Authors: Elle Hill
It should have created an enormous wind as the letters displaced air, but it was a dream, and dreams knew little of physics. She merely ran forward, stumbling, before losing her balance and tumbling in a painful heap to the white ground.
Panting, trembling, bruised and aching, she looked up and saw, directly overhead, an expanse of whiteness. To her left and right, the edges of black letters stretched upward like Los Angeles skyscrapers.
“We . . . did it,” she panted, laughing breathlessly. She looked behind her.
Only Reed’s grinning face wasn’t there. No more than ten feet behind her, the edge of their “J” rose like a shiny black wall. But it wasn’t a wall; it was the edge of a massive construct. A wall would have separated her from Reed.
This hadn’t fallen neatly between them.
Her stomach clenched, trembled. Icy talons raked upward to her mouth through her stomach. No, she realized as horror churned in her gut. The “J” didn’t lie between them.
Reed lay under the letter. Not abstractly under, not disappeared from her dream, not poof, gone, see you in a day. Not here one second, gone the next.
The letter had landed mostly on top of Reed. She couldn’t see everything, but she could see enough, and what was left didn’t look anything like her Reed.
She saw skin, expanses of bone, sinew and glistening bits. And everywhere, everywhere a bright red liquid that couldn’t soak into hard white ground.
Katana screamed.
The world shuddered.
Whiteness trembled and shiny letters shed flakes of black.
She fell to the ground and stared at the edge of the letter. It swayed like something from an old cartoon, structures dancing to tinny music. Around her, whiteness diverged until it became shades of pale, all of which abraded her skin.
Katana placed her hands on the ground, and the whiteness bruised beneath them, changing from white to pink to red to purple-black. She lay down on the ground and watched the stain spread around her body. An aura of pain and death.
The whiteness above bulged downward like a pregnant albino belly. The bulge grew darker and darker gray. The sky dimmed.
All the while, a shrill tune poured from the laden sky, seeped upward from the nonporous ground, erupted from between her lips, spread in weighty waves that gobbled up the world.
She lay, eyes open, staring at the sky as it changed from stark white to the dark red of fresh meat. Her eyes blinked, or maybe they didn’t. Short, springy vegetation pressed against her palms. Some kind of bug or tiny animal crawled over her ankle. Her mouth tasted vaguely of mint and something metallic.
Above her, the sky churned. Clotted pink and black clouds oozed. Her breath lifted her stomach, her chest, raising them in some kind of offering before dropping them back to the ground. Bruises and aches pressed against her shins, her kneecaps, her elbows and forearms. A musty, organic smell clung to her nose.
The giant black letters, and presumably Reed, disappeared.
A long, long time passed. Katana lay motionless, eyes and mouth dry, under a pulsing red sky.
He might not be dead.
It was her first coherent thought. At first, the individual words made no sense to her, but after a moment of careful contemplation, she thought she understood them.
Reed might not be dead. This wasn’t the real world. Her brain worked symbolically, illogically, placing fantastical things next to the perfectly mundane. And even if he had . . . even if the “J” had . . . even if, he was probably awake right now in the real world, brushing his teeth or showering or gnawing a piece of toast.
But hadn’t she heard people who died in dreams never woke up? The shock, a heart attack, mind over matter, or something.
She’d never seen him die before.
Before this, something had dragged him from her or he’d disappeared or ceased to exist. It was a Disney version of death, a hint of it, a fading into black without ever acknowledging the gruesome, smelly, tacky reality. Even after all the pain and terror she’d endured, she’d never seen her own blood.
Her head fell to the side, and she stared at the space where the letter had been. Nothing of the “J” remained, and from her position on the ground she couldn’t tell what the dark gray vegetation might cover. Once here, then gone.
Black dots swarmed over the landscape. After a moment, she realized they only existed in her vision. Concentrating, she heard and felt her lungs pumping far too quickly and shallowly. It felt as if someone had pierced a hole in her lungs and they had to struggle twice as hard to get half the breath.
