Cata holds up her hand. “Not judging. Just saying that in the nightmare you ended up really far away from all of us.”
Sinclair nods hesitantly as Cata continues. “This time, when we came back from the nightmare, Fergus had Ant by the arm, and they ended up here together.”
Everyone just stares at her. “Well, what if this time, before we’re sucked through the door, we all stand close to each other? We could even hold hands. Maybe we’ll end up in the nightmare together. It might be a safer way to face whatever comes next: as a group.”
George crosses her arms, thinking, and Remi looks intrigued, as if finally someone has some semblance of a plan. Even Sinclair seems swayed by Cata’s theory. “It wouldn’t hurt to try,” I say, “although I’m not holding his hand.” I nod toward Sinclair, who responds with a laugh.
“I’ll hold it,” Cata says, and with a whisper of a smile, she reaches out and takes Sinclair by the hand. I reflexively glance at George, in all of her totally hot fearlessness and determination, and position myself next to her.
“Two more minutes,” Ant says, rising to his feet. He takes George’s hand in one of his, and Remi takes his other. But before we even lock fingers, the first boom sounds. Faint blue lines begin to glow from close by.
By the second knock, the door is clearly outlined in fluorescent blue. The third knock is deafening. As the door swings open, with a groan that sounds like the universe is splitting in two, Ant drops George and Remi’s hands and tugs his hat farther down over his ears.
“No!” Cata yells, but it’s too late. Our circle is broken as we are swooped up into the air and sucked through the door like dying stars into a black hole.
CHAPTER 15
JAIME
IN MERE MOMENTS, VESPER HAS AGED TEN YEARS. He strides silently to his computer, types in a few words, pulls a page from a printer, and comes back with a clipboard and a pen.
At the top is printed “State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death.” He begins to fill out the form space by space, asking the paramedics to double-check absence of pulse, body temperature, and other vital signs. Next to cause of death, he pens something and murmurs, “Do we all concur? Myocardial infarction?”
The paramedics agree, and then sign the document as witnesses. Vesper tells them to leave the body. Zhu will want to see it exactly as it is before it is taken to the hospital morgue. Before the men leave, he asks one to locate Zhu and the director and inform them of the death.
I stand at the girl’s side, unable to leave her. At the AIDS clinic, I saw people on the verge of death. I saw dead bodies being taken away. I saw my own father’s body, hours after he was shot and killed while on duty.
But I have never experienced the moment of death. Seeing someone there, a person, a living being who looked me in the eyes and spoke to me in her very last seconds. And when that spark that was her humanity—the thing that had made her BethAnn Lindstrom—was all of a sudden extinguished, nothing was left but an empty corpse. It didn’t seem possible. One second someone is there, and the next they’re just . . . not.
I can’t look anymore. I turn and walk back to my workstation. There are still seven windows open on my monitor, but since Vesper cut subject three’s video and mic, there are three red lights blinking in the top right corner. I want to click it closed, but am afraid it will mess up the whole system, so I try to ignore it.
I feel Vesper walk up behind me, and I swivel my chair to face him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s Jaime,” I respond.
He draws up a chair next to mine and looks at me with bloodshot eyes. When I met with them yesterday, he and Zhu fielded a dozen texts and phone calls in the space of a half hour, and said they had back-to-back meetings for the rest of the day. The man probably didn’t get much sleep last night, and is now facing what could be the biggest crisis of his career. I can’t help feeling for him, even if I don’t count enough for him to remember my name.
“Jaime, I know we offered for you to leave before. But I am going to ask you to stay, at least for a while longer. You were the only person here with me when subject three deceased. You saw it happen. Could you record what you saw? What you experienced?” He nods toward my notebook. “You’ve been taking notes since we started, right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. I won’t ask to see them, and won’t suggest what you should include in them, so that I can’t be accused of biasing your records in case . . .”
In case this goes to court, I think, filling in his blank.
“I understand.”
