Sleeper Code

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “Keep it,” she said, hopping up onto the fence. “Gives me a reason to come back,” she explained with a sly grin.

  And she dropped down into her aunt and uncle’s yard, already thinking about the next time she would see him again.

  Chapter 5

  Tom couldn’t remember a time that his mother’s meat loaf ever tasted so good, and he had to wonder if it had anything to do with the buzz he still felt after meeting Madison Fitzgerald.

  He couldn’t forget the image of her slowly walking away from him across the yard toward the back fence. Wow.

  “You’re quiet tonight.” His mother intruded on his thoughts as she helped herself to another spoonful of mashed potatoes. “Is everything all right? Are you feeling okay?”

  He chewed and swallowed before answering. “I’m fine. Just thinking about some stuff.”

  “Stuff?” his dad piped in. “And what kind of stuff are you thinking about? School stuff? Health stuff? What’s on your mind? If there’s a problem, maybe we can help you out.”

  His father often did this, barraging him with a hundred questions at once. Tom guessed that it was his way of keeping in touch with what was going on in his son’s life, but it often felt more like an interrogation than a friendly father-and-son chat.

  “No problems,” Tom said, taking another bite of meat loaf. His father stared as he chewed.

  “You know there’s nothing you can’t tell us, right?” he asked, pouring some more bottled water into his glass.

  “Of course he does, Mason,” his mom chimed in. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and dropped it onto her empty plate.

  “Well, I know Tom’s been having a hard time with things lately, and I just wanted to let him know that we’re here if he needs us.”

  Tom smiled warmly at his father as he chewed the last of his green beans. “I know, Dad, and I appreciate it.”

  His father resumed eating as Tom scanned what remained of dinner. “Would anybody care if I had that last piece of meat?” he asked, already reaching for the plate.

  “Help yourself,” Victoria answered, helping him to move the plate closer.

  “Knock yourself out,” Mason added. “I’ve had plenty.”

  Everything was quiet then, his mom sipping her iced tea while his dad removed a small day planner from his back pocket and began making some notes on the calendar. Tom quietly continued to eat, his mind replaying his meeting with the girl next door.

  “I met a girl today,” he suddenly blurted. It just seemed to slip out.

  “You did?” his mother asked, a smile slowly forming. “And where did you meet this girl?”

  Dad closed the day planner, his attention piqued.

  “In the yard,” Tom told them as he picked up his napkin and swiped it over his mouth. “She threw a Frisbee and nearly scared the crap out of me.”

  “She threw a Frisbee at you?” his father asked. “What was she doing in the yard?”

  “She came from next door,” Tom explained. “Her name is Madison, and she’s staying with her aunt and uncle.”

  “So she just showed up in our yard?” Victoria questioned. “When was this?”

  “Today,” he said. “This afternoon. I was doing some homework, and she hopped the fence to talk to me. She said she noticed me playing ball the other day and wanted to come over and introduce herself.” He couldn’t help but beam as he talked about her. “She’s from Chicago. She’s a writer.”

  “Sounds like she’s something, don’t you think?” his father asked his mother.

  “She certainly does,” Mom said cheerily. “I wasn’t aware that there was somebody new living next door. Do you know how long she’s staying?”

  Tom shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Mason took the planner from the table and returned it to his back pocket. “So you think you’ll be seeing her again?” he asked.

  Tom played with his fork, crushing a sliver of green bean into paste. “Yeah, I hope so,” he responded. “She left the Frisbee so she’d have to come back.” He was smiling again. Maybe, just maybe he wasn’t as big a freak as he thought he was.

  “Well, I don’t want this girl to become too much of a distraction for you,” his father warned. “Remember, you have studies to maintain and there is your health to take into consideration.”

  Tom glared at his father, a flush of anger making his face feel hot. “I’m aware of my health.”

  “Now, Tom,” his mother jumped in. “What your father is trying to say is—”

  “I know what he’s trying to say.” Tom pushed back his chair. “He’s saying, Don’t forget, you’re not normal.”

  Dad sighed, closing his eyes in exasperation. “That’s not what I said and you know it. I’m just cautioning you not to go overboard with this girl. You know nothing about her, and besides, she’ll probably be gone by the end of summer anyway.”

  Tom stood up. “If you want me, I’ll be upstairs.”

  “He didn’t mean to upset you,” his mother said, reaching out to take hold of his arm. “We just want you to be careful. We don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  He was angry, and he knew he should escape before he said something that would get him into trouble. But he couldn’t help himself.

  “Y’know, you’re always talking about how you don’t want to see me sick or hurt and stuff, but you have no idea how it feels when you talk to me like this, like I’m some kind of special case that needs to be protected from the world.”

  Mason Lovett slowly crossed his arms over his chest, tilting his head slightly as he listened, waiting for Tom to cross the line.

  “I was really excited today about meeting this girl, and do you know why? It wasn’t just because she was really good looking and smart. What really excited me was the fact that she treated me like a normal guy. I wasn’t ‘that kid with the narcolepsy’: I was just Tom Lovett, a guy next door.”

  His mother had let go of his arm, and he turned to walk from the kitchen. “That was really nice for the short time it lasted.”

