The bleeding...
Once, a patient wearing mirrored sunglasses passed beneath her. his abdomen torn open and half his intestines gone. All she saw was her reflection in the sunglasses, her white, bloodless face, her empty black eyes…
The tape shut off.
Janet jumped.
For a long time after that, she sat there, staring at the empty screen, hugging herself and rocking slowly, forward and backward, on the floor.
Reminder: start reading these reminders.
“OK,” she said, pacing up and down in the living room of her apartment. “This is all under control. It’s under control. This is some kind of misunderstanding. Yeah, that’s what it is. Some kind of dream. No! It’s not a dream. It’s not a dream.”
She wasn’t sure, later, how long she muttered on like this, pacing up and down in front of her audience, which consisted of a Styrofoam head wearing a blonde wig Janet had never worn and with painted, smiling red lips.
The dummy head never answered her, which she found reassuring.
In time, she began to wind down. Her frenetic outburst had been the crucible in which she’d burned away all the impossible explanations, and she’d been left only with the possibility that what was happening to her was real.
“What is happening?” she asked herself, sitting now on the living room floor in the gathering gloom of dusk. She didn’t turn on the lights, but just kept sitting there, staring, not at the world around her, but at something buried deep within.
Someone was using her!
Somewhere, somehow, she was being forced to perform operations on wounded men and women. The peripheral details were blurred, like what men and women and what place, but she found she could now focus quite clearly on what she was doing in the “vision.” And on the man. Those crafty, darting eyes, that uniform, the way the others deferred to him.
His eyes.
Forget.
Janet blinked. She’d almost dozed off there. She got up, her legs stiff, and was surprised when she looked at the clock and saw how late it was.
Almost bedtime again.
Almost time to go back to that place of death and light and cold. It would be a night like any other. Or perhaps not. This time she carried a weapon of her own. Knowledge.
Reminder: if you aren’t going to read these reminders, stopping making them. There. This is the last reminder.
Crack-boom! The thunderclap shocked her awake, and she opened her eyes onto a harsh white light so painfully bright it made her eyes water. She was on her feet in an instant.
It was so cold.
When the initial sound had dissipated, Janet became aware of a high background noise level. People were shouting and screaming, and explosions off in the distance or rarely—and loudly—nearby, punctuated the hubbub. There was another sound, too, a high-pitched whine she was sure she couldn’t really hear. She could feel it, though, making her fillings and eyeballs vibrate, making her insides clench up with anxiety.
At last, her eyes began to adjust to the brightness. Bold black shadows were scissoring toward her. Hands were reaching out. A man was coming up in front of her.
“You!”
It was the same uniform, the same pockmarked face, and especially the same black, liquid eyes. But his expression now was different from on the tape.
He was surprised.
“You... know me?” he asked carefully.
Janet shook off the soldiers, who had been loosely holding her arms.
“I seem to have this recurring nightmare where you force me to operate on wounded soldiers. Only it’s not a nightmare, is it?”
His expression showed appreciation, even respect. “Actually, it is a nightmare.” He shrugged, looking up at the bright white fireball that hung motionless in the heavens and the other lights, dimmer, that streaked across the sky or curved in their smooth orbital arcs. “Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever wake up.”
“Who are you? And what the hell are you doing to me?” He’d shown a weakness, and Janet wasn’t going to miss the opening. She knew men. This might be her only chance.
But he tightened up, his eyes growing cold. “I am General Richland of the Alphacorp Marines. Forgive me for the lapse in etiquette, but it seems we’ve been repeating this conversation with little variation every night for the past week.”
Janet shivered.
“Here, ma’am,” one of the solders offered. It was a transparent garment that felt like plastic but brought her a surprising feeling of warmth.
“Well, you might have had this conversation with me,” Janet said, determined to hold onto her original fury, “but I seem to be having this strange difficulty with my memory.”
Despite himself, General Richland smiled. “I’m sorry about that, Captain Jeffries, but you’re vital to our cause. I had no choice but to keep you… in the dark.”
“What was it? Hypnosis?”
He shook his head. “A new drug. It induces a fugue state and alters your metabolism to allow you to work longer without fatigue. I guess it was the blood that gave us away. We couldn’t control when the timescoop snapped you back. Now please, Captain, we need—”
“Captain? That’s twice you’ve called me that. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Oh, it’s only honorary, I assure you. In your absence, the men and women you’ve treated have recommended the designation 216 times. A commanding officer has to go along with the wishes of his soldiers, you know.”
He was so likable. Not at all like the image she’d painted of him from the few frames of the film in which he appeared.
“Look,” Janet said, “I’m a little confused right now. And if this keeps up, it’s going to kill me. So would you please just explain what this is all about?”
Richland gestured for her to follow, and he spoke as they walked. “Our war with Sigmacorp has gone on for so long we no longer have citizens or professionals or even leaders, above troop level. But the fight goes on. The enemy has blinded us with an artificial sun that brings no warmth and has devoured half our continents with Von Neumanns, but we keep fighting, adapting, trying anything we can think of to stay alive.”
“No professionals? Meaning...”
“Right. No doctors. Not in my troop, at least. The enemy perfected a viral weapon that singled out the brightest of us and attacked their neural tissue. A few of us were away on surveillance runs when it happened. We came back to find our best scientists and all our doctors reduced to drooling morons. We’ve managed to engineer a new resistant blood type, but meanwhile—”
Janet frowned. “—You needed—”
“You. We’ve managed to scoop you up, so to speak, from the past. It was a freak of luck, really, that the time-caster was able to locate you—and he had to search for a long time at that. But now we have you. And we’re not letting you go.”
This last made her stop walking. “But every morning you return me to my bed.”
Richland nodded. “The timescoop is like a rubber band. After a few hours, it snaps you back into your time and place of origin. Only if the target space were occupied during your absence would you be able to remain here indefinitely. And so far we haven’t worked out how to—”