Sleeper Seven

by Mark Howard

  Fumbling past people and over the predictable luggage, she made it to the middle of the car, and looking ahead, realized she wasn't the only potential hero or heroine on this train. A crowd of people was funneling into the first car ahead of her, just as others began to stream in behind her. Like her, many others also apparently felt the need to get to the front car and do their own...Something.

  The Logan stop streaked by as Jess inched forward, a few bodies from the next door. Trapped for a moment between two large men, she glanced out the window towards the platform, at the startled and confused faces whizzing by in a blur. One young woman, however, seemed to understand perfectly what she was witnessing. Jess' eyes locked with hers for only a second, but the look of horror on her face chilled Jess to the bone, because that young girl knew was she was seeing: she was seeing Death, happening right in front of her.

  The girl's reaction motivated Jess to push forward harder, lest she succumb to the same impotent shock and awe, and she squeezed her way again into the swirling, black abyss between cars, her back pressed taut against the safety chain, as she maneuvered around three others and agonizingly birthed herself into the front car.

  Ahead of her lay a sea of other struggling bodies — My God, it's full of North Face logos, she thought. After pushing past a few more people, she found herself stuck again, and so, reaching up, she leveraged a few convenient shoulders to vault herself up and over the seats. The steel grab handles in the seat backs made for a decent foot path as she stepped forward, her hands pressed against the ceiling to steady herself.

  From her vantage point, she could see a solid block of people jammed up against the driver compartment door ahead. The black accordion privacy curtain prevented them from seeing Stan in his semi-catatonic state, so the writhing masses yelled and banged on the glass with their hands, briefcases, and backpacks; one enterprising young woman even used her aluminum Sigg bottle, all to no effect. The lack of space prevented any one person from gaining enough backswing to break through the double-layered security glass; instead they accomplished little more than polite taps. Streaks of blood appeared on the glass, as one man with a pocketknife desperately began slicing through the rubber seal surrounding it, cutting himself in the process.

  It was clear she couldn't fight her way to the front of this crowd, and even if she did, she hadn't come up with any better ideas anyway. Her goal now became the nearest doorway. Flinging herself around the pole dividing the seats from the doors, she slipped into a small pocket, grabbed the red knob embedded into the ceiling, and yelled "Move back!" The crowd pulled back a few inches, giving her enough room to slip into place facing the doors, and she pulled down on the handle with her full weight, lifting herself off the floor. Through the knob, she felt the click of a spring-loaded mechanism as the doors automatically retreated into the side walls.

  Swirling, sucking wind entered the car as the crowd pulled back further into the relative safety of the driverless train. Jess considered her options, mentally reviewing the route as the wind buffeted her face, but she couldn't recall any safe place to jump — there were no lakes or river crossings the whole distance to O'Hare. A platform suddenly appeared in front of her, populated with more shocked, blurred faces, followed by open space again. Throughout the previous two minutes she had thought only of the next immediate goal, and now, with some time to finally think, nothing came to her. Like a shark, though, she had to keep moving, or die. Could I climb to the roof? she wondered. There were no more tunnels on the route, at least until the end of the line, she recalled with a twinge of dread, But once out — what then?

  Grabbing the emergency handle again, she lifted her body up and swung her right leg outside the car. Finding purchase on the rippled aluminum exterior, she levered herself up higher as her right hand groped about for a hold on the top of the car. Discovering a sharp lip where the aluminum exterior of the car was crimped to the roof, she grabbed onto it and found she was able to support her weight.

  As she began to swing her left leg out as well, a hard tug on it caused her to lose her footing completely, and she dangled in open space as the steel lip cut into her right hand. Fumbling to regain her holds, Jess found herself feeling more pissed than terrified. Planting her left Fluevog-clad foot onto what she presumed was the face of her moronic "rescuer", she discouraged any further attempts with a satisfying, meaty stomp.

