Who Really Killed Wanda Day - A New DAY! (DAY! Series Book 3)

“Well, you’re puking quite a lot at the mere sight of blood. How did you even become a serial killer? Seriously. How the fuck did you make it this far?” Colin drawled, propped casually against the doorframe of chamber 9 with crossed arms, watching his best friend spectacularly fail at maintaining his composure while losing lunch in decidedly unglamorous fashion.

“Fuck you,” Chris managed to groan before another heave came. “It’s not the blood, motherfucker. It’s the bowels around your neck.”

A hysterical laugh later, Colin took a deep drag from his joint. “Hey, it’s cold, everyone needs a scarf when it’s cold.”

With lots of effort, Chris straightened up. His eyes landed on his buddy, and his stomach did another Olympic-level gymnastic routine of pure discomfort. “Dude, I love you, I really do. But THIS is...”

Suddenly, their heads swiveled in perfect synchronization. The source? Theo strolled towards them, whistling a tune so shrill it bordered on acoustic rape. He paused, giving Chris a look before his gaze landed on Colin. “Holy fuck,” the Doc exclaimed. “What kind of disaster party did you two throw without inviting common sense? The fuck is wrong with you, Day?”

“Nothing?” Colin chuckled.

“He’s got a point,” Chris chimed in, leaning against the wall with the casual confidence of a Jenga tower moments before collapse. “A colon is definitely not a stola, my friend.”

“But it’s still warm!”

Theo’s brow furrowed deeply. “What chemical apocalypse did you unleash on your poor livers?”

Chris’ hand migrated to his head, scratching as if trying to excavate the memories buried beneath his skull. “Well, let’s see... We had a modest trio of beers, a bottle of wine for culture, and some tequila for the fun, you know? Actually, make that tequilaaaas, plural.” He squinted at the doc, his eyes struggling to focus like a broken camera. “Oh, and we might’ve smoked a few blunts. And a few bottles of Whiskey. Plus, we each took a quick trip to Colombia.” He paused, then added with sincerity, “I also popped some pills. And I gotta tell ya, Doc, I have no fucking idea what they were.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Yep!” They replied in unison.

“You’re walking, breathing monuments to poor life choices,” Theo scolded. “Colin, you’ve got three kids who presumably need a functional father. And you, Chris...” He stopped, the words catching in his throat like a bad karaoke note.

Then, in a moment of pure professional surrender, he simply shook his head - the universal gesture for ‘I can’t even right now’ - turned on his heel, and walked away, leaving behind a wake of unfiltered judgment.

Colin placed his hands on his friend’s shoulders. “Well, that was... weird.”

“Yep.”

Together, they stumbled back into chamber 9, which resembled a battlefield. The table stood barren, a lone survivor in the chaos, while the walls sported a fresh, avant-garde paint job in various shades of ‘oh no.’

“Wow,” Colin eloquently observed, doing his best impersonation of a human metronome as he swayed back and forth. His eyes were as wide as... well, very wide indeed.

“YOU did this.”

“I did?”

Chris chuckled. “Oh, you bet. I swooped in right after the second girl transformed herself into the most spectacular human mashed potato impression you could imagine.”

“There was more than one?”

“On a scale of one to ten, how stoned are you?”

For a moment, silence hung in the air. Colin stared at his fingers with intense concentration. He started counting, stopped, and shook his hands like he was trying to fling off invisible spiders. Another attempt, another fail. Finally, he looked up with earnest conviction and declared, “I want two burritos.”

“Oh, THAT explains everything!”

“What was the question again?”

Chris furrowed his brow, his face a perfect portrait of concern mixed with exasperation. For weeks now, Colin had been treating sobriety like it was going out of style, riding a non-stop roller coaster of intoxication. “Buddy,” he said, enunciating each word slowly, “I asked about your level of stonedness, not your Taco Bell order.”

“Can we get another girl?” Colin blinked with the slow, deliberate motion of someone who was approximately 97,3% disconnected from reality. “I mean...” He paused, pointing at the steel table, “There’s not much left of this one.”

“There were three,” Chris patiently explained. Although he was also floating somewhere between Earth and the stratosphere, a part of him recognized the gravity of their situation. Theo’s earlier lecture echoed in his mind. But that was a problem for tomorrow. “We can get another one, yes,” he added.

