Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  “Ancient Chaldean,” Octavian said.

  “That. Yeah. How does he know it?”

  “Not just him,” Dr. O’Neil said. “How do you know it?”

  Octavian glanced at Keomany and Charlotte and saw that they were both wondering the same thing. But he didn’t feel like talking about his thousand years in Hell, and now wasn’t the time. Instead, he turned to Greg and spoke to him in that dead language. The kid ought to have been scared, but he didn’t seem frightened at all by this turn of events. They spoke for a couple of minutes while the others only stood and listened quietly, and when Octavian turned to look at them, he thought that Dr. O’Neil and the police chief looked unsettled, and maybe a little afraid of him.

  “What did he say?” Keomany asked. “Does he know what’s causing all of this?”

  “He has no idea,” Octavian said. “He’s happy. His head is clearer than he can ever remember it being.”

  “There’s some dark irony for you,” Charlotte muttered.

  “He can’t tell us anything?” Chief Kramer asked.

  “Not with words,” Octavian said. “He still understands English but when he tries to speak it, Chaldean comes out. But he has no more sense of what’s going on than we do.”

  “Shit,” Chief Kramer snapped. “I thought for sure we had something.”

  “Wait, you said he couldn’t tell us anything with words,” Keomany said. “Which means there is something we can learn from him.”

  Octavian looked at Greg thoughtfully. “Maybe. With all the weirdness erupting all over the place, this could be just another example of that. But maybe it’s not. Here’s something true. At the end of the seventh century B.C., tribes of settlers began to arrive in Babylon. In a short time, they had completely taken over. These were the Chaldeans, and what was once Babylon became Chaldea. But no one—and think about this, with all of the historians and archaeologists who’ve made it their business to piece together the history of humankind—no one knows where the Chaldeans came from. They just began to appear in Babylon, and they spread, and they conquered.”

  “No one knows?” Chief Kramer asked.

  “No one,” Octavian echoed.

  “Not even in Hell?” Keomany said.

  Dr. O’Neil stared at her, then swung her gaze around to study Octavian.

  Octavian did not smile. “Not the one I was in.”

  “You think they were from somewhere else,” Charlotte said. “One of these other Hells that Keomany was talking about.”

  “I think it’s possible,” Octavian said.

  “This is insane,” Dr. O’Neil whispered, as if to herself.

  “This is real,” Keomany told her. “Trust me. I wish it weren’t.”

  “The point,” Octavian said, drawing their attention back to him, “is that the fact that he’s speaking Chaldean specifically, and that—unless there’s something I’m missing—we’re not seeing a whole wave of people speaking various ancient languages, makes me think it is connected. Whatever this power is, whatever’s brought this chaos to Hawthorne, may have originated with them.”

  Chief Kramer threw up his hands. “How do you get from ancient Chaldea to modern-day New England?”

  Octavian had no answer, and he knew Greg Wheeler didn’t have one, either. He thanked the boy, who asked him a favor.

  “Dr. O’Neil, Greg says he would love you forever if you could get him some chocolate chip cookies.”

  The doctor, still in shock from the conversation she’d found herself in, smiled uncertainly and nodded. She went to Greg and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll make sure they bring you some milk, too,” she said. The boy thanked her in a language no one alive would understand. Octavian took a few steps toward the door, closing the distance between himself and his friends. Charlotte’s eyes glinted with fascination and he felt her watching him hungrily, but he couldn’t be sure exactly what it was she hungered for. Whatever it was, he knew he couldn’t give it to her. Keomany appraised him as well, and he was surprised to see a similar look in her eyes.

  “You’re full of surprises,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm.

  He told himself that chaos was unraveling them all, playing havoc with reason, undermining logic. How else to explain the primal response he felt rising in him at her touch?

  “So, what next?” the chief asked. “We’re not any closer to an answer.”

  “We might be,” Octavian replied, tearing his focus away from Keomany. “If I start with the assumption that this chaos magic is related to Chaldean sorcery, I might be able to come up with a way to tap into the flow, and trace it.”

