Sleeper

by MacKenzie Cadenhead

  Whoosh.

  The lights are on in Meat’s room. He’s fallen asleep at his desk. I rub the sleep out of his eyes and push back on his rolling chair. I throw the door to his bedroom open and run across the hall.

  “Hey, door’s closed for a reason,” Grady says as I—Meat—push our way into his room.

  “Secure Tessa,” I order in a register at least two octaves below my own.

  “Sarah?” Grady asks as he looks from Meat to my body lying motionless beside Tessa on his bed. He’s white as sugar. “Of course, I-I’ll protect her,” he stutters.

  I shake Meat’s head. “No, I mean secure her literally. Tie her up.”

  He stares at me.

  “Grady, can you do that?” I demand. “Answer me.”

  “Yes. Yes, I can do that.”

  “Good. Now hit me—Meat—and tie him up too.”

  “What?” He looks at me in horror.

  “It’s the only way for me to exit his body,” I say, “and you can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to punch your brother.”

  “Well, yeah, but…Sarah, wait. There’s something else.”

  “What?” I snap. I have to get back to the station.

  “After you left, I was thinking.”

  “No time for thinking, Grady. Hit me!”

  He ignores me but speeds up. “Just because you and Wes are different in the same way doesn’t mean you’re alike. The Dexid might have opened you up to your shared abilities, but it doesn’t dictate what you do with them.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Just because you’re both high doesn’t mean you’re on the same trip.”

  “Too many metaphors,” I warn. “I need battle tactics.”

  “Wes is an addict,” he blurts. “Give him an overdose.”

  Pop.

  Grady’s words are lost in the space between Meat’s body and his dream. I am lying on the ground beside the dreamer, but I don’t remember Grady hitting me. Then I realize he hasn’t.

  Wes is inside Meat now. He jumped in and booted me out, just like I did to him the night we haunted Gigi.

  I watch a possessed, naked Meat run around the nightmare classroom, knocking over desks, steamrolling through soldiers, and barreling into students. I cringe at what damage the six foot two linebacker is doing in the waking world, when he suddenly stops and collapses to the ground. Wes falls out, and I smile.

  Grady totally just nailed his brother.

  The half dozen Burners I released from the other dreams pour in through the doorway, and there’s no time to waste. I am on my feet and running. I concentrate, blur my eyes, search through the fog, and notice an area ahead with a slight glow to it. It has to be the dream’s exit. Pretty soon, Wes is beside me. He’s no fool. He might not know how I’ve figured it out, but he knows where I’m headed. I throw open the door to a janitor’s closet, and we exit the dream.

  We’re back in the dirty train car, and the Burners are not far behind. Wes takes off down the aisle, glancing in every dream door that he passes. He’s about four doors down when something catches his eye, and he stops. He looks back at me and smiles. It’s a playful, dangerous grin that chills me to my soul. Please, God, don’t be Tessa.

  He jumps into the dream.

  I follow.

  Unlike Meat’s fluorescent dream, this one is midnight blue, dark, and shadowy. It takes me a minute to adjust my eyes, blinking a surreal landscape into focus. It’s the clinic, my clinic, the place where this all began. I follow dim lights, blinking on and off in a chaotic rhythm, down a corridor of patient and observation rooms. Zombified people groan in their beds while faceless techs listlessly go about their mindless tasks: taking vitals, reading printouts, entering data. Over and over again.

  A howl echoes down the hallway, and I keep moving, aware that the Burners are close behind. I search every room I pass, wondering whose dream I’m in and where I will find Wes, when a catcall whistle guides my search. I follow the sound to an observation room, where I see Wes standing just a few feet away from the dreamer: Josh Mowrey.

  “The Burners will be here any second,” he says. “But if we set up Josh like a bowling pin and slip out of the way as they strike, he’ll get what’s coming to him, and we can get out.” He smiles blithely, and my hands ball into fists. “So are you with me?” he asks. “Or will you be noble and go down for this perverted jackass?”

