by Platt, Sean
“So what do you do all day?”
“Look for and evaluate new information, talk to my team, read, write, watch movies. Sometimes I play Call Of Duty.” He smiled.
“Why don’t you live someplace else? New York, Los Angeles, Sydney even! Why Missouri?”
“Missouri’s where I grew up. It’s my home, a great place to disappear and get lost in the quiet. But I love to travel, and fly out often. I get my fill of adventure, then come home to space and silence. My mom and dad lived over in Festus, close enough to visit, but far enough to leave me mostly alone.”
Desmond noticed the final swirl sitting at the bottom of Mary’s nearly empty glass. “May I?”
“No,” Mary said. “Terrible idea. I can’t believe I’m still standing as it is. But I’m glad we did this. Thanks for letting us stay here. It’s nice to get off the road, and get some sleep in a decent place. And I think I might actually sleep.” Paola snored loudly. Mary and Desmond traded a quiet smile.
“I didn’t ‘let’ us do anything. We’re a team, and I’m sorry about the democracy comment.” He looked over at Paola. “Just know you’re doing great. I can’t imagine how hard it must be, worried about another life full-time like that.”
“Thanks. It’s the uncertainty that makes it so hard. I just want to know what she’s thinking. It kills me to have no idea, and to feel so powerless to help her.”
“She’s doing great too. You should be proud. She’s strong and smart, just like her mom.” He yawned, then said, “Ready for tomorrow?”
“Only if I get the sleep I need tonight,” she said, following his cue again, and quietly thanking him for making it so easy.
Jimmy had his head against the wall, asleep in the corner. John was passed out, his cheek against the polished wood, fuel leaking from his open mouth. Paola was asleep in the middle of a row of chairs. Desmond made a bed to Paola’s right; Mary stayed on her left.
“Good night, Mary.”
“Good night, Desmond.”
They were asleep in less than three minutes.
When Mary woke, her daughter was gone.
* * * *
TO BE CONTINUED ...
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EPISODE THREE
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PAOLA OLSON
October 16
Early morning
Belle Springs, Missouri
Paola jolted awake as if she’d been falling in her dream. Only it wasn’t gravity which snapped her back to reality, but rather the sound of her name being whispered in her ear.
She woke expecting to see somebody standing over her. However, nobody was there. The voice must’ve been an echo of her dream world which followed her to her waking life.
She strained to listen, in case someone had actually called her name. The only other sound in the eerily still hotel lobby was a low growl rolling from her mother’s open mouth; a baby soft bark so familiar it was more lullaby than irritant to Paola. The world was a blur and her mother was barely visible in the shadows which floated through the room like a dark cloud.
She blinked her eyes, trying to figure out which side of the dream she was on.
Must be a dream, the real world isn’t so… murky.
Paola laid her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. 99… 98… 97… 96…95... On other nights, she rarely made it past 65 or so before sleep claimed her. 94… 93… 92… 91…90...
“Paola!” This time the voice was louder, and she had no doubt she’d heard it.
Paola sat up straight in bed. It was her father’s voice, coming from the far side of the still-murky lobby.
“Paola, are you in there?”
This has to be a dream!
“Paola, please! Are you there?”
This was definitely a dream. She was sure of it now. Her father wouldn’t be able to find her out here in the middle of nowhere unless it was a dream.
“Paola!”
Paola pushed the cushions aside and rose to her feet. It would be nice to see the real him, but that was okay if it wasn’t. The Dream Daddy would have to do for now. Though the shadows scared her, she knew she had nothing to fear. When bad stuff happened in dreams, all you had to do was wake up. And she knew how to do that well; she did it all the time. It’s how she could sometimes dream about the stuff she wanted to dream about, without having to dream about the stuff she didn’t.
“Paola? Shortcake?”
Paola stopped at the side of her mom’s makeshift bed. Up close, she could see her better through the shadows. Mary’s eyes fluttered beneath their lids as she pulled the fat pillow in her arms and cradled it to her chest. Another low rumble came from her throat. It flirted with leaving her mouth but ended up whistling through her nose instead.
This is like the hide-n-seek dream. That was a good one.
Paola tiptoed toward her father’s voice, past her mom and Desmond, past John, his face still pasted to the bar, then past Jimmy and into the dining room.
Paola loved the hide-n-seek dreams. She looked forward to them, even tried to make herself have them sometimes as she lay in bed counting down to the possibility, starting from 100.
She always played this in her dreams with Daddy, just the two of them. And in the dreams, she always felt a few years younger, before she began to feel too old to call her parents mommy and daddy. Before good feelings were replaced with the realization that her parents weren’t the perfect people she used to idolize.
He’d usually call for her while she did her best to stay hidden. The longer she was gone, the more desperate he’d get to find her. He would call and call and chase her through the house, looking through windows and opening doors. “I love you, Paola. Please let me find you so we can be together. Don’t make me wait any longer. As soon as I find you, we can go and find Mommy together!”
