“Hey there, bro,” said the doppelgänger with an unnerving grin. A dark trickle of crimson flowed from one nostril down his face. “How’s it hangin’?”
Tom came out of the hallucination with a violent start, feeling like he’d been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer. He struggled to catch his breath, gasping for air as he fought his way back to full consciousness. He felt bad, really bad.
That was definitely the worst one ever, he thought. The hypnagogic episode he had just gone through was more awful than the ones where he’d been chased by wolves or had fallen from the roof of a skyscraper, and the one when he’d been buried alive. They’d all seemed terrifyingly real, but this one …
He was lying in the fetal position. Suddenly he came to the realization that he wasn’t in his bed, the comforting place where he usually came to after his attacks. He seemed to be on the floor someplace, coarse carpeting beneath him. Slowly he uncurled, muscles aching, the dull throb behind his eyes a distant reminder of the excruciating headache he had experienced within his hallucination. He stood carefully, looking around, but everywhere he looked brought only confusion, and he started to panic. Am I still hallucinating?
And then he realized that he wasn’t alone.
Tom yelped at the sight of a gray-haired man dressed in a T-shirt and slacks standing nearby, pointing a gun directly at his head.
It was a Glock nine millimeter, and how he knew that only added to his anxiety.
A million and one things raced through his mind as he looked around the room, desperate for a rational explanation, almost hoping that this really was another trick of his illness. Tom closed his hands into fists, sinking his fingernails into the soft flesh of his palms, and squeezed, hoping that the pain might break this latest attack, if this was indeed a hallucination.
“There’s no need to be afraid,” the man said, although he continued to train his weapon on the boy. “My name is Christian Tremain.” His voice was rough and gravelly. “I work for a special division of the government. I’m sure this is all a bit overwhelming, but we want to help you.”
First the old man working for some freaky group of mad scientists and now this, Tom thought as he backed up into the wall. “Help me wake up, then.”
Tremain lowered his weapon. “This isn’t a dream, boy,” he said. “You’re very much awake and in great danger.”
Tom wanted to laugh, it was all so crazy. He decided that he preferred the daymares where he floated off into space or turned into smoke and blew away on the wind.
“I just want to wake up,” he whispered, banging his head against the wall behind him with a hollow thunk.
“What’s your name, son?” the man asked quietly.
The name Tyler Garrett popped into his head, and for a moment Tom actually forgot his own.
“Tom Lovett,” he yelled, forcing the words from his mouth before he could forget again. “My name is Tom Lovett.”
“Easy, Tom.” Tremain raised a hand in a calming gesture. “I know how crazy this must seem to you, but I do want to help you get through this. The first thing that you have to realize, though, is that this is real—you are not dreaming.”
Tom’s legs began to tremble, the truth of the man’s words slowly sinking in. “How can it be real?” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “How is this even possible?” He was holding on by a hair; in a matter of moments he was sure he would be screaming.
Tremain moved closer and Tom recoiled, sliding down the wall, suddenly feeling like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Who are you …? What’s happening to me? I have to call my parents… I have to—”
“Calm down, Tom,” Tremain ordered in an authoritative voice. “Remember what Dr. Quentin told you.”
Tom tried to shrink farther into the wall. “How could you know about that?”
“He told me what he was going to do,” the man explained. “He told me about the memory implant and how he was going to try to override your programming.”
“The Janus Project,” Tom whispered. “You know about the Janus Project, but it’s just a dream—a hallucination, wasn’t it?”
“Tom, you are a result of the science developed by Janus—a science that was supposed to be used for the good of the country but has been subverted by the project’s director, Brandon Kavanagh.”
“It’s finally happened.” Tom moaned, burying his face in his hands. “I’ve finally lost it.”
Tremain squatted down in front of him, but Tom no longer had the strength to move away. “You’re not crazy,” he reassured the youth, reaching out to grab his knee in an encouraging grip. “It’s the situation that’s crazy.”
Tom looked up and gazed into Tremain’s steel gray eyes. After a moment he asked, “Where am I…? Why am I here?”
“You’re in a motel in West Virginia,” Tremain explained carefully. “You’ve been sent by Brandon Kavanagh to kill me.”
Tom just stared at the man. “Kill you?” he asked, voice raised in panic. A surge of adrenaline coursed through his body as he fought to climb up from the floor. “That’s impossible; I would never … could never even think of doing anything like that.”
Tremain stood as well, the joints in his knees clicking noisily as he straightened. “Check your pockets, Tom. You’ll find proof that what I’m saying is true.”
Tom took the man’s words as a challenge, plunging his hands into the pockets of his black windbreaker. His fingers brushed against two items, one in each pocket, and slowly he removed them.
One was a gun—a Smith & Wesson P99, ten shots fired and one in the clip. The other was a syringe filled with a clear liquid that Tom seemed to know was the concentrated venom of the sea wasp, Chironex fleckeri, an extremely poisonous form of jellyfish found only in the waters of Australia. How do I know this? he wondered, staring dumbly at the objects.
“These … these aren’t mine.” He shook his head vigorously, offering the items up to the man standing across from him. “I have no idea how…”
“Not yours directly,” Tremain said. “But your other half. They were to be used to take my life.”
