Work Text:
It was too quiet.
That was what Waylon noticed first. The woods around him were too quiet. He was in the town Eddie had moved to and it looked like a ghost town now. More like a village than anything else, though it looked like someone had gone to great lengths to make it smaller.
Inside of his chest, the Walrider clenched itself tighter, trying to make itself smaller. A persistent noise, just out of hearing range of a normal person, had been making it irritated the entire time he had been within the town. Whatever was happening here, the Walrider did not like it. From the looks of things, Waylon didn’t much like it either. The town was derelict, broken and torn apart except for small clusters of run-down houses, here and there.
It made him nervous.
This was where Blake Langermann had been heading, however. The official flight plan had said something different, but there had been notes to stop off in this area.
Waylon felt the echo of Miles shift, at his side, and thought he heard the man’s voice whisper something about Blake’s wife, Lynn. Both of the Langermanns’ were reporters, according to the information Waylon had been able to find. Chris’s voice followed, urging caution and defensive maneuvers.
Eddie’s voice was a quiet rumble of reassurance, telling him about what the town had once looked like.
According to him, it had once been a small almost-village, just a little place with a population of a couple hundred. Eddie had loved it, when he’d first moved in. Small and quiet – different in so many ways from the town he had grown up in. Port Arthur had been fairly small when he’d lived there, but it had never been quiet. Too many gossips, too much ‘Silence’ from people who should probably have been saying something, anything, to the police.
But Eddie had moved here to try and start again.
A new life, away from the ghosts of his childhood. No father, no uncle – just the memories of his mother, what little he could salvage.
Something told Waylon that it hadn’t been long before Murkoff had ruined that.
“I’m going to get closer,” he told his ghosts, climbing down from the tree he was perched in. Ever since acquiring the Walrider, his leg hadn’t hurt much – and then, not at all. No pain, no distractions – Murkoff had been looking for a soldier, something to weaponize. If they had managed to keep the Walrider, they would have had something.
‘Be careful,’ Eddie whispered to him, a brush of phantom fingers against his cheek. They trailed over a scar that had been left the last time Waylon had been in a Murkoff building, the slash of a bullet trail as he just barely ducked. ‘Strong as you are, you can still get hurt, you can still die. I barely remember my time here, something happened. Something…’ Waylon almost laughed at how unsure he sounded. ‘Something bad. Nightmares and visions until I didn’t remember what reality was, anymore.’
Off in the distance, Waylon heard something over a crackling loudspeaker. “I’ll be okay,” he told the three of them. “I’ve got four people watching my back. The three of you, the Walrider – honestly, I think I’ll be okay.”
Chris’s hand was a warmth on his shoulder. ‘Remember what you’ve been taught,’ he muttered.
“Knife is in my boot,” Waylon nodded. “Any words of wisdom, Miles?”
‘Yeah,’ the reporter laughed. ‘Don’t get killed, dumbass. Those kids, the quads, they need you to come back to the safehouse. The world needs you to come back out of this alive. You’re the only person who has a fighting chance against Murkoff until the story gets a foothold other than a mistake and a riot at an asylum.’
“The news victimizes the monsters,” Waylon muttered. “The people in charge, apparently murdered unjustly by the hideous creatures they were so kindly watching over.” He sneered, disgusted. “Seriously, fuck Fox News.”
‘Yeah, I don’t consider them actual reporters.’ Miles hissed back, clapping a phantom hand on Waylon’s other shoulder. ‘There’s a reason.’
“This place feels so wrong,” Waylon looked around as he hiked up a nearby path. “Something is—”
He blinked.
The halls of Mount Massive were so covered in blood that he couldn’t see the original paint underneath anymore.
Or was it wallpaper?
Ahead of him, a light blinked off, then on again.
Waylon closed his eyes for a second, feeling dizzy as the space around him seemed to collapse in on itself and back out again. The ceiling pressed him into the floor, the walls flattened him – and then everything returned to normal. Behind him, he could hear something coming towards him.
Something big.
Without pausing to look back, Waylon hefted his small camera and held it up as a light, running towards the flickering darkness at the end of the hallway.
“Waylon!”
The voice had come from his left, hands grabbing the collar of his shirt and dragging him into a room. The door slammed shut behind him, held shut by another set of hands. His head spinning, Waylon looked at Miles, trying to clear his vision. “Miles?”
“You’re right, something is wrong,” Miles glanced towards the door. “Chris?”
Chris was at the door, his bulky body pinning it shut. “Delusions,” he grunted, jolting as something slammed against the other side. “I could hear it as you walked closer to the town. Some shrill noise, almost like an EMP detonation. Obviously not that.” He made a face, digging his heels into the ground. “Waylon?”
“Can’t…” Waylon shook his head, his stomach churning and flipping, nausea rising and bile flooding his throat. “Can’t focus.”
“This is your delusion,” Chris grunted again. The door had a worrying crack in it, now. “Whatever is happening, it’s in your head. Probably drawing off of your memories, what Mount Massive turned into in your nightmares.”
“Where’s Eddie?” Miles looped Waylon’s arm over his shoulder, keeping him on his feet. “If we’re here, why isn’t Eddie?”
“Miles,” Chris gave him a flat look. “What part did Eddie play in Mount Massive?”
“Oh,” Miles paled a little, his grip on Waylon’s wrist going tight for a second. “Shit. Right. Well, that’s going to be fun to deal with. Waylon, come on, wake up,” he shook him. “Seriously, little man, wake the fuck up. I don’t know what’s happening, but it isn’t good.”
The three of them jolted as a loud crashing noise sounded in the distance.
The noise of the explosion that followed shook the entire building. Waylon, propped against Miles’s side, rolled his head upright. “What—”
He bent double, clutching at his chest.
The sky was on fire.
Waylon stood up straight, wide-eyed as he watched the flames burn against the black sky. There was a smoke trail that led into the sky, obviously the path of a small plane or a helicopter.
“Oh god,” he whispered. “Blake. Lynn.”