He nods and stands to return to his station.
“Dr. Vesper?” I say, rushing my words before I can chicken out.
He turns. “Yes, Jaime?”
“BethAnn . . . subject three . . . said something to me right before she died.”
He lifts an eyebrow, intrigued. “Are you implying that she regained consciousness?”
“Yes. I mean, I think so. She seemed to see me—looked me straight in the eyes—and said something about soldiers with guns.”
Vesper’s interest disappears. He sighs. “Her brain waves were so low when she expired that anything she said can only be taken as delirious rambling.”
“I was just thinking . . .” I can’t believe I’m saying this to a sleep expert, but I feel like I have to . . . almost like I owe it to the dead girl. “I was thinking that maybe mentioning soldiers meant that she was dreaming. I mean, when considered along with the occasional spikes in heart rate and muscle tension . . .”
“Sleep is all about the brain, Jaime. The subjects’ brain waves have remained primarily in delta. They are in comas, and though no one knows what really happens in a comatose person’s brain, the mind is operating at a level that is so basic its only job is to keep their body functions continuing, if even that. What the girl said was like the final spasm of a dying nerve. Thank you for telling me, but please don’t worry about it.”
He goes back to his desk and sits down, propping his head in his hands for a few moments before sighing deeply and switching on his microphone to begin an oral account of what happened.
I know I should listen to the expert. I know that a premed student can’t possibly know more than a man who has dedicated his life to the study of the brain. But I can’t help feeling that there is more going on here than what the sensors pick up and spew onto the monitors in beeps and jagged lines. I want to understand what’s happening.
I follow Vesper’s advice and write down what happened in my notebook, including the parts he said to forget about. I write down the way the girl looked into my eyes. I write down each word she spoke. And then, when I finish, I pick up the test file and flip to trial subject four, Sinclair Jacob Hartford.
CHAPTER 16
CATA
I AM LYING ON MY BACK IN THE DARKNESS. THIS definitely isn’t the Void—it is too cold here. My fingers press against something soft and silky. I hear a mechanical tick, tick, tick, and a faint green glow comes from somewhere to my left.
I inhale, and my hand flies to my mouth as my throat constricts. Surrounding me is a stench that makes my eyes water. It reminds me of the long-dead dog my sister and I came across in the woods when we were little, but with a good dose of hospital-smelling chemicals thrown in. My stomach sours.
As my eyes adjust to the darkness, the space takes form around me. I am lying under a curtain of some sort. A shiny curtain that is not quite an arm’s length from my face. I reach up to touch it, and feel that behind the smooth satin is something hard. Solid. Wood, maybe. I drop my hand back to my side. Beneath me the fabric feels the same, but covers something springy. Cushioned.
I inch my fingers outward, and my left hand grazes something cold and clammy.
I turn my head to see a girl only a foot or so away from me. For a second, I think it’s George. She has dark hair with thick bangs swept to one side, as if blown by a gust of wind. Her eyes are
closed in sleep. But there’s something weird about her. After a second I realize it’s that she isn’t moving. Even in sleep, there are those tiny movements of the nostrils, the lips, as the sleeper breathes. But this girl is completely still. And then, as I watch, a small beetle crawls out of her nose.
And as horror stabs through me, I realize that the cold, clammy things my fingers are touching are the girl’s dead, rotting fingers. I try to scream, but it comes out of my throat as a hysterical screech. As I recoil from her, my right shoulder nudges something soft. I whip my head to the right and am inches away from the decomposing cheek of a boy, rotted away to the point that his teeth are visible through the putrid flesh.
“Oh my God!” My voice is shrill and trembling. Fear crushes my chest so that I can barely breathe.
“Where are we?” comes a voice from somewhere to my left. It’s Remi’s lilted accent, his words coming out in a squeak.