And they always did. He would find her first; under the bed, in the closet, behind the oak tree outside, behind the hot water heater in the basement, or in the pantry. Once he sniffed her out, he would open her hiding place door with a playful loud roar, then they would spend a few minutes laughing before holding hands and adventuring off together on a quest for Mommy.
He never took more than a few minutes to find her, and no matter how different the hide-n-seek dreams were, they always had the same sort of ending: the three of them eating ice cream, watching a movie, or doing any one of the million-and-one things Paola had gone from doing to missing each day in the real world.
Something was different about this dream, though.
The hide-n-seek dreams always started good and kept getting better. This one had just started and was already turning into a creeping kind of terrible. The shadow of something ugly twisted the familiarity of the usual dream, souring her warm nostalgia into something wretched.
Paola could’ve sworn she was in the kitchen, but was confused by the long hallway now in front of her. That made what was happening feel like even more like a dream. She was always retracing her steps in her sleep.
I was in the lobby, then I walked through the restaurant and into the kitchen. But now I’m in a long hallway. And it looks like it goes for miles, like the hotel in Vegas where we stayed when we were still a family.
Paola spun around. The endless hallway was mirrored on both sides, with 100 identical doors crowding each direction.
No, this was not the hide-n-seek dream. This was one of the other repeating dreams, where her daddy wanted to show her something, but never got around to it. In these dreams, she always felt lost and alone as she tried to keep up with him, following him for what felt like forever, through twisting halls and endless, winding stairwells. The buildings were always weird and never stayed the same shape for long.
This felt mostly like that, but this world wasn’t soft like her dreams.
That’s how she usually knew she was dreaming. Whenever she wondered whether or not she were dreaming, she could push hard on a wall, tree, or other inanimate objects to know for sure. If the object gave under pressure, she was d
reaming.
The world she was walking through now was not soft, though. Despite the changing, impossible architecture, nothing budged under her touch.
“You’re doing great, Shortcake. Almost there. Just a few more steps.”
The hallway disappeared and the doors went with it. Paola blinked and was back in the kitchen, standing in front of a long, steel table, a lot longer than it should have been. On top of the counter, directly in front of Paola, lay a large butcher knife, almost cartoonish in size.
Paola picked up the blade, its metal handle cold to the touch, and rotated it in her hand, staring at her warped reflection and wondering why she looked so real if this were only a dream. She looked at herself in dream mirrors all the time, but never had her reflection seemed so real.
She set the butcher knife back on the counter, then walked the half mile or so through the kitchen and into the milky clouds of fog which covered the world.
She walked for more than a mile, except now the distance had turned real. Not like the fake miles inside the hotel that acted like forever but were only a feeling.
Rocks, branches and a shallow pool of shattered glass dug into her feet, stinging and tearing her flesh. She looked down, surprised to see blotches of red on her white skin, brown on the black asphalt.
The pain in her feet made the dream feeling fade.
She would have forced herself awake right there, but then she saw a square clearing in the night sky ahead with no fog at all, but rather a neon, blinking billboard that read, “DADDY THIS WAY” with a big red arrow aimed in the direction she was walking. She would walk on.
Just past the billboard, Paola saw the bright white canopy of a gas station, its rows of yellowed and aged fluorescent lights cutting through the fog. The station sat in the middle of all the light, making it look like an oil painting hanging from the middle of a big black frame. The darkness surrounding the station made it seem as though all the world’s light was concentrated under the canopy. Most of that light gathered in the middle, bathing a tall man slouched against a fuel pump.
A chill went through Paola.
The man was her father, only not quite. Same hair, same smile, same eyes, but different clothes, as though he were dressing up to play her daddy, but he’d missed the finer details that made her dad’s style. He was even wearing one of those hats they wore in old films and Indiana Jones movies. The hat looked fake, but the stubble on her daddy’s cheek was real so Paola raced forward, the pain in her feet all but a distant memory.
“Daddy?”
“Paola!” He took off his hat, fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her. “I’ve missed you so much, and I was so worried.”
“I’m so glad you’re okay!” Paola said. “Do you know what happened to everyone?”
“No, but I do know how we can find out. You have to come with me right now, then we’ll come back and get your mom before she wakes up.”
“We should go and get Mommy first.”
“No, we can’t, because she’s sleeping right now and we’d have to wake her.”
“She won’t mind. Come on, Daddy.” Paola waved her arms back toward the hotel.
He sighed, then shook his head. “It’s okay, Shortcake, I promise. She won’t even know you’re gone. And as soon as we get back, we can all go out and get ice cream. Your new friends can come with us and everyone will be happy. It’s just like playing hide-n-seek, except right now your mom’s sleeping instead of hiding.”
Paola shook her head. “She won’t mind if we wake her up. No one will. They’ll be excited. And she’ll probably be mad if I leave without telling her.”
“But it’s me, I’m your father. Besides, it’s my week. You’re supposed to be with me right now, anyway.”
That doesn’t sound like Daddy at all.
