The Orphans (Orphans Trilogy Book 1) by Matthew Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page A

webcam shot of Walter. The darkness not only made Walter’s exact location impossible to determine, but also accentuated the whiteness of his eyes, which darted back and forth from the webcam lens to something offscreen—presumably another computer monitor—as he delivered a panicked message.
    “Hey, tough guy,” Walter said. “I don’t have a lot of time, but I’m sending you this because you need to know the truth. Your parents didn’t die from the car crash. They were killed. And Terry Heins was behind it all.”
    Charlie slapped the space bar on his keyboard, pausing the video. He buried his head in his hands. “You gotta be kidding me,” he said as he tugged his hair so hard it sent tingles throughout his scalp and down his spine.
    Not only was the news the last thing Charlie had expected to hear, it was the last thing he had wanted to hear. But now it was all Charlie heard, as Walter’s words played on a loop in his mind like a scratched cd that kept skipping back to the worst part of the song.
    After a minute, Charlie lifted his head. “No way. No way. This can’t be real. It can’t be,” Charlie said, hoping to stop Walter’s words from repeating. They did.
    Charlie considered removing the drive, throwing it away, and never thinking of it again. He got extremely close to doing that much. His fingers gripped the flash drive, ready to pull, but there was another voice inside his head that wouldn’t let him. The voice told him to stop. It told him that he needed to let the video play out. The voice was right. Regardless of whether he wanted to or not, Charlie needed to hear more. Charlie took a deep breath and then tapped the space bar again, restarting the video.
    Walter continued, “If I’m right, he’s killed a lot more people than just your parents, like hundreds. I don’t know exactly how he does it. He must drug them or something. I don’t know. I just know that they all had heart attacks. That’s what really killed your parents. They were on their way back from meeting with Terry when they crashed. I was supposed to be there with them, but I—” Walter stopped. His eyes turned to saucers as he spotted something on his second screen.
    Walter turned back to the camera and wrapped up the video as fast as he could. “I’ve included a couple files on this flash drive. One’s a list. I think it might be of all the people Terry is working with. The other looks like some kind of contract. I’m not sure what it’s for or what it says. I think it’s in Hebrew, but I’m not positive. It didn’t register with any of the web translators I tried. I gotta go. But you need to be very careful. There are a lot of powerful people on that list. I don’t know how high up this goes, or even where it goes. Just be careful, okay? I love you.”
    The video cut out and returned to the beginning image of Walter, his face frozen like he’d just seen a ghost.
    Charlie peered deep into Walter’s eyes. The manic urgency they conveyed was a stark contrast to what Charlie was used to—to the man he had known his whole life. Charlie barely even recognized the version of Walter that he was staring at.
    As hard as it was for Charlie to reconcile the image of Walter that was stuck on his monitor, the information Walter had imparted was an even greater challenge. Charlie knew that he should believe Walter without question. Walter had never lied to him before, no matter how small the stakes were. And these stakes were anything but small.
    Charlie was almost ready to accept everything Walter had said, but there was just one thing holding Charlie back: the reality of what it meant for him and his life if it were actually true. With all the doubt swirling on both sides of Charlie’s mind, there was no doubt when it came to the most important fact—Charlie didn’t want that reality. He didn’t want his parents’ deaths to be anything more than an accident, or Walter’s to be anything more than some combination of