“We’re in a coffin,” says Sinclair from my other side. I lift my head slightly to look over the dead boy and see Sinclair lying stretched out like me on the other side of the decomposing corpse. In the faint green glow, I can see another body lying to the right of him. I swing my gaze to my left and see Remi, eyes as big as baseballs, staring my way with a look of pure terror. He’s pushed up against the silk on his left at the far end of the coffin.
“Is it just the three of us in here?” I ask.
“Us and three dead people.” Sinclair’s voice is flat, like he’s in shock.
“Who are they?” I ask. “The dead kids.”
Neither boy says a word.
“Where are the others?” I insist.
“Ant let go of my hand as we went through the door,” Remi responds. “You might have been right about sticking together.” He pauses for a minute. “This isn’t real, right?”
“It’s as real as your shantytown,” Sinclair responds, “where BethAnn got killed.”
Is he trying to bait Remi?
“Or got out,” Remi says, not noticing the dig. “She might have actually gotten out of the Dreamfall, remember?”
“What is that noise?” I ask. In this enclosed space, the mechanical ticking is so loud it seems to be coming from inside my head. My heart is beating along with its rhythm. Too fast. Too hard.
“It’s a clock,” Sinclair says.
“How do you know?”
“It’s ticking. What else would it be . . . unless we’re in a coffin with a bomb.”
I crane my head to the right to see him leaning upward. In the darkness, I can barely make him out, but his lips are curved into a tight smile. “Sorry . . . I have a bad habit of joking at the worst times. Stress relief.”
“It’s okay,” I say, and I want to touch his hand, if only to feel something else warm and living.
“It’s an alarm clock,” Remi confirms. “It’s glowing in the dark. I can just see it if I lift my head. Wait, I’m touching it.” And then he squeaks like he just reached out and grabbed a rat. “It’s in her hand,” he says with a trembling voice.
My brain is starting to function again. It’s probably been paused on terror overload and now I’m numb enough to the horror for it to play once more. “We need to see better. Can you take the clock out of her hand and hold it up?”
Another second passes, and there’s a scrabbling noise and Remi makes another sound of disgust. “Ugh. Her fingers are locked around it. Wait. Her arm moves.”
I pick up my head and try to see what Remi’s doing. He’s struggling with something over on the other side of the girl. After a second, I see a dead hand ease up over her hip and come to rest on her stomach. Painted fingernails are wrapped around a glittery alarm clock with a round face. The numbers and hands glow neon green. And on the top, where the snooze button should be, sticking out between the girl’s dead fingers is perched a plastic figurine—a horse with a tail and mane in rainbow colors.
“My Little Pony?” I squeak. “Why is the dead girl holding a My Little Pony clock?”
“My Little Pony . . . the stuff of nightmares,” Sinclair says, with more gallows humor.
“The hands read midnight,” Remi comments.
“Is there any way we can stop the ticking? It’s driving me crazy.” I reach over to try to wrest the clock from the dead girl’s fingers, but she’s not giving it up that easily. I accidentally look at her face again, and gag as I see the beetle perch on her lower lip before disappearing into her slightly open mouth.
“Oh my God. I’m going to throw up,” I say.
“Might improve the smell in here,” Sinclair comments through his fingers. He’s holding a hand over his nose and mouth. If possible, the stench seems to be getting worse. Maybe because the three living occupants of the coffin are warming the place up.
Instead of fading into the background like you’d expect, the ticking is getting louder. My brain feels like it’s going to explode.
“Are we just going to lie in here, or are we going to try to get out?” Remi says finally. “I can’t . . . I can’t stand this much longer.”
“Plus, if we don’t get out before the Wall appears, we could be stuck here,” Sinclair adds.
At this horrifying thought, my panic rises and my thoughts begin to cloud. Don’t dissociate. I try to pull my wits together and focus. I would do Dr. Carolan’s breathing exercise, except I’m actually trying not to breathe . . . or at least breathing in short shallow breaths . . . because the stench is so bad.
“Okay,” I say, urging my brain into action. “Everything depends on where this coffin is. If we’re aboveground, maybe we can get the lid to open.”
