The car veered around the corner while Thomas reloaded his pistol and cast a quick glance at the seat beside him. The documents were irrefutable, but even then he doubted much care would be given to them after everything he had been through. He had gone to people, others who might be able to do something with them, and they did nothing. Now he was sure he was being followed, and all because he got to the bottom of something that would be his undoing.

The serial killer, named the Neon Killer due to the bodies of the victims always being dumped below neon signs, was something that had curiously eluded authorities for well over two decades until his capture one decade ago. To say nothing of how inconspicuous dumping bodies below literally lit-up signs, the police timelines had made no sense -- especially so after their suspect had been brought in.

He was a crazy man, and no good to boot, but he couldn’t have been at the scene of at least three of the crimes if the police’s own evidence was to be believed. Marcus Garvolo had a history of domestic violence, armed robbery, a suspected rape and a questionably thrown-out conviction for gun-running; not a good man by any means.

But he wasn’t the Neon Killer, Thomas Monroe had no doubt about it. Marcus was no saint, far from it and laughable by the groupies he possessed with his power of persuasion and criminal charisma, yet he literally couldn’t do one of the kills -- of that Thomas couldn’t be convinced otherwise. Unless he could warp from Pensacola all the way to Eugene Oregon in the span of an hour and a half (and get back on top of it) then there was no way. Marcus had receipts on his person, receipts that Thomas had been sure to copy and that had mysteriously disappeared from the girlfriend that Marcus had told Thomas of -- a message conveyed through him writing it on his hand with a pen proffered by Thomas.

That girl had ended up dead as well. Suicide, they said. Funny how that works. Marcus was still alive though. Another bit of comedy with the way of the world.

The car behind Thomas turned its lights on, and he knew it was over. These were backroads, and his car -- though great with that get-up-and-go wasn’t one of these new fangled whatevers that was catching up to him too fast.

What the Cherokee, screaming at the height of its RPMs did possess was some off-road capabilities -- something that Thomas was more than willing to test as he twisted hard to go on the off-road.

The murders, racing through his mind as the Jeep dashed and raced through the backwoods and off-roads of the drizzling Washington night, were as deadly as the Neon Killer was, or still is. The headlights were gone behind him, and he soon pulled out onto a country backroad as he huffed terror filled breaths.

That fuck Jenkins tipped the dime off on him. When he had taken the small case, a missing girl of a well-to-do family, he had never expected to be led by the nose all throughout the American legal system to one of the most famous murder cases in that system. Now, he wished he was just back home and taking photos of cheating spouses. As he drove down the road he popped a stick of nicotine gum in his mouth and laughed at the idea. He should just smoke, he wasn’t making it out of this anyway.

The case, one Mary Lemore, was simple enough until he had found that she was involved as pen-pals with Marcus Garvolo, captured in the imprisoned spider’s web. That was what had lead him to talk to the man, whose insanity was like a stink that hit your nose before you even saw him. Hell, Thomas had to drive all the way to Walla Walla prison to talk to him and even the surrounding area smelled funny -- overpowering the smell of the onions they regularly grew there.

“I knew it would be you, Beast.” he had said to Thomas before he could even see him. He spoke to him as he was outside the door. He smiled, eyes devoid of light and razzle-dazzle white teeth shining with a hard-set smile; like a doll’s. He didn’t move his eyes, rather he would pivot his whole head to stare at whoever he was speaking to with those eyes of dark brown staring straight ahead. He was like an owl that way. His fingernails were picked clean. His beard pointed this way and that. His smile never faltered. And before Thomas had been able to reply he only said:

“I know you have questions, and I have some answers -- you’ll fly for ‘em won’t ya? You’ll have to go there if you want answers, but I never liked coming back here. It’s all so fast. I like it back there. Can be slow there. Here we’re bound by the infinite, y’know? There, it’s a circuit. Complete. You’ll like it Beast -- but I hope that you won’t. You shouldn’t like it too much. That can be bad for you. Like anything I guess.” He shrugged.

From there Marcus had told him a story he could hardly believe, and often times had to parse strange and false-seeming information. About the government mostly. How the murders were connected to, from what Thomas could understand, was a government program involved in something that Marcus would only ever refer to as “The Blinking Project” -- drugs as far as Thomas could see, or he had begun with the idea. Whole thing revolved around some program started in the 60’s called ‘Project Gateway’. A CIA program to look into the existence of the spirit world, one that had been met with -- surprisingly -- resounding success.

Their investigation had found not only one, but many ‘worlds’ -- though the mileage could vary depending on what you termed a ‘world’ -- and their inhabitants seemed more than willing to discuss metaphysics and other things. The whole thing was seemingly both banal and earth-shattering, as the creatures held many forms of shifting space and emotion while also allowing very little in the feel of an actual form.

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The papers read like bad fiction and the little amount of named people that Thomas could go and interview were either so acid-fried or senile or both that their words meant little. But they still meant something, and that scared Thomas. He had talked enough to Garvolo that the old fogeys had bits and pieces of sense, especially a frazzled hairball of a woman that had stared at him with circle-eyes and a discolored smile, all framed in topaz jewelry. It was Santa Fe after all.

“You’re flyin’, man. You’re a weird one -- but you’re definitely one!” she had laughed at that like it was an inside joke that only her and her insanity knew. But it wasn’t the first time they had referenced flying, they being the insane that Thomas had interviewed.

“You’ve got it! You’ve got it! There’s nine then six but you are seventh! Woe be! Woe be! You shouldn’t but you’ve got it! Those mad made creatures! You’ve got it!” screamed one of the demented old men.

