I screamed myself out of that dream.
And then I stood in a corridor in a subbasement. Not sure how I knew that, but there was no doubt. A subbasement built years ago.
I walked along the basement, beneath rows of fluorescent lights. There were doors on both sides of the corridor, and I stopped and looked into each one.
I found laboratories with equipment I didn’t understand.
I found one room filled with TV monitors and advanced computer equipment. There was a security guard sitting on a folding chair, his chin on his chest, eyes closed as he slept. He wore a comical peaked hat made from shiny aluminum foil. On a table beside him were dozens of similar hats. All made from aluminum foil. Above the table was a printed placard that read:
Playroom Security Notice
All Employees Must Wear Protective Skullcaps
During Dreamwalking Exercises.
This Means You!
I looked around. It was a room — a big room — which was lined with rows of coffins. Only they weren’t really coffins. Funny things to have in a place called the Playroom. They were capsules of some kind. On a small metal stand beside each one was a miniature version of the God Machine, exact in every detail except that it was no bigger than a camp stove. The machines hummed quietly and on their faces a row of tiny gemstone chips flashed on and off in a random sequence. First the diamond, then two flashes of the ruby, then the topaz, the diamond again, the emerald. Over and over, and I stood watching, transfixed, almost hypnotized, lulled to the edge of sleep. In my mind, though, a voice that was not my own whispered, “The pattern is wrong. The more they dream this way, the greater the neurological damage. We’ve lost so many dreamers already.”
It was the voice of Dr. Erskine. When I turned to look, though, he was not there.
Another voice spoke. One I almost recognized, but it was strangely distorted, almost mumbled. “You can’t expect to look at the face of God and not go crazy. It stands to reason.”
There was no one there.
But I was wrong. When I went over to one of the capsules I could see that there was a person inside. He wore pajamas. How strange was that?
I realized that he wasn’t dead. The man was sleeping. He wore a metal cap with all sorts of wires attached to it, and he was sleeping an electric sleep. His face twitched and his mouth moved as if he was speaking, but there was no sound. There was another person sleeping in the next capsule, and the next. More than twenty people. All of them sleeping. And when I got to the last one I saw that the person asleep in the tube…
… was me.
Frightened, I ran from the room.
Across the hall there was another door and I ran through it.
I stopped because I smelled something bad. Like burned meat. I was in another laboratory, but this was much bigger. And stranger. There, in the gloom at the far end of the laboratory, I saw it. A God Machine. Huge, gleaming. Bigger than the one I’d seen down at Gateway. It hummed and pulsed with power.
Standing before it was a twisted shape that almost — but not quite — looked human. He wore white pajamas that were smeared with food and snot and piss and blood. His skin was wrinkled and puckered and blistered. He heard me and turned to look at me with emerald green eyes.
“You’re not wearing your hat,” said the man.
When he smiled his teeth were white in his burned red face.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“They killed me,” he said, “but I didn’t die. Now I’m going home.”
And then something came whipping out of the mouth of the God Machine. Huge, twisting things with suckers and claws and spikes and…
… and…
I woke in the cold water.
Alone and dying. Lost and forgotten.
Terrified beyond belief.
And… angry.
I was so goddamn angry.
Because I knew.
Son of a bitch.
I knew.
It’s a bitch when clarity comes so sharply but so late. In dreams we are so receptive to the truth, even when it comes to us wearing a disguise.
I knew who we were fighting.
I knew.
ISIL, Santoro, the Closers… they were like arms, like tentacles attached to the same monster. As I drifted out there I thought I knew the name of the monster. And I was going to die out here and never be able to tell anyone. I was going to float into oblivion, a useless piece of flotsam drifting out on the tide. And because I was too slow to understand, everyone I loved and everything I cared about was going to die when darkness fell. All of those children would scream in the darkness and I wouldn’t be able to do a thing to save them.
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
There was a sound in the darkness.
Not a weird cry or my own voice talking nonsense words. This was different. A mechanical sound. Or was that my mind breaking further open? When you first hear something like that it’s so easy to doubt your senses, to believe that it’s a fiction created by desperation, wishful thinking, and a failing psyche.
It was faint and far away, both muffled and distorted by the sound of the ocean. I made myself go still in order to hear it, to try and determine where it was. Not east, I thought. Probably not a Coast Guard rescue craft unless they’d gone out looking and were on the way back to the barn after giving me up as shark food. Wasn’t west of me, either. I found Venus and used that to orient myself. The motor sound was off to the south. How far off, though?
In this gloom there was no way in hell anyone could see me. Could they hear me? The engine, though a ways off, had a throaty rumble. Something powerful but small. A boat engine, not a ship engine.
Going slow.
Slow.
In these waters at this time of night a slow engine could be a night fisherman out for yellowtail or bluefin tuna. Or maybe there were squidders. I rode a couple of swells upward and looked in that direction.
There.
A light.
Two lights. A bow light and the harsh white glow of a searchlight.
Someone was out looking for us. Had they found Top and Bunny? Please, please, let that be the case. Those men had followed me through hell and today they’d followed me into an ambush. If there was blame, then it was totally on me. They deserved better.
The boat was a couple of hundred yards off and it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. To them I’d be a dark dot on a dark ocean.
On the next swell I yelled as loud as I could.
“Ahoy the boat!”
Did it again on the next, and the next.
Kept doing it until my voice was sandpapered away.
Kept at it, though. Kept yelling. Hailing them. Begging for help.
When the engine noise changed from a rumble to a roar, I had that terrible feeling all survivors get when they see rescue within reach and then it begins to pass them by. I screamed and waved my arms, and the motion pushed me right down into the drink where I took a mouthful of water.