Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  Besides, you’d need a ladder, she thought, as always. The joke helped keep her focused on the job.

  “Elissa, let’s have the patient roster,” Jenny called to the nurse in charge of the station for the shift.

  Mid-forties, with a burnt blond dye job, Elissa had been a psych nurse for twenty years. Nothing surprised her and nothing scared her, and Jenny admired that. She needed that kind of no-nonsense attitude, especially on a night like tonight. It was a good team. No matter how out of control the patients got, she thought they would make it through until morning without any major trouble.

  Elissa handed her a clipboard with a listing of all of the patients currently on the unit, their diagnosis, current status, and medication schedule. All of that was on computer, and some of the doctors carried around the small pad computers to keep track of it all, but Jenny liked having something to write on, something she could tack to the wall at the nurses’ station if necessary. Something concrete. Any medical instructions or comments would end up in the electronic file anyway, courtesy of Elissa, but Jenny liked paper, especially when she wanted them all to put their heads together.

  Thunder boomed outside, loud enough that they could hear it even in the corridor. Hear it? Jenny thought. I can feel it. The rumble lingered for several seconds, and Jenny smiled at Elissa and Marlon.

  “I hate storms like this,” the nurse said, looking uneasy.

  “Me, too,” Jenny said. Since childhood, thunderstorms had sent her scurrying under her covers or into the arms of her father. But her father had died of an aneurysm two years ago, and there were no covers for her here at the hospital. Only patients who were far more troubled by the storm than she was.

  “Walk with me,” she said, holding the clipboard and coming out from behind the nurses’ station.

  Marlon and Elissa flanked her and the trio headed deeper into the secure wing of the hospital’s third-floor psychiatric unit. There were two rooms outside the secure area, one of them currently occupied by a fifteen-year-old girl with a penchant for cutting herself. She’d had another incident this morning, this one especially bloody, and though she seemed rational now, she needed close supervision.

  “The Langan girl hasn’t shown any reaction to the storm, but I want a bed check every half hour,” Jenny said quietly, glancing at Elissa. “No need to disturb her, but make sure she hasn’t gotten her hands on anything sharp, and that she’s doing all right.”

  “Of course,” Elissa said.

  “Marlon,” Jenny went on, “I know one of your guys has gone through the room, but I’d like you to go through it yourself. It’s a weird night and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “I’m on it,” Marlon replied.

  The second room outside the secure area was empty tonight, but only because its occupant—a woman who had been pulling out and eating her own hair—had been moved inside the secure unit. She had seemed stable enough until nightfall, when she had relapsed in dramatic fashion, tearing out her hair in clumps and trying to choke it down. If a nurse hadn’t interrupted her, she’d have choked to death. Now she was both sedated and in restraints. With the way the patients were agitated tonight, it would be almost impossible to help them until daybreak. Jenny hated to admit it, but the best that she could do was try to keep them all safe until morning, try to soothe them, and assess them anew in the morning.

  The lights were off in the empty room. Jenny glanced inside as they passed, just as a fresh barrage of lightning splintered the night beyond the glass. It lit up the room with flickering flashes, casting strange shadows.

  “Did you see that?” she asked.

  “Lightning, Dr. O’Neil?” Elissa asked, sounding almost amused, as in, Of course we saw it, woman, it’s been going on for hours.

  “It looked almost blue,” Jenny said.

  “I noticed that earlier,” Marlon told her. She looked up at him, but he averted his gaze, as if for some reason he did not want her to see his eyes. She wondered if he was spooked by the lightning, too, and embarrassed by it. “It seems even bluer now. I figured it was something to do with the rain, the way it reflects the light.”

  “I guess,” Jenny said.

