Ashes of Foreverland (20 page)

Santiago.

“What happened?” Tyler asked.

“He had flown to the United States this morning and arrived in Minneapolis. He met with Macy. That afternoon, just after lunch, he stopped breathing.” Gramm stopped to rake his hair. “I can't explain it. There was no reason for them to...it was like they were just turned off.”

Tyler held the Spaniard's hand. It was colder than usual.

Death usually is.

This was a time to rejoice, not mourn. Alessandra had nearly gone to sleep during their interview. It was only a matter of time, and now this.

“What's the biofeedback?” Tyler asked. “The cause of death?”

“Preliminary reports suggest...it's just...” Gramm pulled at his graying hair.

“What?”

“He stopped breathing.”

“That's not an answer, Gramm! Goddamn it, it can't be nothing. No one stops breathing for no reason.”

Gramm's breathing became shallow. He pursed his lips and took short stabbing breaths like a woman going into labor. If Tyler was twenty years younger, he'd snatch the pansy by the earlobe and drag him down to the table, shove his worried face into Santiago's clammy stomach and let him smell death until it was burned into his palette.

The pounding started again; this time his forehead was being stabbed with an ice pick in time to his heartbeat.

“The good doctor needs to see your stent,” Gramm said.

Tyler clenched his teeth, driving the ice pick deeper into his gray matter.
Reed did this.

It was a slap to the face, an insult. A warning. Santiago was a good soldier. He was meant to guide Danny, but when it was clear that the boy wasn't capable of supporting a Foreverland on the level Tyler wanted, Santiago watched after him.

But now that Danny was missing, it was irrelevant.

Damn him.

“The good doctor,” Tyler said, “will perform a full autopsy—”

Beep-beep-beep...

The lamp next to them dimmed. The monitor was red lights.

Tyler reached for the table—the man's chest sweaty, pale and still—when another warning chimed. The next table, red lights signaling another loss.

And then another. And another.

Like dominos falling.

“Do something!” Tyler shuffled around the table. “Damn it, Gramm, stop this!”

Gramm's hands fluttered at his sides. He looked around like a bird sensing a predator, his brain stuck in a panic loop. His hands went to his scalp and locked onto his hair, gray tufts between his fingers.

Tyler took several short steps and grabbed a handful of the former chemist's shirt. “Puh the pugs,” Tyler said, the words slurring past his swollen tongue. He wet his lips and slowly enunciated, “Pull...the...plugs.”

More warnings joined the chorus.

Six tables had been lost, and now a seventh. They were dropping one after another. Tyler looked down the long row, looked for the one table they could not afford to lose. If the man in the back stopped breathing, all would be lost.

Alessandra would not sleep.

Tyler shoved off and began sliding his feet. When he reached the end of the table, he made a three-step lunge to the next table, and then the next.

The red lights were behind him, but they were gaining. The room was dimming. They were going to lose them all. Tyler kept his eyes on the back.

Three more tables.

His breath shortened. Darkness bled into the fringes of his vision.

His knees shattered like glass. Warmth spilled into the crown of his skull, spread over his head and face like oil, washing away the throbbing pain, and trickled into his burning chest.

One more.

He could barely feel the edge of the table beneath his cold fingers. The beeping was behind him. He reached out, focused on the table against the back wall, when warmth bled through his hips, into his thighs and knees, taking all his strength with it.

The floor began rising.

He took one big step and closed his eyes. The impact was dull, but a sharp crack cut through the numbing fog as his hip shattered.

The beeping was a distant warning. The red lights were still coming.

The table was above him, the lights on the panel still green. He reached up, his senseless fingers finding the buttons. He pushed randomly, pushed them all.

With every bit of strength, he pecked at the monitor, hoping to hit the button that would pull Samuel offline.

We can't lose him!

All at once, the beeping stopped. The room was quiet.

His wheezy breath scratched the silence. He tried to swallow.

“Doctor?” Warm hands were on his cheeks. “Doctor?”

Gramm was squatting in front of him. The good doctor was with him. Tyler's eyelids were so heavy, so tired. A green haze shaded Gramm's worried expression. Tyler barely moved his lips. Words would not fall off his tongue.

He tried to whisper his wife's name, but he couldn't feel his lips, couldn't feel his body. He'd run out of time and could only send out a thought and hope it would reach her.

I'm sorry.

––––––––

D
reams are strange.

Some never-ending.

––––––––

T
he elevator descended with purpose.

The smell of manufacturing gave way to what was below ground: a distinct odor of burnt plastic and clay.

Jonathan pushed his hair back. His distorted reflection—his eyes still green, the bent hump on his nose—split in half as the elevator doors opened to reveal a long empty hall and an attractive young woman in a white lab coat.

“Welcome, Mr. Deer.”

“Jonathan.”

“Of course.” She extended her hand. “My name is Dr. Jones. You can call me Julie. Watch your step.”

The hairs on his head stiffened. An electrified field slowly rode down his neck, over his shoulders and arms until all the hair on his body was rigid.

“It'll take just a moment,” she said.

“Aren't you certain by now?”

“Redundancy ensures our security, Jonathan.”

The scan sank through his epidermal layers, vibrating through subdural layers until it reached his core, examining every cell that composed his body.

Julie paced around him, her eyes crawling over him like he was on display in the Smithsonian. “Remarkable,” she whispered. “Simply remarkable.”

They didn't know who he was.
What
he was, though...they knew what he was. They were in the business of biomites.

She took his hand, traced the veins forking over his knuckles, leaned close enough that he could smell toothpaste. He held his ground while the scan penetrated his chest. She looked at his eyes, his bent nose.

“You altered your face,” she said.

“Anonymity is my ally as much as yours.”

