Artifact (8 page)

I remembered leaving Patrick’s gun with Alice, and it appeared that she shot this one.

I stood up, ready to make my way toward the scream again, and the body at my feet twitched.

I looked down just as its hand snatched my ankle. The front half of the janitor’s head lolled forward and he let out a gurgled moan.

He rolled toward my foot teeth first, just as I kicked my leg out of his grasp. I put a few feet between us, as he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling toward me one centimeter at a time. Because the back of his head was blown away, the muscles in his neck didn’t appear to be attached to anything, so he couldn’t lift his head.

I remembered that Patrick shot Joseph in the head, but he didn’t die either.

No, that’s not true. The Joseph who animated that body was surely gone. What remained was something else.

I noticed that the Janitor’s abdominals had been chewed away, so he must not have had the muscle control to hold himself upright or walk. I turned toward the other end of the hall again, desperate to find Alice, reeling from the thick stink of stomach fluids and blood. I left the Janitor where he lay, unsure about how to put him out of his misery.

I walked toward a set of doors, and recognized my name at the end of the hall, two down from Alice’s office. Most of the offices I passed were open and empty. There was no sight of her.

I carefully moved toward my office door, which was closed, and a sense of gravity and significance made the hair on my arms stand on end. The act of walking into my own office was somehow metaphorically significant. Maybe Alice was right. Maybe this was some deeper level of experience that I just couldn’t understand nor articulate.

As I opened the door and took in the disheveled state of the room, the disorganized stacks of folders teetering on the edge of a cheap particle–board desk, dusty old textbooks, journals, awards, and cardboard boxes full of odd ends, I looked back at the dead janitor who continued clawing at the air between us. I was suddenly struck by another terrifying thought.

I was right. I had no frame of reference for what dreams were like. For any dream. The weight of that truth sucked me in, like the gravity of a massive star. I realized then, without really understanding why, that I had no other experience to compare this dream with, because deep down I knew that I had never dreamt before. Rather, that the dream has always been, and always will be my reality. Things were as real as they had ever been. The only thing that had really changed was the accident. That much I was sure of.

A scream pulled me away from the Janitor.

It was clearer this time.

It was coming from outside the window.

6.

One story below my office, a young woman and a little girl clung to each other on top of a fifty-foot semi–trailer. There was a man with dark hair wearing a blue and black plaid jacket hanging halfway out of a sunroof above the riding cabin, a few inches in front of the air dam. He was face down and lifeless – I could see a thin streak of dark red blood spilling over the edge of the engine compartment, dripping onto the roadway. Several zombies were relentlessly trying to claw their way up the side of the door to reach him.

The countless others that surrounded the trailer began piling onto one another, creating a sort of hill of corpses, which was steadily getting higher. The woman pressed the little girl’s head into her chest so that she didn’t have to look. I immediately recognized her – leather jacket, fully shaven head, mid–twenties.

When Sid and I reached the entrance to the CEM, just before I punched in the key–code, as my heart dropped into my stomach when I realized that the doors were barricaded, I saw the three of them on top of the truck, clinging to each other.

Which meant Sid and I must not have been far–

–Six shots suddenly rang out from somewhere down the road. The woman heard them too, and started frantically waving in the direction of the gunfire.

I craned my head out of the window and saw a man with red hair, wearing faded black cotton shorts, flip–flops and a tattered white tee shirt standing at the entrance to the CEM. He frantically tugged at the door, but it didn’t move.

He stuffed more bullets into his gun, closed the loader and opened fire into the crowd again.

It was Sid.

The vertigo of temporal discontinuity almost knocked me off of my feet.

The fact that these separate visions were somehow interconnecting was probably a good sign. But that would mean there was another me out there. And judging by the sweat pouring from Sid’s face, and the desperate way in which he moved back toward his car implied that the other me must not have made it. Sid couldn’t have opened the door without my thumbprint or access code, and he knew it.

With his ammo exhausted, Sid threw his gun at the closest zombie, and then started swinging into them with his aluminum baseball bat.

