Chapter Text
‘Twas a dark night after the show…. After yet another performance with a dwindling audience, the band members begin to grow suspicious….
“Bobby, I understand that we're in the middle of nowhere in Iowa, but still!” Zubin exclaims, packing his bass guitar into the back of their van. “We're barely even in the middle of nowhere in Iowa.”
Joe rolls his eyes, putting the keys into the ignition of the van. They're all sleep deprived—running merely off of gas station coffee, hopes & dreams/thoughts & prayers, miracles…. And he'd rather not have this argument for the third time this tour.
“Zubes, we are surrounded by corn,” he sighs heavily, adjusting the seat from the last person who used it. His mind is too foggy to remember who'd even driven them to the venue just a few hours ago.
Zubin hops into the van with Rob and Ross, and Andrew eventually gets into the passenger seat after having a conundrum trying to pack up his keyboard. Joe impatiently taps his fingers against the steering wheel while Bora takes his sweet time getting out of the venue.
While waiting soooo patiently, Andrew works on his laptop with the brightness all the way up since he's a freak like that…Rob and Zubin argue over the correct 12-letter word answer to a crossword puzzle, Ross is drumming a reggae beat on his leg with his sticks, and Joe? Well… let's just say he does NOT look happy to be there. He's out of coffee, he has a throbbing headache from the lights, and all he wants to do is crash on a shitty hotel bed.
When Bora FINALLY finishes whatever he was doing in the video, he strolls out all jolly like the others didn't just spend 10 minutes in the cold van.
“Hey, guys! We are ready to roll—?” Bora cuts himself off when he sees the five heads turning towards him. “Well… um… let's get this show on the road!”
Bora slides into the van’s third row next to Ross, who's still drumming a reggae beat on his leg. The entire drive is silent as Joe tries not to drive them all into a ditch. They have to be at a radio show by 8 AM in the morning, and it's already almost 11. At the hotel, they immediately all crash, snores filling the room as everyone at least tries to gain enough energy to make it through the next day.
–
At 6 sharp, the hotel's alarm clock blares. Ross wakes up in a panic and throws the clock at the wall hard enough to leave a scuff. Anyone who hadn't woken up at the original trill of the clock was awoken by an equally loud thud.
Everyone showers and gets dressed, all rushing because obviously not a single person has any sense of time whatsoever. Of course, they all end up looking like side characters in a Disney Channel sitcom (because it's like… 2008 or something). On their way out, they get enough coffee from the complimentary breakfast station that they run out of it entirely.
“So, how'd everyone sleep last night?” Andrew asks, taking a sip of his coffee. Half of them look at him with a blank expression, while the others mumble something about… actually, Andrew doesn't know because it wasn't even coherent.
“Well, SOMEONE'S snoring was shaking the damn walls.” Rob gestures towards Zubin. Zubin's jaw drops in fake shock.
“You almost suffocated me every time you rolled over! We were on the fucking FLOOR!” Zubin argues back. Andrew is beginning to regret even asking.
“I slept fine—” Ross tries to say, but everyone tells him to shut up in five different formats. He's just a drummer, after all.
“Oh, what do YOU know about sleep? You're just a drummer.”
“Must be nice, huh?”
“Want a cookie?”
“Aren't drummers nocturnal?”
“Shut up, Ross.”
Ross sighs defeatedly and stirs sugar into his coffee. Once they hit the road towards whatever studio they're recording the interview at, they notice the same thing again—the emptiness.
“Look, I know you don't want me talking about it for the fifth time, but it literally looks deserted here!” Zubin argues. Joe, who's in the passenger seat while Andrew is driving, looks out the window from the book he'd been attempting to indulge in.
“Fine… I guess you have a point.” Joe mutters, placing his bookmark in his book. As they drive through back roads in an attempt to get there faster, they pass an abandoned-looking brick building surrounded by a worn chain-link fence.
“Spooky,” Ross comments from the third row of the can. He looks up from taping his drumsticks, turning them in his hands. “Wonder what that place is for.”
“Maybe it's an old testing facility. A lot of them are getting shut down, you know.” Bora suggests, looking out the window. The Chainlink fence seems to go on forever, abruptly ending after almost a minute straight.
“That's a fair assumption,” Rob shrugs. “We can ask someone at the interview, maybe they know about some random abandoned building in buttfuck nowhere Iowa.”
Everyone comes to a mutual agreement to ask when they get to the interview. Technically, it's a radio show, but it'll be more of an interview regardless.
