Before I Wake (10 page)

Someone shouted her name, and she turned to see Noah, Eli, and Franny sitting on a blanket in the sun. Noah gave her a big wave and motioned her over.

Until that moment, she’d forgotten his earlier invitation.

Franny jumped up and spread out an extra blanket. “You have to join us.”

Arden was tired. She wanted to be alone, but they were all smiling at her with expectation, and the blanket and lawn were inviting.

She joined them.

They ate bread and cheese, and strawberries dipped in chocolate. They drank champagne out of plastic cups. They laughed and drowsed in the sun until it started to get low in the sky and Vera Thompson found them.

“Did you hear them last night?” Vera gave Arden a hard stare.

Arden propped herself on her elbows. Now that the sun was down, the air was getting chilly. “Who?”

“The shadow people.”

Noah made a choking sound. Franny frowned at him and he struggled to control himself.

“No, Mrs. Thompson,” Arden said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“You must sleep like a log then. They was running all over the place.”

Arden looked from Eli to Franny to Noah. “Were you racing in the halls last night?”

They shook their heads.

“You gotta be careful.” Mrs. Thompson pointed an arthritic finger at Arden. “Lock your door. Don’t forget to lock your door.”

“I won’t.”

What a cruel joke God played on old people.
Now that you’ve made it all these years, now that you’ve put up with all this shit, I’m going to hit you with one last trick: dementia
.

“
I
lock my door every night,” Arden said.

Vera suddenly took visual note of the others. “That goes for the rest of you too.” She pointed at each of them, one at a time. “Lock up tight.”

“We will,” Franny said.

Eli bobbed his head and smiled, while Noah stared hard at the ground, a fist pressed to his mouth.

Vera shuffled away.

Noah released the burst of laughter he’d been holding.

“Jesus,” Eli said under his breath.

“Poor woman,” Franny said.

Noah jumped to his feet. “Somebody should put her out of her misery.”

Franny looked up sharply. “Noah!”

“I’m sorry, but I never wanna get that old and deranged.” He tugged on his stocking cap. “Hey, I was gonna tell her that the shadow people could slip under the door, but I didn’t.”

“Gold star, buddy,” Eli drawled sarcastically.

They packed up. Arden folded her blanket and handed it to Franny. Five minutes later, she told them thanks and headed to her room.

Fury caught up with her outside Building 50.

“I’m leaving for a couple of days,” he said, a little out of breath. “Something’s come up.”

He wore jeans and a corduroy jacket, looking very un-Fury-like.

“Concerning the Oklahoma murders?”

“Mainly an unrelated case. But I have people trying to establish a solid link between the Oklahoma massacre and the deaths of your parents. So far, nothing but the MO to connect the two. There was never much in the way of solid evidence gathered from your—” He stopped.

She got it. Small-town cops were ill equipped, in more ways than one, to deal with such carnage.

“You have my cell phone number?” Fury asked.

“In my room.”

“Call if you need anything. I’d hoped to be here tomorrow when you started the first phase.” He seemed worried.

“No big deal.”

“I’ll be back in a day or two.” She nodded. “Everything will be okay.” She didn’t know what difference it should make to him.

The next morning, Arden got up early, jogged, showered, and headed to the Mercy Unit and Project TAKE. Even though it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, the building was humming. People in lab coats rushed up and down hallways, and the energy in the structure could be felt on her skin. Doctors were being paged, and people pushed medical carts from room to room.

A busy place. She couldn’t remember if it had been that busy when she’d been involved with the program before.

TAKE was located on the first floor, in a solitary wing.

They were expecting her. “We are all so excited to have you here,” said a perky young blonde as she poked around at the back of Arden’s hand, trying to isolate a good vein.

“Why am I getting an IV?”

“Saline solution.” The girl taped the needle in place and released the rubber tubing on Arden’s arm with a loud snap. She straightened and opened the flow wheel on the drip bag. “To make sure you don’t get dehydrated. Do needles bother you?”

Arden glanced up at the saline bag hanging from the metal rack. “It’s just that these things make me think of being sick.”

From there, she was put on a gurney and wheeled into a room that appeared to have been last updated in the twenties. Green tile on the walls. Heavy porcelain, pedestal sink.

Dr. Harris stepped into the room and closed the door.

He smelled like woodsy aftershave again, but underneath that, she detected an unpleasant scent. Something she didn’t like and couldn’t place.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.” He pulled a syringe from the deep pocket of his white lab coat, uncapped the needle, and prepared to inject the fluid into her IV.

“What’s that?”

“Something to help you relax and make the time go a little faster.”

“No, I mean what is it? Exactly.”

“A mild sedative. It will also help to make you more susceptible to our suggestions. It’s part of the protocol.” He looked at her. “Would you rather I didn’t use it?”

“No.” They’d used drugs before, but never an IV line. Who was she to complain about a mild sedative? “Go ahead.”

“Remember that you are in control. At any time during this process, you can stop everything. You can say you’ve had enough. Understand?”

She nodded. “Go ahead.”

He injected the drug.

