DOM#67B
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
3:30 AM FRIDAY MORNING
John woke up from the dream, and could not move.
In the movies, when people had nightmares, they always sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat and panting like a beaten dog. John never did that, though nightmares were his constant companion. When they came, the personal, unremembered demons of the night, he woke feeling heavy. His eyes would snap open, but he couldn’t sit up if he wanted to. Two-ton weights seemed to press each limb to the rumpled sheets of his bed, and movement was impossible for a time after waking. All he could do was lay there, every muscle quivering from unremembered exertion, every joint sore from unknown strains, and feel the bed beneath him.
The bed was too large. It had been ever since Annie died.
He looked into the darkness, past the fuzzy outline of the pillow that half-poked him in the eye. A digital clock on his nightstand glowed like an iridescent monster of the night, deep laser-red eyes staring out with anger and bloodlust. Unblinking. Unmoving.
Gradually the monster’s eyes resolved themselves into readable numbers as John’s eyes cast off the lingering effects of sleep and his brain cast off the lingering effects of his past.
3:30 a.m.
He woke every night, and though the times varied, they were always at the half hour. Never 4:31 or 2:16. Always 2:30 or 4:30 or sometimes even 5:30 if he was lucky. Sometimes, when he cared to think about it, it frightened him that he woke with such precision; such exact timing. Biological clocks were generally well-tuned instruments, he knew...but that tuned?
The digital eye blinked. 3:31.
He still couldn’t move.
Sleep had fled, and he knew that it would not return. He never slept again after waking in the night. When his eyes closed, the demons were real, and though he braved them every night, twice in one night would be too much to face.
Strength gradually returned as his heart ceased to pound against his ribcage. He sat up.
The covers fell away from his naked torso. Though nearing forty, John’s body closely resembled that of an active twenty-five year old. His chest was still firm and muscular, athletic without being bulky. His stomach was flat, with traces of a washboard musculature showing through from time to time. Annie used to tease him about that, telling him he was vain for keeping up so. But he never worked out. He was just born with it.
Annie.
He felt the scar, as he did every night, and as he did every night he allowed himself to think about the dark flesh and the darker past it signified. The gnarled skin curled around his shoulder like a monkey tail wrapped around a tree. The scar tissue on his chest was smaller. The entry of the shot when he was young had left a mark, but it was barely the size of a silver dollar above his right pectoral.
On his back, though, the wound and scarring were greater. There the scar was a large fist of curled matter, darker than his olive skin. It seemed to swallow light, hunching like a malignant mass that turned in on itself, like a malignant black hole above John’s scapula.
He still didn't know where the scar had come from.
The whole shoulder had been shattered, he knew that much. He knew that his father had died, that he had somehow survived the aftermath of a bloody attack, and that he had taken a long time to recover from the day. But he had no memories of those facts. They were gone, not faded away but barricaded somewhere deep and secure, with thick walls that would serve equally well to keep intruders out...or to confine the occupants within.
John took several deep breaths, and as always tried to remember what he had dreamed. What he had seen. What he had been.
That the dreams were important was a foregone conclusion. They started soon after Annie died. Every night he woke (always at the half hour!), feeling heavy, feeling the heart pound within his body, feeling...
(afraid.)
...alone.
That was how he knew the dreams had started after Annie was gone. He never felt alone when she was near. And she had always been near.
Now, as he struggled to remember his dream, the feeling struck him that tonight’s sleeping journey was something of crucial import. It meant the end of something. Or the beginning.
Someone is coming.
He frowned as the thought echoed in his mind with a concrete firmness that was unusual. Where had that come from?
John stood, letting the covers fall to the floor. Annie wouldn’t have scolded him for that, he knew. She would roll her eyes, and make some comment about living with a pig instead of a man, but her eyes would smile lovingly as she spoke so that he would know she was joking and that she loved him. But she would not scold. Annie had never been a nag.
He went into the bathroom, flipping on the light that hung over the sink. Seven bulbs were affixed, but only three glowed when the light was turned on. It was a vanity mirror, with enough light for Annie to apply her makeup or do her hair. But now that she was gone, there was no need for such a large amount of light. John's lip curled in bitter almost-laughter as a thought struck him: "How long has my wife been dead?" And the answer: "About four light bulbs."
It was better with dim lights, anyway. Dim lights were less like hospital lights. Just thinking of that pushed him back into a place he preferred not to be. He suddenly could smell antiseptic cleaning solutions, with the strong undercurrent of feces and death that always hung in the air of the terminal patients unit.
