by Peter Clines
ALSO IN THE EX SERIES
FROM PETER CLINES
Ex-Heroes
Ex-Patriots
Ex-Communication
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Peter Clines
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-8041-3661-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3662-4
Cover illustration: Jonathan Bartlett
Cover design: Christopher Brand
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Then
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Then
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Then
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Then
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
People Can Depend On Me When Things Get Tough. Then
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Epilogue
Epilogue II
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
SYLVESTER TAPPED HIS pencil on his knee. He did it like a drumroll, so the sound was sharp against his jeans. He always had a pencil, even though she couldn’t remember him ever using a notepad. Three months now, a dozen sessions, and he’d never taken one note.
He was bald, but she was pretty sure he shaved his head. It made it tough to figure out how old he was. His tight goatee came to a perfect point under his chin. He had dark brown eyes, and his eyelids hung low. It gave him a relaxed, thoughtful appearance.
Sylvester stopped tapping the pencil, leaned back in his chair, and gave her a look. “How are you sleeping?”
She shrugged. “Same as always.”
“Which means?”
Her fingers danced on the arm of her wheelchair. “I don’t like the mask. If I try to do anything except sleep on my back it pulls at my head or leaves marks on my face. And it doesn’t fit right. Air leaks out and blows over my eyes, so they’re always dry when I wake up.”
“Has it always been like that?”
She shook her head. “No. I mean, the whole thing only started a while ago. Near the end of senior year.”
“Have you tried different masks?”
“Yeah. Dad tried altering them, too. It doesn’t make any difference.” Her lips twisted into a weak smile. “I think I’ve got a funny-shaped head.”
“It looks fine to me,” he assured her.
She blushed. Just a little. “Thanks.”
“You understand why you have to wear it, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you resent it?”
“Didn’t we go over all this ages ago?”
“We did,” said Sylvester, “but I want to see if your answers have changed any.”
She shrugged again. “It’s keeping me alive. The doctors—the other doctors—they say I stop breathing as soon as I fall asleep. The first couple times it happened they were pretty sure I’d died in my sleep. Severe sleep apnea.”
“One of the worst cases on record,” he said.
“Yup. Mom gets worried whenever I stay up late because she’s worried I’ll nod off in class and asphyxiate.”
“Big word.”
“I’ve heard it a lot.”
“So do you resent it? The mask?”
“It’s keeping me alive.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
She sighed. “I don’t like it, but that’s just the way it is, right? I wish I didn’t need it, but I also wish I didn’t need to use a wheelchair most of the time. And I wish I had red hair, too.”
“Why red hair?”
“Because black hair and pale skin make everybody think you’re some kind of Goth. Red hair and pale skin mean you’re a sexy Irish girl.”
“Are you Irish?”
“No, but nobody knows that.”
He tapped the pencil three times on his knee, then a fourth. “Are you worried how the mask’s going over at college?”
Sylvester had covered one side of his office with black-bordered motivational posters. She still wasn’t sure if it was serious or a joke to make people lighten up. “A little bit,” she admitted after a minute of poster-studying.
“Why?”
“Honestly?”
“That’s the whole point of this.” The pencil tapped twice for emphasis.
“I always wonder if everyone thinks I’m some kind of freak,” she said. “Every study session, every party, every late night hanging out, I’m always the girl who has to get back to her room and strap this thing to her head before she falls asleep. And how’s that—” She looked back at the wall of posters and stared at one marked Desire.
“And how’s that … what?” he asked.
She glanced at the office door, toward her mother in the waiting room. “What if I meet a guy?” she asked. “What if I meet someone and things are going great? The chair’s bad enough, how do I tell him, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do it in my room because I’ve got to make sure I strap on my Darth Vader mask before I fall asleep or I’ll probably die’? What guy wants to hear that?”
Sylvester smiled. “That’s your big worry?”
Her mouth twitched into a smile for a moment. “It’s one of them.”
He took a long, deliberate look of his own at the door, at her mother in the waiting room. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” he said, turning his gaze back to her, “but I don’t think you need to worry about guys in college not wanting to have sex. Even if you have to strap on an oxygen mask afterward.”
She blushed again. “I just think it’s going to be weird.”
“Trust me. They won’t care.”
She turned back to the wall of posters.
He let the silence stretch out between them for a minute. Then he rapped the pencil on his knee once. “You’re still having the dreams?”