Without paying attention to the shrill noise at the edge of his hearing or even the warning shouts of his three ghosts, Waylon took off for the site of the crash. It took a minute to get to it, on the other side of the hill, but he got there. It was a mangled mess of metal and fire by the time he did, the remains of a helicopter.
Off past the other side of the wreckage, Waylon could see a cluster of people dragging a woman out of the fire. The static in the back of his head that he had come to associate with the Walrider churned and raged when he looked at them. It made him wary, hiding behind the trees. He couldn’t see anyone else, couldn’t see anyone who might have been Blake.
He was certain, however, that the woman being dragged away was Lynn.
At a closer inspection, the pilot was already done for – skinned and crucified, dead or dying. There was nothing Waylon could do to save him, but there was something he could do to help him. With a twitch of his hand, the Walrider appeared next to him and thrust a hand into his chest, the startled gasping that followed making Waylon wince. The man had still been alive, just barely, and Waylon sighed as he watched the Walrider flicker out of sight again.
By the time he had torn Murkoff apart with barely anything more than determination and his bare hands, he would be so stained by what he’d had to do that he wouldn’t recognize himself anymore. The blood that poured from them and onto him was too thick, too much of it to do anything but swim or drown.
He chose to swim.
He had chosen.
Chris and Miles were agitated at his sides, likely because Eddie wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Ordinarily, he stood at Waylon’s right, had said he liked the symbolism of it. Right now, however, he wasn’t there. He was too far away to feel the flicker and flash of him correctly, his absence a wound in Waylon’s mind.
Something was wrong, here.
Whatever Murkoff had done, whatever had been done to Eddie, everything about it was a nightmare. This entire town was falling apart, the screams in the distance telling Waylon almost more than he wanted to know.
His head felt too heavy, too warm, and he let his eyes slip closed.
Reality fell apart.
This time, when he opened his eyes, he was already in the room with Chris and Miles.
“Where is Eddie, Waylon?”
“Really, Upshur?” Chris snapped the words out, barricading the door. “Where do you think Gluskin is going to be?” He grunted as he threw his back against the metal. It heaved underneath him, bucking like a wild horse. “We’re in a shared mindscape and Park here is terrified of Mount Massive, of what Gluskin tried to do to him!”
Miles snarled as he moved forward, dropping his weight to rest against the door as well. Chris stood, cradled almost lovingly, between his body and the door. “Fuck,” he hissed venomously. “I don’t blame you for that,” he turned his head to look at Waylon. “But fuck does that make this complicated.” He pressed even closer to Chris, helping to brace the bigger man’s bulk again the metal, jamming his shoulder in a little harder. “Every time he comes here, we’re going to have to go through this again. I’m just trying to make sure he knows what’s happening—”
“And see if he can’t short circuit the whole situation?” Chris smiled at him, switching their positions so that Miles was pressed against the door. He arranged Miles’s hands so that they were gripping tightly in specific places, then moved to the side with the handle. “Actually, yeah,” he turned to Waylon. “Waylon, imagine this isn’t happening.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Waylon shuddered, looking around the room and seeing blood dripping down the walls. “Of course it’s happening!”
“Imagine it isn’t!” both of them snapped back at once.
Waylon shook his head, clenching his hands over his temples. He wasn’t in Mount Massive, anymore. Hadn’t been for a long time. Mount Massive Asylum had practically been torn down after the failure of the project. Not even the Umbrella Corporation had been able to get it back up and running. As he thought that, the noise outside the door stopped and he felt a presence at his shoulder.
The Walrider.
“I’m an escaped experiment,” he whispered. “This is all just…a bad dream. A delusion. Brought about by the frequency generators at the edges of town.”
Hallucinations.
He had gotten here long before the Langermanns’ had. His arrival had given him enough time to look around and the strange noise hadn’t made itself known until he had walked closer to the town. Up until that point, in the older houses that looked like they hadn’t been used in years, Waylon had been able to look around and check on things. He had found some papers, what was obviously an old research station, an entirely abandoned home with blood splattered on the walls. When the Walrider had alerted him to the noise of the helicopter, he had pressed through the sound of the weird generators on the edge of the town.
He wished he had destroyed them.
The few papers he had managed to find had talked about hallucinations – an experiment gone wrong, something almost viral in the belief of it. A cult that had risen around what remained of the experiment, the researcher running the tests succumbing to what they had been testing.
The generators were using an odd frequency to induce hallucinations.
The floor around him cracked and crumbled, chunks bigger than him falling down as a figure approached from the darkness below. Waylon’s breath caught in his chest, his hands clenching into fists as he saw a nearly-glowing blue eye, the other filled with burst blood vessels. The scraping of something sharp against the wall was enough to make him lose his train of thought, the relief slipping from him faster than water through hands that had never been cupped enough to keep it contained.
This was Eddie Gluskin as he had always been in Waylon’s nightmares.
Briefly, as he backed away, Waylon could hear Miles swearing violently, calling his name. He couldn’t respond, couldn’t even look back towards them. Eddie’s shoes tapped against the ground, the leather shining as it had when he’d been hiding under a table and it had been his only warning.
“WAYLON!”
Both Chris and Miles were screaming his name, now, but Waylon still couldn’t respond. Down below him, Eddie stopped and tilted his head up. “Is this how you want to play the game, Darling?”
Waylon let out something that might have been a squeak, backing away as best he could. The floor had fallen apart around him, however, and he was left standing in a spot barely big enough for his feet. The wood had rotted away, leaving him exposed under the gaze of Eddie – he hadn’t even felt this much like prey in the asylum.
Distantly, he could hear the Walrider screaming.
It felt like the man’s eyes were roving over every inch of him and a part of him, the small and frightened part that had only started making itself known in the asylum, wanted to slip into the expected role.
A part of his mind wanted to appease The Groom.
Play his part.
Become The Bride.
He hadn’t had time for therapy, in between nightmares and being on the run. If he had, he wasn’t sure what would be said about him, to him, of him. How long it would be before he was locked away in someplace – maybe not like Mount Massive, exactly, but something far too similar for the sake of his sanity.