Annie weighed seventy-two pounds when she died. At least John was there when it happened. No surprise, there, he had been with her almost constantly. He remembered that he held her hand, and kissed it. She made no sound – she had been asleep for almost a week – but he fancied he could see her lips upturn ever so slightly. He imagined she was smiling as she died. And so he kissed her lips, and tried to smile, too, so that she would not feel bad for leaving him. She always got upset when he was feeling sad, and he didn’t want to send her away thinking she had made him anything but happy. He kissed her, and left a trail of bright tears on her soft, sunken cheek.
John shivered, and tried to force his mind away from the image of his dead wife; tried to focus on his dream and attempt to recall that instead. Nightmares, to him, were often safer and far less terrifying than reality.
The dream had frightened him, he knew. In fact, it still frightened him. His heart was still racing, and sweat kept beading at his hairline. But though the fear was real and palpable, he could not find what he was afraid of. As always, the dream was hiding in one of the many locked-away portions of his mind. John had no way to bring it back.
He turned on the faucet and wiped his face with cool water, letting it wash away the last vestiges of a dream that was already more ethereal than most. Down the drain, to mingle with all the other bad dreams that people washed away, a palpable mass of nightmares that swirled and roiled and was finally swallowed up by the darkness below the town.
That image struck him, and for a moment he expected a hand to reach out of the drain and pull him in. A scaly hand, like a half-man, half-crocodile. It would pull him down, through the drain, into the sewers. And John would never actually see the thing’s face. Fear had no face. That was why it was so frightening, because it could never be seen. But he would know that the thing was there. And that it was hungry for him.
He stared at the drain.
Nothing.
Words entered his mind, unbidden and unwelcome, but no less real for all that.
Someone is coming.
He shook his head, trying to cast the words from his mind, trying to give himself peace from an unremembered past that he could neither escape nor embrace.
Nothing is so well-remembered as the aching emptiness of something forgotten.
He looked through the bathroom door, into the bedroom beyond. The bed lay there, rumpled and damp from sweat and fear.
It was empty.
He shook his head once again, and then moved to a chair, and took up a book and read. The words passed obediently before him, straight as parade lines marching before the grandstand, but they left no mark in his mind. He could never remember what he had read in these nighttime sessions. He just read because it was better than laying awake in an empty bed and thinking of a time when it had been full.
At 8:20 that morning John drove his Pathfinder down the winding dirt road that led to the town’s main street. The SUV thunked as it hove up over the concrete lip and then shuddered with relief at being on the only paved road that continued for more than two hundred feet in the entire town. John cracked the window to enjoy the breeze that blew through the town. It was a cool breeze that hinted of winter to come, though the cold season was still months in the future. It cut John's nasal passages pleasantly, leaving him physically invigorated, though it did little for his mindset, which was always dark as he drove to work.
He looked over to the seat beside him. No one was there, and somehow that still surprised him. It had been long enough that the shock should have been past, but somehow it remained. The ache was always there, but in spite of that fact and the myriad reminders of Annie's departure, he always expected to see her beside him, smiling and laughing as she reached out to play with his hair.
He drove past the sign the town council had put up some five years before: Welcome to Loston, Pop. 1472 and counting.
The mountains loomed behind him. Colorado was nothing but one large mountain, it seemed, but parts of it stood higher than the rest. The mountains that guarded Loston were solid sentinels, vigilantly aware of all that transpired before them. The mountains had always made Annie feel safe.
John turned into the driveway of the high school, located right next to Town Hall. He parked the Pathfinder, got out without locking the door - no one had ever had a car broken into in Loston - and went into the office.
It was quiet inside, which was normal. The office was a well-oiled mechanism that functioned with the smoothness and efficiency of a luxury automobile. That was due in no small part to the woman whose flashing and - to the students - highly intimidating gaze now focused upon him.
Mertyl Breckman, the office secretary, noticed him immediately upon his arrival, as she noticed everyone who dared to brave her domain. Though she had lost the last of her teeth some four years previous, it seemed the two hundred students at Loston High still lived in mortal fear that she would bite them. Not even the principal commanded the respect that Mertyl did. When she was especially agitated her mouth firmed into a line that was colder than a Nordic glacier, and slower to warm. Rumors abounded that the reason LHS had such a small graduating class each year was that Mertyl ate anyone who was found wandering into the office without a pass.
John had no pass, but in spite of that Mertyl did something that would have shocked the collective student body.
She smiled at him.
He smiled back at her. When Annie died, Mertyl was one of the first people at his door, bringing a party platter of meats and breads. "You won’t want to eat any of this, and you’re a big boy, so I won’t make you," she’d said, "but you remember that people will be calling on you and they’ll want something to eat."