  Clinging to the skin of the car, she noticed the next station quickly approaching and pulled her body closer against the metal. The platform's foot-wide blue safety strip flashed by inches beneath her heels as she felt a series of whacks on her hindquarters that almost knocked her from the train; several surprised commuters on the platform would later discover buttons ripped clean from their jackets.

  The blue strip vanished, replaced by a blur of brown railroad ties set on top of a steep embankment. There would be no jumping off point here. She thought of the small driver's window: whatever was happening in that cab, she would have a better shot at dealing with it from outside than those futilely banging away inside. Slowly, she inched herself forward as the riders inside watched this new development with a mix of horror and disbelief. The rippled surface of the car gave way to the forward set of doors, which lacked any footholds — she would have to swing her way across the four-foot opening. Though her hands were now cramping, the pain was tolerable, considering she was a mere seven feet from her goal — that little driver's window. Letting her feet dangle, she tried to swing, but failing to achieve any momentum, finally resorted to inching her way across the chasm hanging by her cramped, bleeding fingers alone. Reaching over with her right foot, she found support once again, and slid into place hugging the car just in time for arrival at the next station.

  Not wanting to repeat the abuse she received at the last station, Jess tilted her head back and startled the waiting crowd ahead with a shout of "Get BACK!". As they scurried out of the way, she was relieved to feel nothing on her sore rump but the wind.

  Back in the open air, and knowing they were only a few stops from the end of the line, Jess quickly scooted over to the sliding-glass window. Finding no handles on the outside of the glass, she pressed her hand flat against it and slid it open.

  Looking inside, she found Stan still bent over the console, throttle jammed under his torso, a trail of saliva leading from his mouth to a pool near the window. Thinking him dead, she found herself relieved: she was half-expecting to discover a maniacal driver with a death wish. Reaching inside, she grabbed a handful of his denim overalls and pulled his body towards her. As he slid sideways onto the floor, the throttle wound itself back, sending the passengers inside careening against each other in a violent, bruising group hug as the integrated braking system kicked in.

  Jess didn't feel anything, however, being in mid-air and all.

  ~ 4 ~

  The second she was thrown, time slowed to the point where she looked back upon the train, as it slowly receded from her, and believing the driver to be dead, began to worry about his family and how they would handle their loss. A moment later she recalled her own predicament, and snapping her head around, charted her current trajectory down the steep embankment. Time instantly returned, but just as the sound of the buffeting wind again filled her ears, a ripping, popping sensation banished it once more, and she was at peace.

  She was fine, though: she hadn't hit anything, and looking down, was startled to see a body lying in the gully below. Pinned between two clusters of bushes, it was scratched and bloodied, with one arm bent at a grotesque angle. It looked more like a mannequin than a human, and she turned away with disgust, only then realizing the clothing seemed strangely familiar. Her gaze returned to it, and she thought to herself: That's my body down there, with a certain measure of dispassion that was almost casual.

  Jess herself, however, that is, her consciousness, appeared to be just dandy. Confused, she took inventory, and found she had retained all her limbs with nary a scratch to be found. She even wore the same clothing a
s the body below, only perfectly clean and unbloodied. Her attention was drawn away from this self-evaluation by the wailing of multiple sirens: it seemed every squad, ladder truck and ambulance throughout the city had been activated and summoned to the scene.

  Two police cruisers, zig-zagging through traffic on the highway beside the tracks, skidded to a stop sideways, blocking all four lanes. Three burly cops emerged and ambled over a four-foot chain-link fence separating the highway from the CTA right-of-way before climbing up the embankment towards the train. By this time, many of the passengers had disembarked onto the narrow path beside the train, some of them shouting and pointing towards where Jess' body lay. The officers, ignoring their pleas, shoved past them, one boarding the train while the other two carefully approached the front of the lead car with guns drawn. Observing no activity within, one officer holstered his pistol and climbed up to peer into the windshield. After ruling out terrorism in favor of a medical emergency, they radioed a request for the jaws of life, and only then did one of the cops take any interest in her body.