  As the thunder accompanying that blue lightning cracked the sky, she passed her ID in front of a sensor plate and the door into the secure section buzzed. Marlon yanked it open, letting Jenny and Elissa enter before him. The door clanked shut behind them and they started down the hall. Someone sobbed loudly, full of a sorrow that might only exist in their delusions, but was no less real for the fact. They passed several rooms whose doors were open, patients either drugged or restrained or both. Lightning sketched blue veins in the dark outside their windows. The lights in the corridor flickered, dimming slightly the way the lights in Jenny’s house always did when she ran her hair dryer. Every time it happened, she held her breath. The hospital had already lost power once tonight and had to go to backup generators. The normal power had surged back on soon after, but she feared a total shutdown. It couldn’t happen—the generators would prevent it—but as a doctor of the psyche, she knew that fear was never limited to the rational.

  “Marlon, I want orderlies in this corridor every time a nurse is checking on a patient. On any patient who isn’t restrained, even the ones who are sedated, I want an orderly in the room with the nurse.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Elissa,” Jenny continued, looking at her clipboard. “Mr. Abrams tried to bite Dr. Nathanson earlier. He apologized. Said it was a new compulsion that he hadn’t had before, didn’t know where it came from. But most of his compulsions have been fairly benign if you don’t count the damage he could do with scissors if we let him indulge his obsession with cutting other people’s hair. The biting thing is new. I want him sedated for the night.”

  The nurse started to speak, but hesitated.

  “Something to say?”

  “Is that really necessary, Doctor?” Elissa asked. “He’s kind of sweet, actually. And mostly harmless.”

  “It’s the harmless that concerns me. Tonight’s not the night for new compulsions. If you’d rather wait until he bites someone hard enough to draw blood or worse and we have to restrain him . . .”

  “No,” Elissa said quickly. “Of course not.”

  As they ran through the roster of other patients, blue light flickering all the way into the corridor from the open doors, they passed a police officer seated on a hard plastic chair. The patient inside that room, Wayne Pinsky, was dangerously bipolar and the suspect in a nine-month-old double homicide. Jenny wanted him out of the hospital as soon as possible. The court had remanded Pinsky here for observation. Tomorrow, Dr. Nathanson would be finishing his report on Pinsky with a final interview and examination. Soon after, they’d be rid of him.

  Shouts came from the end of the corridor, and Jenny glanced at the clipboard in her hands, although she already knew who was making the ruckus. Sixteen-year-old Gregory Wheeler had been a repeat visitor to the unit over the years she had spent here. Greg had a history of paranoid schizophrenia and a cocktail of other mental issues that fed each other. Some of the drugs they’d tried were like putting out fire with gasoline. This year he had been steadily declining, succumbing more frequently to his recurring belief that there were very few humans left in the world, that other-dimensional aliens had infiltrated society and were now conspiring to steal his brain, which held some key to their own future which even he did not understand. The delusion was perfect in that he did not need to know what they wanted his brain for, only that they wanted it. Of course doctors and orderlies were all part of this secret invasion.

  It had been difficult to get through to him over the past few days, but by testing several different combinations of drugs, they had seen some improvement and Jenny had hoped to send him home to his mother. But ever since the storm had begun, Greg Wheeler had spiraled down into the most terrifying depths of his delusions.

  “The orderly that the Wheeler boy attacked . . .” she sa
id.

  “Oakes,” Marlon supplied.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Minor concussion. He’ll be out of work a couple of days.”

  “His nose isn’t broken?” Elissa asked.

  Marlon laughed. “It is,” he said, touching his own nose. “But you do this job long enough, you’re going to get your nose broke. It’ll heal.”

  At the end of the corridor, two more orderlies appeared. They’d been the target of Greg Wheeler’s torrent of verbal abuse, checking on his restraints. It had sickened Jenny to have to order Greg restrained. She had a soft spot for the gawky, floppy-haired teenager. But he was as much a danger to himself as he was to others. She only hoped that through a combination of counseling and drug therapy, they could get his perceptions back to normal. Right now he existed just as much in another dimension as these aliens he hallucinated.

