Sleeper Agenda

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “What’s the matter, Tom?” the doctor asked. “We’re getting some readings here that are starting to concern us.”

  A thorn was sticking directly into the meat of his arm, easily passing through his skin and into the muscle of his shoulder.

  “Dammit,” Tom swore, twisting away from the thorn but only managing to cause more pain, this time in his thigh.

  He looked down to see that another thorn had pierced him, going through his jeans and into the skin beneath.

  Tom’s mind raced; he hadn’t noticed the thorns there. If he had, he would have been more careful.

  “Tom?” the doctor called again, and there was actually concern in his nasally voice.

  “The thorns,” he managed. “I stuck myself pretty good.”

  “Get out of there now,” Stempler ordered. “Something isn’t right.”

  “Seriously,” Tom muttered, taking deep breaths to calm himself. “Give me a minute to…”

  With growing horror, Tom watched as a thorn grew out from the thick body of a vine close to his chest, the razor-sharp point coming closer and closer still.

  He started to scream just before the point of the thorn pierced his flesh. He tried to pull away, but thorns were sprouting all along the bodies of the vines that surrounded him.

  “Tom, you have to calm down. Your heart rate has increased to a dangerous level and—”

  But Tom wasn’t listening anymore, not that he could have answered the doctor even if he’d wanted to. The vines themselves had started to move, squeezing him between their thick mass. He could barely breathe, never mind talk.

  More and more thorns erupted from the vines; their spearlike tips seeking out his soft flesh. He could feel himself bleeding from at least six spots, probably more. The wounds had a tendency to grow numb after a time.

  The thought crossed Tom’s mind again, the question he’d had about whether it was possible to get hurt deep within his subconscious.

  It looked like he had his answer.

  Chapter 5

  TOM’S BODY THRASHED once on the exam table, then fell limp. A high-pitched warning peal suddenly filled the air, inciting the technicians to action.

  “What’s happening, Doctor?” Tremain asked, watching as the scientist rose from his seat to check the data output from various machines.

  “We’ve lost him,” Stempler said with disbelief. Then, seeing the look on Tremain’s face, he quickly added, “He’s not dead. But he has fallen so far down into his subconscious that he’s apparently unable to communicate with us.”

  “So he’s in a sort of coma?” Tremain offered.

  “No, not really,” Stempler started to explain when one of the technicians called to him.

  “Doctor, come here!”

  Tremain and Stempler turned to the table where Tom lay, the activity around the boy suddenly furious. As they drew closer, alarms sounded and lights flashed.

  “What the hell is going on now?” Tremain barked.

  Stempler stood frozen, staring at the readouts in disbelief. “I never imagined he’d be able to go so deep,” he said.

  “You’ve got two seconds to explain this, Doctor. After that I’m bringing in a med team and—”

  “It’s really quite amazing,” Stempler said, watching as his people adjusted medication flows and repositioned monitors. “The boy—Tom—has entered an altered state of consciousness deep within his mind, in a place of his, or at least his other personality’s, creation, where he is now injured. Or so I’m led to believe by his last communication, and his physical body is reacting in kind.”

  Tremain watched the frantic activity around the boy. “So what exactly are you telling me … that if he’s hurt or, God forbid, mortally wounded in this dreamland, or wherever the hell he is, he could die?”

  The doctor paused for a moment and then nodded. “Yes, it’s entirely possible.”

  Tremain looked back to Tom, at the wires snaking from his body, the spiking lines on the monitors.

  “Get him out of there, Doctor,” Tremain ordered. “End the experiment—bring him back before it’s too late.”

  Asleep within a dream; how freakin’ bizarre is that? Tom thought, suddenly coming awake with the realization that he wasn’t anywhere near reality at the moment.

  He was lying on a large four-poster bed covered with musty-smelling sheets; the wounds he’d received from the thorny vines had been covered in bandages. The room was dark, the only light from a single burning candle, resting on a dresser top across the room.

