Lucid Dreaming (7 page)

“That's for your own safety,” Hank said, smirking.

“So, what, now you read me my fucking rights, I suppose?”

“I'm
tellin
' ya, girl, you better watch that mouth. I'll bet you're from L.A.,
aren'tcha
?”

“Yeah. And you're from Redneck. So what?”

He shoved me with the gun barrel a little harder than he had to. “That way.”

I started walking, but realized his friend—and more importantly, Teddy—weren't coming. “Wait, what about Teddy—?”

Hank poked at my back again, indicating I should keep going. “Johnny's just going to go through your supplies, then he'll be along presently with your friend.”

I thought about putting up a fuss, but realized it wouldn't do much good. Besides, if they were going to shoot us they would have done it already.

They obviously had something else in mind, and whatever it was I didn't think it was going to be much fun.

Hank walked me off the freeway and down to where he had a big pickup parked. He helped me up into the passenger seat, then put the gun into the rear of the cab, started up and drove off.

We drove in silence for a few minutes, heading away from the freeway down a narrow county road. We passed open fields, and some low grassy hills where cattle grazed.

“Where we going?” I finally asked, trying to sound as conversational as possible.

“We got us a nice
lil
' spread out here. All the comforts of home—and then some!”

I didn't like what that implied.

After a minute or so of blessed silence, Hank asked, “So you say you come from L.A.?”

“Yeah.”

“What's California like now?”

It hurt me to say it. “Pretty much dead.”

Hank smiled. “Well, ain't that a shame.”

I decided right then I hated Hank. “Fuck you, cracker.”

Hank's mouth twitched, then he turned and gave me an up-and-down once-over that made my skin crawl. “You know, little girl, you better have some hidden talent, 'cause otherwise all you're gonna be good for is breeding stock.”

Now my stomach crawled faster than my skin. “Then you better have something a helluva lot stronger than
Prolixin
,” I told him.

No more talk after that.

A few minutes later, the truck turned right onto a dirt lane that ran maybe a hundred yards or so past lawns and outbuildings to the biggest house I'd ever seen. If I'd thought our Beverly Hills mansion was big, this thing was five times its size. Whoever had lived here before the dreaming sickness must have been a billionaire, because this thing had at least a dozen bedrooms.

“This is it,” Hank said unnecessarily as he parked before the house.

I saw a few other people around—there were two guys working on some kind of big farm tractor, and in the distance I saw some others on horseback, herding some cattle.

No women anywhere.

Hank opened my door and motioned me out.

“Where we going?” I asked him.

“There's somebody you need to talk to,” he said.

I jumped down from the truck, and followed him into the house, ignoring the eyes of the men working on the tractor.

We went down a short hallway and past a huge living room on the left. Ahead was a massive staircase, so big it split into two halfway up. The house was two stories, and had two wings. I glimpsed more rooms off to the sides of the staircase on the ground floor, and heard the noises of work coming from back there. Some kind of machine whining, that I guessed was a generator. Music played somewhere in the distance. Hammering was going on outside.

Hank didn't give me much time to look around. We turned right at the bottom of the staircase, and went down another hall. At least they'd kept the place clean when they'd moved in; the marble floors looked freshly washed, and the paintings of horses and people on the walls were dust-free.

We pulled up short before a closed door, and Hank positioned me a few feet away. “You wait here,” he said, then knocked on the door. After a few seconds he entered, and closed the door behind him.

I tried to listen, but couldn't hear anything other than muffled low chatter from inside. There was an open doorway on the other side of the hall, a few feet away, and I couldn't resist the urge to peek in.

And then was sorry I had.

The room I looked into was a bedroom, and seemed to have once been decorated for children. Whatever furnishings it had once held had been moved out, and replaced with four single beds.

And on each single bed was a dreaming woman…and all of them were pregnant, all of them strapped down.

Hank's comment about breeding stock was starting to make more sense.

Holy fucking shit. I was trapped in a Red-State harem.

I had to get out of here. I started to panic, and nearly just ran right then. But there were voices coming from either end of the hallway.

And then the door behind me opened and Hank told me to come in.

He still had his gun. I took one look at his leathery skin, his lined, dishwater-colored eyes, his scruffy beard, and almost told him to just shoot me now.

Instead my feet acted on their own, and carried me into the room beyond.

And whatever I'd been expecting, it wasn't
this
.

The room was decorated like something out of the pages of a Kitsch-R-Us catalogue. It was pink. Really pink, with pink wallpaper and pink carpeting and pink upholstery and pink drapes. The walls had paintings of wide-eyed children in ornate gilt frames. Cabinets held shelf after shelf of little ceramics figures of girls in frilly dresses and puppies with bows and tilted heads.

It was the most horrible room I'd ever seen.

The central piece of furniture was a huge desk with too much trim and an eye-damaging antique faux finish, but what was seated behind the desk was even worse.

It was a woman, in her fifties or early sixties, with styled hair that looked shellacked, enough makeup to supply the models for an entire six-issue run of
Vogue
, and at least three hundred and fifty pounds of extra weight. In her lap was a toy poodle with pink (what a surprise) bows in its kinky fur. The woman was smoking and eyeing me, and that ridiculous little pooch yapped away.

