The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (6 page)

The morning came fast and early.

When the alarm on my phone jerked me awake, I came to in a cot that wasn’t quite long enough in the bare, tiny room with no pictures or decorations, I had that horrible
where-the-hell-am-I
feeling.

I stepped on my overnight bag as I put my feet on the floor. It took me a moment to remember. I was in Delaware, at some out-of-the-way, undisclosed federal building.

7:15AM. Three, four hours of sleep.

I groaned as I stood and stretched. It was all coming back to me now. Manetti had brought me to this room, pointed down the hall at a full bathroom where I could shower. And the dream of the rape came back to me. The dark figure, dressed all in black, face obscured and blurred. The woman, terrified, helpless and ultimately, defeated. Before it was over, she had given up fighting. Relented under the harsh physicality of the man.

I’d never get it out of my head.

Grabbing my bag, I ambled down the hall and shut the door and turned the water on full blast till it was practically scalding. When it comes to waking up, nothing beats a shower, not even caffeine. I let the steam build and got in, feeling the hot pin pricks of the water. It was too hot but I stayed under as long as I could then turned the temp down.

Ten minutes later I wasn’t quite a new man, but it would do. I dropped my bag in my room, and as I was putting my sneaks on, Manetti knocked on the door.

“Ready for the cafeteria?”

“Yeah,” I think I said.

“I don’t know when we’re going to be able to eat again, so better get some food.”

My stomach did a somersault. I mumbled something that I didn’t even understand.

Manetti led me to the stairs at the other end of the hallway, past some patient rooms. We descended to the first floor and went through an atrium into a cafeteria the size of a fast food restaurant.

Manetti bought a meal-sized box of cereal, banana, water, milk, and coffee. I absently grabbed a coffee.

She paid for everything. I let her because she was just going to expense it anyway. Let the government pick up the tab for a change.

We grabbed a table in the farthest corner, away from everybody else, if there had been anybody else in the room. I sat facing the large windows and let the steam from the coffee drift up and hit my face.

“When can we see Alison?”

Manetti poured the milk into her cereal and stirred it up. “I’ve already talked to her parents. They agreed to let me show her the dream.”

“Must have laid on all that Manetti charm.”

She flipped me off. At least she was smiling while she did it.

A guy in scrubs and a conspicuously-endowed Indian woman wearing a lab coat came into the cafeteria and sat two tables away. Part of the research staff. They smiled politely at Manetti like they'd already been introduced and looked at me like I was a walking non-sequitur. Which I kind of was. I gave them the disarming smile. They were thoroughly disarmed.

“So we can get in there right away?”

Manetti sipped her coffee and leaned back in the chair. "She's tied up all morning."

I hated coffee but I drank it anyway because three hours of sleep wasn't going to cut it. I looked Manetti over. She looked no worse for the wear. "Manetti, you have a bad habit of withholding. You do remember you called me, right?"

“You should eat, Eddie. We’re going to be running all day long.” She spooned some cereal. "And no, I don’t have a bad habit of withholding. I have a good habit of safeguarding her protected health information."

The thought of food turned my stomach. "So she has doctor's appointments. Couldn't you have just said that?"

Manetti put her spoon down and sipped her coffee again and looked out the windows that opened to the grounds. Outside there was a brick patio with two tables that led to a duck pond. It was a bright, blue day but it looked cold. Hollies, dogwoods, pines, and white ash trees surrounded the pond and gave way to a few meandering creeks that trickled back to the marshes or filtered their way to the Delaware.

"Come with me," Manetti said, still looking out the big windows.

My initial assessment of the day was right: not a cloud in the sky but the wind was bitter. I followed Manetti across the patio all the way down to the pond. It rippled with the sudden splashes of frogs scurrying. I wondered what frogs did during the winter.

Manetti stopped a yard short of the pond. Koi fish swam to the surface, anticipating a meal.

Manetti looked over her shoulder once to make sure we were alone. "She has a year, maybe less."

"What's wrong with her?"

"A lot." Manetti shook her head, looking genuinely sorry. "Epilepsy and cancer, but that's not what's killing her."

"What is?"

"A rare genetic disorder. Extremely rare. As in, the researchers will never spend any money trying to find a cure. Not enough people die from it."

"Jesus."

"Yeah." Manetti looked up at me. "I had a cousin that was about her age. Different disease, but same deal. It's awful."

"Jesus," I said again.

Manetti shook her head. "He won't be any help."

Her voice got hard and cold and full of history. I didn't pry.

"So if they can't treat—"

"They're seeing what they can do. Proton therapy, genetic piggybacking. They're trying to treat her with a virus that will alter her DNA. She just started to lose her sight."

I shuddered. Sumiko wanted kids. I was on the fence, but hearing all this...I couldn't imagine losing someone you loved more than life itself. Was parenthood worth the risk of bringing a human being in to the world that might suffer? I surprised myself at how morbid I'd apparently become.

Manetti continued. "The seizures put her down for a day or two. Sometimes they have to medically induce a coma to quiet her brain."

I watched the koi. Fish are optimists. They were still waiting for food that clearly wasn't coming from us.

"Time for some hard facts," I said.

Manetti faced me.

"They say the average person dreams three to five times a night. So call it four."

Manetti folded her arms. "I thought you said you didn't know anything about dreams."

