by Mark Lukens
We stopped and picked up some burgers and fries at a fast-food restaurant and took the food with us. We stopped at a dollar store and bought a cooler, some drinks, a throw-away cell phone, some bathroom supplies. Alicia also bought scissors and hair dye for her and a pair of electric clippers for me—something to change the way we looked just a little.
It was almost afternoon when we found a motel that looked run-down enough for our situation. The Indian man who ran it took Alicia’s fake info and cash, and fifteen minutes later we had our stuff in the room and the door locked.
An hour and a half later I had shaved my hair down to a quarter inch with the clippers and taken a shower, changing my clothes, balling up the other ones to throw away. I gave the bathroom to Alicia so she could take a shower.
While she was in the shower, I turned the TV on, scanning the news channels for any reports about us or a stolen car. I didn’t see any reports about the stolen car and no more news alerts about us.
For the moment I felt somewhat safe, but I couldn’t relax all the way—it felt like a massive invisible force was pushing down on me, crowding in from every direction. No matter where I ran or what I did, I was never going to be able to get away from them. They would always find me.
Find us.
It hit me again that it wasn’t just me anymore—now it was Alicia who had been pulled into this. The rational side of me knew it wasn’t my fault; I had no way of knowing what was going to happen. But it still felt like my fault, and I wanted to apologize to Alicia. But I didn’t know how.
I flipped through the TV channels, trying to let my mind wander a little. I needed a break from the stress. It might seem impossible to avoid thinking about life-threatening circumstances, but I had almost succeeded in the task when Alicia came out of the bathroom. Her hair was shorter and blond. She was dressed in the beachwear we had bought at the thrift store.
“How do I look?” she asked.
She looked younger. Different. Radiant. Beautiful. The words almost slipped out, but I bit them back. “You . . . you look great.”
I felt like my nearly shaved head made me look older and her stylish short haircut made her look younger.
After I got up and grabbed a beer from the mini-fridge, I looked at Alicia. “I’m so sorry. Your life is ruined now.”
“It’s not your fault.”
I was about to argue that point with her.
“It’s my fault,” she continued. “I had a chance to walk away in the beginning. As soon as I suspected you were programmed, I could have run away as fast as possible.”
“That’s not your fault. You study this stuff. You were curious.”
“Yes, I admit that. But I also knew something bad was going on.” She paused for just a moment. “Besides, it might have been too late by then already. Maybe as soon as Stan told me about you it was already too late. Maybe by then I was already connected to this.”
I stayed silent. And she was quiet for a moment, an awkward silence blanketing us.
“It’s too late to play the blame game,” Alicia said. “Right now we need to figure out a way to stop this.” She looked away for a moment and then looked back at me. “We need to try again.”
Going under hypnosis was the last thing I wanted to do, but I knew she was right. The only hope we had of finding out exactly what I had been programmed to do was to learn more details that were buried in my mind somewhere. But those memories and instructions seemed to be buried so deep in my mind, and I was afraid we’d never find them in time.
After finishing my bottle of beer, I sat down in one of the wooden chairs, this one not as sturdy or well-made as the last motel we’d stayed in. Alicia sat on the bed.
I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, trying to drown out the noise outside on Ridgewood Avenue. Little by little the sounds from outside faded away, and I was once again floating in my friend’s backyard pool. And once again, it was the peaceful place that Alicia had instructed me to build in my mind. But as I drifted deeper into the fantasy world I had created, a sense of doom began to weigh down on me as the fog moved in. Bits of what I’d thought was snow at first was falling down all around me, but now I knew it was ash from some unseen destruction. The mist swirled all around me like thunderstorm clouds, and I knew it was the same mist I’d seen in the backyard across the street from my house. I saw a glow among the mist in the sky, like clouds were parting, and then the eagle I’d seen before perched on the fence emerged, soaring on the gusts of wind as a golden shaft of light shined down on it.
“The eagle,” I whispered, not sure if I was saying the word out loud in front of Alicia or only in my mind. “It means something.”
As the world darkened around me, I felt cold. The birds had stopped chirping and the only sounds were the whistling wind and the occasional screech from the eagle—a chilling and lonely sound.
The pool water began to churn, little waves rocking my inflatable raft back and forth. I gripped the sides, trying to hold on. I sat up straighter, realizing that the pool was so much larger now, part of it running off toward the foggy horizon, like I was at the edge of an ocean. Panic seized me as I stared at the unending water.
But my panic intensified when I sensed someone . . . or something . . . right behind me where the shore was. Or maybe it was in the water, or above it, hovering there. I hadn’t turned around to see what was behind me yet, too paralyzed with fear.
“Zach . . .”
I thought it was Michelle’s voice for a moment.
“Zach . . .”
But then I realized that it was Alicia’s voice.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
My eyes popped open. I was in the motel room, sitting in the wooden chair. I didn’t think I had sat there very long, but my muscles felt stiff and my back ached. It was darker in the room, like the sun was setting and bringing the night with it. Maybe the deepening shadows of the room had manifested themselves as the dark clouds and waters in my vision.
