Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  “Wendy, it’s all right,” said the man. Wendy lowered the gun.

  “But we haven’t any more seats,” she said sternly, in the same Scottish drawl. I looked down the length of the bus. It was one of those long-haul ones, with comfortable seats, and lights and air vents above them. Each one was occupied, faces staring at me with fearful eyes.

  “He’ll sit up here with me. He’s got to get home,” he said. I felt a hand on my shoulder, the elderly Scottish man, and he gave me a little push inside.

  “We’re away,” he said. “Wendy, take your seat please,” he said. They exchanged a brief look, silent council indecipherable to one not party to their ways. Wendy nodded, then sat down. The driver took his seat and pulled a lever to close the door.

  “Sorry, but the floor is all we have,” he said, looking up at me and gesturing for me to sit next to him. “You can use the steps, I don’t mind.”

  I’d like to say that I cried tears of joy, or that I thanked him, or that I did anything other than sit down quietly, but the exhaustion was too great to have done anything else. All I can do is tell you is that there was a husband and his wife named Wendy, from somewhere in the Scottish highlands, that drove a bus full of dozens of people out of the Frankfurt airport, putting themselves in great danger, and that they asked me for nothing in return.

  “Heads down!” shouted the driver as we got going. I heard gunshots. He sped us away and onto the Autobahn. From there it was pretty clear driving. Into Belgium was no problem, but when we hit the French border . . .

  I will hate to be cursing the French with my last breath; it’s too absurd. That rivalry was already absurd. But I suppose I have good reason; they were the only thing in the way of getting across the Channel.

  When it became obvious that we were in a parking lot and not in a lineup, I left. Then I did offer a nod of thanks to my driver. He nodded back, grimly, and stayed with the bus as I made my way away from the parking lot of the highway.

  I walked, skirting the French border, trying to find a way in.

  One of many absurdities in these last days: thinking I could walk home from the border of France.

  So you can see I tried. Oh god how I tried. But here I am, on the ass end of Belgium, staring out over the North Sea. I was planning on getting into France along the shore, and walking from there, but now, now I’ve spent every last reserve I had. Sometimes, the hallucinations make me think that I can see Bristol, just there, across the water. It’s beautiful water now. I haven’t seen a ship for days.

  A kestrel floated above me for a whole afternoon once, and we watched the sea together. I imagined we were old friends, and that he hadn’t a care in the world but for to visit me sometimes, and look out at the sea with me in silence. We looked together, watching the sun sparkle off of the gentle peaks, reveling in the warmth of the sun’s rays on those clear and gorgeous days.

  My sides hurt, and there was blood in my urine this morning. My head aches all the time, and sometimes it stabs with intense pain and it makes me nauseous. My body is shutting down, one system after another giving up on me. My armpits are swollen, and so is my neck; some malfunction of my lymph system perhaps.

  So here I am, the mess that I am. I’m in a little cottage on the cliffs by the water. I can use binoculars and see that the French border is now unguarded. But I am dying. I know it. I can walk to the edge of the cliff to look out at the water, and the other direction to the well at the edge of the field, but no further. Yesterday, I collapsed in the field on the way back and spilled my water. It took nearly the last of my strength to get a fresh bucket and haul it inside.

  And now I cannot stand.

  I crawled to the loo this morning.

  If I wanted, I could still crawl to the cliff.

  But I think I’ll rather here, in this bed, this stranger’s bed.

  I am afraid. And I am lonely. There is no one here. I will die sad and alone, in pain, ineffectually lying here in a place I shouldn’t be. Oh god, I am alone.

  No, no there’s my old friend now. My kestrel friend, floating so peacefully in the air just there. If I angle myself in the bed a little, I will be able to see him better.

  PART 5

  WAKING

  Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn’t the will to do what is right.

  —Graffiti on the Vladimir Central Prison, Vladimir, Russia

  You must understand that before all this, I was assisting in some research for my post-doc. I wasn’t the most qualified to be doing what I did, but my country called and I answered. Not at first. At first I thought that we could continue our research on the lab animals. But of all the creatures on the earth, only humans were unable to sleep. When my country called, I answered. I was co-opted into running highly experimental treatments and forced into violating the fundamental ethics of my profession, and my conscience.

  They brought in somnologists who directed us. And because no other animal was being affected by the plague of insomnia, they brought in people to experiment on. I was told they were prisoners who had volunteered. Some of the test subjects themselves verified this, and maybe that was true for them, but others fought until they were drugged or beat into cooperation. They installed ape cages, crates that wouldn’t even be fit to be called cells.

  A man whose name I never learned oversaw the guards without a word. He was not tall, and he was not muscular, but somehow he seemed like he would win any fight. He watched everything, all the time. If ever he needed rest, he sat in a chair and rubbed his feet for a few minutes. If ever anyone pled for better conditions, this man would use sign language at them. I didn’t speak ASL but I saw the sign enough times to translate the various parts of it: “Gorillas asked for this, too.”

  It was long, long into the nightmare, when we were brought a huge number of people. We had to put them three or four to a cage. We were told to, and I’m paraphrasing here, Throw ethics out the window, and try anything that could possibly be used to make people fall asleep.

