by Elle Casey
“Oh my god!” I screamed. My voice sounded like it was stuck inside a tin can, which it pretty much was considering what I was driving that day. “I’m in the water!”
I said it and then realized it was true, in that order; somehow my rational-thinking brain knew what was happening before my conscious mind did.
I knew exactly where I was then, as the reality of my situation sank in. I was in the small cove of water that I normally drove over at least twice a day, sometimes more often. Never had I stopped on that bridge or even given much thought to what was there below me as I used it to cross from one Key island to another. Now I was literally in it. Floating, but not for long; my car was quickly filling with cold, black salt water. The beams of light from my headlights were going wavy as they sank below the surface.
“Help!” I screamed, banging on my side window. “Help! Someone help me!”
But there was no one there to help me. The sound of that giant truck—not an alien spaceship—had faded into the distance. Who knows if the driver had even seen me at all? I was all alone, floating out to sea, slowly sinking into the water.
I scrambled to free myself from the seatbelt, but it was stuck. Screaming in frustration, I yanked on it over and over, but it wouldn’t give.
I had been meaning to have someone look at it for me, to fix this stickiness I’d sensed in the buckle, for weeks, maybe months; but I’d been too busy working and napping to do it.
I hated myself in that moment for being so lazy. To think I’d die from my own laziness—it was too ironic to bear. I’d always thought the safest place for me to be was in my bed, and now it turned out it was going to kill me. I swore if I ever got out of this alive, I’d stop napping as a hobby and find something else to do with my free time.
Pulling on the top part of my seatbelt, I was able to get enough slack in it to pull the waist part out. With about ten inches of space between the belt and my body, I was able to wiggle out of it. I ended up with two pulled muscles in my arms and a cramp in my back, but I was free.
The water had reached the level of my seats. I was drenched from the waist down, and it was pitch dark because my headlights had stopped working.
I pressed my hands against my side window. It felt like ice. My breaths were coming quick, shallow, as panic came again. I was free but not free. Able to move, but trapped. The car bumped into something and lurched to a halt. Then it began to turn. Somehow I knew that as bad as my situation was, it was about to get worse. I had to get out of there. Water was coming in faster, and I was going to run out of air very soon.
I grabbed the door handle and tried to push the door open, but the pressure outside made it impossible to even budge it. I screamed and pushed and screamed some more, but it was all wasted effort.
“Try the window!” I yelled to myself, slowly going crazy as death knocked on the outside of the car. The sound of my vehicle moving along the ocean floor reminded me of a submarine.
As I frantically pushed the automatic window button, I took a deep breath and held it. I had a feeling the water would rush in and steal all my air before I’d have a chance to grab any of it for myself. I sat there for three precious seconds, waiting for the window to go down and all the air to disappear, but it never happened.
“Damn you, electric windows!” I screamed. I punched the window but only succeeded in smashing two of my knuckles. I cried in pain as I slumped down into the passenger seat.
“Help, I need help,” I whimpered, feeling all around me for my purse. If I could just find my phone, I could call someone, I thought.
I felt the material of it, the comforting heavy canvas, but just as I laid a hand on it, the car lurched. And then up became down and down became up. The entire vehicle flipped over and I fell up, banging my head and shoulders on the roof of the car.
My purse disappeared somewhere in the chaos.
The car rolled again.
More water came in and splashed all over.
“HELP ME!” I screamed in a voice I’ve never heard myself use before. It was filled with the awareness that I was about to die, with the knowledge that no one would ever find me as my car and I tumbled out to sea.
Help her.
My heart skipped a beat as the memory washed over me. I suddenly recognized the voice from my dream. The voice that was coming out of my mouth now was the voice that had spoken to me last night in my sleep.
The water rose to my neck, and I kicked out in fear, hitting one of the front seats.
Help her. Go get something to break the glass and help her!
The memory of that voice and those words overwhelmed me. “It’s me!” I shouted to no one. “It’s me! I’m the girl!” My heart raced triple-time as I realized I had the means to escape this mess, if only I could find it in time.
I took a deep breath and dove under the water, feeling around my car to find the glove compartment. My foot had caught the headrest of one of the seats, so I swam down to that area and found a door. Feeling along the edge of it, using the inner handle to pull me along, I came to the steering wheel. From there I could reach over and open the glove compartment.
I was worried about all of its contents floating out and disappearing into the void, so I only cracked it open. My lungs were burning with the effort of holding my breath, but I couldn’t take the chance of stopping now. The car was still moving and could flip again at any time, and now I had the small door open, everything inside it exposed.
I let go of the steering wheel and kicked hard, for some reason expecting to have all this freedom to move. The top of my foot smacked against the window, sending blinding sparks of pain up my leg.
I cried out and sent a stream of precious air bubbles up to the surface.
Using the glove compartment as a handle, I pulled myself toward it, mindful of my now-aching foot. My free hand felt inside and, after pushing a soggy owner’s manual out of the way, closed around the hard metal object that the voice in my dreams had told me to find for the girl.