  Someone had brought him here and seen to his injuries. And he had a sneaking suspicion who it was.

  “Bet you thought you was a goner,” a low, rasping voice said from a shadowy corner.

  Tom sat up quickly, his wounds throbbing, and peered into the darkness. “Tyler?” he asked.

  He could barely make out the shape of a chair and a figure slouched there.

  “Now, what do you think?” His voice sounded strangely raw. “Got anybody else rattlin’ around inside your head? Hope to Christ not; it’s already too damn crowded as it is.”

  Tom squinted into the shadows, trying to see his alternate self. “You sound different. Is there something wrong with—”

  Tyler let out a coarse laugh. “ ‘Is there something wrong?’ ” he repeated. “That’s funny. I like that.”

  Something in the darkness across from him shifted, and Tom watched as the figure rose from the chair and shambled toward the door. Tyler was wearing what looked to be a blanket, draped over his head and body, hiding his features.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tom asked again.

  “As if you don’t know,” Tyler said, passing the bureau, his movement causing the flame of the candle to dance, casting eerie shadows on the walls. “I should have let you die,” he continued. “Bled to death on the thorns—but then I’d probably be in worse shape than I am now.”

  The hunched figure stopped at the door with one hand on the knob. His hand was deathly pale, covered in an angry rash.

  “Your hand,” Tom said, and watched as Tyler quickly pulled it back, hiding it again beneath the blanket.

  “Don’t you get it, man?” Tyler said, turning slowly to face him. “You’re killing me by inches.”

  Tom gasped as Tyler removed the blanket—he was looking at his mirror image, only this was a reflection racked with sickness.

  “Not a pretty sight, is it?” Tyler asked. His face was deathly pale and gaunt, large open sores on his forehead and cheekbones.

  “I don’t understand.” Tom slid off the bed, the wounds in his legs and arms throbbing painfully as he approached his double.

  How was it even possible? Tyler was part of him, and despite the wounds from the thorns, Tom was fine.

  “Good sense of humor but dumb as a bag of rocks,” Tyler quipped. “What did you think would happen once we started to merge?”

  Tom stared, mouth agape.

  “Yeah, I knew it. You weren’t thinking.”

  Tyler let the blanket fall from his shoulders. He looked like he’d crawled from the grave: his clothes were in tatters, the exposed flesh teeming with infection.

  “Little by little, I’m rotting away.”

  Tom didn’t know what to say. He could only stare in stunned disbelief at his other half, obviously so close to death. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “We were supposed to join,” Tom said, interlocking the fingers of both hands. “To merge; how …?”

  Tyler shook his head slowly, a scary smiling forming on his sore-covered face. One of the wounds had started to bleed, a scarlet teardrop running down his cheek.

  “That’s how I thought it would be too,” he said, “but then I started to feel what was really happening when I let a little bit of what I am become a part of you—and I didn’t care for it.” He looked at his hands, as if seeing the decay there for the first time. “I was dying, Tommy,” he continued, “and I decided that I didn’t want any part of it.”

/>   Tom moved closer. “But what choice do you … do we have?”

  The double chuckled. “Jury’s still out on which one of us is strongest,” he said slyly.

  “I told you before.” Tom tried to sound tougher than he was actually feeling at the moment, the wounds he’d received from the thorny vines throbbing with the beat of his heart. “I’ll never let you take control.”

  Tyler picked up his blanket from the floor and threw it over his head and shoulders. “You did, didn’t you,” he said, reaching out and opening the door. “But that puts us smack-dab in the middle of a situation.”

  Tom followed him into the hallway.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly feeling light-headed, like he just might float away. He leaned back against the bedroom door frame, his vision swimming.

  “You’re not going anyplace, and neither am I,” Tyler said. “But that’s something we’ll discuss another time.”

  He turned away and walked toward a pool of darkness at the corridor’s end.