“There’s very little I can tell you, besides you’re there. You’ll be flying soon, then you won’t. I can’t believe it, that it’s you who will be the one in the gears. Pray you don’t get ground, hm?” spoke another, a woman dying of a particularly aggressive strain of cancer. “I was there, for a bit. I was flyin’ too. The ones they take don’t come back, though. They don’t come back.” she had lasted a week after Thomas left, dying to an empty room in the sanitary barren of a hospital.

A lot of it seemed like a jumble of terms and ideas that made little sense to Thomas, and he hardly believed it to begin with. What he was concerned with were the murders. The Neon Killer. It was a thread that he had begun to pull and it led him towards halls of power and insanity that seemed to delve deeper and deeper into the various organs of the state that all refused to speak of it. If information on the literal afterlife was thrown out with all the conviction of trash to rats -- something he hardly believed from the documents, why cover up anything involved with this case unless it had a direct correlation to blood on the hands of the agencies in question?

The smoking gun was with a short document asking for verification of previous evidence related to something in the ‘Blinking Project’. Rather than being about a handwaved acid drenched trip contacting other worlds -- this was about simple communication with something using a heightened form of what was essentially morse code. The science eluded Thomas, but it all ended up with him in a diner discussing a cover up with a nameless suit -- one Mr. Jones.

Jones had told him that a large majority of the murders were actually test subjects dumped at various sites and posed to look like murders. A senator's son, a prized genius, a beauty queen or some other kind of kid. All were made to be strung together under the umbrella of Marcus Gavrolo and his insanity -- who was, himself, a test subject that had survived.

The informant wouldn’t say why Marcus had been tested on, instead giving him a location to pick up some documents. He had done so, seeing official CIA correspondence between Gavrolo himself in the form of a parole officer that had been working for the CIA at the same time. The whole thing was loose, really loose, but Thomas had jumped on the whole of it as quickly as he could. He had sent his work, first to the family as he found her name as one of the last in the series of victims that had signed up for a college psychological test that ended with her dead below the flashing lights of a trash filed street in Memphis, Tennessee.

Then he went to Jenkins, that fuck. Jenkins was an old ‘friend’ with a pretty quid-pro-quo grip on life. Once a reporter when it mattered, then a paparazzi when catching a pussy-pic of a vulnerable teen celebrity got cash in full grips, and then something of a war journalist that felt a bit of a lateral move with pictures of death in other countries. He was hard scrabbled, brain and character both -- and was as grizzled as a man who couldn’t grow a beard nor hair atop his head could seem.

Thomas thought that the Lenore case would be an interesting thing to send for a book, get published and maybe get a movie. Now he was dashing through woods and getting onto back country roads of mud filled mist paths that made him jump at the eerie fingers of branches that clawed at the side of his Jeep here and there. Why Jenkins had felt the need to do this, he wouldn’t truly know besides a guess.

He was alone, abandoned and set to the wolves by some asshole who probably did it for a month's rent and half a bottle of pills. The road was alone, and so was Thomas. The nightsong of birds and bugs were silenced, and only the growl of the engine chugging along the midnight dirt and the mud splashing the sides could be heard.

Three pairs of headlights lit up in front of him as Thomas widened his eyes in surprise and turned hard to spin his Jeep around. He spun the vehicle and gunned it as the things behind caught up too fast for him to do anything. They were in the precarious parts, driving next to a gorge as Thomas realized how close he was to the edge of the thing and how the other cars swerved into him trying to veer him off the road over-and-over again.

He raised his pistol and levied a shot out of the window he auto-rolled down with a click of his finger. The glass was only half-way down before he shot twice, the flash illuminating the car beside him. An empty car -- well, sort of empty. There was something there, a hidden shade in the form of a man like dark steam taking broad brushstrokes to become an impression of a human form. His eyes widened as the steering wheel thrust right and crashed into his side

All the while he wasn’t paying close-enough attention to what was in front of him. He put his eyes back on the road as the documents tumbled around his car. One smacked him in the face and he peeled it off in sweaty panic. His stomach dropped with speed. The radio turned on to a tuned scream of some song or other -- and quickly became static void.

He was flying over a black vacant nothing, headlights stopped behind him with the screech of touch-light brakes. He thought back to what the mad man had said.

“I know you have questions, and I have some answers -- you’ll fly for ‘em won’t ya?”

Thomas had never been religious, and he wasn’t sure praying to god as one plummeted to their death really counted as religion or celestial-insurance, but he thought death wouldn't have been like this.

Nor would he have thought that a portal opening and consuming his Jeep would’ve happened either. It allowed in enough, shearing the bottom wheels and the rooftop while the back of the Jeep was just gone. The papers trailed behind while Thomas was left screaming and falling in through stars and gaseous cosmic clouds. Flashes of lumi-green and screaming purple-pink rushed by with the roaring of close and distant stars. Planets of gas and ringed illumination streamed like smeared paint and streaks of ever-quickening things smiled at him with unknowable malice, contempt, grace and love.

Thomas screamed the whole way.

And out the other end, a transition that couldn’t be seen and only felt, and (still screaming while sweat beaded across his face and piss probably filled his pants) he saw a long down target of a crater. Now gravity, that horrible of all feelings when so high, took hold of his stomach and dropped it as he fell towards a massive pool of green and purple glow.

Something ripped from the surface of (what he could now see was) the pool of liquid and tore Thomas from the remains of the jeep -- lashing him into the great bubbling form below.

[HERo- HERO SuMm--]

[HERO SUMMONED -- UNKNOWN]