I Will Rise (20 page)

“You really have her?”

“We nabbed her about three minutes ago. Hot redhead. Feisty.”

I look out the window. Fuck.

“Look, Charles, I won’t lie to you. You can trust us, we can help you. Remember, if you help us, we will help you.” He turns to leave and—damn me, damn curiosity, damn my desire to protect Annabelle at all costs—I am on my feet and following.

I don’t know if the girlfriend thing was a ruse. I don’t know if Jim knows anything of importance. I don’t know what he intends to do with me. But I do know he can’t touch me. Nobody can. My killing hand is primed and ready to suck the bastard dry. He wants to talk, we can talk, but so help me, if he lays one finger on Annabelle…

I follow Jim across a parking lot toward a grocery store; the group from the bus is nowhere to be seen.

“We have to go someplace private where we can talk. You won’t regret this,” he says.

“Where did your friends go?” I ask.

“They’re not my friends, they just had the same dream and took the same bus. I don’t know what happens to them from here on out and I don’t know why I’ve been chosen as the spokesperson—it’s just the way it went down in the dream.”

“So what exactly do you mean you dreamed this?” Play dumb.

“Just like with you and your girlfriend. She goes to sleep and visits you in her dreams, I go to sleep and watch the whole thing like a movie. Lots of us do and in the dreams we interact and comment on what we’re seeing. It’s been happening for a few months now. When things started to come true, like the cop and the dog, a whole nation of us went to sleep and made plans. We arranged appointments and phone calls and discovered that each of us was a real, breathing person, sharing the same dream. What’s more is the dream shows us what to do. We not only see you and her, but we dream the future. We dream what we should do. Most importantly we are shown the truth, not like you and your girl—you two are a couple of pawns. This way.”

We enter the grocery store and again I take note of Jim’s suit. Sharp. I start to wonder how I’d look in something stylish and expensive like that when Jim asks, “You really don’t know what I’m talking about?”

“No. I mean, I’m going to visit my girlfriend, but I don’t know what all this dream shit is about.” Pawns? More dreamers? What the fuck is going on? I consider dropping the innocent act and asking some direct questions, but I figure I should hold off a little bit longer.

As we make our way through the frozen foods section Jim motions, “Back here,” and we pass through a pair of swinging doors into the bowels of the store. Pallets of crackers and cookies and various dry foods line the hallways and there is a dank aroma tainting the air. My plan is to do what I have to do to get Annabelle to safety. Maybe I’ll learn something helpful in the process. Maybe I’ll kill anyone involved in her abduction. Unless of course they turn out to be on our side, and then maybe I’ll gain some allies.

“In here.” Jim walks a few feet down the damp hallway, opens a door and gestures for me to enter. It’s dark and I look at Jim questioningly. He motions a little more emphatically, says, “The light switch is to the left,” and then shoves me. Hard.

The moment I stumble inside I feel an army of arms grabbing at me. I hear men and women yelling and a thought, a mushroom cloud of comprehension, rips through my brain. I rewind and see Jim on the bus.

He says, “Hot redhead. Feisty.”

Hot redhead? Feisty?

They don’t have her. They don’t even know what she really looks like. They only see her as I dream her. Annabelle, in reality, is overweight and blind and admittedly timid. They probably don’t even know where she lives.

Sometimes I can be so stupid.

But alas, to my credit, Jim and company may know these things. He may have only been referencing her dream presence for ease and clarity and, well, effect.

Sometimes I can be so stupid.

I hate it when I reach an epiphany, my mind filling with wonder and clarity, only to rethink things and negate the eye-opening lucidity, leaving me deflated and empty.

Logic, the dream killer.

Illogic running rampant in my brain and here I am, subdued, held. The center of my brain begins to fuzz and blacken and funnel and my body, not just my hand, but my entire body begins to radiate waves of instant death. My arms drop and release and in the dark I hear pained moans joining the screams. I hear thuds, flesh and bones to the concrete and a zillion collapsing souls.

There is shuffling and groaning and before I can react, the fallen arms are quickly replaced. The dead funnel expands, my head a cavernous pit, and the black rose blooms. More arms fall away, more thuds reverberate across the hard concrete floor, and again before I am able to run, they are replaced.

