The Fray Theory: Resonance (16 page)

Romer
sits by himself on a small stretch of beach, gazing at the blue harbor beyond.
Light and warmth come and go as mild gusts of wind drape off the sun, making
the atmosphere waver back and forth between blue and gray. And today, instead
of squawking seagulls or giant cruiseship horns, it’s Neve’s shrill cries that echo
in his mind.

He remembers the way she
looked up at him, her big, brown eyes amber in the sunlight. How her tears had
cut trails through the dirt on her cheeks, and how her heart was drumming
against his lower chest like a little hummingbird.

But what he remembers most
vividly is how just moments before, her grip was hard enough to crush the bones
in his wrist. Hard enough for Isaac’s blade to break upon contact with her
flesh.

He squints as his mind
draws parallels between the two incidents.

At the prison yard,
his
life was on the line. At the graveyard: Neve’s.

Survival mode. Life or
death.

Is that what it takes.? Is
that why whenever his emotions are heightened, inexplicable things start to
happen all around him?

He rises to his feet, pats
the sand off the back of his jeans, and starts towards his workshop.

Up ahead, a row of
industrial buildings run along the train tracks like a brick fortress,
separating the harbor from Gastown. But unbeknownst to even the locals, Romer
knows a way through which cuts his trip in half.

He dips under a broken
chain-link fence, then cuts across the tracks towards a narrow gap separating
two abandoned factories.

He turns to his side and slips
into the divide—an efficient shortcut, but not a comfortable one.

Halfway through the
passage, his phone vibrates.

He retrieves it from his
back pocket, careful not to scrape his leather jacket against the walls.

Neve
… A faint smile sweetens his lips.

Think I’m ready for my cape
.

He clears his throat and
receives the call. “Hello?”

“Romer—thank God!” Neve
breathes heavily into her phone. “I’m so sorry. I’m just—I didn’t know who else
to call.”

Her urgency alarms him. “What’s
wrong?”

“The cops are after me,” Neve
whispers. Her voice is somehow loud
and
muffled.

Romer frowns. “Why?”

“I don’t know for sure.
They came over to Dylan’s looking for
me
I think, but arrested him
instead.”

“Well that makes perfect
sense.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Where are you? Why are
you whispering?”

“I’m in Dylan’s neighbor’s
dryer.”

Silence.

“Is that slang for
something?”

“What? No, no I’m hiding.
I’d leave, but there’s no way to know if they’re still searching the area.”

Is this a prank
, Romer wonders?

He tilts his head back and
shuts his eyes. “Neve—I got a lot of work to do.”

“I swear, I’m not messing
with you. This guy was following me on the street, and less than an hour later,
he shows up at Dylan’s with a bunch of cops.”

“How do you even know they
were after
you
?”

“I overheard one of them.”

“What did you do?”

“I hid in Dylan’s room,
then I—”

“
No
, forty-watt. What
did you do that made the cops come after you in the first place?”

“Well, that’s just it. I’m
not even sure they
were
the cops. They said they were RCMP, but something
was really off about them.”

“Like what? Their belts
didn’t match their shoes?”

“They didn’t ask for Dylan’s
ID. Just barged in and arrested him. They didn’t even read him his rights.”

Romer suddenly feels a
tight, painful heaviness in his gut. “What?”

“The Miranda rights? You
have the right to remain silent,” Neve starts to recite from memory, “anything
you say—”

‘
May be used against
you in a court of law—
’

Romer’s mind wanders back
to the worst day of his life.

Suddenly he is standing in
the middle of a police barricade, staring at the bloody body of a child being strapped
to a stretcher.

All he sees are flashing
sirens.

All he hears is the
wailing of a broken father.

And all he feels are the
steely handcuffs biting his trembling wrists.

“Romer?” Neve’s voice frees
him from his waking nightmare, but the wretched self-hatred continues to wreak
havoc inside him.

He leans forward and rests
his forehead onto the cold brick. He feels faint. There isn’t enough air. It
feels like the walls are closing in.

“Romer, say something.”

“I’m fine,” he clears his
throat. “I’m listening.”

“Look—I know we barely
know each other, but I really need your help. I have no idea what to do.”

Pull yourself together
, he squeezes his eyes shut, banishing his
crippling weakness.

“How long have you been
hiding?” he asks.

“I don’t know… maybe ten
minutes?”

“Hang up right now and
turn off your phone,” his sharp whisper fogs up his screen. “They’re probably
going to search the whole building.”

“They’ve already searched
this unit.”

Romer puffs his cheeks and
exhales. “Well, in that case, your safest bet is to just stay put.”

“Need I remind you I’m in
a dryer?”

