Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  Six of his trees.

  We watched, horrified, as Li knelt in front of the tree and bowed several times, head touching down to the dirty concrete, a small patch swept free of the carpet of dead flies and maggot husks, as he made silent prayers to his god of nightmares.

  It was obvious what he had done; my colleague and I exchanged a single glance by way of sentencing, to make sure we were both seeing the same thing. I readied the gun I had brought, and Tzu nodded. I walked up behind him to get close enough. I’d never fired a gun before. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t confront him; I shot him in the back of the head before he could turn around.

  I would have thought I would have felt something immediately, from killing someone like that. Someone I knew. Someone I had shared meals with. But the hell of that time was that it gathered up all that horror and saved it for later, slowly releasing it, revisiting choices and actions that I wish I could have done differently. But at the time . . .

  And then what to do about hundreds of people strung up to those metal girder trees? There was nowhere for them to go, no one to take them and care for them. We could have left them, but that would have felt wrong. It all felt wrong though. How do you deal with something like that?

  I stepped forwards and crunched a hundred dead, dried flies. The screaming started as that One Who Sees began fighting some dreamed demon as it attacked his face.

  “You may leave if you wish,” I told Tzu. He shook his head.

  “How good a shot are you?” he asked me. I showed him my gun, chamber open to show four rounds, all I had.

  “I didn’t hoard ammo; I just found this on someone we picked up last week,” I explained.

  We tried to consider what to do without looking up at the trees. So many people. Their voices are still in my mind; a lot of it was indistinct screaming or moaning, but there were some words. Ones Who See didn’t really make any sense, but that didn’t stop my brain from trying to hear them. I wish I could have tuned them out, but that part of me was gone.

  Without another word, Tzu walked over to the generator and hefted one of the gas tanks towards the base of the nearest tree. He could barely manage it though, and I went to help him without really considering what we were doing.

  We put gas tanks, big metal canisters, up against all of the trees.

  Tzu slipped in blood once, and his vomit on the floor wasn’t even a notable addition to the myriad of disgust on the ground of that place. Everything the human body can expel was on the ground there, layered with dead flies and the crawling things that eat them.

  Li had successfully called the god of nightmares, for we were inside him.

  We hid behind a wall at a distance we hoped was safe, and I took aim. I missed the first two shots, which sounded hollow and sad amidst the screaming and moaning and buzzing.

  The third shot hit the tank in the middle of the factory and the sparks were enough to set it ablaze in a small explosion.

  Tzu and I hurried away, hoping the first tank would be enough to set the others off.

  They popped with each ignition, coming more frequently as we fled, until we were safely away and the final chorus of explosions came all at once in a crackling boom. There was a clear line of sight to the factory below, but I didn’t look. I only saw it reflected in Tzu’s face as he watched the walls fall away, watch the trees burning, their fruit writhing in their final moments as the flames consumed them. Even that shadow of what we had done was enough to almost push me over the edge. The flickering glow glinting off his cheeks, the way his pupils shrunk to pinpoints.

  Tzu ended his life that night.

  He was the first in my cart on the morning’s pickup round.

  Live Vegetables For Sale. Next Right.

  —Banner hanging on overpass, the I-5, Oregon, United States

  The last day I showed up for work, one of the lieutenants shot up the start-of-shift briefing. He got six headshots in before I even got one, but it was all I needed. I went straight home and locked myself in my apartment, then pushed the couch up against the door.

  Other cops kept going to work. I wasn’t one of those cops.

  As things ground to a halt, I stayed safe in my second-floor apartment. It was a mixed bag of garbage-y emotions doing savage battle with instincts I’d trained up to be in law enforcement; when I heard screaming the first time it just about damn near made me check out. Why would I go and help if someone who was just like me, who I’d come up with, could turn their gun on their friends? Could end the lives of good men and women who were only there to help?

  If I had been sitting one row closer to him. If I’d’ve seen him reach for his gun instead of seen him pull the trigger. If I wasn’t in this stupor, if I could have comprehended it sooner, if my reflexes weren’t dulled to shit. Garbage-y ifs, garbage-y emotions, garbage I was suffocating under as I heard screams from outside.

  They stopped.

  Others came on and off, different people, running from different things, real or imagined.

  I tried to shut it all out. When it came time to do my job, I failed. I am not one of the success stories. I am not a hero. I did not do the right thing.

  But here I am all the same.

  Now, do you know what a slack line is? It’s like a tightrope, but with tons of slack, and it’s usually set up just about a foot or two off the ground. People set them up in parks, between trees, and test their balance and reflexes by walking a slack line. If they fall it’s no big deal, because the ground is right there. A lot of people say that living through the insomnia was like walking on a tightrope, where one wrong step, one slight breeze, one aching muscle tremoring at the wrong time could send them hurtling to their death. Way I see it, for me it was more like a slack line. The ground was right there. It would be so easy to just step off. One side or the other, just a single step and I’m off the rope. Being on it was me shutting myself away from it all. Stepping off one way or the other, well, I could go do my job, or I could put my service weapon to use one last time.