I feel straps, assorted gags, flesh biters, digging into my neck, my wrists, my torso, and a metal folding chair slams the back of my legs, collapsing my knees, bringing me down. The cold metal greets my ass, my back, and before I am fully seated the dark room, the groaning people, the army of arms disappear and I am gone, lost in the cavernous depths of my death-tripping mind.

* * *

A world of nothing.

A world of markers.

A world of staring, filmy eyes. Headstone planet. I float, disembodied, through the dead gray skies of a dead gray world.

The eyes close.

My eyes close.

Here but not really here.

* * *

At long last I am back. My eyes open and instantly go to battle with bright overhead lighting. I squirm and get little to no leeway.

“Charles?” I hear Jim call my name.

Everything begins to come clear, but I am still extremely disorientated. Reality filters in sporadically, in steps:

1. I am sitting at a wooden table, tied to a metal folding chair. My feet are bound to the legs of the chair with extension cords. My middle is wrapped with packing twine. My forearms are bound to the table, secured with thick leather straps that enwrap each arm and disappear into two holes cut into the wooden tabletop. The straps are fastened somewhere below, out of view.

2. “Do it,” I hear someone shout. A series of acknowledging cries follow. The room, which looks like an employee locker room with signs that read things like:
Customer Satisfaction = Success
, is overflowing with people, at least twenty men and women. The floor is littered with about as many dead bodies. The crowd fans around me in a sort of horseshoe shape.

3. I feel tension around my neck and notice that it too is bound with packing twine. Two men stand to either side of me each holding a thick end of the twine in their eager little hands. I look at one and his eyes widen and I feel pressure around my neck. I do the same with the other and again a little pull tightens things up. I ignore the twine pullers and crane my neck to look behind me at the door. A few heavies stand guard with their arms folded across their barrel chests.

4. “Charles?” Jim repeats, and I turn my head to find him standing over me. He is holding a nasty-looking meat cleaver in his right hand.

Full orientation blasts my brain awake, alert, aware, and the world goes seamless, stepping into solid moments. Panic floods. Keep it together. Panic.

“What’s going on here?” I scream. The bindings, the scary crowd, the big cleaver all set my system on fire with nervousness. I feel tingly (not in a good way). The horseshoe of people (I can’t help feeling like I am five years old, seizing at the mall, waiting for my mommy) chatter and yell and cast dispersions. Jim raises his hands and quiets them down.

“He claims he doesn’t know.” Jim’s statement is met with more outbursts, but again he settles the crowd. “Seriously.” And before anyone can speak up he continues, “It could be he doesn’t even realize what’s going on. You all saw how he just went into a trance. He was passed out.”

An ugly man yells, “We still have to kill him!”

“Of course, we still have to kill him”—Jim taps his head in frustration—“but perhaps we owe him an explanation.”

I scan the crowd and all of the familiar types are present and although this isn’t a pathetic display of inadequacy like my seizures for instance, it still feels the same. People are still looking at me and they are still thinking basically the same things: I am sorry, poor thing, it’s unfortunate, but no matter because I am so glad I am not you. However, there is a little something different in the mix this time. There’s fear. There’s power. I rather like the additions. I feel like less of a retard. I feel stronger.

“Charles?” Jim looks at me very solemnly.

I look up at him and ask why with my eyes. Why Jim? Laying it on. Why? Meanwhile my body slowly, carefully, inconspicuously searches for a way out of these blasted restraints. My mind begins to bubble over with a zillion different thoughts. Is this the end? Is Annabelle pissed at me for being late? The eye wall tries to rise, the newly dead eager to bring me down, but I am way too tense and on edge to let it bother me now. Maybe later (if there is a later).

Later.

Work it.

Let it out.

I am so scared.

“Don’t kill me,” I plead.

“I don’t want to kill you. We don’t want to kill you. Unfortunately, we have no choice.” Jim tightens his grip on the meat clever and looks inadvertently menacing for a moment. “I told you that you wouldn’t regret this and after I tell you what I’ve promised maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll understand why this has to be done.”