Within seconds, heat began to spread through her body, and her muscles grew limp.

“That’s it. Don’t fight it,” he said. “Let us do all the work. You don’t have to do anything but relax.”

She drifted. Floated. Lost track of time.

Dr. Harris addressed someone else in the room. Someone Arden couldn’t see.

“Take her down to the basement and through the tunnel to Cottage 25.”

Arden tried to speak, tried to protest, but she couldn’t move.

She finally placed the smell.

Like corroded metal. Like rubber.

Like an isolation tank.

Smells.

Salt water.

Disinfectant that burned her throat.

Corrosion. Rust.

A clanging. A far-off echo of metal against metal. Like the tolling of a buoy in a heavy fog.

Arden had no body. No appendages. She’d left them somewhere. Forgotten. Discarded. Unnecessary.

The voice. That was all that mattered. Everything was the voice.

“You become who you kill,” the voice said. “You can’t forget that. If you look into someone’s eyes as you kill him, you steal a little of his soul.”

Like bad radio reception, the voice faded in and out, forcing her to strain so she could hear every word. But even if she missed something, it would come back.

It always came back. Repeating the message.

A man’s voice.

“I kill people,” he said. “A rage builds inside me, a deep, seething hatred for humanity. When that happens, when I’m to the point where I’m about to explode, I don’t care about anything. I just want to kill. I need to kill, to take a life.”

His voice was low and deep.

She liked that.

“More than one life. Several. I want to hurt. I want to inflict pain. Not only physical pain. Mental pain. I’m not talking torture. I’m not one of those kinda guys. We got some of them in here, and that’s not what it’s all about. That’s not what I’m into.”

Arden strained to hear his next words.

“Annihilation. Wiping people out. Making a huge, fucking statement about the world, about people and life in general.”

“Most people are just a bunch of fucking worker bees, going about their business, not even thinking of the big picture. I want to make them see the big picture, you know. I want them to see that none of it matters. That it’s all shit. All fake. People need to know that. They need to wake up. They need to be shaken out of that false reality of self-importance they’ve created.”

True
, Arden thought.

“It’s not a big deal. The world created rules, but those rules aren’t for me. They have nothing to do with me.”

His voice faded, as if he’d moved from the microphone, or turned his head to the side.

She strained to hear. She didn’t want to miss anything.

“Killing isn’t a big deal. Squashing ants. That’s all I’m doing. But everybody thinks it’s a big deal.” He laughed.

A nice laugh. Deep. Full of sarcasm.

“But it’s all a joke. That’s what I’m teaching. That it’s a joke. You’re all too serious. Life’s a joke. That’s what you gotta remember. That’s what you can’t ever forget.”

Arden had lost all sense of time and space. There was nothing but the present. Nothing but the floating and the darkness and the tolling of the bell.

And the voice.

Without the voice, existence would have been unbearable. She would have been trapped in the dark with nothing to cling to. The voice was what kept her going, kept her from losing her mind.

“I’m going to talk about the killings,” he said. “I’m going to describe them in detail.”

She’d already heard it several times. So many that she had it memorized, and could tell his stories along with him. At first, she just quietly mouthed the words.

I watched from a hill outside their house. It was night, and all the lights were on. They didn’t even close the curtains. I could see them moving around in there. My own private show.

Arden began to whisper the words aloud…

“They didn’t even put up a fight. They never do. They just stand there like a buncha sheep, you know. That always makes me madder. The way they whimper and cower and beg for mercy instead of taking action. Out of all the people I killed, not one ever tried to kill me. Some fight me. but nobody’s ever aggressive. Well, that’s not completely true. I had one grandpa who came running in with an ax. But the guy was so old and weak he could hardly lift it.”

He laughed again.

Arden laughed with him, causing the bell to clang.

“I wiped out the whole family. All of them. Grandpa. Mom and Pop. What ended up being a son and his wife, plus a coupla their brats. I swear, I felt worse when a neighbor poisoned my dog. I liked that dog.”

Arden felt his sorrow.

“You wanna know why I target Middle America? White, middle-class families? Because they are the biggest frauds of all. I hate frauds. I hate phonies, and all them little towns scattered across the Midwest are as phony as they come. How do I know that? Because I grew up in one. All Mom and apple pie is what it seems like to the outside world. People look at them and wonder what’s wrong with their own life.”

Arden nodded and the bell clanged again.

It was true. Everything was true.

“I hate those fucks. Life is dirty. And life don’t mean nearly as much as they think it does.”

The voice went on to tell about another set of murders he’d committed, and another.

“But I have my apprentices,” he said. “We all have to have apprentices. People to carry on our work when we’re gone. People to keep the flame of anarchy alive. I agreed to this recording so the truth could be told. Not some twisted media version of the truth that’s only about forty percent truth and the rest something that’ll be turned into a Hollywood movie. I’m all about the truth. When they make a movie about me, I want it to be accurate.” There was a slapping sound, like hands clapping. “Long live Albert French.”

“Long live Albert French,” Arden whispered. Her voice echoed back at her.