There was something about the way he couldn’t exactly hear Miles and Chris, anymore, that snapped him out of his daze. With a choked breath, a gasp, Waylon yanked himself back, surprised to find a solid floor suddenly underneath his feet as he moved. He was hallucinating, this was a place created in his mind by a generator on the edge of the town. The floor stayed solid as he backed away from Eddie, his hands clenching into fists.
“This isn’t a game I want to play,” he whispered. “At all.”
With a sneer, Eddie tilted his head. Even with how quiet Waylon was, he had apparently heard. “A pity, my Darling.” He raised his hands, one clenched around a knife that Waylon knew would hurt him, even though it was supposed to be a hallucination. “We could have been beautiful.”
Waylon’s eyes went wide as he dropped to the floor, dodging the knife that had just been thrown at him. In an instant, Miles’s hands were closing around his ankle, dragging him backward across the floor. “Come the fuck on, Park!” he snarled as he yanked Waylon away from being able to see Eddie pulling another knife out of the wall. After a few seconds, Chris joined him in helping, having apparently barricaded the door well enough to be able to leave it. Neither of them were grabbing the ankle that Waylon had screwed up while trying to get away from Eddie.
It seemed like neither of them wanted to.
With the visual connection cut off, Waylon felt something in his mind snap back into place and he scrambled to his feet, looking at Chris and Miles. “What the hell was that?”
“That,” Chris huffed out a breath, his eyes wide – fear, then, not exertion. Chris would have been able to lift Waylon entirely off the ground with one hand, when he was alive, not even half of the effort of pulling him would be enough to exhaust him. “Was the two of you being connected. Your mind isn’t your own, here,” he frowned, looked at Miles, then ran a hand through his hair. “He and Eddie are connected. The two of them aren’t…” he groaned. “This is going to make this so much more complicated than it needed to be.”
“What do you mean?” Miles narrowed his eyes at him. “The fuck does that mean?”
“It means,” Chris shook his head, covering his face. “That Waylon and Eddie are so tied together after they bullshit they put each other through, after the way Eddie keeps talking to him, after the way he took over Waylon’s body at one point, that their minds are considered the same place, in some way. Their nanites are tied together.”
Miles stared at him for a minute, his expression incredulous. “I’m sorry, what?!”
“We can technically touch Waylon,” Chris nodded, his hands slipping from his face, dropping to his sides. “Observable phenomenon. We can put a hand on his shoulder, we can speak with him. We know this. Eddie took over his body. Eddie can direct his hands. Eddie can share information in his mind with Waylon – when the two of you were being attacked, don’t you remember?”
With a choked sound, Miles turned to look at Waylon. “You were in Mount Massive.” He took a slow, deep breath through his nose. “You became the perfect host for the Walrider.” His hands clenched into fists. “In the presence of a bunch of other nanite-infected people.”
“Yeah,” Waylon nodded. “Including Eddie.”
The noise that Miles made wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a misfiring engine. “Fuck. Any theories, Park?”
“From what I was reading,” he swallowed around a sudden lump in his throat. “I think that the nanites—well, they were basically looking for acceptance from a host. Eddie, before he died, was obsessed with finding a bride. When I met him, he’d latched onto me, because…Well, because he saw me before he went jumping off the deep end.” He giggled, clapped a hand over his mouth, then nodded. “Before they caught me out for having sent you a message, they were shoving him into the Morphogenic Engine. He broke loose and begged me for help.”
The giggle came again and he wanted to give in to the wave of madness he could feel swelling inside of him. Like a tide that had suddenly drawn back, disappearing off the beach and suddenly there was a tsunami on the horizon.
Waylon shuddered. “I wanted to help him, but it would have clued them into the fact that I’d betrayed them.”
“So he focused on you,” Chris put a hand on his shoulder. “Became so intent on you that when there were nanites in his system, he obsessed. Chased you down,” his gaze flicked down, towards Waylon’s exposed, scarred ankle. “Hunted you. And you tried to keep away from him.”
“I killed him, in the end,” Waylon shuddered.
The conversation was bringing up some long-held grief, a few notes of insanity he could feel creeping up on him.
There was something he had to say.
“That last thing he said to me,” Waylon glanced back over his shoulder.
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” Miles clapped a hand on his shoulder, drawing his gaze. “We need you sane, Park. We need you to function and take this place apart and take down the generators. Trust me on this – don’t focus on that.”
“No, but,” Waylon shook his head. “Those were his last words. That’s what he said as he was dying, bleeding out above me.”
Miles blinked a couple of times, swore almost violently, then shook his head. “What the—”
Something off in the distance exploded and all three of them looked up. The hallway they were suddenly standing in was on fire, closing in on them – Waylon hunched in on himself. Right. This was all caused by him, by his mind, by the fucking nightmares he’d lived and breathed for so long, now. He closed his eyes, shook his head.
He opened his eyes –
Light bloomed awkwardly around him.
On a loudspeaker, he could hear a droning voice that made his head hurt. The Walrider manifested at his side, seeming to hover. It was a motion Miles had made, sometimes, and he had to wonder how many tics and quirks it had picked up from previous hosts. That movement of a hand was Miles, the way it tipped it’s head to the side, but what about the way it leaned back on one foot?
The way it clutched near-vaporous hands together for a minute before letting its arms fall back to its sides?
Was that a glimpse, however brief, of Billy Hope?
How many people had it touched, picked up pieces from, before they had fallen apart and it had been attached to a new host?
A flare of anger, at Murkoff, at himself for being too much of a coward to speak up earlier, at the world for letting a place like Mount Massive to exist, hit Waylon so hard he almost went cross-eyed. The voice on the loudspeaker was drowned out by the whirring of anger in his mind, his fists clenching at his sides. Back at his base of operations, Waylon knew, the quadruplets were acting like scared cats. He’d left food for them, made certain they would have a place to sleep and things to do, and he’d hoped for the best.
What kind of world allowed them to exist like that?
