Artifact Read online

  “It’s okay, Alice.” I said softly, “It’s not your fault. You don’t know how old I am, because I don’t know how old I am.”

  She finally looked at me, and I could see tears running down the crease of her cheek. “How could you not know how old you are?”

  I helplessly lifted my hands. “I don’t know. Whatever happened must have been bad enough for me to forget something like that.”

  “What does that make me?”

  I slowly let my hands fall back into my lap. “The real Alice might be sitting at my bedside,” I said. “Beside my unconscious body, waiting for me to wake up.”

  “That’s a nice thought.”

  “To be honest,” I said. “Since all this started, I’ve had the most calming dreams with you.”

  “Except you said you heard me scream.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if this is real, though,” she said. “What if I really am in trouble? What if this is just a different kind of real? I was with you during the experiment, remember? For all you know, this could be just as much my dream as it is yours.”

  “That,” I said, “is an interesting thought.”

  “I still don’t think it changes anything.”

  “No, I guess it doesn’t. We’re in trouble, that much we can be sure of.”

  “This is about the artifact.” She said finally, wiping tears from her eyes.

  “Yes…”

  “So, it’s reasonable to think that this is something other than a dream.”

  “It’s reasonable, sure.”

  “Well,” she took a deep, shuddery breath. “I can’t decide what would be worse.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, and before either of us could say anything, we heard a door downstairs finally splinter and give way. The moaning grew louder. Alice got out of bed and pulled the curtains back – the street out front was so thick with the multitudes of walking corpses that I couldn’t see the ground. “What do we do now?”

  I shrugged, “We either try to make our way back to the artifact,” I said. “Or wake up.”

  “But you still think those things will hurt us,” she said.

  I thought about it. I thought about Joseph’s corpse lunging toward me at the lake, and how Patrick threw himself between us. Something deep inside told me that they would hurt me. I retained some logical, objective and mechanical instinct, which knew that even though this was a dream, if those things were ever able to sink their teeth into me, any chances I had of waking up would be gone.

  “Maybe it’s a metaphor,” I said.

  “The zombies?”

  “Yeah…”

  “A metaphor for what?” She asked.

  I cut her off. “We can’t let any of those things bite us,” I said. “We probably shouldn’t even let them touch us–”

  “But you said–”

  “Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.” I pictured the deflated shape of Joseph’s head. “Trust me.”

  4.

  I had an idea. After Alice and I barricaded the bedroom door, I spent some time developing a plan–of –action for making my way back to the labs. The zombies didn’t seem to understand the concept of stairs, at least at that point. They were content with stumbling into each other and knocking over furniture for the time being. So we had time to think, with the sound of horror and suffering coming from the street below.

  I got the idea from when I spent a week orienteering in Arizona. Below the surface – the beautiful aspects of deep brown with layers of pink and gray alluvium, the scattered fragments of dull green cacti and the massive purple shadows that moved with the clouds – the desert is a miasma of starvation, dehydration and teeth. It’s a labyrinth of pain and suffering if you don’t know what you’re doing. We were constantly told, like a mantra of certainty, that the desert has a way of swallowing most forms of life, leaving little to no evidence of its existence. If you get lost in the desert without a plan, you’re gone.

  Half the battle in deciding which direction to go is to first figure out where you are – that’s the most important thing to do, especially if one were lost.

  I was apparently lost in the wilderness of my own subconscious. If a dream is not a place like any other, but if it’s still a matter of connecting two points in diverse and unfamiliar terrains, then the mind cannot be cataloged within the context of simply picking a direction, because there was no such thing as direction in this place. Spatial direction in a dream is as much of a psychological construct as a person, let’s say, or a place. I reasoned that I would have to define rules by which to abide and follow. Rules like physics and natural law.

  When I thought about it, I realized that these things were sort of filling in anyway without my knowledge, or at least outside of my awareness. Not only did I take for granted simple things like gravity and weight, I seemingly accepted these things outright, without much effort. Reality had been apparently building itself through my expectations alone.

  I had landmarks to navigate by. I had the labs, my house, my neighborhood, the lake, and the hospital –the extent of the mental cartography I outlined since the accident. I had Alice, Patrick, Joseph and Sid – they could even be landmarks. I had my elusive burn, which seemed to arrive and disappear within a system of patterns. It was like plugging variables into a formula – it was like being my old self again – and suddenly I was aware of what direction was up, what I looked like, what language I spoke, and most importantly, what was out of place and fantastic. I wasn’t quite there yet, but figuring out where you were, after all, was the hardest part of figuring out where to go.

  I brought this up to Alice before the hallucination started to relocate me again. As reality slipped away, as the bedroom began to swirl into itself, into the curtains, into the blood on the floor, into Alice, I said, “I need a landmark.”

  “What kind of a landmark?” She asked.