  “Well, get on it,” the chief said.

  Octavian turned to Keomany and Charlotte, but before he could speak, the chief’s radio crackled. Amid the static were screams and gunshots. Officer Moschitto poked his head into the room, face blanched white, his eyes wide. He clutched his radio like a life preserver.

  “What the hell is this, now?” the chief snapped, grabbing at his radio.

  Moschitto had the answer. “It’s the morgue, Chief.”

  “What are they shooting at?” Kramer demanded.

  Moschitto grew even paler, having to speak the words.

  “The cadavers. They’re shooting at the cadavers.”

  MILES flew down the stairs, taking them two at a time and jumping to each landing, careening off the walls. Amber came down behind him. Several times she called his name, and in the back of his mind he knew he should wait for her. A small voice inside him tried to insist that he send her back up, that she didn’t need to see this or be a part of it, that he should keep her out of harm’s way. But the voice was a tiny thing and could never have been loud enough to break through the roar that filled his head, the frenzy of panic and grief that sent him hurtling down the stairs.

  He wanted the old world, the one he’d grown up in. He wanted the world where vampires and demons and magic were imaginary things, where he could pretend the ghosts he’d seen as a boy had been a singular, haunting experience, comforting evidence of the existence of an afterlife and perhaps of God and Heaven and other now quaint reassurances. He wanted an ordinary world, where his grief for the loss of his mother could never have been interrupted by the possibility that . . . the possibility that . . .

  Rage filled him. Miles hated magic. It was obscene, what it could do.

  They bypassed the lobby level. If they had tried to take an elevator, they would still be waiting up on the fifth floor. At every landing he expected to crash into a security guard, but they were obviously too busy to worry about people on the stairs. The cameras would show the two of them racing down the steps, but whoever was monitoring them probably had better things to do, just like the guards in the ER, and the ones who must already be in the basement.

  Miles leaped to the landing where a metal door had been painted with an enormous B for basement. His right knee buckled and he slammed into the door, grunting in pain.

  Amber caught up, hustling down the last few steps, reaching for him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Just twisted it,” he said. He had forgotten that he wasn’t a kid anymore, that at forty-two his knees were no longer up to this kind of punishment. But the shock of pain had woken him from the lunatic rush that had swept over him.

  Miles brushed his hand against hers, shaking with manic grief. “You should go back. It won’t be safe.”

  Amber flinched, then shook her head. “Just shut up and go. Maybe you don’t need me with you, but I can’t face what’s waiting for me at home by myself. I need a friend, and you’re it. So let’s go.”

  If he’d been capable of it, he might have smiled.

  He yanked the door open and took her hand, and they rushed into the basement corridor together. No sign indicated the direction of the morgue, but gunshots rang out to the right, and he knew which way they had to go. They ran along the corridor, passing several testing labs where people crouched behind tab
les and machines, afraid of bullets, and other things as well.

  Miles let go of her hand as they reached a turn in the corridor, but he didn’t slow down. He turned the corner and only then did he stop short. Amber staggered to a halt behind him. Two police officers and three security guards—all but one of them men—stood in the corridor, backs to Miles and Amber. The cops had their weapons drawn. In front of them, outside the side-by-side entrances to the morgue and the autopsy room, dead people limped and staggered around almost aimlessly. A skinny middle-aged white man had been flayed open, maybe in the middle of an autopsy when he woke up, and his torso hung open as though his chest and abdomen had been unzipped, organs trailing behind him on the floor and hanging in loops. Two old ladies walked aimlessly, their eyes closed as if they were playing some kind of child’s game.

  There were bullet holes in most of the dead people. A fat, naked black woman had been shot half a dozen times. She had collapsed to the floor, but now she struggled to rise again, and one of the cops shot her in the face, eradicating her right eye and blowing shards of skull and drying brain matter onto the wall beside her.

  Amber screamed.

  The cops and security guards glanced back at them. One of the cops swung his weapon around, and Miles thought he might have shaken them out of fear and surprise, but he twisted back and aimed at the dead people again.

