Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  So we managed to hit our strides and our lows at different times, helping each other through those first days, those days when we were just friends embarking upon a silly but epic undertaking.

  “How is it possible that we need sleep this badly?” said Jim, after another episode of Deadwood. “My god. I mean, I never really thought about it before.” His eyes sort of bugged out of his head as he stared at the wall, focusing on nothing, the edges of his world starting to get rough. “Like,” he continued, “everyone that has a shitty night’s sleep thinks, Oh man, sleep is super important. But I mean, this important? We’re dying here—” (it’s ok Jim, you didn’t know, you didn’t know) “—and after only four nights? I don’t really see us making it, guys.”

  We’d been living in a bubble. Games, movies, anonymous outings, and walks. That night, we’d walked past a pretty major car crash, and it had shaken us up, but we had no idea that it was one of the many that were happening all over the globe due to the sudden saturation of tired, inept drivers, making errors, killing themselves and anyone in their path when they made their mistake. We were Shaun in Shaun of the Dead, at the beginning of the film, when he’s just out to get milk or whatever, and oblivious to zombies that are all around him, mayhem on every street corner.

  We watched an X-Files episode called “Sleepless,” and cued up another. When the opening credit music hit, Taikla snatched the remote from my hand and paused it on the final shot of the opening credits sequence.

  “You guys,” she said with dire seriousness, “The X-Files slogan is ‘The Truth is Out There,’ right?” said Taikla. It plainly was, paused on the big screen for us all to see. We looked at her, puzzled at her non sequitur, but curious as to where it was going.

  “Guys, it doesn’t just mean that it’s out there, like it exists and they’ll find it, it means that the truth is out there, like farfetched. Out there.” We stared at Taikla for a moment.

  “Daaaayyyyuuuuummmmmm,” was Jim’s first reaction.

  “Sheeit,” said Alec.

  “Someone has literally been waiting, like, twenty years for us to get that,” said Zoey, laughing.

  “We sound like a bunch of frickin’ stoners,” I said.

  “Hold up,” said Taikla, looking at the window, where the blinds were drawn for a better TV-watching experience.

  “You hearing things already?” asked Jim.

  He’d made us a little timeline, of what symptoms we might expect at what points in our endeavor to stay awake. He’d put it on the fridge. We had our own colors of magnets to move around on it when we started experiencing things on the timeline; so far, the only magnets on it were each of the five colors, stuck to “way tired.” Auditory hallucinations were not blocked in until after five nights, and this was the morning of our third night without sleep, so it was early for Taik to be hearing things.

  By then though, sound was different. Their fridge was driving me mad. The hum of their lights got louder. When the bathroom fan was on it was like a jet engine next to my ear. Our filters were crumbling, and sound was one of the first things to get to us. We sort of lost selective hearing, so every sound started to be as loud as every other sound. During that last X-Files episode, I found myself squinting at the TV, as though it would help me focus on listening better, and hear it past the madness that the fridge was driving me to.

  But that’s not what was going on with Taikla. She threw open the blinds and opened the window, and then we heard it too.

  The riots around the world started at different times, but for us, it was that morning after the third night. We saw a few small pillars of smoke rising in the distance, cars on fire, probably.

  “Get the router plugged in,” said Jim urgently. We went into a sudden panic; we had been unplugged for a mere four days and suddenly we felt like we had been blinded.

  We waited impatiently for the green lights of the router to signal that we had a connection. We jumped on our devices; Jim, myself, Zoey, and Alec on laptops, Taikla on her and Jim’s iPad. We surfed for five minutes and it became apparent that the shit was going down. We spread out, covering different news sources, and called out headlines and important facts as we found them.

  Taikla delved into what could be causing it. Alec covered news overseas, Zoey and Jim covered Canada and the US, and I went local.

  “There’s still air traffic,” said Alec with disbelief. “No one in the world has slept for three nights, and they’re flying planes full of people,” he said, his hands shooting up to his head and grasping fistfuls of hair in frustration.