  I was content to just wait it out in my apartment, and when screaming happened, or gunshots, I just put my good headphones over my ears and played some loud music. That slack line got pretty comfortable.

  Until it wasn’t. I could feel myself slipping away. What if it stopped? What if suddenly everything was back to normal, and everyone was talking about what they did during the crisis? It’s not that I didn’t want to help, it’s just . . . well fuck, I don’t have to justify myself to you. I know there’s shit like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and all sorts of other fuckery I was contending with. Just, when it’s happening, it doesn’t feel logical. It feels like failure.

  So I stopped being a cop. I lived on that slack line and tried to ignore how the rope was fraying. But then my neighbor came to me for help, and he managed to convince me to be something else, someone else. Someone more helpful than a shut-in.

  I don’t know how much you need to know about Anna to care about this story. Maybe it’s not her you need to care about. I’m the one telling you shit, I’m the one who made it through, so maybe all that’s important is that she mattered to me. She was real nice. She brought me soup when I was sick a few times. She and Burt were my neighbors, and they were as kind as you find ‘em. Maybe in their 60s? Hard to tell. They acted young but I knew they were older. They had me over for Thanksgiving last year. If the whole world was people like Burt and Anna, there’d be no need for police.

  It had been quiet for a while. No screaming at least. In the distance sometimes I could hear gunshots, but I didn’t have to drown them out with music. I was perched on my slack line, teetering, trying to hold it together in the solitude of my apartment, when Burt knocked on my door.

  I think I had one foot off the slack line then; one foot on the ground to test it.

  “Jim, I need your help,” said Burt, after I had slid the couch away from the door enough to see him. When he saw my face he started back. Or maybe it was the smell.

  “Burt,
I, uh,” I didn’t know what to say. I think Burt was on a slack line too; he had one foot on and one foot off, and when he surged forward into my apartment, he stepped off it and hit the ground running.

  “Jim, there’s still running water. Come on over here now,” he said, taking my wrist and leading me towards the bathroom. He’d been in there before, to fix my sink. He turned the tap on and got the shower running.

  “You get in there this instant,” he commanded. “It’ll be cold, but I know you can do it.”

  I stripped and got in. It was cold as fuck.

  “Scrub,” he said from the other side of the shower curtain.

  I could go on about how he made me shave, how he fixed me some proper food, how he held my hand when I told him what had happened at the station. How we cried when he told me that Anna was missing. Bottom line is, I joined him in stepping fully off the slack line. When he handed me a backpack and a bottle of pills, that’s when I hit the ground running. First forty-eight hours is critical. I would find her, and I would bring her home. That was the ground beneath my feet, and that was the path that I found to get through it.

  I’ll skip to the interesting bits. Tracing her movement wasn’t too difficult. I managed to pinpoint her disappearance to somewhere between her sister’s on Moberly Street to the diner where she worked on Pike. I started walking from the diner to her sister’s and back, taking different routes each time, to see if I could see anything. But then, I was thinking like me; I was adding a few extra blocks to the trip because I was staying out of the edge of the industrial zone that the walk skirted. If I thought like Anna, I would shave time off and walk amidst the warehouses, past the metal factory and old machine shop. So I did.

  I took a pill. A stim. Burt had given them to me to help, and I gotta say I don’t know that they helped more than they hindered; I was pretty keyed up when I heard the gunshots. I pressed myself flat against the warehouse for cover, instinct kicking in against the chemicals coursing through me. Find Anna, find Anna, was all I thought.

  The gunshots got closer, and I slid against the wall until I found a set of doors.

  Most of us had never smelled death up until the sleep apocalypse. It was hidden from us, the world sanitized of any hint of that indignity. And now none of us are able to pretend we don’t know. I had smelled it once, at a crime scene, an old murder that had gone a few days before being called a crime scene at all. I should have known what the smell was, but the stims, and maybe the psychological junk too, was keeping me from realizing what it was as I slipped inside the huge, impersonal metal doors of that industrial building.

  I grabbed the flashlight from my bag. I swept it around. I was in a receiving bay, bare concrete walls on bare concrete floor. There were large industrial shelves, the kind meant to hold crates of boxes of heavy things, and at the base of one of them, I found the source of the mysterious smell.

  A body.

  Bloated and swollen, quite a few days old, no doubt. There was dried blood all around it.

  It. It’s much easier to talk about dead bodies by calling them it. But this it was a her. At some point she had been a her. Just exactly when a body goes from being a her to being an it I don’t know, but this body had gone over that line quite some time before I found it. I walked closer, tentative steps, towards a strange thing I’ve never seen before, even though my stomach was churning in earnest.

  I gagged at being so close to the smell. And again when I saw the maggots.

  Death and decomposition would become constant companions to us all in the final days, but in that early time this was my first exposure to it in the wild, as a civy, without backup or accountability or procedure. I think everyone remembers their first. For some it was fast and shocking, like having someone jump from a building and land right next to where you were walking, or seeing a body cart go by as they tried to keep the dead out of the city. But for me, there in that receiving bay, it was slow, and I could approach on my own terms. I did. The cop inside me was still there, and I started taking in information. Find Anna, kept thinking the keyed-up part of my mind, but then another part was trying to slow it down with, This could mean something.