He chuckles. “You must
look like a pretzel.”

“I feel like one, too.”

“At least you’re in a cage
of your own choosing,” he says, and immediately regrets it. Did he just give
away his dirty little secret?

It’s fine
.
She doesn’t know anything
.

“Do you think Dylan’s okay?”

Is
Dylan okay? Romer hadn’t considered it since before
the legitimacy of the cops was brought into question.

“I’m sure he’s fine.” Romer
picks up his pace, eyes glued to the bright slit at the end of the passage. He doesn’t
know what he can possibly do to help, but if Dylan actually
is
in some
sort of danger…

Just as he is about to step
out into the open, an uneasy feeling pins him at the brink. He remains put, concealed
by deep shadows, fearful of what could be brought to light should he step out.

He inches to the very edge
of the wall and sneaks a glance towards his workshop.

Down by the entry, several
black SUVs are idling. Their windows are tinted, so Romer looks up to the
second floor where he detects dark figures lurking about—strangers who must
have broken his padlock in order to enter his shop.

He glances at either ends
of the street. Amongst the casual crowd, there are several well-built men in
dark clothes trying to appear inconspicuous. One of them is dawdling on the
sidewalk, pretending to be on his phone. Another is sitting on a bench, reading
the paper. And the third is snapping photos of the area with a long lens
camera.

To someone not looking for
it, it would be so easy to miss the dead giveaways: like how the men make
intermittent eye-contact with one another, but don’t openly acknowledge each
other. Or how each one is engaged in an activity he can quickly abandon.

But who are they? The
cops?
No
. The cops would need a warrant to break into his place.

Unless they’ve already got
one. But for what? He hasn’t done anything.

The cemetery
…

Someone must have reported
him to the cops. No doubt whoever was watching them at the cemetery.

And Neve was with him. It
all makes sense now.

He slides back into the
depths of the passage. He can’t go back to prison. He won’t.

Three years was already a
lifetime.

Retracing his steps back
towards the train tracks, he remembers still being on the phone with Neve.

“Hey—you still there?” he
asks.

“Yeah,” she says after a
brief pause, her voice soft and broken.

Romer sighs. “Don’t worry.
He’s gonna be fine.”

“Okay,” she says with an
even meeker tone. “What do I do, Romer?”

“Just stay put, for now. Wait
for the dust to settle. And lose your phone. I will too.”

“If they were tracing our
call, I think I’d be in cuffs right now,” she says.

“You really want to risk
it?”

“But how do we stay in
touch?”

Romer ponders it, and then
checks the time on his phone. “Okay, here’s the plan: stay put for as long as
you can, unless there’s a fire, or whatever, and once you know
for sure
the coast is clear, sneak out and meet me at—” he hesitates, deciding to take a
more cryptic route. “Meet me at that place where I ‘
fell
’ for you. Wink
wink.”

After another stretch of
silence, “when?” she asks.

Romer breathes a sigh of
relief.

“Midnight.”

Dylan opens
his eyes to pitch black. His head is throbbing, his mind feels foggy, and his
entire body is atremble. Despite his best efforts, he can’t seem to retrace his
steps to the juncture that has led him here.

Wherever
here
is.

He goes to swallow, but something
rubbery seems to be lodged in his mouth. He reaches up to remove it and finds his
left hand following along.

A weak frown registers on his face
as he realizes his wrists and legs are tightly bound.

He inhales a deep breath through
his nose, taking in warm, stale air. He
screams at the top of his lungs, but his gag soaks up his voice like a sponge.

Things are seeming worse by the
second.

The wild growl of a v8 engine
fills his ears, and he instantly places himself inside the trunk of a car. And
with a sudden jolt, he skids to his side and strikes the back of the tight confinement.

The car must’ve been idling at a
traffic light when he came to. That would explain the trembling, but as for why
he is tied up and being transported in a dark trunk, he can’t even venture a
guess.

With his energy slowly returning
to him, he
starts to feel around for the
trunk’s release latch. And in no time, he realizes the pull-grip has been cut
off.

Shit
.

With a bit of struggle, he
repositions himself and starts to claw at the inner lining. If he can just break
through to the brake lights, he will be able to shove them out of their sockets.
If he’s lucky, he just might be able to alert someone on the outside.

Come on
!
COME ON
!

His raking becomes more and more savage.
His nails are breaking, bleeding, but he ignores the sting. His warm, slippery
blood is running down his fingers and pooling in-between, but he keeps at it.

Claustrophobia is a state of
mind
.
All suffering is a state of mind
,
he reminds himself over and over until the words unhinge from their meaning.

