by Amy Plum
Sinclair leans back and kicks the thing in the face, sending it into the murky water with a splash.
I grab my backpack and pull out the small bag of medical supplies I produced as we were leaving the Void last time. “Bandage!” The horrific music has gotten louder and slower, the words warped and dragging out. I have to yell for her to hear me.
She won’t uncurl. “Fergus, help,” I say, and he leans back and grabs her gently by the shoulders. She holds the finger out, not even looking at us, and I bind it as tightly as I can with a white sterile strip, taping it to hold it on.
Sinclair whips the crossbow off his back and aims behind the slowly moving boat. He pulls the trigger, and the cord twangs.
“Why are you even shooting a doll?” Fergus yells. “It’s not like it’s alive . . .” But he stops talking as a dark cloud of blood floats to the surface of the dyed green water from the pierced belly of the floating butcher.
“Oh, shit,” Cata moans softly, as she looks up and sees what’s happening. The underwater dolls have begun to rise to the surface and are bobbing and floating around like fish in a net.
“Look!” Sinclair says, and points at the dolls on land. They’re all leaving their castles and cottages and mountaintops and heading down toward us, still singing, faces stretched with the grotesque smiles. Sinclair raises his crossbow and shoots the Alpine doll in lederhosen who descends from his summit while yodeling. It tumbles over and over, plumed hat flying into the middle of the Italian piazza nearby, blood spurting from its chest as it comes hurtling toward us, splashing next to our boat in the water.
“Don’t shoot them,” I yell at Sinclair. “It’s going to make it worse!”
“They chopped Cata’s finger off. They started it.” He aims at a bullfighter in bolero hat and tight red pants.
A tiny hand attaches itself to the side of the boat, and the doctor raises its surgeon’s mask and leers horribly as it swings its scalpel toward me.
Fergus grabs me and pulls me back, out of its way. “This is your dream, Ant. Do something,” he urges, and then yells as a pirate doll fires its pistol from close range, grazing his temple. Blood courses down his forehead as he sits there, stunned.
I close my eyes. “Stop!” I say. The boat jumps its tracks and slams to a halt against the riverbank to my left. I focus on the mob of dolls racing toward us, weapons brandished, and I make a sweeping motion with my arm. They fly backward, knocked into the water as if by a strong wind.
“Hurry!” I say, pulling Fergus by the arm. As I drag him from the boat onto land, he seems to come to his senses. And even though blood is pouring from his head, he turns to Cata and helps lift her from her seat.
“Oh my God, Fergus,” she says when she sees him. She looks like she’s going to throw up, but leaps out of the boat, holding her wounded hand in front of her chest. Sinclair follows her, and we run away from the dolls into the blackness. Just ahead, an exit sign glows red, and I run straight through it, without thinking about what might be on the other side.
Everything goes black. It feels like I’m falling.
And then a voice speaks. “I’ll bet this is your favorite ride, little missy.” I feel myself being shoved into a seat with a cold steel bar situated ineffectually between me and the front of a roller coaster car. A black woven seat belt with metal clasps lies on either side of me, but the fabric is shredded and the lock is broken.
I look up, and a man with a long scar across his cheek, breath like the wino who begs for money outside the A&P, and two blue-black teardrop tattoos at the corner of one eye leers at me. I fixate on the tattoo, and think, Don’t they get a teardrop each time they kill someone in jail?
“You don’t really need that seat belt,” he says. “We’re just legally required to provide them. But hey—you aren’t really living if you’re playing by the rules!” He walks over and presses a button on the control box, and hard rock blasts out of the speakers. It’s a song called “Crazy Train.” I’ve only ever heard it at fairs, and they always play it on the scariest rides.
The ex-convict presses another button, and the train lurches forward.
I hear a voice yelling and look back to see Fergus seated in the car behind me, blood matted to his forehead. Behind him, Cata fumbles with her seat belt. Sinclair is behind her, struggling to get out of his car, but the carnie guy keeps pushing him back in.
“What happens in this part of the dream?” Fergus yells.
