Donovan turned to face me. “Richard,” he began, “I feel that I must apologize for not keeping you better informed. Time is of the essence, and we can’t afford to sit down and swap our life stories at this point.”
“I understand,” I said. I still wanted to learn what was going on. Why were these people being chased down? Was it because of the drug ring that Laura had mentioned? Or were they arms smugglers, as the news report had suggested? What had I gotten myself into? Had I doomed myself to partake in a life on the run?
Donovan walked over toward me. He looked as though he was trying to crack a smile, as though he could sense my discomfort and wished to ease my mind. “Come, sit,” he said, motioning toward the chair at the end of the table. I pulled the chair out and sat down as he climbed up onto the desk before me. “I feel I owe it to you, Richard, to show you a taste of what your life has become. I know about the dreams. I know how they feel. I know how they affect your life.” I nodded, understanding what he meant about affecting one’s life. “But, more importantly,” he said as he looked up toward the ceiling, “I know why the dreams occur.” I tilted my head to the side, interested.
“Once we reach Chicago,” he said, turning back toward me, “I promise that I will spend a few days educating you in the ways of Psi.”
“Psi? I think Laura mentioned something about that once.”
“Yes, I’m sure she has. I’d imagine that she couldn’t explain to you what she was doing?”
“Right,” I said. Laura had never really given me a straight answer about this Psionic stuff. Perhaps Donovan would prove a bit more informative.
He smiled for a moment, and then all trace of emotion left his face. Once again he took on the cold, dead serious visage. “We have a few minutes before Crimson arrives,” he began, “and then we’ll need to leave here as quickly as possible. Since we have a brief time to kill, would you like me to,” he paused a moment, trying to find a word but failing, “show you some of what we know?” I thought maybe he would play some kind of guessing game with me and try to read my mind. I was pretty good at outsmarting people at those games, so I smiled and nodded.
Donovan closed his eyes and raised his head slightly. He slowly reached his left hand across to his right arm, and pulled back the sleeve of his coat. He reached out toward me with his right hand, placing it on my forehead. I had never played this kind of mind game before. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my forehead. The lights hanging from the ceiling began blurring into a multicolor haze. The room began to spin, and then suddenly everything went dark.
I was lying in bed. It was my bed, but it wasn’t. I looked down at myself. I wasn’t me. I felt scared. I was sweating heavily, trembling, almost crying. My parents walked into the room. They were my parents, but again, they weren’t. My mother came forward and put her arms around me, drawing me close. “Oh, my poor Donovan,” she said with a great warmth in her voice. Was I Donovan? Was this his memory? Everything turned a bright white for a moment, and when the light died, I was sitting on a high table. I looked around, and realized that I was sitting in a doctor’s office. My parents sat in chairs to my right, and a man in a white coat, my doctor, stood to the left. His hand scratched his chin thoughtfully, and he shook his head. He didn’t know what was wrong with me. The world turned white once again.
Now I was sitting in a different office. I was alone, but I could hear the voices of my parents in another room. They sounded angry. They were yelling at someone, my schoolteacher. The teacher said something about Night Terrors. My mother began to cry.
The air was smoky. I sat in a living room with two other children. Where was I now? A man walked into the room. It was my father. Not my father, not Donovan’s father, but his foster father. I had been placed in his care, because the social worker thought that my parents were mean to me. They were never mean to me, but the social worker said that I wouldn’t be having the bad dreams otherwise. She was wrong, and I had tried to tell her, but she didn’t listen to me. She said that I would be better off here. I didn’t think so, as I looked up at my new father. He didn’t love me like my parents did. He was very strict, and I had to do as he said or he would yell at me.
In another doctor’s office, the social worker, the doctor, and my foster father argued over what was wrong with me. My father said that he was giving me the best love and discipline that he could. The social worker said that that I needed better care, and the doctor agreed. So I walked down the hall, and into my new room. I had my own big soft bed, but that was the only thing in the room. The walls were clean and white, and the floor had black and white checkered tiles. The doctor came in and sat down on the bed beside me, and asked me about my dreams. I told him that horrible monsters chased me and ate me, and he wrote it all down on his notepad. Then he gave me a pill to eat.
I saw the doctor hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Each day was the same thing. Talk about dreams, take pills. Some days I would play with other children. I didn’t like them very much. They all acted strange, and said things that didn’t make sense. One boy would sometimes act like he was two different people. Another boy kept banging his head against the wall, crying that he could hear voices. One boy never talked to anyone. I wanted to be with my parents, my real parents.
One day I had a terrible dream that I was being chased all over the hospital. When the monster chased me into a dead end, and was about to eat me, he went away. The doctors found me in that dead end room, and said something about hallucination. They took me back to my room and gave me lots of pills. They stopped leaving my door open, so I was stuck in my room. I thought a lot about the boy who heard things. I thought that maybe we had the same problem, but that for me, it only happened in my sleep. When the doctor came, I asked him about the other boy. The doctor said that he was schizophrenic, and that he wasn’t really hearing things. So maybe I wasn’t really dreaming things.
But I was really dreaming them. I couldn’t sleep at all, because I was so scared. I would keep myself awake all night long, not wanting the monsters to find me. They couldn’t find me if I was awake. Then one night I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and the monster came. I was scared, but I was also angry. I didn’t want the monsters to eat me anymore. I didn’t want to let them win. I kicked the monster, and he got really mad and punched me with his big, clawed hand. I felt myself glow. I didn’t know where the glow came from, but I was glowing like a light bulb. I pointed my finger at the monster, and a big blue spark jumped from my finger and zapped him. He blew up into fireworks. I woke up, and my finger felt hot.