  A nurse accompanied the two orderlies who’d been checking on Greg. The trio patrolled the corridor warily, and Jenny thought they were smart to be wary. The patients and staff were all skittish now.

  “All right,” Jenny said. “Get to it.”

  Marlon and Elissa agreed and went farther along the corridor to meet their colleagues and pass along instructions. Jenny turned to the cop guarding the murderer Pinsky’s door.

  “Can we get you anything, Officer?”

  The thin cop had a dark complexion, a prominent Roman nose, and a roguish smile. “If you can get me off Chief Kramer’s shit list, doc, that’d be great. Otherwise, just a cup of coffee at some point, if you can swing it.”

  “Coffee we can swing,” Jenny replied. “The chief’s shit list is another story. What’s wrong, Officer? You don’t like our company?”

  “I’m sure you’re excellent company,” the officer replied. “It’s the setting that troubles me, y’know? The ambience.”

  Jenny smiled, her nerves settling down now that the Wheeler boy had stopped shouting. “I’ll see what I can do about that coffee.”

  She started back toward the security doors. Passing by one of the open rooms, she looked in to see the blue lightning flashing outside. Thunder hammered the hospital an instant later.

  “Lightning’s too close for comfort,” the charming officer said. “That one must have been right—”

  Blue light flashed so brightly that Jenny threw up a hand to shield her eyes. The safety glass windows in the patient’s room shattered and lightning struck the empty chair by the bed. Thunder rolled across the sky, shaking the entire building. Jenny cried out and fell to her knees and the cop stood, one hand on the wall and the other on his sidearm, absurd really, as if he thought they were under attack. More glass blew in somewhere on the wing.

  The lightning didn’t subside. It kept striking the building. Lights in the corridor popped and sizzled and blew. Elissa and one of the orderlies down the hall held on to one another. Marlon swore, but Jenny couldn’t hear much of it over the thunder. A boom rocked the whole corridor, and it seemed like it came from Pinsky’s room. Jenny forced herself to stand and looked in through the small window in Pinsky’s door to see that part of the wall had been smashed in by lightning and the murderer’s bed was on fire.

  “Fucking hell!” she shouted. “Marlon! Get it open!”

  As she ran for the fire extinguisher, tugging out the master key in her pocket that would open the panel, she realized that the thunder had begun to fade. The lightning had ceased. The electricity still sparked and the lights crackled on and off, but the moment had passed.

  Jenny yanked the extinguisher out and ran back to Pinsky’s room. Marlon had unlocked the door and hauled it open, and now he pulled the extinguisher from her grasp and led the way into the room, followed by the Italian cop, who had drawn his gun. With a few quick bursts of foam, the burning bedclothes were extinguished, as were the flames that had started to flicker up the dresser.

  The cop lowered his gun. Pinsky posed no threat to them now. The killer lay frozen in a portrait of agony, his flesh charred, his eyes turned to gelatin in his skull.

  “Holy God,” the cop whispered.

  “Not tonight, man,” Marlon replied. “Not tonight.”

  Shouts came from the corridor. A buzz from down the hall indicated help was coming. Jenny left Marlon and the cop in Pinsky’s room, but when she reached the corridor, the shouting turned to a scream.

  The sixtyish OCD patient, Sid Abrams, sat astride Elissa on the floor, holding her down, biting her face. He tore the meat of her cheek, blood spraying, and as he chewed he cried copious tears, shaking his head and trying to apologize with a mouth full of her flesh.

  An orderly tackled the old man off her, struggling with him on the ground. A nurse ran to help Elissa. Other staff streamed into the secure section, but even as they did, howls and cries rose from all of the occupied rooms. The blue lightning had done something, Jenny realized. It had more than upset them. The place was bedlam.

  Her twenty-first-century psych unit had become a true madhouse.

