Thunder Road

Chapter 2-2

His head felt as though someone had taken a mallet to it. Holding back a groan with some difficulty, Randall Lenz rolled over on his back and stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling overhead. That he didn’t recognize the ceiling in question wasn’t too strange, since he spent a lot of time on the road, searching for new subjects for his agency to investigate and add to the Daedalus Project if it turned out they were the real deal. However, the disorientation he currently seemed to be experiencing showed no sign of going away any time soon. Usually, once he blinked and took stock of his surroundings, he remembered right away where he was.

That didn’t seem to be happening at the moment.

He scowled and made himself sit up, even though his head hurt even worse in an upright position. And it wasn’t only his head — his entire body felt like he’d gone on a bender and had spent the overnight hours participating in the local version of Fight Club.

Not that he knew what constituted “local,” precisely, because he was damned if he could even remember where the hell he was.

Frown deepening, he glanced around the room and saw that he appeared to be in a motel or hotel room of some sort — slightly shabby, carefully anonymous furniture, the ubiquitous notice tacked to the back of the door advising guests about check-in and check-out times and providing information about emergency exits. Probably, the wisest thing to do would be to get up and walk over to the door so he could read the sign for himself, since they almost always provided the name and address of the hotel in question. At the moment, though, he didn’t know whether he was even capable of that much exertion. Everything just hurt.

All right. Time to go back to the beginning and figure out where the hell he was. Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to recall what the beginning was supposed to be.

He pressed his thumb and middle finger against his forehead, rubbing slightly. In the past, that simple trick had often helped with his headaches, but it didn’t seem to be doing much at the moment. If anything, he felt slightly worse.

But there was an unopened bottle of water sitting on the nightstand, and he made himself reach for it, crack open the lid, and take a long swallow. Yes, that was a bit better. Not a lot, but if nothing else, the sensation of the tepid liquid slipping down his throat helped him feel a little more grounded, helped him to return to himself.

What had happened to him?

He was dressed, although his shoes sat on the floor by the nightstand and his suit jacket had been draped across the foot of the bed, with his tie lying on top of it. Clearly, he’d been in good enough shape to remember to take off his jacket, shoes, and tie, although he didn’t recall removing any of those clothing items. Hell, he didn’t remember even coming to this room in the first place.

Although it hurt more than he wanted to think about, he forced himself to lean over to the foot of the bed and rifle through his jacket pockets. Worry mounted in him as he went through all of them…twice…and realized his cell phone appeared to be just as MIA as his memory of how he’d gotten there.

His gaze roamed the room, but he didn’t see the phone anywhere, not on the nightstand, not on the little round table over by the window. He supposed he could have left it in the bathroom, but searching for the damn thing would require him to get up off the bed to find it, and he wasn’t sure whether he was physically capable of that sort of exertion at the moment.

No sign of his laptop, either. Lenz reached into his trouser pocket and was somewhat relieved to find his wallet there…a relief that was short-lived once he realized that his official Homeland Security I.D. also seemed to have disappeared. All he had on him was his Virginia driver’s license and his own personal Visa card, not the official one he used when traveling. Oh, and a couple of hundred dollars in cash, all twenty-dollar bills, as if he’d withdrawn the daily maximum from an ATM. He couldn’t remember carrying that much money with him, or making that kind of a withdrawal, but since he didn’t seem able to recall much of anything useful at the moment, he supposed that wasn’t so strange.

Obviously, the mystery wasn’t going to clear itself up any time soon. Gritting his teeth, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and then sat there for a moment as he allowed himself to recover from the painful exertion. Crazy how he could be so incapacitated when he didn’t even know what had happened to put him in this state in the first place.

Had he been in a car accident? Possibly, but even though he hurt all over, it was a sort of generalized ache, nothing obvious like the sort of sternum injuries that were common when an airbag exploded. He didn’t have any obvious cuts, scrapes, or other lacerations, no broken bones, and he wasn’t covered in the fine white dust that was the telltale fallout of an airbag letting go.

His bladder told him that it seemed to have escaped serious injury, and needed to be relieved. Well, he supposed he would have to stand up sooner or later.

