Frank sits there for a long time with his stomach tied in knots and his eyes fixed on the image in front of him until a waitress wanders over to say that his computer session will end in five minutes and would he like more time or anything else to drink? Chewing anxiously on his lip, he shakes his head and gives her back his empty glass. Five minutes. Maybe he could use the laptop at Stacey's place to carry on snooping. Looking again at the photo of Anna and her dead lover, he quickly scans the image for any clues that could tell him where it was taken or where he might find this young lady now. The steps that they’re sitting on in the picture are oddly familiar and like a bolt from the blue he suddenly remembers why: it's UCLA. This photo was taken somewhere on the UCLA Westwood campus where film-makers are always shooting teen rom-com movies and tv shows. Thank god, he's finally made some progress.

Back at Stacey's, Frank lets himself in the front door and kicks off his sneakers, glad that the house is still empty because he's really not in the mood to make small talk or pretend like everything's normal when it so obviously isn't. Smoking a cigarette to try and ease the tension building up in his muscles and head, he wearily pads across the soft carpets to his room where he locks the door and flops down on the bed, trying to formulate some kind of plan. His phone vibrates in his pocket with a text and it turns out to be Gerard checking up on him again which just makes him feel sad and lonely so he ignores it. Sighing miserably, he stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray Stacey left for him and rolls onto his stomach, pulling a pillow over his head and breathing in the comforting scent of his own warm breath and unwashed hair. A pang of homesickness burns in the back of his throat but he's not sick for New Jersey, he's sick for the band. My Chemical Romance is his whole life and he wants to be a proper part of it again. The sooner all this stupid Anna Fletcher stuff is resolved, the sooner he can forget about it and get back to doing what he loves.

There's a scrap of paper under the pillow and he grabs it and pulls it out, shaking hair and cotton fluff out of his eyes to read it over again in the warm daylight. It's Lorna’s name and phone number. On the night Brian and Gerard found him feverish and ill outside Brian’s hotel room, he was put to bed and left alone while his friends ran out to find a doctor or buy some medicine and while he lay shivering under the sheets he'd noticed Lorna’s scribbled message from the diner still there on his hand, smeared by tears and rain. Dragging his aching body out of bed, he'd found a pen and copied down her details on the back of a gig flyer before washing the message off his skin and stashing the paper in his suitcase.

Now, Frank makes a final decision and pockets the paper in his jeans before changing into a long-sleeved collared shirt that hides most of his tattoos and rummaging through his suitcase until he finds a pair of sunglasses and his backpack, putting both on before running downstairs to Stacey's study where he finds a local phonebook and compares the listings with Lorna’s details. Her last name is ‘Mackenzie’ so he matches the number she gave him to the right Mackenzie address and tears out the page. The sun is still blazing outside but he takes off running down the bright city streets with blood and ghosts hissing in his ears.

***
Lorna’s house isn’t far but when Frank finds it he loiters outside the dusty junk-filled front yard for a while wondering if he should have called first. What if she’s not home? But her rickety red bicycle is chained to the fence beside him so he guesses that's a good sign. Pushing open the rusty yard gate, he walks slowly up the concrete path and rings the bell. There is a long, long pause and he fidgets nervously on the doorstep, wondering if the doorbell is broken or something. Maybe he should knock. Then the sound of sluggish heavy footsteps approaches from behind the paint-chipped door and it eventually creaks open to reveal one of the largest, meanest looking men Frank has ever seen. This guy is a triple threat of tall, fat and muscular and he must be an ex-wrestler or something because he is HUGE, close to seven feet tall and built like a truck with a massive beer gut and immense heavily-tattooed arms bursting out of his dirty white vest. His head is shaved and his chin is thickly bearded and in one giant hand he's holding a half-empty beer bottle. The expression on his face is one of intense hostility and dislike and it's aimed squarely down at Frank who feels his jaw drop in awe and quickly forces himself to speak instead of gaping like a moron. “Um, is…does Lorna live here?”
The huge guy narrows his eyes and turns away from the door with a rumbling sigh. “Lorna!” he bellows into the house, “Door!”
With a final glare the man-mountain turns and lumbers off down the dim hallway inside, disappearing into a side-room from which a television is aggressively blaring. Sighing with unconscious relief, Frank shakes his hair out of his eyes and adjusts the bag on his skinny shoulders. He's sweating bullets and his old burns are starting to sting again.

