Ch 1. Dying Dreams

Clara Deeds peered into darkness. A lonely emptiness stretched out before her, endless, without a thing to lay eyes on. Somehow she felt she should know what to expect, that something would present itself, but in that time and place her memory was as dark as the world around her. She spun around slowly, looking, listening, and feeling for something, anything, but there was nothing to find. Dread crept in. She wondered if maybe this was the afterlife. If she’d died and gone to purgatory where she would search forever for something she couldn’t find. She could only guess at why she was there, where she was, or who she even was. Her own self was blotted out by the endless dark. There was nothing. Nothing at all. She panicked, thrashing to and fro like a newborn. What was the point? Why exist if nothing else did? 

But a flash of light caught her eye, a few photons from somewhere in the darkness that struck her retina. Her thrashing ceased and some hope returned. She didn’t dare blink, waiting to see if it was a one off event, or perhaps merely her imagination. Another flare dispelled the rest of her worry, then another came, and at last a tiny spark blazed to life in the distance, no bigger than a star in the night. The scintillating pinprick called to her, and she drifted towards it like a lonesome moth. The darkness receded inch by inch as the thing’s pull became irresistible. It grew as she accelerated, frighteningly quick, making her stomach do somersaults of protest against the sensation of falling to one’s doom. Panic returned once again. She could feel the warmth of it on her skin, the power of its presence, and found she had to squint against the harsh light as it grew. What a sight it was. A brilliant sphere of gas that moved like a liquid, or perhaps a liquid that moved like a gas. It swirled around and into itself, tumultuous energy on a scale she could hardly comprehend, a dynamo surging with power. 

She raised a hand to shield her eyes against the impossible, undulating brightness, but the light had become almost as vast as the darkness behind her. It grew and grew from a house, to a mountain, to a planet, and finally to fill her entire field of vision. Her skin sizzled, crinkling like burnt tinfoil, and the pain was incredible, but far away. A fading sensation that she could only assume was how death felt gave her a little relief. It was as if her whole existence was slipping away. The fading pushed back the pain and she focused on it. It became her only raft in an ocean of fire as the inferno tore into her eyes and her body, ripping away the parts that could feel pain. She reached out, streaking towards the rushing vortexes and knots of luminescence as the rest of her was blasted away, until only the tips of her fingers were left to brush the light. 

Clara woke up in bed. The pleasant fading sensation had been her burgeoning consciousness. Now that it was fully here, she thought she might prefer burning alive, seeing as today was yet another Monday. 

With herculean effort she managed to sit up and shake herself from the urge to curl up and drift away again. She pushed off the bed with a groan, physically launching herself into the day, but tangled sheets snapped tight around one ankle and she pitched forward with a yelp. She absorbed the impact with her body, too groggy to even catch herself, wheezing as the Earth dealt its blow. What better way to wake up than to immediately have the wind knocked out of you?

“Jesus Christ, five more minutes. Five more …” 

She grabbed at the sheet to pull the rest of the blankets down on top of her and made a nest on the floor beside her bed. Good enough. At least she’d get to lay there a little longer before heading to the call center. A soul-sucking job if ever there was one, Clara hated doing tech support for a company that made crappy software. She hated the way her bosses didn’t even pretend to care about her. She hated how distant all her coworkers were, and worst of all, how much of that apathy she saw in herself too. Most other things about her life weren’t how she’d once imagined them either. Barely any hobbies, even fewer friends, and not a date since college. Was she depressed? She asked herself the question often, but the answer was always the same: Only on the weekends. Acting like death warmed over at work wouldn’t do anybody any good, especially herself. Getting fired might free her from a tasteless existence for a while, but it would be out of the fryer and into the fire to find another place to suffer at. The rut she had been in lately felt a mile deeper than it had been yesterday. Wake up, drive to work, work, drive home, sleep, and dream about being mangled by impossibly beautiful astronomical bodies.

Her alarm, set loud for a reason, rumbled the side table beside her head, knocking away the last of her delicious drowsiness. She was forced up to her feet to shut it off. With a cough and a groan, she ambled to the bathroom and went to work to craft a presentable mask. Dark brunette hair pulled into a utilitarian bun, just enough makeup to make it look to the uninitiated like she wasn’t wearing any, and a pair of slacks with a turtleneck. She pasted a smile on her features in the mirror and thought it probably passed for a real one well enough. The ugly truth was nobody at the call center would notice if it didn’t. She left her first floor apartment with a sigh upon seeing the dreadfully overcast sky. 

