“Snap out of it, Doc. Your mind’s wandering again.”
“Um, my apologies.”
“Where’s Lori?” she asked again.
“I…I do not know, my dear,” he replied lamely, feeling ashamed of himself for looking at Krysty in an unpure manner and eager to shift blame for his own feelings of guilt. “We-we got separated.”
“Well, she’s a big girl now. Hope she can look after herself!” Krysty cried, punching Doc easily in the shoulder with a left jab, and then she turned, her long hair fanning out behind as she ran away from the coming storm flashing softly on the horizon.
The bedroom was gone. No walls, no windows. No smiling cartoon moon looking down.
Doc was alone once more.
Doc was dreaming.
Yes, a dream. Despite his earlier beliefs to the contrary, that was the only answer. Yes. Logic dictated his conscious mind was sleeping while his unconscious plundered his brain, skirting the damaged areas marked Do Not Enter and Condemned and Warning! DANGER! for a change, and, instead, pulling out pieces of memory long in storage, kept there if needed, locked away if not.
Lori, young Lori. Despite the dream Krysty’s assurances, Doc knew Lori wasn’t a big girl. In fact, despite the strip-queen body and the mounds of antagonism she routinely spouted, she was even more immature than young Dean.
Dean had never met Lori. She had passed on before Doc made Ryan’s son’s acquaintance.
So.
Damn the philosophy lesson and the code he knew he was trying to make sense of-instead, he would try to deal with the stone-hard facts. Doc knew he was in the middle of a jump dream, his memories of the past unbottled and poured into his skull in a vol- atile mix courtesy of the blender provided by the frightening forces of the mat-trans experience.
Ignore it, he finally decided. Go back to sleep.
Doc closed his eyes and nodded his head and was surprised to find his eyelids weren’t functioning- either that or he could see right through them, since he was looking down at his hands instead of the back of his eyelids.
“No, not mine,” he whispered, for Doc was flabbergasted to find his hands were young again, and the veins were bold and purple and the muscles underneath the taut skin were pulsating within their fleshy outer covering, muscles that now enabled him to have a bold strong grip, as if modified with tensile cables of steel. The liver spots of artificial age thrust cruelly upon his weathered skin had vanished. His threadbare garments-trousers, shirt, coat-all were also whole and new. The felt of his black frock coat was brushed and unfrayed. The leather of his boots crinkled like new brown paper and shone like wet vinyl in the flickering flames.
Flames?
A tall stovepipe hat stood erect on his head, though Doc couldn’t recall wearing such a chapeau more than once or twice, and even then, only because the headgear was a gift, and he’d never liked the thing, feeling that it made a mockery of him and goodness, but wasn’t it terribly hot in this latest splotch of mind vomit.
The shock of returned youth fell away as Doc realized he was surrounded by fire.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he boomed, and the voice in his ears was like freshly thrown thunder. He’d have to speak loud and plain to be heard here; a chem storm was brewing, flashing pink lightning against the darkness of the night sky. The air smelled acidic and alien, like the laboratories of his college days.
And then, he knew. He remembered this place. It was Snakefish, California, a mere scrap of a once prosperous state decimated by the sub-launched nuclear missiles from Soviet submarines off the West Coast. It was the home of Baron Edgar Brennan, who’d either taken or been given the comical name of a long-dead folksy cowboy actor, according to Mildred Wyeth. The physician had heard of Edgar and his strange ville secondhand, since she was still in cryo sleep during the time of that adventure, but Doc had assured her she hadn’t missed much.
Baron Brennan had set himself up in high style thanks to a hidden cache of gasoline…but he was an old man, and in a tale as ancient as the world, youth overtook age. His subjects in Snakefish had turned against him. Ultimately he died with his face in the dirt, shot in the back by a sawed-off shotgun, a double-barreled charge of death that nearly cut him in two, chilling him messily, if not instantly.