–
“Soooo, while we were driving here from our hotel…” Zubin starts casually, making small talk to one of the interviewers. “We drove past some huge, abandoned building.”
Both interviewers turn to look at him, expressions barely masking their apparent fear. “The one near Gibbs?” Paula, the female interviewer, asks.
Joe chimes in,n “Yeah, on some back road. Our GPS took us through a bunch of quasi shortcuts, and there was—”
Paula cuts him off.
“There was nothing.” She says quickly, voice now carrying an edge to it that wasn't there before. All of the band members exchange a confused look, but decide to drop it for now. “We're live in three…. Two…”
The interview starts, and the atmosphere is both visibly and audibly tense. Everyone seems glad that there's no video streaming. Paula and the other interviewer, John, ask questions, write things down, and play their music. During one of the songs, Joe and Rob start whispering to each other. Most mics that record music aren't sensitive enough to pick up anything but what they're meant to, so they'll be fine.
“I don't like how she brushed it off like that,” Joe says quietly, scooting closer to Rob, who nods in agreement.
“There's definitely something going on. I can tell.” Rob whispers back, leaning towards Joe. The interviewers aren't even in the room anymore, having stepped out for whatever reason.
Zubin notices the conversation, taking immediate interest. “What if you guys weren't too far off about it being a testing facility? I mean, if Bora weren't out doing… whatever he's doing…. We could get him to go to a library or something. Look up newspapers.”
Joe glances at the window. He can see the two interviewers outside, both smoking. He clenches his jaw unconsciously, turning back to Rob and Zubin. “I don't like this. At all.” He suddenly says. The others pause, never having seen Joe this… adamant about something being off. Usually, he's one of the more positive ones.
“What's off?” Rob asks. Zubin nods in agreement, waiting for whatever answer Joe throws at them. It could be an hour-long rant about anything and everything.
“Everything,” Joe replies simply. No further elaboration. None is needed in a statement like that. The interviewers step back in just as the song ends, and they go back to the questions.
“That was Tally Hall’s song, The Bidding. Now, which one of you wrote this song, again?” Paula asks, now acting as if nothing happened in the first place. She seems to have even lost the edge in her voice. Zubin and Rob exchange a look behind Joe's head. Something is really off.
–
When Bora comes to the studio after the interview is over, he's holding a stack of papers. When they get into the van, Bora lays everything out. It's news heading after news heading about the abandoned building they saw.
“KILLINGER RESEARCH FACILITY — ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS OR HUMAN EXPERIMENTS?”
“LOCAL RESEARCH FACILITY BURYING CLAIMS OF HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION”
“HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS UNCOVERED IN KILLINGER RESEARCH FACILITY IN GIBBS, IOWA.”
Zubin and Joe grab one of the articles, and the others follow, grabbing the ones that are left. Each paper is almost the same—damning evidence of human rights violations, experimentation… Some of them even have graphic pictures. Bora watches them carefully, having already had time to process and react to the presented information. Joe feels like he's going to be sick.
He drops the paper, his hands trembling as he tries not to become physically sick. Bora hesitates, not even knowing what to say. Rob and Zubin both exchange a knowing look, understanding what this means.
“There's something else,” Bora adds quietly, almost sheepishly. Five pairs of eyes turn to look at him. “The person I spoke to at the library said that we can't talk about this to anyone. Not even just seeing the building. Something about media and an NDA—”
“If we didn't sign anything, then I don't care. This is fucking absurd, Bora,” Rob argues, holding up one of the news articles showing a picture from inside the facility. Joe immediately looks away.
“She said if we talk about it, and if it spreads, bad things will happen. Maybe not to us, but to everyone else—”
“So what? We're supposed to act like we didn't see any of this?” Andrew asks. “Did you even see the—?”
“I saw the pictures, Andy.” Bora snaps. The van goes silent at his sudden, sharp tone. “We all saw them.”
Ross hesitates before speaking. “But what's going to happen?” He asks, drawing nods of agreement from the others. Bora glances around before answering.
He leans forward, lowering his voice. “If the media gets to this, the lady said there's a possibility that… whatever's inside of there will get out.”
Another moment of silence follows, but only for a few seconds before half the members burst out laughing.
“Oh, you're hilarious! That place is abandoned. Nothing is going to come out of there because there's nothing IN THERE.” Rob exclaims.
