Sleep Over
Page 26
But as one of us voiced thoughts of suicide, another was there to reassure, to show the face of love. Even in our state, so far gone that we were no longer ourselves, we could snap out of it for long enough to quell that terrible path.
Other groups killed themselves.
We weren’t other groups.
We were in the living room. Taikla and Jim and I were on the couch, Zoey and Alec were on the floor, on a big throw pillow in front of the long-dark television. I think Taik was the one on watch, but I’m not sure.
We had tea-light candles lit, safely in big holders so they could burn down harmlessly.
To avoid staring, we were playing flashlight tag. I had a laser pointer, and the others had LED flashlights from camping, except for Taikla, who had the other laser pointer, a green one that was so bright it almost hurt to look at the dot it made.
The red dot on my laser pointer was holding its own in the corner of the room to the left of the TV. Taikla’s green laser was “it,” and she was after one of the LED beams, keeping to the roof and walls in the rules we had come to make. No going on posters. No going on bookshelves. Bare walls and ceiling only.
I was watching the green laser dot corner one of those LED spots when I fell asleep.
No warning, no nothing, I just, that was it.
I fell asleep.
I woke up to Jim shaking my shoulder gently.
Taikla, Zoey, Alec, and Jim stood above me. All smiling.
“Hey bud,” said Jim, offering me a hand to help me up. “We did it.”
“Did, did I just sleep?” I said. My head felt like it had been freed of a great fog, the terrible weight of ineptitude and deplorable mental degradation finally lifted, and I knew that it was over. “You slept, too? We’re all, we all—” I stammered. Jim hugged me. And then we were all hugging, one big group hug, at the end of it.
It was a long road ahead of us, but breaking free of it, that feeling of coming out the other side of that terrible, terrible time, was such a high. We went up on the roof together to have a look, and that first sunrise was the most glorious thing any of us had ever seen.
We all cried then, but it wasn’t a wall. It was a door.
An afterword from the editor
This is, and will be for a long time, the greatest shared tragedy in human history. No other event has touched the lives of every person on earth, and no disaster has come as close to wiping mankind out of existence as the Insomnia Plague.
I’ve spent most of the last four years compiling these stories. Not all I collected made it to this book, and there are others which I wish I could have found but are irksomely absent. We’ve heard whispers of things which no one will talk about. Certainly many more events will come to light; the optimist in me thinks there are more tales of heroism than there are of barbarism, but who can say. Not I; my mental health has taken too great a toll in collecting these stories, and I shall have to leave further archival work to others with a greater fortitude for this gruesome task.
But enough about my weak tolerance for dealing with history. After all, this is not a collection of facts. It was not myself for which I undertook this task.
These tales serve not as a reminder to us—for we will never be able to forget that time, as much as we’d like to. No, not for us who survived. It is for the future generations that this history is written. It seems just absurd enough to slip into myth and legend, to become a story instead of a warning. And we must not let that happen.
So it is for Generations One and Two, and their children and all the children after that, that we must be very clear about this.
We do not yet know what caused it.
We do not yet know if it could happen again.
We were brought so near our extinction completely without warning.
Never forget, and never let the future forget. And for god’s sake, don’t ever cut the funding into sleep research until we know which beast it was who brought us to the edge of oblivion. Better still, until we know which beast it was who pulled us back from the brink. Because I’m fairly certain it wasn’t any of us here.
Sleep, and sleep well.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
What a wonderful support I’ve found in my agent, Beth Campbell, over at Bookends. Beth, your guidance and help throughout this process has been invaluable, and I will forever be grateful to you for adding me to your roster, for making Sleep Over a better novel, and for finding a home for it.
A huge thank you to Cory Allyn, my editor at Skyhorse. Cory, the transformation that Sleep Over went through between when it got to you and when it went to print has been enormous, and I know your influence has made it a better novel.
Thanks to the innumerable people who’ve talked to me about sleep, and the myriad of specialty topics I needed to know about to get it right. I’ve informally interviewed so many people for this project; your collective wisdom, experience, and anecdotes helped me form what I hope is a not-too-inaccurate tale of the insomnia apocalypse.
Love to Nerd HQ and the La Fontana crew. What a wonderful place, full of wonderful people. Gian & Co., you helped more than you’ll ever know.
When I was struggling to find the right name for this manuscript and playing around with different titles, I have to thank Matthew Sun for having the insight to let me know I’d already found it. The magic may have been inside me all along, but sometimes it takes a good friend to point out the obvious. Thanks Matt.
I have so many good friends who have helped me hone my craft in general, and this novel in particular. Chats we’ve had about sleep, insomnia, how the world works, and speculative science-fiction digressions have all helped make this book happen. And before Sleep Over, your thoughts on my previous works helped lay the foundation upon which I slowly built a road that let me finally achieve my goal. Thanks for indulging an author, and for being my friend.
And lastly, to Aaron. Our paths may have diverged, but having you walk beside me as I went on this journey was tremendously wonderful. Thank you for all your help along the way.
H. G. Bells’s blood type is Maple Syrup, swimming with the microcosm of bits and pieces of projects-on-the-go. She’s spent most of her life writing in Vancouver, Canada, but is feeling the call of the wild more and more. She’s maxed out her GOLS sheet in “Hot Bath Enjoyment,” “Games, subsection: All Sorts,” “Tinkering With Entertainment Systems,” and “Film Projection.” Find her at hgbells.com.