“Now, Bubbles, you stop that,” she told the dog, and handed it a treat. It stopped barking to eat the treat, and then miraculously shut up.

She motioned at a padded pink chair on the other side of the desk. “Have a seat.”

I really didn't want to sit on all that pink, but decided it might be wise to hear her out.

“What's your name?” she asked me.

“Spike.”

She frowned. “Now, that's no name for a girl. I'm betting that's not what you were born with.”

“No, it's not,” I told her defiantly.

She cocked her steel gray head and actually
tsked
. “If you don't give me a real name, I'll make one up for you.”

That could be even worse than what I already had. “Ashley,” I told her reluctantly.

“Ashley. Now what's wrong with that? That's a pretty name. You can call me Mama.”

I couldn't help it. I laughed.

Her features suddenly drew down, and the glare she gave me froze the rest of the laughter in my esophagus. “Why is that funny?”

“Sorry,” I muttered.

That seemed to ameliorate her some. “Good. Now let's talk about what to do with you.”

“That's easy: Let me take my
shit
and go.”

The glare again. “Young ladies don't talk that way around here.”

I threw a gesture back at the bedroom behind me. “From what I've seen, young ladies don't talk at
all
around here.”

“Let me explain about them—”

Just then there was a knock at the door, and the dog yapped again. “Yes?” Mama called out, while feeding another treat to that miniature hellhound.

The door opened, and the other man who'd been at the truck—Johnny, I think Hank had called him—came in with a cardboard box. It was full of
Prolixin
.
My
Prolixin
.

“Check this out, Mama. This is what she had in her truck.”

Mama cast an approving eye at the box, then glanced back at me. “That's a lot of medication for only two people.”

“And the other one's not even
takin
' it,” Johnny added. He was younger than Hank, not much more than twenty, a gangly kid who still had pimples and not much facial hair.

He was also leering at me pretty obviously.

“What?!” I asked him.

“Mama, can I have her?” Johnny said, not even taking his eyes from me.

“We'll talk about that later, Johnny. You get on back to the road now.”

He left reluctantly, closing the door behind him.

I turned back to her, about to stand up but thrown off balance by the handcuffs. “No, we'll talk about it right now. First, you're going to take these handcuffs off, then you're going to give me and my friend some food and a little
Prolixin
, and we'll be on our way.”

“On your way to
where
?” she asked, with some amusement in her voice.

“None of your business,” I told her.

She lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply, then blew smoke across the desk at me. I caught a whiff and coughed, and she chuckled.

“You really are a Californian, aren't you?” she said. Before I could answer, she went on: “Let me tell you about those women you saw in the other room: No, they're not being given
Prolixin
, but that's because we don't have that much of it to spare. I'm the one who set this place up, and my number one rule has always been that whoever is working gets the
Prolixin
. Right now I need the men to repair the farm equipment and keep watch on the cattle and guard the road; later on, I'll wake up some of the women when we need 'em.”

“So in the meantime,” I told her, “the men get free access to women who are too lost in the dreaming to offer any resistance, right?”

Mama didn't give an inch. “If you mean those girls across the hall, they were obviously pregnant before all…this happened.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

She fed the dog another treat, then said, “You've done pretty good getting across the country, but unless you can fix an engine or ride a horse or carry a hundred pound load, I can't spare any
Prolixin
for you right now.”

Now it was my turn to feel superior. “You might want to rethink that. There's a reason I was on
Prolixin
to begin with.”

Her features clouded. “What?”

I pressed my advantage. “You don't even know what it was used for, do you?”

She frowned. “I don't have to. My daughter-in-law worked at a pharmacy. She was the one who figured out that
Prolixin
stopped the dreaming.”

“Yeah? Well, then maybe you should ask her what it was used for, because I don't have anything else to say. And then maybe you'll want to consider letting me and Teddy walk out of here.”

She took another drag, then stubbed out the cigarette, even though it was only half-smoked.

“We'll see.”

They didn't give me the
Prolixin
.

I'm not real clear on what happened after I left Mama. The next thing I really remember was kind of swimming up out of a sea of blurry images, and finding out that I was no longer handcuffed, but tied to something big and round. Overhead were rough wooden beams with sunlight peeking through, and there was hay under my ass, and a gamey animal smell, and the sound of mooing. I was in a barn, with almost no idea of how I'd gotten there.

My left arm hurt. I looked down, and saw the sleeve had been torn away there, and my arm was covered with purple bruises.

Then I remembered the dreaming women, the talk with Mama…

For a second I was sure I'd been raped.

Fucking Texas.

Then I stopped and realized I didn't
feel
raped. The only place that really hurt was my arm. But there was a metallic taste in my mouth, and when I spit I saw blood. But my mouth didn't hurt, all my teeth were still there, so…

“Are you back?”

I jumped a mile, or at least as much as the ropes would let me. I jerked to my right, and saw it was a woman who had spoken. She was just walking up from behind the support post I was tied to, and had a big metal pail of water in one hand.

“Yeah, I am,” I told her.

She set the bucket down and kind of half-smiled at me. She was maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven, pretty in a kind of rough-hewn way, dressed in flannel and denim, and—best of all—not pregnant.