My chest was on fire as we cut down another side street. Holliman was lagging behind, croaking out breathless directions as he tried to read the map while staying ahead of the growing mob behind us. We were going to die here. None of us really knew where we were going, and Mrs. Graves’ arm was bleeding steadily from where that kid had stuck her a few minutes earlier. It might be enough to kill her in time, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
The people of Braxton would tear us apart long before then.
“Keep her head still. They’re starting to twitch more, and it has to get in at the inner canthus precisely to have a full effect.”
Nodding, I leaned forward, my knees digging into the dreaming woman’s shoulders as I tightened my inner thighs’ grip on the sides of her head. We had done this more than fifty times in the last three hours and I was getting very tired, but Graves was right. They were starting to fight back a bit more.
We’d started with the two cops outside of “You Sew and Sew”. Graves got me to lay them both out flat on their backs and straddle their heads while putting weight on their shoulders “in case they have a sudden reaction to the Elixir.” I wanted to ask what kind of “reaction” that might be, but I held my tongue for the moment. Holding the larger man’s head steady, I’d opened his left eye as instructed while Graves dripped a single drop of Elixir into it.
The effect had been subtle but immediate. The twitching tension that had been in the man’s body had melted away, replaced instead by soft, heavy snoring. When I met Graves’ eyes, she nodded with a small smile. “He’s truly sleeping now.”
I frowned in return. “He wasn’t before?”
Graves shook her head. “Not a natural sleep, no. He was in a state of induced dreaming. The Elixir has freed him from that.”
I’d kept quiet then, but by the time we reached this latest woman, who went from violently spasming to sleeping peacefully with a single drop from Graves, I couldn’t help myself.
“What is it? The Elixir I mean.”
“Clint…”
“No. You guys say you want me here. Need me. Okay. I’m here. Fucking trapped here, apparently. So do me a solid and stop jerking me around.”
She sighed and glanced around. Holliman had gone off to find a map of the town or some other source of information. Before he left, I’d asked why he didn’t just search the internet before we came here. He gave me a hollow laugh and shrugged. Said he’d tried, but the world has forgotten this place exists, and not just in people’s memories. That reminder of how isolated we were here had been troubling, but Graves’ expression was somehow worse. There was a degree of mistrust and fear in Graves’ face as she checked that her partner was not around. Were they not as united and in control as they wanted me to believe? And if not, what did that mean for our odds of escaping this place?
Satisfied we were alone, she turned back to me. “The Elixir is a substance that comes from the one we serve.”
“Like, they make it for you? Um, for us?”
Her expression grew haunted. “In a sense, yes. Not in a laboratory or factory though. It is essen…”
“I found a map of the town finally.” We both jumped slightly as Holliman approached. Turning to him, I saw his expression was growing hard. “What’re you two talking about?”
I shook my head as I stood up from the sleeping woman, legs slightly trembling. “Nothing. Does the map show us where we need to go?”
Holliman grimaced slightly. “Potentially yes. It’s one of these poorly drawn tourist maps. The detail is there, but the scale? I don’t know. But it does show a ‘historic mine’ in the western edge of the city. I’d guess that’ll be where we find what we’re looking for.” He gestured down at the sleeping woman. “Though we’ve got to work faster if we’re going to get to that point any time soon.” He looked at Graves. “How many have you done so far?”
She licked her lips. “Fifty-three with this woman.”
Frowning, he shook his head slightly. “Not nearly enough yet.”
I stepped forward. “So how many is enough? And enough for what?”
He shifted his gaze back to me. “Enough to weaken the grip of the thing living here. To give us a chance of not dying when we confront it.”
Swallowing, I dropped my eyes. “Um, okay. So does that mean we have to do everyone still alive in the town?”
He shook his head. “No, just a percentage need to be dosed. According to this map, back in 2014 the town’s population was about 9,000 people. From what we’ve seen and been told, I’d guess that less than 2,000 of those are probably still alive. If we dose ten percent of that number, we should be safe by 200 or so.”
