by James Sperl
“Hey, you,” she said to the baby, scooping her up. “Did you sleep okay? Huh? I missed you last night.”
And she meant every word. Getting to sleep had been a chore—all she kept thinking about was Naomi. Was she crying? Was she hungry? Did anyone tend to her? When the convoy returned, and the place plunged into temporary pandemonium, the first thing she wanted to do was check on the baby. It was instinctual. The sort of thing any good mother would want to do.
The word hit her like a ton of bricks. Mother. For all intents and purposes, she supposed that was what she had become to this precious girl. And the designation fit as comfortably and snug as a fur-lined glove. Had she not gone with Andrew the previous evening, she would have ended up here with the rest of the concerned mothers who flocked to check on their children.
Dustin prepared a bottle of formula. “I don't know. I'm just hoping people will come to their senses.”
“They will,” Clarissa said, walking over to him. “People freak out when tragedy disrupts their lives, but most seem to find their way back after a time. Just look at this place.”
“Maybe.” Dustin screwed the cap on a baby bottle filled with formula then dropped it into a pot of boiling water situated over a propane burner. He faced Clarissa. “A lot of people think there are more out there. That whoever attacked the convoy is part of a larger group.”
Clarissa had heard that as well. “Even if that's true, do people really believe that they'd outnumber what we have here?” Dustin shrugged. Clarissa felt his frustration. “So where's everyone going? What're they planning to do?”
“Hide probably. Scavenge. Eke it out until things either calm down or implode, then move along until they find something else. Wash, rinse, repeat.”
Naomi fidgeted with Clarissa's hair. Clarissa gave her a playful poke to the ribs, which elicited a gummy smile. It filled her heart to overflowing.
“Well, I guess you can't fault people for doing what they think is best for their family,” she said. “We're all just making the smartest choices we can in light of everything that—”
The Sound stopped Clarissa cold.
It amplified in intensity until it screeched across the sky, filling the air with its now infamous scraped-metal reverberation.
She peered out the window. People froze and gaped skyward, but did so without panic. This was old hat now, even though the terror in their eyes was always fresh.
“It never gets any easier to hear,” she said.
“I know,” Dustin responded. “But at least I don't feel like I'm going to die at any given moment when I hear it, unlike three months ago. I just wish there was a way to make it stop.”
Clarissa teetered on the decision to tell Dustin everything. To tell him of the real reason she was here, of Rosenstein, and the claim that they may hold the key to all of it. But as nice as he was—and let's face it, he was pretty easy on the eyes too—she didn't know him. She didn't know who floated in his circle. As much as she wanted to confide in him, it was still too soon.
“Ever since this thing started I've had some of the craziest dreams,” she said.
“My whole life is one big, crazy dream now.”
Clarissa turned around to look at him, as Dustin plucked the bottle from the boiling water. He squirted a jet onto his wrist then, satisfied, handed the bottle to Clarissa.
“Thank you,” she said. She slipped the nipple into the baby's mouth. She sucked eagerly on it. “Seriously, though. You have any weird or odd dreams since this thing started? Like nightmares?”
Dustin gave her a pointed look. “I have.”
“Any where you're in this crazy alien-looking industrial space with horrifying creatures that surround you in total blackness?”
Dustin's face went flat. “Okay, you just made the hairs on my arm stand up. How did you know that?”
She didn't know why, but it surprised Clarissa to learn that Dustin felt his nightmare was unique. Given the number of people he came into contact with on a daily basis, she assumed that he would have made the connection by now. But he seemed genuinely surprised to hear that someone else had dreamed the same thing he had.
How many others had had the dream but never spoke of it? She was convinced the Nothing Place played a crucial role in whatever was happening, and that conviction grew with each person she came across who had dreamed about it. She could now add Dustin to that list.
“Because I had it too,” she said. “And so have others.”
Dustin's expression went blank. “What're you talking about? The same dream? How's that even possible?”
“I don't have an answer for that, but it's true. And everyone described the same things I just did.”
Dustin searched the air. “But...but what does it mean?”
“No one knows. But I have a theory.”
Clarissa told him how she thought the Nothing Place was a staging area, a place where dream consciousness could somehow transcend time and space into a wakeful consciousness plane.
“Shit,” Dustin said after she finished explaining. “That's mega deep.”
“Tell me about it. Can I ask you a question? Were you alone when you had the dream?”
Dustin attained a new level of disbelief. “How did...” He stopped himself from reacting then answered, “Yeah. It was at the beginning when we didn't know much. I was asleep when this elderly couple came across me at the right moment. If it weren't for them...” He drifted off. “Dave and Claire Englewood. They're in here someplace.” He returned to Clarissa. “What do those things want?”
“That's the thing,” Clarissa said, checking the level in Naomi's bottle. “No one knows. I'm not sure we ever will. But it's in that place that things happen. I just know it. If we could find a way to shut it off somehow or prevent the mind from going there, I really think we could beat it. Hell, even having a little bit of control in there might make a difference. Until then, though, we'll have to continue to sleep in groups or risk dreaming of that horrible place.”