  “I don’t know.” I tried to think quickly, as the world continued to collapse. “There was a guy named Sid who helped me the last time.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He picked me up just before I was about to get eaten by a pack of zombies.”

  “A landmark.”

  “In this place,” I suggested, “people can be landmarks. Sid, for example, led me to the labs.”

  “Maybe you should start there.”

  The last thing I said before the world changed again was, “In case I don’t see you again, there’s a gun in the closet. Make your way to the labs.”

  5.

  –The world coalesced into box around me, and I remembered hearing Alice scream.

  The elevator opened when it reached the ground floor, and I quickly punched the button for floor one; the memory of her scream was suddenly visceral and urgent. The doors closed, and for what felt like an eternity, I rode in silent, dreadful anticipation. I wondered if this was the same Alice from my last dream – I wasn’t certain how things functioned here, or if I was the only one who retained memories between one reality and the next.

  I was out of the doors before I realized that they had opened. On the wall directly across from the elevator, there was a bloody handprint streaking around the corner toward the filing department, which gave me pause – the hallway was narrow, dark and silent, and the beige painted walls organized a claustrophobic mixture of gray and black shadow – the only source of light came from the filing–room at the end of the hall. If one of those things somehow made its way into the building, I didn’t want to be blindly stumbling into it. I found the light switch, but it didn’t work.

  The light in the elevator suddenly flickered and died. I punched the button, and nothing. Emergency lights switched on.

  Silence – then I heard another scream, muffled, as if it were coming from one of the offices.

  I ran, desperately hoping that this version of Ali
ce would still be alive by the time I reached her. I took the corner at a dead sprint and tripped over an uneven burl in the carpet. I took the fall on my shoulder and tried immediately scrambling back to my feet, and as I moved to my knees, my hand touched something clammy and organic. I probed the roll of carpet, and realized that it wasn’t part of the carpet at all. I felt my way through the shape of a widow’s peak, two holes and a forehead. It was one of the custodians that had been vacuuming the hallways earlier. Dead.

  I rolled him onto his side and saw that someone shot him twice between the eyes. The back of his head was completely missing. My eyes drifted down, and I noticed that his stomach had also been ripped open – I retched and pushed myself away, blinking against the image of ruined strips of flesh and muscle glistening in the floodlights. I took a few moments to spit the taste of uncooked beef out of the mouth.

  I remembered leaving Patrick’s gun with Alice, and it appeared that she shot this one.

  I stood up, ready to make my way toward the scream again, and the body at my feet twitched.

  I looked down just as its hand snatched my ankle. The front half of the janitor’s head lolled forward and he let out a gurgled moan.

  He rolled toward my foot teeth first, just as I kicked my leg out of his grasp. I put a few feet between us, as he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling toward me one centimeter at a time. Because the back of his head was blown away, the muscles in his neck didn’t appear to be attached to anything, so he couldn’t lift his head.

  I remembered that Patrick shot Joseph in the head, but he didn’t die either.

  No, that’s not true. The Joseph who animated that body was surely gone. What remained was something else.

  I noticed that the Janitor’s abdominals had been chewed away, so he must not have had the muscle control to hold himself upright or walk. I turned toward the other end of the hall again, desperate to find Alice, reeling from the thick stink of stomach fluids and blood. I left the Janitor where he lay, unsure about how to put him out of his misery.

  I walked toward a set of doors, and recognized my name at the end of the hall, two down from Alice’s office. Most of the offices I passed were open and empty. There was no sight of her.

  I carefully moved toward my office door, which was closed, and a sense of gravity and significance made the hair on my arms stand on end. The act of walking into my own office was somehow metaphorically significant. Maybe Alice was right. Maybe this was some deeper level of experience that I just couldn’t understand nor articulate.

  As I opened the door and took in the disheveled state of the room, the disorganized stacks of folders teetering on the edge of a cheap particle–board desk, dusty old textbooks, journals, awards, and cardboard boxes full of odd ends, I looked back at the dead janitor who continued clawing at the air between us. I was suddenly struck by another terrifying thought.

  I was right. I had no frame of reference for what dreams were like. For any dream. The weight of that truth sucked me in, like the gravity of a massive star. I realized then, without really understanding why, that I had no other experience to compare this dream with, because deep down I knew that I had never dreamt before. Rather, that the dream has always been, and always will be my reality. Things were as real as they had ever been. The only thing that had really changed was the accident. That much I was sure of.

  A scream pulled me away from the Janitor.

  It was clearer this time.

  It was coming from outside the window.

  6.

  One story below my office, a young woman and a little girl clung to each other on top of a fifty-foot semi–trailer. There was a man with dark hair wearing a blue and black plaid jacket hanging halfway out of a sunroof above the riding cabin, a few inches in front of the air dam. He was face down and lifeless – I could see a thin streak of dark red blood spilling over the edge of the engine compartment, dripping onto the roadway. Several zombies were relentlessly trying to claw their way up the side of the door to reach him.

