The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  She felt something digging into the small of her back, and her first instinct was to crawl away from it as fast as possible, but she stopped herself. She swallowed her fear and slipped her hand behind her back. Her fingers found the offending object and she almost laughed out loud: It was the stupid door latch.

  She depressed it and pushed with all her might, but nothing happened.

  She wanted to cry.

  Then she realized she was trying to open the door the wrong way. She changed tactics, sliding the door instead of pushing it, and it rolled to the right with a gentle squeak.

  Lyse crawled through the crack in the doorway. As soon as she was on the other side, she quickly slid the door back into place, the lock catching with a click. She pressed her ear to the metal, but she couldn’t hear anything coming from the other side.

  She squinted, eyes adjusting to the meager light as she checked out her shoulder, expecting to find blood everywhere.

  “No way,” she said, pushing the flannel fabric around, looking for tears.

  She could find nothing. No blood, no rips in the material of her shirt. The lack of a wound was unsettling. Especially when she’d so clearly felt something tearing into her skin.

  She took a minute to check her surroundings, eyes running down the length of the gray concrete hallway. She noted the closed metal doors that were spaced out evenly on both sides of the walls and wondered where they led. She had no idea where she was, or where the hallway would take her once she started walking, but she knew that she needed to get moving, or risk being caught and thrown back into that awful room with whatever the hell monster she’d left in there.

  Time to go, she thought, and climbed to her feet.

  She decided to head north—a smart choice, as it turned out, because a few moments later she heard the sound of footsteps coming from behind her. Fear licked at her insides as she sped up, the soles of her sneakers making a soft shushing sound as she ran, the sound echoing down the hall.

  She tried to open a couple of the doors, stopping just long enough to discover that they were locked from the inside before moving on. The light got murkier the farther down the hall she got, but this ceased to be a problem as her eyes began to adjust.

  She felt like she was going nowhere fast. Every step she took just led her farther down a seemingly endless hallway. She was starting to get worried. Would she ever find her way out of there?

  Without warning, she passed two doorways directly across from each, both of them standing wide open. She stopped in her tracks and doubled back so that she could see where they led: One opened onto another, smaller interrogation room. The other was the entrance to a long hallway very similar to where she already was, but more brightly lit.

  She stood there feeling indecisive, not sure which path to take. Continue going down the first hall, or try the new direction that had been presented to her?

  Behind her, Lyse heard the faraway echo of feet drumming on concrete.

  She had to make a choice.

  “Eleanora?” she whispered. “What do I do?”

  She felt a hot tear slide down her cheek and wiped it away with the back of her hand. She was exhausted and scared and she wanted to go home—back to Georgia and a time before Eleanora was sick.

  She closed her eyes, slowing the trickle of tears.

  “Dammit,” she moaned, and slammed her fist into the concrete wall, putting all her frustration into it.

  The release she felt was unbelievable. She felt so much better, despite the fact that her left hand now hurt like hell.

  “Sorry,” she whispered to her damaged knuckles, watching blood pool inside the abraded skin.

  A rivulet of bright red slid down her wrist and fell onto the floor. She stared down at it, surprised by how black it looked in the low light. She couldn’t have said why, but for some reason she felt compelled to kneel down and examine it in more detail.

  “What the hell,” she said, as the blood drop began to quiver.

  She got even closer, watching it shimmy on the concrete floor. She was fascinated by the droplet’s strange behavior. She’d never seen anything like it before . . . and then, without any warning, the blood drop began to roll down the hall.

  Lyse opened her mouth, but no words came out. Instead, the corridor was filled with the mind-numbing scream of a high-pitched alarm.

  Someone must’ve engaged the emergency warning system for the building, she thought as an army of rotating red lights flashed on and off, up and down the corridor.

  Lyse climbed to her feet, still not sure which way to go.

  Screw it, she thought, and began to follow the blood, curious to see where it would lead her.

  * * *

  There was no real illumination now. Even the meager overhead lighting was gone; just the intermittent flash from the emergency lights was all she had to show her the way. But it was enough for Lyse to keep an eye on her guide . . . the droplet of blood.

  It’s in the blood.

  She had no idea where the phrase had come from. Yet there it was in her head. It sounded familiar, as though she’d heard it before.

  What’s in the blood? she wondered.

  The alarm siren was pervasive, a trilling whine that rose and lowered in pitch, the pattern repeating again and again, and she’d had to cover her ears with her hands or risk going deaf.

  She’d gotten a smear of blood on her cheek for her trouble and had unsuccessfully tried to wipe it away with the tail of her flannel shirt. This had only made it worse. She’d given up, hoping there weren’t any more monsters in the hallway to drool over the scent of her blood.

  Eardrums protected by her palms, she continued down the corridor, following the blood droplet through the first hallway. She was glad she hadn’t had to make the choice herself. Glad the blood had decided which direction to go, which hallway would be her fate.