I pushed up to the top of the car and found just a few inches of air left. I took three long breaths before I dunked my head below the surface again. Feeling my way to the driver’s side window, I placed the device against it and waited.
I realized then that I had no idea how to work it. I was going to die because I hadn’t bothered to even look at the thing before I’d thrown it into my purse.
The agony of my regret was almost too much to bear. I started to freak out, and accidentally sucked in some water.
I started having a seizure. I’m not sure that it was an official, medical seizure, but my body was thrashing all around and I could no longer tell where I was. It was dark and cold and my chest was on fire, the lack of oxygen sending me over the edge.
And then the voice came.
Put it on the window and push.
My struggles ceased, and I floated to the top of the car. There was still an inch of air left, and I gulped as much of it as I could before I let myself be swallowed by the sea again.
I wasn’t alone. The voice was with me again. It brought me a sense of peace that made it possible for my brain to start working again.
My hand moved slowly into position, the water making it hard to maneuver as quickly as I wanted to. I felt with my free hand to be sure I was actually resting the puncher on the glass.
Hurry. Push hard. Wait until you feel the kick, and then push the rest of the glass out and swim away. Hurry! You don’t have much time left!
I did what the voice told me to do. I pushed so hard it floated me in the opposite direction.
Use your feet for leverage! Push!
I put one foot on the opposite door; the other floated freely, too damaged to be of any help. My hand trembled with the force it was using to punch the glass free.
Just when I thought I was going to have to give up and sink to the bottom of the ocean, the glass gave way.
There was a muffled thump, and then the car moved, floating sideways, sinking even fart
her down.
I pushed the sheet of fractured glass out of the way and wiggled through, desperate to breathe, desperate to rid my lungs of the carbon dioxide that was suffocating me.
A stream of bubbles left my mouth without conscious effort. I couldn’t tell which end was up, but my body began to float and I followed its direction. Within seconds my head was breaching the surface of the water and I could breathe again.
Waves crashed over me and salt blistered my lips, but I was alive. I was alive!
The lights from a nearby home running a generator guided me to the shore. It didn’t take me long at all; my car had sunk in less than ten feet of water. I slogged up onto the small beach held together by a mass of tangled mangrove roots and sat down for a few minutes to gather my thoughts and just breathe. My lungs had never felt anything so glorious as the air that went into them that night.
I tried not to think about it, but the memories of that voice, that person in the sinking car with me telling me what to do, wouldn’t leave. Who was she?
I knew that she was a girl. And I knew that she sounded exactly like I did whenever I listened to myself on a video. Could it have been me? But how had I known that I would need to escape through glass earlier today? How was that even possible?
I made it into town by limping and hitchhiking. The woman who picked me up toward the end of my journey was a nurse headed into work after being paged for emergency staffing purposes, and she made sure I was given a quick pass through triage directly into the ER.
Every single person who came in to see me while I was there—and there were a lot of curious medical professionals around that night—said it was a miracle that I’d survived. My foot was broken in two places and my hand in three. I needed ten stitches for the cut above my right eyebrow that I hadn’t even realized I’d suffered until someone pointed it out to me. One of my ribs was broken and my left knee swollen.
My boss came to see me the next day, just before I was discharged. When he asked me how I got out of the car, I told him that I’d used the glass-puncher that the Pep Boys guy had given me.
He laughed and said that he’d always just thrown them away.
I smiled and said, “Don’t do that anymore, okay?”
I didn’t tell him or anyone else about the voice in my head, the one that had told me to help the girl. Because I realized, after all the confusion cleared away and I’d had some time to think, who it was who’d saved my life that day.
It was me.
That voice was my own.
My name is Kelli Erickson, and I am a dreamer and a telepath. I can communicate with my future self, with my past self, and with other telepaths who know how to send and receive. But that’s a story for a different day; today, I have a nap to take, and these days, I don’t consider naps to be the work of lazy people. Today I consider them going to work.
About Elle Casey
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Elle Casey is an American girl living in southern France with her husband, three children, and several furry creatures. She writes in a variety of genres, including YA Fantasy, YA Action/Adventure, Sci-Fi, New Adult Romance, and Adult Contemporary Romance. She’s a little on the wild side, usually making people laugh, and always in the mood for adventure. There’s not much in this world that she loves more than reader interaction, so feel free to drop her a line.
Visit her at www.ElleCasey.com.
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Tortured
by Nicolas Wilson
One: Peter Ferguson, HR DivHead
I woke to the sensation of hands at my throat, and the panic that brings. I thrashed and kicked to free myself before my eyes shot open, ripping me from my troubled sleep. The hands remained, crushing my windpipe. They were my own, and I forced my grip to slacken until I could breathe again.
My fiancée, Cassie, stirred in the chaos. “You okay?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “That nightmare.”
“The alien. Sam.” She winced, and I could see it, even in the dark. “The one you tortured.”
Her tone cut me. “Yes,” I whispered. She couldn’t understand why I’d done it. She wanted to. But every time I tried to explain it, she came away from it a little less in love with me. It’s why I’d been keeping the details of the dream mostly to myself.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked, in a tone that told me she’d rather go back to sleep. But it was the third time this week that I’d woken her. I didn’t want to talk about it, but maybe I needed to.