“Can everybody just shut up?!” Joe finally snaps. Everyone quiets down almost immediately. “Clearly, this is fucked up, but we don't exactly have time to drone on about it. We're still on tour.”
“You’re not wrong..” Ross mutters, rubbing the back of his neck. Zubin sighs, but doesn't disagree.
“I apologize if it makes me an asshole for saying that I don't care, but I want to get the fuck out of here, and I just want to get the rest of the tour over before revisiting this.”
Bora clenches his jaw and turns around in the driver's seat, putting the keys in the ignition. At least they're getting out of Iowa entirely. Right?
–
“Pffft, and when we were driving through Iowa for our previous performance and radio show, we drove past the craziest thing!”
Rob shoots Zubin a sharp look from where he's standing halfway across the room. Despite not truly believing a word Bora said, he doesn't want anything bad to come of it.
“Really? What was it?” One of the fans asks unsuspectingly. Rob jumps in to try to steer the conversation away, but Zubin is on a roll.
“Zubin, I don't-”
“Some abandoned building that actually used to be a research facility! Apparently, there were some sort of human rights violations, ns and they had to—”
“It's just a hoax,” Andrew chimes in.
Rob breathes a sigh of relief. “Right… some news article from the eighties. Nothing more than that.”
The fan nods slightly, chuckling. Joe glances over from where he'd been standing. Those images flash through his head. What looked like humans, just… wrong. Really wrong. He excuses himself from the group of people he'd been talking to, Ross watching him practically bolt off.
“Sorry about Joe, I don't know what's up with that guy today.” Ross laughs lightly despite knowing damn well.
Joe locks himself in the family restroom, giving himself room to pace around and try not to lose his shit. He leans against the wall, running his hands through his hair over and over again. He's never been this happy for a tour to almost be over. Ever. Not even after they'd all got food poisoning that one time.
“God damnit...” Joe whispers, feeling like the only one who even thinks this is somewhat wrong. “Pull yourself together.” He walks to the mirror, staring at himself intently. He looks like shit. He's pale, shaking, and his hair is messed up from running his hands through it at least a hundred times.
He runs the faucet, watching the water pour out for a moment before splashing some onto his face. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, standing like that for a moment. His hands grip the counter so tightly that his knuckles turn white.
Three loud knocks on the door startle him back to his senses.
“J? Dude, why are you being so weird?” Joe immediately recognizes the voice as Ross. “This isn't about that again, is it?”
“Well, what is it fucking is, Ross?” He snaps. Ross is silent for several moments before Joe speaks again. “I'm sorry.” He says quietly.
“No, it's… It's fine.” Ross says, seemingly hesitant. “Are you okay?”
Joe pauses at the question. Is he okay? “No. This entire thing is messing with my head, and I don't know what to do about it.” He looks down at his hands, finally noticing his knuckles. He releases his grip entirely, wincing at the change in pressure.
“I'm sorry,”
“It's not your fault, is it?”
Everything is silent for a moment.
“Is it not all of ours?” Ross asks. “You seem pissed at all of us. Then again, you have for… what, days now? We're not trying to make things worse, but we're worried about you.”
“Did you see the pictures from the news articles?” Joe asks suddenly.
“The newspapers that Bora got from the library in Iowa?”
“Yes. Did you see the pictures in them?”
Ross thinks for a moment. He knows he didn't, barely even looked at the one he picked up, and called stupid.
“No. What was in it?” Ross asks. “In the picture, I mean—”
“Pictures,” Joe corrects him. “There were at least four.”
Ross nods as if Joe can see him. He can hear footsteps approaching from outside the door, followed by Rob's familiar voice.
“What's going on? Why are you talking through the bathroom door?” Rob clearly asks Ross.
Joe can't make out what Ross replies, but Rob groans and knocks on the door. He sighs, knowing this is about to become a much bigger deal than it needs to be.
Rob speaks again, but it doesn't sound convincing. “J, we have to go. I promise Zubin accidentally telling one person won't cause a world war.”
Joe runs his hands through his hair again, disgruntled. “And how can you be so sure? You didn't even believe any of what Bora was trying to tell us!” He snaps back.
Ross walks away. Rob tries the handle and finds it locked.
“Joe, please.” His voice is different. Not exactly calm, but not angry. Not like Rob is ever angry. Heart of gold, that's what everyone always says about him. And they're not wrong.
“Fine.”
The door unlocks, and Joe walks past Rob without making eye contact.