After a short walk to the parking lot, she came to the best part of her morning. The only thing that gave her any sort of thrill anymore. Her baby was an early 2000’s Subaru without a scratch on it, lovingly known as Su. With a little smile, a real one this time, she pulled the door open and sighed into the seat. She put the key in the ignition and turned, ready to get the day over with. The little strength her only beloved possession gave her was always enough to make it through. But when she turned the key, nothing happened. The engine didn’t even turn over. She tried the key a few more times, but no luck. 

What was to most people a mere inconvenience threatened to send her spiraling, and she realized today was going to be even more of a struggle than expected. Another sigh escaped her lips, this one more disappointed than anything. She barely had the energy to be pissed off, which bode ill for her ability to deal with anything else today. How had she even gotten to this point in her life? 

Funny, she thought. This is all it takes to make me question my entire life? 

When she was younger she had found a love for the sciences, engineering, and anything else technical, but her grades hadn’t given her the clout to make a top school. Apparently if you couldn’t do that, then the safe path was your only option to make a living. Either that, or go into twice the debt for half the pay. At least that would have given her something to do other than solving the same two problems over and over again. ‘Is your computer’s operating system up to date?’ ‘Yes Sir, there’s certainly no way you did anything to break it yourself, must be on our end.’ ‘Why don’t we try reinstalling the software?’ There was probably just as much boredom in research or engineering, or so she told herself. Maybe it had better payoff after fighting to discover something new, or build something useful. She hated the fact that she’d probably never know.
She got out of her beloved Su and clomped toward the nearest bus stop instead, sparing a longing look over her shoulder. The nearest stop was a good 20 minute walk, and the minimum hour long bus ride destined her to be late. As she walked, she fumed about Su, and the weather, and the state of her life. By the time she made it to the stop her mood was in the gutter and all she wanted was to turn around, trudge home, and collapse into the bedding she’d left on the floor. Maybe she could have that dream again and feel herself being obliterated repeatedly. 

She made it to the stop and sat heavily on a bench to wait. All by herself, she had no choice but to let her mind wander until the bus arrived. It inevitably took her to darker places.

The rumble of an approaching motor stirred her from a miserable trance. The bus was late, of course, adding another 10 minutes to her tardiness. She paid her toll and plopped down in the first seat she could find, too preoccupied to spare a look for the man across the aisle from her. 

He was very tall, expensively dressed, and with a head shaven so close it was shiny on a cloudy day. He peered down at a newspaper with an expression like it had shat in his breakfast. Nobody else who’d gotten on the bus had the gall to take the seat next to such a presence, so there was nothing but air between them.

The ride passed quickly in her morning haze. The bus punctuated the silence every so often with the squeal of its brakes, hissing hydraulics, and the roar of the engine that made her long for Su again. After a few stops, she happened to glance over at the man, and couldn’t help but feel a sense of camaraderie at his dour expression. 

As they accelerated away from the last corner before Clara’s stop, the man turned to her and caught her eye. His expressions shifted like a cliff face might, if one could move, from intense bitterness to a kind and toothy smile. He leaned in and spoke with a light british accent, the smile never leaving his face.

“How many times is this now, dear?” 

She tripped over the question, searching for meaning in the nonsensical. How many times? How many times doing what?

“What?” 

 He looked at her curiously, and for a moment, she had the ineffable feeling that she knew him. She was also certain she’d never met him though.

“Can’t recall?” he said, disappointed. “Well, maybe this next part will jog your memory.”

“Huh?”

His eyes flicked to the window behind her. Terrified gasps and shouts from the other passengers made her rubberneck just in time to see it coming. Her shocked cry was lost in the cacophony of screeching metal and shattering glass as the semi truck smashed into the bus. The impact sent her sprawling across the aisle, launched right into the stranger. He took the brunt of the hit with a grunt. The bus tipped over as the semi carved its path, and gravity dashed them against the side. One arm got twisted awkwardly behind her back in the chaos, and she felt something make a sickening pop. She thought she might have screamed. A fuzzy sensation made it hard to tell, but having been knocked senseless did little to numb the pain. Glass and loose carry-on came raining down onto the pair of them, and the big man beneath her cried out. He’d caught a shard of glass in the head, and the spurt of blood muddied his shiny scalp. 

The bus finally came to a shuddering stop, and the screeching of metal on asphalt gave way to moans of pain and sobs. It was all over in a second. For a while they both lay there, stunned, until Clara could hear sirens approaching the scene. She smelled motor oil, and the excrement of some poor rider who was now little more than pulp. The approaching siren’s wail forced her back to a fuzzy awareness. Unable, or perhaps unwilling to survey the chaos around her, she let her head droop into the man’s soft lapel. Dammit Su, she thought. Why today?