  “You shouldn’t be here!” one of the guards shouted, backing up a few steps to talk to them. He had gray hair and a paunchy belly and he looked terrified. In his hand, he held a Taser gun, but he hadn’t fired it.

  “What are you doing?” Amber demanded. “It’s . . . it’s wrong!”

  “Are you high?” the guard asked. “They’re fucking zombies !”

  “This isn’t a movie. You don’t know what they’d do. They just look lost and sad. Those two old ladies don’t even have their eyes open. You think they’re going to eat you?”

  “That’s what they do!” one of the cops shouted at her. “Don’t be stupid. The fat lady keeps coming for us. And these are just the ones who were on the tables. The morgue assistant who called it in said the ones in the drawers, they’re banging to be let out!”

  Miles turned and vomited on the linoleum. He wanted badly to cry. His eyes burned with the need to shed tears. But all he could muster was a nausea that retreated to a dull queasiness the moment he puked. For a second he leaned against the wall, trying to breathe, trying not to picture the dark inside of one of those morgue drawers. His mother wasn’t out in the corridor, which meant she had woken from death inside a metal coffin, a drawer where she had been put into cold storage, covered with a sheet.

  He wondered if she knew what had happened to her. The dead looked lost, Amber was right about that. But he had seen his mother’s ghost upstairs, and he felt sure she must know. Even if her spirit had left her flesh behind, somewhere her consciousness knew that her remains had been desecrated.

  “Just stop, you idiots,” he said. “Stop shooting long enough to see if they try to attack you.”

  One of the cops shot the autopsy man in the chest, and Miles wondered what he thought he would hit. There were no organs in there, no further damage that could be done to make the corpse lie down, short of a grenade exploding.

  “This is magic,” Amber said. “It’s got to be part of what’s happening everywhere in town. It’s not fucking Dawn of the Dead.”

  “How do you know?” the redheaded female guard snapped at her. “There are vampires. You want us to treat the zombies nice until they eat our goddamn brains?”

  Miles didn’t want to argue anymore. The only one among the dead who seemed intent on reaching the living was the black woman, but she didn’t look angry or evil or hungry. And as she looked up at them now, she had a faraway gaze as though her purpose lay somewhere quite distant. She tried to speak, but she had no voice.

  Yet he thought he could make out the two words she tried to utter. He had no expertise in reading lips, but it seemed clear to him.

  She said, My baby.

  The woman wanted to reach her child. They might not all know who they were, or what had happened to them, but this one did.

  Blind with grief, thinking of his mother in that drawer and the way her ghost had vanished upstairs, Miles could not stop himself. He ran through the blockade the guards and cops had set up. The female guard tried to grab him, but he shook her off and before the cops even knew what he was doing, he was between them and the dead woman who only wanted to reach her baby.

  “You stupid bastard!” someone shouted at him. “What the hell are—”

  The black woman, riddled with bullet holes, reached for Miles. A tremor of fear passed through him, but it was swept under by the current of his grief. He saw his sorrow reflected in her eyes, and he took her hand. She stepped toward him.

  “Move aside, damn it! Move aside!” one of the cops was screaming.

  One of them took a shot, but they didn’t dare shoot Miles and they couldn’t hit the dead woman without putting a bullet through him, too.

  Amber screamed his name. He heard a scuffle and understood that she was trying to get to him, and the guards were holding her back. He saw the two old dead women bumping into each other, their eyes still closed. The autopsy man slipped in his own viscera and fell down. His heart broke for all of them, and for his mother, and for himself. And he prayed the cops were wrong.

  The dead woman wrapped her arms around him, sagging into him as though she wept, although—like Miles—she had no tears. She held him as though gaining solace from his kindness, and then she stepped back, her gaze straying once more to some faraway place where she must have believed her baby awaited her.

  Miles turned to the cops, who stared in astonishment, mouths open in expressions that might have been comical if there weren’t so much anguish in the air around them all.

  “They’re harmless,” Miles said, his voice catching. “They’re just in pain. They’re grieving for themselves.”