His harrowing circumstances are
fast becoming a haunting reminder of a deeply-buried memory.

It seems history is adamant to
repeat itself.

σ

~Three Years Ago~

Silver light
pours over the windowsill. It is almost too bright to look directly at.

It must be a full moon tonight
, Dylan thinks, and then looks at the clock on his beaten
night-stand.

It is 3:12 a.m., and the barracks
are as still as a frozen lake.

Lips pursed and jaw clenched, he exhales
through his nose. It’s been about twenty minutes since a bed-frame has creaked,
or since one of his roommates has muttered something unintelligible in his
sleep.

And in the blink of an eye, it’s already
3:15 a.m., leaving him with exactly fifteen minutes and not a moment to spare.

He rolls to his side and slides
off his bed onto his knees. From underneath the bed, he pulls out a small
backpack, jacket, and boots.

With his eyes darting from one
cadet to another, he sneaks out the room and carefully shuts the door behind
him.

One down
, he breathes a silent sigh of relief. His least consequential
obstacle is now behind him.

He looks down the hallway in both
directions. The coast is clear as far as he can tell, but directly across, the door
to cadet Colton’s room is ajar.

Every muscle in his body tenses.

Has he been caught? Is it over,
already?

And in that moment, Dylan realizes
he hasn’t even thought of a plausible explanation for being out and about so late.

He looks down the hallway towards
the latrines, and quickly decides not to stick around for an actual problem to
present itself. He takes the stairs all the way down to the main level, and
then starts to put on his boots and jacket.

He throws on his backpack, and
lurks over to the exit, peering at the grounds through the small glass window.

Once again, the coast is clear.

As he exits the building, his face
is stung by the crisp night air. He inhales a deep, oxygenated breath, and sets
out towards the plush forest framing the academy.

Though the odds of running into a
security guard are slim at this hour, he doesn’t risk cutting across the open
field. It’s far too big a risk to shave only a few minutes off his excursion.
So he keeps within the dark shadows of the night with his sights set on the
trees in the distance.

Soon enough, he reaches the brim
of the forest and crosses the threshold into the heart of nature.

The darkness is sweeping, the moonlight
barely managing to penetrate the thick foliage. And Dylan is still far too
close to the premises to even entertain using his flashlight.

So he hurries through the winding trail,
assessing each step based on the outlines of trees and bushes.

The rustling of dried leaves
beneath his boots is roaring in the dead of night, sending his heartbeat to a
gallop. He needs to be especially careful not to drift off onto one of the embedded
training grounds, or stumble into a man-made ravine.

Or worst of all: trip an alarm.

His eyes eventually adjust to the
darkness, able to better detect the ditches compromising his gait. But even
once he has picked up the pace, the end of the trail seems nowhere in sight.

Is he lost? Or is it just harder
to tell the progress he’s made because of the lack of light?

He reaches for his map, confident
that by now he is far enough from campus. But just as he grabs his flashlight, the
crunching of brittle twigs startles him.

Dylan swings his head towards the
source of the noise and sees a pair of hands spring up into the air.

A gesture of peace?

“Identify yourself,” Dylan demands
with a rather assertive tone. If it’s one of the junior cadets, he just might
be able to feign authority and send the kid on his way.

“I don’t want no trouble, man,” a
surprisingly lax voice reassures. “Just doin’ a late-night delivery.”

Dylan switches his flashlight on
and holds it up. “Step into the light,” he orders, and watches a lanky twenty-something
year-old step forward.

It must be him
. “Are you Bryce?”

“The one and only,” Bryce cracks a
smile.

Dylan unclenches a bit. “Are we
set?”

“Ssss, yeah… there was this little
hitch.”

“What?” Dylan’s tone drops.

“Well, most of what they had were either
panty-droppers or guzzlers, so I grabbed you a hatchback. It’s a total mom-car,
but easy on gas if you—”

“What about the passport?”

As though he just remembered there
was more to their deal, Bryce pulls out a navy passport from the inside of his
jacket pocket.

“Got it right here,” he taps it onto
his open palm, boasting a playful smirk.

Dylan flicks his flashlight at it.
“Hold it up.”

“It’s legit man. I’m a pro,” Bryce
flips to the page containing Dylan’s photo, and then holds it up to the light.

Dylan steps forward with his stern
gaze fixed to his commissioned ID. He then looks up at Bryce and takes a second
to read him.

Frail build, unkempt hair, and dilated
pupils. But he doesn’t strike Dylan as the type that screws over his customers.

Dylan puts his flashlight away,
and then pulls out twelve hundred-dollar bills from his back pocket.

He completes the exchange and
begins to inspect his ID more closely.