"You should know by now I'm creative with the truth. Anyway, four times a night, okay?"

"Right."

"Seven billion people on the planet."

"Give or take."

"Thank you China and India. Seven billion times four is—"

"Twenty-eight billion, Eddie. I get where you're going."

"Twenty-eight billion dreams
per night
." I looked her in the eye. "So what are the chances that some of those dreams are going to be similar to something that actually ends up happening?"

"Pater isn't here to give us his logistical regression models, but I'd figure chances are pretty high."

"Chances are pretty high," I said. "Even if you cut it in half. Shit, even if you cut it to one billion. Chances are pretty good. And then you factor in memory bias, which is exaggerated when it comes to dreams."

"You read too much."

"That’s impossible.” I gave her my crooked smile. “Dreams make sense but they're not logical. In the span of a few minutes you've imagined the weather, your mother, your high school bio class, characters from a movie you just saw, your younger self, the girl you never talked to in grade school...it's easy to divine almost any meaning from your dreams. You have carte blanche to make them significant."

"You don't think Alison has precognitive abilities through her dreams."

"I doubt anybody does. Just play out the odds. There are a lot of dreams happening every night."

She nodded.

"But you knew that already."

"Somebody did. And the people watching her didn't take it seriously for awhile."

"Until?"

"Until we were halfway through when the Atlantic hurricane season began."

"Which we're coming to the end of."

She nodded again. "Alison is eight for eight."

So maybe there was something there. "Sure, but how much advance notice did she give you guys? It's easy to dream about a storm the hurricane chasers have been talking about for a few days—"

"Sometimes as much as a week."

"Still, a storm isn't much. She could dream about drizzle and—"

"I'm going to show you the images."

"The images." I shook my head. "I need to know how you're doing this."

Manetti turned back to the building. "I'm working to get you security clearance."

"Look, Manetti, you called me out here for a reason. You want to know if she has precognition. What I do best is sifting through the paranormal, hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo bullshit to get to the truth of a thing, or at least, to the possibility of the thing. The very first thing we do on ghost hunts is be skeptical of the equipment we're using. That means starting every job with new tapes and new batteries. That means doing quality assurance on your recorders, making sure they're not creating sounds or visuals themselves. That means making sure everything is working properly. So the first place I'd start is with the tech, or however you're capturing somebody's dreams. Has it been tampered with? Has Alison figured out a way to trick it? Is somebody on the research team influencing the output?"

Manetti said nothing.

On our last gig together, she’d repeatedly made sports references so I threw one at her. "I can't help you if you force me to play ball with a blindfold."

Manetti said, "I'll get you cleared. But I need to go through channels. I brought you in because I like how you play flyers, Eddie. But you have to understand that I can't."

I nodded, trusting her. "Okay. So what else did she predict?"

Manetti gave me a look.

I smiled, knowing I had her. "They don't bring you and the team out to chase hurricanes. They would have brought you out here to stop something major."

"Not just one. She predicted a shootout at a mall—"

"Around here? I read about that."

"And something else." She checked her watch. "Briefing in ten minutes."

"Okay. How much lead time do you have left on this other thing?"

"A day, maybe two," she said.

"Good thing we work well under pressure."

She laughed, a rarity. "We always work against the clock and come in late. Alison had this dream five nights ago. At first the researchers didn't know what to do with it, tried to figure it out themselves. They were afraid to bring local LE in because of the security concerns, this bounced around a few federal agencies before it got to Pater. We had boots on the ground yesterday midday."

"God bless you. What about the criminal you've got locked up here?"

"I'll give you the vitals but remember I didn't share this with you."

"How can I remember you not sharing something with me?"

"Don't be an ass. Alpheus White. Career criminal. Loves the action. Armed robbery, aggravated assault. He is currently serving a term."

"No, he's not. He's here." I looked the building up and down and noted the lack of any fence around the property, the forcable electronic security doors, the limited number of security staff I'd seen. "This isn't a prison, it's a hospital."

"He's on lockdown on a secluded wing, on a secluded floor. Guards on him twenty-four seven."

"The last time you and I worked together, there was a wild card. I warned you but you and Pater didn't want to listen. Eamon Moriarty, the same guy that iced my brother, was the wild card. He almost killed me in Oregon and now he's vanished."

“He didn’t almost kill you.”

“He left me defenseless when I was about to face you and Riehl. Same difference.”

“Did you ever stop to think Eamon wasn’t trying to get you killed?”

That was like asking me if I’d ever considered two plus two was three. “No.”

“Think about it. He had to choose between helping me and Riehl or you. We’d worked with him, developed a relationship. We trusted each other. He saved our asses on a couple of occasions. Then there’s you. You made it abundantly clear you would hurt, if not kill, him if you got the chance.”

I said nothing as the old anger at Eamon boiled to the surface. That son of a bitch kid deserved to die for killing my brother.

Manetti went on. “He had to choose between you, his sworn enemy, and his only friends in the world. He chose us. Do you blame him?”

“He deserves to be in a prison. Not a fucking cushy hospital and not jetsetting with a team of federal agents, essentially living a free life. He deserves to rot.”

It was Manetti’s turn to say nothing.

“He’s dangerous—”

“We agree with you there.”

“And the monster is roaming the quiet countryside.”

Manetti's lips formed a thin line. "We're looking for him, Eddie."