  The guard who’d been holding Amber released her, and she stepped up beside the cops.

  “We’ve got to figure out a way to make them dead again,” she said.

  Miles nodded. She understood the obscenity here, what this twisted magic had done to them. This was an abomination.

  He heard the shuffle of footsteps behind him and the whimper of someone in fear. Before he turned, he saw Amber’s eyes go wide in surprise, and saw the cops raise their guns and take aim again.

  Miles spun to see two people emerging from the open door to the morgue. One wore a white lab coat, maybe the morgue assistant who had called in this horror in the first place. The other held him from behind, a scalpel to his throat, a puncture wound in his neck already weeping blood.

  The man who held the morgue assistant had been burned to death, his skin cracked and charred. Where his eyes ought to have been were ruined, blackened pits, but his grip on the terrified morgue assistant was strong.

  The burned corpse smiled.

  “Pinsky,” one of the cops said.

  “This one’s not harmless,” said the other. “He’s a fuckin’ serial killer.”

  CHAPTER 13

  AMBER tore free of the security guard holding her back and brushed past the two cops, who shouted at her to get the hell out of the way. She grabbed Miles by the arm and pulled him aside, out of the line of fire, but she saw in his eyes that he had no fear of the policemen’s bullets just then.

  “Do it!” she shouted to the cops. “Shoot him!”

  “No shot!” the younger cop snapped.

  The two policemen shuffled forward, guns trained on the charred cadaver who had taken the morgue assistant hostage. Amber felt her stomach churn every time she glanced at that dead man and saw the scorched, empty pits of his eyes and the bones jutting through skin burned paper-thin.

  “Even if they had a shot,” Miles muttered to her, “it wouldn’t stop the thing. They’ve all got bullet holes.”

  She knew it, but to hear him sp
eak the words chilled her. Amber stared at the wide, terrified eyes of the morgue assistant as the burned man walked him backward toward the elevator at the end of the corridor. The scalpel had already drawn a thin red line on the hostage’s throat, opening up a puckered wound that began to weep blood.

  One of the cops took three quick steps forward, and the burned corpse twisted his hostage around to make sure the morgue assistant stayed between him and the police. The other cop took a shot, winged the dead man’s shoulder, and both corpse and hostage froze. A sneer of fury contorted the burned man’s face, cracking charred flesh, splits in his cheeks showing raw, bloody meat. The burned man was pissed, and he jabbed the knife an inch into the morgue assistant’s throat.

  The hostage screamed and began to beg and plead, tears rolling down his face. The burned, eyeless corpse smiled and backed toward the elevator, the morgue assistant helping him now, walking carefully backward, afraid to do anything but comply with the dead man’s every whim.

  Amber felt useless and helpless. She choked on a scream, unable to let it out. She shook her head and a terrible sorrow embraced her. In a time of impossible things, this moment would be branded on her soul forever, poisoning her sleep every night. She’d overheard the cops . . . in life, this man Pinsky had been a murderer, a serial killer. Now some anarchic magic, some convulsion in the chaotic sorcery plaguing Hawthorne, had given him a semblance of life. The other revived corpses wandered aimlessly or sought out some simple comfort, but Pinsky’s mind held only one purpose—to survive, and kill again.

  Pinsky jerked his hostage back, nodded his charred skull at the elevator, and Amber saw the light of understanding flicker in the morgue assistant’s eyes. Trembling, his neck bleeding badly, the man reached out and pressed the elevator call button.

  A quiet sob wracked Amber’s body and she clung to Miles’s arm, almost hiding behind him as the true abomination of this horror became clear to her.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “He can still see.”

  As if he’d heard her, the dead man turned toward her, brow crinkling so that the skin split. Those empty, charred pits stared at her. Amber froze, wanting to scream and run but afraid that he would pursue her. Her rationality had all but fled. The police shuffled forward, not shouting at the killer the way they might have if he were alive. They seemed at a loss as to what to do. Shooting the corpse did nothing, but if they tried to rush him and take him by force, he would murder the morgue assistant.