she’s in the lap of the dead man, in the arms of the dead man and no way
to get out of there because the crazyman is coming. The crazyman looks
so scary, so bad and scary, that she can’t watch him coming, doesn’t
want to see the gun in her face the way the red-haired girl saw it, so
she turns her head away, turns her face to the dead man She woke from
the dream as she had never awakened from another, not screaming, not
even with an unvoiced cry caught in her throat, but gagging. She was
curled into a tight ball, hugging herself, dry-heaving, choking not on
anything she had eaten but on sheer throat-clogging repulsion.
Jim was turned away from her, lying on his side. His knees were drawn
up slightly in a modified fetal position. He was still sound asleep.
When she could get her breath, she sat up. She was not merely shaking,
she was rattling. She was convinced she could hear her bones clattering
against one another.
She was glad that she had not eaten anything after the doughnuts last
evening. They had passed through her stomach hours ago. If she had
eaten anything else, she’d be wearing it now.
She hunched forward and put her face in her hands. She sat like that
until the rattling quieted to a shudder and the shudder faded to spasms
of shivering.
When she raised her face from her hands, the first thing she noticed was
daylight at the narrow windows of the high room. It was opalescent
graypink, a weak glow rather than a sunny-blue glare, but daylight
nonetheless.
Seeing it, she realized that she had not been convinced she would ever
see daylight again.
She looked at her wristwatch. 6:10. Dawn must have broken only a short
while ago. She could have been asleep only two to two and a half hours.
It had been worse than no sleep at all; she did not feel in the least
rested.
The dream. She suspected that The Friend had used its telepathic power
to push her down into sleep against her will. And because of the
unusually intense nature of the nightmare, she was convinced it had sent
her that gruesome reel of mind-film.
But why?
Jim murmured and stirred, then grew still again, breathing deeply but
quietly. His dream must not be the same one she’d had; if it was, he
would be writhing and crying out like a man on the rack.
She sat for a while, considering the dream, wondering if she had been
shown a prophetic vision. Was The Friend warning her that she was going
to wind up in a Dixie Duck Burger Palace scrambling for her life through
food and blood, stalked by a raving maniac with an automatic carbine?
She had never even heard of Dixie Duck, and she couldn’t imagine a more
ludicrous place to die.
She was living in a society where the streets were crawling with
casualties of the drug wars, some of them so brain-blasted that they
might well pick up a gun and go looking for the rat people who were
working with the CIA, running spy networks out of burger restaurants.
She had worked on newspapers all her adult life. She had seen stories
no less tragic, no more strange.
After about fifteen minutes, she couldn’t bear to think about the nightù
mare any more, not for a while. Instead of getting a handle on it
through analysis, she became more confused and distressed the longer she
dwelt on it. In memory, the images of slaughter did not fade, as was
usually the case with a dream, but became more vivid. She didn’t need
to puzzle it out right now.
Jim was sleeping, and she considered waking him. But he needed his rest
as much as she did. There was no sign of The Enemy making use of a
dream doorway, no change in the limestone walls or the oak-plank floor,
so she let Jim sleep.
As she had looked around the room, studying the walls, she had noticed
the yellow tablet lying on the floor under the far window. She had
pitched it aside last evening when The Friend had resisted vocalizing