“So,” he said, his chest reverberating. It was a nice hum against her face. “Can you remember me now?” 

She looked up at him and wiped at tears she hadn’t felt forming. His toothy smile remained. Given the new context, and the blood dripping down his face, it struck her as terribly indecorous. Couldn’t he see they were surrounded by destruction? Nevertheless, she wracked her brains trying to remember meeting him. Her recurring dream resurfaced in her mind instead. Maybe getting turned to mush by a large object was not as pleasurable in real life as it was in her dreams. Too shaken to respond verbally, she looked up at him and shook her head. His expression returned to something a little more dour.

“That’s too bad. This next try will be your last. Give it your best, ok?” 

He was making no sense, but maybe that was just the concussion talking. She was about to form the words to respond when his hands clasped around her mouth and the back of her head. She let out a muffled yelp of surprise before he cranked and all went dark with a snap.

Enveloped in familiar emptiness, Clara peered through the night, searching for something she couldn’t quite recall. But as she saw the pinprick of light, she finally could remember what it offered her, just beyond the raging inferno that would take her first. This time she streaked toward it like a rocket, unafraid of its power. In an instant she was upon it, her body rapidly disintegrating, leaving her little time. She hurled herself in, and the speed of her approach offered her a deeper glimpse than ever before. Subsumed entirely, she felt the heart of it tear away at her being, and expected to feel some final moment. The irresistible fading sensation she had come to associate with waking was there, but suddenly, her senses intensified. Her body began to reform, the pieces lost on approach filled in by the surrounding mass. It rushed into her just as fast as she had flung herself toward it, the gaps in her body becoming swirling vortexes of that brilliant light. It didn’t stop when she was whole again, instead filling in the gaps and then some, pushing her body to a bursting point. Instead of fading, all she felt was pain. She couldn’t even hear herself screaming as the roaring inferno merged with her, displacing or infusing every part of her being until finally she could see nothing but darkness again. 

Clara hopped out of bed, and stood tall. For once in her adult life, she felt completely alert at seven in the morning. Something was clearly off.

“What the -?”

No blurry eyes, no lead limbs, or vague headache. Her back didn’t hurt from the old mattress like it usually did. Even the prospect of work didn’t seem too bad. Strangest of all, there wasn’t any urge to crawl back in bed and pass out for another fifteen hours.

She recalled the inferno, much more vividly than usual. The recurring dream (or perhaps she could label it a nightmare now) seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. She’d had it countless times, she was quite sure, but the swirling inferno-thing had never done that. Then again, she’d never been so aware during the dream before. She had never quite reached the edge either, much less the very center. All the parts that had been replaced by the inferno had returned to their normal state of flesh and blood. Naturally. She wasn’t sure why she would have expected anything else.

As quickly as possible, she went to get something to write on, something that would let her record anything she’d done the day before that let her feel like this in the morning. Had she showered at night? Eaten something specific? Weirdly enough, she thought she could remember something devastating, but it escaped her much like a half remembered dream. Maybe the only devastating part had been that it was a Monday. Or perhaps she was remembering another, separate dream. Somehow she could recall her car failing to start, then a muscular black hand over her mouth. She put the notepad away, a little discouraged. Surely something must have been different. Could it have been the dream itself that made her feel this way?

She went about her routine, humming a cheerful tune, amazed at her own positive mental state. Tuesdays weren’t normally the days when she felt chipper, much less any other day, but she certainly wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Having dreams about burning alive was a bit off-putting, but if it made her feel like this, then maybe she could invest some time into learning to lucid dream. If lighting herself on fire at night would light a fire under her ass in the morning then it could be a worthwhile habit. 

She felt a keen sense of deja vu while pulling on her slacks and a black turtleneck. There were a couple of similar outfits in her wardrobe, turtlenecks being her favorite, but the hamper didn’t hold the shirt and slacks she could have sworn she had put on the day before. Weird.

After leaving the apartment, early for once, she headed toward the best part of her day. Memories of her baby failing to turn over returned on the way to the lot. Certainly that had been some sort of nightmare, right? She could hardly fathom the thought.

Her anxiety grew as she reached the car, peaking as she sat in the driver’s seat and inserted the key. Something made her hesitate. After waking in such a good mood, the universe giving her visions of her car failing to start and then actually making it happen seemed like the sort of thing that it would do, but she shook it off. The prospect of having a good day for the first time in a long time made it hard to take thoughts of the universe being against her seriously.

