by James Sperl
But getting inside to rescue them seemed a near impossibility. The place was so heavily guarded, it would take a small army to penetrate through its defenses. Yes, Andrew thought as he considered it further, a small army would make all the difference. Even though Travis barreled toward New Framingham, it was foolish to think Rosenstein wouldn't feel the impact. They were probably in crisis mode right now, scrambling to prepare for an evacuation of their own. If there were ever a time to breach their security and slip inside, it would be during the attack.
But first things first. They needed to be sure Clarissa and Rachel were in fact there. And that started with confirming that they weren't still here.
“All right,” Andrew said. “Here's what I think we should do: I think we should split up.”
Cesare recoiled in confusion. “What? Why? They've got them, Andrew.” He threw out an arm and pointed to someplace beyond New Framingham. “They're over at Rosenstein right now!”
Andrew held up a palm. “Yes. Probably. But we need to be sure.”
Cesare couldn't believe what he was hearing. “Need to be sure? What...what in the hell are you talking about? How much surer do you need to be?”
“Cesare, ask yourself what we know. Yes, both Rachel and Clarissa are missing. Yes, Donna and Rosenstein are probably behind it. But that doesn't necessarily mean she took them out of here. I'm inclined to agree with you that she did, but before we charge off on some half-baked plan to rescue them, we need to be as close to a hundred percent that they're not here someplace, perhaps held in plain sight.”
Cesare placed his hands on his hips and seethed at the ground. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “So what're you thinking?”
“We run a sweep,” Andrew replied. “As thorough a one as we can. We start at the north end and move south. You take the west side, and I'll take the east. We poke our heads into every conceivable location. If we're both still empty-handed by the time we meet up, we move on to plan B.”
“Which is?”
Andrew jiggled Naomi in an attempt to quell her fussiness. “Something I'd rather not think about.”
Cesare regarded the chaotic scene inside the Sleep Zone then canted his head when the car horns trumpeted an ominous third time. He looked at Andrew gravely. “We don't have a lot of time.”
“Then we better get a move on.” He shifted Naomi to his other arm. “I know it's a long shot, but we need to keep open the possibility that their absence could be just a simple matter of shifting circumstances. You saw what happened with Jon.”
Cesare smiled sadly. “I think you're being overly optimistic.”
“Without question. But I'd like to check all the same.”
Cesare held his gaze on Andrew long enough to convey his doubt but not so long that it burned precious seconds. “Fine. But I don't think we've got more than ten minutes before shit hits the fan in here.”
“I'll move like lightning.”
“You better,” Cesare said, then he was gone. He charged across the lot through the Sleep Zone until he became lost in the scattering crowd. Andrew clutched Naomi close to his chest and alternated between a jog and a fast walk to the northernmost point of the community. He had a lot of ground to cover and less time than he needed to cover it.
“Come on, Clarissa,” he mumbled to himself. “Where are you?”
CHAPTER 69
Clarissa had never been in Lisa's room before. Before this party, she had only ever been to the girl's house on one other occasion, and that was with Valentina. They were friendly to one another at school—if amiable head nudges and half-plastered smiles counted as friendly—but Clarissa didn't know if those pleasantries amounted to a free pass into her bedroom. Still, what did Lisa expect? You couldn't have a party of this magnitude and not have a pair of amorous teens slink off to someplace private.
She couldn't believe she was here. Alone. With Travis Austin no less. She'd had her eye on him for some time, and when the rumor mill came full circle, and she learned that he harbored a secret crush for her, all bets were off. A few bottles of liquid courage was all it took for her to strike up a conversation with him. If the rumors were true, then she knew it wouldn't be long before the two of them ended up somewhere more discreet.
Like Lisa Albertson's bedroom.
They started making out almost immediately. The bass-y, deep-floor thrum of something by the Beastie Boys made the room pulse. She could feel the kick drum resonate throughout her entire body. Its beat almost matched the thump of her own heart.