  “Anything on the Texas power grid has gone dark. Jesus, how long until we lose power?” asked Zoey.

  “I’m on it,” I said.

  We chopped away at our keyboards. Hours went by. We hunched lower and lower down, the weight of the disaster settling onto us with each headline, each YouTube video, each news segment.

  “Shit, we have to eat. And shower. And we need to do other stuff after; we need to prepare better,” said Taikla.

  “We’ll need more water,” said Zoey.

  “No Zo, it’ll rain, we’ll have water,” said Alec. “What we’ll need is food. And meds; it looks like people with ADD spectrum disorders are faring much better, because they have meds. Doug, you still know a guy?”

  “I do.”

  “Stop stop,” said Zoey. “I mean yes you’re right, but right now we need food and water and to shower. We need to keep it together. Pace ourselves. Taik, go have a shower. Jim, come help me make some food. Doug, Alec, drink a liter of water, and then wash out that big Rubbermaid bin that’s in the hall, and the lid, and fill it with water like your life depends on it. Add a cap full of bleach from under the sink.”

  We didn’t argue. It felt good to have direction. I wanted to keep going on the net, but she was right: we had to take care of ourselves.

  In the end, that’s what saved us. We had regular times for bathing, eating, drinking, resting. We kept to a pretty rigid schedule, because we’d had one drawn up before it all went down. Instead of the concerts and outings that I had planned, instead there were blocked-in scouting missions and supply runs.

  It was deadly serious, but it was something we’d spent time talking about before. Well, sort of. In the zombie apocalypse, which of these mid-rise apartments would have the most food to pilfer? Which of them would be the most dangerous to us if they were on fire? Which of them would make a good fallback position? What if alien invaders could hear but not see? What if gravity suddenly inverted? What if, what if. We had talked about a ton of apocalypse scenarios; now that we were living one, we knew what we were doing. Theoretically. Sort of.

  Well of course there were no zombies, but a lot of the things were the same.

  It’s not like we didn’t believe it at first; we all tried to go to sleep that evening, just to see. Until we did that, it wasn’t quite real. Even when we turned our phones back on and they called their moms and dads (cell service was still available then; thank god we caught it before it went out or they wouldn’t have been able to say—).

  I had no one to call. Everyone I loved and cared about was with me, or rather just below me, out on the sidewalk at the intersection to get cell reception.

  I leaned on the windowsill and watched my friends talk to their loved ones. Hands covering mouths. Tears being brushed away. Heads nodding as they listened to the advice of the ones who cared about them more than anything. Being watched over by the one who had only them.

  When they came back inside, it still didn’t seem quite plausible. It was preposterous, it was unbelievable. Of course, we only had to experience a single night to make it real.

  As we lay awake in Jim and Taikla’s apartment, trying to fall asleep, waiting the whole night to be sure, then we knew it was real. When we convened and had breakfast the next morning, we knew, and we carried on with our survival plan.

  Jim and I set out to the supermarket near the train station.

  Yeah right, us and the whole of Ea
st Vancouver. Jesus. It wasn’t like it was all ghetto to begin with, with like, those metal things that slide down over doors and windows. It was unprotected, and the whole front entrance was smashed. It was mostly quiet, but I’d guessed the bulk of the looting had already happened there. The lights were out. Aisles were strewn with things. Flashlight beams scanned all around. The occasional whispering could be heard. There were a few people inside, taking whatever they wanted.

  Jim looked at me and shrugged.

  “Gotta do what you gotta do,” he said.

  We went in and took what we could, filling the backpacks we’d brought.

  Back at the apartment, as soon as we got in, Zoey bared the way and handed me a towel.

  She pointed at the shower.

  “Yes’m,” I said cheekily, but glad to have a bit of quiet after the stress of being out in the world, looting. Looting? Jesus. It’s not like we were taking electronics; just whatever food we could find. I think that’s different. I hope it’s different.