How many people had the combined might of Murkoff and Umbrella chewed through, swallowed pieces of, then spat out the remainder? How many lives had been lost, how much blood had been spilled?
How many children had been ripped apart and put back together in ways that suited their tormentors?
The quadruplets, he had found out, were meant to be assassins. A set, working in twos, one mind in two bodies. Their own identities had been wiped out to make room for connected minds, for strategy and violence, for bloodshed and nothing more.
Eddie Gluskin had been groomed in more than one way, as a child. His father and his uncle, certainly, disgusting monsters that they had been, family sexual assault was horrifying, the stuff of nightmares for too many kids. His uncle had just been another layer to it, working for Murkoff and handing them files about his nephew. Whether Eddie’s father had known or not, Waylon didn’t know, but he suspected that the man probably would have been alright with it. What was one more monstrosity when you were already committing so many, after all?
Eddie had never been allowed to be what he might have been.
How many more children had been torn apart?
How many had lost their lives?
The Walrider swirled around Waylon as he stretched out his neck, feeling more than hearing the bones pop back into place. He was going to put a stop to it. Nothing else mattered – his own children were safe, he had made sure of it – and Murkoff needed to be burned. Nothing should be able to grow from the twisted, dark roots.
A company born in the ideals of Nazism shouldn’t be allowed to flourish, after all.
Umbrella would have to burn too, but that was a fight for another day.
‘Breathe, Waylon.’ The solid voice-impression of Chris grounded him in reality a little more, the warmth of a hand on his shoulder. How many people had been like him, stopping in for what should only have been a little bit of time before their lives had been ripped away from them?
How many were like Miles, asked to come in to help in some way?
How many were like him?
The wrong place at the wrong time with the best intentions. Their lives stolen from them because they dared to ask for help—
Dared to try to get away—
Dared to fight back.
Waylon took another deep breath, his steps crunching faintly through the gravel as he strode across the part of the village he’d found himself in. Eddie had loved this place, once, had loved the freedom he’d felt in living so far away from his family.
A searchlight flared on overhead and Waylon practically threw himself into the plants growing at the side of the road. The sounds of footsteps, of people practically chanting something, passed by his hiding spot.
He covered his mouth, his eyes closing again, when he felt it.
The air felt heavy in his lungs, like he was drowning.
When Waylon opened his eyes, it was to see a sparsely decorated living room.
There were sun-bleached walls, shadowed shapes carved out by the light where photos had once been hanging. “This was home, once,” came a voice from behind him. The grey carpet beneath his feet was old, worn and thin, and his feet thudded against the floor beneath it. “In all of its glory.”
“It looks—”
“You can insult it,” Eddie’s eyes, when Waylon turned to look, were focused on an empty spot on the wall. His hands were clasped behind his back. “I won’t mind, much.”
“Eddie…”
Waylon almost stepped back when Eddie made eye contact with him. Even in the middle of the asylum, with his breakdown and his pursuit of Waylon, that had been his most striking and memorable feature. His eyes, silver in the light of the house they were in, seemed to stare into the heart of Waylon. “This was my home,” he told Waylon, the strength of the accent he had been born and raised with coming through. The slight-British lilt of his words was gone, leaving behind the Texan underneath. “This was where I was raised. My mother and father lived here,” he reached forward, gently touching where the photos had once been. “In our shared mindspace, it seems I’ve destroyed their memories.”
“You probably didn’t want me in your head,” Waylon reached out, hesitating for a split second before putting his hand on Eddie’s arm. “I don’t blame you.”
“This must be so terrible, for you,” Eddie shook his head, his face pulling tight. “To be stuck with the three of us. One of us having done what I did to you,” he sighed. “It must have made you suffer. You have two people who tried to kill you and a third who died to save you in your head – you have the Walrider attached to you, now.”
Waylon watched as he turned away, moving towards the window. “I think I would have liked you,” he told Eddie. “Before, I mean. When they hadn’t gotten their hands on you.”
“Oh, Darling,” Eddie scoffed. “Do you really think there was a before?”
For some reason, that made Waylon angry.
“Of course there was a before,” Waylon stepped into his space, reaching up to take Eddie’s face in his hands when the man tried to look away. “There was a time they hadn’t chased you to a village that drove everyone insane – that made you obsessed with pregnancy,” he shook his head, trying to push back against the helplessness he felt. “You told me once that you tried to get help.”
“Therapy wasn’t as modern back then,” Eddie chuckled, his eyes slipping closed as he leaned into Waylon’s hands. “I gave up trying to find it.”
“But you tried—”
“Does that excuse the monster I was?” his eyes opened like a flash of mercury, anger churning through them. Despite his tone and his words, however, Waylon somehow knew that Eddie’s anger was not aimed at him. “I hurt you – pursued you to the point of you jumping out a window and down an elevator shaft. You mean to tell me that I everything I did can be forgiven by the suffering I went through?”
“It doesn’t—”
Eddie’s hands came up and curled around his wrists, trapping Waylon’s hands on his cheeks. “I was The Groom, the second most feared patient in the asylum. If I had had my way with you,” he paused there, his cheeks flushing as he stared down at Waylon. “You would have ended up cut apart, dying slowly as I dug into you. The violence against your body alone would have been horrifying, even if you didn’t account for the mentality I would have forced upon you.”
He tossed Waylon’s hands away like the touch was suddenly burning him. With as large of steps as he could manage, Eddie snarled as he walked away, the walls staining black in his wake. “I’ve been a monster my entire life, Waylon,” he called over his shoulder. “And I cannot control myself in this shared dreams of ours. If you follow after me, I may end up killing you.” He paused at the end of the hallway, refusing to turn back. “I will do my best to keep away from you – as it should always have been.” His head angled down and Waylon could almost see the furrow of his brow, just from the way his shoulders tightened.
He stood at the point where the echo of his parent’s house joined with the echo of the asylum.