The barricade in front of the building’s entrance.

That’s where Alice must have gone.

I knocked several boxes off of a shelf as I ran out of my office, sprinting down the hall. I gingerly hopped over the emaciated janitor, and hit the emergency stairway, taking it five at a time, heading to the ground floor.

SIX

1.

A dark silhouette finished pushing a table against the door.

“Alice!”

She spun around and pointed the silver gun at my chest, and when she realized it was me, slowly lowered it to her side. “Lance – help me,” she said. “They’re breaking through–”

“We have to open it,” I said, breathing heavily. “There’s a friend outside.”

“What?”

“We have to open the doors, let him inside.”

“Are you crazy? There are hundreds of them out there–”

I moved past her and started pulling things off of the pile.

“Lance, stop – your friend isn’t out there. Do you even know what’s happening?”

“Yes – just help me.”

She grabbed my arm. “Lance, don’t–”

I pulled away and her fingernails took a bit of skin. Blood welled up from the scratches. “Don’t open that door,” she warned.

“Trust me–”

“No, Lance – stop!”

“Goddammit Alice – he’s going to die!”

She stepped away and raised the gun to my chest. “There’s nobody alive out there. I – I’m sorry but your friend is gone. Step away from the doors.”

I carefully bent and set the box in my hands onto the floor.

“Alice, listen to me,” I said calmly, slowly raising my hands. “There’s a guy out there named Sid. I was trying to help him – he actually helped me. He saved my life. He’s out
there right now. Didn’t you hear the shots?”

She hesitated.

“It’s okay – we’ll open the doors, let him in, and get the barricade back up as fast as possible.”

She clenched her jaw and put her finger on the trigger. “How do we know he’s not sick like rest of them?”

“Trust me, Alice.”

She shifted her balance from one foot to the other, weighing the risks.

“Alice, each second we waste is one less than he has,” I said. “Please.”

She swore and tucked the gun into her waistband. We started peeling things off of the mountain of junk.

I pulled the six-meter banister out of the handles and pushed the doors open.

Sid was twenty meters away, hacking a path from the building to his car with his baseball bat. A ring of corpses lay on the ground at his feet, already starting to move again.

“Sid!” I screamed, waving my arms in the air.

Alice fired into the hordes that began pushing toward the entrance.

Sid turned, and when he saw me standing in the doorway waving him in, his face momentarily fell. He immediately regained composure and ran.

After juking his way through a tunnel of dead arms, he dove inside and messily rolled to his feet. He immediately started helping Alice and I rebuild the barricade, breathing as if he couldn’t get enough air. The masses outside converged onto the entrance, causing it to bow inward, but the banister held fast.

Sid collapsed onto the floor and spent the next few moments sucking air.

Alice pointed her gun at Sid and said, “Were you bitten?”

Sid shook his head and held out his arms for us to see. He met my eyes and blinked. “You…”

I shrugged agreement. “Me.”

“Where did you go?” He asked between breaths, “Where are your clothes?” He pointed at my chest. “What happened to your burn?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Complicated.” He echoed, looking back and forth between Alice and me.

Alice stepped away as he got to his feet. “You know each other?”

“Yes,” I said. “He picked me up this morning – brought me here.”

Alice frowned. “I thought you didn’t know how you got here this morning.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “This was after.”

“Lance,” she wiped at her face several times, as if she could somehow clean the moment away. “What on Earth is going on?”

“I’ll explain later – right now we have to get to the maintenance locker and grab the extendable ladder.”

“Why?”

Sid said, “There are a couple people out there on top of a storage container, about a block west of here.”

2.

The ladder wouldn’t reach. I had to work fast because the end of this dream was probably getting ready to cycle again. I had no idea how much time I had left.

The plan was to extend the ladder all the way to the top of the truck, forming a rudimentary bridge to the office. It extended several meters shy of where we needed it.

When Sid and I slid the ladder out of the window, we clubbed a few zombies as the bottom half fell to the ground.

