NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  He nodded slightly.

  ‘Now pay attention and make sure you process this. You only have to survive for another two weeks, tops, until these maniacs are all dead. Do you remember hearing that on the news before the power went out? Do you understand?’ I shook him by the shoulders for emphasis. ‘Two weeks or less.’

  Still nothing but silence from Captain Brandon, so I played my last and best card. ‘When we find you a safe place, you can sleep. And have the dream.’

  His head shot up and his eyes locked on mine. They were blazing.

  We padded down the alley until we reached a street that ran south, straight toward the beach. Above English Bay, the moon was obscured by a stray cloud. In the distance, a glimmer of liquorice ocean, framed by the mould-black outlines of arbutus trees. Stray dogs, usually so deferential during the day, came closer, cowered less. Ahead of us squatted a string of three and four storey apartment buildings, mute toad sentries. Trees arched over our heads, entwining their branches to obscure the stars. And quiet—a keening quiet made of listening ears—all around us.

  ‘What was that?’

  Beside me, Brandon’s eyes were large and liquid as they stared. I heard it too: a low thrumming.

  ‘Watch out! Watch out!’

  A shape scurried between us, so stooped as to appear to be running on all fours. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the figure burrowed back into the blackness.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ Brandon demanded, his voice shaking.

  ‘Just one of them.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t human. It was a rat. A giant rat,’ he said, as though trying to stuff his foot into a much-too-small shoe. His hands were quarrelling.

  ‘It wasn’t a rat.’ I affected scorn, but didn’t feel it. In the shadows of my memory a giant rodent appeared as I rewound and replayed the last ten seconds. It was the Blemmye incident all over again. In Nod, words were highly infectious. Nod itself was literally a plague of words. I was going to have to be careful about what I thought, what I said.

  We sleepwalked toward the beach. The thrumming grew and as it did, other sounds were slowly becoming discernible in the mix. Sounds that suggested images. I began to see shapes in the distance.

  ‘I need to sleep,’ Brandon moaned, but he meant dream. Then somehow he was flat on his back in the middle of the street, staring up at the trees and I was standing over him. ‘Tell me who to pray to.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it death?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The dream. Do you think the dream is death?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Brandon looked up at me and smiled. ‘You’ve got to laugh. If it’s death, then it’s okay. If the dream is death, then we’re safe. I hope it’s death. I hope I die. I’m ready to die.’’

  ‘Who were you, Brandon? Before?’

  He raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Who was I?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘I don’t know. I was…I was a bus driver. Was that what you wanted to know? Then for a while I was a fucking dart board for some crazy old bitch.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘And now I’m lying on the road. Oh, man, I just need to close my eyes for five minutes…’

  The sounds from up ahead were pulling apart from one another, taking on individual identities. Squawks and squeals. Roaring and chattering. Some sort of mob scene.

  I grabbed Brandon and dragged him to his feet. Odd shadows were feeding in from the alleys and buildings around us, all heading in the same direction.

  And suddenly, there we were. The beach. A mass of black shapes; a black mass of shapes.

  My head spun. I had to wonder if, after three days with virtually no sleep, I was beginning to see some of the same things Tanya and Charles saw. If so, then Nod was a far more terrible place than I’d imagined. Before us was a fantastic monochromatic scene, populated by creatures both real and mythical. Writhing pythons, massive, knot-shouldered apes. I recognized a Gandaberunda, the double-headed bird from Hindu mythology; a Cretan Bull or Gyuki with enormous, hollow eyes that glowed like moons. Massive crabs, pincers clicking, and enormous spiders, spike-stepping on the sand.

  Ever kick at a mound of dirt and expose an ant’s nest? That was the nature of the motion on the beach that night. Part sock hop, part orgy, part pitched battle—the beach was swarming with impossibilities. Ever close your eyes and pay close attention to the shapes that squirm behind your lids? That was what I saw. What I thought I saw. What I saw. So little light, so much black canvas for my mind to splatter. A contact high, perhaps, with the minds of a thousand maniacs.