In between heartbeats, Waylon watched as his clothes changed, his posture loosened and straightened up. Only a few moments passed before he was The Groom once more, a knife in his hand and a song spilling from his lips. “How happy you could be,” Eddie stopped singing to say those words without a tune, bitter and more broken than Waylon had ever heard him be.
His head rolled upright on his shoulders and Waylon took a step back, already knowing what would come next.
He needed to run.
So he did.
His heart pounding in his chest, Waylon picked up a running pace that would have shamed Olympic winners. All around him, he could hear doors flying open, metal grinding against metal. The Walrider appeared at his side for a second, launching itself up and away. In its hands, he could feel the warmth of flesh for a moment, possibly a living person being tossed aside as he ran from his delusions.
Behind him, he could hear the thudding footsteps of his pursuer, a version of Eddie that he hadn’t ever grown fond of.
A pair of hands shot out of a doorway, dragging him into the room and slamming the door shut behind him. With his back against the door and his hands on Waylon’s collar, Chris raised his eyebrows. “So,” he breathed the word out, listening as Eddie’s steps continued past the room. “His delusions and yours are tied together.”
“Not just tied,” Miles’s voice was a welcome relief as the eerie silence settled back in around them. “It’s like the two of them are fueling each other. Waylon and Eddie’s worst fears are, somehow, the exact same fucking thing.” He stepped forward, crossing his arms and leaning his back against the wall, his shoulder pressed against Chris’s. “Eddie losing control and becoming who he was. The Groom, chasing his Bride-to-be through the hallways he grew to know as home.”
Waylon squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember how reality felt. “He’s losing himself, here.”
“Yeah, no fucking shit.”
“Miles.” Chris shot an exasperated look at him.
“Sorry, Waylon,” Miles at least had the grace to sound sincere in his apology. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Waylon opened his eyes again, gesturing around himself. “This was the town Eddie moved to when he tried to get away from his father and his uncle. This is where they turned him into The Groom. This town, this entire fucking place – It’s just another one of Murkoff’s failures. When it didn’t work the way they wanted it to, they focused on the asylum.”
“Didn’t his uncle work for Murkoff?” Miles looked up again, brushing his hair out of his face. “I remember that – someone told us. Who,” he frowned, then shook his head. The edges of his memories and Waylon’s were blending together. All of their memories were bleeding into his, making it hard to know who he was on his own anymore. “Who told us that? Fuck. Anyway.” He shoved his hands into his hair. “His uncle worked for them – fed them information on his nephew, told them about him as a candidate for this fucking place.”
“Then somehow manipulated him into moving here,” Chris said it flatly. For a moment, Waylon thought he was criticizing Miles’s idea. When he furrowed his brow and nodded, however, it was obvious that he was just putting the pieces together. “We know Murkoff specializes in mental alteration.”
“They ran an insane asylum,” Waylon muttered, shoving his back against the wall. “They were masters of it.”
Miles looked at both of them in turn, meeting Chris’s eyes before he nodded as well. “They might have implanted the idea in his head. Without their interference, he would have lived a long and happy life. Eddie’s actually a kind of decent guy, when he isn’t dragging down on himself for what he did. And, honestly,” he snorted. “The fact that he hates himself so much for what he did, the way he uses it to try and scare you off is kind of telling of the fact that he would have been a good person.”
“A little traumatized, possibly averse to touch,” Chris added.
“But good,” Miles slumped against the wall. “Would have been touch-starved and a little repressed, but he wouldn’t have been a murderer, I don’t think.”
‘How happy you could be’.
The words rang through Waylon’s mind again. “Excuses…” he pushed away from the wall, pacing around the room as he thought about it. “It doesn’t excuse it,” he stopped, looking up at the both of them. “But it does explain it.” He turned towards the door, his hands curling into fists at his sides. “It’s not exactly his fault – sure, he reacted badly, but he was also being manipulated. It doesn’t grant immediate forgiveness, but it does allow him to try his best to make up for it.”
“Waylon, what are you thinking?” Chris crossed his arms, looking nervously at Waylon, as if he expected him to start screaming into the darkness.
Adjusting his glasses, Waylon moved towards the door. “Oh, just something really stupid.” He gestured for Chris to move. “C’mon, let me out.” He waited, watching as Chris settled in even more than before, planting his feet. “Chris.”
“No.”
“Chris.”
“Fuck off,” Chris made a noise in the back of his throat, something like a cross between a scoff and a huff of laughter. “You’re trained better than you used to be, but you’re still likely to die if you go out there and face off against him.”
When Waylon looked to Miles, the man raised his hands like he was absolving himself from the conversation. “Don’t look at me, code-monkey.”
“I’ve got the Walrider,” Waylon countered Chris’s glare. “I’ve got an idea. If I don’t face him, he’s going to keep running around in his delusions and his memories and the four of us are never going to get out of here. He and I are connected, I can find him and get him to remember himself. I can get us out of here. You just have to trust me.” He put his hands on his hips, winced a little, then crossed his arms. Lisa had told him, once, that there was nowhere for him to really put his hands when he was angry. On his hips made him look like he was just pouting and crossing his arms over his chest had just made him look like a little kid.
The best way to hold them was straight down, fists clenched, but he didn’t want to even slightly look like he was going to throw a punch. Chris was a soldier, was a fighter, would knock him flat with one hit.
It took a moment, but he knew he had won when Chris let a heavy sigh practically fall through the floor. “You’re taking your life in your own hands,” he warned as he moved away from the door. “Just don’t fucking die, okay?” he held the door open, gesturing for Waylon to leave the room.
“I’ll see you guys soon enough,” Waylon felt the hint of a promise in his words.
The door closed behind him when he left the room and he could feel Chris lurking just behind it. The constant soldier, taking up his post to keep someone safe. Miles could handle himself, Waylon was sure of it, but he could tell that Chris seemed to like him.
In another time, they might have been good together.
The hallway was the asylum, now. The stench that hit him was the one he had slowly tuned out while trying to escape. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw someone, could hear the distant whirr of a chainsaw. That had been the noise that had always heralded Frank Manera.