She had been right on both counts. Food had tasted like dry ash to him, burning and soiled. But the party platter didn’t last through the day, as well-wishers and mourners came to pay their respects and visit with one another and then eat a sandwich, as though Annie's death marked the grand opening of some strange new restaurant.
"How are you, John?" she asked.
"Same as yesterday, just a day older. You got anything for me?" He nodded to the orderly mail slots behind her. She kept them clean and tidy, just like the rest of the office, and, by extension, the school.
"Just a smile," she answered.
"You know what I like."
He continued his walk through the office, veering around the filing cabinets and out the back door, leaving Mertyl to her world of typing and clerical work.
It was less than twenty feet to his classroom, and as usual, the room was already full. John was a popular teacher - perhaps the only popular teacher at LHS - and his kids usually beat him in there each morning.
He stepped in just as the bell rang, a bell that was more likely to signal his tardiness than that of the students. Before Annie died, he tended to arrive an hour to an hour and a half early, turning on the computers and preparing for the day ahead. He would also be there so that any students who might be having problems with their schoolwork, home life, or anything else could come by and get his advice.
No longer. He just didn't have the strength. But he still loved the kids he taught, and they knew it and loved him back. The nightmares were what got him out of bed each day, but these children were the only thing that convinced him to leave his house. They needed him, almost as much as he needed them.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he said, sitting down at his desk. The role sheet had already been filled out by one of his pupils, and he didn’t bother double-checking it.
Their computers were already up and running, as well, the screens seeming to roll a bit under the phased light of the fluorescents overhead. They waited for nothing but him. He looked at them for a moment, then a quick smile flitted across his lips.
"Let’s lock and load."
Almost as one, the children slipped their disks into the computers. Hard drives whirred (a few of the older ones made a raspy noise, like the discs were being scoured by brillo pads), and the new web pages they were designing appeared on their screens.
John walked between them for a few minutes, nodding, complimenting, pointing out ways that each could be improved. The children smiled at him as he passed between the aisles of the computer science classroom, and he smiled back. He would have thanked God for them every moment of every day, if he still believed in God.
One of the kids was particularly involved in his work, to the point that he didn’t notice John quietly move behind him to observe. His name was Dallas Howard, and John watched him silently for a few moments. The young man worked quickly, fingers skipping quickly over the keyboard as he typed. John smiled as he watched the work progress.
Dallas had been a trouble student when he came to John’s class. Failing most of his classes, in trouble with all the teachers, he brought a lifetime of attitude with him. The rest of the teachers at the school had given up on him, and he took their poor expectations of him and did his best to live down to them.
Not John, though. He firmly believed that no kid was a lost cause. He focused intensely on the boy from the first, pushing him to do better, to be more than he had been. Surly in the beginning, Dallas had gradually begun to respond to John’s gentle prodding. Soon he was smiling when he sat down at his desk, waiting for the next assignment to be handed out, the next challenge to overcome.
John lay a hand on his student’s shoulder.
"Good job, Dallas," he said, "pretty soon you’ll be able to outdesign me."
Dallas didn’t so much as pause in his work, but he did snort lightly, as if to say, "I already can."
"That good, are you?"
Dallas stopped typing for a moment, looking at John with playful teasing. "The worlds I create in here are already better than the piss-poor one God did for us."
He grinned widely, and John smiled back. A few of the nearby kids in the class heard the comment and snickered. One of them, a girl with a pair of rings in her nose, spoke up. "Want to be God, eh? You’re the wrong sex, little man."
More laughter came with that comment, and John was pleased to see that Dallas could smile as well; that he was not taking himself so seriously anymore.
"You bring up a good point, Patricia," he said to the girl, then raised his voice to address the whole class. They grew silent instantly, all side-chatter ceasing as he spoke. John appreciated the fact that they liked to listen to him, but also felt the pressure each time as he strove to find something to say that would both interest and inform his students.
"Remember, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "the world is fast moving into an age where the computer-illiterate won’t stand a chance. Tomorrow’s world is going to be run by and through computers: a new age of machines merged with people, where they do the work we are either unwilling or unable to do for ourselves."
He paused for a moment, trying to figure out where he was going with this particular strand of thought. Very often when he taught, John found himself saying things that he had not thought about beforehand. It was as though the words came from someone else at times, emerging so quickly that they left him breathless and wondering just what part of his brain had come up with that idea.