  It’s the perfect dilemma. I can save myself by being the utter hypocrite Wes says I am—that he wants me to be—or be ejected from the dream realm and wake up in Burner-induced paralysis with no way to help Tessa.

  “Had it not been for Gigi, this predator would’ve done way worse to you,” he slyly reminds me. “You know how good payback feels. And let’s be honest. The Pollyanna look just isn’t you.” The taunting snark suddenly disappears, and quietly, thoughtfully, he adds, “Make the honest choice, Sarah. Even if it’s not the right one.”

  I glance at the door, which rattles from the weight of heavy, advancing footsteps. That way will lead me into the arms of the Burners, with no hope of protecting Tessa or bringing Wes down. But even if I refuse to hurt Josh, Wes will jump into his body or throw him to the Burners and make his escape.

  I look at Josh. He’s done for, no matter what. And the sick truth is, I really don’t care. Wes is right. If I’m completely honest, I feel a little pleasure in knowing he’ll finally be punished for his sins.

  But this decision isn’t about Josh. It’s about me. I nod my head as I accept the fact that the bad choices and dark deeds were not all Wes’s doing. They were mine too. And it’s high time I stop them from happening again.

  “Fine,” I say, heading for Josh as the Burners burst into the room. Wes’s eyes twinkle as he relishes my fall. The only thing better than confronting me with my true nature is having manipulated me into doing so myself. But as Grady said, there are some things Wes doesn’t know. The twinkle disappears as the Burners rush toward us. I pivot before I reach Josh and throw my body into Wes’s.

  I relax my eyes

  my breath

  my mind

  and break free of the dream

  break free of the box

  because I know there isn’t any box at all.

  We fall backward, through the floor, and into the fog, where there are no walls and no rules.

  My stomach drops like on the first dip of a roller coaster. For a moment, we are flying through the void, and I savor it. There’s a freedom to this release. I might have fallen all night in this nothingness had I been alone. But I’m not. As Wes digs his teeth into my shoulder, I lose my focus, and we slam into the ground.

  We’re back on the train, inside the box Wes has constructed. Immediately, he’s on me, and we grapple on the floor. Wes grabs my arm and twists it behind my back. I yell as I thrust the pinkie finger of my free hand deep into his ear canal. He howls in pain. His fingers wrap around chunks of hair on either side of my head, and I scream as he lifts me from my roots. I’m kicking, biting at air, but when he smashes my skull down hard against the train floor, the fight stops. My peripheral vision completely blacks out, and all I can see is his body drag itself away from me. Slow at first, he picks up speed as he runs down the long, narrow aisle of my tunnel vision and into the next car of the train.

  There’s a low rumble. The Burners have picked up our scent. I stumble to my feet and shake my head to excise the ringing that goes from ear to ear. My vision fights its way back as I move awkwardly down the aisle, steadying myself with a tight grip as I move from seat to seat until I can limp after Wes on my own. Groaning, grunting, and growling chokes the air behind me, but I don’t look back.

  Ahead of me, I see a bright glowing orb beside a set of sliding dream doors. Try as he might, Wes can’t shake me. I will always find him. He’s disappeared into a dream, but before long, I’m there too. Exhaust
ed and bruised but determined, I tumble, head first, into…

  Leaves.

  Brittle.

  Crunching.

  Thick.

  They engulf me. They’re sticking to my clothes, tangled in my hair. I raise myself on elbows, and as I brush them away, I realize where I am. The nature preserve behind the Horsemen’s football field. Where I told Tessa to go before she fell asleep.

  I’m in her dream.

  I pull myself to my feet and begin searching for her, knowing that somewhere in this dream, Wes is too.

  I stumble over rocks and roots and pebbly paths. I become clumsy as my desperation deepens, and I fall, scraping my hands and knees. I know what’s coming, and I’m terrified.

  Snarls and moans mingle with the whistling windy air. The Burners are closing in, and I’ve no way of knowing how close they are or how many have come. But it doesn’t matter, so long as I get to Tessa and Wes first.

  Then…

  The trees thin as they open onto a clearing.

