Waking the Dreamer (Transhuman)

by Andy Kaiser

  “Sounds boring. What does that even mean?”

  “I have no idea. But the place is close. About a mile from here.”

  “Can you get directions?”

  “Rock on.” Zack bent over the phone.

  I was getting excited again. We had a place. A name. I didn't know what Nyhill Industries did, but right now I didn't care. The name was close enough to Camp Nyhill. Though, I realized, this was yet another way in which Eena had hidden something from us.

  “You know what this means?” I said.

  “Sure. There's no Camp Nyhill. Eena was lying to us!”

  “Zack.”

  “Well, what do you want me to say? That even if she was lying to us, she maybe had a good reason and that she really does need our help?”

  “Yeah. That sounds about right.”

  Guided by Zack's cellphone, we pushed our way through the forest towards Nyhill Industries.

  Chapter 23

  Nyhill Industries was a dark building, a couple stories tall and really wide. There was a small parking lot off to the side. Weak floodlights illuminated parts of the parking lot and what looked like a front entrance to the building, a set of extremely tall double-doors covered with thick, black glass.

  Zack and I crouched in the woods surrounding the building. We faced the front doors.

  The rest of the building was also dark. There were windows, but all of them were tiny, horizontal slits cut into the sides of the building. If lights were on inside, we couldn't tell. All the windows looked tinted, or maybe they had blinds on their other sides.

  “Is this the place?” I whispered. I saw no one else except for Zack, but we were hiding in the bushes in the middle of the night, only fifty feet or so from the building. It seemed that whispering was appropriate.

  We saw no signs. There were no address numbers or anything that said what this building was. But Zack's cellphone showed us that the building's shape matched what was on the satellite map.

  “It's gotta be,” he whispered back. “This is definitely Nyhill Industries.”

  The front doors opened. They moved together and swung out like we were looking at the outside of a high-tech saloon. Bright light streamed from inside the building, plastering a long white glow over the ground where the light escaped from inside. Zack and I hunched lower in the bushes as a person stepped into the glow. The silhouette was tall and slender.

  Talia walked out of the building.

  She was the same as I remembered. Only now, hidden and unmoving, I had a better chance to look at her. Her blond hair was chopped so short it barely moved as she walked towards the parking lot. She moved away from the building's dazzling lights to the weaker glow of a parking lot floodlight, and I clearly saw her face.

  Her skin was tight. It was also too shiny, like the way I got when I put on too much sunscreen. She looked angry. Her eyes were a very light color and looked almost gray in the floodlight. They made her stare appear strange and flat. Almost dead.

  Zack started recording with his cellphone. He shaded the light from the display with one hand, and tracked Talia with the camera, recording the whole time.

  She walked to a car and opened a door. She reached inside and pulled out a duffel bag filled with something heavy. She hung the duffel over one shoulder, and used her arm on that same shoulder to steady the bag on her back as she walked.

  She headed back into the building. Behind her I could see a little of the inside of Nyhill Industries. It looked like a wide hallway with closed doors along each side. The double front doors swung closed after a moment. Zack and I blinked as our eyes tried to adjust back to the semi-darkness.

  “So what's next?” Zack stared at the building intently. He had stopped recording. He began taking a few pictures of the building and the parking lot.

  My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to collapse. I had never done anything like this before. I knew that if anyone saw us, Zack and I would be in very big trouble. I would've been very happy to turn, run and not stop until I got back to Lone Wolf Lodge. Back to the cabin, the lake and the beach. And the sand.

  Eena needs my help.

  I swallowed and tried to sound brave. “Wanna check if the door is unlocked?”

  Zack turned to stare at me. Then he grinned.

  Chapter 24

  We left the bushes and approached the building. Without talking, we avoided the dim yellow circles lighting the ground from the parking lot floodlights. We sneaked up to the building and crouched together against the outside wall, just a few feet from the front doors.

  I glanced at Zack. He stared at the doors fixedly, his body tense, ready to spring in any direction at any time. He looked almost comfortable, like he did this type of thing every day.

  I took a big breath. Then another. Then I told myself not to stall anymore, so I stood up and reached out to open the door. My hand was visibly shaking and I couldn't stop it.

  I grabbed the handle and pushed.

  Nothing.

  I pushed harder. It was locked.

  Zack sighed quietly from my other side. He leaned close to me and whispered, “Try pulling, Sherlock.”

  I pulled and the door opened.

  I kept it open just a crack. I moved closer to peer through it before I decided to open it wider. Then I stepped in. Zack slid through behind me and the door closed with a quiet hiss.

  We were in the middle of a white hallway. It was really clean in here, like someone had just mopped the floor. The place smelled like a swimming pool - the chemical stench of chlorine was everywhere.

  The hallway we were in was narrow. Three doors were on either side of us. Past the doors was a staircase leading down and up. The doors were labeled simply with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. There were no other signs, windows or anything else to tell us anything about this place. Zack pointed his cellphone over the whole place, recording everything.

  Zack pointed at a door and gave me a questioning look.

  We had to find Eena. I nodded at him and we each got on either side of Room 1. I had no plan for what I would say if someone had opened the door from the inside, but at least our positions would give us the opportunity to run.