She stared at the posters, then at her hands. He let her sit for a moment before he asked again. She nodded once. “Yeah. Every night.”
“Exactly the same?”
She straightened up as best she could. “Not always. Sometimes I remember different parts of it. Different places, different people. But it’s all the same. It’s all …”
He tapped the pencil one-two-three-four
times. “It’s all what?”
“You know.”
“It’s important for you to say it,” Sylvester said.
“Why?”
“Because how you remember things and how you describe them are little clues to what’s going on in your head.”
She sighed. “It’s all real,” she said. She waved her hand around the office. “The stuff in my dreams feels more real than all of this.”
The pencil rapped three-four-five-six times against Sylvester’s knee. “Your parents think it’s because of this obsession you’ve developed with horror movies.”
“I told you, the dreams came first.”
“That’s not what they say.”
“They saw the movies first. I didn’t tell them about the dreams until later.”
The pencil spun twice between his fingers, then tapped against his knee. “And they’re still suicidal dreams?”
“No,” she said. “No, they’ve never been, I keep telling you that. They’re just … I’m just dead in them, that’s all.”
“But not suicidal.”
“No.”
“If the dream is so realistic, how can you be dead? How are you experiencing it?”
“I’m supposed to be dead,” she explained, “but I’m not. Not in the normal way.”
“Buried alive?”
She shook her head. “No, not like that. I’m dead, like a vampire or something. But I’m different than the others.”
“Others?”
“Well, most of the undead just want to eat you, right? I’m still me, I’m just … dead.”
Sylvester’s pencil paused in the air between taps. “Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you this. In these dreams, can you still walk?”
She looked at her legs. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I can.”
“So, you’re having a dream that feels incredibly real where dead things walk around. And in this dream your legs—which have been ‘dead’ for ten years now—work again.”
“Sort of. Is that a normal dream? It isn’t, is it?”
“I have heard of it once before,” he said. “Something a lot like it.”
“You have?”
“It was in a movie. You’ve been watching a lot of horror movies, right?”
“Some of them, yeah.”
“Did you ever see one called Nightbreed?”
She thought about it and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“It might be before your time. It’s an older one by Clive Barker.”
“The Hellraiser guy?”
“Yes.”
“I met Pinhead at a convention in Seattle last year,” she said. “The guy who played him, I mean. He was really nice, even though he seemed pretty bored.”
“I think he’s in this one, too.” Sylvester drumrolled his pencil against his knee. “It’s a film about a man who has dreams he’s dead, and then he ends up becoming one of the undead. And parts of him that had stopped working start working again.”
“Is that a sex thing?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “It’s not like that.”
“That’s good,” he said, smiling. “The psychiatrist in that one turned out to be a homicidal maniac.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not a maniac.”
“I’m in the dream, too?”
She paused and weighed the question. “Lots of people I know are in it.”
He tapped the pencil against his knee two-three-four times. “So, if I’m not a maniac in the dream, what am I then?”
She stared at her legs for another moment. “You’re dead,” she told him. “Everyone is. The world is dead.”
“Was there a war?”
“It was a disease. A virus.”
“Ahhh. A virus that made the dead walk?”
“Yeah.” Madelyn bounced her fist on the arm of the wheelchair, breaking the beat of the pencil tap. “And I don’t know why it’s all different now.”
THEN
I’M FALLING.
I’m not sure where I’m falling from. That’s not part of the dream. I just find myself plummeting through the air toward the crowd below.
The crowd looks up at me. Men and women, young and old. It just seems to be random people. They’re all talking. I can see their mouths moving but can’t hear any words. The dream is silent.
My body tenses up as the ground flies up to meet me, but at the last minute I slow down. It’s like coming to the end of a dive in a deep pool. My body just sheds momentum into the air. I step down onto the pavement as if I’m hopping off a bus.
The crowd surrounds me. They’re all still talking. I still can’t hear them.
No, not a crowd, a mob. A horde. They claw at me. Grab at me. Tug and pull and yank. One of them has my hair, because in the dream my hair is long and shaggy, like the hero on the cover of a romance novel. A pair of arms wraps around my neck like a bony scarf.
They want me.
The people are not well. They’re lepers or burn victims. They have gray skin, like sand at the beach. Many of them are injured.