The music screeches, “I’m going off the rails on a crazy train . . .”
I point to the speakers. “What he says.” And the train lurches forward.
Chapter 28
Jaime
ADRENALINE IS PUMPING THROUGH MY VEINS SO hard that I have to fight to keep my voice steady. I avoid the receptionist’s eyes as I pick up the pen and write my name on the sign-in sheet.
“You’re checking back in?” she asks.
I nod. “Took my dinner break and I’m back.” I try to say it flippantly, but my heart pounds out of my chest as I write down the time.
The receptionist is silent. Does she know I’m not supposed to be here? She picks up the phone, dials a number, and puts the receiver to her ear. I can hear the tone ring on the other end, over and over. I finally have the guts to lift my eyes to hers.
She isn’t even looking at me, only holding out her open hand. “Yes, it’s the Pasithea clinic. Could we have three pepperoni-and-mushroom pizzas delivered to the back entrance, please? Put it on our tab.” She looks up at me. “Phone!” she whispers, still reaching her hand toward me.
“Oh. Right,” I say, and fish my phone out of my pocket and place it in her hand. She stows it in the drawer, and now I am left without a timepiece or any mode of communication, but I am in.
I walk to the end of the hallway and lurk in a space between a beverage machine and the wall until I see the door to the basement lab open. Zhu and Vesper barge out and scurry down the corridor leading to Mr. Osterman’s office. “I can’t imagine what is important enough that he would insist we come see him instead of him coming to us,” Zhu says, worriedly.
“It’s got to have something to do with the parents,” Vesper responds. “Anything else could wait. Unless he’s gotten some useful feedback from one of his colleagues, that is. Maybe he has some valuable information for us.”
“He could have told us that over the phone.”
They round a corner. I squeeze out from behind the drinks machine and dash through the door they just came through and down the stairs. Within seconds, I’m back in the laboratory.
Everything seems like a freakish dream: the darkened room, diodes blinking ominously in red and green from the octopuslike tower, which has been amputated of some of its arms. Only four beds are occupied: Catalina, Antonia, Sinclair, and Fergus. And their feedback is steady, slow. They are still in REM, as I calculated. My window of time is tight. I have to act now.
I rush straight down to the floor, dropping my bag by the door and ripping my coat off as I go. When I played back the video of the sleepers, I noticed which angle the cameras caught. So I stand well out of sight as I press the buttons on the Tower that operate each subject’s video camera.
I’ve given my plan twenty-five minutes. Ten minutes for Zhu and Vesper to walk through the building and across the courtyard to Osterman’s office. And then a few minutes for them to figure out he’s not there. Or, if he is there, some moments of confusion as they discover that the text he sent them asking them to come directly to his office wasn’t actually from him. Then ten minutes to walk back. I’ve used five of my minutes getting down here. Twenty left. I’m going to need every second.
I’m shutting down the Tower. Not just the pacemakers and respirators . . . the whole Tower. There’s no time to try this out on each subject individually, and I can’t count on the doctors to replicate my process with the others if I only resuscitate one. I’ve thought this through. It’s all or nothing.
I go over my timing. Once the heart stops beat
ing, brain cells begin to die after approximately four to six minutes without blood flow. After ten minutes, brain cells are effectively dead. My window is frighteningly short.
I check Fergus’s charts. The first time he woke up, he was in cardiac arrest for five minutes and stayed flatlined for three.
Even if I unplug all four subjects at the same time, everyone’s body responds differently. They could suffer cardiac arrest all at once, or one at a time. The important thing is getting them to that point of awakening . . . the point of imminent death. And then resuscitating them before any damage occurs to their brains.
That is why I can’t count on doing it all myself. I’m going to need help. It will pretty much ensure I’ll be caught, but I’ll just have to try to talk my way out of things.
I check the clock. They’ve been in REM for more than a half hour. I don’t know if there’s an overall on/off control switch for the Tower, but I did see an electrical cord running underneath a plastic cover stretching all the way to the wall. I walk over, crouch down, and place my hand on the heavy-duty plug attached to the wall socket. And pull.