He might still be alive
, she told herself, but the words did nothing to fill her lungs with air. Sitting up would probably help, but she lacked the strength to lift her torso from the ground.
She started to speak, to comfort herself with the soothing sounds of her own voice. Bubbles fizzed in her chest; her voice emerged in a raspy whisper.
She found she had no words.
The landscape morphed around her. It became a Van Gogh-esque night sky, complete with chunky comet, before changing into an alien landscape straight out of a low-budget science fiction movie. In one scene, she lay in the middle of a southern California desert. Dust and sand crunched beneath her, the sun scalded her face, a far-too-large beetle scuttled inches from her head.
Sand slowly grew less gritty until she lay atop a Berber carpet, a white ceiling arching overhead. A memory dream, perhaps, but she found she didn’t care to remember just now. No one approached her, no unseen menace accosted her, no terrifying scenes unfolded before her glassy eyes. Only the scenery shifted around her prone body.
Life goes on
, she thought distantly. Only this wasn’t life, was it? It wasn’t even a reasonable facsimile. It was an artificially-induced dreamworld with a population of one, a terrifying landscape in which she existed for weeks, months, or forever as superhuman beings fed off her misery.
Not for the first time, although definitely the most fervently, she wished she could sleep. Just a small, short escape while life worked out the kinks, while the filing cabinet in her brain found less painful places to store memories. But the joke was on her: She already was asleep! There was no escape in the dream world, no sleeping or bathroom breaks or downing of comforting carbohydrates to help her cordon off her mind from the twirling world beyond. She and this world were one and the same.
Maybe when I get out of here, I’ll write a paper about the psychological needs fulfilled by peeing
, she thought without humor. But then again, she didn’t have much chance of waking up, did she, especially now that her only hope had disappeared.
He might still be alive
, she told herself, and part of her meant the comforting words. Her body, though, or what she’d come to think of as her body, did not respond. Her muscles refused to clench, her breathing remained shallow, and her stomach burned with something like hunger.
Carpet relaxed into a smooth, cold hardness like marble or glass. Above her, the ceiling disappeared, and she found the sky funneling upward into an unending expanse of soda-bottle green. She tasted sugar on her tongue.
Through her senses, she perceived the passage of time. The sky evolved above her, the ground softened and firmed around her, the air or rain or flames cooled and heated her body. She remained fully conscious as her surroundings swept her along into scene after scene in which she did not participate.
For a long time, she did not close her eyes. She worried that if she did, she’d open them countless times in hopes he would have suddenly materialized in front of her. Hopelessness was painful, even stupid, but hope unbearable.
Was it the possibility of escape she mourned? Sure. Katana was trapped in a completely non-metaphorical nightmare, and Reed had represented direction and hope. He gave her something to look forward to, added dimension and meaning to this monstrous existence, and promised to help her find her way back to life.
But she missed him more. She missed
him
. When grief crushed her chest and stomach in toward her backbone, she wasn’t regretting the loss of her freedom but of him, Reed. Funny, strong, smart, stoicism about two inches deep above a deep vulnerability and puppy-dog sweetness. Tall, husky, sexy, with the universe’s most soulful brown eyes.
He’d called her Kat, just as her parents had, as her friends did. He’d joked with her and made her laugh, refused to lie and weathered her pain, touched her and made her want to throw him to the ground and make sweaty, grunting love with him.
She wished she’d never met him.
Better to have loved and lost? Baloney. It sounded all romantic on paper, but Shakespeare had written five hundred years ago, when the average life expectancy was forty years. Stuck in this world, she’d live forever, or seemingly so, always remembering the people she’d loved and lost: Mandy, her parents, and now her beautiful, brave hero. But Reed was no abstraction, no memory relived. He’d been the only good, truly real thing in this world.
Katana eventually closed her eyes. It was the only sense she could shut down. Lying down, sightless, was the closest to sleep she could come in this world.
The squawk of seagulls, the thump of machinery, the shrieking of human voices: she heard them all in turn as the world shifted. Scents ranging from strawberry-scented car fresheners to sulfur (a bit of overkill, in her opinion) scalded her nostrils.