“Fun-FUCKING-tastic!” Colin clapped his hands with unhinged enthusiasm. “We’re gonna make the mother of all massacres tonight.” His eyes widened, pupils dilated, as he dramatically coined his own twisted wordplay, “A mother-cre!”

Laughing, Chris shook his head. “Oh, buddy, I love you when you’re stoned!”

“I love you as well. Really, Chris, I never loved a man before. And I don’t love you in a gay-ish way, you know? I’d never fuck you. Or suck your dick! IRGH, that is SOOOOOO gross! But if we were on a crashing plane with just one parachute, I would TOTALLY miss you and think about you all the time, I SWEAR!” He slurred and looked at Chris, his expression dead serious. “And I promise, I promise when you’re dead, I’ll take care of your plant. But I’m totally swiping your pan. That pancake pan is like... the Excalibur of breakfast cookware! The Holy Pan! Yes, The Holy Pancake Pan. I’d be the Peter Pan of Pancakes.”

“Yep, just love you!”

“I know you’re in a hard place right now, and not everything is going as planned, but I am here. RIGHT HERE! In this puddle of blood. Surrounded by... guts. I am HEEEEERE for YOU! Even though you throw up when you see a tiny drop of blood.”

“Appreciate that.”

“You’re perfect, you know that? Perfect. P-E-F-R-E-C-E-T. Perfect. All of you. I love you, buddy. SO MUCH! And I will never-” Midsentence, emotions crashed over him like a tsunami. Suddenly, he crumpled to the floor, tears streaming down his face. “I miss Wanda so much!”

Chris settled beside his friend, his movements practiced and weary. This emotional implosion had become as routine as their morning coffee, happening with clockwork predictability every other day. And with each passing week, Colin’s grief seemed to metastasize, growing more raw and uncontrollable.

Seven months had crawled by since they’d stumbled upon the Tablet of Terror, and they were still far from cracking its secrets. Paxton had unleashed his digital Rolodex of cyber-ninjas and keyboard warriors - the kind of folks who could hack the Pentagon, or recover MySpace selfies from the digital graveyard or cringeworthy Wattpad fanfiction stories someone wrote at twelve.

Yet, despite their best efforts, the tablet remained as impenetrable as a politician’s tax returns.

On the surface, it looked ordinary. But this innocuous slab of silicon was guarding its secrets with enough traps to doom any attempt to fail. There was a teeny tiny chance that this tablet was just an overpriced paperweight, but neither Colin nor Chris was buying that theory. If some bonkers, tinfoil-hat-wearing, restraining-order-collecting stalker had gone THAT far, there had to be something juicy in its circuitry.

“We’ll find him, buddy,” Chris reassured quietly. “We’ll get through this together. Through thick and thin.”

“Through skin and bones.”

“Through organs and brains.” He extended his hand to Colin, an invitation that hovered between camaraderie and something far more sinister. “Ready for a massacre?”

“No.” Colin sighed, then got up. “But I’m ready for the mother-cre!”

“GET UUUUUUUUP!” LeighAnn’s battle cry accompanied her aerial assault, her body launching directly onto Colin’s knees. The impact triggered an involuntary, primal scream from him - part pain, part startled reflex - before he cautiously peeled open his eyes. “Come on, Dad, it is already six!”

A muffled grumble erupted from beneath a mountain of blankets adjacent to the father-daughter-duo, a sound so primal and disgruntled it could only be translated as pure morning hatred: “Too early!”

“Hey, Uncle Chris!” LeighAnn’s voice chirped with weaponized cheerfulness, her small frame crawling across the bed like a tactical morning assault unit. “Do you wanna get up as well? We’ll be cereal killers!”

“Nope.”

“DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!”

Colin glanced at the alarm clock, his bleary eyes struggling to focus. His daughter had been right - it was precisely one minute past six in the morning. A wave of confusion washed over him as he realized he couldn’t recall the sequence of events that had led to his current horizontal position.

“Why am I in your bed?” Chris mumbled, attempting to navigate the treacherous terrain of consciousness as he carefully tried to sit up.

“Because you live heeeere?” LeighAnn shouted back, her volume calibrated to maximum morning enthusiasm. “Why do you always forget?”

“Because some things we don’t wanna remember,” he replied and let himself fall backward into the pillows.

“Can you wake the others, Crumbs?” Colin mumbled, curling into a tight, defensive ball under his blanket - a human burrito of morning avoidance and hangover recovery.

“Okey-dokey.” LeighAnn rushed out of the room like a tiny, energetic tornado, her mission to wake the household clear and present.

