The Waking Dreamer (4 page)

Edging forward in the congestion each time he saw a sign for the interstate, he had to constantly remind himself to slow down.

Five exits away.

His phone sounded from an incoming text from Nancy:
Not going to see u again?

Three exits away.

Emmett did not respond. Only words on a screen, Emmett understood their underlying message. They were not accusatory but rather as a statement of fact, as if Nancy were finally accepting what she had not wanted to believe. And she was right. He had no intention of returning to Houston again. It was not his home.

The only place home exists is in your head
, he quoted to himself.
Dark City
had it right.

Again, he fought the urge to push the car forward in traffic, feeling as if the city’s skyscrapers were poised to reach from the heavens and bar his exit. He pictured the constructs of metal and glass wrapping their beams about his car, both embracing and strangling him all in one motion.

One exit away.

He was ready to leave it all behind in search of the adventure awaiting those seeking its fickle attentions. When he finally banked off onto Interstate 10 East, he jolted the car forward eagerly, reverently thankful to bleed the neon from his eyes as he sped toward the promise of an unknown, strange new day.

I’m ready. Let’s do this
.

CHAPTER 3

Morning soon became afternoon, and a sticky twilight descended over the Gulf Coast. Hours passed as the interstate proceeded southeast from the glass-topped skyline of Houston before turning north through the bustling port of Beaumont. Plumes of white smoke funneled up from massive refineries along the water’s edge. Emmett felt his head lighten as he crossed a high, steel-framed bridge in Orange that led to Vinton. He focused his eyes straight ahead until he reached the other side. Perhaps it was his usual fear of heights or maybe it was a sense of foreboding as he left Texas behind, but whatever the cause, Emmett wiped his hands and urged the car forward with mixed anticipation and disquiet.

Seeing the sign welcoming him to Louisiana, he kissed his index finger and rapped his hand against the dashboard. “One down. Three to go.”

Hundreds of miles of low-lying marshes escorted him on his journey. Navigating the knotted overpasses of Baton Rouge, Emmett bypassed New Orleans on Interstate 12 and took the shortcut toward Hammond and on to Slidell. The sun seemed to set almost as an afterthought along the horizon as he passed Gulfport and began to see highway markers for Pensacola, the first hint of his destination.

As the darkness heralded twilight, Emmett shook his head and stymied the first of several rolling yawns; his eyes felt as if they had swallowed too much light, but they finally adjusted to the approaching dusk.

The interstate grew sparse and unlit as he reached the Florida Panhandle. Void of landmarks or roadside diversions, mile markers ceased counting down. The fatigue of the previous weeks coupled with his usual insomnia finally caught up to him, and Emmett began to wonder if he could safely finish the long drive.

He considered stopping to sleep. The yawning had grown altogether irritating, as if reminding him that he had erred and not thoroughly planned the drive. He
had
researched it thoroughly, of course, ensuring that the roads he would take were all public and not under construction. He had budgeted enough money for gas and food, but an unplanned motel charge simply wasn’t an option. Emmett resolved to finish the drive, somehow, on sugar and the promise of a sunrise over poetic unknown roads not yet traveled.

He rolled the radio knob searching for George Noory, finding only static-laden hissing in the deep wilderness. It was the perfect late-night hour for radio: conversations about monster hunters, wielders of dark magic, and people who dream of the future.

Without the radio to distract a mind that did not readily quiet on its own and his phone’s battery long since drained, he tried having a conversation with himself but felt absurd for doing so. He quickly found himself passing the time by cataloguing the different rattles coming from the old car. It was all an effort to keep his mind occupied long enough to delay thoughts of money, job-seeking, and apartment-finding. When he was certain that he had nothing else to do but think on these things, he looked down and was oddly relieved to find the gas gauge’s slightly shaking needle holding steady below
E.

“Fail at math, Emmett,” he said aloud.

Yet he felt thankful for something to focus his attention. The last interstate gas sign was at least twenty miles behind him. With so little gas left and the next major city, DeFuniak Springs, nearly forty miles away, Emmett decided it was prudent to pull off the interstate at the next exit.

When he reached the exit ramp, he shifted gears and coasted in neutral to save what little gas remained in the tank. The county road leading to the gas station quickly wound away from the highway and snaked deeper into the thick tree line. A sign marked the edge of Blackwater River State Forest, a vast stretch of feral wilderness that filled a huge swath of the northern Panhandle on Emmett’s printed directions.

