The Point

by John Dixon

  Lucy stood ten feet away, kissing Malcolm.

  Good for them, Scarlett thought. Then she piled into the backseat beside Seamus.

  Cramer twisted around in her seat and told Seamus to lean forward. Diaphanous sheets of green and purple light wavered between her palms and Seamus’s injured eye, reminding Scarlett of an aurora borealis. Light pooled over the wound, congealing like coagulating blood. A few minutes later, Cramer sucked the light back into her hands, and Seamus was as good as new.

  The door opened, letting in a blast of cold air, and Lucy slid in beside Scarlett. Lucy rolled down her window and called to Malcolm in German as they pulled away.

  Scarlett elbowed Seamus in the ribs. “That was pretty dumb back there.”

  “I couldn’t let you show me up,” he said.

  “How’d that work out for you?”

  “I’m good as new,” he said. “Are your teeth chattering?”

  “It’s cold as balls,” she said.

  “Here,” he said. She felt his arm go over her shoulders. Then he pulled her tight against him. “Get warm.”

  Then they were kissing. Passionately, desperately.

  What did it mean?

  She didn’t care. She was buzzed and happy, and this was the first real fun she’d had since coming here.

  They made out all the way back to the base.

  DALIA’S EYES BURNED.

  Rhoads droned on and on as Captain Fuller drove them down the long driveway through the tunnel of pines.

  Shut up!

  She wanted to scream it—he’d given the same lecture a thousand times—but instead she fought to keep her burning eyes open and to nod in all the right places. To Rhoads, this recon mattered more than anything.

  She was exhausted. Night after night, she’d sacrificed real sleep to go looking for the Watcher. Most nights, she caught fleeting glimpses of the woman, always at a distance. The Watcher was almost ethereal, felt as much as seen. Dalia had called out to her, but the Watcher never answered, never even lingered. Whenever Dalia shouted to her or started in her direction, the Watcher faded away into whatever wilderness edged that particular dream, leaving Dalia aching with curiosity and more: a need to see this woman, to speak with her, to know if what she was beginning to suspect actually could be true.

  Was she obsessed?

  Yes, she supposed that she was. At least that was what others would say, but so be it. Who could judge her? No one, that’s who. Not Rhoads, not Appleton, and certainly not Valerie Schmidt.

  Only Dalia could judge Dalia. So what if she’d grown a little obsessed with the Watcher? That was natural enough, considering that she was surrounded day in and day out by a legion of laughable weaklings.

  She also had continued to observe Scarlett’s dreams—and Kyeong’s. She’d known that Scarlett liked him—she’d seen it in her eyes and dreams—but she’d never expected him to reciprocate. He was an island, a jungle island filled with nightmares.

  Scarlett should have spent her break with Dalia. They could have relaxed and had fun, become good friends. But no. Despite all Dalia had done for Scarlett, taking her under her wing, keeping her safe, teaching her, Scarlett had abandoned her for the biggest loser at The Point. Well, that was Scarlett’s loss, not hers, Scarlett’s mistake.

  Still, she couldn’t let Scarlett destroy herself, especially not when she had vouched for her. She had to keep an eye on Scarlett’s dreams, had to be ready in case she needed an intervention.

  “We’re running out of time,” Rhoads said. “We have to find them before they strike again.”

  She nodded, knowing from Rhoads’s dreams that he was frightened of more than another act of terrorism. Things were getting personal.

  They drove out of the woods and entered the snowy expanse of The Farm. Fields and orchards spread away from the fenced compound encompassing a large barn, several outbuildings, and a huge old farmhouse complete with a wraparound porch, a weather vane, and Christmas lights twinkling along the eaves.

  “We need names,” Rhoads said. “Times, dates. Any clues to where he might be now.”

  A few residents in orange jumpsuits and matching jackets stumbled along shoveled paths between the buildings, doing the Thorazine shuffle.

  Back at The Point, everyone feared The Farm, but it wasn’t that bad. Not really.

