Then he woke up and it was all gone, except for Meng Po, still grasped so tight in his hand that the statue’s impression was forged into his palm. His mother’s keepsake, symbol of luck.
Apparently it hadn’t worked very well. His parents were dead. And it was his fault. Somehow.
In other times when stress got to him, Alex focused on football plays. On reading defenses and calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. He reviewed hot reads in his head, being on the same page as his receivers when a blitz was coming. Recognizing a man-to-man defense so the middle would be open and, as quarterback, he’d be free to roam unhindered through the secondary. There was something incredibly fulfilling and cathartic about the sensation of his shoes pounding turf as the thuds of oncoming tacklers sounded in the narrowing distance. Those moments when the field was clear and all his life crystallized into a base simplicity where everything was perfect and nothing could go wrong.
As it had now. Badly. For real. A dream from which he wasn’t going to wake up.
“Alex,” a voice called at the edge of his consciousness. “Alex.”
A soft voice, soothing. Female. His mother maybe, not dead at all, all of that no more than a nightmare sprung from his getting his head rattled. He was probably still at the hospital, about to wake up in his room there.
“Alex!”
Louder this time, loud enough to rouse him. But he wasn’t in bed. He was standing in the shadow of a window covered by a flimsy blind that let the flashing letters of a motel marquee slip through.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked him, eyes moving to the wall crusted with peeling paint. “What did you do?”
Alex saw the drawings on the wall before him of monstrous machines rolling this way and that like a scene out of War of the Worlds. Like a giant page from the sketchbook still hidden in his bedroom.
42
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
ALEX LOOKED DOWN AND saw the motel pen in his hand, ink splattered across his palm and fingertips.
Sam couldn’t believe what she was looking at. “I didn’t know you could draw.”
“I … can’t.”
“But, then…” She let her own thought dangle, unsure how to complete it until: “This is what you were talking about in the hospital, when you asked me about not remembering doing something.”
Alex dropped the pen, as if it were suddenly hot. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed, grimacing.
“Your head?”
“It’s killing me again.”
Sam sat down next to him, close enough so their legs were touching. “You don’t remember drawing all that?”
“I remember dreaming about football.”
She looked toward the wall. “That’s not football. And this has happened before, hasn’t it?”
Alex followed her gaze. “Not this big, but, yeah.”
The flickering lights from the motel sign framed Sam’s face in a way he’d never seen it before. Like a posed picture with just the right amount of shadows to make her features glow beneath the colors reflecting off her glasses.
“We need to figure this out,” she said.
“Figure what out?”
“All of this. Why it’s happening. How it may be connected.”
Alex’s gaze cheated toward the wall again. “To that?”
“You know what I always tell you about math.”
“To reason the problem out, to approach it logically.”
“Let’s try that,” Sam told him. She shifted slightly, bracing her hand against the bedcovers and inadvertently running her fingers across his thigh. “Where should we start?”
“You tell me.”
“No, you’re the quarterback.”
Alex frowned, making himself hold his stare on the wall. Sam realized he hadn’t slid sideways to put some distance between them, any more than he’d stiffened or recoiled at her touch.
“Okay,” he said, focus still locked on his drawings, “what does that remind you of?”
Sam followed his gaze. “The things we saw tonight, the drone things dressed as cops. Machines like nothing that are supposed to exist today. That must be where these sketches come from too. Somehow.”
“Except I’ve got a sketchbook at home I filled with the same kind of drawings before tonight.”
“Oh” was all Sam could think to say.
“And then there’s the ash man.”
“Ash man?”
“That’s what the guy I cut in half back home looked like to me. Like he was coated in ash.”
“How’d he show up the way he did?” Sam interjected. “Where’d he come from?”
“And how could he still talk when he should’ve been dead?” Alex added.
“But he didn’t bleed,” Sam remembered. “He didn’t even seem to be in any pain. And then he disappeared. Poof!”
“Like magic,” Alex picked up.
“Maybe exactly like magic.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was never there, not really. Like an illusion.”
“You can’t cut an illusion in half.”
“I said like an illusion. Like those fake cops were like robots.”
“Androids.”
“Huh?”
“What you call a combination man and robot,” Alex explained. “An android. Or a cyborg, like in Terminator.”
“What’s that?”