A small opening in a copse of towering evergreens revealed a makeshift gravel driveway that led down a slight incline to a rundown gas station; its sign along the road was unlit but the station windows still showed interior lights. Allowing inertia to carry the car the remainder of the way, he slowly pulled up to the only pump, idling for a moment before turning off the car. The gas pump sat under a handwritten sign: “CASH ONLY—PAY INSIDE.” He pulled his hoodie over his head and, drawing its strings snug, braced for the brisk winter chill.

Emmett opened the car and stepped outside. He shook the fatigue from his limbs and stretched his legs to the sound of aching creaks, rolled his head from side to side with an exaggerated moan, and forced the previous five hundred and ninety miles to shudder free from his limbs.

Then he looked around. He felt, for the first time since leaving Houston, complete isolation. Stepping out into Blackwater River State Forest’s edge, the boy raised by concrete and steel felt suddenly able to breathe. Freedom tasted of silence, expansive space, and undisturbed pine. Emmett could not remember feeling drawn to nature before, and yet finally alone within it, he felt like he had finally returned home.

Soon
, he had promised himself when leaving Houston for the unknown. For
this
. And though he was not quite yet
there
, he was
here
now.

“So … when will
soon
be
now
?” he whispered to the night.

When no answer was returned, Emmett grinned and focused his attention on getting gas. Looking toward the gas station, Emmett saw that the store’s interior lights were flickering on and off through heavily fogged windows.

He finished with the gas and stepped over a gravel embankment opposite the gas pump to walk the twenty or so paces to the store. The light inside still flashed off and on as he drew closer and reached for the door. Then he stopped.

The night’s still silence was penetrated by an abrupt, loud snapping somewhere off in the distance beyond the tree line. The sound rebounded throughout the surrounding forest before dying away.

Probably an alligator
.
Or a bear. Does Florida even have bears?
he joked to himself. But he wasn’t laughing.

He blinked and looked around the clearing. As far as he could see in either direction there were no other cars, no other people anywhere near him. Then Emmett recognized how alone he was out in the middle of nowhere, though the thought did not comfort him as it had just moments earlier.

The boy who had grown accustomed to the vigilant neon of an unsleeping city found himself hesitating.

Too many hours on the road and epic quantities of sugar for the win
, he told himself. Despite the unusual feeling in his stomach—fear perhaps, but somehow familiar—he had already pumped the gas. He couldn’t begin his new life by stealing from countryside merchants.

He pushed open the door, feeling the immediate rush of dry, stale heat as it escaped into the winter air. A bell jingled on the handle, but other than that and the low hum of the refrigerators along the store’s far walls, the store was unusually quiet. The overhead lights continued to flicker on and off and grew more erratic every second. In the alternating moments of darkness and light, accented only by the iridescent glow of the glass-paneled refrigerators, Emmett’s eyes had trouble adjusting as he craned his neck to look around the aisles.

“Um, hello?” Emmett said hesitantly. An unsettling silence responded. “Hello?” he called out again. “Anyone there?”

Assuming that the station’s employee simply couldn’t hear him—perhaps he was in the restroom or in a rear stock room—Emmett cautiously approached the empty counter. He saw that the cash register was closed and the small security video screen behind it was flickering in sync with the lights.

A metallic crash like a trashcan being knocked over rang from outside. Emmett jumped around to face the door as his hand instinctively went over his chest as if to calm his racing pulse. Nothing.

Again with the bear-gator
. Yet the fear was back, this time palpable in the flickering isolation. Again there was the oddly familiar sensation, as if some irretrievable memory were teasing him at the edge of his awareness.

Okay, what movie am I flashing back to?

He was quite certain he had never been to Florida before, and he had certainly never pulled off the interstate in the dead of night at a creepy gas station. Nevertheless, he felt the maddening awareness that comes with almost-captured recognition—just beyond the reach of his probing finger tips, but close enough to smell and even taste, its contents brimming with recollections awaiting remembrance.

Something isn’t right
, he admitted to himself as he quickly moved up the center aisle to the door. He felt an irrepressible urgency to leave—from what he could not remember, and yet dawning somewhere in his mind was a terrible memory. He shivered with a visceral sensation of panic, a deeply ingrained demand to take flight. It was the kind of panic that shockingly focuses all of the senses, so that a twig snapping in the distance becomes a violent crashing against the ears. Emmett reached for the door and pushed it open, cursing the bell that clanged into the empty night.