Tom dropped the gun and syringe to the floor, stepping back from them as if they had the ability to attack on their own.
“I can’t take this,” he said, turning around, looking for a way out of the room. “I have to get out of here…”
“Listen to me, Tom,” Tremain said, coming after him. “Dr. Quentin believed that Brandon Kavanagh was planning to sell the technology developed at Janus to the highest bidder and contacted me in an attempt to stop him. Both he and I believed that the only way to stop Kavanagh was to turn the Janus technology against him.”
Tom reached the door, yanking it open only to have it stop short as the slide chain reached its limit.
“A process has been started inside your brain, Tom,” the man went on. “Unification—where the two halves of your fragmented personality will attempt to merge together to heal as one.”
A mirror image of himself—a bad version, from his hallucination, standing behind the door of Quentin’s cabin—filled his brain.
“Hey there, bro. How’s it hangin’?”
“We can help you, Tom,” Tremain said behind him. “And you can help us.”
The man’s hand closed around Tom’s upper arm and Tom reacted, taking hold of Tremain’s wrist, twisting it effortlessly to one side and driving him painfully to his knees. Instinctively Tom knew he could break the man’s wrist at that moment but decided against it.
“Don’t touch me,” he said, speaking in a voice that wasn’t entirely his own. “Don’t you ever touch me.”
He kicked the man away and turned, pulling the chain from the track and throwing open the door, running for the stairs that would take him to the parking lot below. He had never been here before, but somehow he knew how to get away, and he let the strange intuition guide him.
Tom moved through the darkness as if it were second nature, as if he had been do
ing this his entire life. Something told him to work his way toward the entrance to the driveway, and he did so, darting across the expanse of parking lot to the base of an illuminated signpost. He peered at the dark road beyond and realized he didn’t have the slightest clue where to go next. He was on his own, the strange force that had been guiding him suddenly absent.
Immediately he thought of his parents and looked across the lot at the Starlight Motel’s main office.
“I’ll ask if I can use their phone and—” he muttered to himself.
The screeching of brakes and the roar of an engine interrupted his plans as a black van turned off the main road and barreled up the drive. Tom stepped back, nearly tripping over the concrete base of the signpost as the vehicle came to an abrupt stop in front of him. The side door of the van slid open to reveal a man dressed entirely in black, a man who seemed to know him.
“What the hell happened to you?” the man from the van asked in an angry whisper. “Why weren’t you at the rendezvous point?”
Tom’s mouth moved to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. He had no idea how to respond.
“Sleeper One?” the man asked, jumping out of the vehicle, eyeing him with caution. “Are you all right? Everything finished here?”
“I—I…” Tom stammered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“What’s the problem, Crenshaw?” a voice asked impatiently from the driver’s seat of the van.
“Think we have a little identity crisis here,” Crenshaw responded, his hand going to an object concealed in a leather holster attached to his belt.
Tom didn’t have a clue what the man was reaching for, assuming at first that it was a gun but then remembering that all transport agents carried Tasers.
Transport agents? It was as if he were thinking with somebody else’s brain. And what the hell was a Taser?
“Deal with it and let’s go,” the driver ordered.
Crenshaw pointed the Taser at Tom, and he was temporarily mesmerized by the blinking green light on top of the device. But then his senses started to scream that he was in danger.
Tom was on the move before he realized what he was doing. Listening to the shrieking instincts inside his skull, Tom broke into a run. Crenshaw took off after him. As Tom dove toward a patch of shadow behind the signpost, he was startled by a high-pitched whine, and a burning pain shot through his side. Tom froze and glanced down at two projectiles lodged in his side; they were attached to thin, coiled wires leading back to the device in Crenshaw’s hand.
“Lights out,” Tom heard the man say as fifty thousand volts of electric current passed through his body, overriding his central nervous system.
Fighting to stay conscious, Tom felt himself hauled up from where he had fallen and then dumped unceremoniously into the belly of the waiting van.
“We’ll get him back to his handlers and they can worry about what to do from there,” he heard Crenshaw say from someplace very far away.
“Sounds like a plan,” the driver responded. “The sooner he’s somebody else’s responsibility, the better.”
As Tom spiraled deeper into oblivion, he heard Crenshaw laugh and felt the van begin to move. “What’s the matter, Burt?” the man asked his partner. “Sleeper One a little too much for you?”
“Let’s just say I’d be more comfortable driving nuclear ordnance,” Burt responded.
“The kid gives me the creeps,” were the last words Tom heard before slipping down into a very dark place.
Chapter 11
It was like something out of one of those black-and-white horror movies that Tom and his dad rented around Halloween. He stood on the front steps of an old, run-down mansion with those two questions he seemed to be asking himself a lot lately. Where am I, and how did I get here?
Everything came back to him in a rush, and it just about knocked him on his back. He remembered it all—the dream conversation with Dr. Quentin, his nasty twin on the other side of the cabin door, waking up in the motel room—At least, I think I woke up. It was getting harder to tell the difference between reality and hallucination.