I groaned. “Fuck. That’ll take all night.”
Holliman shrugged and gave a hard smile. “Do you have other plans?” He snorted. “Besides, I found a gymnasium three blocks over. It looks like some of the townspeople were hiding there before they got infected and fell asleep.”
Graves had been putting her bottle of Elixir back in its satchel, but she paused and looked up now. “How many are in there?”
Holliman didn’t meet her eyes, but instead looked back down the way he’d came. “Alive? Hard to say for sure. There are a few dead in there too. But if I had to guess, it’s close to a hundred.”
She glanced at me and nodded. “Okay then. Let’s go.”
The outside of the gymnasium proudly proclaimed itself to be “Home of the Braxton Barbarians”—A name that was ironically apt given everything that had happened there. Bodies and signs of long-past fighting littered the parking lot as we made our way toward the building. We found a couple of sleepers amid the chaos, but most were truly dead here.
The carnage got much worse as we reached the double doors leading into the gym. A couple of dozen bodies lay in a jumbled pile of slow rot at the entry point. I could see several holes that were probably gunshots on a number of the people, and the outside of the doors were streaked with bloody finger trails and dents, along with one long breach of the metal from a fire axe that was still lodged in the right door.
Gagging a little, I had to fight the urge to just close my eyes and block it all out. “Jesus. It was like a war here. They were trying to get in to the others, weren’t they?”
Holliman puffed out a breath and nodded. “Yes, it looks that way. For whatever reason, some people weren’t affected as quickly as others. Maybe they tried to leave town and couldn’t, or maybe by the time they realized how bad things were, all they could do was try to hide in here.” Stepping over a dead teenaged girl, he yanked open the door with a squeal. “They chained the door from the inside, but they left a gap to shoot through. I found some bolt cutters at a hardware store back the way we came and took care of the chain, but we still probably want to block this door open when we go in.” He gave me a weary glance. “Don’t want to be trapped in there if things go sour.”
Graves touched Holliman’s shoulder. “Do you think it’s dangerous in there?”
He shrugged but didn’t turn to look at her. “Dangerous? Yes. They all seem asleep though. And this whole place is dangerous. The quicker we can get done, the less risk we have of running into something unexpected and nasty.” Pulling out a small flashlight, he stepped inside and we followed.
The first room was a large atrium with two sets of double doors on the far side leading into the gym proper. Spare chairs and tables had been piled against another exterior door down at the far end, and clustered around that pile were two men and a woman, all alive and twitching from down in the belly of some deep dream.
Graves gestured to them. “We may as well get these before we venture inside.”
Holliman frowned but nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. But let’s hurry.”
Five minutes later, the three were all truly asleep and we were stepping into the gymnasium. The murk of the faint fading daylight coming in through the few grimy windows gave an illusion of normalcy at first. There were a few signs of what were probably discarded makeshift weapons, but no bodies or slumbering people at first. It wasn’t until our lights reached the far corner of the gym that we saw the enormous mound of flesh that lay dreaming.
“Oh my God.” Graves’ voice trembled slightly as she took a few steps forward to get a better look. “They…they’re sleeping amid the dead, aren’t they? Did they…did they choose to do that? To sleep in that?”
Holliman nodded. “I think so. The putrification is oddly slow in this place, and these people were likely all insane when they fell asleep, so I suppose it made some sense to them.”
My own voice was barely above a whisper when I spoke. “Who are the dead people? In here, why did some die and some live?”
Graves spoke up. “My guess is that not everyone got infected or turned at the same rate. The ones that were too slow or somehow immune to it got killed by the rest before…well, before being turned into bedding.”
Tears sprang to my eyes as the sudden urge to vomit overtook me. Doubling over, I vomited onto the dirty edge of what had once been a basketball court. Holliman patted my back.
“I did the same thing earlier. It’s for the best. It’ll make what we have to do easier.”
Throat burning, I gave him a sidelong glance. “What’s that?”