Alicia wasn’t sitting on the edge of the bed anymore, she was standing now.
“Did I say anything?” I asked. “Did you find anything out?” I searched her eyes for some kind of positive sign.
She shook her head. “Sorry. I think we should take a break for a while.”
I agreed. I needed to stand up and move around. I wanted another beer. I grabbed one from the fridge, expecting Alicia to forbid it, but she didn’t. I opened it and drank half of it down in a few swallows.
Alicia still hadn’t sat down. She looked nervous and antsy. “What if we can’t do this?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. All we can do is keep trying.”
“I’m not an expert at this,” she practically snapped at me. “I mean, I know the basics, and I’ve done a lot of research on this, but you need someone who’s an expert at this kind of thing.”
“Like who?”
She didn’t have an answer for me.
“We can’t seek anyone else out.”
She nodded in agreement, knowing exactly what I was talking about. We couldn’t pull anyone else into this nightmare, risk anyone else’s life.
“All we can do is try,” I said again. “We know it’s supposed to happen tomorrow at four o’clock. We just need to know exactly where, and we need to know exactly how and where the bomb is going to go off.”
Alicia walked over to the nightstand between the two beds and picked up her small notebook that Stan had bought. She opened it, staring at the numbers. She shook her head in frustration. “The answers are in these numbers somewhere. We just aren’t seeing it.”
“We’ll try again a little later,” I said. “We’ll take a break for an hour and then we’ll try again.”
*
Alicia tried once more to get something out of my subconscious . . . anything. But there was nothing.
After she brought me out of hypnosis, she suggested that we get some sleep. “Maybe you’ll see something in your dreams,” she said.
“Maybe,�
�� I answered, trying to sound positive.
I drank two more beers while I watched TV with the sound turned down low. I was exhausted, but too wired to sleep. Alicia nodded off in the other bed almost immediately. She had left the notepad and pen on the nightstand between the beds next to the old alarm clock and telephone. She had instructed me to write my dreams down as soon as I woke up, even if the dreams seemed mundane or didn’t seem to make any sense. There could be something buried in the random images in my dreams, a clue hidden there.
Even though I watched TV, trying to get sleepy, my mind kept slipping back to the planned terror attack for tomorrow. But the more I tried to concentrate on it, the more I tried to find something in my memories, the more elusive it became. I was just frustrating myself. Maybe Alicia was right—I should try to get my mind off of it, let my subconscious take over. But I felt like I was running out of time, and the thought of sleeping while this cabal planned a terror attack made me feel guilty. People were going to get hurt and killed. Maybe a lot of them. I knew the pressure I was putting on myself was too much, too heavy, like the mist in my visions that pushed down on me, but I couldn’t help it.
Finally, I turned the TV off and lay down in bed. The lights were out but there was still enough light from the street seeping in around the edges of the blinds and flimsy curtains hanging over the window beside the door that looked out onto the parking lot.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to sleep, but then I drifted off without realizing it.
The dream began at the same familiar starting point. Michelle stood in the middle of the street, just beyond the splash of light from the streetlamp. Her back was to me. She was staring at the house across the street. And then she ran toward it.
I chased her, calling out to her, begging her to stop. I knew where we were going, where she was leading me to. I wanted to stop, but the dream carried me along helplessly, like I was adrift in a rough sea, trapped on a float on the dark, churning water.
Moments later I rushed through the opened back gate, then through the darkness of the back yard to the beacon of light shining out through the open back door.
I was in the storage room a few seconds later. I saw the graffiti on the walls—my graffiti, the racial slurs, the strings of numbers, the random words, the ramblings of a lunatic. That’s what the cabal wanted the world to think of me.
“Zach . . .”
Michelle was inside the home, calling to me.
I remembered what I’d seen the last time Michelle had been inside this house. I remembered her in the doorway, her body bloated, her skin gray and dotted with black bruises, the rope tied so tightly around her neck, digging into her mottled flesh, her feet sheathed in the black boots where I’d found the bank receipts and notecards with the numbers on them, the toes of her boots hanging a few inches above the cracked linoleum floor. I remembered her staring at me with eyes that bulged from her face, threatening to pop.
But she wasn’t there in the doorway.
“Zach . . .”
I went inside the house.
She wasn’t there.
I searched through the dilapidated house, rushing past more of my graffiti, my crude drawings, my words and numbers painted frantically.
“Zach . . .” Michelle whispered from somewhere in the darkness.
I couldn’t find her. My search through the house became more and more panicked. The house, much like my friend’s pool I had been floating in, seemed to grow so much larger than it should have been. Rooms opened up to more rooms, and halls led to more halls. I could tell I was traveling deeper and deeper into the house, entering rooms I’d already been in before. There were no windows, and it felt like I was somewhere deep underground, or lost in a funhouse maze from hell.
And then I came to some kind of back door. I pushed it open. I was outside, in the back yard. The same gray mist hung over everything, shrouding something in the yard . . . something big.