  Keeping his gun drawn, the officer skidded down the embankment into the gully to where her body was sprawled out in the brush. Holstering his gun, he scrambled towards it, issuing a "Jesus" between heavy breaths. He had seen enough dead bodies to know what they look like.

  The EMT's, close behind, maneuvered a stretcher through the craggy path from the highway to her body. Jess found it slightly amusing how much of a fuss was being made — she wasn't down there, she was up on the tracks, and felt just fine. More than fine. Taking a moment, she examined this new state of hers. Where a moment before she was full of adrenaline, in pain, drenched with sweat, and almost sick to her stomach, she now had none of those concerns. She felt calm, had no pain or nausea, no worry, and nary a drop of sweat. Everything was just grand.

  Something began to take hold in her consciousness, however, something just on the tip of her tongue — something she was forgetting, as if she had just awoken from sleep with a fading swirl of emotion, and was desperately trying to remember the dream from which it sprang. Then it hit her, and in an instant she became aware of the strangeness of feeling absolutely no concern for her body below. She needed that body to live, and right now she wasn't alive — not in the conventional sense of the word. Apparently, she reasoned, she was dead.

  Panic set in as she tried to move closer to that pale, mangled contraption that was her body below. The effort was made more difficult with the discovery that she wasn't exactly walking along the railroad bed; she was gliding over it instead, and had difficulty controlling her movement. Her anxiety increasing, she desperately began to swim down through the air towards her body. As she painstakingly closed the distance, she overheard the cop tell the arriving EMT: "Take your time, she's gone" — sending her further into despair.

  A few feet away now, she felt a revulsion towards this twisted wreck; there was no way she wanted to go back in that, but the thought of losing the rest of her life terrified her more than the disgust she felt. Positioning herself a few inches over her body as best she could, she closed her eyes, and willed herself to feel her legs, arms, torso, head — anything to reconnect to her human senses again. Within a few moments, a small tug at the back of her head burgeoned into a violent pull as she was yanked downward — head first, then torso, then limbs — and snapped back into place with a thunk, like a ping-pong ball caught in a vacuum cleaner.

  As her previous state of pure consciousness solidified within her body, she felt every cell of her being newly burdened with a distinct weight and thickness, a heaviness, a substantiality, a humanity; and it was, frankly, disgusting to her. This process of unification was accompanied by numerous high-pitched, descending tones, reminiscent of a poorly auto-tuned song, which finally resolved into a chorus of shouting voices and sirens.

  And then came the pain.

  ~ 5 ~

  "Welcome back, sweetie."

  Her eyes slowly opened, and after a few blinks, the cloudy haze cleared to reveal the smiling face of a nurse in blue scrubs.

  "I'll be right back, don't you go nowhere," she ordered, quickly shuffling out of the room. Jess could feel the pain lingering just behind whatever painkillers she had been given; a dull ache that she knew would catch fire once the drugs wore off. Bandages covered her arms and legs, and a sling supported her right arm, but she found, with relief, no Plaster of Paris anywhere.

  The nurse reappeared as promised, joined by three doctors: an older man followed by two young interns — one male, one female — who stood behind him like children hiding from an overly-affectionate aunt. The elder doctor approached and flicked a light back and forth between her eyes.

  "Good evening, young lady. You're back from your trip, eh?"

  She tried to muster a "Guess so", but her throat and mouth felt terribly dry, so it came out more like "Guckth...".

  "Do you know where you are? Do you know what happened to you? And who you are, for that matter?"

  "Uh, ahem, yeah...train wreck," she managed, trying to force a swallow.

  "Well now, you're not that bad off, considering," the doctor replied, misunderstanding her answer. In the meantime, the male intern, overcoming his fear, walked around him to stand at the other side of her bed.

  "You expired, you know," he informed her, a touch of amazement in his voice.