  Then a gibbous moon emerged from behind its cloud and revealed even more. A brutal democracy of size: giant, sharp-beaked robins and dwarf elephants; miniature dinosaurs and massive cockroaches and slugs. And they were busy. Fucking and fighting, cawing and screeching. Like what amphetamine-fuelled punk rockers and orgiastic Romans had thought they were doing, but now for real. That was the moment when Hieronymus Bosch came into sharp focus for me as a steely-eyed realist. A gorilla was riding a hysterical, bleating fawn while a pair of giant, grinning frogs panted approval and a six-foot tall raccoon stood on its hind legs, watching as it licked its slick and dripping paws, a huge erection clearly visible between its legs. Three giant house cats lapped at the goopy innards of a torn-open scorpion, its stinger still twitching above their heads.

  But surely these weren’t really animals, but people? I turned to look at Brandon and saw, looking back at me, a massive blinking squirrel in a filthy Captain America T-shirt, its head flitting back and forth, its muzzle twitching in terror. And then I looked slowly down.

  I saw my body covered in shaggy fur; I held up my arms and saw the stubby paws and long, straight claws of what could only be a grizzly bear.

  Then a shape appeared on the sidewalk beside me. Another bear—a black one—its muzzle inches from my own face.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you want?’ the creature mimicked me, its voice a stoned drone.

  I tried to step around it. ‘Get out of my way.’

  ‘Get out of my way.’ The creature blocked my path. Its gums were black in the moonlight, its sharp teeth burning white. Every move I made, the bear mimicked until I began to think it must be my mirror image. Then I reached my paw out and felt fur. At that same moment, the other creature’s claws raked my chest, and I felt blood trickling down like sweat.

  ‘Say, ‘I’m walking away now’’, squirrel-Brandon chattered into my ear.

  ‘I’m walking away now.’

  ‘I’m walking away now,’ my mirror repeated.

  As I backed up, followed closely by squirrel-Brandon, so did my doppelganger. Eventually, it lost interest in us, dropped down onto all fours, and loped back into the melee.

  We crossed Beach Avenue and stepped onto the sand. Directly ahead of us, a pack of howling chimpanzees held down a squirming, bloodied kitten, its four broken limbs painfully splayed outwards. When it struggled, loud grinding sounds emanated from the broken bones beneath its skin. All around, other creatures were throwing rocks at the poor creature, or slashing at it with their claws. Helplessly, we moved toward the scene.

  An albino crow was hopping back and forth in front of the writhing kitten, its beak opening and shutting, its eyes milky and pupil-less. As we approached, the creature was bobbing its head and speaking into the kitten’s ear.

  ‘There, there, there. It won’t hurt much longer. Soon you’ll be asleep.’

  Behind me, Brandon whimpered.

  ‘The bag!’

  In response to the crow’s words, a grinning chimpanzee threw a black plastic garbage bag over the kitten’s head and held it tight around the poor creature’s neck. The bag huffed and puffed as the kitten struggled. Then it went limp.

  The crow ordered the bag removed. Exposed, the fur on the kitten’s head was matted and damp.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ the crow whispered into its ear.

&n
bsp; The kitten’s head moved a little. This upset the crow, which began to hop back and forth in fury.

  ‘Get the dream stick!’ it screamed. The nearest chimp picked up a hefty piece of driftwood with a large knot like an eye on one end. ‘I try to help you! I try and try and try to help you sleep! And you won’t do it!’

  The chimp smashed the kitten on the crown of its head, then paused, panting, to consider the effects of its actions.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ the crow moved in, gentle and solicitous once again.

  No response.

  ‘Is it still breathing?’

  The chimpanzee loped over and put its ear to the kitten’s mouth.

  ‘Fuck, no,’ it replied with some satisfaction. ‘It’s dead.’

  As the animals that had been holding the kitten down faded away into the background, the crow flew into a rage and began pecking viciously at the corpse. It was more than I could handle.

  ‘Leave it alone!’

  The crow turned and aimed its bloody beak at me. ‘Stay out of the Lord’s work!’

  The giant crow hopped toward me, stopping only when we were eye to eye. Twinned eyes, something all creatures share.