“I can't believe I'm with you,” Travis said between kisses. “I never thought a girl like you would go for a guy like me.”
“Are you serious?” Clarissa said, pulling back but only long enough to make her puzzlement known. “Have you seen yourself?”
The question was legitimate. Clarissa didn't know if he realized just how much he had changed over the past year, but everyone else sure did. Travis's transformation was one for the books. At one point, she had consulted an old yearbook to make sure the person she had developed a deep crush on was the same pudgy boy from those elementary school pages. It was alarming. The metamorphosis brought to mind classic stories involving ugly ducklings and beautiful swans.
His hands maneuvered to her ass, and hers went on an exploratory mission to the small of his back and the nape of his neck. The alcohol made the room swirl but in a sensual way. She felt completely at ease, lost in a moment of total bliss.
“You're amazing, Clarissa,” he said, his breath scented with whiskey.
“You're not so bad yourself.” She smiled and teased his lips with the tip of her tongue.
“I think I love you.”
Clarissa opened her eyes. “Whoa, there, pilgrim,” she grinned. “Slow that cart down. We're just having fun.”
But Travis was oblivious to her mild objection. “Being together will be the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.”
Clarissa pushed back from him, arms locked against his shoulders. While Travis was cute, she hadn't gone so far as to plan any wedding. Red flags were flying.
“We're not...look, Travis,” she began, “I'm just letting loose, you know? Having a good time. I don't really know you, but I think I might like to.”
Travis's troubled brows crashed. “I don't understand. I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you, but...but we only just, you know, met.”
Travis sat up. “So then why did you bring me up here?”
Clarissa felt the first tendrils of unease slither into her belly. “I didn't 'bring' you, I...I just thought we could hang out, maybe mess around a bit. You know, have fun.”
“Fun,” said Travis, the word dead on his tongue. “If I wanted just to have 'fun,' I could have had it with any girl here. But I wanted to be with you. I love you. I always have.”
Clarissa swallowed dryly, her throat a sun-baked desert. She fought like hell to keep her eyes from watering from slow-brewing unease.
“Okay, maybe this was a bad idea.”
She righted herself onto her knees, but as soon as she attempted to climb from the bed, Travis seized her arm.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Where're you going?”
Clarissa tried to look at him. She wanted to shoot him straight, to tell him that she had made a huge mistake and that she was sorry if he felt like she led him on, but the darkness that had crept into his smoke-gray eyes infused her with a fear she had never known.
“I...I'm going to go,” she said, her words bordering on a stammer.
Travis gaped at her as if she had spoken in some alien tongue. “No,” he said after a pair of seconds. “No, you can't leave. We just got here. We're supposed to be together.”
Clarissa wrested her arm free. “I'm sorry, Travis.”
She was half-bent to standing when Travis snared her wrist and yanked her back down. “I said no! You're not leaving.”
Her response was instinctual and erupted from her throat on a primal level: “Somebody
help me!”
Travis's free hand slapped over her mouth, but even if he hadn't seen fit to silence her, the music that droned from downstairs and shook the walls was more than sufficient to drown her out.
She howled in muted pleas against his tobacco-scented fingers. In seconds, he had her lying face up on the bed, the weight of his body pinning her to the over-soft mattress.
“We're meant to be together,” he muttered into her ear. “Even if you can't see it yet.”
Clarissa shrieked with everything she had, but a bass-and-drum heavy track and the delighted squeals of over a hundred booze-wrecked party goers absorbed her muffled cry. Tears cut tracks down the sides of her face, as Travis forced her legs apart to lie between them. She heard and felt his belt buckle clink, and then she felt his exposed manhood thrive against the inside of her thigh.
“We share the same soul,” he said just before he closed a fist around the panties beneath her skirt. He ripped them free with a single tug. His feet kicked to gain traction. Then he was inside her.
Clarissa stepped outside of herself. As Travis grunted and floundered, she stared at the popcorn ceiling above her, its starfield patterns jostling with each fervent thrust. She transported herself there, drifted among its nameless galaxies and reveled in the joy of being no one amid nothingness. But the universe was not hers to keep. It receded from her, pulling away until the ceiling was a lone, stark white tile against impossible blackness.