Lorna looks surprised when she comes to the door. “Wow, Frank, I didn’t really think I’d see you again. I thought I might've scared you off.”
“Nah, of course not,” Frank mumbles, blushing awkwardly. Lorna is wearing khaki shorts on her slim bare legs and a tight Get Up Kids t-shirt. Her blonde hair is pinned up in cute braids that frame her pretty pink-cheeked face and she looks good enough to eat right now. Frank clears his throat and looks at his shoes. “I found out something about my, I mean OUR nightmares,” he stammers, “I can tell you about it on the way but basically, if you want to come along, I'm going to the college campus in Westwood.”
“Aha,” Lorna says, her eyes sparkling, “So that’s why you have a backpack. Are we pretending to be students?”
“Do you want to come or not?” Frank sighs, feeling embarrassed for no good reason. Lorna’s expression turns serious and she nods, “If it’s got something to do with our visions then count me in. I've a friend who goes to school there so I know the place well enough to sneak around. Just let me find some shoes and stuff. Come in.”

Painfully aware of the beer-swilling giant in the living room, Frank follows her inside and shuts the door behind them. The hall is lined with peeling yellow wallpaper and littered with dusty industrial sized soup cans, toolboxes and dirty biker leathers. The whole place reeks of damp and motor oil and Frank wonders where Lorna’s dad – if that even is her dad - keeps his motorcycle.
“Come on,” Lorna whispers, leading Frank down the passage towards a narrow wooden staircase. As they pass the living room door he glances inside and sees the big man slumped on the couch in front of the TV. “Don't worry,” Lorna says, rolling her eyes, “Dad doesn't care if I have guys around.”
Moving quickly, she ushers Frank upstairs to her bedroom and it's bigger than he was expecting, with a double bed squeezed against one wall and a large white closet with slatted doors. The walls are papered in the same depressing yellow as the downstairs hall but Lorna's decorated them with dozens of drawings, postcards, posters and photographs.
While she busies herself pulling random shoes out of a messy pile in the corner, none of which seem to match, Frank looks around at her posters and spots a couple for some obscure vintage bands he likes. “You sure your dad doesn't mind me being up here?” he asks in a whisper.
“No, he really doesn’t care. I’m not a kid anymore and it’s not like he doesn’t fill the house with his little biker chick whores most nights. Jeez, I’m entitled to a little fun of my own don’t you think?”
“Fun? No wait, I didn't mean that you and I should-”
“Relax, I'm teasing, you idiot.”
“I didn’t think…” Frank trails off lamely and sits down on a wooden chair by the bed with an embarrassed smile. Lorna snickers and starts to pull on a pair of battered white tennis shoes, threading the frayed laces into little bows just as BANG: the closet door flies open, hitting the wall. Lorna jumps up in surprise as a man wearing black leathers and a motorcycle helmet storms out and stabs her in the chest with a butcher knife right before slashing her throat! Thick streams of blood spurt everywhere, splashing the walls and bed with red, and Frank screams in horror, his heart in his throat, as the attacker whirls around and lunges for him, wrapping a black-gloved hand around his neck and slamming him back against the wall.
Struggling frantically in the silent stranger’s iron grip, Frank claws at the leather-clad fingers tightening and tightening around his neck until he can’t breathe. His own terrified eyes are reflected back at him in the black mirror of the stranger's visored helmet and he watches them widen in pain and shock as a sharp steel blade is thrust deep between his ribs.

Hot bloody agony rips through his body as the knife tears through his flesh and organs and the sharp scent of blood floods his nose and mouth. The killer in black jerks the knife free of his victim’s chest with a wet scrape and Frank collapses to the floor, his legs numb and his chest on fire as blood oozes through his clothes and pools quickly around his twitching body. The murderer steps back with the blade dripping in his hand, a faceless demon in the dying light, and Frank moans with pain, trying to move, to get up, but his body won’t co-operate. Blood surges up his throat and bubbles in and out of his shredded lungs and he looks up through a haze of pain and tears and sees Lorna. A river of blood is gushing from the gaping slash in her throat and her lips are turning blue as her wide eyes darken and die. The air in the room shivers and ripples with shadows and Frank can see the ghostly outline of Anna Fletcher kneeling over him and staring down with white empty eyes as he gasps his last breaths. Behind her a dozen more people – faceless and rotting – are standing still and silent like tombstones in a graveyard as everything goes dark and a numb chill starts to creep through Frank’s body. Blood floods his mouth and trickles down his chin and as the darkness takes him away Anna opens her dead mouth and screams: “The list! We found their fucking list!...”