  During warmer months, the trees blossomed and bore fruit and the pastures turned a beautiful emerald green. Most residents moved more or less freely about the main compound. They had volleyball and badminton, tetherball and a sandbox. They even tended the orchards and gardens themselves, all to the music of wind chimes and birdsong.

  Fuller parked beside the barn. Some of the residents looked up, saw the black Suburban, and looked away.

  “Ready?” Rhoads asked.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Fuller stayed with the Suburban. She and Rhoads went inside and signed in at the front desk. The officer behind the glass buzzed them through the door.

  Residents in orange jumpsuits occupied the enormous recreation area. A dozen stared dully at a big-screen TV, watching a cooking show. Another dozen sat in the separate lounge area, reading or writing or talking quietly or rocking back and forth. A meathead gone to fat stood alone at the Ping-Pong table. He knocked the little white ball across to the other side, then shuffled after it, no doubt to knock it back the other way and start his shuffle again.

  Hours of fun…

  She recognized a few of the residents as cadets who’d washed out during her time at The Point. One, a TK named Sharonda, had snapped at dinner one evening, given a bloodcurdling scream, and overturned a table in the West Point dining hall. Previously, the girl had been nice, quiet, and utterly pitiful. The meltdown in the dining hall—which had been a very big deal—was the first and last interesting thing Sharonda had done at The Point.

  Sharonda sat in the lounge area, knees drawn up, hugging her shins, her med-slackened face watching a slow game of checkers. Looking up and seeing Dalia, she smiled and started to wave. Then she spotted Rhoads, dropped her hand, and stared once more at the board.

  Good, Dalia thought. She hated seeing Sharonda. Waving back felt like hugging a leper.

  Still, this place isn’t as bad as everyone at The Point thinks.

  They crossed the main floor and came to the elevators.

  No, they shouldn’t fear The Farm.

  The elevator doors slid open. She stepped inside and shuddered.

  They should fear The Mushroom Farm.

  They descended in silence. Rhoads crunched TUMS and checked his watch. Dalia waited, feeling the creep of revulsion and anxiety as they sank deep into the earth.

  The elevator stopped. The doors slid open. They passed through another checkpoint, buzzed through a heavy door coated in flame-resistant rubber, and entered the underground facility she’d come to think of as The Mushroom Farm.

  She followed Rhoads down the narrow corridor, hating the nursing-home smell of the place, a stale and fleshy odor underscored with ammonia and poorly masked with cleaning products, like old hamburger marinating in cat piss and Pine-Sol.

  The tinkling Muzac down here did little to muffle the disconcerting sounds coming from behind the cell doors: screams, laughter, and the endless murmur of people talking to themselves. When Dalia first had started coming here, she’d made the mistake of glancing through the thick window slits of this maximum-security wing. Rubber walls, padded walls, scorched walls. People in straitjackets, rocking back and forth, moaning, wailing, weeping; people pacing their cells, mumbling and gesticulating wildly; and several people too dangerous even for consciousness—including Appleton, she was disturbed to see—strapped atop gurneys like corpses in a morgue, hooked by tubes and wires to machines that sustained them, carried off waste, and monitored all manner of things that she didn’t want to consid
er.

  They arrived at 113. The door slid open. Rhoads led her inside. The door slid shut behind them with a dull thump. Within the cell, the odor grew chokingly pungent.

  Valerie Schmidt, an ashen woman who looked much older than her twenty-eight years, lay as dry and stiff as driftwood atop her cot. Valerie was a High Roller, a member of the posthuman black ops unit trained at Fort Bragg before Rhoads started The Point. The High Rollers had gone rogue. Captured after the Atlanta tragedy, Valerie split her rare waking hours among mocking laughter, scalding tirades, and prophecies of doom.

  A wooden chair waited for Dalia beside the cot. Rhoads would stand behind her, as always, his hands on the seat back, as if he were propelling her in a wheelchair, pushing her into the dream recon.

  Of course, Rhoads had no idea that she could strafe Valerie’s dreams just as effectively back at The Point. The less he knew, the better.

  She sat.