  As much as she racked her brain, she’d never seen blood behave in such an odd way. The closest she could come was that once in middle school, when they’d studied the periodic table, her Earth/space science teacher had shown the class a droplet of pure mercury. It had caught Lyse’s attention because it was so pretty. A metallic silver, it reflected your face back at you when you looked into it, and rolled around the surface of its container, always returning to its original shape no matter how the teacher manipulated it.

  The blood reminded her of that mercury.

  She watched it slide and curl around itself as it rolled down the length of the hall, moving with a graceful fluidity. It was as if it were being pulled toward something greater than itself. It made Lyse wonder if she was in the bowels of a particle collider whose giant magnets were attracting the iron in it.

  Not that there was enough iron in her blood for any magnet to catch hold of—even the big ones in a particle collider.

  Maybe she was in an underground lab buried deep beneath the deserts of Los Alamos, or in some kind of top-secret military base right out of a twisted, wannabe Dr. Strangelove remake.

  It’s in the blood. It’s in the blood. It’s in the blood.

  That phrase again. A persistent whisper repeated in a voice she didn’t recognize.

  Lost in her head, Lyse had to pull up short when the hallway came to an abrupt end in front of a large hangar door. She’d been so focused on following the little droplet that she hadn’t realized the corridor had changed its shape, the floor dropping away from the ceiling and the side walls expanding until it was now big enough to drive a jeep through.

  It was colder here, too, which made Lyse suspect she was being led even farther underground. She was pretty sure a facility like this one, with its myriad locked doors, strange layout, and emergency alarm system, would not be mappable by the likes of Google Earth.

  The hydraulic hangar door blocked the droplet’s path, and the poor thing was vibrating like crazy as it
tried to find a way through the door to the other side. Lyse knelt down and touched the ground in front of the door, her fingers coming away coated with dirt.

  Only the dirt didn’t feel right.

  No, it was darker and smoother than normal dirt—and Lyse understood then that it was ash.

  She stood up and swiftly began to wipe her hand on her pants, something cold snaking through her heart. She didn’t want to know where the ash had come from. She didn’t want it on her fingers, or sticking to the bottom of her sneakers.

  The incessant screeching of the alarm seemed to have lessened, or Lyse had gotten used to it—she didn’t know which—but she felt more cognizant now, more awake and functioning. She began to search for a way to open the hangar door and quickly discovered a large yellow button built into the wall beside it.

  Here goes nothing, she thought, and depressed the button, hoping it wouldn’t alert someone to her presence.

  Pale golden light trickled across Lyse’s feet, expanding up the length of her body as the door rolled into itself, leaving everything on the other side of it illuminated. Lyse gasped as she saw what lay before her.

  The droplet of blood—which didn’t seem to care what was inside the new space—shot forward, crossing the threshold and resuming its journey onward.

  Lyse

  Lyse blinked as her eyes tried to adjust to the bright white light, but it was like being thrust into another universe after all that darkness. The scream of the alarm system faded away behind her as the heavy hangar door rolled back into place, basically trapping her inside this new environment. Even as she was grateful to have made her escape from the people pursuing her, Lyse’s brain began to fully process what she was seeing, and she began to feel a pit of fear opening up in her stomach.

  It’s a laboratory, Lyse thought as she took a step away from the interior of the massive room, the cold metal of the hangar door pressing into the small of her back. But it’s wrong. Something is very wrong here.

  Cages lined the walls as far as the eye could see, but inside them weren’t lab rats or chimpanzees or dogs. No, these heavy-duty steel cages were filled with human beings. Some sat listlessly in puddles of their own excrement; others were curled up in the fetal position, their limbs pressed against the bars of their cages. They wore hospital smocks that barely covered their nakedness, their heads shaved down to fuzzy stubble.

  To her horror, Lyse realized that all of them were female.

  Whereas the human element was soiled and unkempt, the rest of the lab was pristine: a state-of-the-art medical facility with various apparatus that Lyse could barely describe, let alone understand what they were for or how they worked. There were stand-alone, concrete block rooms built within the lab, each with a long observation window cut into its side, so that someone could monitor what was happening in the interior of the room.

  Above her a sea of fluorescent, commercial-grade light fixtures flooded the giant space with white-hot light that cast minimal shadow, though it was caught and reflected back at Lyse in every one of the lab’s chrome and steel surfaces.

  It was like looking into an alternate-universe version of Josef Mengele’s lab at Auschwitz. Because only someone or something as monstrous as the Nazis could’ve created what she was seeing here in this place.

  In the face of such horror, Lyse had forgotten about the blood drop—and when she looked down at the floor, she saw that it was gone. She scanned the ground, trying to catch sight of it, but it had disappeared.

  “Damn,” she murmured, frowning. She was annoyed with herself for not paying more attention. It was the blood drop that had led her here in the first place.

  Without her little scarlet guide, she felt uncertain of where to go next—and then she realized it didn’t matter. The first and only order of business, she decided, was to free the women.