  ‘I helped it repent. So it should have been able to sleep! I do what I can to help, but nothing is ever good enough!’ Then the crow’s voice took on a resigned tone. ‘But it’s out of my hands now.’

  ‘What hands?’ I asked, but the crow ignored me.

  Though its face was incapable of showing human emotion, the crow sounded mournful when it spoke again. ‘Everything’s gone. At night, we’re not even human in the eyes of the Lord any more. We’re nothing but shadows. There’s a lesson we’re failing to learn. But what? It’s a school and we’re failing.’

  ‘But what if you’re wrong? What if there’s no reason for any of this? What if it’s just happening?’

  The crow’s eyes glinted. ‘You’re crazy. Crazy. We’re in a maze of paying, and the only way out is to figure out what for and how much. We can’t be forgiven if we don’t know what we’ve done. What have we done? What have we done? What…?’

  A commotion up by the water stopped the crow’s reverie, and the crowd began to surge forward. We were pulled along with everyone else until we were reached the shore. Then I saw something I never thought I’d see again: the steady glow of electric lights far out in English Bay. A grid of unblinking white. It could only have been one thing: a ship. A big one.

  As we stared at those piercing points of light, our animal shapes fell away from us and we reverted to our tattered human forms.

  DAY 11: Cat’s Sleep

  A sham sleep, like that of a cat watching a mouse

  ‘Rise and shine, pal. Rise and shine.’

  And I did rise, ever so slowly. Ever so reluctantly. I opened my eyes into blazing morning sunlight so bright as to almost be a sound. My first feeling was shock at realizing I’d slept. Then I went straight into Zoe-directed heart palpitations. Where was I? I wasn’t at the school, which meant that Zoe was alone and had been all night. Or longer.

  ‘You too.’

  I turned over and saw a boot-shod foot prodding Brandon’s shoulder. A shiny, well-polished boot—something whole in a shattered world. But Brandon didn’t wake up; he just turned onto his other side and pressed his face up against a sheet of cardboard, one, I now remembered, that we’d threaded through the railings last night to conceal our hiding place.

  Then it all came back to me. After leaving the beach, we’d climbed onto the first floor balcony of this empty apartment and broken its French doors open. We’d hoped to pass the night in there, but the swaths of dried blood we’d found on the walls and floors forced us back outside.

  Below us, the Awakened were muttering and wandering. The arrival of the mystery ship had shaken them up. I could almost feel the effort that was going into assimilation—in trying to gag down the fact of electric lights out there in English Bay along with all the slippery new mythologies they were all still choking on. What, I couldn’t help but wonder, would Charles make of this latest jigsaw piece? And more importantly, what did I make of it? Was the ship crewed by people who’d figured out a cure for the insomnia epidemic? Had the cavalry arrived?

  As soon as we’d put up our cardboard barrier, Brandon flopped down to the floor. He fell asleep almost instantly, but not before saying one final word to me in a gentle, relieved voice: ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘You. Do something with him. Wake him up.’

  Back in the present, a strong hand grabbed the back of my T-shirt and hoisted me into a sitting position.

  My captor—what else could he have been?—was a short, muscular man with a neatly trimmed black beard. But it was his clothes I was looking at. They were shockingly clean, just like his boots. In fact, his khaki pants and white T-shirt looked brand new, as did the gleaming rifle slung over his shoulder. This was the first person I’d seen in eleven days who looked like what normal had once been, if that’s not too tortuous a way to put it.

  ‘Are you from the ship?’ I asked.

  He ignored me and pointed at Brandon.

  ‘Wake him up now. Don’t make me ask again.’

  I pushed Brandon’s shoulder with the palm of my hand, but to no avail.

  ‘I don’t know why he’s not waking up. He hadn’t slept for days, I know that. He was tortured.’

  Strange to be speaking openly of sleep again.

  ‘Roll him onto his back.’

  ‘Are you from that ship in English Bay?’

  He spat and shook his head.

  ‘Nah, I’m from over by Main and Quebec. Just flip him over.’

