Lucid Dreaming Read online

  LUCID DREAMING

  Lisa Morton

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  First Edition published by Bad Moon Books

  This Edition © 2011 by Lisa Morton

  Cover © 2010 by Jill Bauman

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Acknowledgements

  My first thanks on this go to Tom Piccirilli, who wanted to buy it when it was a mere sprite of a story, and who gave me some much-valued early encouragement. The Dark Delicacies writing group was smart enough to tell me to let this child grow up (I love you guys). Roberta Lannes (whose shoes I am not fit to kiss) was helpful with some of my techie stuff. The amazing Gene O’Neill took me by the elbow and led me to Bad Moon. John R. Little (whom I am honored to call friend) provided advice and insight. Hank Schwaeble, Del Howison and Cody Goodfellow all graciously offered time and blurbaliciousness. Ricky Grove of course keeps me fed, writing, and well loved. Cesar Puch’s layout and Zach McCain’s art made my words look far more beautiful than they had any right to. And of course a Texas-sized hug for Liz Scott and especially Roy Robbins, who make all their authors feel like royalty.

  My biggest thanks are reserved for you, the readers. Especially the ones who make it all the way to the end.

  Chapter 1

  The ropes aren’t too tight, are they?

  I’ve never tied anyone up before, I swear, so I’m really not sure if I did it right or not.

  I’m sorry—I probably should have introduced myself by now, shouldn’t I? I mean, we already know who you are (at least I think we do), so I should tell you who the fuck I am. I was born an Ashley, and I wasn’t very happy about it. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for sticking me with the same retarded name every other dipshit girl in the ’80s was born with. Gah. By the time I was twelve everybody just called me Spike, because of the way my hair always stood straight up on its own. So that’s what you can call me. Spike.

  You know, I’ve come a long way to be here. And I mean that in every sense—physical and mental. Emotional. Like the hippies say, “What a long strange trip it’s been”, to get here. I was going to say, it was a long way to come to see you, but that’s not really true. I came because…well, I guess because there’s really nowhere else to go. But it was hard getting here, really, really hard, and I never gave up. Isn’t that what you always told us, that we should never give up, stay the course?

  Oh well, I guess you’re in no position to care anymore, are you? Now, if you don’t mind—or even if some carefully concealed little part of you does—I’m going to tell you a story. My story. I’m telling you because…no, I’ll tell you why at the end.`

  Chapter 2

  I think I know what you were before, but know what I was? A violent paranoid schizophrenic. They also said I was “delusional” just because I said “Sure” when they asked me if I wanted to be President of the United States. “Sure,” I said, “who doesn’t?”

  They asked me shit like that while I was an inmate in this dilapidated, overcrowded state facility, out in Oxnard. You’ve probably never heard of Oxnard. Stupid name—sounds like it should be in the Midwest, right? Except it’s in California, maybe an hour west of Los Angeles. I was there because they said I had attacked a man with a knife, for no reason. I knew the reason: I’d forgotten to get my prescription re-filled. I’d been taking Prolixin for a couple of years, and everything had been fine, but then I got busy and forgot and you know how all that goes. Obviously the insanity plea wasn’t a tough one for the judge to buy. So I wound up in place where they just tranked me up instead of treating me. Doped to the fucking gills, stuck in a day ward with a bunch of fat middle-aged nutcases who drooled a lot and talked to themselves. Yippee, let’s hear it for the fucking system.

  I was twenty-three. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was sick. I never heard voices telling me to do weird shit, or thought bugs were crawling on me, or anything, but without medication pictures would flash in my head and I’d find myself doing whatever I saw. Without even knowing it. Like when I got in an argument with my mom, I saw myself pounding this meatloaf she was making, pounding it with my fists over and over and over until the kitchen was covered with raw ground round. I didn’t mean to do it, it just happened. Or another time, I think I was like fourteen, I saw myself walking up to this girl at school I didn’t like, pulling up my shirt and using a black felt-tip to scrawl obscenities across my bare skin. Took months to get that crap off, too.

  For ten years I listened to the psych’s gabble about “biochemical imbalances” and “nutritional therapy.” The Prolixin helped, as long as I took it. I couldn’t get into a college, and mom pretty much kicked me out at nineteen, but I actually held a job as a salesgirl in a record store for four years, Final Vinyl in Hollywood. Ever heard of it? No, sorry, that was a dumb question—of course you’ve never heard of it, any more than you would have heard of any of the bands we stocked. I had a best friend named Tommy, who was a computer geek, and I had my own tiny studio apartment. I owned a refrigerator and a television I got at a garage sale and an old computer Tommy gave me. I stole internet access from a neighbor’s Wi-Fi. I played my stereo too loud sometimes, and other times I was happy to just be quiet and read. I had my little life, like everybody else.

  Then I missed one trip to the drugstore and it all fell apart.

  It was late at night. I had to take the trash out. It wasn’t the greatest area of town, especially not when you were a fucked-up paranoid schizophrenic off her meds. I had a knife with me when I went outside. He was a drunken homeless guy digging through our trash bin.