“Come on, Frank, open your eyes! What the hell's going on? You’re scaring me!”
Shivering with cold and pain, Frank opens his eyes expecting to see Death itself looming over him but all he sees is Lorna alive and whole and staring anxiously down into his face. “Frank, can you hear me? Are you okay?” she asks fearfully, laying a small warm hand on his forehead, “Talk to me, please!”
Lost in a state of shock, Frank gasps a few shuddering breaths, coughing on the blood in his mouth...except of course there is no blood in his mouth now, and suddenly no more pain in his chest. It's all fading away to nothing. It was never real in the first place.

“Are you okay?” Lorna asks again. She looks scared and Frank frowns and brushes her steadying hands aside, wondering why he’s lying on the floor now and why there are no dead people or masked murderers dressed in black to be seen. He and Lorna are alone and safe in her room and neither of them have been stabbed.
“H-Holy shit,” he mumbles queasily, sitting up as the last echoes of pain ebb out of his body, leaving him shaken and weak, “It happened again.”
“WHAT happened again?” Lorna cries.
“I don’t know, another murder-dream I guess.”
“Are you telling me that you get the nightmares when you’re AWAKE?”
“Kind of. It’s only happened twice,” Frank says defensively, pulling himself up onto the bed and rubbing his neck, “I think it's because of some pills I've been taking.”
Lorna nods slowly and Frank can tell she’s wondering why he didn’t disclose this little fact to her before in the diner.
“Alright,” she says quietly, getting up and sitting down clumsily beside him, “So who did you see dying this time?”

***
“Oh man, this place is huge,” Frank sighs as Lorna leads him across the bustling campus of ornate sandy-bricked buildings and sports fields in the middle of Westwood. “Well yeah, what were you expecting?” Lorna shrugs, “It’s a university, Frank, not a high school. Didn’t you go to college?”
“Not for long,” Frank mutters.
“Well, those steps you told me about from that picture of Anna sound like the ones outside the School of Law so maybe she took some classes there.”
“Or maybe her boyfriend did.”
“We need a computer,” Lorna decides, glancing up at a large blue-and-gold banner fluttering over the archway of the student union, “If we want to find these people then we need to search from the inside.”

The two of them find the main library and Lorna leads the way towards a bank of computers, “My friend Abi gave me her login details so I can come here and use the internet for free,” she explains, pulling up a chair, “We can’t afford a computer at home and, y’know, it's some place to go.” Frank nods in understanding. His new friend’s homelife didn’t exactly look happy and he knows how important it is to escape from your problems once in a while.

Once Lorna has logged into the college's intranet, she quickly scrolls down the student news pages and it isn't long before she finds something of interest. “Ah,” she whispers, “Here we go. It says here that the guy who died in the car accident we both saw last week, Anna’s boyfriend, was called Sammy Ortiz and he played football for the UCLA Bruins... Looks like he had a bright future ahead of him…” With sadness in her eyes, she opens Sammy’s memorial page and zooms in on a picture of him smiling proudly in his football uniform.
“That’s definitely him,” Frank sighs, swallowing the ugly memory of Sammy’s corpse lying in the road, “Poor kid.”
“And now Anna Fletcher, where are you?” Lorna mutters, opening the student residential directory. “Oh,” she comments after a few short moments of searching, “Well that's kinda obvious.”
“What?” Frank asks anxiously, peering over her shoulder, “Where does she live?”
“Where else would a pretty girl who’s dating a football player live? In a Sorority house.”

It's a short walk to the Kappa Pi Alpha house but before they reach it a pit of unease has already started to grow in Frank's stomach. His anxiety is only made worse when an ambulance thunders past them with sirens blaring in the quiet afternoon and they both quicken their pace and run towards the house. The sunny sky has clouded over and a cold breeze is rushing out from under the campus trees, shrouding everything in a damp leafy chill.

A large crowd of people have gathered outside the Sorority house and there are several girls there in floods of tears along with a few angry-looking guys, some older adults and a squad of policemen. In the middle of it all, two paramedics hurriedly wheel a covered gurney into the back of the waiting ambulance and as Frank and Lorna slip quietly through the crowd towards the wide front porch Frank catches a glimpse inside the ambulance that makes his stomach turn. One of the medics is performing frantic CPR on the unresponsive body of a young woman and he doesn’t need to see her face to know that it's Anna and the paramedics got here too late to save her. She's already dead.