Dustin seemed to be considering something. “Are you talking about having control of your dreams?”
Clarissa rolled her eyes. “I know, it's not realistic. It was just wishful thinking.”
“But if you could,” Dustin pressed, “do you think it would make a difference?”
“What, to be able to move around freely in your dream state as if you were consciously aware? Of course, it would.”
Dustin suddenly looked around shiftily, like a street-corner hustler.
“Wait here a second.” He glanced left and right then skulked over to his backpack where he pulled out a mint tin. Issuing a final canvas of the area, he returned to Clarissa.
“Have you seen these before?”
Clarissa looked into the tin. A smattering of small, white pills lay scattered over the bottom. They could easily have been confused with breath mints, though Clarissa doubted they had anything to do with oral hygiene.
“What are these, Dustin?”
She tried to hide the contempt in her tone, but she was pretty sure she failed considering how he looked at her. She wasn't trying to be judgmental, but she'd had enough of pills and the damage they caused.
“I know what it looks like,” he said, defensive, “but it's not like that. I'm no druggie if that's what you're thinking.”
She was, but she didn't admit it. “All right. So what are they?”
“They're sleep aids.”
“Sleep aids? Like what, Ambien?”
Dustin half smiled. “No, no these are nothing like Ambien. These are something...different.”
Clarissa didn't like how enigmatic he sounded. Something about how he responded felt illicit as if someone had instructed him not to show her the pills.
“Different how?” she said.
Dustin inhaled. “Okay, so you know how I told you I was with the community pretty much from the beginning?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the first few weeks were pretty rough. I had a hard time
sleeping, and the few times when I did manage to conk out, I would wake up after only a couple hours. Everyone told me it was anxiety, that I was stressed. Who wasn't stressed back then? Who isn't still?” He held up his hands inquisitively, but Clarissa understood these were rhetorical questions. “It started to really wear me down. I couldn't function because I kept waking up all the time.”
She angled her head at him. “Were you having bad dreams?”
“I didn't think I was. I mean, I never remembered anything when I woke up. I just sort of snapped awake, like I forgot to set my alarm or something.” Dustin held up the tin. “That was, until these.” Clarissa looked again at the pills. “You mentioned control? These are about the closest you'll get to having control of your dreams. More than that, you'll actually remember the dream when you wake up.”
Clarissa was confused. She pulled the empty bottle from Naomi's puckered lips and set it down, then she placed the baby over her shoulder and patted her back.
“What do you mean?” she said beneath a furrowed brow. “What kind of control? Like being able to dictate what happens?”
Dustin nodded ahead of his response. “Almost exactly. I don't know what's in these things, but from the moment I started taking them, I was able to sleep way better.”
“You're totally losing me.”
Dustin closed his eyes and held up his hands.
“Okay, what I mean when I say control is that while you can't exactly build your dream around you, you can manipulate the things that occur within the landscape of that dream.” Clarissa's scowl deepened. “For example, say I had a dream that I was in a life raft on a stormy sea. Wind is howling. Waves are crashing. At any moment the raft could sink. You with me?”
“Yeah...”
“All right. Before, if I'd had that dream, I would've woken up without really knowing why. I may have remembered something about an ocean or a boat, and that something about it was stressful, but that would have been it.” He pointed at the tin. “With these, I not only remember every detail about the dream, I remember the things I did in it to make it less potent.” He didn't wait for Clarissa to protest before he continued. “So in my dream scenario, I'm in the raft, maybe preparing to drown at sea, but instead of drowning, I step out of the raft onto the deck of a duck-shaped blimp.”
Clarissa recoiled and smiled. “What?”
“You heard me. Then I reach for a storm cloud, only it's not a storm cloud, it's grape flavored cotton candy. And the rain? It becomes coffee, and I fill the cup that's now in my hand with it and float away.”
Clarissa shook her head as if she had just woken from a dream.
“I know,” Dustin said. “Crazy, right?”
“Just a little.”
“But it's all true. These pills, whatever they are, help to give back some power. Some control. But like I said, only to a certain point. That scenario I just described? I wouldn't have been able to change the storm or the raft, or even where I was without them. Something about how the consciousness is wired to interpret external stimuli and manifest it into a dreamscape, or at least that's how it was explained to me. They called it the 'template,' which is basically the framework around which the dream is built. You can't change the template that appears when you dream, but everything inside it is fair game.”
Clarissa found Dustin's explanation fascinating. She had lost him in the beginning, but by the end she hung on his every word, riveted. In the pre-Sound world, the ability to control one's dreams even to a small degree would have been considered revolutionary, but what Dustin just described? That was unheard of. A drug that could wield that sort of power wasn't manufactured in a garage by some strung out meth freak. It was engineered, carefully and with purpose. Only one name with the capacity and wherewithal to produce it sprang to mind.
But whether Dustin knew or had ever heard of Rosenstein—or wanted to admit that he did—he revealed a curious little nugget in his response. Clarissa didn't hesitate to seize upon it.
“Who are 'they'?”
Dustin stood up straight. “Sorry?”
“You said that 'they called it the template.' I was just wondering who 'they' were?”
