If the awards show wasn’t just another lie his fucked-up brain told him.
There was too much evidence of an accident of some kind. His ribs ached, especially now that he was standing in the almost frigid outside air, and his left hand had a starburst of scars along the back that pulled when he made a fist. The headaches were a constant reminder of his brain’s misfiring, but it was the fleeting glimpses of a past he couldn’t quite grab at that were driving him nuts.
It had gotten so he really wasn’t sure if what he was remembering was real. Not the purring, husky laugh of a best friend as they shared a large coffee on a San Francisco pier or the screams of thousands of voices under a wall of lights he couldn’t see past. Amid all the confusion, fractured bits of music wove in and out of his shaky memories, pieces of a life he might not have ever lived.
Of everything Damien almost didn’t remember, it was the thought that the music wasn’t real that scared him the most.
After stumbling outside, he and Jerome fumbled through the bushes, trying to fight their way to clear air, when a man dressed all in black stepped out of the tree line. For a moment, Damien thought the shadowy form was a dark cast of one of the nearby firs. The moon was dripping full, and its light turned Skywood’s gardens and surrounding forest into a silvery-tinted landscape.
That was when Damien learned bright red blood looked like spilled ink under a full moon’s light.
Damien never heard the shot that killed Jerome. He only saw the aftermath of the man’s head suddenly cracking open and his face crumbling inward under the force of the bullet’s strike. He only knew he smelled blood in the air, and in a heartbeat, his mind flashed back to the feel of his body hitting cold steel and the stink of his bandmates’ deaths in his nose.
The sound of a bullet hitting a short stone wall by his knee got Damien moving. Another shot rang out, burrowing through a hedgerow he’d ducked behind. From his scant cover, Damien spotted the man moving out of the trees, only stopping long enough to check Jerome’s body spread-eagled over the grass.
Not looking back, Damien began to run.
THE sirens were loud, echoing through the valley. Damien could follow the whoop-whoop of sound if he tried hard enough, but he was too busy running for his life.
Evergreen boughs snapped at his face and bare arms, stinging welts into his pale skin. Pounding through the underbrush around the compound, Damien ducked and wove as best he could, but the nearly freezing night air pulled at his lungs and tightened the muscles around the scar zippering up his chest. The thin cotton T-shirt and elastic-waistband pants Skywood had issued him were little protection against the elements, and he’d torn out the sole of his left loafer trying to leapfrog through a bank of craggy boulders set into a grassy hill.
Still, it was a damned sight better than having his brains sucked out from all the syringes they’d shoved into his head.
Panting, he forced himself to stop moving when a thick beam of light swept over the forest, the chop of a helicopter’s blades cutting through the air above him. His heavy breaths created ghostly blossoms of mist in the air, their spectral shapes glistening in the full moonlight before whispering off into the darkness. The sky turned a molten red above a sea of rising flames, and voluminous black clouds rose up from the spreading fire, the wind carrying their heavy, ash-laden forms over the nearby countryside.
“Better get your ass moving there, Damie.” He blew on his fingers, trying to get his hands warm. The helicopter whirred past, circling around to point its beam down on another part of the valley floor, and Damien took off, slogging through the damp tall grasses in the hopes of finding a way out of the hell he’d been trapped in.
Ever since he’d woken up and found himself the proud owner of a torso-long scar down the front of his body and his shorn hair growing up around staple holes along his skull, Damien had wondered where the fucking hole was that he’d fallen through and how the hell he could find his way back without his own personal White Rabbit. The doctors kept insisting he’d gotten injured while stoned out of his mind and snowboarding in Aspen, but people who said he was their son once told him he was in a car accident. Their conflicting stories were shaky at best and became transparently false when they’d begun to elaborate on the missing chunks of his memory.