She turned the key and … click. Nothing. No pleasant roar. No contained explosions to propel her into the day. Just the turn of a key.

“What the fuck?” 

She sat in stunned silence and tried to think if this had already happened to her sometime in the past. Her chipper mood vanished, but at least it had given her the motivation to be out early this morning. 

“Well, this is weird.” She shook herself, trying to dispel the overhanging deja vu. She tried the key again, but got nothing. “No helping it I guess.”

She popped the hood and the trunk and rose. If it was a bad battery maybe she could just jump it and be on her way.

“Need a hand?” someone said from the far side of Su.

The accented voice triggered more recollections of the half forgotten dream. She turned, halfway out of her seat, and saw a certain someone smiling at her. Mounting evidence told her that dream had some true-to-life influence. 

She had to stifle the urge to snap at him. Different versions of ‘I know more than you, dickhead,’ died on her lips. 

Come on, Clara, she thought. He’s probably just trying to be nice. Chipper mood, please come back. 

Instead, she got the vague memory of a hand over her mouth and hot breath on her face. Of course she had to clearly remember dying in a ball of fire instead whatever that had been. She could recall the image of a tall, muscular, attractive stranger with a cool accent that she ended up on top of, and … Maybe she should get out more.

“I don’t think so, it’s probably just an old battery,” she said, trying to focus on anything else. 

She let the door swing shut and moved to the trunk. Meanwhile, he just stood there. It was definitely kinda weird, but she decided that offending someone twice her size might be a bad idea. Doubly so if he was a neighbor, which he must be, if someone who looked just like him was appearing in her dreams, and hanging out in her parking lot. Right? She hefted the jump starter out and circled around to the engine bay.

“Do you live here, in the complex? I feel like I’ve seen you before.”

He shook his head. 

“I don’t live here, but you have seen me before,” he said, rather ominously, or so Clara thought.

She put the jump starter down and took a good look at him, and took a look around the lot too. Nobody else was out and about yet. 

This is what I get for leaving early, she thought. No witnesses for my murder.

“Do we know each other somehow?” she asked.

His smile grew even larger.

“Apparently not. Here, catch.” 

He tossed something and she caught it out of the air. It was a small piece of plastic that fit in her palm. Two metal prongs stuck out of one end, and a tiny number was written on the other in white letters. She had enough experience to recognize it as a fuse, an automotive fuse to be exact. One that might complete the circuit from battery to starter motor. Without it, your car won’t start. 

She put two and two together and felt her heart rate skyrocket. Adrenaline pumped and a cold sweat formed on the back of her neck. She was glad Su was between her and the big man, his smile more unnerving than ever. 

“Have you been messing with my car?” she nearly screamed at him. “Get away from me or I’m going to call the police! I’m going to call them anyway so you should start running.”

“Call them on what? This?” 

He held up a cellphone. Her cellphone. She felt at her pocket anyway in disbelief only to find empty fabric. He’d never even gotten close. How had he snatched her phone? She took a step away and turned to start running, but he spoke, and for some reason she didn’t understand, she stopped to listen.

“I thought you might want to know how you ended up on the bus instead of at your job Clara.” 

She turned back to him, slowly, as if she might trigger him to attack with a sudden movement. That damned smile was still on his face.
“How do you know my name? And I never ride the bus.”

“I know you never ride the bus. Just like how I know you love your car and hate your job. Just like how I know you’re single and live alone, and that every morning you wake up and wish your life was different. Just like how I know you think it’s Tuesday morning. It’s not. And ‘different’ is exactly what I can offer you, if you’ve the bravery to accept.” 

He tossed her the phone and she immediately started dialing 911, only for it to die mid dial. She looked up again, and the man was suddenly gone. Startled, she looked around the empty lot. There were plenty of cars, but none he could’ve made it to in time, and he’d been completely silent. Warily, she crouched to check beneath Su. Nothing. Then she swiveled around to check underneath other cars in the lot, but he was gone. Vanished in broad daylight. 

Now thoroughly discomforted, she replaced the fuse as quickly as possible, hopped inside and cranked the car. The lovely grumble of Su’s engine came to her immense relief. 

Before she could peel off, she noticed a business card trapped under the driver’s side wiper. She took another paranoid glance around the lot, opened the door, and ripped the card out. On one side it had curly handwritten letters that read ‘Something Different’ and on the other side was an address she didn’t recognize. She tossed it in the passenger seat and hit the gas so hard she left tracks halfway out of the lot. 

She didn’t know where she was going, but after what just happened, it definitely wasn’t to work. It damn sure wasn’t to that address either.