Black (10 page)

“Last night?” He paced to his right, wondering if Michal might wake him up at any moment. “Oh, you mean the chase through the alleys and the shot to the head and the way I handily dispatched the bad dudes? Actually, this may come as a shock to you, but none of that really happened.”

“What do you mean? You made that all up?” Her face lightened a shade.

“Well, no, not really. I mean, it did happen here. But here isn't really real. The cow can't really jump over the moon, and when you dream that you're falling but you never actually land, it's because you're not really falling. This isn't real.” He grinned. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Her eyes shifted to the end table where the bottle of pain pills sat. “Did you take any more medication?”

“Ah, yes. That would be the Demerol. No, I didn't ,and no, I'm not hallucinating.” He stretched out his arms and announced the truth of the matter. “This, dear sister, is a dream. We're actually
in
a dream!”

“Stop messing around. You're not funny.”

“Say whatever you like. But this isn't really happening right now. You'll say I'm crazy because you don't know any better—how can you? You're part of the dream.”

“What do you call the bandage on your head? A dream? This is insane!” She headed for the breakfast bar.

Tom felt the bandage around his head. “I'm dreaming about this cut because I fell on a stone in the black forest. Although not everything correlates exactly, because I don't have a broken arm here like I did there.”

Kara faced him, incredulous. For a moment she said nothing, and he thought she might be coming to her senses. Maybe with the right persuasion, dream-people could be convinced that they lived only in your dreams.

“Have you given our situation with the New Yorkers any more thought?” she asked.

Nope. She was still in denial.

“You're not listening, Kara. There
was
no chase last night. This cut came from the black forest. This is a dre—”

“Thomas! Stop it! And stop smiling like that.”

Her sincerity certainly sounded real. He flattened his mouth.

“You can't be serious about this nonsense,” Kara said.

“Dead serious,” he said. “Think about it. What if this really is a dream? At least consider the possibility. I mean what if all of this” —he swept his arms about—“what if it's all just in your mind? Michal told me this was happening, and it is, exactly like he said it was. Trust me, that was no dream. I was attacked by Shataiki. You wouldn't know about those, but they're big black bats with red eyes . . .”

He stopped. Maybe he should go light on the details. To Kara such realities would sound preposterous without having lived them firsthand.

“In reality, I live on the other Earth. I'm waiting for Michal, but he's taking forever, so I sat down and put my head back on a tree. I just fell asleep. Don't you see?” He grinned again.

“No, actually I don't .”

“I just fell asleep, Kara. I'm sleeping! Right at this very minute, I'm asleep under a tree. So you tell me, how could I be standing here if I know I'm asleep under a tree waiting for Michal? Tell me that!”

“So you live in a world with big black bats and . . .” She sighed. “Listen to yourself, Thomas! This isn't good. I need you sane now. Are you sure you didn't take any more of those pills?”

Tom felt his frustration building, but he remained calm. It was, after all, just a dream. He could feel however he wanted to in a dream. If a great big ghost with fangs rushed him right now, he could just face it and laugh and it would vanish. No need to trounce all over Kara—she could hardly be blamed. If he couldn't convince her, he would just play along. Why not? Michal would wake him up at any moment.

“Fine, Kara. Fine. But what if I can prove it to you?”

“You can't .We have to figure out what we're going to do. I need to get dressed and then get you to the hospital. You have a concussion.”

“But what if I can prove we're in a dream? I mean really? I mean, just move your hand around like this.” He swept his hand through the air. “Can't you tell that it's not real? I can. Can't you feel that something's not quite right? The air feels thinner—”

“Please, Thomas, you're starting to scare me.”

He lowered his hand. “Okay, but what if I could prove it logically?”

“That's impossible.”

“What if I could tell you how the world is going to end?”

“Now you're a prophet? You live in a world with black bats, and you can read the future? None of that sounds stupid to you? Think, Thomas, think! Wake up.”

“It's not stupid. I can tell you how the world is going to end because, in reality, it
has
ended, and it has been recorded in the histories.”

“Of course it has.”

“Exactly. It will begin with the Raison Strain—some kind of virus that comes from a French company. Everyone thinks it's a vaccine, but it mutates under intense heat and will ravage the world sometime this year. I'm not quite sure on that last detail.”

“That's your proof? That the world is going to end sometime this year?”

She wasn't buying the argument.

Tom suddenly had another thought. Quite a fun thought, actually. He walked for the front door, twisted the deadbolt, and flung it open.

“Okay, I'll prove it to you,” he said and stepped outside.

“What are you doing? What if they're out there?”

“They're not out here because they don't exist. Am I talking to a wall here?” The light stung his eyes. He stepped across the front walkway and gripped the railing. They were three floors up. The parking lot below was concrete.

Kara ran to the doorway. “Thomas! What are you doing?”

“I'm going to jump. In dreams you can't really get hurt, right? If I jump—”

“Are you crazy? You
will too
get hurt! What do you call the bullet wound on your head?”

“I told you, that was from a rock in the black forest.”

“But what if you're wrong?”

“I'm not.”

“What if you are? What if there's even a slight possibility that you are? What if it's the other way around?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if this is the real Earth, but you think the other one is because it feels so real?”

“The cut on my head from the fall, it's real. How can you—”

“Unless it really was a bullet that cut your head, and so you dreamed something, like the rock. Step back, Thomas. You're not thinking clearly.”

Tom looked down, suddenly struck with that possibility. Out here in the morning light, his confidence waned. What if she was right? He had hurt his head in both the black forest and in his dream here. What if there was a real connection? Or what if he had the dreams backward?

“Tom. Please.”

He backed away from the railing, heart suddenly hammering. What was he thinking?