It’s good
, he nods to himself. He would never be able to tell it
apart from his real one.
“You weren’t kidding about being a pro,” he
half-chuckles.

“A happy customer—” Bryce counts
the cash, “is a returning customer,” and tucks it away in his fanny-pack,
having no idea that once Dylan gets to Seattle, he plans on leaving the car at
the rental branch and taking a bus across the border into Canada.

He slips his passport into his
pocket. “You rented the car
under an alias, right?”

“Yeah, we cool,” Bryce bobs his
head.

“So, where is it?”

“That way—” Bryce nods towards the
end of the trail. “It’s a dark gray hatchback in the third stall of the
cemetery parking lot.” Off Dylan’s look, “I know, it’s eerie as fuck,” he chuckles,
“but at least I don’t gotta worry about running into no one at this hour. Unless
it’s Halloween,” he scoffs, “learned
that
the hard way.” He reaches back
into his fanny-pack and pulls out the car keys.

Dylan reaches out to grab them, but
nearly jumps out of his skin when he hears a piercing scream. The morbid sound floods
the forest like light engulfing a silhouette.

“Shit—” Bryce panics like a
spooked gazelle and bolts down the trail, vanishing almost instantly.

Another scream trails the echoes
of the previous, luring Dylan’s attention. And he can’t tell whether it belongs
to a girl, or a young boy.

He looks in the direction of
Bryce’s flight; towards his one and only shot at getting to Romer before his
trial. But the tortured voice of a complete stranger has pinned him in place.

“Fuck,” he curses and segues off
the trail towards the screams. With each and every step, the victim’s voice
becomes magnified, until Dylan emerges at the brink of an enormous cemetery.

Must be the one Bryce mentioned
.

He remains hidden behind a large
tree, gawking at the astonishing sight before him.

Roughly fifty feet ahead, three
cadets are standing ten-hut with their backs to him, decked-out in their combat
uniforms. The fourth is circling six younger cadets on their knees who are assembled
in a perfect line. They’ve all been stripped down to their boxers and numbered
on their torsos with what appears to be mud.

And not until one of them bends
over does Dylan realize their wrists are tied behind their backs.

With his forehead on the ground,
the bent-over cadet slavers from his gaping mouth. His sobbing has become so intensified
that no actual sound is leaving his throat.

Meanwhile, the circling cadet is
going on and on about what it takes to become a
real
soldier. How
graduating from this academy is the kind of honor you earn. And most
importantly, how facing your fears before you’re dispatched onto the
battlefield is detrimental to your survival.

Don’t you mean ‘instrumental’
you overgrown tool
?

Dylan scowls at the loathsome
roid-monkey and the self-proclaimed alpha of the academy, Tobias Colton. The
prick is quite possibly the only person in the world Dylan would shoot right in
the face, and feel nothing.

Colton concludes his monologue and
comes to a stop by the weeping cadet. He stares down at him for a few moments,
and then suddenly swoops down.

“GET THE FUCK UP!” he barks into
the cadet’s ear, jolting the kid back up onto his folded legs. “And you call
yourself a GODDAMN SOLDIER!?”

“I’m claustrophphph—” the cadet
stammers, “ph-phobic,” his posture wilting under the weight of his fear. “I sss-swear.”

Claustrophobic
?

Dylan follows Colton’s line of
sight to what seems to be a rough and poorly assembled rectangular box.

A coffin.

And directly next to it, there’s a
dark, rectangular patch. And it’s not a shadow.

It’s a freshly-dug grave.

Dylan’s wide eyes dart back to
Colton as he tosses something the size of a sugar cube into the air.

“Luck of the draw, solider,” Colton
flashes a smug grin. “Unless, of course, one of your comrades wants to
volunteer?” He looks to the other candidates, but they all avert their eyes.

“
NO
,” the young cadet begs
as Colton’s crew grab and drag him over to the coffin.

“Quit being a little bitch!”
Colton barks as the kid is stuffed into the box. He then slams the lid down,
snuffing his victim’s pleas for mercy.

“And you might want to stop
panting so much,” he bends down and shouts at the box. “That air’s gotta last
you the next four hours.”

Boasting a wide grin, Colton crosses
his arms and backs up, spectating as his crew pummel nails into the coffin’s
lid. And Dylan finds himself in full stride towards Colton like a grenade of
rage.

He comes up to Colton from behind
and kicks him in the hamstring.

Colton heaves a grunt and falls to
his knees, at the sight of which the others cease their hammering.

Dylan takes advantage of the lull
and marches up to the coffin, shoves the nearest cadet out of his way, and starts
to pull the nails with the hammer’s claw.