Then he felt himself continue, saying, "So let’s say Mr. Howard here is right, and he is becoming a god of computers." A few titters at that, and more than a few of the girls batted their eyes at Dallas, who was blushing a bit under the class’s scrutiny. Blushing, but John noted with approval that he was not looking away from them. He was becoming a very strong and self-assured teen, so very different from the attitudinal, beaten-down youth of only a few months before.
John turned his attention from Dallas back to the class. "So what does it mean to be a god? How many of us have thought about the ethics of the computer age?"
John looked around the room. The kids all stared back at him, blank-faced.
"I see. Does anyone even know what I’m talking about?"
"Porn," said one of the kids. The rest of the class snickered. John laughed a bit, too, though for a different reason. It never ceased to amaze him that in all the changes in all the kids through all the years, one thing stayed constant: mention of anything sexual or any kind of bodily function was guaranteed to elicit a laugh.
"Yes, that’s one thing we might have ethical concerns over, and certainly a subject we could spend a lot of time discussing. But I’m afraid that if we talked about that, then I’d just find out how hopelessly old fashioned I am and you would all have me blushing inside five minutes." More laughs. John drew a deep breath, still not sure where he was going with this but determined to find out.
"But there are a lot of other things to consider, too. Remember," he said, warming to his topic, "when you are given access to something powerful, you have a responsibility to use it well. The more power, the more responsibility. And I think we can all agree that one of the most powerful tools ever made is the computer and the other machines associated with it. We have to think about our responsibilities in using it well. And I’m not just talking about porn."
"What else?" asked Dallas, raptly attentive.
John paused. He liked to wait for several seconds after such shouted questions. Often the other students would rise to the challenge and begin an interesting discussion. No takers this time, though, so after a moment John continued speaking. "How about video games?" he asked. The class continued to stare at him in that semi-blank way that students did when they weren’t thinking; when they hadn’t been kick-started into thinking. John was losing his audience. He had to get more participation.
"Does anyone know what the first video game was?" he asked.
One of the kids raised a hand. "Pac Man?" A few more shouted answers rang out as each student tried to guess the answer.
John let the guesses continue for a time, then shook his head. "Good guesses, but wrong. The first video game was called Pong. There were two lines and a ball that bounced back and forth between them. That’s it. Nothing else."
"Booooring," drawled Dallas, his voice sounding like a foghorn as he drew out the vowel. The class laughed again, and Dallas clasped his hands over his head and shook them in victory.
Geez, thought John, he’s coming along great!
Aloud, he said, "Thank you for that compelling gamer review, Mr. Dallas." Another round of laughs. "So who of you plays video games now?"
Three quarters of the hands in the class went up.
"What are some video games you like?"
The words came quickly, a shouted chorus of the newest titles.
"Duke Nuke ‘Em."
"Tomb Raider."
"Double-0 Seven."
"Metal Gear Solid."
"Resident Evil."
John waited until everyone had made a contribution, then held out his hands for silence. Immediately the students quieted, waiting for his point. "Good list there, ladies and gentlemen. Now, consider: in recent years, a major selling point for new systems is how life-like they can make their games. How real are they? How many pixels calculated per second? How fast?"
He stopped a moment, then turned to a young lady named Jerianne, a sallow-faced girl who wasn’t interested in speaking much. John called on her a lot for that very reason, trying to include her and encourage her. Some students needed to be held back a bit, to be reigned in and corralled. Others needed someone to set them free.
"What do you think, Ms. Halley?
"Huh?"
"How fast are games now?"
"Dunno."
"They’re making games that perform over six billion pixel calculations per second. That’s more than enough to make exceptionally realistic games. Cartoon-like, or even life-like."
A few of the students nodded, and John smiled inwardly. They were starting to focus on what he was saying.
"So here’s a question, or maybe just a thought: when a five-year old played Pong, what was he doing?"
Silence. Then Jerianne answered.
"Playing a video game."
The class snickered again, but John silenced them quickly. "No, don’t laugh. That’s exactly right. He - or she - was playing a game. But now, when a five year old plays one of the modern breed of games, what is that child doing?"
"Playing a game," someone said. John shook his head slightly.
The class waited, then finally Dallas spoke. The kid was smart, and he gave the answer that was so simple it sounded stupid...which of course was why John wanted someone to say it.
"He’s making decisions."
"What?" asked John.
"He’s making life-and-death decisions."
Someone hummed Darth Vader music. More snickers. John chuckled, too, but his eyes were serious.
"Sounds funny, doesn’t it? But maybe that’s right. Isn’t it just possible that a five-year old, someone whose own sense of reality isn’t fully shaped yet, could confuse real life with a game? When you can’t tell the difference between the people next door and the people on your video game, is there a difference? Are the people in the machines more real to some of us than the people in the supermarket?"
