The boy who had grown accustomed to the vigilant neon of an unsleeping city found himself hesitating.
Too many hours on the road and epic quantities of sugar for the win, he told himself. Despite the unusual feeling in his stomach—fear perhaps, but somehow familiar—he had already pumped the gas. He couldn’t begin his new life by stealing from countryside merchants.
He pushed open the door, feeling the immediate rush of dry, stale heat as it escaped into the winter air. A bell jingled on the handle, but other than that and the low hum of the refrigerators along the store’s far walls, the store was unusually quiet. The overhead lights continued to flicker on and off and grew more erratic every second. In the alternating moments of darkness and light, accented only by the iridescent glow of the glass-paneled refrigerators, Emmett’s eyes had trouble adjusting as he craned his neck to look around the aisles.
“Um, hello?” Emmett said hesitantly. An unsettling silence responded. “Hello?” he called out again. “Anyone there?”
Assuming that the station’s employee simply couldn’t hear him—perhaps he was in the restroom or in a rear stock room—Emmett cautiously approached the empty counter. He saw that the cash register was closed and the small security video screen behind it was flickering in sync with the lights.
A metallic crash like a trashcan being knocked over rang from outside. Emmett jumped around to face the door as his hand instinctively went over his chest as if to calm his racing pulse. Nothing.
Again with the bear-gator. Yet the fear was back, this time palpable in the flickering isolation. Again there was the oddly familiar sensation, as if some irretrievable memory were teasing him at the edge of his awareness.
Okay, what movie am I flashing back to?
He was quite certain he had never been to Florida before, and he had certainly never pulled off the interstate in the dead of night at a creepy gas station. Nevertheless, he felt the maddening awareness that comes with almost-captured recognition—just beyond the reach of his probing finger tips, but close enough to smell and even taste, its contents brimming with recollections awaiting remembrance.
Something isn’t right, he admitted to himself as he quickly moved up the center aisle to the door. He felt an irrepressible urgency to leave—from what he could not remember, and yet dawning somewhere in his mind was a terrible memory. He shivered with a visceral sensation of panic, a deeply ingrained demand to take flight. It was the kind of panic that shockingly focuses all of the senses, so that a twig snapping in the distance becomes a violent crashing against the ears. Emmett reached for the door and pushed it open, cursing the bell that clanged into the empty night.
As the winter air assaulted his exposed face, he stepped outside and felt the door close behind him. He saw nothing unusual. His car was parked where he left it, and the light over the gas pump continued to flicker. Yet something felt very wrong.
This is the part in the movie when you are yelling at the idiot to run!
His body reacted strongly with sudden trembling; the hair along his skin raised with urgency. He felt like a prey animal being pursued unseen. He wanted to call out, but it felt like his throat was collapsing. His feet would not allow him to take another step forward. Waves of crippling anxiety washed over him, holding him in place. In his mind, he told himself to move.
Get back in the car!
He felt a rush of cold air drown his lungs as he tried to run. His body didn’t budge. The fear became even more terrifying because he could do nothing but bear witness to whatever it wanted to show him.
And then fear, imageless and without context, suddenly took form. Ten or so paces away, standing between Emmett and his car, stood a shadow—no, darkness that separated from shadow. He had not seen it there a moment before; it had appeared during the time between the blinking of his eyes. Rising distinctly from the darkness, as if the form were crouched and was slowly beginning to rise, was an unnaturally pale, white nude form that was vaguely human in appearance, though scarred and riddled with bruises and tears in its skin. As its long, thin legs and arms stretched to the full extension of its body, it turned its shoulders upright to lift a pale, gaunt neckline. The last to come into view was its smooth, hairless skull crisscrossed with pulsing red veins that seemed to glow against the bone-white surface.
Black eyes on either side of a thin slit for a nose turned to look at him. The figure’s face was scarred with a stretched, exaggerated expression that caused Emmett’s stomach to lurch with rising bile. The figure hissed suddenly, flicking a long, coarse tongue out and between its thin, pale lips. Memory failed him, and his mind was at once both silent and screaming with every word for danger it knew.
Do something!
His body finally responded with an uncoordinated lurch forward. The figure lunged at that same moment like a pouncing predator, responding with a guttural, bestial mixture of growls and snarls. Emmett’s legs tore into the ground as he wrenched his body away, flailing as much as running down the gravel road back toward the interstate.
Without chancing to look over his shoulder, he veered to his right by instinct, away from the road and back toward the gas station. His hands flailed open as his arms pumped, and a small part of his mind registered that he had dropped his keys in the confusion.
But fear was in control, and his instincts took him in an arch behind the rear of the gas station. The forest surrounding the station awaited him in the distance, and seeking suitable darkness to hide from … whatever it was that he was running from, Emmett pumped his legs with abandon. The grasses were ankle-high, the ground soft and yielding like slow-drying mud that seemed to conspire to slow him down. Thorns and thickets scathed against his jeans and his hoodie as he tore deep into the underbrush.
After several moments of running that felt like hours, he felt his limbs aching and his chest heaving with exhaustion. He could think of nothing else but to hide, and he bounded headfirst into a line of tall trees ahead of him, and with some measure of determination chanced a fleeting glance behind him.