“We’re underground,” says Sinclair.
I crane my head to look over at him. “How do you know?” Through my peripheral vision, I spot something moving through the dead boy’s gaping cheek, between his teeth. I try to avert my eyes. It’s a millipede, my brain says. I taste bile, and ignore my nausea. “Sinclair? How do you know?”
“Because these people are rotting. They’ve obviously been dead for a while. You don’t just leave dead, rotting people aboveground. We’ve got to be buried.” His gaze falls to the boy between us, and a look of disgust passes over his face.
“Well, since this is a nightmare, who knows? I mean, six people buried in one coffin is already unrealistic. Maybe we’re laid out in a viewing room in some creepy Addams Family–style mortuary.” I try not to think about the last funeral I went to: my mom’s. Although we didn’t “leave her to rot”—she was cremated within days—Sinclair is right. The boy on my right looks like he’s been dead for months, years even.
I reach my hands up to press against the coffin lid. My arms are bent at the elbows—there’s not enough space to straighten them. The lid doesn’t budge. I try to bend my legs and pull them up to shove with my feet, but there’s not enough room. “Let’s try to push it open together,” I say. “All three at once.”
Sinclair presses his palms against the coffin lid, ready to push. Remi is smaller than us, so his arms are already perfectly straight. He tries to replicate my leg movement, and scrunching into a ball, is able to place his tennis-shoed feet against the lid.
“Okay,” I say. “One, two . . . push!”
We strain against the lid for a good few seconds, but nothing happens.
“Let’s try it again.”
“This isn’t going to work,” Remi responds.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to just lie here and hope we somehow get sucked into the Void the next time the Wall comes.” I’m disgusted with Remi’s defeatism when we’ve barely even tried.
“Even if we do get out,” Remi continues, “what if we’re not close enough to the Wall? We had to run for it before. It never just comes to us.” He sounds like he’s beginning to panic. “What if we’re stuck here? Forever?”
“Well, forever’s not going to last very long if you hyperventilate and use up all the oxygen,” Sinclair responds.
“For God’s sake, Remi, just shut up and push.” I plac
e my hands back on the lid. “And really try this time instead of giving up before you’ve even given it any effort.”
Remi doesn’t deign to respond. He rolls his legs up again and places his soles against the ceiling.
“One, two . . . push!” This time something shifts, ever so slightly.
“The lid,” Sinclair says excitedly. “The lid on my end. I think it opened a crack.”
“Let’s try again!” I urge. We do the same routine about three more times, but nothing else happens, except for the fact that our exertion has made the air a little bit warmer. With it, the horrible dead smell gets worse.
“Well, that was a resounding success,” Remi says after a moment.
I ignore him and say to Sinclair, “At least we know the lid opens on your side. Maybe if all three of us are down at your end and we put more pressure on it, we can get it open a little farther.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Remi asks. “Crawl over the dead kids?”
I paused, not having considered the logistics before suggesting it. “I guess that’s the only way,” I concede.
“There’s barely any room between us,” Sinclair says. “How’s that going to work?”
I lift my head and check out the space on either side of me. “Remi, try to scoot yourself over the top of the girl. Then we’ll try to push her down to the end.”
“That means I have to touch her.” His voice chokes with revulsion.
“You’re touching her already, aren’t you?” Sinclair asks.
“I’m trying not to.”
“Try to shuffle over her on your back,” I suggest. “Don’t roll over her front ways or you’ll be looking her in the face.”
Remi lay there, unmoving.
“Does anyone have a better idea?” I ask. “We’ll have to crawl over them at some point anyway. If we manage to open the lid more, we still have to squeeze out of Sinclair’s end of the coffin.”
I can hear Remi blow loudly through pursed lips, like he’s trying to psych himself up. And then there’s a scurrying noise as he jams his tennis shoes against the bottom of the casket for leverage while trying to shift his butt and shoulder up on top of the girl.