As the winter air assaulted his exposed face, he stepped outside and felt the door close behind him. He saw nothing unusual. His car was parked where he left it, and the light over the gas pump continued to flicker. Yet something felt very wrong.

This is the part in the movie when you are yelling at the idiot to run!

His body reacted strongly with sudden trembling; the hair along his skin raised with urgency. He felt like a prey animal being pursued unseen. He wanted to call out, but it felt like his throat was collapsing. His feet would not allow him to take another step forward. Waves of crippling anxiety washed over him, holding him in place. In his mind, he told himself to move.

Get back in the car!

He felt a rush of cold air drown his lungs as he tried to run. His body didn’t budge. The fear became even more terrifying because he could do nothing but bear witness to whatever it wanted to show him.

And then fear, imageless and without context, suddenly took form. Ten or so paces away, standing between Emmett and his car, stood a shadow—no, darkness that separated from shadow. He had not seen it there a moment before; it had appeared during the time between the blinking of his eyes. Rising distinctly from the darkness, as if the form were crouched and was slowly beginning to rise, was an unnaturally pale, white nude form that was vaguely human in appearance, though scarred and riddled with bruises and tears in its skin. As its long, thin legs and arms stretched to the full extension of its body, it turned its shoulders upright to lift a pale, gaunt neckline. The last to come into view was its smooth, hairless skull crisscrossed with pulsing red veins that seemed to glow against the bone-white surface.

Black eyes on either side of a thin slit for a nose turned to look at him. The figure’s face was scarred with a stretched, exaggerated expression that caused Emmett’s stomach to lurch with rising bile. The figure hissed suddenly, flicking a long, coarse tongue out and between its thin, pale lips. Memory failed him, and his mind was at once both silent and screaming with every word for danger it knew.

Do something!

His body finally responded with an uncoordinated lurch forward. The figure lunged at that same moment like a pouncing predator, responding with a guttural, bestial mixture of growls and snarls. Emmett’s legs tore into the ground as he wrenched his body away, flailing as much as running down the gravel road back toward the interstate.

Without chancing to look over his shoulder, he veered to his right by instinct, away from the road and back toward the gas station. His hands flailed open as his arms pumped, and a small part of his mind registered that he had dropped his keys in the confusion.

But fear was in control, and his instincts took him in an arch behind the rear of the gas station. The forest surrounding the station awaited him in the distance, and seeking suitable darkness to hide from … whatever it was that he was running from, Emmett pumped his legs with abandon. The grasses were ankle-high, the ground soft and yielding like slow-drying mud that seemed to conspire to slow him down. Thorns and thickets scathed against his jeans and his hoodie as he tore deep into the underbrush.

After several moments of running that felt like hours, he felt his limbs aching and his chest heaving with exhaustion. He could think of nothing else but to hide, and he bounded headfirst into a line of tall trees ahead of him, and with some measure of determination chanced a fleeting glance behind him.

In the inky blackness, he did not see his pursuer, and only by a narrowness in his eyes could he see the dark shape of the gas station behind him and the gravel road back to the interstate somewhere just beyond the store. He caught his breath with great effort and held it, listening in the night’s silence for any notice of the figure that chased him. Only a single crow responded with a bleating caw, followed by a rustle of flapping wings as the bird took flight somewhere overhead.

What the hell am I going to do?

His mind raced, a thousand discordant possibilities and thoughts fighting for his focus. Emmett had no idea what that
thing
might have been, and yet maybe he should have known, should have remembered.

In the darkness, still and silent as the trees themselves, he saw the figure in the clearing moving toward him—a hundred or so yards away, nearly a third of the distance from the gas station to the edge of the tree line where Emmett hid.

The figure stared directly at him, and though concealed mostly by shadow and the darkness of a moonless sky, it had clearly targeted Emmett. It closed the distance in the breath of a moment, moving with an inhuman speed, all but flying across the ground. The rush of fear was so great that Emmett could taste the bile rising violently in his throat as he staggered in terror backward and lost all feeling in his extremities.

The figure drew to within an arm’s length. It reached one hand to Emmett’s face, a hand that narrowed with bent and gnarled fingers that looked more like misshapen claws. Emmett’s mind pleaded for him to flee, and yet so stricken with terror, he could not will himself to move. The creature reached Emmett’s throat immediately, suddenly, and, closing around the flesh with a choking grip, pulled Emmett close to it.