  You know the rest. The good news is that he survived. I like to think maybe it woke him up, got him to clean up and get a life.

  I got a life out of it. At the California State Facility at Oxnard.

  I’d been at the hospital for about three months, I think— it’s hard to reckon time when you can barely fucking lift your head—when it all started. Even I noticed there were a lot more people showing up in the day room, new faces and not typical loons either—some were younger than me, some obviously had money or prestige. But you couldn’t ask them what was going on; they were a lot more doped than I was.

  Next thing I remember, though this part’s kind of vague, was seeing a report on TV about a huge upswing of unexplained violent crimes. They implied it was happening everywhere. Some sociologist displayed a lot of impressive statistics.

  Then we didn’t get to go to the dayroom at all. Ms. Conroy, the one matron I liked, told me something was going on and they had to turn the dayroom into a temporary ward
to accommodate new patients. Even at the far end of the hall, where my room was, I could hear screaming, lots of it. It never stopped. That was the one time I was thankful for my sedatives. My roommate was lucky—she was a catatonic.

  Then a long time went by when nobody came. Two, maybe three days. No one came to let us out, to give us food or medication. Without bathroom visits the room began to stink. Lump— my affectionate name for the catatonic—didn’t notice, of course. Just lay on her bed like always, staring and drooling.

  I could feel my own medication wearing off. I hoped I wouldn’t hurt Lump. The pictures in my head weren’t pretty, and they were starting to come on strong.

  Then on about the third day, Ms. Conroy unlocked our door. She looked strange. Her usually spotless uniform had stains, blood stains, on it, and I could see it had come from her left arm, which was a roadmap of fresh cuts.

  She looked at me with a half-lidded smile and mumbled, “You’re free, little lamb. Go graze with the kangaroos.”

  Then she raised her right arm. There was a scalpel in that hand. As I watched, she slowly drew the blade across her left arm, adding a new gash. Fresh crimson spattered her white tennis shoes. Some hit Lump. Lump drooled some more.

  I liked Ms. Conroy, but I wasn’t going to wait to see what she’d do next with that scalpel, so I got the fuck outta there.

  It was a nightmare in the corridor, like something out of a horror movie. As I ran, doors popped open and hands thrust out at me. I of course wasn’t totally sure whether it was real or not, but it felt real to me. Once I passed a door that was closed and suddenly it banged open, and a middle-aged woman with wild hair and truly crazy eyes hurled herself at me, making little grunting noises. She clawed at my shapeless blouse, until I got hold of both her wrists, threw her away and ran. I looked back once, to see if she was following, but she’d just kind of collapsed on the floor and was pounding aimlessly at the wall.

  Fortunately the security doors were all wide open, and I ran out into another ward, where they kept the non-violent cases… not that you’d know that now, not with the blood everywhere. On the walls, on the floor, smeared in weird patterns that looked like ancient runes. I could smell the blood even over my own stench. Needless to say, I wanted to get out of there real bad, but the hallway in front of me was filled with people.

  With women. The one nearest me was banging her head on a doorframe, leaving big wet patches on wood and skin; she didn’t stop or look up as I walked by her. Another woman, who was even younger than me, sat in a doorway and grinned idiotically. The worst was a patient who had her fingers in her mouth and was eating them. The middle and index fingers were gone down to the first joint. She acted like she was enjoying a midday snack. Finger-lickin’ good.

  What the fuck was going on?

  At least none of them tried to stop me.

  Neither did anyone else, for that matter. No doctors, no orderlies, no nurses. I had no idea what’d happened to Ms. Conroy. I almost just split, but then I remembered that the facility was in the middle of nowhere, and I’d need wheels to get anywhere. A few other things would be nice, too: Money. Real clothes.

  Prolixin.

  I sure didn’t want to see whatever all the rest of ’em were seeing. Been there, done that.

  I knew where the drugs were stored; we passed the dispensary on my twice-weekly walks to see my therapist, staid old Doctor Pembroke. The dispensary door was locked, but I found a maintenance closet with hammers and screwdrivers, and I managed to break the lock. The power was still on and it set off some kind of alarm, but there was nobody left who gave a shit. I found five big bottles of 10 mg Prolixin, and grabbed them all. I cracked the seal on one and dry-swallowed a couple of the pills. Then I raided the doctors’ offices, finding money in forgotten wallets and purses. I found a big floppy bag that I emptied out to hold the Prolixin. I found a man’s oversized suit jacket that actually looked pretty phat on me, and some sunglasses.

  I also found a TV, still turned on. It was showing nothing but a symbol for the Emergency Broadcast System. I flipped through the channels, got snow on most of ’em, the EBS on a few others. One was still running old movies.

  Only one news station was still live. The newscaster, who I recognized but couldn’t fit a name to, looked wasted, with dark-circled eyes and messy hair. He was saying that reports had confirmed this “epidemic or phenomenon” was happening all over the world.

