Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  “Your radio’s crap,” she told Ben.

  “Or something’s causing interference,” he said. “They’re putting a new cell tower on Admiral’s Hill. If this keeps up, people are going to be pissed.”

  Amber stared at the radio for a second but knew it was useless to keep running up and down the dial. She had wanted local news more than music, but they were almost at Starbucks now, and then Ben would be dropping her off near where she’d left her car parked on campus, and then she’d be going home. If there was something to report, she’d find the news on TV or online.

  “Here’s another one,” he said, tapping the brake.

  “Damn,” Amber said. “What the hell is wrong with people today?”

  She hit the button for her window, and it whirred downward. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she poked her head out and stared at a Ford F-150 pickup and a rusty old Audi sedan that had collided. The testosterone-boosted pickup had a dented front end and a shattered headlight, while the gray Audi had been mangled by the impact. The crash had smashed its windshield and accordioned its hood. A huge smear of the Ford’s red paint scarred the Audi’s crumpled front end.

  “Check out the PT Cruiser,” Ben said, pointing out the window on his side.

  Amber glanced past him and saw a ruined purple PT Cruiser being hauled up onto a flatbed tow truck. The whole side of the car had been caved in. Apparently there had been at least three cars involved in this accident, but it was the fourth time in the three miles since they’d left the hospital that they had seen recent wreckage. The police were at some of the accident scenes, but not all of them. Amber had been searching the radio for some news, something that would suggest a reason for the accidents.

  “So weird,” Ben said.

  Amber nodded. “It’s like there’s just bad luck in the air or something.”

  “Had to be some kind of malfunction with the stoplights or something,” Ben muttered, mostly to himself. It wasn’t the first time he had said it, and Amber had the strange feeling he was mostly trying to persuade himself.

  “All of them at once?” Amber asked.

  Ben scratched at the stubble on his chin. “I guess,” he said. And then he smiled mischievously. “Wouldn’t want to be the guy in charge of this stuff. His ass is fired, as of right now.”

  “Or at least in time for the next newscast, so the mayor has a scapegoat.”

  They turned onto Eastwind Avenue, a tree-lined street that had once been home to fish markets and dive bars but—over the course of the past twenty years—had been the locus for Hawthorne’s twenty-first-century gentrification. The façades of the shops and restaurants were pristine and relatively uniform. Victorian-style lampposts had been installed up and down the street. There were a couple of other expensive restaurants in Hawthorne, near the marina, but the rest of the town’s fine-dining establishments were on this particular three-block stretch of Eastwind Avenue. Most of them were places where Amber could rarely afford to eat, but she had been to the Sea Glass twice during high school and loved it. Of course, it wasn’t all fine dining on Eastwind Avenue. College students and twenty-somethings packed Pedro Diego’s pretty much every night for authentic Mexican cuisine and a long list of specialty margaritas. Neo-hippie high schoolers frequented the Troubadour, a café where members of the staff performed four or five songs an hour.

  Not every storefront window was a restaurant, of course. Eastwind Avenue boasted a florist shop, an especially snooty bookstore, a handful of clothing boutiques, and a jeweler’s. But for Amber, the best reason to drive down Eastwind was the green-and-white sign that hung at the intersection with Church Street, the beacon of the Starbucks logo. As weird as this day had been, a good cup of coffee would make everything better. She could practically taste mocha latte on her tongue.

  “Remember,” Ben said as he pulled up to the curb across the street from Starbucks. “No caffeine.”

  “Really?” She gave him sad eyes.

  “You promised.”

  “It’s been a crisis kind of day,” she said. “A girl can’t be held responsible—”

  “No caffeine,” he repeated.

  “Cruel, cruel man.” She popped the door and climbed out. “Thank God for chocolate.”

  Ben followed her across the street, but Amber’s focus was on the cars moving up and down Eastwind Avenue. All the accidents they’d seen on the drive over had made her wary. If people were driving crazy today, she didn’t want to end up as a bloody hood ornament.