Wait a minute.
Lisa's heavily postered walls cascaded away like poorly shuffled playing cards. They flung into the same murky pitch until all that was left was an infinity of darkness.
Clarissa pushed herself onto her elbows. Her skirt was down, her underwear on. Travis was no longer there. Instead, he hovered over her and delivered a sinister smile, as he too drifted weightless into that black void, falling upward at astonishing speed until he was no more.
Clarissa scrambled onto her knees and peered over the edge of the bed. It floated on a sea of unrelenting blackness, the bed a lifeboat into an otherworldly plane of existence. She swung her feet over the edge without caution and lowered them until they met resistance. Clarissa stood.
The bed fell away from her in an instant. It hurtled through space with high velocity, as if launched from a cannon. Darkness surrounded her, yet she could still see herself. She planted her feet firmly, yet felt nothing beneath them.
The space around her percolated. It morphed into a darkly cavernous world, a place that haunted both Clarissa's sleeping and waking dreams. Vast, gloomy architecture swooped up from hidden shadows, arching and intertwining in a spider's web of enigmatic, terrifying beauty. She knew this place, and the truth nibbled at her fear like tiny bugs with mighty pincers tunneling beneath her skin.
She was here.
She was in the Nothing Place.
Light the size of a pinpoint flickered in the far distance. As her wits reassembled, Clarissa inherently understood that the cold and quivering blue dot was her objective. Somewhere over there lay the answer. Somehow she was supposed to figure out what that was.
She started walking but couldn't measure her progress; the darkness was too all-consuming to provide any reference for her steps. She could feel her legs move, could sense and see her feet alternate position in a forward motion, but beyond that, she had no clue if this place allowed for the same laws of physics she knew.
A forgotten memory seeped back into her mind. A drug. Yes, she had been given something. A drug was forced into her but there to aid her. To help her. But how? Her mind was cloudy with answers, but a single word kept materializing in the nebulous waters of thought: control.
That sounded right. She was in charge. She was in control. But what did that mean here? Clarissa pinched her eyes closed to clear her mind, the meaning elusive. Then it came to her as if a stop-gate had opened and full comprehension allowed to spill forth.
Donna.
Donna had her. Had taken her. She was in a room somewhere, strapped to a table. At least her physical body was. Her dream consciousness had been sent adrift into a sort of bi-planar purgatory. She remembered now. Remembered what she had been tasked to do:
Save the world.
It was no small thing this. Particularly since she was so short on time. She recalled that Travis and his horde sped toward New Framingham, their goal seemingly to destroy and pillage—and Clarissa played no small part in his demented scheme. Yes, she remembered that too: Travis was coming for her.
It galled her to have to side with Donna. The woman was a callous, ice-cold representative of the human species, but even though Clarissa was in the Nothing Place against her will, she felt obligated to do everything she could to bring the transcendental nightmare that plagued her world to a swift end. Her mind was clear now and fully engaged. She started walking toward the blue light.
Almost immediately, she detected movement in the darkest pockets of the surrounding space. Terrible shadows skittered out of eyesight, each attempt to catch one of the evasive creatures skulking nearby foiled by her inability to turn fast enough. It was as if the things could predict where she would look.
Control.
She reminded herself of that word and what it meant. The last time she was here she had willed herself invisible. She held up her hand and watched it go from opaque to translucent to nonexistent. Like that, she was there but not there.
What else could she do to help herself? Fumbling around in the darkness wasn't only frightening, it was also frustrating. Not being able to see where she was going presented speed and efficiency issues. She had a lot of “ground” to cover, but her feet barely left the surface upon which they trod. She shuffled forward maddeningly slow, the fear of tripping over something unseen or, worse yet, walking off a ledge commanding her every step. She desperately craved light.
An idea sprang to mind.