“Where were you done?”

He sighed. “Are we finished?”

Julie turned down the hall. There was no end in sight. The subsurface laboratory felt cool and damp. If he was correct, they were at least one hundred feet below the manufacturing plant. They passed heavy lab doors where vibrations leaked out.

“Can I ask a question?” she said. “Why come to us? Why on earth would you come here when you can have anything you want in one of those Foreverland worlds?”

She stopped at a set of double doors. Her hand hovered over a scanner.

“You have the secret to creating a Foreverland reality, why would you want to toil in the physical world?”

The doors opened.

The room was the size of a warehouse. They stepped between two long rows of glass cubicles that resembled side-by-side shower stalls, the glass black and reflective. The cold air settled around him and he shivered. He would count the stalls to make sure they were all present, they were all functional.

“To balance the scales,” he answered her question. “I came to balance the scales.”

The wilderness of Wyoming

H
er sleep was endless.

She swam in the ether of unconsciousness, where dreams came in fragments and images blurred into colors and sound smeared the background. There were snippets of waking, of seeing the landscape slur past her, of night falling. For the most part, her eyelids were too heavy and she remained in dream purgatory.

Until all was quiet.

She rolled her head off the glass, her chin wet with saliva. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

It was a truck.

She was in an SUV. It took a moment to notice the person in the driver's seat, a boy with long red hair. His name limped out of the fog.

Danny
.

That was all she could remember. They were parked on an incline, surrounded by trees. Senescing foliage, in the grip of autumn's approach, was among needled evergreens. A single tree stood before them, one barren of life, wedged between two halves of a boulder, a tree with silver-gray branches, dead and gnarled.

She knew this tree.
Impossible.

“No.” She slammed her fist into her leg. Pain radiated across her thigh. This was no longer a dream.

“No, no, no...” She fumbled with the handle.

“Cyn.”

“Don't touch me!”

“Let me—”

The door popped open. She tumbled from the SUV and slammed into the ground. A thousand memories rose to the surface.

There was snow here.

I was buried in the snow. The boy, Sid, on my chest, his hands around my throat.

The driver's door slammed. Cyn scrambled on all fours and stumbled through the thicket, away from the hill. Around the back of the SUV, she ran in the opposite direction. Away.

Away, away, away...

Run,
Barb's voice whispered.
Run, run away.

Cyn's throat hurt, her chest burned. She missed steps, fell and got back up, racing down the long slope, sprinting for the trees at the bottom.

She fell one last time, her palms scuffing through long grassy reeds, raking the rocky ground. She crashed hard, losing all her breath, rolling over with pain deep in her stomach.

She was here once before. She was here again.

In the wilderness.

Give me the body.

Cyn closed her eyes and wished it would all go away, that this was all over. She couldn't do this again, couldn't face the wilderness.

“Not again,” she muttered. “Not again.”

Barb's presence began to fade.

It receded into the background, far below the surface of her awareness, deep into her subconscious where Cyn no longer felt her, no longer heard her.

A shadow fell.

Danny reached out. She considered it. He brought her out here, took her to the last place on earth she ever wanted to see again, and now he wanted to help her stand. If he thought she would enjoy this, that she would follow him back to the SUV so they could tour the countryside and reminisce about the old women in their brick house, about their shaved heads and the cots and the needles in their heads, about waking up in an endless Foreverland loop without memories...

She raised a limp hand and let it fall into his hand.

He latched on and tugged. When her dead weight didn't budge, he relaxed.

And she pulled.

Danny's weight yanked forward, the toe of his boot catching her ribs as he tried to stop. She snatched his coat and pulled him over her as she turned, bringing his weight crashing down.

She hooked her leg around his waist to mount him, but the slope carried his momentum away from her. He was on his hands and knees. Too lanky and strong to take down, she threw herself onto his back and wrapped her arm around his neck. With the inside of her elbow over his windpipe, she secured the choke hold with her other arm and rolled.

All his weight fell on her.

He flailed like a flipped turtle, grinding jagged stones into her shoulders. She ducked her head, hooked her legs over the top of his and applied more pressure. Wildly, he tapped her arm. A few more seconds and the restriction on the carotid artery would black him out. She kept her head down.

His arms thrashed through the tall grass.

Paper began to rustle. He stopped prying at her arm and waved a piece of paper. She couldn't read it, but she saw the lettering.

Her hold relaxed.

He dropped the note and gasped for air. Cyn bucked him down the hill and spun in the opposite direction, sweeping the paper up as she jumped to her feet. Danny stayed on his hands and knees, choking a string of drool to the ground.

Green ink.

That was the color of the letters on the envelopes she never opened. The envelopes she stacked in a wicker basket, envelopes she threw in the garage.

“What is this?”

He put his hands on his hips, still on his knees. His cheeks were red; a scuff on his chin was finely lined with blood.

“Did you write this?” She shook it in his face. “Are you the asshole sending me letters?”

He shook his head.

“Then who?”

“A friend.”

“Is this a joke? You were in on this sick joke the whole time?”

He didn't answer.

“What...what does this even mean?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you...” She balled up the note and fired it into his face.

She regretted letting go of the choke hold and stormed up the hill, her thighs burning as she climbed. Not even halfway to the top where the dead tree waited, she stopped.

Pressure was building.
No, not pressure. Presence.

Barb was rising from her subconscious like something lurking beneath the water. She ignored it, pumping her arms until she was halfway—

Give me the body.

Cyn turned around. Danny was on his feet, opening the wadded note, smoothing it against his thigh. Barb whispered in the dark.

She took a step back down the hill. Her head swirled with panic as Barb tried to find a handhold. With each step toward Danny, she faded away, disappearing like an apparition.