  I touched the door handle, then slowly wrapped my hand around it. It was the kind where you pushed it down like a lever to open. I held my breath as I carefully pushed the handle. I heard the whisper of the latch mechanics inside as they slid around. Still holding my breath, I slowly opened the door an inch.

  The room inside was dark. I nodded in relief to Zack as I swung the door open. He and I stepped in and I closed the door. Zack shone his cellphone light on the wall until he found a light switch and clicked it on.

  This was a very strange room.

  It looked like a laboratory, until you saw what was actually on the tables.

  There were a lot of laptops scattered all over the room. They fought for desk space with boxes that looked like microwaves, but had really complicated dials and buttons on the front. Cables ran everywhere – over and around the tables, and they snaked into the wall at a handful of points around the room. Everything was turned off.

  That wasn't the strange part. The strange part was all the bones.

  Pale white bones were littered over all the tables, were leaned up against walls and placed on stands. I could identify long leg bones. Ribs, arms, feet, hands and other scattered pieces I couldn't identify.

  Then there were the skulls. They seemed to stare at Zack and me as we stared back in shock and disgust. These weren't the clean, perfect skulls my teacher presented in school. Many were incomplete. Some were missing the lower jaw, or the teeth, or the bones around the eye sockets had been broken away in some terrible accident.

  From what I could tell, all were human.

  This room was a morbid, freakish shrine to the human body, minus the skin and guts.

  I corrected my earlier thought. This place wasn't only strange, but I had the feeling we really shouldn't be here, that we should run and es
cape as fast as possible. But I knew we had to stay because of Eena. Talia had been chasing her and now Talia was in this building somewhere. If Eena had escaped, she would've found me somehow. Since I hadn't seen her, that meant Talia had her. And since Talia was here, Eena had to be here.

  Zack didn't share my feelings. While I stayed by the door, already scared and ready to bolt, he actually walked closer to the bones on the tables and studied them.

  Then he walked over to a laptop and turned it on.

  “Zack, no!” I hissed. He looked at me and shrugged.

  “No one's here,” he whispered.

  My curiosity got the better of me. I moved around so I could see the computer screen. It prompted for a username and a password for access to “DunningNet”.

  Zack was eager to find out more, but neither of us was ready to start guessing passwords on an unknown computer.

  There was no paper in the room. Not that I expected an obvious clue, like a big folder labeled with “Secret plans for kidnapping Eena,” but I hoped for at least something. The few drawers under the desks held only blank tablets, pens, pencils and other boring office supplies.

  We turned out the lights and slid back out of the room.

  Back in the hallway, Zack headed toward the next door.

  “Wait,” I whispered.

  He froze and looked back at me.

  “What's up?” he whispered.

  I realized maybe I could try dreaming my way to Eena. I'd used it before to find my way through the woods at night. By the time I realized what was possible, she'd gotten too far away for me to reach her. But if she was here in this building, trapped either on this floor, or above or below where I stood, I might have a chance of “seeing” her.

  I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate as hard as when I'd been panicked in the forest just hours ago. I pushed out the tentacles and I again “saw” with my dreaming-sight. The hallway I was in lit up in mental shades of gray, and my vision blurred around the edges. A black-and-white, line-art Zack was a few feet off to my side. The invisible wind made his hair dance slightly. He was breathing heavily. He must be more nervous than he looked. Oddly, that made me feel better.

  The ceiling and floor were stopping points - I couldn't see beyond them. I opened my eyes and thought. Maybe the tentacles were like a physical thing and they couldn't go through other objects. They had to go around.

  I gestured to Zack and lead him towards the stairwell at the far end up the hallway. A landing went both up and down - a three-floor building, and we were on the middle floor. I paused near the landing and closed my eyes again. I extended the tentacles up the stairs, and my sight followed them without me needing to move myself. They explored up the stairway, which made one complete rotation before getting to the building's upper level.

  I looked down the hallway of the upper level and saw more doors. It seemed to be a copy of the floor we were currently on.

  As I watched, one of the doors opened. It swung inward. I saw a person pause inside the doorframe, about to step out. A tall, slender person.

  Frightened, I retracted the tentacles quickly. I wrenched my eyes open, feeling the dreaming effort drain my energy, as if I'd just exercised for an hour straight. I felt hungry and sleepy. This night was catching up with me. It would be morning in a few hours.

  I beckoned to Zack.

  “Someone's on that floor,” I said quietly. I pointed above us. “It might be Talia. Let's go down.”

  We moved as quiet as we could and got to the building's lower level. Zack and I stepped off the last stairs and into the hallway. Then we stopped and stared at the scene in front of us.

  I didn't know what Nyhill Industries pretended to be, but I had a word for it.

  It was a prison.

  Chapter 25

  I no longer cared what we saw on the ground floor. I didn't care who or what was on the top floor. I only cared about what I saw now, and that was a hallway containing four locked rooms that looked just like jail cells.