  “We’ll talk about it now!” Tom demanded, pushing off from the door frame and falling to his knees. He didn’t know what was wrong, and he wondered if Tyler had done something to weaken him.

  “Now why would I do something like that?” Tyler asked, reading his thoughts with a shake of his head. “What do you take me for? If nothing else, I’m fair.”

  He continued down the hallway toward the patch of darkness. “We’ll be seeing each other again,” he said casually over his shoulder. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Tom tried to follow but felt a pull, a serious force intent on extricating him from this environment.

  “No.” He tried with all his might to fight it, but to no avail. Everything around him went to black as he found himself pulled from the depths of his inner being.

  The ascent toward awakening.

  It was like coming up from the bottom of a really deep hole.

  Tom bolted upright, gasping for air, his heart hammering in his chest, his skin soaked with sweat. It reminded him of the old days, when he’d awaken from a narcoleptic attack, when he’d realize on opening his eyes that the disease had taken him again.

  The lab techs swarmed around him, pushing him back, holding him down, tiny flashlight beams shining in his eyes as they bombarded him with questions.

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  “Can you tell me how old you are?”

  “Who is the president of the United States?”

  He wanted to answer, but his mouth wouldn’t work properly; his attempts at speech came out in a useless garble. It wasn’t long before he felt another pinprick of pain in his arm, and the spinning room began to slow, and he was once again embraced by the arms of sleep.

  There was no dreaming with this sleep, no doubles with rotting skin, no ancient mansions covered in thorny vines. There was nothing but the deep, dark black and the slowly dawning sense that he was alive.

  And then awake.

  Tom opened his eyes to see Tremain standing in the corner of the room, cup of steaming coffee in his hand. The man was silent, taking a slow sip from the cup, his eyes unwavering.

  “Is something wrong?” Tom slurred, his hands going to his head. He felt like it was wrapped in cotton.

  “No,” the director replied, moving toward the side of his bed. “Just wanted to be sure you were actually awake this time.”

  “How long was I out?” Tom asked, the question reminding him of before, when waking up had filled him with a certain amount of trepidation.

  “Not long,” Tremain said, pulling a chair from beneath a small desk in the corner and sitting at his bedside. “About six hours. They had to pump you full of stuff to make you sleep in order to counteract the stuff they gave to wake you up.” He brought his cup up to his mouth. “It’s all very complicated. How are you feeling?” he asked, taking a drink.

  Tom laid an arm over his eyes. “Honestly? I feel like crap.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me, after everything you’ve been through.”

  Planting his hands on either side of the bed, Tom tried to push himself up to a sitting position, only to feel sharp pain throughout his upper body and hammers pounding in his head. He groaned and lay back down.

  “What the hell happened to me? I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Tremain asked. “According to Doc Stempler, when we put you under, you entered an altered state of consciousness so deep that your dream perceptions actually began to manifest on your physical self. Your heart rate skyrocketed and your blood pressure dipped so low they thought they’d lost you for a while. Never mind what your brain waves were doing.” He brought the cup of coffee to his mouth again. “Pretty heavy stuff, eh?” he said, before taking another drink.

  “This is insane,” Tom muttered.

  Tremain placed his coffee cup on the floor by his feet. “The doc believes this is all connected to the conditioning Janus used to house two distinct personalities inside your head. He believes the other half is actually an altered perception.”

  “I don’t understand.” Tom shook his head, nearly overwhelmed.

  “Join the club.” Tremain stood. “Being the director of Pandora doesn’t necessarily mean that I understand the intricacies of the science behind everything we’re involved with. Usually it’s not necessary. But now with Kavanagh out there, a threat to all of us … I’ve done my best to get a firm grasp on the logic here, based on what Stempler’s explained to me.” He paused, and Tom could see that he was trying to think of the best way to explain this latest theory, one that they could both understand.