  Tessa sits quietly at its center.

  Wes stands beside her.

  I start to speak, but it’s pointless.

  He jumps

  into

  her

  body.

  I race over to Tessa and watch, helpless, as she falls backward to the ground. Her eyes glaze over as her body begins to twitch, then shudder, then jerk. She looks like she’s having one hell of an epileptic fit, but she doesn’t get up. She remains on her back, writhing but not moving more than a foot in any direction.

  I exhale relief. Tessa is safe. Grady tied her up, just like I asked him to. Wes can’t do anything to her body; he can’t even knock himself out to return to the dreams. He’s trapped.

  I take a moment to breathe. To steel myself against the awful decision I’ve made. The only choice I have left.

  I sit beside my best friend’s quivering body until, finally, she stills. Can Wes guess what’s coming? Is he making a plan? Or has he accepted his fate?

  The grunts and growls grow louder as the Burners circle the clearing. I cannot tell how many there are. Drawn by the massive amount of Dexid in Wes’s system, they look infinite. They surround us.

  As they come toward me in an enormous heaving mass, I lean down beside Tessa and whisper in her ear.

  “I’m so sorry, Wes,” I say. “I wish it didn’t have to end like this.”

  Then I jump into Tessa’s body and push Wes out.

  My eyes open on a flushed face. Grady holds a heavy book above my head. “Hit me,” I command. “Now.”

  His Adam’s apple bulges as he swallows his fear and brings the encyclopedia down.

  An agonized scream fills my ears as I return to my best friend’s nightmare, and it takes me a moment to realize that the cry is not my own. I look over to see Wes tangled up in a thicket of Burners, struggling as they crush him tighter and tighter.

  Overdose, I think.

  His wild eyes meet mine for just a second. Then I too am enveloped in a Burner’s cold embrace, and we both dissolve into the dark nothingness of the hungry, paralyzing beasts.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Whoosh.

  The automatic doors open to the overpowering perfume of antiseptic cleaner. There’s a secondary smell I hadn’t been able to place in those first few weeks, but now, after a month and a half of daily visits, I recognize the odor lurking behind every Clorox-wiped surface for what it is: sick. I suppose that’s what you get in a hospital. Whether the patients recover or relapse, one way or another, they move on. But the imprint of illness they leave behind never disappears, no matter how hard the janitors scrub.

  I wave to Hugo, the weekday security guard who has my visitor’s badge waiting. “Think today could be the day, Miss Reyes,” he says as he hands me the adhesive nametag.

  “Fingers crossed,” I chirp, and Hugo gives me a thumbs-up. He started making this statement after my sixth consecutive visit, and now it’s become a thing. I doubt either one of us considers the meaning of the words anymore. It’s more about ritual than hope. But the ritual is just as important to me now. Routine is what keeps me going.

  I take my badge and proceed on my daily route: main hallway, first left, second right, elevators up to the fifth floor.

  The doors open on a nurse’s station. A nurse named Donna looks up sternly from her charts, but her face softens into a forlorn friendliness when she sees it’s me. She waves me through. I give her a polite smile, turn left, and follow a long hallway to room 529.

  Donna’s type of pity is something I’ve become very familiar with in the past few months. First, when Gigi threw me out of the cool clique at school. Next, in the aftermath of Jamie’s accident. Then, on the faces of the FDA agents who interviewed me about the horrible side effects of the drug Dexidnipam. And now, as the devoted girlfriend of the boy in the coma in room 529.

  The coma.

  When I “woke up” from my Burner-induced paralysis after Wes and I were expelled from Tessa’s dream, I was in the hospital, surrounded by doctors who all had endless questions about my harrowing experience on Dexidnipam. I’d seen no need to mention the dream sharing or body snatching, because, between my testimony about the nightmares and temporary paralysis it induced and the fact that another patient in the trial was now in a coma, Dexid’s shelf life had been indefinitely shelved. But for a good couple of weeks, I was hounded with specific questions I pretended I couldn’t answer. Like why Wes had exponentially more Dexid in his system than I did.

