Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (11 page)
Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
The man with the kit came to her side, stood over her, and stared down at her with a sour turn to his lips.
“This is how you manage assets?” he said to Grey Man.
The tone in his voice elicited no confidence in Lara that he cared about her as a person. He discussed her the way you would a tool that hadn’t been properly put away.
“Just fix her,” Grey Man said.
Though she probably didn’t look it, her time with Jack in her bedroom had left her feeling marginally better. He’d pulled her back from the brink. She didn’t understand how hallucinating a man who gave her medication, lovingly cleaned her wounds and then held her tight in protective arms for hours could have an effect on her medical condition, but it had.
Lara could have lain in those arms forever, imaginary or not. All she wanted in life was someone to make her feel safe, to help her get past the nightmares, but she had long given up on the idea of meeting a man who would stay. Not that many of her relationships had gotten that far, but the fact that many nights she woke up out of sound sleep screaming her head off, tended to deter even the most understanding males. The kinder ones suggested she seek professional help as they left.
Lara had done just that, finding a therapist a few months after the dreams had begun. Initially, she’d believed the psychologist she’d found could help her through them, uncover what caused them. After their third session, however, distrust crept into their time together, along with the fear that the psychologist had another agenda. He acted far too interested in the dreams themselves and their specific content in connection with the horrible events that always followed them in the news. His concentration centered on documenting her dreams rather than helping her deal with them, or making them go away. A part of her began to wonder if he were using her somehow, maybe to write a paper about her he would publish without her permission or, worse, a book. His probing of her nocturnal experiences went so far as to suggest a prurient fascination with the violent acts she related. It creeped her out, and she never went back.
Jack, on the other hand, struck her as the rare type of person she could trust with the dreams, someone who wouldn’t rush to judgment about her mental state. She could picture him listening carefully, offering genuine support, sending strength and resolve into the fragile areas of her life, exactly as he had when he lay next to her in bed.
Wait. Remember. Jack isn’t real. He’s a just coping mechanism you’ve created for yourself to deal with this
.
Yet what about the healing strength she’d felt flowing into her from him while she’d curled against him in bed? Had she imagined that, too? Why wouldn’t her brain just allow her this little fiction? She deserved someone real who cared about her. Why did her rational mind keep ruining it for her, pounding at her to give him up because he didn’t exist?
Jack had sworn he was real, that she’d really been home in her bed, that everything she’d experienced was all completely real. Dumb. Who trusted a hallucination to tell you the truth?
Lara finally stopped denying the truth and accepted her situation. She wasn’t somewhere else having a stroke. Granted, she was confused, under stress, still sick with fever and the residual effects of the drugs she’d been given, she might even have hallucinated a thing or two, but she didn’t believe herself mentally incapacitated.
Unlike her gorgeous, patient Jack, Grey Man was here with her.
This
, not Jack, was her reality. Grey Man was an actual person. He meant her harm.
She had no illusions she could defend herself physically against him. She was a wreck. Her fever was down a degree or two, but it still held her firmly in its grip. Her hand was in terrible shape, a little less swollen than before, but badly damaged and infected. She hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since the night of her abduction.
For the first time since she’d unsuccessfully fought her abductors, however, Lara was ready to go to battle again. Did they have control of her physically? Yes, no question. Did they control who she was? No way. Inside Lara was still whole.
Don’t try to be brave
, Jack had told her.
Let them think you’re broken
.
I am broken
, she’d said.
No! You’re not. You’re strong
.
He was right. She wasn’t broken. She wouldn’t allow them to do that to her.
Don’t try to be brave
.
Bravery didn’t have anything to do with this. Resisting their insane demands to find places she’d never been just by thinking about them would be her way of taking control back from her captors. She already knew how this ended. She wasn’t leaving this cell, but she would go out true to herself, and no longer a victim.
“Help me roll her,” the man with the kit said.
Grey Man didn’t move, offering him no assistance.
“Fine.”
The medic set down his kit, squatted, lifted and tugged at Lara. She didn’t help him either, not that she could help much, but eventually he had her on her back. He snarled in disgust when he saw the burns and blood.
“She’s filthy,” he said. “These burns are already infected.”
