“Forgive me,” she whispered.
Before he could ask why, he felt the teeth sink into his throat like ice-cold pincers. A hot wet stream—his blood?—coursed down his neck, and he tried to cry out. But he strangled on the sound of his own scream, and he kicked out hard, to free himself from the bedclothes. His hands pushed at her, and kept pushing…
The bed curtains screeched back.
He could see her, rearing back, naked, with his blood on her lips, her eyes blazing…
Bright light shone in his face.
He pushed again, to throw her from the bunk…
And a voice was crying, “Michael! For God’s sake, Michael…wake up! Wake up.”
His hands were still pushing, but someone had grabbed hold of them.
“It’s me! It’s Darryl!”
He stared out from his upper berth.
The lights were on. Darryl was hanging on to his hands.
“You’re having a nightmare.”
Michael’s heart was hammering in his chest, but his hands stopped flailing.
“The mother of all fucking nightmares, I’d say,” Darryl added, as Michael started to subside.
Michael’s breath slowed. He glanced down. The sheet and blanket were twisted around his legs. The pillow was on the floor. He felt the side of his neck. It was damp, but when he looked at his fingertips, they were only covered with sweat.
“You’re lucky I came back,” Darryl said. “You might have given yourself a heart attack.”
“Bad dream,” Michael said, his voice hoarse. “Guess I was having a bad dream.”
“No kidding.” Darryl blew out a heavy breath, then turned to take off his wristwatch and laid it on the nightstand. “What the hell was it about?”
“I don’t remember,” Michael replied, though he could recall every detail.
“You forgot it already?”
Michael dropped his head back onto the pillow and stared numbly at the ceiling. “Yeah.”
“For the record, I thought I heard you say Eleanor.”
“Huh.”
“But I’ll never tell.” Darryl grabbed his towel off the hook on the door, and said, “Back in five. No matter what, do not go back to sleep.”
Michael lay there, alone again, waiting for his heart to slow down and the last of the panic to pass…and seeing, in his mind’s eye, Eleanor’s long brown hair tumbling down over her pale white breasts, and her wet red lips, still open and wanting more…
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
December 23, 10:30 p.m.
“I’M THIRSTY,” Sinclair said loudly, and Franklin got up off the crate he was sitting on, picked up the paper cup with the straw, and held it out to him.
Sinclair, whose hands were cuffed, sucked through the straw, greedily. His throat was parched, but no amount of water, he knew, would ever quench it. He was sitting up on the edge of the cot. Ranged around him in the storeroom were mechanical devices the size of blacking boxes, capable of sporadically emitting waves of heat, even though they were supplied with no coal or gas source that he could detect.
It was truly an age of wonders.
There was a nagging pain in the back of his head, where the bullet fragment had grazed his skull, but he was otherwise intact. Around his left ankle he wore an improvised shackle, a chain looped through a pipe on the wall and clamped with a padlock. The room was stacked with boxes, and on the floor off to one side he noted a broad russet stain, which could only have been caused by blood. Was this where prisoners were normally taken for interrogation, or worse?
He had tried to engage his guard in conversation, but beyond learning his name—Franklin—it had proved hopeless; he wore something in his ears, connected by a string, and buried his face in a gazette with a half-naked girl on its cover. Sinclair had the impression that Franklin was afraid of his prisoner—justifiably so, if it came to that—and that he had been ordered not to exchange any information. But if the opportunity ever presented itself, Sinclair would very much like to repay him for that wound on the back of his head.
The time crawled. His own clothes had been removed—he could see them neatly piled on a crate belonging to a “Dr Pepper,” whoever that was—and replaced with an embarrassing pair of flannel pajamas and a pile of woolen blankets. He longed to get up off the cot, reclaim his clothes, and go in search of Eleanor. She was somewhere at this encampment, and he meant to find her.