  It was a full three days of that. Supply runs, gathering information, preparing.

  Alec set up containers on the roof of the apartment to catch rain water.

  Jim and Taik’s bedroom was converted: we tipped the bed up on its side and shoved it against the wall. The room became a walk-in closet, full of supplies and food.

  So yes, three days of coming to the realization that the world was in a heap of trouble.

  But then, then we needed a break. After a run one night, Jim and I came back to the apartment, exhausted, to the smell of roasting turkey.

  Taikla, Zoey, and Alec were sitting at a beautifully set table. There were candles. There was a pretty good spread; mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, roasted veggies, gravy, and a huge turkey.

  That’s when I cried.

  Everyone had their own highs and lows. This was strange; for me, it was both a high and a low at the same time. Everything felt awful; my ears were being assaulted by that damn fridge, and the hum of the lights, my eyes were scratchy and raw, and I’d had a headache for two days. But there were my best friends, sitting at this beautiful table, which was full of food.

  It was a different sort of wall to hit, and I hit it hard. By the time Taikla got me into a chair at the table, I was wracking with sobs. Taikla rubbed my back, a soothing palm traveling up and down and back and forth. My head was in my hands, my fingers pressed into my eyes as though they could stem the flow of tears. When I finally wiped them I saw a plate of steaming turkey before me, that Alec had put together for me, with a little pat of butter on the mashed potatoes just the way I like, and I lost it again.

  When I say everything was raw, this was part of it. All the layers of facade and defenses had been stripped away with each sleepless night. There was no filter for external things, smells, sounds, but also no filter for emotions. Once the dam burst, I was pretty wrecked.

  “Taik,” I managed to finally get out, “eat. Eat. I’ll be fine. This looks amazing,” I said. “You all look amazing,” I said, bringing a fresh wave of raw emotion bubbling out of me.

  We all broke that way, at some point or other.

  And we helped each other through it.

  So did the drugs.

  We did get meds like we had talked about. I still knew a guy. He was busier than ever. Cost us a pretty penny. But we got ‘em. Got ‘em before they were all gone.

  And once we knew what to look for, we started checking medicine cabinets for all the things that would keep us awake, that would energize us. We were careful with those though; we’d seen the video of what happens when someone takes too many uppers. Seen videos of people running through the streets with mortal wounds, as though they couldn’t feel them. We didn’t want to be them. We wanted to hole up in Jim and Taikla’s apartment and weather the storm.

  At first, we took uppers all together, so we could all be a sort of pretend version of our normal selves, and have the energy to do things together. But as the crisis wore on and on, we decided, in one of these lucid, drug-induced waking times, that we should ration them even more. Only one of us had to be competent, and could care for the other four. We drew up a schedule of who would take what meds when, and indeed, the system worked. There was always one of us firing on most cylinders, leading the group. And we rotated who it was. Slipping in and out of lucidity near the end was only made bearable by whoever was “on watch” and helping us through it. Feeding us. Guiding us around, sitting us in front of the TV. Rubbing our backs soothingly.

  When the energy got low, and I mean low, like zero motivation to do anything, we worried that it might be the precursor to becoming Starers. So we tried to do more things together. The supply runs had all but ceased, so we stayed in and stayed together.

  We watched more TV, seemingly endless TV. We burned through Deadwood like it was nothing. That Swedgin guy was just about the best character I’ve ever seen. Until we started watching Battlestar Galactica, and then by god I wished Admiral Adama was there with us to tell us what to do.

  That’s when Jim hit his wall. I guess Adama reminded him of his dad. He actually fell forwards off of the couch and onto the floor, arms curling around his head, and cried. We paused the show and weren’t sure what to do. We put our hands on his back and said soft things to comfort him. Taikla took him into the bedroom and held him until he calmed down. The Wall affected us each differently, but mostly it was a private thing to get through. Once we got through it, though, I knew I was somehow stronger after my turkey-dinner-cry, and Jim, well, Jim seemed at least more stoic, more solid somehow. His eyes had a sort of determination in them after he rejoined us on the couch.