Chris stretched sluggishly, a sardonic chuckle escaping his lips as a piercing scream echoed through the house. “Looks like Thommy is awake,” he announced with dark amusement. A few moments later, another loud cry heralded Henry’s rude awakening, quickly followed by a colorful curse from Sam. “And both boys are up as well.” With the precision of a seasoned morning veteran, he rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket up, effectively cocooning himself from the rising chaos.

“Oh, no, buddy, you’re getting up as well!” Colin sat bolt upright in a rigid ninety-degree angle, looking like a half-deployed human origami. He attempted to rub the sleep from his eyes, his fingers pressing against his eyelids in a futile ritual. But to no avail. He was goddamn tired - the kind of exhaustion that seemed etched into his very bones, a weariness that went beyond mere lack of sleep and hinted at something deeper, more consuming.

“Hey, YOUR daughter!”

“Yeah, but MY house! So get your fucking ass out of MY bed!”

Chris grumbled something that could have been a string of curses. He sat up and rose to his feet, but instantly fell to the floor - a spectacular collapse that elicited a hyena-like laugh from Colin. Undeterred and slightly wounded by his friend’s amusement, Chris made an epic attempt to crawl back into bed. He grabbed the sheets, desperately trying to pull himself up. “Stop laughing. The floor is swaying!” he protested, his dignity hanging by a thread as thin as his tenuous grip on vertical stability.

“It’s not!”

“Try!”

Colin threw him a grin, then stood up with surprising grace. “See?”

“How? Just... how? You’re over FORTY!”

“Yeah, forty and fucking forgetting entire evenings and how the fuck you ended up in my bed.”

“We made a massacre.”

“The mother-cre!” Colin slapped his forehead as the memories of last night came rushing back to him, flooding his consciousness like the infamous blood-soaked elevator scene from The Shining. “Damn, that was bloody.”

“Yeah.” Chris sighed. “Colin?”

“Yes?”

“Please, don’t you ever-”

“I promise, I will never use a colon as a scarf again,” he said with a smirk. “Thinking back now, that was absolutely disgusting. Warm... but disgusting. And kinda... slimy!”

“Yeah, I... I’m not delving into those details!” Chris blinked twice, looking slightly nauseated. “You discovered some... alternative uses for that poor colon! Apparently, you were convinced it would make a superior jumping rope for LeighAnn. You actually tested the theory!”

“Oh! How many jumps did I manage?”

“Seventeen. Then you faceplanted spectacularly!”

“Hmm. That explains the pain in my face,” Colin mused, rubbing his presumably bruised cheekbone. He turned toward the bathroom. “And now, get up and we’ll meet downstairs in ten!”

“Hey, just because you-”

“We’re best friends. We ride together, we die together, we kill together and we will have breakfast with the kids at six in the fucking morning on a fucking Sunday together!”

After a spring clean in Chamber 9 which took the dynamic duo no less than four hours and seventeen minutes of pressure washing, Chris was already back upstairs while Colin was still in the shower. He hopped into Paxton’s office, mission mode fully engaged. “Hey, Pax,” he announced.

The IT expert winced and turned around. “Hey.”

“Shit, you look like roadkill,” Chris stated matter-of-factly, utterly unfazed by the death stare Paxton immediately leveled at him. “You know, like an opossum that’s been run over by a car, then died on the highway, got squished deeper into the asphalt by a parade of tanks, stomped over by a herd of elephants, and then left rotting in the Texas summer sun for three weeks and-”

“Fuck you, Thielmann,” Paxton growled. “You’d look like this too if Colin was threatening you the way he does me.” He paused, his eyes darting nervously to the door. “I’ve seen Chamber 9. He’s slowly losing his mind, and I don’t want to end up on his table.”

“He is nooooot losing-”

“The fuck he is, and you know that. And that is understandable. Scary, but understandable. The games are open, Chris. He knows that.” A sudden beeping made Pax turn back to his screen. His fingers danced across the keyboard, scanning the monitor with the intensity of a caffeinated squirrel. Then he stopped cold. “Oh... fuck!”

“Oh, fuck?”

“Fuck!”

“Fuck?”

“FUCK!” Paxton erupted, his fingers flying. Then, with a quick sidestep, he shifted just enough to give Chris a clear view of the screen.

“Oh.... FUCK!”

“Yep.”

“FUCK!”