  The countless others that surrounded the trailer began piling onto one another, creating a sort of hill of corpses, which was steadily getting higher. The woman pressed the little girl’s head into her chest so that she didn’t have to look. I immediately recognized her – leather jacket, fully shaven head, mid–twenties.

  When Sid and I reached the entrance to the CEM, just before I punched in the key–code, as my heart dropped into my stomach when I realized that the doors were barricaded, I saw the three of them on top of the truck, clinging to each other.

  Which meant Sid and I must not have been far–

  –Six shots suddenly rang out from somewhere down the road. The woman heard them too, and started frantically waving in the direction of the gunfire.

  I craned my head out of the window and saw a man with red hair, wearing faded black cotton shorts, flip–flops and a tattered white tee shirt standing at the entrance to the CEM. He frantically tugged at the door, but it didn’t move.

  He stuffed more bullets into his gun, closed the loader and opened fire into the crowd again.

  It was Sid.

  The vertigo of temporal discontinuity almost knocked me off of my feet.

  The fact that these separate visions were somehow interconnecting was probably a good sign. But that would mean there was another me out there. And judging by the sweat pouring from Sid’s face, and the desperate way in which he moved back toward his car implied that the other me must not have made it. Sid couldn’t have opened the door without my thumbprint or access code, and he knew it.

  With his ammo exhausted, Sid threw his gun at the closest zombie, and then started swinging into them with his aluminum baseball bat.

  The barricade in front of the building’s entrance.

  That’s where Alice must have gone.

  I knocked several boxes off of a shelf as I ran out of my office, sprinting down the hall. I gingerly hopped over the emaciated janitor, and hit the emergency stairway, taking it five at a time, heading to the ground floor.

  SIX

  1.

  A dark silhouette finished pushing a table against the door.

  “Alice!”

  She spun around and pointed the silver gun at my chest, and when she realized it was me, slowly lowered it to her side. “Lance – help me,” she said. “They’re breaking through–”

  “We have to open it,” I said, breathing heavily. “There’s a friend outside.”

  “What?”

  “We have to open the doors, let him inside.”

  “Are you crazy? There are hundreds of them out there–”

  I moved past her and started pulling things off of the pile.

  “Lance, stop – your friend isn’t out there. Do you even know what’s happening?”

  “Yes – just help me.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Lance, don’t–”

  I pulled away and her fingernails took a bit of skin. Blood welled up from the scratches. “Don’t open that door,” she warned.

  “Trust me–”

  “No, Lance – stop!”

  “Goddammit Alice – he’s going to die!”

  She stepped away and raised the gun to my chest. “There’s nobody alive out there. I – I’m sorry but your friend is gone. Step away from the doors.”

  I carefully bent and set the box in my hands onto the floor.

  “Alice, listen to me,” I said calmly, slowly raising my hands. “There’s a guy out there named Sid. I was trying to help him – he actually helped me. He saved my life. He’s out there right now. Didn’t you hear the shots?”

  She hesitated.

  “It’s okay – we’ll open the doors, let him in, and get the barricade back up as fast as possible.”

  She clenched her jaw and put her finger on the trigger. “How do we know he’s not sick like rest of th
em?”

  “Trust me, Alice.”

  She shifted her balance from one foot to the other, weighing the risks.

  “Alice, each second we waste is one less than he has,” I said. “Please.”

  She swore and tucked the gun into her waistband. We started peeling things off of the mountain of junk.

  I pulled the six-meter banister out of the handles and pushed the doors open.

  Sid was twenty meters away, hacking a path from the building to his car with his baseball bat. A ring of corpses lay on the ground at his feet, already starting to move again.

  “Sid!” I screamed, waving my arms in the air.

  Alice fired into the hordes that began pushing toward the entrance.

  Sid turned, and when he saw me standing in the doorway waving him in, his face momentarily fell. He immediately regained composure and ran.

  After juking his way through a tunnel of dead arms, he dove inside and messily rolled to his feet. He immediately started helping Alice and I rebuild the barricade, breathing as if he couldn’t get enough air. The masses outside converged onto the entrance, causing it to bow inward, but the banister held fast.

  Sid collapsed onto the floor and spent the next few moments sucking air.

  Alice pointed her gun at Sid and said, “Were you bitten?”

  Sid shook his head and held out his arms for us to see. He met my eyes and blinked. “You…”

  I shrugged agreement. “Me.”

  “Where did you go?” He asked between breaths, “Where are your clothes?” He pointed at my chest. “What happened to your burn?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Complicated.” He echoed, looking back and forth between Alice and me.

  Alice stepped away as he got to his feet. “You know each other?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He picked me up this morning – brought me here.”

  Alice frowned. “I thought you didn’t know how you got here this morning.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “This was after.”