“I want to go back to the hotel, Daddy.”
Paola’s father rose to his feet, returned his hat to his head and flashed Paola a movie star smile. “Come on, Shortcake. We’ll be 15 minutes tops.”
Paola shook her head and took a step back. The dream part felt like it was fading.
“Okay then,” he held his hand out for Paola, “We’ll wake her first, but we’ll have to be careful. You know how fucking awful she is when she doesn’t get her sleep.”
Paola froze.
Dream Daddy would never say anything mean about Mommy. Or use that kind of language. Neither would Real Daddy.
“Why did you say that, Daddy?”
Paola knew she’d never hear an answer because her father’s face started to change right that second, mouth first as it drooped horribly. The nose went next; shifting, contorting and folding itself inside out in an angry looking liquid motion. It looked like the devil was giving birth, like every bad thing Paola had ever seen, heard of, or thought up, was suddenly given two long and skinny legs.
Her father’s skin grew bright red, wet, shiny as the muscles and bones beneath the flesh seemed to churn like someone was running a mixer in the thing’s insides. The monster looked kind of like the black thing they’d seen in the road, but different in ways Paola couldn’t quite place as she had turned away from the creature in the road pretty quickly. It was then that Paola realized with horror that she could not look away from this thing that was not her father.
Its eyes, dark, black, and evil, were the only constant as its face shifted form again and again like it was searching for the right fit. Her head began to hurt as if something were pressing hard sticks against her skull. Or fingers.
And that’s when she realized it had reached out and was clutching her skull, and somehow forcing its way into her mind.
Memories began to flicker past her mind’s eye. Things she’d not thought about in years.
I’m five and we’re sewing a pillow for the tooth fairy. We have to hurry because my tooth is hanging to my gums. Daddy comes in the room smiling. He just finished building a tiny bed for the tooth fairy, in case she gets tired and wants to rest before she finishes for the night.
Her headache grew worse as if her head were being crushed beneath the pressure of the monster’s fingers. And just like that, she could no longer remember what her daddy had built for the tooth fairy. And a moment later, she could no longer remember what age she was when the tooth fairy visited. And then after that, the memory itself was gone, leaving her confused, as if trying to recall a name she’d heard once five years ago.
He’s digging through my mind like when Mommy digs through her garden. He’s filling his baskets with memories instead of flowers, and yanking them up by the roots. He’s taking them with him.
She cried out and tried to smack the monster’s arms away, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. It wasn’t hers to control any longer. She’d become little more than a puppet.
A few moments later, she lay on the cold concrete ground of the gas station, unable to remember what happened, or how she’d gotten there. Nor could she remember her name.
The only thing she knew for certain was she was about to die.
* * * *
CHARLIE WILKENS
October 17
Early morning
Pensacola, Florida
As they got comfortable in the house in Pensacola, Charlie settled into the hope that things might be okay. They hadn’t seen any creatures since leaving Jacksonville, but they also hadn’t seen survivors. That was just fine by Charlie.
The house, a three-story mansion on the water, belonged to Bob’s brother, Derek, who was gone to no one’s surprise. Rather than be upset by the news, Bob was relieved to find the brother he hated was on the highway to heaven or hell or where-the-fuck-ever.
The house was easily the nicest Charlie had ever been inside. The photos of Derek and his family arranged in a neat row on the wall told Charlie exactly why Bob didn’t care for his brother. He was gay, with a black boyfriend and an adopted Chinese toddler girl. Even if Bob weren’t racist, the boyfriend wouldn’t jive with Bob’s hardline anti-queer views.
Charlie wondered how someone like Derek — successful, good looking, gay, and who didn’t hate minorities — could be related to Bob, who was the tail’s side of the coin on all those things. Well, except the gay part. Charlie figured anyone as homophobic as Bob was probably deep in the closet hiding behind a pink taffeta gown or two.
Charlie had gotten a taste of Bob’s homophobia the previous fall when he tried growing his hair out to look less geeky.
“What are you, a faggot?” Bob harangued him repeatedly.
One time, Charlie was feeling snarky, and answered, “Yeah, want a kiss?”
Bob answered with a swift smack in the mouth. That night at dinner, Bob demanded Charlie cut his hair or he would hold him down and shave him bald.
“You’ve got a choice,” Bob said, “You have your mom take you to one of those faggy salons so you can get it cut nice and short, or I will strap you down and shave you.”
“Mom,” Charlie pleaded, “He can’t do this.”
His mom had that look.
She wasn’t willing to turn the burner up on Bob’s temper. “You’ll look handsome honey. We’ll take you to the place Chad’s mom takes him. You like Chad’s hair, don’t you?”
Charlie just shook his head. He could hardly look at her. He was more pissed at her than Bob. She was his mother. She was supposed to fight for him, not help the enemy. Charlie fled from the table. The next morning, he took his bike and went to the barber he’d gone to for years and got a shorter haircut, vowing to grow it out the minute he turned 18.