  “Stempler used your eyesight as an example,” he said finally. “Before your two sides started to merge, you needed glasses to improve your vision, but Tyler didn’t. His state of being, of having perfect vision, was transferred to you. Your perceptions were altered.”

  “You’re saying my eyes … they actually changed—psychically?” Tom knew he didn’t need his glasses anymore but hadn’t really given it a lot of thought yet. Everything else going on seemed much bigger, but it was eerie to suddenly be seeing differently than he had just recently.

  “They used to call it mind over matter when I was a kid,” Tremain said with a nod.

  “So is that why I haven’t experienced any narcoleptic attacks?”

  “Bingo,” Tremain said.

  Tom closed his eyes and attempted to process it all. “Who thinks up this stuff anyway, utter maniacs?” he said with a disbelieving laugh.

  “No kidding,” the director said, reaching down to pick up the empty cup from the floor.

  He returned the chair to the desk and looked back at Tom. “The human animal is a fascinating creature, Tom. Full of great intelligence and imagination—always reaching to understand more about the ways things work and how to make things better, but we’re also kind of twisted.”

  “And that’s where something like me comes from,” Tom said.

  Tremain nodded. “And why the Pandora Group exists.” He started toward the door. “If you only knew the kinds of things that have been created by supposedly civilized minds, you’d never leave that bed.”

  “Minds like Brandon Kavanagh’s,” Tom said, watching as the director stopped at the door.

  “Just like Brandon Kavanagh’s,” he agreed. “And he used to be one of the good guys, if you can imagine that.”

  “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you?” Tom asked.

  “I’m afraid of the threat he poses, yes,” Tremain said. “The sooner we have him in custody—”

  “Or dead,” Tom interjected.

  Tremain seemed to think about that. “Or dead,” he concurred. “The better off we’ll all be.”

  Tom closed his eyes again, feeling himself grow more tired by the second. “Give me a chance to rest up, and we can try to reach Tyler again. Something tells me there are all kinds of secrets locked away inside my head and…”

  “We just have to
figure a way to get them out,” Tremain finished, the last words Tom heard before falling fast asleep.

  Chapter 6

  TOM SAT AT the edge of his hospital bed, waiting for his escort.

  That was probably the thing that irked him most about being at the Pandora facility: he was never allowed to go anywhere unescorted, which made it seem like they didn’t trust him. And to be perfectly honest, after what he’d experienced the last few days, he didn’t really blame them.

  The disturbing image of a gaunt and sickly Tyler Garrett filled his mind. It was horrifying to know something like that was inside him. A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts, and he slipped on his sneakers before answering.

  Agent Catherine Mayer waited in the hallway. “You call for an escort?” she asked, smiling.

  He liked Mayer; she was the agent he saw most often, but best of all, she didn’t treat him like some kind of science project reject.

  And there was something about her, maybe the shape her mouth took when she smiled, that reminded him of his mother. No, not my mother. He had to keep reminding himself that the woman he’d known as Victoria Lovett was no relation to him at all.

  He felt a stab of pain and silently cursed himself as he checked the hospital room to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind. It wouldn’t do him any good to dwell on the past. He had to concentrate on the future.

  “Ready?” Mayer asked, and Tom nodded as he joined her in the hall.

  The two waved at the nurse behind the desk on their way to the elevators up to Tom’s living quarters.

  “Are you feeling better?” Mayer asked as the elevator doors closed.

  “Yeah, thanks,” he answered, smiling. It was amazing how such a small gesture could go so far toward making him feel human again.

  The elevator came to a stop, and Tom was ready to step out when the doors opened to admit Tremain and Agent Abernathy. Tom could see a hint of bruising around Abernathy’s jaw and eye, a painful reminder of their fight earlier in the week. The man gave him a look that could freeze blood.

  Both men were armed and wearing bulletproof vests. Tom knew that Abernathy was in charge of field operations, and his curiosity was immediately piqued.