  On silent feet, Lyse moved toward the first row of caged women, her breath coming in short, hollow gasps. She tried to calm herself down but discovered that fear was one thing that would not be quieted. She gave up and just focused on remaining calm as she approached one of the near-comatose young women.

  “Hello?” Lyse whispered as she knelt down beside the bars, her lips as close to the woman’s ear as she could manage. “Can you tell me who you are and what’s happening here?”

  The young woman didn’t move. She stayed curled into a fetal position, her shorn head a Brillo pad of coarse hair that Lyse wanted to reach out and smooth down. Lyse got even closer to the bars, her eyes taking in the girl’s pale brown skin—and then her heart lurched: One of the girl’s eyes had been burned away, ropy scar tissue covering the side of her face. Lyse sat back on her heels, thrusting her hand into her mouth to stop herself from sobbing.

  She stayed like that, motionless and trying not to cry, for a while—how long exactly, she wasn’t sure, but when she was able to think straight again, she stood up and backed away from the cage. She hadn’t heard a sound since she entered the lab, and she was pretty sure that meant the women had been sedated. No roomful of living creatures was this quiet unless there were drugs involved.

  She looked for a way to jimmy the padlock on the woman’s cage, but without a key or lockpicking tools—which she had no idea how to use, anyway—she couldn’t open it. In anger, she grabbed the lock and began to pull on it, yanking it back and forth as she took out her frustration on the stupid piece of metal keeping her from helping the poor, tortured woman in front of her.

  A cracking shot ricocheted across the lab, echoing off the floor and walls. Lyse threw herself to the cold tile floor before she realized it was only the sound of a door opening somewhere on the other side of the massive room.

  My best bet is to just stay down and out of sight, she thought as she kept her body parallel to the ground and began to crawl away from the cages, keeping her movements as quiet as possible. Across from her was a long metal cabinet covered in computer monitors, and she decided that it provided the largest hiding space she could get to without crossing the open floor of the lab. So she headed toward the cabinet, still crawling, reaching it just as she heard the echoing footsteps of her pursuers.

  “She’s in here. Start looking by the cages.”

  A man’s voice caromed through the space, the acoustics in the lab carrying his words straight to Lyse’s ears. She could feel her heart rate increase, every muscle in her body throbbing in terror as she tried not to breathe. They knew where she was, had probably seen her on their monitoring system, and it was only a matter of time before they found her.

  I need an out, she thought, racking her brain for any kind of plan that might save her.

  She began to scan the space, looking for an escape route.

  “Check those cages. Make sure she’s not hiding inside an unlocked one.”

  Whoever was leading the search was smart. If she could’ve figured out a way to get into one of the cages and play pretend “science experiment subject,” she would’ve done it—but her clothes and healthy coloring would’ve given her away instantly.

  Lyse blinked as something bright flashed across her plane of vision. She searched for its source, hoping it wasn’t one of the people pursuing her, maybe their watch face catching the fluorescent light and reflecting it back. But then it appeared again, more insistent this time, flashing back and forth across her face, then shooting away before returning once more. This time it moved away from her slowly, trailing across the floor at a speed she could follow with her eye.

  Someone is trying to show me something.

  The light twitched as it caught up to the droplet of blood, staying with it as it continued its journey across the floor. She realized that the light was helping her, showing her where the droplet was so that she might follow it. She didn’t hesitate, not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, and began to crawl away from the shelter of the cabinet.

  The floor was cold, its hard su
rface digging into her knees and elbows, but she ignored it, pushing forward. The blood took a circuitous route, weaving in and out of the workstations and between lab tables. She followed as best she could, keeping her eyes locked on the droplet as it progressed in its slow and meandering fashion. She could hear the men looking for her, hear the scrunch of their tread as they fanned out across the floor, but she kept going.

  The droplet led her away from the center of the lab and past another row of caged women. Lyse tried not to focus on their pathetic faces as she passed them by, not wanting to see what horrible torture they’d endured. She felt a hand clamp on her ankle and she almost screamed, but fear kept the sound locked inside her throat. Instead, she pulled her leg free—which she was easily able to do—and then turned around, prepared to fight off an attacker.

  But no one was there.

  She checked to make sure the blood droplet was still visible, then returned to the row of cages—and that was when she saw the long, pale fingers retracting back between the metal bars.

  “Hey,” Lyse whispered. “Don’t go.”

  She crawled over to the bars, searching out the woman’s face.

  “Who are you?” Lyse asked, her voice so low that she didn’t know if the woman could hear it or not. “Please, I want to help.”

  The woman was probably Lyse’s age, but the dark circles under her eyes and her dry, cracked lips made her look older. Her face was unharmed, but she was extremely thin and had a gray pallor to her skin.

  “Get away,” the woman murmured. “Tell them what you’ve seen.”

  Her eyes were so full of desperation that all Lyse could do was nod.

  “They burn the ones who don’t have the blood . . .”

  Lyse got closer to the bars, forgetting where she was for a moment.