CHET LEAVES ME by myself at the medical center, goes home so nobody can see the twitch in his fingers. Not that the army much cares about an unemployed junkie, I’m sure. But paranoia just comes with the territory—I’ve lived down the hall from it long enough to know.
I don’t remember when Gabe and Sonya left. I know they were here, and I know that Colonel Hellraiser Higgins was, too. Hopefully not with her monster tape recorder, because I’m sure I was a hoot and a half. Beyond that, my mind is a fog.
The TV is playing reruns of Charles in Charge. I’m only half paying attention to it, can’t even really see it without my glasses. The other half of me is fighting off the drowsiness brought on by the pain meds the docs keep pumping in through my IV. I enjoy not feeling the throb of my leg, but I’m not really a fan of not feeling like myself.
The lights are off; the halls are quiet. I might be the only patient the WMC has tonight. There’s supposed to be a soldier posted outside my door, but I haven’t heard him out there in hours. He probably walked away for coffee and ended up talking to the nurse on duty, Louise Engleton, who graduated the same year I and the others moved from middle school to high school. Aside from the TV, the only light is a thin rectangle around the door, illuminated by the fluorescents out in the hall.
The shadow of the door itself is blacker than the night sky outside my window. And as my eyes flutter and sleep begins to crash over me in slow waves, I see the outline of something else inside that darkness. A silhouette—a person standing in the room with me. Even the blue flicker spilling across the room from the little Emerson set perched in the corner isn’t bright enough to reach into that eerie, inky space.
Suddenly, sleep seems both immediately present and desperately far away. I try to focus on Scott Baio and his predictable hijinks or to let the exhaustion I feel down into my bone marrow knock me out for the night.
But it’s watching me. I can feel it (feel them?). I don’t know who it is or when they came in, but they’re not moving. They’re not even breathing, I don’t think. Through the corner of my eye, I see the dark slopes of shoulders, a slender neck, and a head that turns, ever so slightly, to watch me. There’s a soft reflection where the eyes should be, and I can see a distorted, transparent version of the TV flashing in one of those … what? Lenses? Is someone in here in the dark, wearing sunglasses?
Goose bumps creep across my forearms, up my back, around my neck. All the little hairs on my body stand at attention.
There’s a weird creaking noise from that side of the room, like old wood or … or maybe leather. The silhouette shifts, the reflective eyes—big and oblong—turn sideways in an almost inquisitive way. Insect eyes, I think on impulse, a thought that doesn’t so much feel like my own but one that was put inside my head.
“Chet?” I say. My voice sounds faint and groggy through the veil of medicated sleep. I lift my arm to find the remote that controls the TV and lights and, most important, calls nurse Louise. But my limbs are clumsy. Not fast enough. Not fast enough at all.
Then the thing (person? whatever it is?) is standing in the shifting light of the TV screen, moving from the door to inches away from my bed in a blink. A human-size fly dressed in all black, with wide, shining eyes and a strange protrusion at its mouth. Arms outstretched, fingers reaching.
I think of that movie from a couple of years ago, The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum, and Geena Davis saying, Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I’m so afraid I might piss myself. More afraid, I think, than I was yesterday afternoon, lying on the ground with a shattered leg and rain pouring down on me, surrounded by fire and the shredded remnants of an airplane. At least then I had Sonya’s voice to keep me company.
Now I’m alone, and this bug thing is moving through the stuttering shadows toward me. Skittering across the room, the edges of its body flickering.
I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for whatever happens next …
But nothing does.
A bray of laughter on the TV cuts through the silence. When I open my eyes, I see that Charles in Charge has been replaced by Night Court, and the clock on the wall, ticking dutifully, says that it’s a quarter after three in the morning.
I’ve been sleeping this whole time.
It didn’t feel like sleeping, though. Not even close.
Groggily, I pat around until I find the remote and switch the lights on. There’s nobody else in the room, not even a sweater hanging off the back of the door that I might have mistaken for a person. Just me and the sanitized grayness of the room and Judge Harry Stone presiding.
Try as I might to shake the jitters away, I’m still creeped out. And the pain in my leg has cranked itself back up to a gnarly roar. I hit the button for nurse Louise and hope that when she doses me again, the sleep it brings is peaceful.
Before she arrives, though, I realize that there’s something crumpled in the fist of my free hand. A piece of paper ripped from the notepad on the table beside the bed. I unfurl it with pale, shaking hands. There are a few words scribbled on the page, in handwriting that I know isn’t mine. It looks almost like a child wrote it:
YOUR FRIEND SLEEPS LIKE YOU DO.
SWEET DREAMS, CHARLIE.