The Sleepwalkers Page 18

  Christine stares out the back window, watching the figures move slowly, two on one side and one on the other, toward the car. They are only white streaks in the rain-distorted world outside her windows, but she knows who they are. She has seen their kind in the dreams she never remembers. In those dreams, something tells her, they always appear in her mirror.

  Because they’re me, she thinks, or I was one of them.

  And I could never see them. Because . . . Because . . .

  Because my eyes were closed.

  “Margie, don’t open the door! Don’t!”

  The white shapes are close, passing the back of the station wagon. Surely, Margie must see them now.

  “Don’t open the door!”

  “What seems to be the matter, Margie?” the sheriff asks.

  “Margie . . . ” says Christine, “don’t! DON’T!”

  And Margie unlocks the car door, opens it, and gets out.

  Through the rain-soaked glass, Christine watches in horror as the figures from her forgotten nightmares lurch toward the open door. Quick as a cat, she leaps over the driver’s seat, yanks the door shut and pounds the lock down with her fist. She backs away from the door, into the passenger’s seat, and curls herself up into a little defensive ball. Her mind reels. She’s surrounded.

  The sheriff bends down and looks in at her, with the same leering grin as before, then his face disappears, and Christine watches Margie’s torso as she gestures to him emphatically. Trying to tell the sheriff what’s going on, of course. As if he doesn’t already know.

  Christine looks to the back of the station wagon and is relieved to find the white figures are gone.

  Maybe they left, she tells herself, maybe they . . . woke up? For some reason that sounds right.

  She watches the sheriff ’s torso ushering Margie’s torso back toward the squad car before they disappear in both the downpour and the glare.

  This is it, her chance. She pushes herself into the driver’s seat, wincing as she brushes her burned legs on the car seat. She puts one dirty bare foot on the brake, one dirty, pale hand on the wheel, and reaches for the key to start the car, to make her escape, to leave this damned town and run and run and be happy—but instead of a key, she finds nothing. Because Margie took the keys with her.

  How many times can luck leave one girl orphaned?

  Suddenly the police car’s floodlight and headlights go dead, leaving only the eerie red blink of the light bar and the darkness. Rain hammers on the roof of the car. This is the end. Unless . . . and Christine turns on the radio . . . unless Anna has some advice—of course, the radio won’t work without the keys.

  Only somehow it does.

  A shush of static fills the car, but instead of little Anna’s voice there are other voices, thousands of them, tormented, mad voices, screaming words of venom in languages Christine doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to. The screams and shouts rise and rise. She tries to cover her ears, but the sound bores through her hands, through her flesh, into the core of her brain. Screams rupture her mind, ripping her ears from all sides. From the air all around her, from the car seats, from the glass of the windows, from her own goose-bumped flesh, from every strand of her hair, death-screams sing and slice her will into a thousand pieces.

  And then it all stops, and only one thought remains. It might be whispered to her from the radio, or it might be coming from her own mind, but either way it is a horrible realization, and it means the end of her:

  The cargo door in the back of the station wagon is unlocked.

  And in that instant, certainty settles into her heart: there will not be time to climb back and lock it.

  She looks back and sees two white shapes blinking with bursts of red, blurred by rain, standing at the back window. And the tailgate opens.

  They’re climbing over the backseat with impossible speed. Their eyes are closed, but they see Christine Zikry all too well. Their pale hands claw her face already as she fumbles desperately with the door handle.

  The sound of her own gasping and wails of terror are eclipsed in an instant by dissonant laughter from the radio, which swells to an eerie blast, loud enough to make the windshield quiver. One sleepwalker has her by the hair now and is climbing over the seat; the other is two inches from her face, teeth bared in a snarl, ready to bite her cheek off like a starving dog. That, she’ll remember later, is when the white light comes back and her hand finds the door handle.

  The next instant, she’s out in the night, drenched, growling in pain as she yanks her hair free from the hand of the thing in the car. She slams the door, hoping it will buy her a second or two.

  As she turns to run, though, her heart plummets in despair.

  There were three of them. Two are in the car. One is here.

  And now it’s upon her. Her body seizes up with pain as the thing, the sleeping thing, slams her back into the car door. For a second she thinks it snapped her spine, the pain is so debilitating, but she’s still on her feet, still fighting, holding its clawing hands back, ducking away from its chomping, gnawing teeth (this thing is a fourteen-year-old boy, she realizes, nothing more. Just a boy. And he’s asleep—but he’s also a monster).

  Its teeth are closing on her face now; she feels the tips pushing into her skin, and she knows in another instant it will be chewing her nose in its jaws, but the horrible laughing from the radio is a little quieter since she slammed the door, and the white light—must be the floodlight back on—is blazing again, and that’s a better way to die.

  The light grows.

  The gnawing teeth are on her face and they hurt, but they can’t puncture the skin yet because of the slickness of the rain or because of amazing luck, she doesn’t know which. But the biting doesn’t stop, and she knows it will never stop until she’s in many pieces.

  And the light grows, then roars—thud!—and rushes past.

  Christine Zikry is on her knees in the mud. No pale creature is attacking her anymore because he’s lying twenty feet away in a reddening mud puddle, his limbs all bent the wrong way.