After a long while—many dreams had come and gone—her breathing returned to normal. As time spent itself, she found it easier to counsel patience and to tell herself, and be willing to entertain the possibility, that Reed might still be alive. However, she remained limp and motionless on the ever-changing ground. Her sword rested a few feet away. Eventually she would get up and begin the never-ending cycle of fighting and horror, but for a while, she simply refused to participate.
From behind her eyelids, darkness bloomed. The air around her smelled and felt cooler, and soft grass grew around her. Nighttime, then, outside somewhere. Katana lost herself in memory of her cow dream, one of the least offensive and gentlest dreams she could recall.
A bug crawled along her cheek, distracting her from her pretend-dream. She ignored it and concentrated on the warmth of the cow’s ear, the earthy smell of the gentle herbivores . . .
The bug’s movement made her cheek itch, and the impression of cows faded away. With a sigh, Katana raised a limp hand to her cheek to brush it away.
And felt a finger.
She gripped the finger, which was actually a thumb, and clung tightly, all before she’d even opened her eyes.
She saw a silhouette, not the person’s facial features. With a gasp, she swung her clenched fist toward the person’s head—and then stopped when it jerked back with a surprised noise.
“Reed?” she whispered.
“You wake up grumpy, girl,” he said in amusement. “Can I have my thumb back?”
She gripped his hand, staring upward, trying to make out his features. Was this part of another nightmare? Was this really Reed? Her Reed?
Her breathing emerged in soft gasps, and she reached out a hand toward his face. He leaned forward and kissed her palm, and the moonlight illuminated his face. Reed. Alive.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her as she stared up at him, lungs once again pumping overtime, eyes painfully dry.
A knot of emotion cramped her belly. Staring at him, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to scream his name, weep, or, oddly, follow through on her initial punch. In the end, she reached for him and dragged him down to her for a kiss.
He collapsed on top of her. As she locked her hands behind his neck, her lips pressed against his and her eyelashes brushed his cheek. She kissed him as if she could draw him into her, fill up her cold body with his warmth. He breathed against her, and she could smell, could taste the familiar tang of his toothpaste. Her pores soaked up his smell, his taste, the heaviness of him on top of her. She opened herself to him, filling her lungs with his air and exhaling all those hours of bitterness and grief.
He groaned against her, and she opened her mouth very slightly, inviting him closer. Their tongues twined, their breaths merged, their hands caressed. Katana kept her eyes open as she kissed him, desperate for glimpses of his beautiful face, of his strong neck, of the hair that curled around her fingers. Her eyes crossed, trying to see ever more, and she laughed against him, even as one of her hands slid down his broad back.
She tugged the hem of his dark shirt. He stopped kissing her only long enough to draw the shirt over his head and fling it away. When he returned, she nipped him, wanting to devour him, to make him part of her forever. He growled against her and sucked her upper lip.
His torso was longer than hers, and she found she could only reach the small of his back. With an impatient noise, she tugged at the waistband of his jeans.
“You, too,” he whispered, and they disrobed as quickly as possible while maintaining constant physical contact.
He groaned and sank down onto her. His harder body felt luxurious against her softer and rounder one. While he kissed her, nibbled and trailed wet kisses over her face and throat, his hands smoothed in tender, hot circles on her stomach. She kissed his forehead and then the top of his head as he moved downward. When a hot tongue swirled over one of her nipples, she groaned. His wet thumb very lightly worked over her other nipple before he moved his hand to cup and caress her breast.
Her hands felt empty, useless, so she plunged them into his hair and massaged his head. After a moment of aching attention, he switched breasts.
“Everything about you is sweet,” he murmured to her, kissing her breastbone.
You’re beautiful
, she wanted to say, but her throat felt too tight. The only sounds she managed were stuttered breathing and the occasional moan.
He moved downward, licking and kissing his way down her stomach, pausing to kiss a ring around her belly button. Before moving onward, he laid his head briefly on her stomach, resting his cheek on the softness. His body slid downward, between her legs, and soon his head rested between her wide-open thighs.