When he spotted a vent, he hopped up on a nearby chair and yanked the cover off, clambering in as quietly as possible. The metal was cold beneath his fingers and he wondered where he was in reality. The frequency emitters were making him see things, sure enough, but they could only do so much for the sensations bleeding through from the real world.
This felt real enough.
The distant screaming of the victims of the asylum made Waylon’s hair stand on end, his teeth clenched together as he climbed through the ventilation shafts.
They hadn’t been nearly this long between rooms before, had they?
When he felt the fingers curl around his ankle, yanking him down from within the ceiling, he shrieked. In the room below, standing tall, was Eddie Gluskin. This wasn’t the version of Eddie he thought he’d gotten to know – the remains of the man who’d been protective of him over the months they had gotten to know each other. The nanite ghost of Gluskin had been somewhat kind, if a little overprotective.
This was the version from the asylum.
The scarring flowed up his face like water, then disappeared again. On, off, on, off, like the lights in the hallways. His hands were covered in the fingerless gloves he’d fashioned for himself, his patchwork clothes stained with blood. The knife he held in his right hand gleamed in what little light there was in the room.
“Oh, Darling,” Eddie crooned as he crouched down and put a hand on Waylon’s cheek. “Were we not meant to be together?”
Waylon took a deep breath and held very still.
He’d known something like this might have been a danger. He’d been the focus of Eddie’s mania, back in the asylum – here in the asylum – and Eddie had been a constant at his side since then. They’d not been separated since, not even for an instant. Waylon had, in fact, relied on Eddie to help get him out of some situations that might have otherwise killed him. Before then, the nightmares had kept him close.
“I think we were,” he told the other man. “But I don’t think this is the right place for it.”
Something dark rolled across Eddie’s face and his eyes narrowed. Before he could say or do anything, Waylon shook his head. “Look around you, does this seem like the proper place for us?” he gestured at the walls, the peeling paper and the bloody handprints. “Eddie, this isn’t where we belong. Not here, not if,” he took a deep breath and braced himself for however the man was going to react. “Not if we want to be together. It won’t be here, Eddie.”
If he were being honest with himself, which he often tried to be, Eddie had been his type.
Was his type.
Still is.
When it came to women, he preferred people like Lisa: capable, brilliant, unafraid to be who they were and not willing to back down. A dominant personality, in other words, someone he could orbit around and soak in the light of their brilliance. Lisa had, for some unknown reason, put up with him despite the fact that she’d met him in a caffeine-fueled haze. He’d been preparing for midterms and he thought he remembered just drinking coffee straight from the pot.
When it came to men, Eddie would have been just his type if he’d ever found one that hadn’t been bone-headed and stupid.
Typically, the men who looked like Eddie, muscled and tall and broad-shouldered, were the ones who were still somewhat closeted. The ones who would use the eye-roll-inducing phrase, ‘No homo’ even as he went down on them.
If he let his vision go hazy, Waylon could pretend that this was a normal situation and that Eddie and he were a normal couple. If this were a normal day in a normal life, then the asylum setting would absolutely not do anything for his libido. He waited as Eddie studied the walls, his knife glinting in the light. What exactly had driven his delusions to drag them back here?
Was it just his delusions?
Or had the connection between the nanites in his system and the nanites that formed the ghost of Eddie Gluskin dragged them both there? He had thought that Eddie was the only one remembering the asylum in all the horrifying details.
In his nightmares, Waylon often made it back to Mount Massive, that much was true, but all of Eddie’s memories and dreams had him placed there. He’d had a lot of time to speak with his ghosts and that had been something Eddie had admitted to him. Mount Massive had become the only place Eddie really remembered with any clarity, anymore. Even the childhood home had been a faint memory, a distant haze of blue paint and screaming terror.
“Don’t you want to be with me?” Waylon stepped forward, pressing himself against Eddie, feeling something that almost felt like a heartbeat in the man’s chest. He trailed a hand up his back, resting on his shoulder.
He pressed his cheek against Eddie’s chest, over his heart, just listening to his breathing.
Instead of answering him with words, Eddie simply tucked the knife away and scooped Waylon off the floor. “Forgive me, Darling,” the British-lilt to his words was still there along with the dangerous flash in his eyes that spoke of The Groom. “I suppose it is in my nature to be such a beast; I simply couldn’t bear the thought of you leaving me.” He turned and tried to fumble with the door handle for a moment before Waylon reached out and pushed it open. “Darling,” Eddie scolded.
“You have your hands full with me,” Waylon said as sweetly as he could, leaning closer to Eddie’s face and wrapping his arms around his shoulders and neck. “I figured I could help with this one little thing.”
“Oh, you know I cannot stay mad at you,” Eddie’s voice was a deep rumble as he continued walking. Around them, inexplicably, the walls of the asylum were turning a bright-yellow color. A light flashed all around them, like sunlight, and Waylon hid against Eddie’s neck. When he dared to look around again, they were in a small house with yellow-painted walls and a soft grey carpet.
Eddie blinked a couple of times, then settled Waylon on his feet. “This was my home,” he said, his voice quiet. The accent he had put on was gone.
Instead of his asylum clothing, he wore something Waylon never could have pictured him in before. Dark-wash denim covered his legs, leading down to a pair of sturdy hiking boots. His shirt was a green-and-blue plaid, tucked in neatly. “This is where they created the monster I became,” he continued after a second. There was no scarring on his face this time, when he looked at Waylon.
“Eddie,” Waylon reached out and put a hand on his arm. He startled a little when Eddie put a hand over his, clutching tightly at the lifeline that Waylon offered.
Even when dressed for the outdoors-oriented life he’d chosen to escape to, Eddie still wore fingerless gloves to cover the scars on his palms. “Waylon,” he whispered. In the living room of his memory, the walls a bright color and drenched in sunlight from all sides, Eddie looked much more at home than Waylon had ever seen him. “I lived here for a year. I feared, the entire time, that my father and my uncle would come and find me.” He glanced around the room, something softer in his eyes as he took in the photos and the knickknacks.
