“I’m not going to do this, Doug. You can forget it. You’re sick. You’ll have to keep your fantasies to yourself.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Listen to this.”
Another voice came on the line. “I’m sorry Amy. He got me while I was in the shower… What does want? Why is he-”
“Ethan?” Amy’s voice was desperate. “Is that you? Are you okay?”
But Ethan was gone. Only Doug’s laughter remained. “Don’t fret. He’s okay…for now. I told you that you’d do what I said. Now remember: third shelf from the bottom in the living room bookcase, page 131 of the ’76 Lance amp; Shield. You do like I said, and then you get in your little Mercedes and…” He laughed. “Well, you get in that fancy car of yours and you follow the yellow brick road.”
“Then it will be over?”
“Yeah. Then it will be over.”
3:23 A.M.
Evening was just as it should be. Whiskey in his belly, mixing with pills. Jack Daniel’s and Halcion-any idiot would realize that it was a deadly combination, but it wasn’t doing much for the man with the brain of a machine.
Ensconced in his fortress of solitude, medicated big-time, and Steve Austin felt that he was in the throws of a caffeine rush. He didn’t want to be known as The Six Million Dollar Man, but he had to face the fact that he shared the cyborg gentleman’s steel-belted constitution.
Shit. Nothing was happening, and April’s pills were nearly gone. Since her death he had gobbled Halcion like candy, and he hadn’t slept once. Not one night, not one minute. And how long had he been on the pills before that? Since January, maybe December. Yeah, December, because he remembered that Christmas lights had been blinking on April’s fake tree the first time he took the pills. He remembered the sparkling eruptions of light and color flashing before his eyes like broken circuits misfiring in a self-destructive machine, remembered watching green electrical cords garrote fake tree branches while he fell asleep for the first time in nineteen years, for the first time in April Destino’s arms.
The pills were little miracles in December. The Six Million Dollar Man was on them steady, three or four each time he visited April’s trailer. The pills, and April’s arms, had delivered him to the land of dreams.
That wasn’t quite right. Singular, not plural. The land of dream. His dream of April Louise Destino, the girl who had become his own private dreamweaver. But now the pills weren’t working anymore, and The Six Million Dollar Man couldn’t sleep. It was a simple proposition: if he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t dream.
He knew about placebos, but this was ridiculous. Because if the Halcion wasn’t working now, what did hat mean?
Steve knew about the special bonds some people hared. Even though he had never experienced those things the way other people did, he could recognize he signs. A clear gleam of eye shared by lovers, words spoken with nothing more than a simple glance, thoughts shared in the silence of a held breath. Steve had felt those things when he lay sleeping in his dreamweaver’s arms, lost in his dream. Only there. And now, despite his best efforts, he worried that it was all over. Full system shutdown. Access blocked, big-time. Maybe his crazy speculation was right on target. Maybe Halcion couldn’t crack the sleep barrier. Maybe, instead, it had been the combination of Halcion and the comfort of April’s arms, her mind fogged with the drug, her brain in tune with his, that had allowed him to find his way into the dream.
But now his dreamweaver was dead. Dead and cold on a warm April night. Brain waves flat on a gray ocean, cerebrospinal fluid making jelly of her brain.
The link had dissolved.
Steve stared at the yearbook that lay open on his lap. April’s message- Dream a little dream of me! – was still on the page. In all honesty, he couldn’t remember if it had been there before tonight.
Sure, he hadn’t looked at his yearbook in a long time. And, sure, he had to admit that he’d forgotten most of the messages written on those slick pages. And, sure, April had a key to his house, and she might have written the message during one of her visits. But maybe, just maybe…
Dream a little dream of me. It was such a simple instruction. The Six Million Dollar Man threw his head back and laughed the mirthless laugh of a machine. April might as well have asked him to find a cure for cancer.
He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t dream.
But if there was something left of April, even after death…if there was anything left…and if this message was physical proof of it…
Tonight’s topic: messages from the dead. Steve Austin supposed that weirder things happened. Most people laughed at them, and some people pimped them with little concern for the truth-new-age spiritualists pulling tricks that had been old in the days of the table knockers, writers who scribbled for newspaper tabloids, and those who traveled the tabloid TV circuit claiming that they had been kidnapped by space aliens. There existed, in this land of dreams, a great number of preachers who claimed to heal every malady from hemorrhoids to cancer with a single touch. They coexisted with those who had seen Elvis at Burger King, and those who knew who really assassinated JFK (and why), and those who said that Walt Disney lay in cryogenic sleep beneath the Matterhorn in Anaheim, California, the joyous screams of generation upon generation of American children ringing in his dead ears.
Such claims made a ghost story seem just a tad ordinary.
A ghost story. Maybe that was what this was shaping up to be. The Six Million Dollar Man was tired. His battery was worn down. He longed to step from his cold mechanical world into the realm of shadow and faith that his dreamweaver had inhabited. He was so hungry for a dream that he prayed it was possible. Because if this wasn’t a ghost story, if what he had shared with the adult April Destino was nothing more than a pathetic drug habit, then his brain was truly fried.
If that were the case, the scribbles in his old yearbook had it right.
Forever, and always.
3:26 A.M.
Doug Douglas was certain of one thing: he was hungry. He’d had a quick bite at Mickey D’s around seven, but he’d been too nervous to have his usual order. No way he could confront Amy with four Big Macs, three orders of fries, two apple turnovers, and a chocolate shake (cut with a cup of double-sweet coffee to provide a little caffeine kick) stewing in his guts. The flat little cheeseburger he’d settled on was now a blob of mush that had given up residence in his stomach for a one way trip through his intestines. The meal, if it could be thought of as such, was little more than a distant memory.
Worse than that, there wasn’t anything appetizing in the kid’s refrigerator-no ice cream in the freezer, nothing but fruits and vegetables and whole wheat bread in the regular fridge. Doug couldn’t make anything out of that. He couldn’t even make a mayonnaise sandwich because the kid didn’t own a jar of mayonnaise. And the kitchen cupboards made Mother Hubbard look like a survivalist stocked up for Armageddon. The kid didn’t have any potato chips. No microwave popcorn, no pretzels, no peanuts, no cookies. There wasn’t even any of that healthy crap, like granola bars or trail mix. The only snack food Doug could find was a bag of those awful rice cake things that tasted like Styrofoam.
The pale little cakes looked kind of like flat marshmallows. Doug tried to get used to the idea, because his gut was complaining like a monster truck with a bad muffler. But then he spotted that despised word on the wrapper. “Unsalted,” he whispered, shoving the package back into the cupboard. “I’m not eating unsalted Styrofoam.”
It was probably better that he didn’t eat anything, anyway. Fear had a way of flushing his system, and he couldn’t stand to spend valuable time malingering on the porcelain throne tonight. Not until it was over with Amy. Not until he could forget about her trying to cross him up.