The Sleepwalkers Part 35

Half an hour later the sun is coming up. The rain clouds paint themselves in cool pinks and blues of sunrise and drift away.

The Dream Center continues to burn. Still perched in the tree together, Billy and Christine watch it fall.

Mostly, the minutes pa.s.s in silence; Christine sits with her head on Billy's shoulder, his arm around her, their chests rising and falling together in breath after grateful breath. When they do talk, it's about silly stuff, like building a tree house and living there forever.

Except somehow childish ideas don't seem so childish anymore.

Chapter Twenty.

IN THE WHITE HOSPITAL ROOM IN PANAMA CITY, the flowers on the table by the window have already wilted a little. Sunlight pours in.

On the television, a local news anchor stands in front of the charred remains of a building, talking into his microphone and gesturing.

In the hospital bed, Christine doesn't hear a word of it. She has the volume turned all the way down. She's staring out the window, watching how fast the clouds go by. Maybe she never looked before, but she never noticed they went by so fast.

"Knock, knock," says a voice. It's Caleb. He has a stuffed monkey in his hand and a notebook tucked under his arm. His other arm is in a sling.

He presents the monkey to Christine.

"I told you not to get me anything else," she says. "Bribery won't make me heal any faster. But thank you. Did you have a good walk?"

She nods at the notebook. "How's the article coming?"

Caleb smiles and shakes his head. "I couldn't even figure out where to begin. I wrote a poem instead. It's called 'And the World Remained.' Kinda cheesy, actually."

"A poet, how s.e.xy. Let's hear it."

Caleb blushes a little and shakes his head. "The whole poetry thing's a little new right now. But I promise I'll let you read it sometime. So, did the doctors come back? What'd they say?"

She shrugs. "Just a cracked rib, minor burns, and a really, really bruised neck."

Caleb winces. "I'm so sorry."

"Shut up," she says. "You saved my life."

"And your head? What about the CAT scan?"

Her eyes darken. "Like we thought. He, uh . . . he took out part of my brain."

"What does that mean? I mean, is it going to affect you? Memory, coordination, stuff like that?"

"No. The doctors think it's an unused section of brain tissue. I think it has to be like a filter, you know? To keep the spirits out. Like a lock on the door to our minds. Without it, they can come in and possess you any time. Or at least during sleep. And it also makes the voices easier to hear, I think."

"I'm sorry," says Caleb again.

"It's okay. That's how it had to be, I guess."

Caleb looks at her. "That's what your sister kept saying."

She looks at the stuffed monkey absently.

He clears his throat. "They still pulling bodies out of the Dream Center?"

She nods. "Forty-seven now, I think, but they said there are more in there. I stopped watching."

"We should probably leave soon. Morle-my dad-had a lot of friends who might be pretty p.i.s.sed off right now. Like that doctor. I keep thinking he's going to walk in here. It's creeping me out. I think we should take off soon, just get as far away as we can."

"Yeah," she says to the monkey, "but there's one thing we need to do first."

Trees shoot past outside the car windows.

"We gotta make it fast. This might not be safe for us at all."

As they pull in the driveway even the air feels different. The Dream Center is gone, and sunlight now s.h.i.+nes on the front lawn where its shadow would have fallen. But there's something else, Christine thinks. Even with the sun s.h.i.+ning right on them, it still seems a little . . . dim.

They park beside a Channel 13 news van and get out. Christine glances at Caleb. His brow is furrowed; his eyes are fixed on nothing.

He's been like that for most of the trip.

"Penny for your thoughts," she says.

He smiles halfheartedly over the roof of the car.

"Nothing," he says.

"Okay, two dollars."

"You drive a hard bargain," he says. "But really, it's nothing."

"Thirty million dollars!" she jokes, and pounds her fist on the car roof.

He sighs. "I'm just thinking that . . . I have the blood of a psychopath in my veins, you know? The thought that my dad was somebody capable of . . . what he was capable of is . . . It scares me."

She nods. "Hey, if genetics are any indicator, we're both screwed," she says. "But they're not. Caleb, the world is still here. You didn't end it. You did what you had to do. What can I say? You're not your father: you're you. And, well, you're hot."

Caleb laughs.

"So turn that frown upside down, sweet cakes," she says. "You and me are going to drive away from here together and start again."

"I know. I can't wait for that," Caleb says. "But I still can't help feeling like . . . I don't know . . . like something's wrong."

"Shus.h.!.+" she says.

And he does. He comes around to her side of the car and takes her hand.

The smell of smoke still hangs faintly in the air.

The old asylum is nothing now but a field of black ash and shattered gla.s.s. A few twisted steel girders jut up like lightning-struck trees, but aside from that the place is leveled.

They walk slowly toward the wreckage, watching for anything dangerous. Caleb feels the cold steel of the gun in the waistband of his pants, concealed by his T-s.h.i.+rt, and he's glad they brought it.

"Hey, where you guys going?"