The restraints don’t budge and I get frustrated with my slow, calculated attempts at loosening them. These fools are going to kill me. It doesn’t matter what I say, or what I do at this point, they are really going to kill me. Fear finally pervades, upsetting and overriding every other emotion. I am dead, but they are going to kill me. They are going to kill me and I am so fucking scared. I start to cry and struggle openly with the restraints. The twine pullers assert their control and apply pressure to my neck.

“I didn’t do anything,” I scream through fist-sized tears.

“Perhaps not intentionally, Charles, but you are destroying the world. You may or may not understand this, depending on whether you know more than you are willing to tell us, but there is no great dreamer. We are not being dreamed, nor are we threatening some perfect order. Something, somewhere along the line has filled your girlfriend’s head with these lies. She really believes what she tells you but she knows no better. We do. You follow me so far?”

I think it’s time to change strategies. “I won’t kill anymore,” I say earnestly. “Let me go, let her go and we will disappear.” And we will. If they let me go, to hell with all this shit, I’m getting Annabelle and we are dropping out of civilization.

“I thought you didn’t know what was going on?” Jim’s face darkens and his eyes narrow. “You had me going there. Not most of them”—he gestures at his associates—“but you had me.”

I think I just made a mistake. Jim seems kind of upset that I have been lying to him.

“I’ve been nothing but straight with you, Charles. I was hoping you would have showed me the same courtesy and respect. Obviously you and I are on different moral planes. This is why you are here”—he points at me—“and that’s why I am here”—he points at himself. “Okay, I will be brief, I promised you an explanation and I am a man of my word.”

I nod, defeated, liar, loser, fuckup. Let’s get this over with.

“As I was saying, there is no dreamer. There is no human threat. What there is, is death. You are death’s agent, a carrier, and your touch kills.” He gestures to the dead on the ground and then to himself and the others in the room. “We have all been touched and will perish soon, but if we take you with us, we may not rise again. That’s what this is all about. Charles. Life and death. If you succeed, death wins. The dead will rise and the world will lumber on in a perpetual state of dread and horror, no feeling or emotion, just dead people doing dead things. If we succeed, life goes on, providing we can fight off and contain the trouble you’ve already made for us. In exactly thirty-six hours from the moment you killed the canine, roughly a day and half or so away, the dead will rise and walk the earth and try to destroy the living.”

The crowd looks at me accusingly. Their patience is wearing thin. Jim nods at them.

“How do you know you’re right? Maybe Annabelle knows the truth,” I contest.

“Doubtful. We all believe the same thing, Charles. Not because we want to or have an opinion about it, but because it is, and we were chosen to stop it.”

“Let’s get on with it,” a woman calls out. “Come on. Jim, it’s enough.”

Jim nods again and draws closer to me. The twine pullers yank hard and my neck constricts.

“You can’t kill me,” I sputter, “I’m already dead.”

“True. Hence the cleaver.” He holds up the offending weapon. “We have to dismember you and burn the pieces.” Jim leans in and whispers, “I know you only did what you did because you had to. We all watched your life for some time before this started up and we’ve all grown to love you. Most of us still do. I really don’t want to do this, but please understand I have no choice. I have to. And don’t worry about your girlfriend, she won’t be harmed.”

He stands up tall, positions the blade close to my left wrist and takes aim. I try with all my might to move my arm, but it remains securely fastened to the table. Jim brings the cleaver up over his head.

My sweat is flowing like a river. It stings my eyes and runs salty in between my lips. Everything slows down and I can hear the stillness inside myself. I can hear the anti-beat of my frozen heart, the unflow of my thickened blood, the negative whoosh of my death breath. They can’t kill me, I think, they can’t hurt me, I’m already dead.

Jim starts the downswing and I watch in horror as the cleaver slices through the air. The crowd watches, mouths agape, eyes wide, glistening with anticipation. The blade draws nearer and nearer and I look up at Jim. His eyes are closed and his mouth is a tight grimace. He looks like a dead man, embalmed, stuffed, displayed, funerary suit and all. If this doesn’t work, if fate intervenes in the next millisecond and sets me free, I’ll make sure he does more than just look like a dead man, touched or not—I’ll speed him to his grave. I’ll work my hands into his abdomen and rip his self-righteous heart from his chest.