On one wall was a photo of what must have been Eddie and his mother.
“I remember, now,” Eddie moved over to it, tracing his fingers over the frame. “The things I was saying in the asylum – those were my father’s words. The words of a man swimming in his own bullshit,” he smiled, a little, as he said it. “Misogynistic bastard. ‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen’ blah blah blah,” he snorted, then turned to look at Waylon and where their hands were still touching. “I think, without the mania and the violence that they put to the forefront of my mind, I would have been a good person.”
“You moved several states away to escape your father,” Waylon smiled back at him. “I have no doubt you would have been.”
“Thank you,” Eddie swallowed, seemingly nervous. “I also think, if I’d been born at a better time, I would have liked to actually get to know you. Without the asylum chase and the broken leg and the attempts on your life.” He looked out the window. “If I’d been born later and met you before you were married…” he shrugged. “Well, who is to say what might have happened?”
Waylon wanted to tell him what might have happened.
Eddie Gluskin, sarcastic wit and dry humor and brilliant mind, would have at once caught his attention. He was attractive, even as an older man, and Waylon would have seen him in a crowd at one of the few parties he’d been dragged to.
There might not have been a marriage to Lisa, if he’d met Eddie first. He simply couldn’t see himself giving up a relationship like that.
The sour taste of what might have been lingered in his mouth as he watched the sunlight flicker. “You’re going to wake up, now,” Eddie muttered. He pulled Waylon closer, gesturing out the window. “You’ve pulled me out of the asylum, I’ll be here if and when you go delusional again.” He nodded when Waylon looked up at him. “I and the others will have your back in whatever you do, Waylon.”
Waylon closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was in a small house that had started to collapse in on itself.
With the flashlight he pulled out of his pocket, Waylon looked around the room and moved closer to the wall. The color was hard to make out, the dim beam of light turning it a mottled grey, but he could see patches of bright-yellow where the dirt hadn’t settled yet.
For a moment, he could have sworn he smelled a flash of cologne.
There was an empty square on the wall, where Eddie had been staring at the photo of himself and his mother. Waylon stared at it for a minute, then nodded.
He knew what he had to do.
When he got back to his base, back to where the quadruplets were and back where what little he owned was, he would find photos of Eddie’s mother. He would go visit Tess again, if he had to. Go all the way back to Port Arthur, just to find the small spark of happiness that had dragged Eddie back out of his own head.
Something like that was powerful.
Worth holding onto.
He stood up straight, walking out of the house. When he got out the front door, he turned and looked back at it – it was a small building, but it would have been enough for Eddie on his own. He could see flecks of color, the soft blue the outside had once been painted. Waylon smiled – he could just imagine Eddie painting it.
The image was a little lonely, but it spoke of healing.
He wondered what Eddie would have looked like in his twenties. He had seen photos of him as an adolescent, had met him in his late forties. Would he have been all sharp edges, still? Cheekbones and nose and chin, with those intense eyes of his.
Eddie would have been handsome.
“I’ll want you to come back with me,” he spoke to Eddie, knowing he would hear him. “I’ll want you to come home.”
The surge of happiness he felt from Eddie was almost overwhelming. Behind him, he could feel Miles and Chris falling in step with him.
Blake’s voice was desperate in the distance, Miles wincing at how terrified the other man sounded. Things had clearly not gone well for him, him and his wife the focus of the cult that had popped up around the whispers of the Walrider, the experiments that Murkoff had done. The screaming of the people who had lived in the town had stopped, a silence falling over everything that reminded Waylon too much of Mount Massive.
“What sort of man is he?” he thought to ask Miles.
‘Kind. When he wants to be. Loves his wife, adores her. Focuses too much on work, ignores the world outside in favor of finding out the story within.’ A beat of silence. ‘Somehow, I keep finding the workaholics who ignore everything but the work when it comes down to it.”
“I’m going to go find him.”
Waylon moved through the trees, taking as quick a route as he could. There were flashes of Mount Massive at the edges of his vision, but they were quickly discarded. He knew where reality was, what it was, his delusions couldn’t control him right now. Miles and Chris whispered to him, occasionally, and he had to wonder what had changed about him.
What sort of man was he?
He had been a husband and a father, once. Now, Lisa was dead and the boys had been sent to live with their grandparents. Now he couldn’t really go home, not until Murkoff and Umbrella were gone.
Maybe not even then.
He had once been Waylon Park, a nerdy computer tech with a love of overlarge sweaters and high-top shoes. They had been worn with pride, his skills so necessary that they outweighed his refusal to wear a uniform. He had been hired by Murkoff on his reputation and skills alone. The job had been a hell of a thing to find, a major upgrade from what he’d had before. More money for the same amount of work and he had taken pride in it up until he had been sat down in front of a screen, watching a patient screaming to be let loose.
He had been Waylon Park, once.
His name wasn’t very important, these days.
The way he had been combined with those he had known, had worked alongside, had only ever known as nightmares – that all had a way of turning into an unwillingness to be anything but a nameless face among hundreds of thousands of others. He had been Waylon Park, once, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he had become someone else.
Miles Upshur, Chris Walker, and Eddie Gluskin were in his head.
He wasn’t exactly himself, these days.
Between them and the quadruplets, the way he tended to fall into silence like them, he was actually surprised he was even still something resembling a person. The four others he spent time with could speak mind-to-mind, even with him. With the experiments involving the four talking to the three in his head, things had shifted.
Talking had fallen by the wayside.
The four of them slunk in and out of the small base they had all crowded into and he didn’t ask them where they went when they were gone. The forest was nearby, a way out for him and something approaching home for them.
‘You need to talk to him, soon,’ Miles’s voice was frustrated. He always was when he knew something was going to be more complicated because he couldn’t be the one doing it. Right then, it was about a friend of his, someone who had worked with him back when he had first become a reporter. A man named Blake Langermann, someone Miles still felt he could trust. Trusting people was a rare thing these days, a finite amount of people even being considered for it.