It's a tall guy with a red goatee. A camera hangs around his neck.

"Just wanted to drop some flowers by," Christine says. She holds up the bouquet in her hand. "It's so horrible what happened."

"No s.h.i.+t, Sherlock," says the guy. "Smoke?" He shakes one loose from his pack and holds it out to them, while lighting his own.

They shake their heads.

"You know," the guy says, "you aren't supposed to be around here. Only search and rescue and press are allowed. And the cops, naturally. I'm taking some pictures for the Miami Herald, then getting the h.e.l.l out of here and going to Waffle House. I'm freakin' starving."

He takes a big drag off his cigarette, squinting at them.

"You're just here to drop some flowers by?" he asks.

They nod earnestly.

He looks around. "Alright. I'll take you guys in, but only because this one is such a hottie."

He nods toward Christine, who blushes, embarra.s.sed.

"I have a press pa.s.s; they won't question it. Just don't get me in trouble. Come on."

Caleb wonders where the h.e.l.l the Miami Herald was when all the kids started going missing, but Christine catches his eye and smiles at him, cheering him up.

The photographer leads them through a chain-link fence and flashes his press pa.s.s to the cop posted there. Caleb and Christine walk quickly behind him.

The photographer talks without taking the cigarette out of his mouth while simultaneously fiddling with his camera.

"The death toll of this thing is ridiculous. Eighty-one barbecued bodies in the place so far. That doesn't even count the ones who got incinerated completely. . . . "

A wave of nausea comes over Caleb. He did that. He killed those people. But he reminds himself it was all for the good.

The guy continues talking as they round the corner and come into sight of the pond. Still swollen from the rain, its waters reach almost all the way up to the ruined Dream Center's foundation. "You want to hear something really messed up, though? They haven't even broken this story yet; it airs tonight and won't make the papers until tomorrow."

Caleb looks up. He sees a diver in the water, pulling something behind him.

"They found bodies in the water too. And these didn't die from the fire, no way. They were put down there. Anch.o.r.ed to the bottom. I talked to the coroner; he said he's pretty sure some of them were drowned alive. And I'm not talking about just a few of them either. A lot of them were preserved because the water's almost freezing from the spring down below. The divers said there's a huge cave system down there too."

Christine has stopped. She stares at the photographer with eyes that suddenly look haunted.

"How many bodies?" she asks.

"Sixty . . . something . . ." and the guy digs a note pad out of the pocket of his denim shorts and flips a couple of pages. "Sixty . . . five. Hey, you alright, honey? You look like you're gonna puke."

"They've counted all the bodies?" she asks.

"Yeah, they scoured the bottom. The official report said they pulled up sixty-five bodies."

Caleb grabs the guy's arm. "Listen, this is really important. Are you sure there were only sixty-five? Not sixty-six?"

"Yeah," the guy says. "I got a quote from the head diver. He said they checked the whole spring, cleaned it out, and found sixty-five. Why? Are you kids on drugs or what? You look completely tweaked out."

Caleb and Christine exchange a look.

"I think we're going to be alright," Caleb says to the reporter, to Christine, to himself. And he laughs hard, releasing some of the tension that had knotted in his stomach.

Christine laughs too and hugs him.

"d.a.m.n," mutters the photographer around his cigarette. "I want some of whatever you kids got."

He walks away, snapping pictures of the diver as he emerges from the pond.

"I'm sorry I didn't come back sooner and help you. I'm sorry I didn't believe you. I'm sorry my father did all this. I'm sorry I had to kill all those kids. I'm so sorry," Caleb says.

Christine smiles, tears welling in her eyes.

"You did your best," she says, "and it was more than good enough. It was amazing."

She kisses him.

For an instant he holds back, thinking of his life back home, his direction, his plan, and he throws them all out and kisses her back, hard.

Maybe she is crazy, but he's a ma.s.s murderer.

And if this is what it's like living in insanity, he wouldn't mind doing it forever.

"Are either of you guys with the Red Cross?" asks somebody.

Caleb and Christine turn to find a tall, beautiful black girl of about fifteen years old. She's wearing a muddy, white nightgown with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

"They're supposed to take me back to their office so we can try and get a hold of my folks," she says.

"No," says Christine, "I don't know where they are. Are you alright? What happened?"

She shakes her head. "All I can say is this," she says, "it's too much of an ordeal to go into all of it. I was locked up in there since just about as long as I can remember, and I didn't belong there, 'cause wasn't nothing wrong with me. I don't even remember how I got there, that's how long it was. And they did bad stuff in that place, too, let me tell you. And then last night I wake up and I'm in that pond over there and I got a weight around my neck." You can tell she's fighting the urge to cry. "Don't even know how I got there. I wake up and I'm in the water, and I grab the edge of this boat that must've turned over.

Somebody put a rope with a weight on the end of it around my neck, but I was able to get out of it, praise G.o.d, otherwise I'd have drowned."