“We need to pull all the dreamers free of that so we can give them the Elixir.”
An hour later we had dislodged forty or so people from the hill of death and dreaming that occupied darkest part of the gym. I’d vomited twice more—once when we pulled the first man free and again when we hit a pocket of firm dead flesh holding a pair of women tightly. It should have been long withered away, but instead it was spongy and resistant to our attempts to yank the women out. It took all three of us pulling at the first woman and kicking at the rotten mess around her to break her free, and when she came out, it was with a soft, liquid pop that filled the air with a foul smell that took my breath away. We pulled her away quickly and then grabbed the second, but we were only a few feet away from the mound when I had to stop and retch again. Wiping my mouth, I helped them slide her the rest of the way to where we had lined up the others on the far side of the gym.
“We…why don’t we do this batch and then get more?” I spit again, more to get the smell off my tongue than the bile from retching. “I need a break from going into that.”
Graves looked at the pile and then at the twitching bodies we had laid out across the gym floor. “I think we’re less than halfway done with what’s in there, but this is a good starting point. We can move them into the front room when we’re done to make room for the rest.” She looked at Holliman. “Sound good to you?”
He nodded. “Yes. Let’s just hurry. It’ll be dark soon.”
We were halfway done with the first batch when it happened. At the time, I was too terrified to consider the why of it all, and looking back on it later I just chalked it up to our being tired and in the routine of doing the same strange and horrible task over and over. And I guess that was my first mistake—it wasn’t exactly the same thing over and over. Because with every person we took from dreaming, the others grew more restless.
I think we all realized this was building towards something bad, but our wordless agreement was just to work faster. Get it over with so we could somehow finish whatever was happening in this town and get out. I think about that attitude now and ironically enough, I marvel at it. I had no real idea of what we were facing or how we were supposed to beat it, but through some amalgam of desperate faith in Holliman and Graves and desperation at our situation, I trusted that it would work out so long as we had a plan and kept to it. That’s probably why, when Graves cried out and shoved me off the man I was steadying for the Elixir, there was no fear, just irritated surprise.
It all happened so fast. She shoved me, I turned toward her even as I saw a blur of movement from behind. Someone small with a piece of metal or a knife, stabbing the air where I had been and hitting Mrs. Graves’ arm instead. She let out a scream and reached for the attacker’s wrist even as I was catching myself and trying to regain my balance so I could help.
The air was suddenly split by the crack of a gunshot, and the small boy holding a butcher knife went tumbling back a couple of feet before sliding a few more. My eyes followed him first—I could already see blood pooling from his chest and even at a distance it was easy to tell he was dead in the moment before I turned to look for the source of the gunfire.
It was Mr. Holliman, his eyes wide and roving as he looked around the gym and then at Mrs. Graves, his shocked expression narrowing to one of angry concern.
“Gracie? Are you okay?”
She was cradling her arm and looked pale, but she managed to nod between deep, panicked breaths. “I…yes, I think so.” She gave him a smile before looking over at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, thanks to…”
“Ha.”
“Hee hee.”
“Ha ha ha HA!”
It wasn’t the laughter of one person or just a few. In fact, at first it seemed less like laughter than it did trickles of dirty water, crawling through new cracks in a dam, growing more eager and numerous with every second. I looked toward the dark corner of the room and saw what was crawling towards us wasn’t foul streams but madness given legs and hands and teeth—dozens of dreamers now woken back into whatever plague held this place. Crawling and standing with the rotting muck of their family and friends clinging to their bodies as they picked up left behind weapons and started to stand and walk towards us, every lip curled into a smile between chuckles and cackles and guffaws.
“Ha ha.”
“Hee hee heeeeee!”
I turned to look at Holliman as he was stepping forward to lift Mrs. Graves to her feet and pull her toward the exit. He gave me a silent glance that told me all I needed to know.
This was not according to plan. This was not in control.
And if we didn’t get away from this place and these people, we were all going to die.
NoSleepAutoBot t1_jbgkkx2 wrote
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