Following Miles’s words was the harsher hiss of Chris’s voice, the giant of a man practically rolling his eyes and shaking his head. ‘If you’re going to go talk to him, you need to be careful.’
“I will be,” Waylon whispered.
For a moment, he reached a tendril of thought towards where he could feel Eddie. The nanite-ghost of Eddie Gluskin was at the edge of his awareness, still in the run-down house that had once been the only peaceful home he had known. “Eddie?” he called to him. In seconds, he felt the warmth of his arrival at his side, the sensation of a hand on his shoulder and sliding down his upper arm. “I’m going to go find Blake.”
‘Stay safe.’
Waylon took a deep breath, nodded, then took off sprinting through the village full of corpses. The scent came at him from all sides, the decay and mold of lives having stopped in place forced into his mouth as he breathed.
By the time he came across Blake, the man was collapsing at the edge of a building, his hands clutching at air.
A flash of panic shot through him as he remembered a paper he had come across – Miles had come across? – in the asylum about psychosomatic pregnancies. About why there had been no female patients. There had been heavy suggestion involved with Murkoff’s research, their bodies responding to suggestion so strongly that they had gone through the motions of pregnancy. As that thought hit, Waylon slowed down, coming to a stop only about ten feet away from Blake.
Where was his wife?
He couldn’t even remember her name right then, only knew that she had been in the town with Blake. Waylon had caught glimpses of them, over the time they had been terrorized and tormented by the experiment still very much running.
With a clenching of his fist, he directed the Walrider to the frequency generators on the edges of the town.
There was more than a little satisfaction as each one shut down suddenly, a high-pitched shrieking whine heralding their demise. In a couple of minutes, the Walrider appeared back at his shoulder. He could feel Eddie on his right, Miles just ahead of the Walrider, with Chris behind all of them. “Blake Langermann,” he called out. The man didn’t respond at first, curled in on himself and clutching tightly at something that wasn’t there.
Miles urged him forward, his worry for his old friend coloring his presence. Waylon nodded, crouching down next to Blake.
“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice soft.
When Blake looked up, it was with eyes that were haunted. “She’s dead,” he whispered. “Lynn. She’s – She’s dead.” He looked back down at his arms, a panicked cry ripping out of him. “She’s dead and there isn’t a baby.” His body trembled as he looked at Waylon again. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Waylon put a hand on Blake’s arm. “There’s no baby.”
Pushing his glasses aside, dragging his dirty sleeve over his eyes, Blake shook his head. “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“You can take a few minutes to not be okay,” Waylon sat down next to him, ignoring Chris’s suggestion to get out of the area. Blake needed more than a pat on the back and an explanation. Strangely, Eddie was the one most willing to let him sit there and help the man. “Trust me, this place is fucked. It’s one of Murkoff’s things. They set up Mount Massive, a couple of years ago. Back in twenty-twelve, do you remember that?”
Blake nodded, hiding his face in his hands. “Friend of mine was there,” he bit the words out. “Haven’t heard from him in a while but I know he was going after Murkoff.”
“Okay, so that’s where things are going to be weird,” Waylon chuckled awkwardly. “My name is Waylon Park.” He watched as Blake looked at him, properly and fully, for the first time. “And I’m officially considered a runaway experiment by Murkoff. They infected me with their bullshit and then I got out and survived.” He held out a hand. “They killed my wife, too.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
Pushing his glasses back on, Blake nodded. “I’m going to assume Miles sent you, somehow. Bastard always did have a way of knowing when something was happening.”
“In…A way.” Waylon hedged, doing his best to ignore Miles cackling in the back of his mind. “He died. Protecting me. I owe him a lot – he should be here, right now, in person rather than in spirit.” He felt, rather than heard, Chris’s laughter joining Miles’s. If he’d had more time, he would have cheered at the fact that he’d been right about them liking each other. In another life, they might have been friends, possibly even more. “But he asked me to get to you, to have you help us on what we’re doing.”
“What’re you doing?” Blake straightened out his shirt as best he could, the tattered fabric stained with blood and other fluids. “Because if it’s taking these fuckers down, I am on board with that.”
“It’s ruining them,” Waylon nodded, standing up and offering Blake his hand. “Burning them down and salting the earth they grew from so that they can never grow up from their roots again. Anything you can do to help with that, anything you want to do to help with that, would be much appreciated. I’ve already taken down a couple of sites of theirs and I don’t think they want me running free for much longer.”
“I’ve got a nice bit of ammo, for you in your war,” Blake took his hand, standing up. “Murkoff has a sister corporation. The paperwork is all legal but the information is buried.”
“Oh?”
“Umbrella Corp.”
If Waylon had been capable of being even more surprised than he was in that moment, he would almost have paid to see it. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Blake cleared his throat. “In the public eye, Umbrella bought Murkoff through subsidiaries and offshoots and poured extra funding into it. In truth, they were started as sister companies. Umbrella is working with genetics – Murkoff is working with what brains are capable of. They’re going after the same problem with different routes. Tackle the average human’s lifespan shortcomings, health problems, make the perfect soldiers. They won’t need to sleep, they’ll be strong and near-invincible—Imagine,” a look of fear passed over Blake’s face, then. “Imagine the wars that could and would be fought by having soldiers like that.”
Waylon spared a thought for the quadruplets he had found.
Everything about them suddenly made sense.
If Umbrella had bought Murkoff and combined the research from both companies, then they would have gotten something very close to those four. Telekinetic, at times, telepathic, supremely strong. The four of them thought as a whole, a unit, a single person in four different bodies. They could think on their own but the four of them were constantly in each other’s heads.
The flow of their thoughts was uninterrupted by having separate bodies.
A cold shiver of fear ran down his spine as he thought about what an entire army of soldiers like that would allow for.
“As I said before,” he met Blake’s eyes. “My name is Waylon Park. And I want Murkoff destroyed.”
“My name is Blake Langermann,” Blake’s fists clenched at his sides, his wedding ring glinting through the muck on his skin. “And I want Murkoff turned to dust and Umbrella turned to ash.”