In the inky blackness, he did not see his pursuer, and only by a narrowness in his eyes could he see the dark shape of the gas station behind him and the gravel road back to the interstate somewhere just beyond the store. He caught his breath with great effort and held it, listening in the night’s silence for any notice of the figure that chased him. Only a single crow responded with a bleating caw, followed by a rustle of flapping wings as the bird took flight somewhere overhead.
What the hell am I going to do?
His mind raced, a thousand discordant possibilities and thoughts fighting for his focus. Emmett had no idea what that thing might have been, and yet maybe he should have known, should have remembered.
In the darkness, still and silent as the trees themselves, he saw the figure in the clearing moving toward him—a hundred or so yards away, nearly a third of the distance from the gas station to the edge of the tree line where Emmett hid.
The figure stared directly at him, and though concealed mostly by shadow and the darkness of a moonless sky, it had clearly targeted Emmett. It closed the distance in the breath of a moment, moving with an inhuman speed, all but flying across the ground. The rush of fear was so great that Emmett could taste the bile rising violently in his throat as he staggered in terror backward and lost all feeling in his extremities.
The figure drew to within an arm’s length. It reached one hand to Emmett’s face, a hand that narrowed with bent and gnarled fingers that looked more like misshapen claws. Emmett’s mind pleaded for him to flee, and yet so stricken with terror, he could not will himself to move. The creature reached Emmett’s throat immediately, suddenly, and, closing around the flesh with a choking grip, pulled Emmett close to it.
At once, the world around him—the mundane, listless world he had left behind and the unknown, new world he had just discovered—fell away, consumed by a torrent of agony. It was as if fire were feasting on his flesh. It was a pain of the most unnatural and unbea
rable kind, in which a human feels life being ripped away.
The creature tightened its grip on Emmett’s neck. He struggled to breathe. The pain burned under the creature’s grasp, and it didn’t die away. It was seeping into his tissues and deeper into his muscles—first at the base of his neck and creeping outward toward his collarbone and abdomen. His body could not endure the violation, and every aspect of his mind still able to focus cried out for release … or a quick death.
He looked at the monster—it could be called nothing else. It spread its wide lips once again in a feral grin to reveal rows of jagged fangs. It seemed drunk on Emmett’s fear and delighted that its prey finally looked upon it. Emmett willed his body to fight back, desperately urging his body to fight or to flee, but his limbs would not respond. He could do nothing but heave uncontrollably, swallowing the earthy, peat-like stench of decay that seemed to wreath the figure like a dense, unseen fog.
With a final choking breath, Emmett meant again to cry out for help, to scream for someone or something. When no words came and his body remained unresponsive, he allowed himself to look directly into the eyes of fear and terror, and in that moment a memory began to unfold somewhere in his mind.
… a river … there were rivers … and there was water. Vast, endless water. Skies pregnant and swollen with storm clouds that rained endlessly … rained for so many days that the waters became endless as the darkness was endless … as dark as the eyes that stared at him … eyes that had seen the rain and the waters … and pain, endless pain … searing and ravaging and burning as the world was rent apart, and into the deepest fissures poured the many waters until nothing on the land remained but the wetness of the earth that had wept for far too long …
Pain.
In the present, in the harsh winter cold, and in the shadow of the deeper forest, Emmett Brennan understood that he was dying. Whatever the creature was, it would penetrate every space within his body and suckle greedily on his very essence. And somehow, Emmett understood that it would not permit him the release of death. He would not die soon.
When will soon be now?
Emmett’s eyes rolled sideways, and if not for the creature’s claws around his throat, he might have shouted a warning to the bronze-skinned, amber-eyed woman he could now see across the field running toward them.
CHAPTER 4
Through his darkening vision, Emmett watched the amber-eyed woman leap through the air. The creature’s grasp around his throat released suddenly, and as the creature spun around, Emmett fell backward. The woman landed on the soft grass only feet from the monster, twirling sideways out of reach of its claws. The creature and woman moved with such swiftness that both were a blur to Emmett’s eyes; the monster brought its rending claws around toward the woman, who spun again in a complete circle, pirouetting out of reach with startling speed.
She was a young woman with dark, flawless skin, with long brown hair tied back behind her head and an athletic, toned body dressed in form-fitting black clothes that all but concealed her in shadow. Her glittering, round amber eyes lit up the night, meeting Emmett’s for the briefest moment as if to confirm that he was still alive. She nodded at him once with a confident expression, seemingly unafraid of the monster she fought.
Emmett watched, transfixed as her arms, previously tucked close against her, suddenly sprang outward in a flurry of motion. Twin black serpents with glowing black eyes lashed out as she spun twice more away from the creature, striking the creature’s skull with a cracking sound. In response, the creature reared to meet her change of direction. Still she managed to pirouette just outside the danger of its outstretched claws. Just as suddenly, her body contorted and the motion carried her backward again, forcing the creature to double back after her in a maelstrom of movement. Emmett had no time to think before reacting with a forced roll to avoid the creature’s stampede.