“They’ll have to jump to the ladder,” Sid said. “We’re going to have to try and hold it steady. They’ll only have a few seconds before being pulled to the street.”

The zombies ignored the ladder for the most part, except to move around it, and continued piling themselves around the shipment container.

“It’s about six meters from the top of the container to the ladder,” Alice said. “The woman might make the jump, but not the little girl.”

“An Olympic athlete couldn’t make that jump,” I countered.

Sid shrugged, barely keeping the rising panic out of his voice. “I could climb down, and she could throw the girl to me–”

“That’s not going to work,” I said.

Suddenly, the man that was hanging over the sunroof began to stir.

“Oh no…” Alice said.

He sluggishly pushed himself upright, and I could see a deep wound on his right side. The blood seeped in rhythm with his pulse – it was bright red and full of oxygen.

“He’s still alive,” Sid said.

“How do you know?”

“He’s wincing.” Sid’s relief was palpable, if only momentary.

I saw it too. The man carefully inspected his side and clenched his jaw against the pain.

Twisting his head, his gaze settled on the woman and the child hopelessly looking up at our window. He looked around the trailer and saw that the zombies were nearly high enough to climb up.

He said something to the woman in the leather jacket, and she turned her head. There was no way of knowing what was being said over the rising din. She just stared at him. After a few moments, she pointed to where we were holding the ladder.

He nodded and looked down into the cabin for a few moments, probably trying to clear his head and catch his breath.

He disappeared into the cab for what felt like an eternity. When he reappeared, he had two bundles of what looked like bungee cord. He painstakingly crawled onto the trailer and moved to where the woman and the little girl were kneeling.

They spoke briefly, and the woman started to cry. The little girl’s face was blank and stoic, seemingly detached from the world that was falling apart around her.

He stood and waved at us.

“Catch!” He yelled.

He waited for me to extend my arms, and then pitched a bundle of bungee high over my head, where it slapped against the building and then slid down into my open arms.

“What does he have in mind?” Alice asked.

He held up both of his fists about a foot apart, and yelled, “Anchor each strut to some sort of mooring inside!”

He doubled over and clutched his side from the effort of having to yell. I could see that he was coughing blood. He stopped moving, taking massive breaths as blood spread around his head.

I turned to inspect the things inside my office.

“The desk,” Sid said. “Tie it off to the legs.”

I quickly rigged the ladder to the bungee, and then knotted the cord to the desk.

“I think he wants us to make it longer so that the ladder can reach the trailer,” I said. “We tie off each strut so that it doesn’t wobble too much as they climb over?”

“Yeah but,” Alice said. “What does he have as an anchor?”

“Forget that,” Sid said. “How is he going to tie off his end?”

We looked down, and the man was back to his knees. The woman was still crying. He knelt in front of the little girl and smiled. He gently caressed her cheek and then embraced her for a few moments.

“He’s not going to tie off anything.” I said calmly.

“What…?”

The man turned toward us and stood at the edge of the trailer. He swayed for a moment, and then glanced up. For a long time, he just stood there looking at me.

“No!” I shouted.

He nodded once, took two very deep breaths and then leapt from the trailer.

As soon as he hit the ground, he got to his feet and started shoving, throwing, punching, whipping and elbowing the zombies around the trailer. The zombies that he couldn’t reach started pulling themselves away to follow him.

“What the hell is he doing?!” Sid screamed.

The man was slowly clearing a path to the ladder. The woman leaned over the lip of the trailer and dropped to the ground. She turned, and started coaching the girl down.

By then, the man cleared a pretty substantial area between the trailer and the building.

When the little girl was finally down, the woman shoved her up the ladder, following closely.

“Hold it steady!” Sid yelled.

When the woman reached the halfway mark, she turned to see if the man was following, but he disappeared beneath the waves of that horrible sea. He was gone. I could see a pile of zombies pulling apart something that resembled a blue and black plaid jacket, but nothing more.

She lay on the ladder halfway between the boiling ocean of living corpses and the safety of the window – literally suspended between life and death. She lay there for some time holding the girl, and wept.