If she wanted light, why not create it? Focusing her imagination into her empty hand, she felt her fingers close around something solid. Moments later, that same solid object exploded with a beam of white light. The penetrating shaft should have stretched into the far-reaching blackness until it had nowhere left to go, but when Clarissa directed the light onto the diseased looking structures around her, the peculiar forms only became awash with a faint, sickly glow.
She panned the light around and discovered rather quickly how limited its range was. Only the structures nearest to her were visible, the light splashing over their surfaces saturated with particulate and haze, which reduced clarity. All Clarissa could make out were general forms and their relative angles. She tried to force dream a stronger light, but either she didn't know how or the light she already had was the strongest allowed in here. Nothing changed.
She picked up her pace. The blue light shimmered in the distance and seemed to grow as she approached it. She swung the light in her hand (was it a flashlight? a spotlight?) left and right, probed it into recessed areas and overhanging threats. If something waited for her, it—or they—was doing a masterful job of remaining hidden.
A silhouette of a figure was just ahead, backlit against the effervescent light. Clarissa trained her beam on it, but it didn't budge. Instead, it moved toward her. Suddenly, she had remorseful thoughts over creating the light. What was she thinking? She might be invisible, but the brilliance shining from her hand advertised her presence as if she were an interdimensional lighthouse. She needed to kill the light, and fast. But just as she prepared to corral her dream powers into making it disappear, she became vaguely aware that the dark figure heading straight for her was not one of the shadow creatures. It was a person.
In fact, it looked like a woman.
Clarissa called out to her, but she forgot that the Nothing Place consumed speech. She moved at what felt like a jog, but, really, it was anyone's guess as to how fast she moved. Her feet had the sense of traveling over dense air rather than hard ground, but Clarissa made forward progress—the ominous structures around her drifted past like abandon
ed seaborne barges.
She wanted to reach the woman. Needed to reach her. She couldn't allow one more person to be yanked away by those hidden monsters and thrust into that terrible blue light. Clarissa hollered at the woman on instinct and slashed her light from side to side in the hope of getting her attention.
The woman appeared to stop, and while Clarissa couldn't be certain, it sure seemed as if she turned in Clarissa's direction. A small, victorious smile blossomed on her lips, but no sooner did she swell with confidence than a different figure appeared directly in front of her.
She screamed so powerfully that her throat raked with pain, even though she heard nothing. She swung at the shadow with both hands, the fingers of her free hand curled into a talon of death, the light in her other hand repurposed as a cudgel—she would be damned if she would go down without a fight.
Rage replaced fear. She felt it down to the marrow of her bones, a lava-hot anger for all that had been lost and for all those the Nothing Place had stolen. If her final moment had arrived before she vanished to...wherever, she wanted the things that pulled her there kicking and screaming to know her wrath. To know that they would have to work for their prize.
Her assault didn't last long. Three swings in, something seized her left arm about the wrist then blocked and subdued the haymaker she intended to deliver with her right. She screamed again, but the harsh scratch she felt in her throat was absent any fear. This time, she loaded it with primal fury. She pushed forward, the intent to glare into whatever served as the creature's eyes, but she didn't find a monster filling the cone of light bursting from her hand.
She saw Dustin's face.
Clarissa froze in confusion, but she wasn't nearly as stunned as Dustin, who struggled against what he no doubt thought was a floating light. Then Clarissa remembered: I'm still invisible. He can't see me. Willing herself visible, she gazed into his terrified eyes and nodded assuredly: Yes, it's me.
His brows crashed, and he had barely the chance to process this turn of events before Clarissa lurched into his arms. Sound may not exist in the Nothing Place, but it couldn't suppress the comfort of a warm body. She encircled Dustin's neck until her arms came back around to meet her shoulders. She wanted to cry from pure relief that she wasn't alone, of knowing that Dustin was still alive, but she wouldn't permit herself to become emotional. Not here. Not now. Tears meant weakness, and for what she had been sent to do, she would need all the strength she could summon.