  She feels very dizzy as she sees this, and realizes it’s because she’s been holding her breath a very long time. Still, she can’t breathe in; her lungs are frozen with fear.

  She hears something, but her brain can’t register the sound, pop-pop-pop.

  The side-mirror just above her head leaps off the car and skitters across the muddy shoulder. She stares at it, dazed.

  “Come on!” someone yells. “Get in!”

  A car idles in front of her with the passenger door open. It must’ve struck the demon—the boy—who now lies dying.

  “GET IN!” shouts a voice—seemingly issuing from the taillight Christine is staring at.

  She’s about to get up when the popping comes again, but this time it sounds sharper, louder, more frightening.

  And suddenly she gets it. The sheriff is shooting at her. And she’s in shock.

  She tries to stand, not knowing if it will be possible, not knowing if she’s hurt beyond repair, maybe broken like the kid, the sleeping demon, but she finds that she can stand. And when she tries to run, she finds that her legs work fine.

  As her feet slap through the mud, she experiences everything very clearly, hears the station wagon door open behind her and hears the two pale things get out to chase her, feels the rush of air as a gunshot whistles past her cheek, sees the demon again, somehow horribly just a dead kid now, lying in a pool of streetlight and summer rain. Then she’s in the car. The door is shut, the rain is gone, and the sound of an engine roars her away.

  She still isn’t breathing when she looks over to see who’s driving the car, because it might be one of them, or (and this is what she really expects, what she fears the most) it might be the director, ready to take her back to the white, white room.

  When she sees who it is, she still can’t breathe.

  “Are you okay?” the voice says, deep with concern.

  She can only nod. Breath can come l
ater.

  For now, her Billy is enough.

  Chapter Fourteen

  FOR A WHILE THEY RIDE TOGETHER without saying a word, letting the engine and the thunder do all the talking. Caleb, Billy, concentrates on holding the car on the road through the slippery, wet corners while keeping the flashing red lights of the sheriff ’s cruiser as distant as possible.

  Christine concentrates on Billy. She watches his face—very serious and very handsome—in the periodic ruby blink that reflects in the rearview mirror. After a while, she breaks the silence:

  “How did you find me?”

  Caleb is distracted, fighting a wind gust to keep the car on the road; then he answers. “Uh . . . Anna,” he says. “Five thirty-five AM.”

  Christine smiles. “I knew you’d listen. I knew you wouldn’t leave. Somebody had to believe I wasn’t crazy. I’m glad it was you.”

  “What’s going on at the Dream Center?” Caleb asks.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You have to talk about it if we’re going to help everyone else there.

  We have to let the world know what’s happening.”

  She’s looking over her shoulder out the back window.

  “I think they’re gaining on us.”

  “Put your seatbelt on,” says Caleb.

  Christine smiles again, then pulls the belt over herself and clicks it in place.

  “How did you get out?” Caleb asks, and Christine tells him the story of going to sleep in the Dream Center and waking up in Ralph and Lee’s shed with blood crusted all over her head and a five-alarm headache.

  She tells him how Ralph kept saying she was a demon, how he tried to burn her alive, and how Margie had tried to stop him and killed him with a shovel.

  “Wow,” Caleb says.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Ralph was always nice guy too. Except for the whole ‘trying to burn me alive’ thing.”

  Rain is pounding on the windshield, and even with the wipers going full tilt and Caleb leaning forward as far as he can, he can still only barely make out the yellow line in the center of the road.

  “This is bad,” he says.

  She looks back. “They’re closer.”

  The rain speaks in its mumbling, liquid language and the digital clock on the dash switches numbers.

  “So what made you come back, all the way from California?” Christine asks.

  “Your letter,” says Caleb. “I just graduated. I was going to go to Africa. Your letter made me come here instead.”

  “What letter?”

  “The letter you sent me, saying you were in the Dream Center and needed help.”

  He looks at her. Her face is puzzled.

  “Here,” he says, and he pulls out the letter.

  She stares at it.

  “I didn’t write this.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t write it. I mean, I wrote letters to you all the time, but I never sent them. I never had your address. This is definitely something

  I would have written, though. It even looks like my writing.” “Maybe you wrote it and don’t remember.”

  “They didn’t let me have pens.”

  “Why would somebody else send it?”

  “Maybe, whoever it was . . . I don’t know . . . maybe they wanted you to come.”

  This sinks in, but neither of them speaks.

  She glances over her shoulder.

  “They’re a little farther back now.”

  They sit in silence for a moment.

  “So why Africa?” asks Christine.

  “I write. I want to be a journalist. I wanted to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, for one thing, but mainly I was going to write about the AIDS epidemic. Orphaned kids. There’s a whole generation of children over there growing up without parents.”

  She smiles.

  “What?” says Caleb.

  “That’s very noble of you,” she says. “I hope somebody does something about it.”

  Caleb digests this for a moment.

  “Of course they will. Once people really understand what’s going on over there, the government will send more aid and medicine, and more international workers will come to educate the population about safe sex.”

