Virus . . . virus . . . virus . . .
Ah, there it is. This place is not reality. It is the Nightmare Virus. To my knowledge, this is the fastest I’ve regained my senses while in the Nightmare. My logic and memory are beating the shadows. Is this . . . progress?
It has to be.
“My name is Cain. This is my fifteenth time in the nightmare.” I continue forward, letting the sound of my own voice calm me even though its echo tells me how long and endless and unknown this Tunnel is. “My brother is Nole.”
The details of memory stop there. I know other things—broad things—but can’t remember what was happening in the Real World before I fell asleep.
I open my eyes as I jog, and blink. Ahead is a very distant glow.
This . . . is new.
I increase my pace, feeding off the thrill of alertness. The first glimmer of hope. From what I recall, no news reporter ever mentioned something other than the black Tunnels of the Nightmare. Did Nole ever see this glow?
No, he would have told me.
Keep going, I command myself. I’ll reach that light no matter what, no matter how much despair sets in. If there’s one thing I’ve learned at the end of the world, it’s that hope is stronger than despair.
Hours pass.
I fall back to a walk. More hours pass. I don’t stop.
Without a watch or the sun, I can’t tell how much time is consumed by the shadows. Certainly a day has passed, maybe even two. Time works differently in the Nightmare. It lasts longer. I can’t quite remember the exact calculations. Five Nightmare hours to every one? Something like that.
More math.
Life Above is still fuzzy, foreign. The Nightmare fog is too thick, fighting against me to keep my thoughts contained.
The next time I look up, the light glows the size of a quarter. Maybe if I don’t focus on it . . .
I race time. Burst through barriers of seconds, minutes, hours. Shapes appear in the light. Movement? Sweat clings to my skin and drips down my head, sticking my hair to my face. Then, as though passing through a portal, I trip over a lip at the mouth of the concrete and fall to my hands and knees in the light.
Gravel digs into my skin. I press my palms firmly against the small rocks, letting them pierce my nerves. The invisible claws and voices and shackles that nipped at my heels in the Tunnel are gone. Subdued. Outrun.
These pricks against my skin, the divots in my palms, are something other than darkness. Finally.
Relief. Sore, sweaty relief. I heave in deep breaths.
A shout interrupts my solace—a human shout. I spin toward the Tunnel, ready for whatever might emerge after me. Whatever might pursue me.
Nothing comes, but the voice calls out again.
“I’ve got this one!”
I bolt to my feet, fists at the ready—though I’m still shaking free of the blindness. My vision clears and meets a pattern of dark bars against a gray misty light. A cage. I’ve left the black concrete tunnel only to enter a new Tunnel of thick wood poles that curve into sharpened points above my head.
Like the rib cage of a Leviathan.
Crude ropes hold the poles too tight for anything thicker than an arm to fit through. But this cage is not in darkness. I’m . . . outside. Kind of. The sky above is a black gray without stars, moon, or sun but with plenty of low-hanging clouds. I can’t pinpoint where the dim gray light comes from.
The air is much like what I’d encounter walking the streets of New York at night—moving, carrying various scents and stenches. Am I still in the Nightmare or have I woken up?
A padlocked door at the end of the rib-cage prison keeps me trapped. Behind me is the entrance to the Tunnel. Still in the Nightmare then. But . . . what is this place? The relief I felt moments ago flashes into defense.
I shake one of the bars. “Hey!”
“Ooh, we’ve got an Anger,” the voice says. I turn, trying to find it.
“Finally,” someone else says. “I’m so sick of Fears. They’re dull.”
“And predictable,” the first voice chimes.
“Don’t know how they get out of the Tunnel at all.”
I search for the source of the voices, but my gaze catches on three other tunnels like mine, their mouths forming a semicircle around a gravel clearing. The tunnels disappear into an earthen wall with dead grass along the brow—almost like possessed hobbit holes. In front of each tunnel sits a cage like mine, and each holds two to three other people, though they all sit in their prisons with their heads tucked into their arms, while I have my fists up by my face.
A campfire crackles not far away with a few sawn logs for seats, though the fire doesn’t give off the warm glow I tend to associate with flame. A pot rests in the coals to the side.
Four people sit around the fire, sipping from dented metal cups.
This . . . this is a world. There are people here. Clouds and fires and smells. This Nightmare isn’t a mutation like Nole and I thought.
I’m in a dreamscape.
A body steps up to block my view of the other tunnels and the campfire. A male, blond and pale with hardly a muscle visible in his gangly limbs, he keeps his distance. He is writing something on a clipboard or perhaps a tech pad of some sort.