  Sure, I could have tried to explain it all, but Wes had been right about at least one thing. All that the truth would have elicited was a trip to the loony bin for me and more experiments on him. No matter how things had gone down between us, I could never allow that.

  Especially when I knew he was really awake.

  It had been Grady’s words about addiction and overdose that guided my actions that night. The only real way to take Wes out and save my classmates had been to overload his system, not with more Dexid, but with as many Burners as we could attract. I can only guess that Wes had taken so much of the drug that when the monsters attacked him, they not only expelled him from the dream realm, but also caused an immobility and unresponsiveness in the waking world that was so complete, the doctors classified him as comatose. Only one monster came for me—the higher amount of Dexid in Wes’s system attracting the vast majority of the beasts—and I lay locked in my body for only a few hours. The untold number of Burners that infected Wes froze him in a waking paralysis that’s been going strong for twenty-three days and counting.

  I push open the door to room 529 and take a deep breath. Just as he had the day before and the week before that, Wes lies unmoving on a hospital cot, his hands and head hooked up to machines that tell his doctors absolutely nothing about what’s really going on inside him. I let the door click closed as I walk to his bed and hoist myself onto the mattress beside him. Leaning over his chest, I place my fingers on his eyelids and push them open.

  “Hey,” I say and conjure a smile. “It’s a beautiful Friday. Sixty-eight degrees outside and kind of sunny. Not a bad day to wake up.” I look at his fingers, knowing from personal experience that when you’re trapped like this, the extremities are always the first to regain movement. But there’s not a twitch.

  “Not ready to move yet? Okay, then how about some gossip? Gigi 2.0 continues her reign, albeit a slightly less bitchy one. That healthy dose of paranoia that our sleep stalking gave her might actually have paid off, just like you said it would. Jackie Dahl spilled a particularly vomitus container of tapioca pudding on Ms. MacDonald’s new leather jacket this morning, and for a second, it totally looked like Gigi was going to hurl her fist into Jackie’s face. But then she smiled and kind of laughed it off. Progress, right?”

  I glance at Wes’s mouth, waiting for it to curl into that twisty grin. But hi
s lips remain taught in a straight line, slightly parted and a little chapped. I make a mental note to bring lip balm tomorrow.

  “What else? Um…Amber seems to be less and less okay with standing just outside of Gigi’s spotlight. Even though with Kiara gone she’s top minion again, she’s been seen out and about without Gigi, and I swear she’s back-talked her master in public more than a few times. I foresee a falling out before graduation. Might want to wake up for that. Could be entertaining.”

  I pause, but the beeping machines are the closest thing I get to a laugh track.

  “And Jamie’s rehab is going really well. They told him yesterday that there’s almost no chance he’ll ever play football again, which made him even more determined to walk by Christmas.” I chuckle. “If anyone can do it—” I stop myself, because now I’m just being mean.

  No matter how pissed I am at Wes, I also decided not to abandon him. No one forced me to stick around, and antagonizing him when he can’t talk back sort of undermines that. As much as I’d like to punish him—and plan to once he’s regained control of himself—for now, I’ll try to be decent.

  “Tessa and Grady say hey,” I lie, then shake my head. “Okay, you got me. Tessa had some different words for you. She’s definitely not a fan. But Grady did specifically instruct me to tell you to wake up. Probably just so he can grill you like he does me every waking second. He’s totally obsessed with our Dexid experience. But Tessa and I have been on him to chill out a bit, and I think it’s starting to work. He’s pulled way back on the drug dealing, which is good. I think we might even be able to convince him to stop all together. He feels responsible for everyone you dosed with Dexid and has some PTSD or something over what could have happened. I’ve tried to explain to him that your actions weren’t his fault but…”

  I trail off and bite my lip. It is so hard not to go off on Wes, to just talk to him, even when he can’t talk back. “Listen,” I say. “I know things are messed up. I know we’re messed up. I can’t tell if I should make small talk or lecture you on all the awful things we’ve done. Hell, I don’t even know if you want me coming here.