  Rhoads moved in behind her, gripping the chair. “We’re counting on you.”

  Valerie’s respirator sucked and hissed, sucked and hissed.

  Dalia closed her eyes. The smells and sounds of the subterranean cell disappeared, replaced by the smells of cinnamon and vanilla and the ticking of an old clock down the hall. The cottage again. Valerie’s memory dream. The place was warm and happy and, yes, a memory. Dalia could feel that veracity, its nostalgia.

  This was the same dream Valerie had every time Dalia checked, a short but vivid scene repeated on an unvarying loop, as if broadcast from some magical dream tower.

  As usual, Valerie lay on a comfortable-looking old sofa, smiling drowsily.

  “We haven’t forgotten you,” the unseen man said from outside the dream frame. His voice was deep and soothing. The room brightened and warmed at the sound of it. “Have faith.”

  “All my faith is in you,” Valerie purred.

  “We will come for you,” his voice, low and seductive, told her.

  Valerie shifted languorously. “Come for me.”

  Dalia felt a twinge of absurd jealously at the obvious sexual undertones. Valerie didn’t deserve this man…

  The dream ended and started over. Dalia remained. If she pulled out now, Rhoads would just send her back in again.

  Valerie sighed.

  The deep voice returned. We haven’t forgotten you…

  And then a door opened to her left.

  Dalia could have screamed. In all the hundreds of times she had observed Valerie’s dreams, they had never deviated. How had the door opened?

  She moved forward, the main script still playing behind her, Valerie’s voice murmuring, Come for me.

  Dalia stepped through the open door and into a sweet-smelling summer scene of rustic perfection. Birdsong filled the air. A warm breeze passed, bending the hay and tall grasses between her and the wooded hillside.

  The Watcher is here…

  Dalia could feel the Watcher’s warmth in the dream breeze, could hear her soft heartbeat stitched into the birdsong, could smell her floral scent mixed with the sweet aroma of the dream meadow. Sensing her, Dalia quavered with loss and longing and a twist of dread. Then she saw the Watcher, beckoning from the tree line.

  Dalia started across the field, her eyes locked on the Watcher, from whom a sense of familiarity now emanated like heat blurring the air over hot macadam.

  The Watcher beckoned, fading back into the trees.

  Dalia pumped her arms and legs, running, pulled forward by familiarity, urged on by bone-deep desperation that she almost but didn’t quite understand.

  Entering the forest, she slowed. Beneath the trees, the world was cool and dim yet no less sweet than the meadow. She stumbled forward, desperate to find the Watcher.

  There!

  Glimpsing the Watcher through the trees, Dalia moved downhill into a ravine.

  She heard the creek first, then smelled it—a good, green smell that reminded her of childhood, the happy years before everything had gone bad—and then she was clattering across the stones of the narrow brook, jumping from mossy rock to mossy rock, and she reached the opposite bank and stumbled into the embrace of the Watcher.

  For a long time, Dalia held on tight, crying and laughing.

  “Dalia,” the Watcher said, stroking her hair gently.

  “Mom,” Dalia said. “I’ve missed you so much. I…life has—”

  “Shh,” her mother said, pulling her once more into an embrace. She looked…normal. “Everything’s all right now. I never forgot you, Dalia.”

  “But you’re gone,” Dalia said. “You killed yourself. You left me all alone.” She stepped back again, half expecting a nightmare twist, some awful transformation in the thing pretending to be her mother, but Mom still stood there, smiling sadly, telling her how sorry she was for leaving her alone, explaining that Dalia had reunited them through her dream walking. Mom had been trying to reach her for months. Now, finally, they were together again, reunited.

  “I’m so happy,” Dalia said. “I’m so tired, and I’m so happy.”

  Her mother brushed away Dalia’s tears with the soft touch she’d missed so much. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone wonderful,” her mother said. Had so much gray always streaked her hair? “He’s waiting for you.” She took Dalia’s hand and led her alongside the creek, moving downhill through the forest. Dalia had no idea who was waiting for her, but at that point, feeling her mother’s familiar hand, she would have followed her straight through the gates of hell.