“I counted seven ’fucks,’” Colin’s voice sliced through the tension, causing the two men to wince and whirl around simultaneously.

“Colin!” Paxton yelped surprised.

“That’s me, yeah!” he confirmed, his tone a perfect blend of amusement and suspicion. The Blood Baron stood leaning against the doorframe, his suit draped over him with the precise, somber elegance of a high-end funeral director. His mere presence seemed to drop the room’s temperature by several degrees. “Care to enlighten me what your fuck-flock is representing?”

Chris floundered, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “We have... we were just... uhm... we were....”

“Watching porn,” Paxton interjected flatly, his poker face impeccable.

“Yes!” Chris latched onto the excuse with desperate enthusiasm. “A... porn video. Nice girl. Big tits.”

“Yes, really big... tits. Enormous.”

“Giant tits!”

“Like... watermelons.”

“Huge... huge tits,” Chris stammered, his creativity running on fumes.

Colin narrowed his eyes, his hands sliding casually into his pockets as he advanced. The two men instinctively retreated, their backs nearly against the wall. “I’ve known both of you for quite some time,” he said, his voice unnervingly calm, “Pax, I know you like taking dick pics and stuff, and I bet you’re pretty much into porn, whatever, I couldn’t give more fucks if I tried. But YOU, Chris, you’re not the type to watch porn. No matter the situation, whether you were in a dry spell with Ashley or playing the field - you NEVER watch porn.” Chris swallowed hard as his friend stopped inches away, jabbing a finger into his chest for emphasis. “You never did,” Colin continued, “because you can’t stand seeing another guy’s dick where yours should be, and hearing that dude cum makes you want to hurl.”

Nervously, Chris brushed through his hair. “Yes, that was... I mean... it’s been a while for me, and Pax has... Pax here has... this video is...”

“DON’T LIE TO ME, CHRISTOPHER THIELMANN!”

Paxton seemed to physically shrink with each passing second. “You know, Colin, this is-”

“ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT! You have ten seconds to tell me the truth otherwise I’m gonna invite you both to have a little chit-chat with me in Chamber 9!”

Chris, recognizing defeat, gave up first. “Something popped up. On the internet,” he admitted.

“And WHAT?” Colin hissed. His gaze landed on the screen behind the monitor.

Both men watched, transfixed, as the gears in Colin’s brain visibly shifted into overdrive. His eyes first skimmed the text, then narrowed with the intensity of a laser beam. Finally, Colin gritted his teeth so hard that they could see the muscles in his jaw clench.

“It’s from... Louis,” Paxton explained, carefully weighing his words. “He... was released a couple of days ago and seems to-”

“We’ll take care of that,” Chris chimed in, “Of him. Of this... situation.”

Colin was silent. A minute passed. Then another one. The tension in the room could have been cut with a knife - if said knife wasn’t too scared to even enter. “He is 18 now, isn’t he?” he finally asked.

Paxton swallowed heavily, exchanging a nervous glance with Chris. “Yes,” he managed to squeak out.

“Good. We’ll have a chat with Kenneth anyway. He’s our prime suspect.” Colin crossed his arms, his expression grave. “And if he doesn’t send Louis back to the psych ward, I’ll make sure both of them meet Big Bertha,” he added, then nodded toward Chris. “Let’s go. Barbie’s waiting in his compartment, and we’re having a little conversation right now.”

So, the plan starts - Back to square one!

Kenneth, the father of one creepy son,

Is back in the spotlight; the motive seems clear,

And once they reach him, he will die of fear.

They are about to paint his sky grey,

Is Kenneth the one who killed Wanda Day?

If you’re sitting there with a blank stare, completely lost in this narrative maze, and you can’t answer these three questions:

Who is Big Bertha?

Who is Louis possibly talking about on the internet?

How are Thommy and Colin related?

I suggest you rewind and start this wild ride from the very beginning with Book 1!

The entire DAY!-Series:

Who killed Wanda Day (Book 1)

Christmas With The Days (Book 1.5)

Valentine’s DAY! (Book 1.75)

Who Really Killed Wanda Day - Wedding Bells (Book 2)

A Few DAY!s In Italy (Book 2.7)

Alaska DAY! (Book 2.83)

Who Really Killed Wanda Day - A New DAY! <-------YOU ARE HERE!

Have fun going down the rabbit hole of unethical thinking.

And those of you who have been here from the start:

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Just kidding. Follow me to the second chapter!