And then he remembered the van, and he unconsciously rubbed at his side. Was that real or another trick of my sick—and obviously getting sicker—mind? He really didn’t know for sure. So, where now? Tom thought anxiously, stepping back down the rickety wooden steps to get a better look at his surroundings.
The front façade of the sprawling mansion was covered in snaking, leafy vines that just about obscured the large front windows of the multifloored structure. He turned around, looking down a stone path overgrown with weeds that wandered into a wall of swirling fog so thick he couldn’t see anything beyond it. It was strangely quiet here: no traffic in the distance, no sounds from the house, as if the whole area were encased in a bubble of silence.
“Okay, so this can’t be real,” Tom decided aloud, trying to calm his increasing panic.
But there was something strangely familiar about this creepy place. He remembered Dr. Quentin’s cabin and his explanation of mental constructs. Maybe that’s what this was, Tom thought, turning back to the mansion’s front steps.
Tom started to climb, the old, warped wood beneath his feet creaking with each footfall. At the top of the stairs was a set of large double doors the color of dried blood, paint peeling as if the doors were shedding their skin. As his foot landed on the last step, one of the red doors slowly squeaked open, revealing a grand but dilapidated entryway within. He stopped dead in his tracks, half expecting to see a ghostly white hand beckoning from the shadows. Instead there was a voice.
“Are you going to stand out there with your thumb up your ass all day or are you coming in?”
The voice was familiar. “How do I know it’s safe?” he questioned, peering into the entrance, searching for its owner.
He heard a dry chuckle, like the sound of metal ball bearings rolled across a wooden floor. “We’re beyond that now, bro,” the voice replied, and Tom caught the hint of a southern drawl. “Safe is something we’re going to have to work real hard at, so I suggest you get yourself in here right quick so we can get down to business.”
This is so friggin’ weird, Tom thought as he walked across the porch to the open door. He told himself it was just a hallucination; there was no point in being afraid.
The foyer was just as run down and dilapidated as the front of the building—the floor covered in dried seasonal leaves, dust and dirt. Tom jumped as the door slammed shut behind him.
“Hello?” he called out, his voice echoing under the cathedral ceiling.
Getting no answer, he carefully looked around, up the winding grand staircase that led to the second floor, straight ahead at a doorway partially enshrouded with a heavy, moth-eaten curtain, to the left at a hallway that went off into the darkness, and to the right into a parlor with its furniture still in place.
Outside, the wind had picked up, and the mansion seemed to moan like somebody in pain. Tom was again reminded of late Saturday nights, sitting beneath a blanket with his dad, bowl of popcorn in his lap, watching some scary movie on television. He wanted to be back there again, with his father—his family. He wanted to be free of what seemed to be a nightmare that just didn’t want to quit.
“You felt safe with him, didn’t you?” the voice with the southern accent asked.
Tom turned to the darkened parlor.
“Your dad,” came the voice again. “He made you feel safe, all nice and secure.”
“How do you know I was thinking about my father?” Tom asked as he entered the parlor, eyes squinting, attempting to pierce the murky shadows.
The voice chuckled, and Tom felt an icy finger of dread run up and down his spine. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of humor in it; it was more growl than laugh.
A table lamp clicked on, dispelling the inky darkness from the corner of the room to reveal Tom’s twin seated in a high-backed leather chair not two feet from Tom, his hand still on the lamp’s pull c
hain.
“Hey there,” he said with a smile.
They were exactly identical, the only difference being that this version of himself wasn’t wearing any glasses, and there was something about the expression on his face—the smile. It was cold, more of a sneer than an expression of pleasure, and Tom knew that this young man—this version of himself—was capable of just about anything, no matter how horrible.
“Come on over; take a seat.” His twin gestured toward a chair directly across from him. “We got loads to talk about.”
Tom clumsily made his way to the proffered chair, eyes never leaving his double as he slowly lowered himself into it. “What exactly are you … are you me?” he asked.
His twin laughed again, that same horrible hacking sound. “No, bud, I ain’t you,” he said, leaning back and casually crossing his legs. “And you sure as hell ain’t me.”
A name popped into Tom’s head as it had done in that West Virginia motel room—the name that had almost made him forget his own. “You’re Tyler Garrett.”
His double nodded. “I certainly am, and you’re Tommy Lovett—the guy who shares my body.”
Tom stiffened. “Your body?”
Garrett’s hands rose to placate. “Okay, okay—our body.”
The wind wailed fitfully outside. “This is too much.” Tom shook his head as he leaned back in his chair. “It’s just too friggin’ much.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Garrett agreed. “And the question is, What are we gonna do about it?”
Tom swallowed hard and closed his eyes. “I’m going to wake up and then I’m going to make an appointment to see my doctor and—”
“And they’ll have you exactly where they want you,” Garrett finished for him.
Tom opened his eyes to stare at Garrett.
“That’s right, you’ll go and see … what’s his name?” Garrett asked. “Powell? I know him as Dr. Goyer, but even that probably ain’t his real name. Anyway, you’ll tell him about your strange dreams and how there’s this fella living inside your head who looks just like you only he talks with a good ole boy drawl, and they’ll tell you that they have just the thing to make you better.”
Sleeper Code Page 11