A heavy rush of guilty despair hits him like a ton of bricks and he stops in his tracks on trembling legs, staring helplessly at the ambulance as it pulls out of the drive and speeds away. Two people have died right in front of him in less than a week and maybe he could have saved them if he’d reacted to his dreams a little quicker. If he’d only known what they meant! Lorna grabs his arm and startles him out of his self-blame. “We can’t get inside this way,” she whispers, “The cops’ll stop us.”
"Why would we want to go inside?” Frank snaps miserably, his voice cracking, “Anna’s already dead. We're too fucking late!”
“I know,” Lorna says sadly, “But before she died I think she tried to tell you something in your dream, and we have to find out what she meant. I bet that whatever the 'list’ is we’ll find it in her room.”

Retreating through the cluster of onlookers, Lorna takes Frank's hand and leads him around the back of the building to the deserted garden where they quickly jump the fence and creep quietly down the side of Anna’s house, avoiding the back door and gazing up at the windows above. “The cops will be covering the front and rear doors,” Lorna whispers to herself, “And judging by the crying girls outside they’ve already evacuated the house. Anna's killer is probably long gone by now but we don’t have much time before the crime scene investigators get here. A window is our only option.”

Glancing quickly around to make sure no one can see them, Frank pulls his sleeves down over his hands to avoid leaving fingerprints and gently slides open the first window he sees which has been left ajar so they can slip inside.

Anna’s room is the first one they find upstairs. The peach-cream carpet is stained with a wide pool of congealing blood and the crimson boot prints of paramedics, and several gory splatters also adorn the pale pink wallpaper. Frank shudders and averts his eyes from the mess, looking mournfully at Anna’s neatly-made bed and her study desk which is covered in papers and make-up and framed pictures of her and her friends. Lorna tiptoes over to look at the pictures. “There’s one of Sammy,” she whispers, “I guess they were still dating when he…passed.”
Frank nods numbly and walks carefully around the blood pool to Anna's dresser. There is an open box of beauty supplies laid out there ready for use and inside are several pairs of plastic gloves for hair-dyeing. Tense and pale with the fear of being discovered, he carefully takes two gloves and puts them on to search for anything that looks like a list while Lorna hops back to the door to stand guard in case the cops return.

As he digs quickly through Anna’s drawers and papers, Frank feels an disturbing sense of unreality and wonders if he's trapped inside yet another dream that he can't ever wake up from. Since when did his life include breaking into murder victim’s homes to search through their personal belongings like something out of a crime drama about renegade detectives on CBS? What if he and Lorna get caught? Tampering with a crime scene is a serious offence and he can already imagine the story plastered in sadistic detail all over rock music websites: ‘My Chemical Romance Guitarist Arrested at Murder Scene!’ To say that his life might be seriously fucked up by this would be an understatement.
“Hurry up!” Lorna hisses from the doorway. With shaking hands, Frank shoves Anna’s photo albums aside and opens yet another drawer – the last in the dresser. There is nothing in it except a small metal box, hand-painted blue and sealed with a padlock, and there is no key. Acting on impulse, he reaches out and grabs the box and a small electric shock shoots through his glove and stings his fingers. “Ow,” he yelps, dropping it again with a clatter, “It fucking shocked me!”
“Shhh!” Lorna hushes, her eyes wide and Frank swallows hard and gingerly leans forward to pick up the box again, glancing into the dressing table mirror as he does so. Anna’s bloodied face is staring back at him. Biting his tongue to keep from screaming, Frank stares fearfully at the ghost in the mirror, dreading what she might say or do to him. But all Anna does is nod once before disappearing from sight. Convinced that whatever he’s looking for is inside this box, Frank pulls it out of the drawer, wincing as another strange shock rockets through his hand, and shoves the damned thing in his backpack before joining Lorna at the door. ‘‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’’

The urge to run away from the murder scene is overwhelming but it would look insanely suspicious to anyone passing by so once Frank and Lorna sneak out the window and back over the garden fence, they walk slowly into the street as if they’ve just arrived in the area. A grave-faced policeman calmly directs them and other onlookers away from the house and they obey him meekly, walking back down the street and eventually off the campus and back into town. When they’re a safe distance away Lorna gives in to her fear and breaks into a run and Frank is more than happy to follow her. Charging down the boulevards, they find a bus stop and jump on the first ride back to Lorna’s neighbourhood, sweating and gasping for breath, both of them locked in a daze of relief and adrenaline. No one caught them. As crazy and fucked up as this plan was, they actually got away with it.

Notes

((Hi lovelies. To all of you who are still reading this I want to say a massive THANK YOU. Please feel free to comment and I will try to update soon. xxx))