  I and the other researchers protested. They shot one of the subjects.

  “They will be killed anyway. Use them. Make them sleep. Save them, save yourself, save the human race.”

  My country called, and I answered. Who better than I, at the forefront of research, new to the field, young and virulent, who better to find the cure and save the human race? We ran endless experiments but few tests. The only test we were told to care about was the ANA test: Asleep/Not Asleep. We had many of them hooked up to monitors to keep track of their brain function, but they may as well have been hooked up to a skipping record player for all it told us.

  They had to kill a few more subjects—I think it was four in the end, before they got all of us doing what they wanted. I tried to lead the pack and set an example, but the others were more set in their ways and couldn’t see that we were the only ones standing between the human race and certain extinction. As the shots destroyed the would-be test subjects, I found acceptance washing over me, and I embraced my role in what was to come. I urged the others to join me, and, though hesitantly at first, they did follow the example I set.

  I threw myself into the work. I made the choice to see the subjects as nonhumans. This has been documented before, but never in these circumstances. I knew that if I, or someone like me in some other lab somewhere, didn’t find the answer we were looking for, that humanity would perish. We were working to stave off the very real and very imminent threat of the extinction of the human race. And if all was at stake, anything became permissible. And if anything was permissible, then my subjects had to be nonhumans. I did terrible things to them, so they had to be nonhumans. The noises they made were just byproducts of some approximation of sentience, some cruel joke that the machines were playing on me to test my resolve. At some point they brought in a surgeon and all the subjects’ vocal chords were removed. It was much more humane for all involved, subject, guard, and researcher alike.

  They were biological machines
meant to simulate humans so completely that it was almost impossible to tell the difference. The only way I knew how to separate the machines from the humans was that humans weren’t confined to the cages. If they were in a cage, they were a machine to be experimented on. If they were not in a cage, they were a fellow human who I was trying to save.

  Their encryption keys had been corrupted, and I was trying endless strings of combinations to unlock the function I sought. ANA became a pop-up window in their eyes. Even when some of them shut their eyes, I had to do a secondary ANA test: Alive/Not Alive. I had many ANA1s test positive, only to fail the ANA2.

  Things became rather like some parody of science. Like a movie director who once saw a film that took place in a lab and was trying to approximate the look of the thing. Or like a prison director who wished he had been a scientist. Method was reprehensibly lacking. The most we could hope for was that everyone continued to update the test subjects’ charts and kept their own experiments to their own subjects. There were several botched experiments, where drugs were administered to the wrong subject. Sometimes the drugs interacted spectacularly.

  There were no proposals, no oversight. There was simply coming up with an idea and executing it. What a thing, to suddenly have the freedom and the opportunity to operate without limits.

  We did learn many other things during that time.

  It was several hours before I realized that one of my fellow researchers was not just resting on the floor near the break room. I requested help from one of the guards, and together we hefted him into the body bin. It was not long before it was emptied. They did a good job at keeping our lab conditions clean and maintained like that; bodies were removed promptly, fluids were cleaned immediately, and we were kept stocked in delicious food and beverages throughout. Whatever we needed to keep going, we were granted anything . . . to an extent. I will say that when one of the researchers began his “Comparative Taste Analysis” study it was quickly stopped and he was removed from the premises. For some reason that one was stopped, but nothing else we did warranted intervention. Some of the more radical approaches were even encouraged, which in turn promoted more outlandish and even reckless experiments.

  I was asked to continue on with administering a cocktail of drugs to a subject after another researcher collapsed on the floor of the lab. She was taken to the body bin. How many had that been? How long had it been since they’d brought any new people in to help, or to be subjects?

  There were so few guards left. The silent man was still there, still watching.

  I took a moment to walk the banks of cages, half of them empty, and in a lucid moment of awareness, grabbed another researcher by the arm.

  “Are we the only ones left?” I asked her. She looked up from her tablet with wide eyes.

  “Look at this, look at this bloodwork,” she said. I took the tablet from her and promptly dropped it. The screen shattered. Of course I couldn’t escape the effects of the insomnia; I’m sure I was very nearly dead by the end. I picked the shattered tablet up and read between the sunburst rays of cracks. It meant nothing to me but I nodded.

  “Come see,” she said. She led me to a cage where one of the machines lay, chest rising and falling rapidly, eyes shut. I looked at the monitor and it told me that it wasn’t sleep we were seeing.

  “It’s not,” I started, but then the delta waves dipped, rose, then dipped again.

  “Delta wave achieved,” she said.

  “My god, what is it? What did you use?” I asked frantically, grabbing the man’s chart to have a look. I had administered the last treatment. It was me. I let out a little cry of joy.

  The silent guard rushed over to join us, but his knees went out from under him and he stumbled and crumpled to the ground. I went to him. His eyes fluttered, and he seemed shocked. He adjusted himself into a more comfortable position and grasped my arm.

  “Hey, come over here,” I called to the other researcher. But she was on the ground too, laying where she had fallen in front of the cage with the sleeping man.