Somehow I was changing. When I had the bad dreams, sometimes I could win against the monsters. Sometimes I still lost. One day I learned how to make myself sleep and not dream. It felt good, like I was sitting there, but the world around me was gone. I’d open my eyes, and three doctors would be there, trying to wake me up. One day when I was alone, I stood in the corner and picked up my bed from the other side of the room. It wasn’t heavy, even though I couldn’t have picked it up if I was standing right next to it. The doctor came in and saw what I was doing, and ran to get help. I dropped the bed, and it made a big noise. The doctor came back with a few nurses, and they had some kind of coat with long sleeves that they put on me. The sleeves were too long, so they tied them behind my back so they wouldn’t drag on the floor.
The next day some new doctors came to visit me. They weren’t like the old doctors. They wore black suits instead of the white lab coats that I was used to seeing. They didn’t ask me about my dreams, either. They kept asking about how I had lifted the bed from the other side of the room. I told them that I just lifted it, and they asked how. I said that I was right next to it, and it was very light. They said that I wasn’t next to it, I was on the other side of the room, and it was very heavy. They didn’t understand.
I had to go with them to a new hospital. This hospital was different. They kept me in a dark room. Sometimes they would take me down the hall to a room with a big table that I would lay down on. They would poke me with little wires and zap me, and ask me to tell them what I saw or heard. We did that a lot. I couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to help me.
Then they started bringing me into a room with a lot of toys. But the toys were all high up on shelves along the walls, and I couldn’t reach any of them. They were so high up I almost couldn’t see them, except from way back by the doorway. They would say that I could play with whatever I wanted, as long as I got it down off the shelf first. So I reached out and grabbed one that looked fun, and started playing with it. The doctors wrote in their notepads.
After doing that a few times, they had a new game for me. They would hold up a card, and ask me what shape was on the other side. It was an easy game and I always won. They didn’t know, but every time they would hold up a card, they told me what the answer was. We did that for a few hours, and then a new doctor came in. He didn’t have any cards, but he asked me to tell him what he was thinking. I said I didn’t know, because only he knew what he was thinking. He seemed to like my answer. Then he asked me what new toy was in my room. I thought about it, and I could see a big stuffed dog in my room, so I told him that. He smiled, and said that I was impressive. Then they brought me back to my room, and sure enough, there was a big stuffed dog in there.
That hospital was fun for a while. I didn’t like that they kept my room so dark, but it helped me sleep better. Sometimes they would give me new pills, and then watch me all night to see what I did. Sometimes they made me feel sick, and sometimes they would help me sleep. But after a few days, they wouldn’t work anymore. Some of the pills would make me not see what was going on. I would take the pill, and then suddenly I would be someplace else, usually with the doctors holding me down. I didn’t like taking the pills, and I kept telling them, but they wouldn’t listen. They were mean to me. Why wouldn’t they be my friends? I didn’t have any friends at that hospital. I missed my parents.
One day I decided that I wanted to be back with my parents. The doctors said that I was government property. I didn’t understand what they meant. I was angry, and I just wanted to see my parents. I told them that if they didn’t bring in my parents, I would leave and find them myself. They said that I couldn’t leave, and they locked my door and left me in the dark. I could see them standing in the bright hallway. After a few minutes they left. I stood up next to the door and put my hand against it. I could feel the small metal pieces inside the lock that kept the door closed. I reached into the door and moved the tiny metal pieces around. I could see the pattern that they needed to go into, and arranged them. The lock clicked, and I opened the door slowly.
I walked down the hall, looking around the corners long before I would get near them, making sure none of the doctors were around. But then I got to a corner that I had never been around. I couldn’t see what was on the other side. I had to peek around. Nobody saw me, so I kept going. I could feel some cool air blowing down from above, and there was a hole in the ceiling with a screen over it. The ceiling was pretty high up, probably about twice as high as me. I twisted out the screws that held the screen in place and slowly lowered the screen down to the floor. Then I jumped up high into the hole and started crawling around inside. I crawled and crawled, and I saw some light. I crawled toward the light, and I found the end of the hole. I undid some more screws and pushed out the screen that covered the end of the hole, and jumped out. I was outside a big metal building. The hospital. I started running away from the hospital, toward some trees. The world turned bright.
Donovan took his hand off of my forehead. We were back in the basement with the black walls and ceiling. He had a grim look on his face. “I hope that helped you to see what’s going on,” he said. I nodded. I was glad that I hadn’t been through half of the things that he had seen. A moment later there was a knock at the door. Donovan reached out toward the door with his hand, and a moment later I heard the familiar squeaking sound of the door opening and closing. A young man with red hair walked in. “Crimson,” Donovan said, “this is our new companion, Richard.” Crimson nodded toward me. I nodded in return.
“It’s bad out there,” Crimson said. “I left the stadium when I heard the news about Bronze, and watched the scene from one of the buildings across the way. They had the doors all blocked off with armed guards. Black cars parked all along the street.”
“Did you see any Stalkers?” Donovan asked, a look of concern on his face.
“Two,” Crimson replied, “the ones that were on the news.” Donovan nodded, looking very concerned, almost worried.
“Now is the time. We can’t stay any longer.”
comments? Chapter 7: Narrow Escape
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