  I did, but just like the Cowardly Lion in the poppy fields of Oz, there was no rousing poor Captain America. Our new friend ground his teeth as he looked up and down the street.

  ‘God damn it We can’t carry him all the way across town. God damn it.’

  I fell easily into the rhythm of my captor’s baffled logic. ‘Well, if we can’t move him, we’d better hide him.’

  He nodded, and so we dragged Brandon’s limp body inside the apartment, reasoning to one another as we did so that A) the place had already been looted and was unlikely to be a target for scavengers and B) the quantity of dried blood on display would be a turnoff for all but the most deranged of the Awakened.

  We managed to stash Brandon behind a futon that, seen from the apartment door, concealed him fairly well. If anyone entered from the balcony, though, it would be game over. With this in mind, Dave—during our exertions we’d exchanged names—suggested we leave the interior door open.

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  He made the frowny face some people use to indicate serious thought: chin up, jowls down. And while he thought-grimaced, I studied him. Despite his admirable grooming, Dave was one of the Awakened—there was no doubt of that now that I’d had a good look at him. No matter how clean he kept himself, there was no disguising the black rings beneath his eyes and the cadaverous expression he wore. Although he’d tried.

  The strangest thing about Dave was this: despite being a poster child for macho guerrilla chic, he was wearing makeup. Lots of makeup. Foundation and cover up, if my memory of female grooming habits serves me well. The effect was the exact opposite of what Tanya had tried to do with me before we went into the park: plausibly pre-Nod at twenty feet or more. Up close, however, Dave looked like an ageing soap opera Lothario. A perfect phrase popped into my mind: Cat’s sleep. Cat’s sleep is sham sleep: the sort that your household tabby will feign while surveilling a mouse. Dave was a Cat Sleeper.

  Having finished thinking he relaxed his face. ‘I’m taking you back to the base. We’ll come back for your friend tonight if Dr London decides that’s the plan.’

  ‘But what if I’ve got somewhere else I need to be?’

  To his credit, Dave had the good manners not to stare significantly at his rifle. Instead he rubbed his temples with his thumbs as he spoke.

  ‘We Sleepers have got to stick together. It’
s a fucking nightmare out there, man. As I’m sure you well know.’

  To his credit, Dave had walking through Nod down to a science. For the most part we stayed, abandoned cars permitting, in the exact centre of the street. He cradled his rifle, its barrel pointing the way forward—a clear statement of intent that no one we encountered was eager to dispute. He moved quickly but not so quickly as to create an impression of haste. Purposefulness was the name of his game.

  I followed close behind.

  We cut straight through the heart of the West End, passing within a block of Charles’ School, then turned up Robson and entered the urban canyon that led toward Granville Street and the heart of downtown. Until then, the streets had been quiet; all we’d seen were flitting shadows and the occasional blood-muzzled dog. It was a comfortable, familiar apocalypse, something I’d seen rehearsed in a hundred or more big budget movies: burned cars, ragged curtains fluttering through broken windows.

  Soon enough, though, we came across a bizarre sight, even by Noddish standards. Directly ahead of us people were emerging from their hidey holes and gathering in the middle of the street. We stopped to watch as they gathered together, all of them staring straight up into the sky, faces open as sunflowers. Some grinned and laughed at whatever it was they thought they were seeing, while others held their hands over their mouths in amazement, joyous tears trickling down their cheeks. I looked up and saw nothing but blue sky and a few wispy clouds.

  In a minute there were fifty people. In another minute there’d be a hundred.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Dave asked. He’d looked up for a second but was now keeping his red-rimmed eyes fixed on the pavement. He looked terrified.

  Emboldened by my companion’s big brother of a gun, I went up to a particularly ecstatic young woman who had deep, infected scratches running up and down her arms. Two weeks ago, she would have been gorgeous: model-thin and fine-boned. Now she was a tottering skeleton, walking on tiptoes, as though in high heels, even though her feet were bare and bloodied.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ she said rapturously. ‘It’s the angels! There are thousands of angels flying across the sky! It’s going to be okay! They’re here to save us!’