“I’m afraid,” I told her.
“The captain put you in the infirmary,” she said.
“I know. But I tortured his girlfriend.” I touched her cheek. “I can’t blame him for his reaction.”
“I can,” she said huffily. But we both knew it wasn’t that she suddenly agreed with what I’d done, she just didn’t agree with him, either.
“But it’s not him I’m afraid of,” I said. “He… said his piece, even if he said it with his fists. No. I’m afraid of the alien.” But I wasn’t afraid of her because she was alien—I’m not a xenophobe—so I corrected, “The telepath.”
“Why is that scary?” Cassie asked.
“We still don’t know the limits of it. She says that on her planet they don’t force people to do what they want; she’s not even sure if they could. But even if that’s true, we still don’t know for sure that she can’t control humans. We can’t know. I don’t think I’m having nightmares. I think… I think she’s trying to kill me telepathically. Trying to make me strangle myself in my sleep.”
“Have you tried to talk to anyone?” she asked.
“The captain would have me filleted for even bringing her up. The wound is too fresh, too raw. And SecDiv…”
“I was thinking more along the lines of someone from PsychDiv.”
“Oh. No. I…” She thought I was crazy. That hurt my pride, but I also couldn’t really argue the point. It was a perfectly valid theory. “Hadn’t thought about that.”
“Well, you should. Because if anyone can tell you if your brain is being tinkered with, it’s them.”
“And,” I admitted, “if I’m just being crazy, they’d be able to help me with that, too.” I was dangerously close to pouting. Maybe I just needed to go back to sleep. “I’ll call the doctor in the morning.” I rolled over far enough to kiss her forehead. “Goodnight.”
Two: Vipisana “Sam” Samatha, refugee from the planet Abhijñ
I couldn’t sleep. Watching through Peter’s eyes as he kissed his wife goodnight didn’t soothe me. I wanted to understand why he would do what he had, or perhaps—since that seemed adequately explained by fear and paranoia—how. Were all humans capable of that level of cruelty? Was I surrounded by monsters?
Every time I closed my eyes, I re-lived it; I could once again feel the cold, mechanical hands of the ship, the Nexus; I experienced, as if for the first time, the pain I had felt when it probed the holes it had bored in my flesh. I didn’t blame Haley, the ship’s computer: she was under orders from Pete. Oddly, I felt it more strongly now than I did then. While it was actually happening, I had barely registered the pain and torment; I was too obsessed over Drew, and whether or not he would survive his wounds.
He did. And when he retook his post as captain, he beat the living hell out of Peter. I watched it happen, through both their eyes. At first it felt cathartic, but I quickly understood that it was a balm for a burn: it helped, but it wasn’t a cure.
Perhaps most frighteningly of all, I wondered, too, if Peter was correct. I had watched as he’d choked himself, watched as Drew beat him. But perhaps I’d done more than watch. I never made a conscious decision to push either man to violence. But I didn’t understand my effect on a human mind any better than the Nexus’s scientists did. What if I was controlling them, however subtly? What if Peter was right?
The thought terrif
ied me more than the ship’s instruments had when they cut through my skin, or the electricity that was used to burn my muscles until all I could do was cry. What if I was manipulating them—maybe all of them? What if Drew had never wanted to share his quarters with me? Or his bed?
I couldn’t lie there any longer, wondering if I was even welcome, so I kicked out of bed violently enough that Drew stirred. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “I need to take a walk, to clear my head.”
“Sure you don’t want company?” he asked.
“It’s not that kind of problem. I need space.” I kissed him on the forehead. “Thanks for understanding.”
“Let me know if you change your mind,” he said. I think he was extra concerned, because it wasn’t the first late-night stroll I had taken. And some of the others I’d taken while sleepwalking. Maybe it was from the insomnia, I couldn’t guess, but I’d had entire conversations with members of the crew that I later couldn’t remember, including, apparently, one that Sasha, out of Engineering, had interpreted as flirtatious. She’d admitted it to Drew, because she didn’t want him to think that she was trying to steal me away.
I was concerned, too. If I could unconsciously converse with crewmembers, or walk the ship, could I unconsciously try to make a man kill himself, too?
That question kept me up all night. I couldn’t sleep, even after my walk.
More than once I reached out to Peter’s mind. He was dreaming of me, dreaming I was forcing him to slice through his wrists with a scalpel. I tried to force the me in his dream to stop, or to get his dream-self to stop, but in the end all I could do was watch. I wanted to take it as a comfort that I couldn’t even control his unconscious mind. But all it really meant was that I wasn’t consciously aware of how to do it. And worse, it underscored the fact that I wasn’t sure I actually wanted his suffering to stop.
I kissed Drew when he left in the morning for a meeting. I tried to take a nap once he was gone, but I couldn’t shake Peter’s dream, couldn’t stop obsessing over it. So I decided to find someone to talk to.