  We switched back to The X-Files for a while after that. And then Sons of Anarchy. Days of television. Days and days. Weeks.

  Thank god for BC Hydro. They’re the real heroes in all of this; those people that went into work to make sure the power stayed on. How on earth did they manage it? I know hydro lasted way longer, because it didn’t really need human intervention, but those poor people who relied on coal: god damn, I don’t think we could have lasted without power. Lights off, power on. We watched TV, but the five of us were careful not to use what we felt was more than our fair share.

  But we had power, and last we did.

  And when it did finally go out, we’d stored enough candles and Coleman lanterns to last us.

  We played board games by candlelight. Although it wasn’t so much playing them as it was pretending to play them. We moved through a fog, our brains turning to mush in our heads as we tried merely to exist, make it to the time when it would be our turn to take a pill and feel awake, feel alive. Those times were hard as well though; when it was my turn, I nearly lost it when I became lucid enough to see my friends and how bad they looked.

  You probably have a ton of description of what people’s faces looked like near the end, when we hadn’t slept for weeks and weeks, and it felt like we were dying because we probably were. But all that cosmetic stuff aside, my friends’ faces were actually different. Not just the way they looked tired, but something deeper than that. They weren’t themselves any more. They were almost blank. Not Staring, thank god, but like, on the teetering verge of not being there anymore. I think that’s how a lot of people died; just sort of . . . left. I almost couldn’t take seeing them that way, but I tried my best to soldier through it and brought them each out of it for a few moments while the drugs coursed through me and kept me functional.

  I held Zoey’s face in my hands and looked her right square in the eyes.

  “Zoey, I know it’s hard but you have to fight it. You have the next turn to take a pill, and then you’ll be fine and dandy like me.”

  “Rug Doug, you look awful,” she said.

  “I know. But hey, I feel almost human. Hang in there.” She nodded.

  Taikla had seen the exchange and was waiting to catch my eye. She blinked into existence, her face animating into a dead-tired but lucid impishness.

  “Doug,” she said seriously.
She held up a box, some box of our meagre rations left in the supplies. It was a box of bread crumbs.

  “Doug,” she said again. “Mother. Fuckin’. Bread crumbs.”

  “Aw yis,” I said. She put the box down and started stacking gaming pieces on the table.

  I found Jim and Taikla in the living room, standing face to face with their foreheads pressed together, staring at each other.

  “Jim,” said Taikla.

  “Taik,” said Jim.

  “Jim.”

  “Taik.”

  Over and over again. Back and forth. Saying each other’s names. There was no end in sight. I sighed, left them to it, and made food. When it was made, I brought them some and had to interrupt them, pulling them apart and sitting them down on the couch.

  “Eat,” I said. It’s not like it had been months. We weren’t gaunt or anything. But their faces were starting to show it, though how much of it was hunger and how much was exhaustion and a deep-rooted terror, I’ll never know.

  Our walk-in closet of food and supplies was running low, but by then we were nearly dead anyway. We were still trying to stop becoming Starers (though we didn’t know what caused that symptom of the plague to manifest, we stuck to our theory that being too inactive could be bad).

  But always, we were with each other. We shared meals, what little meals we could cobble together as things ran low and we were just glad we still had Taik’s spices to help season whatever meagre grub we could rustle up. At some point or other, some of us, and I won’t say who because it could have been any of us, and was all of us even if we didn’t say it out loud, wanted to end it.

  Society was gone. Everything had fallen apart. Fire had taken out part of the east side. Our food stores were nearly depleted, and we had barely enough energy to walk, and no cognitive ability left with which to function as anything other than mindless robots, going through the motions of the schedule we had set out at the beginning, set on repeat when we got to another end of the eleven-day cycle. Whenever we had a pill in our system to pep us up, it was awful to see what was happening. All it would have taken was one of us to not give the next pill to the next person on watch, and we would have sat there and rotted.