“You think that's possible?” he asked.

“Yes! Yes, I think. I know!”

He rubbed his fingers together, then looked at her. Actually, now that he thought about it, she was his sister. If he was only dreaming, did that mean Kara didn't really exist?

The morning newspaper lay by the front door. If she was right, then it meant they really
were
in trouble. He grabbed the paper.

“Okay, get inside.”

She did, quickly, and he pulled the door closed.

“You have me worried,” Kara said. She took the newspaper from him and led him into the kitchen. “This isn't good timing. That bullet obviously did more harm than we thought.”

She dropped the paper on the counter, turned the water on, and scanned the front page as she washed her hands.

“I'm sorry, honestly, I'm just . . .” Actually, Tom didn't know what he just was. Clearly, it was decision time. He had to assume that he was in Denver after all, and not as part of a dream, but in reality. What that said about the black forest and Michal made his head spin. He didn't have the brain capacity to figure it out at the moment. If he really had been chased down by New Yorkers last night, he and Kara had their hands full.

Panic rolled up his belly. They had to get out of town.

“Tom?”

He looked up. “We have to get out of here.”

She wasn't listening. Her wet hands hung over the sink, unmoving. Her eyes were fixed on the newspaper to her left.

“What did you say that virus was called?”

“What virus? The Raison Strain?”

“A French company?”

He walked up to her and looked at the paper. A bold black headline ran across the top:

CHINA SAYS NO

“China says no?”

She lifted the paper, unconcerned with the dark water blotches her hands made on the page. He saw the smaller headline then, halfway down and on the left, the business-page headline:

FRENCH ASSETS:

RAISON PHARMACEUTICAL TO ANNOUNCE NEW VACCINE, SELLS U.S. INTERESTS

Tom took the paper, flipped to the business page, and found the article. The company's name suddenly seemed to fill the entire page. Raison Pharmaceutical. His pulse pounded.

“What—” Kara stopped, apparently confused by this new information. She leaned in and quickly read the short story with him.

Raison Pharmaceutical, a well-known French parent of several smaller companies, had been founded by Jacques de Raison in 1973. The company, which specialized in vaccines and genetic research, had plants in several countries but was headquartered in Bangkok, where it had operated without the restrictions often hampering domestic pharmaceutical companies. The company was best known for its handling of deadly viruses in the process of creating vaccines. Its contracts with the former Soviet Union were at one time quite controversial.

In the last few years, the firm had become better known for its release of several oral and nasal vaccines. The drugs, based on recombinant DNA research, weren't dose-restrictive—a fancy way of saying they could be taken in large quantities without side effects. Dibloxin 42, a smallpox vaccine, for example, could be deposited in a country's water supply, effectively administering the vaccine to the whole population without fear of overdosing any one person, regardless of how much water was consumed. A perfect solution for the Third World.

Several of the vaccines, however, would be subjected to a whole new gamut of rigorous testing procedures if Congress passed the new legislation
introduced by Merton Gains before he became deputy secretary of state.

Raison advised this morning that in a matter of days it would announce a new multipurpose, airborne vaccine that would effectively eliminate the threat of several problematic diseases worldwide. Dubbed the Raison Vaccine—

Kara uttered a short gasp at the same time Tom read the sentence.

“Dubbed the Raison Vaccine, the vaccine promises to revolutionize preventive
medicine. Stocks are bound to react to the news, but the gains may be
tempered by the announcement that the firm's Ohio plant will close in the
interests of focusing on the Raison Vaccine, developed by the Bangkok facility.”

The article went on, offering details about the stock market's anticipated reaction to the news. Tom's hand trembled slightly.

“How did you know about this?” Kara asked, looking up.

“I didn't .I swear I've never seen or heard this name until right now. Except . . .”

“Except in your dreams. No, that's impossible.”

Tom laid the paper down and set his jaw. “Tell me how else I could have known about this.”

“You must have heard about—”

“Even if I knew about the company, which I didn't before last night, there's no way I could have known about the Raison Vaccine—not with-out reading this paper. But I did!”

“Then you read the paper or heard it on the news last night.”

“I didn't watch the news last night! And you saw the paper outside, exactly where it always is in the morning.”

She crossed one arm and nibbled at her fingernail, something she did only when she was beyond herself. Tom recalled his discussion about the Raison Strain with Michal as if it had occurred only a moment ago, which wasn't that far from the truth. For all he knew, he had been asleep under the tree for only a few minutes.

But this wasn't really a dream, was it?

“You're actually telling me that something's happening in your dreams that gives you this information?” she demanded. “What else did you learn about the future?”

He considered that. “Only that the Raison Vaccine has some problems and ends up as a virus called the Raison Strain, which infects most of the world population in a . . .”

“In a what?”

Tom scratched his head. “In a very short time.”

“How short?” She exhaled sharply. “Listen to me, I can't believe I'm even asking these questions.”

“In a few weeks, I think.”

Kara paced the kitchen, still biting her fingernail. “This is just crazy. Yesterday the extent of my life's challenges consisted of whether I should cut my hair short, but that was before I came home to my crazy brother. Now the mob is breathing down our necks, and it just so happens that the whole world is about to be infected by a virus no one but my dreaming brother knows about. And how, pray tell, does he know about this virus? Simple: Some black bat with red eyes in the real world told him. Excuse me if I don't don my gas mask posthaste.”

She was venting, but she was also troubled or she wouldn't
be
venting.

“Not a black bat,” Tom said. “A white one. A Roush. And the Roush have green eyes.”

“Yes, of course; how silly of me. Green eyes. The bat with green eyes told him. And did I mention the tidbit about this world all being a dream? Well, if it's a dream, we really don't have to worry, do we?”