The Tower makes an eerie sighlike noise as it shuts down. The sound is one I’ve heard before: after the second quake. The flashing lights don’t all extinguish at once. They sort of fade until the whole thing is dark.
The room is silent. There is no feedback. The monitors are dead. From now on, we’re on manual. Old-school. Flying with no wings.
With a chill, I realize that’s the same thing as plummeting.
Chapter 29
Cata
I HATE OZZY OSBOURNE. ESPECIALLY “CRAZY Train.” Just stating that for the record . . . not that I have much time to think about it as I am hurled forward, my chest jamming painfully against the metal bar barely holding me in the roller coaster car. After jerking forward a few inches and then grinding to a stop twice, the train sits at the entrance to a tunnel.
Working carefully with my severed finger, which is shooting a laser of pain through my hand and all the way up my arm, I detach the seat belt from the empty seat next to me and use it to tie the two of mine together. I still don’t feel safe, but it’s better than nothing.
Sinclair is arguing with the carnie behind me, and I turn just in time to see the guy’s jackboot meet the side of Sinclair’s head . . . with knockout force. Sinclair slumps over like a rag doll: out for the count. “What the hell are you doing?” I scream at the man, struggling to get out of my homemade seat belt.
“No climbing in and out of the cars. It’s against regulations,” the carnie says with a sneer. “Besides. I didn’t like his face.” He calls to someone in the shadows, “Take ’em away, Carl,” and the train lurches forward with a jolt.
“Sinclair’s unconscious!” I yell to Ant and Fergus. “He can’t hold on!”
In an instant Fergus is up, out of his seat, crawling over the back of his train car. He perches for a second on the beam connecting the cars, and then throws himself over the front of mine. He scrambles past me, lurching toward Sinclair as the train enters the tunnel.
We are plunged into complete blackness, and it’s not until we pass under a series of tubes of fluorescent blue that there’s enough light for me to see that Fergus has climbed into Sinclair’s car, wedged himself in next to him, and propped him upright, holding his head against the corner of the train car so it won’t get jerked around.
I don’t trust Sinclair any farther than I could throw him, but I still don’t want him to get mangled in this carnival ride from hell.
I turn my attention forward to two cars in front of me, where all that is visible of Ant is her hat, the earflaps waving wildly in the wind. She looks so tiny and alone. The train jerks to the left, and we go through another series of fluorescent tubes. We seem to be picking up speed. And then something happens.
Everything stops in exactly the same way it did in the very first dream, when I was frozen in midjump while running away from the Flayed Man. That time I was caught in a bubble, and could see outside of it into everyone else’s individual dreams.
It’s the same now, but the bubble surrounds the four of us. We’re suspended in time, trapped in our roller coaster cars, as images race by us at breakneck speed.
As the images slow down, I recognize them as scenes from my life interspersed with ones of Fergus, Ant, and Sinclair. Finally, they stop flicking by. We’re presented with a fuzzy, out-of-focus image of my little sister screaming.
The picture grows superclear: Julia’s face is beet red and soaked in tears. She falls to the ground, and there I stand: me, my face scrunched up in fury. Me, with my I-won’t-cry-no-matter-how-badly-you-hurt-me expression. My jaws are clenched so hard my teeth hurt just remembering it.
There’s my dad with his razor strap held in one hand, its copper metal socket shining in the light. He lifts it up and back. “I’m not going to stop until I see you cry. I’m going to break your spirit, Cata,” he growls, saliva flying from his lips as he brings the leather down toward my bare skin.
At the point of impact, the image is shattered into a million pieces, and inside our bubble we are drenched with a liquid that douses all of us. My mouth had been open in a horrified gape, and now it’s full of the coppery penny taste of blood. I sputter and choke and let go of the metal bar to pull up my T-shirt and wipe the blood out of my eyes and nose and from around my mouth.