Seeing Emmett cower on the ground, the monster turned on him only to have the woman step within reach, as if luring it back toward her. It responded with an anguished cry that mangled the air. The creature crouched low and swiped at her knees, but she easily stepped out of its reach, sweeping upward with a high kick. The creature pounced, sailing toward her, yet just as effortlessly, she thrust both arms outward, dove headfirst to the ground, and tumbled several feet from the monster before rolling onto her feet and continuing her seeming dance.
The woman would step in with a forward slashing motion, her arms whistling as her twin serpents sliced through the silent night’s chill. With the same fluid motion, she would spin to the side with a backhand motion, striking at the creature’s face while remaining just outside of its reach. Emmett could see that she was drawing the monster away. With every twirl, she lashed at the creature’s eyes and face, and with each counter of its claw, she would dance back two or three paces.
There was a sudden explosion of sound somewhere in the forest, a low, booming roar that rocked the trees. The woman reacted first, turning toward Emmett as she lashed across the creature’s face with both serpents.
“Stay down!” she yelled to him.
Another boom shook the earth, and there was yelling somewhere in the distance. A robed figure flew backward through the air out of the forest and crashed down on the ground near where the woman and the creature were still fighting. More screams erupted from the trees as another robed figure ran out and away from the fighting, pursued by a blond-haired man with an angular jaw whose open palms were pointed out before him.
The blond-haired man stopped and pointed one finger at the fleeing figure in the distance. Pursing his lips together, he produced a shrill, bleating whistle. A clear, rippling force rushed through the air and lifted the robed figure into the air and flung the figure twenty yards across the clearing.
The robed figure nearest the fighting managed to stand. His middle-aged, pockmarked face scowled at Emmett as he brought his hands up to his chest, motioning as if forming something in the air before him. He was chanting something, his discordant syllables tearing at the very air itself. Emmett watched with horror as the man’s face began to contort, the features stretching as if made of hot wax. The man thrust his hands toward Emmett, and a globe of shadowy substance hurtled toward him.
Emmett had little time to react as the blond-haired man sprinted between Emmett and the oncoming darkness. Turning to face it with his raised palm before him, he released a single note of harmonious, pure sound that seemed to dissipate the shadows inches before they reached him. The robed figure had already renewed his chanting, but the blond-haired man raised his arms out and produced a reverberating, cavernous note that flung the robed figure high into the air. He fell to the ground again upside down, landing awkwardly on his neck.
The woman was still fighting with the creature. She bled in several places where its claws had torn across her tight black clothes. She spun back out of the creature’s attack and brought both her serpents across its eyes, spraying what must have been its blood across the ground. The creature pitched forward and screamed, the sound nearly bursting Emmett’s ears.
The woman spun around one final time, her serpents wrapped around her arms as she grabbed something fastened to her back. Both hands swept upward holding a long staff that pierced through the creature’s chest and out its back. Its claws grasped the shaft protruding from its chest, its mouth agape gurgling oily substances before collapsing forward to the ground.
His apparent saviors exchanged nods with each other as each surveyed the area. The woman knelt over the creature’s rapidly decomposing body. A pervasive stench filled the clearing as the creature’s form bubbled and dissolved into the ground.
Whether it was to run back to his car or to run into the forest, Emmett did not know. But he tried to stand and immediately felt an overwhelming wave of heavy nausea bear down through his head and pitch his body forward. His vision blurred as bile rose in his throat, and he felt the torrent of pain in his neck from where the creature had strangled him. He ground his teeth and will
ed himself to remain conscious.
“Hold on, mate,” he heard a curiously accented voice say. The man was looking at him even as he was checking the nearest robed figure for a pulse. Emmett tried to focus through the pain by staring at his rescuer: effortless blond hair, clear green eyes, and the strong jaw and nose that gave one the appearance of having been lovingly chiseled from granite. Broader and taller than Emmett, he wore a well-fitted pinstripe shirt and slacks that were smudged with mud.
Emmett tried to breathe deeply and slowly through his mouth. He felt a sharp, biting pain in his chest as he did so and, after holding his breath, suddenly gasped for more air. Pulling down his hoodie’s zipper, he saw his neck was covered in black, rotting gouges, tortured and disease-laden skin cracking off along its torn edges. It looked as if his neck had been burned severely and deeply, and that now the skin, still alive somehow, was dying anew from the sickest sort of infection.
“All right?” the blond-haired man asked as he crouched down in front of Emmett. “My name’s Keiran. Is that your car at the station, then?”
Startled, Emmett looked back at the woman who had walked over to the other robed figure lying motionless further away.
“Huh? What?” he sputtered.
“Is that your car at the station?” the young man repeated, pointing in the direction of the gas station when Emmett did not respond.
Emmett mumbled something and stared blankly back at the man, feeling the pain coursing through his body. I’m in shock. This is what shock feels like.
The young man waited a moment before leaning toward him. “Is that your car, mate?” he asked more pointedly and slower, as if to focus Emmett only on his words.
The stranger’s green eyes directly met Emmett’s gaze, and in that brief moment Emmett saw a confidence in him, the same confidence he had seen in the woman.
My car. Low on gas. Emmett’s mind began to regain its focus.
The Waking Dreamer Page 4