  And there was foul play afoot: bloody footprints around it told me someone had been there when the blood was still fresh. I shone my flashlight beam around and scanned the scene. The crime scene. The footprints were big; work boots, perhaps, more than likely from a man. I went into Investigation Mode. I tried to slow down but I was getting jittery from the stim.

  Bloody handprints smeared on the wall next to the shelves. A high-heeled shoe several feet off from the body. This had been a violent, struggling death. And someone else had walked away from it.

  I shone my beam around the concrete industrial bay. I was in a large enclave of a receiving bay; the shelves that bordered the bay stopped by a door into an office. There was an exit sign above it, though it wasn’t lit—another way out, should I need it. At the edge of the shelves by the door was another body. I went to it.

  This body was newer. Her skin was pale but not rotting. Her cheeks were bruised. One of her eyes was hanging out of the socket by the optic nerve. Her hands were bound behind her back and tied to the shelving, so she was in a slumped-over sitting position. Her insides sat puddled on the ground in front of her.

  I reeled away and threw up.

  I hurried to leave. Anna couldn’t be here. She was somewhere else. I had to find her. I heard a shuffling scrape, and then a woman’s laugh. I pressed myself up against a wall, heart hammering, stomach writhing, mouth stinging with bile.

  Just as I reached the metal doors though, another sound from outside made me stop. Not a gunshot, but the woman’s laugh again. Then a gruff man’s voice, right from the doorway. I couldn’t hear them well enough to get the words, but I didn’t need to. My gut knew what was happening, and knew that I had two options before me. I could retreat back into the bay and exit through the office, or I could investigate what was likely a murder in progress.

  There was no way the newcomers didn’t smell the smell. And if there were two bodies already, from different times, there would be more, and more and more until whoever was responsible was stopped. This was someone’s killing room.

  I turned my flashlight off and slunk along the wall until I found the office doorway. I slipped inside it to keep myself hidden, watching the way I had come in, where I could hear them coming in. I pocketed my flashlight and knelt on the ground, peeking through the door which I left slightly open; there were no windows to see through, and the darkness behind me would keep me hidden. Or so I hoped; I’d never been that close to danger before, never watched as a monster went on its hunt, so close to where I watched.

  A voice came inside and I could make out the words.

  “Double patty, extra cheese, no pickles, comin’ up!” said the woman. The man was silent. He led her into the bay and shut the door behind him.

  “Chocolate milkshake, comin’ up!” said the woman cheerfully.

  I reached down my leg and pulled out my gun. I’d never fired it outside of a firing range before, except that once, in the briefing room. I suspected this would be the time for it.

  The man and the woman came fully into the loading bay where the other bodies were. He held an LED lantern up in front of him as he went, and he had her by the arm, leading her. She walked along slowly, taking small steps, but she looked relaxed. He let her go and put down the lantern. He stood still, she was in constant motion.

  She sort of shuffled side to side, and then started doing things with her hands, miming some vivid dream action. I recognized her then—Anna. Found Anna, found Anna. How long had she been with this . . . this thing, this monster? I didn’t know what kind of monster he was yet, but I could feel him, his shadowy tentacles writhing in the dark.

  Oh god, how much of those drugs had I taken? But the evidence was there—even if maybe I was freaking out a little, it doesn’t change that there were bodies there. I know, because I went back to be
sure.

  “No ketchup, got it, Ralph?” said Anna cheerily. She continued on acting out what I gathered was pouring coffee, taking a side step to another spot behind the diner counter she knew so well in her mind’s eye.

  “Ralph, no ketchup, you got it?” she said in a singsong tone, louder.

  The man stood still, so still, and just watched. He reached to his side and drew a long hunting knife.

  Anna moved in her dream, unseeing, unhearing. My gun had already been raised; as soon as I’d seen the knife I was ready. Yet he didn’t advance; he watched her move, just staring. Do I shoot? Do I wait until he lunges? Even though everything I had seen was telling me, This was the guy, this was a monster, I was still held back by my training. He was just standing there with a knife. I didn’t know he put those other bodies there.

  Yes I did.

  He took a step towards her.

  I shot him in the head.

  Anna didn’t flinch, didn’t react in the slightest, as her would-be killer dropped dead to the ground next to her. My pulse raced. Adrenaline coursed into my blood even after I’d done the deed; who knows how it was reacting with the drug I took earlier. I went to her.

  “Hey Ralph, throw on those onion rings, too, or they’ll go to waste. Adam likes onion rings, right?” she said. Her eyes scanned along in front of her and she reached out, manipulating an imaginary coffee maker into brewing another pot.

  “Anna?” I asked, to no response. “Anna?” I tried again, but she didn’t seem to be aware that I existed, or where she was, or what had just happened to her.

  “Adam, how are the pugs doing?” she asked with a dopey smile. She waited, nodding as she listened to the dreamed response, then laughed. “He’ll get over it.” Her eyes were open. She moved perhaps a little slower than normal, but she was competent in her spatial maneuvering.