“Yes. Less sticky. They curve upward and around me.” He finishes his potato.
I move to jot down the details but find myself sketching instead: a tunnel with goopy liquid pooled in the base. “Can you stand up in the tunnel?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard.”
I look up. “Because it’s too small?”
He shakes his head. “Because the darkness is too heavy.”
I sketch a figure, ankle-deep in goop. Hunched over with shadows hovering around his head. My heart quickens as the scene takes shape. Then I stop. Because this isn’t just a scene . . . it’s Nole’s reality. And even with my crude drawing, the very idea of such a reality gives me chills.
Nole sets his pen down. “Cain . . . I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like the darkness is made of every fear I’ve ever had. It’s almost like a tangible emotion. Suffocating me.” His voice quivers. “It makes me understand Mom more.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything. When Dad cheated on Mom and left her with us, she entered a dark place of depression. I’d only ever seen her strong and stalwart prior to that. I kept waiting for her to snap out of it. All she needed to do was decide to be strong, but she didn’t—she wouldn’t. She chose weakness, and we had to go out and try to make money so we could eat.
I was thirteen. Not a lot of options for two fatherless kids to make a buck.
Nole was more tender with Mom. He’d read to her every evening and sometimes stay with her through the night, going to work at a fast-food joint the next day with bags under his eyes.
Mom eventually pulled out of it. Took us to church. Found her strength again—“strength in weakness,” she’d say, which never made sense. She never returned to Mom From Before.
And I could never accept Mom of After.
Even now with her gone—taken by cancer one year later—I haven’t fully forgiven her.
“You’re not like Mom,” I mutter. “You’re stronger. You would never abandon me. You’ll never let the Nightmare beat you.”
“She came back to us, Cain.”
“Too late.” I don’t want to talk about this. It’s an old argument—an old wound we’ve discussed a number of times. It’s the one thing we can never agree on. “Let’s get back to work.”
Nole takes out his calculator, and we scratch in silence. He tapes a few more papers on the fridge as if I’ll make any more sense of those than I did the first two. I check our propane level and adjust the solar panel that gathers enough energy to charge Nole’s computer and give us electricity for one lamp. We stole the panels off an abandoned house in the city after the Nightmare started claiming lives.
Our tiny house—which we named The Fire Swamp—has been ours since Mom died. We thought it’d be funny to name it House Of Unusual Size after the rodents in the fire swamp of The Princess Bride until we realized the acronym basically spelled HOUSE.
We sold Mom’s place and, after paying off the rest of the mortgage, had just enough to get either this glorified shack-on-a-trailer or a rennovated school bus. The Fire Swamp, at least, felt like a home and a new start.
Nole likes to say it was God’s timing, because now with the apocalypse upon us we can move around and survive as long as our truck has a full tank. I prefer thinking of it as one last gift Mom gave us to try to make up for the wreck of a life she left us with.
“I think we’re about ready.” Nole slaps his computer shut and waves his notebook. It’s been several hours since we entered our work in silence.
“Ready?” Does he mean what I think he means?
“Ready to test our cure.” He smacks the notebook with the back of his hand. “I have the amounts and list of ingredients, temperatures, and dosage all figured out. It’s time for our first clinical trial.”
He grins. I grin. Finally.
“We should be able to find everything we need in the university labs. I’ve got one of the keys and a bolt cutter for the rest.”
“As if anyone’s going to arrest us,” I say drily. “The cops are infected too.”
He laughs. The exhilaration of today finally being the day that we’ll see if Nole’s math, brain, and passion pay off fills the room. This could save us. Save him. Save the world.
“Let’s go!” I throw on my jacket.
“Oh, wait.” He grabs his laptop again and pulls up a video screen, then presses the red Go Live button.
“Hey, geeks. Today’s the day.” He angles the camera toward me. I give an awkward wave, then sidle out of the frame. Nole’s viewers want an update from the brainiac they trust. Not me.
“I think I’ve got the formula right. We’re off to test it and will keep you updated. Stay strong. Stay awake.” He signs off as the comments flood in from the few who actually happen to be awake and desperate enough to watch the cure vlog of two college-age brothers.
No one else is offering the world anything.
If we can’t give them fantasy worlds, we might as well offer them life in the regular world.
Nole pops up from the couch, puts the computer into his backpack and his notebook in his back pocket, then looks around the tiny house for anything else we might be forgetting.
“Okay. We’re good.” He takes a step toward the door and sways. “Oh man.” He catches himself on the wall. “Seriously?”
“No!” I’m more annoyed than anything. “Already?” My eyes find the battery-operated clock hanging crooked above our loft ladder. Sure enough, we’ve used up all of Nole’s awake time.
The Nightmare is here for him again.
He sighs and sits back on the couch. “Sorry, Cain. We’ll have to wait for the next Awake.”
“It’s fine,” I grumble. It’s not his fault. “Besides, this is the last time you’ll be sucked in. Your last Sleep. After this . . . you’ll be cured.”
He laughs and closes his eyes so I won’t have to see the smoky gray Nightmare mist flow over his irises.