Sid was begging her to climb, and Alice was untying the bungee from the desk, probably planning to lower it so that they could help pull themselves up.

If these dreams were a part of me – If I were creating them as I went, what sort of monster did that make me? I had to keep asking myself the question – the same question that I thought was the right one: Why? Why is this happening?

I would never know.

Or I wouldn’t know soon enough.

Dreams are meant to be awakened from, not drowned in. I wasn’t going to wake up, was I? Sooner or later, I was going to die there.

I watched the woman weep with the child in her arms, until the world went away again. And again. And again. And again until the end of time.

3.

–My wrists were bleeding.

“Here, you deal with him,” A woman said over my shoulder. “This is getting us nowhere.”

I quickly realized that I was sitting in a wheelchair. My ankles were shackled to the caster housing, and my arms were handcuffed behind the backrest. I looked around and saw a white wall with paintings hung in beautifully ornate and impressively detailed golden frames. They stretched in either direction for eternity. Miles and miles of paintings were arranged throughout an immaculate white room. The walls were so blatantly clean that I couldn’t tell where the ceiling began or where the floor ended.

I tested the handcuffs and my wrists stung.

Things were so bright, I experienced whiteout. My rods and cones compensated with a peripheral impression of gray.

Someone faced me toward a painting. “What do you see?”

I shook my head and sighed. “Take these handcuffs off of me. Let me up.”

“We’ll let you go,” someone else said. “If you tell us what you see.”

I studied it for a moment. “A little girl.”

“More. Tell us more – tell us everything you see in the picture.”

I violently pulled my wrists apart and kicked my feet but nothing happened. I thrashed so hard that I was sure the wheelchair would tip, and when I realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, I sat for a long time simply focusing on my breathing.

“When you’re finished,” someone said. “Tell us about the painting.”

I sighed and looked up. “She’s wearing a blue dress and a red bow in her hair. She’s standing in a garden holding a green watering spout.” I said, “It looks like it may be spring time…”

The person rolled me to another painting.

“And this?”

“What is happening?”

“You were about to tell us what you see.”

“No,” I said. “Why am I here? What is this? Usually these dreams follow some sort of logic.”

“You’re here to tell us the truth,” said a little girl. “We want to know what you see.”

“Where are Alice and Sid? Where is the woman and the little girl?”

“You’ll know everything, when you tell us what we want to know.”

“Why?”

“So that we can help you see the truth,” someone else said, a man.

“What truth?”

“Why you think you’re dreaming. Why you think that you can’t wake up.”

“How is this going to help?”

“Tell us,” they said in unison.

A man said, “Tell us what you see.”

I studied the painting in front of me again. “It’s the
Mona Lisa
.”

We rolled down the line and they parked me in front of another painting. “And this–”

“Please,” I said. “Just tell me what’s happening.”

“What do you see?”

“How do I get out of here? How do I wake up?”

“You start by telling us what we want to know.”

“And then I can go?”

“That’s up to you.”

I sighed and glared at the painting. It was a portrait of Jesus breaking bread and drinking wine with his apostles. “Da Vinci’s,
The Last Supper
.”

They rolled me to another, and–

–What I saw shocked me. It looked exactly,
exactly
like
what I had been experiencing since the accident. An unexpressed scream stitched itself into my throat, and I fought the tears back from threatening my vision. I sat for quite a long time, taking in every detail of the painting. Nobody behind me seemed to mind. Until that moment, I lacked the words to describe exactly what I had been going through. This, however, changed things…

The painting presented a world that was melting into a desolate and arid landscape. There was a pocket–watch that lost so much viscosity it ran like warm paint over the side of a desk. There was another watch hanging over the limb of a dead bush, as if it were dead itself.

No, dead wasn’t exactly the right word.

In order for something to be dead it must have first possessed life. A watch was built lifeless. Lifelessness was the defining characteristic of a clock – a watchmaker gives it the illusion of life solely through the expression of his will and patience, and everything thereafter is an aspect of reality, which creates itself anew with each passing second. “I think I know what’s going on here.”