There’s a woman with curly blond hair who looks like she’s been throwing up blood. One man has a long gash across his bald scalp and is missing an ear. A teenage boy holds up an arm that ends in a dark stump. An older, well-dressed woman is coated in blood, as if she works in a slaughterhouse.
And then, even though I’ve been looking at all of them since the dream began, I suddenly notice their eyes. All of them have the same dull, chalky eyes. Blind eyes. Their gazes don’t settle on anything. I see one man whose eyes drift off in two different directions.
The people keep grabbing me and I realize—in that way you sometimes realize the painfully obvious in a dream—that this is a bad dream. A very bad one. I’m not surrounded by hurt people. These are things. There are monsters all around me. Sightless, sickly things.
A woman with a battered face opens her jaws wide and bites down on my arm. I can feel it and I wince, but her teeth can’t make it through my leather jacket. Her mouth opens again and two of her teeth drop out.
I know I’m in a dream, but I also remember teeth falling out means this is a stress dream. Is that true for other people in your dream? Why is my mind so clear on some things and so fuzzy on others?
I throw a punch and one of the monster-people flies back into the crowd as if I’ve smacked it with a baseball bat. The physics of the dream seem a bit off. I grab another monster by the wrist and pull. It flies into the air and swings around me in circles. I’m making it fly, like a father spins a small child by the hands. I’m doing it with one hand.
If this is a flying dream, does it mean it’s about sex?
The spinning monster strikes some of its companions and knocks them down. Then I let it fly free. It soars off into the crowd. Something moves near my feet and I stomp on it.
I hear a hiss of pistons and the whine of electronics. The dream isn’t silent, I realize. There’s been a sound here all along, a white noise I’ve grown used to and blocked out. And before I can think what the noise is, the ground shakes. Heavy thuds come from behind me.
I ignore the monsters and turn around.
A tan wall stretches out in either direction. Looming over me is a double archway and a pair of iron gates. It looks like a fortress. I’ve seen it before, but I can’t remember where.
Stepping through the gate on the right is a giant robot. Blue and red armored plates accent its silver body. It must stand close to ten feet tall. It’s shaped like a person. I’m sure it’s female, in that odd way you just know things in dreams.
The robot looks at me with huge white eyes like tennis balls. Its metal skull nods once and then it holds up its hands. Electricity arcs between the thick fingers. It brushes its sparking hands against the monster-people and they collapse to the ground.
One of the creatures sinks its teeth into my shoulder like a vampire with bad aim. I shrug it off and knock it away with another physics-defying punch. The monster slams i
nto another of its kind and they both tumble away.
The robot turns back to the gate and bellows, “Bring it out!” It has a woman’s voice, like I suspected. It raises an arm and waves something forward.
A truck rolls through the gate. A big one, like the ones used by movers and film crews, but this one has been decorated with wide swipes of red spray paint. It crushes the monsters under its wheels. There are people in the back of the truck. They wave at me and poke at the creatures with long spears.
The monsters that look like people are all around me. For every one I push away, three more push forward. There is nothing to the world but pale, gaunt faces and grasping hands. They have my arms, my collar, my hair …
TWO
WITH REGRET, GEORGE admitted he was awake and squinted up at the ceiling.
It had been another rough night. It led to one of those mornings that felt like hell from the first moment of consciousness, and he tried to push coherent thought away one last time even as he buried himself back down into the pillow. The alarm had gone off early. He’d slapped the clock twice, and each time he hoped for another ten minutes of peaceful sleep. Just enough to make the day bearable.
The ceiling fan had other ideas.
The fan’s beaded chain had come with the apartment. It wasn’t the standard string of tiny silver balls. Someone, the rental company or a previous tenant or just a cheap repairman, had replaced it with a line of blue plastic crystals.
The crystals were just light enough to catch the subtle motion of the fan. The long strand built up momentum after a while and began to spin in an arc. The arc lifted the top two crystals high enough to scratch at the side of the fan. Again and again. The noise was loud in the quiet apartment. For a man trying to get back to sleep for a few precious minutes it was like Chinese water torture. He glared up and willed the beads to stop moving. They ignored him.
When George was happy with the fan, he liked to tell himself it was a line of Mardi Gras beads. At the moment, he thought about taking a kitchen knife to them and cutting the string in half. Stringisection. Stringicide. He was an easygoing guy, for the most part, but the string needed to be punished.