  KEOMANY and Octavian went through the front doors of the club side by side, bent low to stay beneath the roiling smoke still pouring out. The hot breath of the fire blasted against them as though trying to keep them away, but they forged on. Keomany knew that Octavian must have half a dozen ways to handle this fire, but with people trapped inside, they had to be careful. And the elements were her specialty.

  The roar of the blaze filled her ears as they ran through the small foyer of the club, past a ticket booth and velvet ropes and the stool where the bouncer would have been sitting. The curtains that separated the foyer from the club were burning, flames licking up and across the ceiling. Octavian tore them down with his bare hands, unmindful of the hungry fire that tried to leap to his clothes. As his shirt caught fire he batted it out with a hand, and then they were in the main area of the club.

  Tables were overturned. Chairs had been hurled aside. A section of the roof had fallen in and an upward glance revealed a ring of fire like the gullet of a volcano. One whole side of the club had been engulfed in flames, and Keomany assumed that this had been the location of the bar, where the blaze had begun. On stage, the band’s equipment crackled and blackened and one of the raised drums tumbled to the ground as the whole kit gave way, melted by fire.

  The girl outside had described a fight, and it was not over. At a glance, Keomany spotted seven or eight people down, some of them probably dead. Six were still standing, and she saw that they were interrupting a bloodbath. They lunged at one another, tearing with fingernails and teeth, punching and kicking and clawing. One woman drove a man down with an elbow to his throat and then began to kick him in the balls, over and over, until another man—his face savage and bestial—brought a chair down on her head and then fell upon her, sinking his teeth into her arm.

  They’ve gone insane, she thought.

  One of them might have been the vampire, but they were all so vicious she could not tell the difference.

  “Like we talked about,” Octavian said.

  “Damn straight,” Keomany agreed.

  She planted her feet, let the heat of the fire buffet her, trying to burn her and suffocate her all at once. Monstrous, it roared, flames continuing to consume the club, working their way toward the corners they had not yet touched. The middle of the room had become a bonfire of tables and portions of the collapsed ceiling. Somewhere glass shattered, the heat blowing out windows.

  Keomany closed her eyes, reaching one hand toward the hole in the roof and the other out toward the inferno where the bar had once stood. She had become far more adept at working with air and earth, with roots and plants, but she had dealt with fire before. Weather could be influenced, but never really controlled. Still, she had to try.

  With a single exhaled breath, she thrust her spirit down into the earth, extending herself, searching for a place beyond the reach of the chaos storm that had begun to unravel Hawthorne. She felt the fire. Felt the rain. Tried to smother the one with the other. The wind howled inside the
club, and that was not at all what she wanted. It only made the flames leap higher, ravage the walls faster, leap from table to table to fabric seat. But the rain came with it, this strange, warm rain whose source was a perverted nature. Still, rain was rain, and the fire did not like it. She could not bring more rain, but she could focus it, draw the clouds above more tightly together so that the moisture falling elsewhere in town would, for a few moments, fall almost entirely in this one place.

  Impossibly, the fire raged higher, as though fighting back. But she had seen the blue core of the flames and knew that there was magic in them. She opened her eyes, and through the hole in the roof she saw blue lightning dancing inside the clouds that were colliding above the club, and she could picture it now . . . blue lightning strikes, blue fire eruptions. Had this been a mistake? Would it only bring more lightning?

  “I can’t control the fire!” she shouted, trying to be heard over the blaze.

  Her voice was met with snarls and hyena laughter. Keomany turned in time to see a man running toward her, blood on his hands and smeared on his mouth. His eyes were wild and his teeth jagged and plentiful as he lunged for her. No time to dodge. He would be on her in a moment.

  The beast-man cried out in pain as green electrical fire seized him, a sphere of magic that crackled like real flame. He struggled against it, but to no avail. The sphere contracted quickly and Keomany heard the air hissing out of it, and a moment later he tumbled to the floor, free of the sphere but unconscious. One of his legs looked broken. She had no sympathy.