  The stream flowed over a tumble of mossy stones, cascaded several shimmering feet, and spilled into a glimmering pool beside which stood a beautiful man, dark-haired with bronze skin and dark eyes, dressed all in white. His full lips spread, revealing a dazzling smile. “Dalia,” he said, his voice deep and soothing. It was the voice. “Dalia, at long last. Come. Come to me.”

  She went to him and fell into his embrace, which was somehow even more comforting than that of her mother. He held her and smoothed her hair and said her name, the low bass of his voice another embrace. He understood her, how she’d worked and suffered, how she’d hidden her pain, overcome it, how people had betrayed her again and again. But that was over now, his deep voice assured her, all over now.

  She was so relieved.

  Then, holding her and rubbing her back, the man began to ask questions about her life, about The Point, about dream walking, and especially about the girl she knew, Scarlett.

  And Dalia, no longer lonely, told him everything.

  CONSIDERING THERE WAS NO BOOZE, The Point’s New Year’s Eve party was a lot of fun. They had food and soda and games, and big speakers ringed the gymnasium, blasting music by a surprisingly good live DJ: Scarlett’s mythology professor, Major Petrie, who apparently had a thing for EDM and hip-hop. Who could have guessed?

  The cadets danced and ate junk food and shouted and laughed and generally acted like the excited fools the cadre was allowing them to be, if for one night only.

  Scarlett hung with Seamus, Lucy, Cramer, and Vernon but also talked to dozens of cadets who drifted in and out of conversations, everyone living it up, high on this temporary freedom.

  She was incredibly happy. She was starting to feel that she actually belonged here, and she could finally understand, if not yet wholly echo, the optimism of people like Lucy, Cramer, and Vernon. The last few days had been incredible.

  She’d had fun with Lucy, swapping bro-jokes and girl talk, and each night they’d ridden along with friends, hitting the bars and restaurants of Highland Falls and Fort Montgomery. Best of all, however, was the time she spent with Seamus.

  She and Seamus played chess, cards, and Ping-Pong but spent most of their break above ground, walking the campus. She especially loved their late-night excursions. After everyone came back from town and hit the r
ack, she and Seamus would sneak out through the subway ladder. These walks were the best. Seamus liked to climb, too, and they made a pact to tackle the stone face of Thayer Hall after the snow and ice melted.

  Wherever they went, whatever they did, they talked, getting to know each other. Seamus was smart and tough and sometimes funny, though she liked that he didn’t need to be funny. Most guys, if they made you laugh a couple of times, soon ruined everything, trying way too hard to be witty or ironic.

  Half Korean, half Irish, Seamus got his largely Asian appearance and love of spicy foods from his father’s side and his blue eyes, freckles, and fiery temper from his mother’s people. For most of his life, he’d been relatively happy. Until sophomore year, he’d liked school, actually had enjoyed studying and learning, and had been a pretty good athlete, excelling in a few sports despite moving a lot. His favorite sport was gymnastics.

  After his dad had gotten mean, Seamus started avoiding home and running the streets with other kids. Overseas bases, he explained, never have a shortage of wild army brats. While running the streets, he used his gymnastics skills to hang with a group of kids who were into parkour. Scarlett loved it when he talked about those times. He lit up, his eyes distant but gleaming, telling her how those kids would run and jump and climb all across the base, driving the MPs crazy. She wished she could have run with them.

  She didn’t say so, but she also wished she could have been around to help him through those dark times. He didn’t bring up his murdered family again, but she sensed it often in things unsaid, like a rumbling storm cloud behind anecdotes. He did mention—choking up a little as they walked the campus one night—how much he missed his two little brothers, twins named Sean and Liam.

  Over the course of those days, Scarlett and Seamus drew together in the curiously expedient manner exclusive to young people living in close quarters, away from home, and under heavy institutional pressure. In this manner, unlikely friendships form quickly and fiercely among boot camp battle buddies, college freshmen, prison inmates, and teens trapped in rehab.