  As she approached the door to Starbucks, a pair of fortyish women—fit and fashionably dressed—were exiting. One, an athletic blonde, held the door for her and Ben.

  “I’m hearing at least thirty accidents, maybe more,” the blonde said to her friend. “Someone’s going to get sued.”

  Amber paused, taking the weight of the door from her. “Are you talking about the car accidents today?”

  The woman nodded, eyes lighting up with interest. “Yes. It’s crazy, isn’t it? How does something like that happen?”

  “What did happen?” Ben asked. “We saw a few of them on our way here, but do you know what caused them all?”

  The blonde gestured inside. “There was a policeman here a few minutes ago who said something went wrong with the system that controls the traffic lights. They all went green simultaneously. None of the drivers are to blame, but I’m sure their insurance companies are going to come after the city. The mayor’s lucky no one was killed.”

  Her friend started talking to her again, and then the women were drifting away.

  “Thanks,” Amber said, but they were barely paying attention to her and Ben now.

  “Told you. Malfunction,” Ben said.

  But Amber still felt uneasy. Malfunction or not, it was a strange day. And it only became stranger as they walked into Starbucks. Her gaze had taken in the short line and started to turn toward the menu board when she heard someone make a gagging noise at the table to her right. She turned just in time to see a paunchy businessman—his laptop open in front of him—make a pinched, disgusted face and spit a mouthful of coffee back into his cup.

  “What the hell?” the man said, staring sourly at his drink.

  Before Amber could comment to Ben, the man’s behavior rippled through the place. Others made similar faces, some swallowing a gulp of something awful and some spitting it into their cups or into napkins. One teenage girl, standing in front of the pickup counter, turned and spurted some kind of frozen coffee drink into the trash can.

  “This is disgusting,” the man next to Amber and Ben said, rising from his chair.

  They stood back as the complaints began, people marching up to the counter to explain that the milk or cream in their drinks had gone sour. A man who had just received his coffee from the pickup counter called over the noise of grumbling customers to say that the cream in the dispenser there had become completely curdled.

  “Looks like cottage cheese over here,” he said.

  The girl who’d been taking orders and was now taking the brunt of most of the complaints looked like a deer in the headlights. She was rescued by another barista, a huge bear of a man with his reddish hair tied back into a ponytail. He lifted his big hands in a calming gesture.

  “All right, folks. Please settle down. We’ll get fresh cream and milk out there in just a minute, and we’ll be more than happy to set you all up with replacements for your drinks.”

  A beautiful girl with caramel skin came over with an open container of milk and whispered something in the burly man’s ear. Amber knew from his expression that it wasn’t good news.

  “You’re shitting me,” he said, frowning as he took the milk container from the girl.

  He took a whiff of the open container and made a face, holding it away from him. With all of the customers looking on, he turned and dumped the milk into the sink. It came out in sludgy chunks and he let the container fall into the sink.

  “Change of plans,” he said, looking back at his customers.
“People who don’t like black coffee may need to get refunds.”

  Amber turned to Ben and fixed him with a glare. “Are you still going to try to tell me this isn’t a weird day?”

  Before he could reply, a loud thump echoed through Starbucks, silencing the complaining masses. Something had hit the plate glass window at the front of the store. Everyone in the place seemed to be on pause, looking expectantly at that window, but there was no one outside and no indication of the source of the noise—just gray skies and a light sprinkle of rain. People started to turn away, but Amber took a step nearer the front door.

  Something dark struck the plate glass and she jerked back, startled.

  “Okay, this day is officially weird,” Ben said.

  “Ya think?” Amber snapped.

  The window had a long crack in it now, and she worried that further impacts might shatter it. But curiosity drew her forward. She thought she knew what she had seen but wanted confirmation. Others followed her, moving toward the front of the store. Through the glass, she could see two dead birds on the sidewalk outside—one a crow, and one a fat seagull.