  I looked back to the guard. His eyes drooped, then shut completely, and he fell limp. I helped his head down to the ground carefully so it wouldn’t strike the hard floor. I felt his pulse, which was steady. I rose but felt my head swill with clouds, and a curtain fell abruptly across the stage of my awareness. I barely had time to drop to the ground and put my head on the cold, hard floor.

  When I awoke I knew it wasn’t anything we had done. All the guards had fallen asleep, all the subjects. Everyone had slept. It was over, and nothing I had done had mattered.

  It’s mine it’s mine, everything the light touches is mine! Here hangs King Kim, the last human being, and lord of the whole world!

  —Signboard accompanying a hanging body on a bridge, Bakan, Cambodia

  I had the town all to myself.

  “Late fees be damned!” I shouted as I went past the library.

  People had left to be with family out of town, or to try and be in the city, following where they thought there’d be power or military protection.

  Once, a truck full of raider hooligans came through and ransacked a bunch of houses.

  They spent a few hours in the two-lane bowling alley, having fun, while I hid in the attic of the church. A dangerous place to hide in retrospect, but then, how was I to know that churches were one of the most burned-down buildings of the whole shebang?

  They were the last people I ever saw. Or, you know. Then.

  Once they headed out, I had the place to myself.

  Not that I didn’t think there could be others. Fool me twice . . . I became a master of paranoia.

  When I started in with the mirrors, well, that project occupied me for days at a time. I was still in the attic, waiting to be sure that the hooligans had indeed left the town. I was watching a car door mirror, which gave me a view down the main drag. It was small, but I could see their taillights in it. Until I couldn’t. And that’s what got me looking around, seeing how else the mirrors on cars let me observe the surroundings.

  When I came down from the church attic, I spent hours gathering mirrors. Ripping them off of cars mostly, but also going into houses to pilfer the better, larger mirrors from walls. I got pretty good at stripping them out of bathrooms, even when they were affixed pretty well. They didn’t need to have perfect edges. Even the shards of broken mirrors from my failures saw use.

  I picked my Watch Spot. Okay, I know it’s weird, and there might already be names for things I invented, but I didn’t know that at the time, so I gave names to all these things. Like Watch Spot: a very specific place in the town that gave me access to the best view of my domain. All of my mirrors pointed at Watch Spot. I picked the top of the library. It was high up and it was central.

  The elementary school had been setting up to have a bake sale when things got hairy, and their supply room had been left unlocked. I found their pavilion tent, the kind to keep a street-side vendor and their goods safe from the sun or rain, and made it my own. I got sandbags from the hardware store, not that they were for sale—they were in the display window, propping up the store mascot, a Bigfoot. I leaned the Bigfoot up against the wall and took his supports to use on the tent.

  Watch Spot had big rubber bins all around it, for food, medical supplies, guns. I searched for the nicest chair I could find, which turned out to be a padded leather recliner from the mayor’s house. I put it at the front of the library in my staging area. I tied ropes all around it and hauled it up to Watch Spot. I scraped it up a bit in the process, but it was still comfortable as hell.

  Once safely in my throne, I had a view of my Mirror Lines.

  Mirror Lines worked to send views of the things I wanted to keep an eye on right to the Watch Spot. I had six. Mirrors angled just so to give me an eye on a specific spot, but also anything in between, in their path. If the mirrors could see it, so could I. The longest one I made consisted of more than thirty mirrors. Hours spent extending the line out and out, checking back
down the line between each adjustment to see that I’d got the angle exact.

  I also took to keeping several mirrors on me, in pockets, so I could look around corners if I needed to. And then they became like a second set of eyes. If you could extend your vision out as far as you could reach, wouldn’t you? The mirrors became my eyes. I started using them all the time, looking at the world only through mirrors. Wherever I walked, I would watch my step in two mirrors—a round one in my left hand to watch the ground, a slightly larger oval one in my right hand to watch the way ahead.

  Two Mirror Lines were fixed on my house. I kept supplies hidden there and wanted to know if someone was snooping around it. So I had a Mirror Line on the back yard as well as the street. The whole street. So I would have time if someone drove up it in time for . . . who knows. I got guns and hid them around town so I could be all cool and jump for cover and come rolling back to a crouch with a shotgun in hand.

  So the House Mirror Lines were viewable on the top two mirrors of my surveillance setup at Watch Spot. Sitting in that leather recliner I held my head just right to see all six Mirror Lines at once, each one like a monitor in an array of feeds from security cameras. The leftmost two were Mirror Lines that watched the east of town, one for the road in, and one for a side road that was mostly for logging but could also be a way in. The two on the right at Watch Spot were fixed on the west, one on the main road there, and one down the main drag, just in case I missed someone coming in. I made adjustments daily.

  Once it was just me, I realized it might not just be me. All the animals left in town. I opened up houses and took stock of who I had left. I led the way with my mirrors, one angled down, one angled up and ahead, peeking around corners and into rooms, hands swiveling this way and that to give me the best scan.

  All the dogs had been taken. People loved their dogs. I didn’t find a single one.