  What a strange, rude, word, Jess thought to herself, Talking about me like sour milk. She frowned at him, as did the older doctor before quickly changing the subject.

  "Ah, how are you feeling...any pain?"

  "Huh uh."

  "Well you rest up now, we'll check back on you in a bit." He rose, noted something on her chart, and after instructing the nurse to provide only ice chips, left with the female intern in tow.

  The young man lingered, however, staring at her awkwardly as he backed away towards the door. It seemed he wanted to say something, but after a long moment, he turned and left as well.

  She dozed on and off for a few minutes, or a few hours — she couldn't tell which — until awakening to a visitor entering the room.

  "Hey, Messy! They said you were in and out, you in?"

  "Gavin," she squeaked, turning her head to see him. He giggled, and grabbing a styrofoam coffee cup from the table next to her bed, offered her some partially-melted ice chips. Taking them, she smiled an icy smile at him.

  "Lady, don't you worry, I made it clear to them that there is no dying in here for you today, so you got zero worries, I got you covered."

  "What happened?" she whispered, wondering how much he knew of what she remembered.

  "You crawled out on a train, you damn fool! Trying to be all Wonder Woman or something. Don't ya remember? Then they shut down the power and you went all Air Jess." He whistled while drawing an arc in the air with his finger, and punctuated it with a Pop, eliciting a wince from her.

  "You got a dislocated shoulder, three bruised ribs, and of course this," he said, sprinkling his fingers back and forth over her bandaged body, "...this is all branchy and scratchy and just plain ol' crazy, but other than that, you're all good."

  She realized from his description that they didn't know she had stopped the train, or that she had in fact...died...for a few minutes, at least.

  ~ 6 ~

  After the short visit, she slept fitfully through the evening and into the night, as vivid dreams of the entire eight-minute drama replayed in her mind. In some variations the train derailed, in others it barreled into the platform at the end of the line, but in none of them did things turn out as well as they had in reality. What did remain constant in each dream version was the moment of impact, when she was torn from her body, and into that place of peace and detached observation.

  Shooting pains in her side dragged her consciousness to the surface, and groaning, she opened her eyes to find it was 3:30 AM. She lay there half-asleep, the jolts of pain intensifying as the meds slowly wore off. Finally, unable to take any more, her hand began to reach for the call butt
on, when with a thunk, the discomfort instantly receded.

  The pain was replaced with a gentle tickling sensation, which started at the base of her spine and worked its way up, spreading across her back. It then morphed into a soft, fuzzy feeling, whereupon it changed again into something more metallic and sharp, but not painful. The relief from the pain was so great that instead of analyzing these strange new sensations, she simply enjoyed them as they rose through her body and floated away.

  Gradually becoming aware of a slow, methodic, deep breathing, she remembered her single-occupancy room, and upon opening her eyes, was annoyed to discover that not only had she been moved while asleep, but that she was now in the lower portion of a bunk bed, with another patient sleeping above her! Her annoyance turned to bewilderment as she looked around and found herself actually lying on the floor underneath a single bed. She slowly rolled out from underneath, careful not to wake the person above, and stood, only to gaze down upon her own sleeping form.

  This must be the most realistic dream I have ever had, she thought. She hadn't had one like this since her teens, when she read a book on lucid dreaming and started experiencing a few on occasion, but she soon lost the ability as her interest in the subject waned.

  The strange thing about this dream was her ability to ponder it — her previous lucid dreams quickly collapsed, awakening her, if she actively thought about them too much. But not this time — she even said to herself I am asleep and dreaming, and I am fully aware of this, yet the dream kept progressing without any dissolution.

  Well this is certainly new and unique, she marveled, and she decided to see what else she could get away with in this dream state before it all inevitably fell away from her. Turning away from her slumbering body, she glided — she noted she could glide in this dream — towards the door. Grabbing for the handle, she felt only the sensation of metal, as her hand, finding no purchase, passed right through it.