  “Over there,” Ben said, pointing to the left, up Eastwind Avenue. “There are more.”

  And there were. Amber counted at least a dozen dead birds on the sidewalks on either side of the street. An old Volkswagen Jetta parked right in front of Starbucks had a dead pigeon on its hood, nestled in a fresh dent.

  A muffled thump reached them, and Amber glanced over at the façade of Holland’s Flowers, watching a dead gull drop to the ground. The front window of the florist shop had a spiderweb of cracks in it. One more blow and it would shatter.

  “What is this?” someone whispered behind her.

  “The fucking End Times, or something,” another voice muttered.

  Amber ignored them. She leaned forward and craned her neck, looking up into the cloudy sky. The light drizzle continued to fall. Against the gray storm clouds, hundreds of dark, winged figures flew in circles. Then some of them started to dive.

  “Back up,” Ben said, pulling her a few feet away from the window. Stumbling, she almost shrugged him off before she realized he meant to protect her in case another bird hit the window and smashed it.

  “Jesus, look at that!” said the businessman who’d been the first to complain about his coffee.

  But they were already looking. Amber watched in silent amazement as birds began to rain down on Eastwind Avenue. Sparrows, crows, gulls, and pigeons dove from the sky, darting with unrelenting speed into the rain-slicked windows of the restaurants and shops all up and down the street. The front window of the Scarlet Letter Bookshop imploded with a crash they could hear half a block away at Starbucks, even with the door closed. Birds hit parked cars, cracking windshields. For thirty or forty seconds it went on and on, hundreds of birds flying straight into windows and walls and cars.

  “They’re aiming,” Amber muttered to herself.

  “What?” Ben asked, whispering so that only she could hear.

  Wide-eyed, she looked at him. “None of them are hitting the street. Did you notice that? Yeah, they fall on the ground when they die, but it isn’t just some fucked-up bird suicide. It’s like they’re pissed off and they’re attacking.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ben said, shaking his head, ready to argue.

  “Is it?” Amber asked.

  Ben peered back out the window. Whatever he had been about to say, he swallowed the words, unsure.

  The big redheaded barista stood in front of the doors to the store. He bent and looked up at the sky. “I think it’s stopping.”

  Amber could have told him that. The avian assault slowed. A final gull swooped down, headed right for the front window of Starbucks, and then—even as they scrambled back to avoid shattering glass—it banked to the left, flapped its wings, and soared skyward once more, attack aborted.

  The people inside Starbucks held their breath for ten or twelve long seconds before they began to wonder aloud if it was really over, and safe to go outside.

  “Ben,” Amber said, taking his hand to get his attention. “Please take me to my home.”

  “I thought you wanted to go back to campus and get your car.”

  “I’ll get my dad to drive me later. Right now I just want to see my family.”

  She’d lost interest in coffee.

  AS Octavian drove along the rutted road that led past the sign for Summerfields Orchard, the willow trees overhead seemed to lean in toward his car, although whether they welcomed him or meant to keep him away, he did not know. It might have been entirely his imagination, but with a sprawling farm and orchard owned and staffed by earthwitches, it seemed entirely likely that the willows would respond to the witches’ intentions, conscious or not. Cat Hein and her wife would not be happy to see him; that much he knew. They looked at him as a danger to Keomany, and Octavian could not deny it. Whenever he and Keomany were together, it seemed there were dark and perilous events afoot.

  One of these days, he thought as he turned into the Summerfields parking lot, I’m going to have to come here just to buy apples.

  He piloted the silver Lexus he’d rented in Montreal across the yellow grass and dried mud of the field Summerfields used for most of its parking. It was after six o’clock now, and he assumed that the handful of cars still in the lot must belong to employees. On the far side of the lot, he turned into the narrow path that led to the enormous farmhouse where Keomany lived with her employers. Dust rose behind the Lexus, turning into a swirling cloud in his rearview mirror.