Dustin's expression became laden with regret as if he realized that he may have divulged too much. Clarissa wanted answers, but she didn't want to scare him away by being too forceful or straightforward. She decided to back off her interrogation lest she spooked the most significant source of information she had.
“The only reason I ask,” she followed swiftly, “was because I wanted to know where I could get some. They sound great.”
He seemed to relax, but only a little. “Well, you can't just go out and get these. Not in here.”
“So where did you get them?”
Dustin hesitated. “Someone gave them to me.”
“Okay. Who?”
He checked the store again then, making a decision, pulled Clarissa behind a shelf filled with boxes of diapers. It was out of the line of sight of the front door.
“I'm not really supposed to say.” His voice had dropped to a near whisper. “They're not something that's available to everyone. I just...I happen to know the right people, that's all.”
“Oh. All right.” She pretended to be indifferent. “You don't have to tell me. I was just interested was all. But I don't want to get you into trouble if it's going to be a problem. I'll just ask elsewhere. That guy over at the library looked like he might know something.”
It was the first time in her entire life Clarissa had tried to play the jealousy card. She knew Dustin felt something for her, just as she knew the guy who worked at the library—a buff, dreaded, hunk of a man, whose eyes could melt hearts—was the embodiment of male insecurity.
“Noah?” Dustin wrinkled his nose. “You don't want to talk to him.”
“Yeah? Why's that?”
“Because he's born again. He'd have a better chance of getting pregnant than getting a hold of these. It was a nice try, though.”
Clarissa's face flushed. “What was?”
“Uh huh. Don't think I don't know what you're up to. You're cute and all, but...”
Dustin let his sentence dangle while Clarissa's heart leaped with restrained glee. So he had made her. Big deal. At least she made the point that she would seek out information from other sources if he didn't help her. He scrutinized her then checked the entrance once again to make sure no one had come in. When he was fully satisfied they were alone, he leaned so close to Clarissa she could smell toothpaste on his breath.
“Okay, look. I'm not supposed to say anything, but if you really want to get your hands on some of these, I can put in a word for you.”
“That's sweet, but I'm a twenty-first-century girl. I prefer to conduct my own business.”
Dustin stared at her long and hard. “All right. But if anyone asks, you didn't hear this from me, got it?
“Of course,” she said. “I don't want you to get into trouble. Truthfully. Though, I'm not sure I understand why you would.”
The fact that Dustin was so consumed with worry concerned Clarissa. What was he afraid of? She meant what she said. She didn't want things coming back on him. Whatever he ended up telling her, she needed to tread lightly with the information. But when he finally gave her a name, it was all she could do to keep her eyes from popping out of her head.
“The person who gave these to me was the woman at intake,” he said. “Her name's Donna.”
CHAPTER 57
Oh shit oh shit oh shit...
That's all Clarissa could think the rest of the day until her shift was over and she could tell the others what she had learned from Dustin. They were in the right place. She was sure of it now. Everyone already suspected that Donna was fishy, and now that Dustin had outed her as his supplier, those suspicions seemed to be confirmed.
Donna was part of Rosenstein.
Clarissa was both exhilarated and frightened to reach this conclusion. She and Andrew had already so much as surmised that R
osenstein was here, the activity at the Boston Scientific building leaning heavily toward the theory, but Donna was the final nail in the coffin.
Even when Clarissa was a waitress, eight hours had never felt so long. She rushed to meet Andrew at an outdoor seating area in front of the Brew House as soon as her shift was over. Cesare and Rachel would be off in another half hour, but they planned to check on Elenora, and Jon's training wouldn't have him punching out for another two. Evan was supposed to have started his first day at school, but with everything that had happened the night before, classes were temporarily postponed. Fortunately for him, Best Buy and its aisles of electronics had more than enough to keep him occupied until his father got off. Clarissa had only Andrew to tell her news.
He had barely greeted her before she launched into what had transpired earlier in the day. She described her conversation with Dustin in detail, recalling it nearly sentence for sentence. She didn't want to omit a thing. Didn't want Andrew to think she had misheard or misunderstood what Dustin told her.
After she had finished, she awaited his response and bade her time by chewing on already ragged nails.
“Well,” he said after a contemplative moment, “as if we needed more evidence that Donna was lying.”
“No doubt,” said Clarissa. “But what I don't get is why she's lying. If they're here, why hide it?”
“I think that's clear at this point. New Framingham isn't an attempt at rebuilding a community—it's a hunting ground. For whatever reason or purpose, Rosenstein is plucking unwilling test subjects from here, and they don't want anyone to know about it.”
Clarissa was sure Andrew was right, but a kink in his theory caused her to shudder.
“Yeah, but...Dustin knows, and I don't think they're using him as a test subject. Do you...do you think he's part of it?”
Andrew regarded Clarissa. She could tell he evaluated her as if deciding on an answer that wouldn't upset her. Even after so brief a time, it was clear that Dustin had worked himself under her skin. While she knew Andrew looked out for her, it wasn't his style to sugarcoat the truth. He would shoot her straight, which was how she preferred it, no matter how difficult it was to hear.