“Hm. So what’s the plan here?” Zig stirred a new spoonful of sugar into his third cup of coffee.
“Ideally, to erase all evidence that John Watt survived the attack in Budapest,” said Greyson.
“And then things will go back to normal?”
“Yes. For a while.”
“For a while??”
“This delay is necessary. They are already here. But my people need more time.”
“More time to…?”
Vern didn't respond, his expression fixed, gaze staring off into the middle ground. Then slowly, like an unstrung puppet, he crumpled forward and his head hit the tabletop with a little more violence than intended. The ceramic on the kitchen jolted on impact, and a spoon clattered off a saucer.
Startled, Zig tentatively reached out to him. “Hey, are you okay…?”
Vern groaned, his voice gravelly and squashed flat upon the tabletop. “Wha… Ziegler? What’re you doing here?” he slurred.
“Oh, you're back.” Zig casually slid his gun off the table. “There was an incident. You okay, man?”
“Everything hurts," Vern rasped against the table. "My hand hurts.”
"Bit of a story there.”
“I haven’t been blackout drunk since college,” Vern mumbled as he raised his head which suddenly felt like it too heavy and full of bees. “Were we up all night?”
“Yeaaah.”
Vern then stared, raccoon-eyed, at the mitten of gauze encasing his wrecked right hand. “What the… what happened?!”
Zig leaned forward to top off his coffee with a fresh pour from the stained glass pot. “Have a cuppa first. You’re gonna need it.”
For a moment, Vern said nothing, staring down at the mug filling up on the kitchen table as he quietly attempted to process the past six hours. Mentally he was trying out all the dropdown menus, flipping through the timestamps on his internal logs, searching for the gap in his memory. Eventually he noticed the blood on his sleeve. His gaze followed the congealed spatter pattern down to the rest of his business-blue dress shirt, discovering the entire front half of his clothes were stiff with blood. He realized the blood flaking off his hands wasn’t his own. His pupils dilated and slowly he began hyperventilating.
Zig watched him carefully. “Now stay calm…”
“I am calm,” Vern breathed shakily as shock began building up into rage. “...Did I kill someone?”
“Technically it wasn’t you—”
Vern looked up at Zig, stricken. “What?”
“Your friend did.”
Vern’s stare was murderous. The rage peaked. “Not again,” he seethed, standing up from the table so fast that the chair squeaked. “Not again..!”
“He said that you'd be okay with it.”
“He said he’d never do it again!”
Vern turned away, intent on storming out, but stopped when he spotted the body on the floor. It wasn't even a benign view of the dead man, of his legs sprawled or a tell-tale arm from behind the couch – it was the caved-in head in a pool of blood that still looked bright red, too fresh even though it’d been soaking into the carpet since last night. The man’s face had been pulverized straight into the back of his skull, red and pink gristle spilling over the cracked edges. Faceless, he seemed anonymous, even though both men at the kitchen table knew him.
It was the first time Ziegler had seen him die. It was Vern’s second.
“It’s Watt,” Zig told him, almost apologetically. “Or, was him. It’s fine, he’s not really dead. Please sit back down, I think you’re gonna hurt yourself.”
But Vern was gone, catapulted back into his own head as a flood of memories seized control of his faculties.
He was back in the chair again, in Budapest. He could feel the leather burning across his arms, flaying the top layer of skin off in one stroke –and then he was burying his fist into another man’s face, but he didn't stop there, he slammed his fist into it over and over until both eye socket and knuckles cracked open and something spilled out over his hand–
The skewed and panic-fueled memory of endless running around in the maze of basement corridors, of the dust and debris biting into his bare feet on icy tile, his right hand tightened in a broken, bloody fist weighing down his arm like a cement block, blood all over the green surgical gown he’d been wearing for the past month.
Shouts echoed down the corridor, words he didn't understand. Moonlight through barred windows. The sharp scent of fresh air, of antiseptic and bleach and vomit and despair, slamming through door after door, and—
He was back in the chair again, in Budapest. He could feel–
Zig figured out how to get Vern to snap out of it. Many of his friends were war vets who got hung up like that sometimes, their eyes like static snow as the war waged behind them.
Smell as a strong mnemonic trigger, Zig knew, was one way of interrupting the cycle. He knew better than to touch him. The last time he tried that with someone having a bad flashback, he'd been grabbed and throat punched by an 80 year old man with a breathing tube.
He held his cup of hot coffee under Vern’s face.
Gradually, Vern’s heavy breathing slowed until he was quiet, sweat beading at his temples. He staggered and dropped back down into his seat, shaking. Blinking.
The coffee had done the job. As consciousness jittered at the edges, Vern fought to focus on the present: the burnt bitter aroma of coffee that’d been in the pot for too long, the coffee rings on the kitchen table — goddammit, that’s what coasters are for, Grayson — the smell of his own sour hide and the copper stink of blood, and he could still taste the alcohol on his breath. Fuck, was he still drunk?
Zig sat back down and set the cup of coffee back onto the table. The mug was emblazoned with a silhouette print of the White House and the word WASHINGTON, DC in a robust serif font beneath it. He pushed it towards Vern.
“I’ll explain,” he said.