  As he pulled up in front of the farmhouse, the dust cloud billowing around the car once he came to a stop, the front door swung open and Keomany came out onto the front steps, a big black shoulder bag and a lavender backpack her only luggage for their trip. A beautiful woman, Keomany had a gorgeous smile, but she wasn’t smiling today.

  She didn’t even give him a chance to get out of the car. Pulling open the back door, she tossed her bags in. The rich, earthen scents of the farm and the sweet, slightly decaying smell of the orchard blew in on the breeze that swirled into the car.

  “Do you need to use the bathroom or anything?” she asked, before shutting the rear passenger door and then opening up the front.

  “I’m fine,” Octavian told her as she slid into the passenger seat and yanked the door closed.

  “Good. Let’s get going, then.”

  “Tori and Cat don’t want to come out and say hello before we go?”

  Keomany shot him an impatient glance. “Tori and Cat don’t like you.”

  Octavian laughed and feigned offense as he put the car into gear. “You’d think saving a woman’s life would earn you a little affection.”

  “Cat appreciates that you saved her life,” Keomany said. “But that doesn’t make her like you any better. Maybe she’s just envious of how easily magic comes to you.”

  Octavian grinned again, but this time he did it to hide the anger that flickered through him in that moment. He had a command of magic that Cat Hein could barely conceive of, but he had paid for that knowledge with centuries of torment in Hell.

  “So, do you have a better fix on our destination?” Octavian asked, bluntly changing the subject.

  Keomany nodded, reaching back to grab her backpack. From a side pocket, she drew a map of New England, which she unfolded to reveal a spot that had been circled in purple marker.

  “Hawthorne, Massachusetts,” she said.

  “And what’s in Hawthorne, Massachusetts?” Octavian asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Keomany replied, tucking her silken black hair behind her ears. Her soft, brown eyes were full of fear. “But it’s something old and dangerous. The natural order of things is unraveling in Hawthorne, and whatever is causing the chaos is growing stronger.”

  Octavian pushed a little harder on the accelerator. Keomany turned on the car radio and starting punching buttons until she found something she liked—a tinny, edgy bit of rock that sounded like i
t would only be played on the local college radio station. Now that they were on their way, she seemed to lighten up a bit.

  “It’s good to see you, Peter,” Keomany said.

  “Always good to see you, Keomany.”

  “Nikki didn’t want to come with you?”

  Octavian smiled. “It’s sad. She was so disappointed not to be able to join us. It’s been months since something evil tried to eat her. She sends her best, though.”

  Keomany smiled archly. She traced her finger along the map, following the route they would take to Hawthorne, and then glanced out the window at the dimming sky.

  “No sign of a storm,” she said.

  “Was there supposed to be?”

  “No. But I have a feeling that will change as we get closer.”

  “So, Hawthorne?” Peter said. “You really have no idea what we’re going to be driving into the middle of?”

  “I told you. Chaos.”

  “You can’t be more specific than that?”

  Keomany rolled her eyes and started scanning radio stations again.

  “That’s why they call it chaos.”

  NORMAN Dunne groaned in his sleep, furrowed his brow, and reached out his right hand in search of his alarm clock. Half conscious, he tapped the nightstand and extended his probing fingers farther, bumping a plastic water glass, which tumbled off the table and spilled its contents onto the linoleum floor.

  “Come on,” he muttered, his voice a dry rasp.

  The alarm emitted loud, rapid-fire beeps, irritating as hell, and after several more seconds of this, he opened his eyes into slits, glancing to his right in search of the offending clock.

  Awareness flooded back into him. He felt the IV tube in his left arm tug as he shifted in bed, saw the chair against the wall and the tray table with its plastic bedpan and the white cable wrapped around the metal side rail of the bed—with which he could call the nurse—and he remembered it all. Out on the boat, fishing with Tommy, dragging up that old trunk in the net, opening it, and then the pain in his chest. A heart attack at his age!

  “Shit,” he whispered, sadness sweeping over him.