The class quieted. John smiled to himself again. He could see that some of them - most of them - didn’t think his statement was correct. But that was all right. They were at least thinking about it, instead of just absorbing every single word he said without trying to make sense of it for themselves. "Kids today are all supermodels," he had told Mertyl once. "If they aren’t physically bingeing and purging, they’re doing it intellectually, swallowing everything that you give them and then puking it back at you at exams and hoping it doesn’t leave a bad taste in their mouths. I want to be someone who teaches them how to eat a good, balanced meal that will actually help them in some way."
Now, the class looked like it was preparing to tuck into a feast. The first words were confrontational. A small African-American boy named Jonas spoke up without raising his hand, his high-pitched voice lowered as he tried to speak forcefully. "You gonna spread that line about how TV and video games are the reason kids are shooting each other in L.A.?"
"Maybe." See what they did with that.
"That’s crap, Mr. Task. You can’t tell me that some kid plays Metal Gear and then goes out and shoots his best buddy ‘cause the game made him do it."
"You think it’s crap?"
Jonas nodded. Standing up to the authority figure. That was all right with John. They were welcome to hold their own positions. He enjoyed it when they did, in fact, as long as they didn’t stomp on anybody in order to stomp on that person’s argument.
The class waited to see what John would reply. He didn’t say anything, though, because at that moment the classroom door opened.
And she walked in.
John almost lost his breath. It caught in his throat, trapped there, and for a frightening moment John worried he’d forgotten how to breathe at all.
He didn’t know why the girl affected him like that. His love for the children in his class was completely on the level of teacher to student, of an older brother who ached to show them the way through life. So why he should have this strong physical reaction to the girl who stepped into the class was beyond him. It was strange; baffling.
More than that, it was...what?
It was recognition.
There was something familiar in her face, something about her bone structure. Something about her cast aside the gloom that shrouded John’s past, and for a split second he thought he could remember. A bolt of lightning seemed to flash through him, burning out his insides and leaving behind cold ash that sent shivers up and down his skin. Then the moment passed and the gloom once again drew itself over his memory.
At last, his mouth remembered its job. "May I help you?" he asked.
The girl held out a yellow slip of paper. After a moment of serious deliberation he was able to move his feet and walked toward her. Further control returned as he approached her, and in the few feet between them, he was able to convince himself that there was nothing special about the girl in the doorway. But only on the surface. Beneath his conscious thought, he knew he was telling himself lies, and knew that she was important.
The paper she held was a transfer permission slip. She was a new student. But usually new students came with a week or two’s warning. John looked around, stalling while he simultaneously tried to figure out what to do with her and what to do to gather his shell-shocked wits about him.
The answer presented itself in the form of Dallas Howard’s enraptured face. Obviously he had noticed the new student - Kaylie Devorough, the slip said - as well, and was equally struck by her, although for far more obvious and biological reasons than John.
A sly grin spread across John’s face. "Well, class, it seems we have a new student. And you know what we do to new students around here."
A chorus of voices rang out. "We eat them!"
One of the kids cackled like a witch while two or three others dissolved into more genuine laughter. Kaylie stiffened for a moment, then relaxed as she realized that this class was likely to be less than torturous.
John turned to face the newest addition to his class. "Well, Ms. Devorough, I’m Mr. Trent and welcome to Computer Sciences. Today we’re loading websites the students have designed."
Kaylie stuttered, "I don’t...that is...."
"You don’t know much about computers?"
She shook her head.
"That’s okay, I’m not sure I do, either. So we’ll sit you with someone who knows what he’s doing." John pretended to scan the classroom, though in fact his choice was already made. "Why don’t you sit with Mr. Howard?"
John guided Kaylie to Dallas’ desk, and the boy’s face lit up. Was this Heaven? John didn’t think so; indeed, he no longer believed there was such a place.
But, if this isn’t Heaven, John thought, then at least it can be a good place. I can try to make it better.
Dallas’ face was red, but glowing with excitement as Kaylie moved her slim frame near to him, sitting beside him and letting him explain what he was doing.
John pulled himself away from them with difficulty, trying to cast off the webs of strangeness that had cast themselves about him with the entrance of the new student. He moved into a different row, and work resumed as the class returned to their individual projects. John began his roving again, wandering up and down rows in an apparently directionless pattern that somehow took him by each student who needed his help at just the right time.
He helped the students where he could, laughed with them where he could not, and above all tried to shake loose the thought that had come into his head. The thought from that night, and from so long ago. The thought that had returned to his mind with Kaylie’s entry into the room. Someone is coming.