Michelle?
No.
It wasn’t Michelle. It wasn’t a person. It was something else. Something much larger.
A snort came from the mist, then a pawing at the earth, thundering footsteps approaching from the wall of swirling fog and the ash drifting down like gray snow. It was an animal of some kind, something large and heavy.
At first I thought it was a bull materializing out of the fog, but then I saw the curved horns. It was a ram, its coat black and shiny in the night, its eyes barely discernable among the blackness, but I could tell the animal was staring at me.
With a rush of breath I woke up. It felt like a scream was trapped in my throat.
Alicia stood at the end of the beds. She was already dressed, and I could tell she’d been awake for a while.
“Bad dream?” she asked.
I didn’t answer right away because I couldn’t really call it a nightmare, more like a weird dream.
“You should write it down.”
I did, blinking rapidly so I could see the paper and my words through my sleep-blurred vision.
“Is that coffee I smell?” I asked as I scribbled words on the page.
“I drove down to a McDonald’s and got us some coffee and breakfast.”
I was alarmed that I hadn’t woken up when she’d left and returned—I must have really been tired. And I was also alarmed that she’d driven the car we’d stolen, even if it was only a few blocks. But I didn’t say anything; we’d be driving it again soon enough.
“Cream and sugar?” she asked.
“Please. Both.”
She brought the coffee to me as I continued writing. I took a sip.
A few minutes later I had finished jotting down my dream. I remembered the first part easily enough, because it was like the beginning of most of my dreams over the last week or so. But the rest of the dream was fading already, and it didn’t take too many words to describe what had happened once I was inside the house, moving from room to room as the house seemed to grow so huge. I described how I’d felt trapped and panicked. And then I was outside and saw the black ram. But the beast hadn’t charged me; it had just stared at me, snorting and scuffing one hoof on the grass.
Alicia sat down on the other bed. I handed her my notes.
“This doesn’t mean anything to you?” she asked after reading them.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what’s from my imagination and what has been planted.”
She nodded in agreement.
I looked at the alarm clock, sitting up a little straighter. “It’s nine o’clock already?”
She nodded.
The seconds were ticking by faster and faster.
“We should try another session,” Alicia said.
*
A few minutes later I had eaten a breakfast sandwich and finished my coffee. I sat down in the uncomfortable wooden chair and did my best to relax.
Alicia spoke, helping me sink down into the world I had created, and within minutes I felt like I was floating on top of the water in my friend’s swimming pool And just like before, the feeling of peace and relaxation was driven away as the mist rolled in, the ash falling all around me, the wind picking up.
The eagle was there again, swooping down from the mist and ash, a golden light filtering through and shining on it. Beyond the edge of the pool a creature stirred in the mist. The ram came forward.
The ram and the eagle—two animals.
But what did they mean? They had to mean something.
The water was getting choppy again, the wind shrieking. The eagle soared on the wind, in and out of the mist, like it was blasting holes in it, screeching.
The ram hadn’t come closer to me. It stood still except for when it pawed at the ground, snorting like it was ready to charge at me.
And then I was back in the motel room again, the shift so sudden I felt like I had skidded to a stop. My eyes popped open. I sat rigid in the chair.
“What time is it?” I muttered. My mouth was dry and my body was stiff and sore. I f
elt like I’d been sitting there for hours.
Alicia bolted over to her bed, shoving her clothes and the few possessions she had down into the duffel bag.
Everything seemed to be moving so quickly. I struggled to stand up.
“We gotta go,” she said.
“What time is it?” I asked again. I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand between the beds. “One o’clock? It’s one o’clock?”
“I kept you under longer than usual.”
“What?” I still felt like I’d been run over by a truck.
“But it worked.”
“What worked? What did I say?”
“You know where it’s taking place.”
“Where?”
“Come on. We don’t have a lot of time. I’ll explain on the way.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Alicia drove because she knew exactly where we were going—The Ocean Wave Resort. I remembered seeing something on the news about some kind of music festival or outdoor concert going on there. It clicked in my mind as soon as Alicia told us where we were going. I swore I’d seen glimpses of the place in my dreams, or at least the ocean nearby, but I couldn’t be entirely certain. I wasn’t sure how Alicia had pulled the information out of me. She said she’d kept pressing and pressing while I was under hypnosis until the name of the hotel just seemed to come to me. I asked about the video, but she’d forgotten to record the session.
It was almost two o’clock when we got to the hotel. The pool area beyond it was packed with partiers. A local band was playing. Parking was impossible so Alicia drove a few blocks away and parked down a side street. We would walk back to the hotel. It was better than driving the stolen car up and down A1A; eventually a cop was going to pull us over and run the license plate.
The world around me felt surreal, like I was trapped in one of my visions as I slipped into hypnosis. It was easy and tempting to believe that none of this was real and that it was all part of a big dream. We were about to try to stop a programmed terrorist—it couldn’t be real.
But it was.