  “Then you’ll make a difference,” she says. It’s a tone that, to Caleb, seems patronizing.

  “People will take action,” he says, miffed. “What’s going on is horrifying.”

  “People like to be horrified,” Christine says, as the wipers screech across the windshield.

  Caleb opens his mouth to say something, then shuts it and decides not to push the subject anymore.

  “Caleb, STOP!”

  He had been looking at her, and when he looks ahead again, he sees flashing red and blue lights up ahead. Two cop cars are parked lengthwise across the road, a roadblock. He slams on the brakes.

  They both brace themselves against the doors, and Christine grabs the front of Caleb’s T-shirt into a ball with her fist.

  First they fishtail left, then right, then they overcorrect and begin spinning out of control. The flashing lights get closer and closer, racing past like a strobe on each rotation.

  Now: the impact, a terrible sound of ripping metal.

  Caleb grits his teeth.

  And they stop. They’ve knocked the two squad cars onto the shoulder like bowling pins. The sheriff ’s car comes sliding in behind and skids to a halt just a few feet short of their bumper.

  Caleb sits, stunned, staring at the rain in the headlights of one of the wrecked squad cars, but Christine is working, frantically turning the knobs of the radio.

  “What do we do, Anna? What do we do?”

  Static fills the car, and Anna’s little voice comes through, wavering.

 

  “Play dead!” whispers Christine, and Caleb nods.

  Through the dazzle of headlights, he sees the silhouette of a cop approaching Christine’s window.

  The cop knocks on the window with the barrel of his drawn gun.

  He leans down and stares at Christine for a second (she sits completely still), then he straightens up and turns back to somebody and says:

  “Hey, Merv. I think this one’s cooked.”

  Caleb barely hears: “What’s the other one look like?”

  He takes that as his cue. He stares at the dashboard, staying very still, fighting not to blink even as the Maglite’s blaze burns into his retinas. Finally, the light turns away, and he hears the cop call:

  “Yep, we got a coupla fried eggs. Too bad,” he laughs.

  Caleb hears the other voice:

  “Check the sheriff ’s car, make sure he’s alright.”

  Caleb hears screaming. It’s a woman.

  Careful to move only his eyes, he looks in his side mirror and sees Margie fighting with the sheriff, then gesturing to the approaching cop.

  He can barely make out the words: “Tried to kill her . . . just a girl . . . ” over the sound of the rain.

  Caleb hears the sound of footsteps on the pavement and looks forward. He sees the other cop approaching Christine’s window and plays dead again. This time the flashlight scalds his eyes for so long, he’s sure he’ll blink. He has to blink, but the instant before he does blink the flashlight turns mercifully away. The new cop at the window calls:

  “Hey, did you even check the pulse of these perps?”

  But just then more screams pierce the rain, and in the side mirror Caleb sees Margie. She’s running away up the center of the road. The sheriff and the first cop are chasing after her—and having some trouble on the slick pavement.

  “Jesus Kee-rist,” says the cop at the window, and he sticks his flashlight in his belt and jogs up the road after his comrades.

  Maybe twenty seconds pass, and all is still—so still, in fact, that Caleb’s afraid Christine might have gotten hurt after all and passed out. Paralyzing ice seeps
into his heart at the thought that she might actually be dead.

  But just then she jerks to life. She shoves her door open, hisses, “Come on!” and sprints toward the shoulder of the road.

  Caleb lettered in track three years in a row, and it’s all he can do to keep up.

  She’s not as weak as she looks, he thinks, and the thought gives him comfort—because although he still doesn’t know what they’re up against exactly, he knows they’ll need a lot more strength than he has on his own.

  He watches her break into the woods ahead of him like a tailback through a defensive line. She doesn’t slow as the branches gouge her skin and break against her rush. She doesn’t slow as her bare feet pound over slick, sharp rocks and roots. And to Caleb’s great alarm, she doesn’t slow as she reaches the steep, almost sheer slope leading thirty feet down to the river below. Instead, she jumps, lands, slides, then jumps again and again until a final landing—ploosh—puts her knee-deep in a racing stream.

  Caleb almost loses it twice trying to follow her. Once he slips and descends on his ass for a few feet, then he almost twists his ankle when a rock rolls out from under him.

  One more jump and he lands next to Christine, grimacing at the sickly feeling as his running shoes fill with water, their soles oozing slowly into the mud of the riverbed.

  “Come on!” Christine whispers.

  She grabs Caleb’s wrist and leads him under the bridge, into the deep shadows. Fifty feet away the shadow of the bridge ends and the river runs away in the blue of the moonlight, but here he can see nothing. There could be an army of sleepwalkers right next to him and he’d never know until it was too late.

  But again, Christine does not slow. She pulls Caleb behind her at a relentless pace, weaving around what he can only guess must be rocks with perfect grace and precision. How can she see so well? Are her eyes that adjusted to the dark? Did they deprive her of light in that place, that asylum?

  She leads on. They’re only a few feet from the end of the dark, from the place where they’ll step into the moonlight and out from under the bridge, when a flashlight beam slices down from above, cutting through the gloom just a few feet ahead of them. They both pull up short.

  Two voices drift down from above.