  The workout helped him calm down some.

  It was all part of his regular grind, a light workout three hours before bedtime. Sometimes he used the treadmill or the weight machine in the family room downstairs; other times he’d just shoot some baskets outside in the yard. Tonight he had used the weight machine until the muscles in his arms and legs burned from exertion.

  A shower and then some downtime usually followed his exercise: maybe watching some television or a DVD or sometimes just surfing the Net. But tonight he couldn’t concentrate on much. Tom’s mind was filled with thoughts of Madison Fitzgerald.

  He rubbed his wet hair roughly with a towel. Tom tossed the towel to the floor and stood in front of his dresser mirror, picking up a brush. He knew it was stupid to be obsessing about someone he hardly knew, but there was definitely something about Madison that he couldn’t get off his mind.

  Tom stared at his reflection in the mirror. The bruising on his forehead seemed as if it had already started to fade, and he wondered if it was even possible for somebody like Madison to be interested in him. He didn’t think he was all that bad looking, but it wasn’t his looks that were the problem. The fear of having an attack had kept him close to home, so his chances of meeting people his own age, especially girls, were pretty much zero.

  He might really like this girl. Sure, she was attractive, and yes, she had talked to him—the first girl his age he’d talked to in, like, three years—but there was something more than that. He had felt a connection.

  Tom went to the window, opening it a little wider. There was a breeze tonight, and the sound of the wind passing through the leaves was strangely soothing.

  He stood at the window, hand ready to draw the shade, and looked across at the house next door. There were two lights on downstairs and one upstairs. He wondered if the upstairs light was in the room where Madison was staying.

  “You’re such a freak,” he muttered, pulling the shade midway and
returning to his bed.

  He removed his watch and glasses and set them down on the bedside table as he did every night. He had always hated going to bed, even as a little boy—there was always a part of him that was afraid this would be the time he wouldn’t wake up, that this night he would drift off and descend so far down into sleep that he couldn’t find his way back to the waking world.

  He pulled back the covers and crawled into bed, trying to push the unnerving thoughts from his mind. Reaching over to the nightstand, he switched off the lamp, plunging the room into semidarkness, illuminated only by the quarter moon in the night sky and the soft lights from the neighbors’ house next door.

  Madison’s house.

  Tom closed his eyes and braced himself for sleep, drifting off faster than he expected.

  The hunter moved through the darkness as though he were a part of it.

  Silently he cut through the nighttime woods, darting from tree to tree, steadily making his way toward the cabin sitting at the top of the rise.

  The forest was quiet, unusually so, as if sensing his intent, as if knowing what he had come to do.

  He made himself at home in any environment—crowded city streets, dense primordial jungle: it was all the same to him. He had a function to perform, a job to do, and he would finish it without hesitation.

  From a place of concealment he studied the cabin—rustic in name only, he was certain. The structure was sure to be equipped with all the amenities of the modern home—the perfect place to escape the pressures of day-to-day life, to hide from the ills of the world.

  With careful eyes he searched the darkness for any signs of security measures. Not finding any, he slowly moved toward the cabin, hugging the shadows, all of his senses completely focused on his surroundings.

  The night remained silent, offering up no surprises as he climbed the three plank steps to the cabin’s porch. He stood perfectly still, eyes closed, imagining the layout inside. He heard sounds from within and, using the blueprint drawn in his mind, figured they were coming from an area away from the door, allowing him to enter without being noticed. The hunter studied the door, then reached out and gripped the smooth metal of the doorknob. It turned easily and quietly.

  It was nice on the inside, cozy. His eyes darted about the entryway, taking it all in. Its layout was almost exactly as he had imagined.

  Slowly he followed the sound of activity, down the short corridor toward a room just beyond the cabin’s entrance. The hunter carefully rounded the corner, peering into a room that could best be described as a den. His eyes immediately focused on a lone figure, kneeling on the wooden floor before a fireplace. He was an older man, with a head of thick white hair, wearing brown corduroys and a heavy cable-knit sweater; there were slippers on his feet. The fire burned low, and he was using a metal poker to move the logs around. A fresh pile of wood waited to his right.

  The hunter said nothing and simply stood in the doorway, watching his prey work to rekindle the blaze. He had added the first of the new logs to the growing fire when his body suddenly froze. The hunter had seen this before in the hunted. It was as if a long-dormant sixth sense was suddenly activated, an animal instinct that warned of impending danger.

  The old man slowly began to turn. “You have been expected,” he said.

  The hunter smiled.

  A predator’s smile.

  Tom came awake fighting the urge to scream.

  Something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

  He was soaking with sweat, his body trembling with the terror that now gripped him. His mind was racing, horrible staccato images flashing through his head as he attempted to calm himself down, to put his jumbled thoughts into some sort of order. Was it just a really bad dream or one of my hallucinations? he wondered.

  Staring up at the familiar, flaking ceiling in the morning light, he tried to slow his racing heart, taking deep breaths—in through his nose and out through his mouth. He had a hard time remembering when he had ever felt so completely freaked.