  Then his expression went blank, and he just stared into the camera, slack-jawed. A little pool of saliva gathered around his lower lip and spilled over, running down his chin.

  There was more screaming from behind me, within the bowels of the facility. It was so time to go.

  I took keys wherever I found them, and tried them all on the cars outside until one fit.

  Oh, and I took one other thing, too—a guard’s gun. I found it still in a holster, the holster on a gun belt, the belt hanging from a low tree limb outside. I’d never used a gun, so I fired it into the ground once to make certain I knew how. Whatever had happened seemed to be everywhere, and if I came up against any more whack jobs trying to take me down, I wanted to be able to handle them.

  The car I got that started up was pretty sweet, one of those big butch SUVs that felt like a military vehicle. It had three-quarters of a tank of gas, so it should get me back to Hollywood. It had a radio, of course, which I promptly turned on.

  I pressed the fucking search button until my fingertip was raw, but there was nothing on FM. I found one AM station still transmitting, but it just sent an automated Emergency Broadcasting System announcement over and over.

  I was pretty fucking scared by then.

  Fortunately the Prolixin was kicking in, so I could at least think. Or maybe it was unfortunately, because I knew that whatever was happening, it was real.

  I locked the doors on the car. Then I sat there and thought for a few moments. Something big had happened. Whatever it was, it’d been building for a while, sending more and more people to the loony bin. And it was also big enough that nobody had come to help—or to lock the crazies away.

  And why hadn’t it gotten me?

  I’d deal with that later. Right now, I had to decide what to do. Where to go. I had money—about $300—and plenty of gas. Where should I go?

  Tommy.

  If anyone had figured out what was going on, it’d be Tommy. He was the smartest person I’d ever met—way smarter than that imbecile Doctor Pembroke—and he’d been writing me every month, so I knew he still lived at the same place. He was a good guy. He’d let me crash with him. Maybe together we could figure out what to do.

  Just one problem:

  I’d never driven a car.

  Well, that wasn’t completely true. Tommy had taken me out to an empty parking lot once and given me a few quickie lessons. It hadn’t seemed that hard. And Tommy’s car had been old and cranky, with no power steering so you really had to haul on that steering wheel to make a turn.

  This baby was, as the car dealers liked to say, fully loaded. It should be a lot easier to drive than Tommy’s.

  Ignition first, then…right, put it into gear. Take off the parking brake. Accelerator on the right, brake on the left.

  Easy.

  Of course I hit the accelerator too hard at first and nearly smacked into a brick wall, but I got the hang of it pretty quick. This thing practically drove itself.

  Sweet.

  I was really into the driving by the time I hit the freeway. It was late afternoon, nearly five p.m., and the lanes heading east towards Los Angeles should’ve been packed, totally bumper-to-bumper.

  Wrong. There was no traffic. I mean no traffic, as in I was completely alone. Only once did I see another car. It was driving straight towards me, on the wrong side of the 101 freeway. At the last second I veered aside, and the asshole shot on by. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him go smashing through the guardrail, disappearing over the side. I didn’t stop to help or look back. I had to get to Hollywo
od. I was scared and wired and I needed a friend.

  The 101 finally came down out of the hills to the west of

  L.A. and spilled down into the San Fernando Valley. I sped past Tarzana, Woodland Hills, Encino, Studio City. There were a few more cars on the freeway now—none of them moving. Just parked there. I swerved around them, doing a scared-shitless 80 miles per hour.

  I drove over the Cahuenga pass and got off at Vine.

  Hollywood was hell on earth.

  The power seemed to be dead here, and stoplights weren’t working. Car wrecks were everywhere. Trash blew in the streets (which was weird even for Hollywood). A coyote ran right in front of me at one point, looking like he owned Hollywood, which I guess maybe he did now. Because the people…

  They were severely fucked up.

  There were lots of them lolling about, in the streets, on the sidewalks, in the buildings. I had to slow down to a crawl to avoid hitting them. Some shambled along, like movie zombies. Some waved their arms in the air, or danced, or shouted. Some were naked; others dressed in torn and dirty clothing. At the corner of Fountain and Vine, a man wearing a rumpled expensive suit and a dead look in his eyes ran right in front of the car. I slammed on the brakes, and he started slapping the windshield and screaming, “They’re here! They’re here!!”

  I gunned past him and headed for Tommy’s place.

  Tommy lived in an area of older, slightly rundown but funky apartment complexes, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. I didn’t bother to park in a real space, but just shut the car off in the middle of the driveway and got out.

  A woman was lying on the sidewalk leading to Tommy’s unit; she was beneath a smashed third-story window, one leg obviously broken under her, yelling, “I’m falling! Oh God, I’m falling—!”

  I walked around her, as far away from her as possible. It didn’t matter, because she didn’t even notice me.

  Tommy lived towards the back. Just before his door, an elderly man was dancing in the walkway. It was a strange jittery little dance, a combination of shuffles and hops.