My father disappears and the images begin to shuffle again, stopping at one of Ant . . . hatless . . . gloveless . . . in what looks like a puffy little-girl party dress. She sits in an old-fashioned school room, no teacher visible, but a large group of students standing around her, jeering.
“It doesn’t matter if you ace all the tests. You’re still retarded.”
“Girls can’t do science. You probably memorized the answers.”
“You must have cheated.”
“Why can’t you talk like normal people?”
“Because she’s autistic. That’s the same as being retarded.”
Ant in the picture is doing something with her hands, and I see that she’s trying to tap her fingers against the table, but the awful kids are holding her arms down and she can’t move them.
“What’s the tapping for? Are you sending Morse code to your alien friends?” sneers one boy, hatred practically steaming from his pores.
“Why don’t you give her a hug?” jeers a girl with perfectly wavy long hair. “Antonia loves hugs.”
A boy leans forward and pinions Ant in his arms, squeezing her against him. There is a close-up of her face. She is so past scared that her pupils are pinpoints, and her eyes start rolling back into her head.
“I know what she needs!” the hateful girl says. “What Antonia needs is a good wet kiss.” In an extreme close-up, a single tear leaks from the side of Ant’s eye, and then the picture goes static and disappears.
Oh my God. Was that real? Did something like that actually happen to her? I’m pretty sure she would never wear a party dress to school, but that whole scenario might be a composite of her worst fears. Looking girlie. Being restrained. Being touched or groped without being able to fight back.
Oh, Ant. I want to crawl two cars forward so I can be with her. Not hug her, of course, but just be there with her, letting her know someone is on her side.
But I’m immobilized in my seat, my body weighing a thousand pounds, the scenes shuffling by again. It stops on an image of Fergus. He’s face-to-face with a huge man—not just tall but portly—with pasty white skin and red hair.
The beautiful woman I saw with Fergus at the introductory meeting is standing in the background, pleading, “Chip, leave him alone. He can’t help it.”
“He can help it,” the man yells as Fergus cowers beside a huge mahogany desk. “We can all help everything. Wellness is in the mind.”
He grabs Fergus by the T-shirt. “Your illness is a figment of your imagination.”
“Dad, I have about a thousand medical evaluations that prove you wrong,” Fergus is sa
ying.
“Western doctors don’t know anything. You have to will yourself free. Take control of your mind. Heal yourself. But you don’t want to, do you?”
“It doesn’t work like that!” Fergus pleads, holding a hand up to protect himself. But he’s too late. His dad has reared back and punched his son on the jaw. “You’re pathetic!” the man yells as Fergus falls in slow motion to the ground. His mother rushes to his aid, but his father holds her back with one hand.
“People pay a fortune to hear me speak, and my own son won’t even listen to my free advice. He’s a failure, and he always will be.”
The picture closes in on Fergus’s face. His nose is bleeding. His eyes close slowly in defeat.
The images shuffle once more. I look backward to try to see Fergus, but his face is in the shadows. Sinclair’s eyes are back open, though, and from the concentrated look on his face, I know that the girl now staring at us from outside the bubble is meant for him.
I recognize her immediately. She was in the coffin, the girl whose bedroom we were in. Faith. She holds her My Little Pony clock in one hand and shakes it like it’s a hand grenade.
“Why’d you do it, Sinclair? Why did you lie to me? You told me things would be better if I were gone, but guess what, they would have gotten better if I had stayed. There are all sorts of things you learn in the afterlife. One of them is how to know the truth. You probably don’t even know what that word means.
“Did you know what you were going to do the first week you befriended me as the new student in your rich-kid school? Had you already laid your plan to spread lies about me, get people to hate me, get me to hate myself? Thanks a lot for finding the poison for me and for ‘being there for me until the end.’ I doubt someone like you actually has feelings of remorse. So all I have to say is . . .”
And as she says this, her face goes from looking like a teenage girl’s to moldering into a rotted corpse face: “I wish you a very short life, and hope that as you die you have one moment of clarity to see yourself for the monster you are. Don’t worry. I’ll be waiting for you. I hope to see you extremely soon.”