  This must be what it’s like to have a heart attack, he thought, his heart hammering so hard that he thought it might just burst. He had been taught relaxation exercises by a number of his doctors over the years and struggled to remember some of their instructions. He was supposed to clear his mind, imagine his racing heart within his body, and then picture the frantically pulsing muscle gradually slowing as he breathed deeply and slowly. Tom inhaled, inflating his lungs to capacity, and then breathed out, the picture of the pumping heart in his mind beginning to match the sensations inside his chest. That’s it, he reassured himself, finally beginning to feel some sort of control.

  But that was short lived.

  The vision of an old man suddenly exploded to life in his head. Tom gasped, his body suddenly rigid.

  The old man, his face flushed and pink with exertion—or was it fear?—knelt before a roaring fireplace, the shock of snow white hair on his head waving in the air like some bizarre kind of underwater plant life.

  “You have been expected,” he said.

  Tom screwed his eyes tightly shut, trying without success to force the bizarre imagery from his mind. Instead he watched as the man took hold of the arm of a chair nearby and forced himself to his feet. The old man’s eyes were intense and filled with fear as he stared, it seemed, at Tom.

  But how can that be?

  Tom was certain he’d never seen the man before, but he felt a strange connection to him. Questions about the man’s identity hung on Tom’s lips as he lay in his bed, pummeled by the vision playing inside his head. He knew that it was best to simply allow the hallucination—or whatever it was—to run its course, so he surrendered to it, allowing it to play out to its conclusion.

  The white-haired man looked like he was about to speak again when Tom heard a strange coughing sound and an explosion of red appeared on the front of the man’s sweater. At first Tom wasn’t sure exactly what he was seeing, but then he heard the odd sound for a second time and another eruption of red appeared on the old man, as though a flower, a crimson flower, had blossomed on his chest. But then the flowers began to drip, to ooze, leaving a trail on the man’s front as he crumpled to his knees and fell to the floor before the fireplace.

  Holy shit! Tom thought, realizing what was happening. The old man had been shot; before Tom’s very eyes, he’d been shot.

  Panicking, Tom tried to break the vision’s hold on him, but the nightmare imagery held him tight.

  He suddenly found himself within the hallucination, positioned over the injured old man, staring down into his paling face. Bubbles of blood accumulated at the corners of his wrinkled mouth, trailing down to stain his cheek. The old man’s gaze was defiant and his lips trembled as he tried to speak.

  Unable to control his actions, Tom moved closer, leaning his ear toward the dying man’s mouth to hear what were certain to be his final words. The old man spoke, a single word that Tom could not comprehend.

  Then a figure clad in black appeared, a gun in his hand, a silencer attached to its barrel. The murderer knelt carefully beside the old man’s body, keeping his back to Tom as he pressed two fingers to the dead man’s throat. Tom wanted to see the killer’s face, wanted to see the kind of person who could so coldly murder a defenseless old man.

  And as if reading his thoughts, the killer slowly stood and turned to face him. Tom gasped. He was painfully familiar with the shaggy blond hair, athletic build, high cheekbones, and pointy nose; after all, he’d seen them every day of his life.

  The killer was himself.

  The vision released its hold, and Tom was able to move again. He tossed back the covers and jumped from his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his brain on fire. Snatching up his glasses from the bedside table, he stumbled as he headed for the door to his room. The muscles and joints of his legs ached painfully. He must have worked out harder than he realized the night before.

  Tom didn’t want to be in his room any longer; he wanted to b
e away from this place where hallucinations of murder and murderers who wore his face threatened to make him insane. He threw open the door and lurched out into the hallway. Immediately he felt better, the air much fresher here than the staleness of his bedroom. Barefoot, he padded down the carpeted hall toward the stairs. The muscles in his legs were still sore, so he was careful to grab hold of the wooden banister as he descended to the ground floor.

  He heard the sounds of morning television wafting through the house from the kitchen as he reached the foyer at the foot of the stairs. Besides the aching muscles of his legs, he noticed a painful emptiness in his stomach. Just the thought of eating was enough to get the juices inside his empty belly gurgling.

  “What’s for breakfast?” he called, trying to sound as normal as he could—trying his best to forget the disturbing imagery of the hallucinations he had just endured. He was hoping for bacon and eggs, maybe even some home fries, but would settle for a big bowl of oatmeal. The way his stomach was feeling, anything would taste perfectly fine.

  “Tom?” his mother called out, getting up from the tiny kitchen table to meet him in the doorway. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m good,” he told her. The violent images from his waking vision tried to force their way to the forefront, but he managed to hold them back. “I’m good. Just a little stiff.”

  Then he caught the look in his mother’s eyes, a look of genuine concern, and a creeping realization gradually began to dawn. He looked to the watch that wasn’t there.

  “Oh no,” he said, rubbing the skin on his wrist, feeling like he might be sick. He leaned against the doorway for support, his aching legs trembling.

  “How long?” he asked, fearing the answer.

  She placed a warm hand against his cheek. “You poor thing.”

  “How long, Mom?” he demanded, his voice cracking with emotion. He didn’t want to hear it, but he had to.

  “Five days,” she whispered, looking away, not wanting to see the hurt in his eyes.