  I guessed that they were locked because each metal door was mounted with high-tech card readers, like I saw in hotels and important rooms at school. As if the locks weren't enough, each door also had a heavy-looking padlock hanging securely around a latch. Video cameras were mounted along the ceiling in front of each room, and each camera pointed into a small viewing window mounted high up on each door.

  Each small window had dark translucent letters stickered over it. Like on the ground floor, this was a simple numbering system, only now it was a letter-number combination. Nearest to Zack and I were N1 and N2, one to our right and the other to our left.

  Staying far back from each door so as not to get in view of its camera, Zack and I stood on tiptoes to look inside N1.

  There was a simple, short bed along one wall. The other wall held a desk. The room was white, clean and deep. Further away was a toilet and a stand-up shower, both half-covered by a curtain that had been pulled aside. There was no dirt on the tile floor, nothing on the desk, and the bed looked like it had just been made and never slept in.

  It was a prison, all right. Nicer than in the movies, but the goal of the room was clearly to keep someone inside and to make sure they couldn't get out.

  Zack walked further down the hallway and I continued to examine the room. He caught my attention seconds later with a frantic gesturing. I hurried over to him. He stood in front of room N3. He was staring through the room's window. He looked scared.

  I stretched up to look, and couldn't hold back the gasp when I saw the view.

  Eena was sleeping inside.

  Then a quiet footstep sounded behind us.

  “Hello,” said a soft, oily voice.

  We both whirled. We were face to face with Talia. She glowered down at us.

  “Run!” I yelled. Zack and I dodged to opposite sides, trying to get around her and sprint down the hallway.

  I was too slow. As I moved, Talia's arm whipped out like a snake and caught my shirt. Her hand curled up into a claw and I felt her nails rake painfully along my back. She was freakishly strong – she lifted me by my shirt and I was left dangling on tiptoe. In one second, I'd been put so off-balance, the most I could do was to struggle to keep from falling.

  Zack was faster. He'd dodged to the side as Talia grabbed me. He ran down the hallway faster than I'd ever see him run before.

  Then he tripped. Zack, the athlete, the gymnastics master, tripped. One leg got tangled with the other and he hit the ground hard. His face slapped into the floor and it looked like it really hurt. He'd been moving so fast, his momentum carried him farther as he slid on the smooth floor and crashed into a wall.

  Zack was into sports. He knew how to make his body work under extreme pressure. He wouldn't just trip like that. It couldn't have been his fault. I looked up at Talia. She was watching Zack with a look of intense concentration on her face, along with a nasty smile.

  It had been her. She must have used the dreaming to trip Zack, to knock his legs out as he ran. He was now struggling to his hands and knees. He stared at the floor, trying to figure out what had just happened. He shook his head.

  “Zack, get out of here! Call the cops!” I yelled.

  I concentrated, gathered the tentacles, and pushed Talia as hard as I could.

  She wasn't expecting that. Her eyes widened and her head flew back and then her whole body was slammed into the wall, just next to the door of Eena's prison.

  Unfortunately, she still kept her claw-grip on my shirt, even as I pushed her away. I heard a tearing noise as I was yanked sideways and thrown onto the floor.

  I heard Zack's pounding up the stairs.

  Before I knew what was happening, I heard a clicking and ratcheting sound above me as Talia did something to the door of Eena's room. Talia opened the door and threw me in. I landed hard, but got up in time to see her as she slammed the door shut again. I heard multiple clicks from the other side as all the locks engaged. I yanked on the door, but it didn't budge. The handle wo
uldn't even turn. I stood tall to look out the window of room N3. I saw Talia jog down the hall, back to the stairs Zack had just taken. She held something to her mouth and spoke. I could barely hear her voice through the heavy door.

  “Camp three is compromised. Start the sequence.”

  Chapter 26

  The bad side: I'd just been thrown into a securely locked room with Eena. The good side: I'd just been thrown into a securely locked room with Eena.

  She'd been sleeping heavily and the noise of the fight woke her up. She pushed herself halfway off the bed and blinked at me. I didn't blame her for being out of it. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been up this late. Or early.

  “Tyler?” She spoke dreamily, her voice still fuzzed with sleep.

  She swung her legs down and her bare feet thumped on the floor. She looked at me closely, and her brain quickly caught up with reality.

  “Tyler!” She was in front of me in a flash, and she hugged me tight. I hugged her back. I was thrilled I'd found her. But part two of the plan – saving her – I hadn't planned yet. It was worse than that, actually: I didn't even have a clue of where to start.

  “What are you doing here?” She looked frantically up at me. “What have you done? How did you find me?”

  “Me and Zack. We went looking for Camp Nyhill, and, well... We're here now. Or I am. I don't know what happened to Zack.” I explained to her what had happened since Talia interrupted us at the lake. She let me talk. Her eyes got bigger and bigger as the story progressed.

  “So you used the dreaming to see in the dark? You attacked Talia?” She paled.

  “Well, yeah. I guess I did.”

  “I've never done that. Never. I didn't think it was allowed. I didn't even think it was possible.”

  She looked at me. She had tears welling up in her eyes.

  I was more confused than ever. “But isn't that what you wanted me to learn? Why did you tell me about this power? Why was I supposed to practice? I thought I was supposed to use it to help you.”