When he did so, the room spun around him, and he grabbed a corner of the nightstand and held on, willing himself to remain upright. A lancing pain shot through his head, almost blinding in its intensity.

Blinding….

The word — or possibly the mental image — seemed to jar something in him, although right then, he couldn’t say exactly what it was. Something about a bright flash of light.

Maybe it had been a car accident after all. Maybe what he was remembering were the headlights of the car that had crashed into him. But if that had been the case, why was he here in this hotel room instead of in a hospital somewhere? With as banged-up as he was feeling, he highly doubted any EMT would have let him walk away from the scene of that kind of accident.

Somehow, he managed to take a step, and then another. It hurt, but he forced himself to keep going. The bathroom wasn’t that far away — ten feet, maybe twelve. He could do this.

Eventually, he got to the doorway and held on to the jamb for a moment to steady himself. Once he thought he was strong enough to totter the last three or four steps to the toilet, he moved forward again. Undoing his pants told him how unsteady his hands were, but he kept going, took care of business, and then zipped his trousers closed again. No blood in his urine, so at least that was a good sign.

That task handled, he turned toward the mirror. Big mistake. A hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked reflection stared back at him, hair mussed, dark stubble covering his chin and cheeks. If he’d encountered that mirror self while walking down the street, he probably would have given the man in question a wide berth, figuring he had to be an addict or mentally ill.

Well, he needed to do something about that. With a shaking hand, he reached for the tap and turned on some cold water, then splashed it on his face and ran it through his hair, doing his best to finger-comb it into submission. The shock of the water brought a little blood to his cheeks, although there were dark circles under his eyes that made him look as though he’d gone a week without sleep, rather than being unconscious for…well, however long he’d been passed out in that hotel room.

Those rough ablutions sapped his energy enough that he knew he didn’t have the strength to do much more than stumble back to the bed and fall down on it. At some point, he’d have to force himself to walk over to the motel office and try to find out how he’d gotten there in the first place, but for the moment, Lenz knew the most important thing to do was to get his strength back.

No…actually, the most important thing to do was try to remember what the hell had happened to him.

He knew he’d gone to Kanab, Utah, in search of Adara Grant, a young woman who appeared to have some sort of strange influence over the weather. That was his job at the division of Homeland Security where he worked — to track down people who possessed unusual abilities and bring them back for study and possible weaponization under the umbrella of the Daedalus Project. And no, the truth of the project’s mission statement had never been outlined in quite so bold a manner, but Randall Lenz and everyone he worked with knew exactly why the government wanted to get its hands on those people.

Again he saw a flash, only this time he realized it was the muzzle flare from his service pistol. It hadn’t been his intention to kill Lyssa Grant, Adara’s mother; he’d drawn his pistol to intimidate her and Adara, nothing more. But something had hit his head and the gun had gone off, and then…

…and then he’d awakened in this hotel room. That didn’t feel right, though, as though his brain had skipped over something vitally important, even if he couldn’t recall what it was supposed to be. He remembered feeling a burst of triumph as the skies over Adara Grant’s house had opened up, her own fear and rage obviously calling the storm to her. That storm had told him she truly did possess the power to control the weather.

But nothing after that. No, wait…there had been a man. A stranger had shown up on Adara’s front porch, had asked for her by name as if he, too, knew there was something special about her. A dark-haired man, middle or late twenties.

A name came to him.

Jake.

Jake what?

Lenz wrestled with the name but couldn’t seem to come up with anything more than that single syllable.

Still, it was another clue, another piece of the incomplete puzzle that his memory had apparently become. Sooner or later, he’d figure out who Jake was.

And where he’d come from. Lenz didn’t know much right then, but he somehow knew if he found Jake, he’d find Adara, and then he could do his best to salvage something worthwhile from this entire miserable situation. If he failed, Daedalus would be taken from him, and he’d never be able to recover professionally from such a blow. Worse, he couldn’t expect any of his successors to give the project the delicate care it deserved. A myriad of nightmare scenarios danced through his head, and he gritted his teeth and did his best to push them to the back of his mind where they couldn’t distract him.

For the moment, he needed to heal.

However long it took.