He took her vitals, noted her high fever to Grey Man, and then took scissors from his kit. She expected him to attack the bandages around her hand, but he went for her clothes, cutting her T-shirt off of her and then her panties. Nothing about his actions was sexual, not even in a deviant sense. It was robotic. He worked briskly, expediently, never reacting when fabric that had stuck to the burns tore away skin with it and she flinched. Once he had her naked, he stood up again and looked around her cell, searching for something, stymied.
“Water?” he asked.
Grey Man pointed at the open door.
Kit Guy returned, dragging a hose that ended in a nozzle.
He sprayed her down like an animal in a pen, while Grey Man watched from the far side of the room.
Lara wanted to cry in humiliation, but focused on the water. Cooling water to her fever. Her first in days, other than in her hallucination with Jack. She refused to shame herself by showing how desperately she needed to drink and didn’t open her mouth wide. Rather, she parted her lips subtly and was rewarded when a bit splashed inside. She licked her lips and stole a few precious drops that way, as well.
The medic spread ointment on the burns, his fingers gouging carelessly into raw flesh. He dressed her unceremoniously in an orange jumpsuit with no underwear. Forced medication on her. He didn’t explain what it was, and she worried strong sedatives or more hallucinogens might be among the mix of pills, but he didn’t give her a choice, prying open her mouth and shoving them inside. Try though she did, she couldn’t deny the additional water that went with them. She swallowed it greedily.
Lara endured all of this until his latex-gloved hands grabbed her injured one to remove the bandages. She’d been through this before with Jack and knew the intense pain it caused. Reflexively, she yanked her hand back, but he held it firm. With his first cut into the bloody wrappings, the movement traveled to the wound below. Like a spike driven through the palm of her hand, the shock was brutal.
She pulled away, backing up, and when he wouldn’t let go, thrashed in panic. Despite her vow to remain silent, not give them anything, she couldn’t help the low whimper and words whispered to herself. “Not again.”
No, please. I can’t take this another time
.
“What was that?” Grey Man asked, instantly on alert. “What did she say?”
“I think she said, ‘not again,’ ” Kit Guy said.
Grey Man came over and leaned over her.
“Not again,” he said, pretending to mull over the words. “Now why would you say that, Lara?”
She quit her struggles, but wouldn’t look up at him. Looking up would get her a slap across the face. She knew it. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head back so far she had no choice but to look him in the eyes.
“Not again?” Grey Man said. “Someone else cut this bandage off for you?”
“I dreamed,” Lara said.
“Where did you dream to, Lara?”
She lied. Quickly, without putting too much thought into it. If she said it quickly and naturally, maybe he’d believe it. She would not give him Jack.
“The hospital. I dreamed I was in the ER.”
“The ER.” Grey Man exchanged a meaningful look with Kit Guy. “Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ve been to that particular hospital before?”
“I don’t know. It was an ER.”
“Did you give them your name?”
“I don’t–”
With her hair wrapped in his fist, he jerked it hard, and her head whiplashed on her neck.
“No. No. I didn’t give them my name. They already knew it.”
“Knew it?” he sounded skeptical.
“How would they unless she told them?” Kit Guy said.
Grey Man released her hair and turned his back to her, pulling a phone from his pocket. He called someone and spoke in a low, urgent voice. She allowed her head to nod forward again, her hair to fall in front of her face.
Grey Man came back.
“What else?” he asked.
She kept silent, furiously thinking through the rest of the lie to give him.
“What else happened in the dream?” he demanded.
“The doctor wanted to cut off my hand. He had a big saw. I looked at him and…”
“And what, Lara?”
“He was you.”
She waited while her story sunk in with them.
Did she imagine it, or did Kit Guy sigh in relief?
“She dreamed,” he said. “Not a run. A nightmare.”
Grey Man looked away, training a murderous expression on the far wall. He lifted his phone and spoke into it again.
Two words. “False alarm.”
He hung up.
Kit Guy removed the last of the bandages. Lara couldn’t look. He turned her hand one way and another, examining the injury.
“Nothing in that box,” he gestured at his kit, “is going to fix this.”
He dropped her hand in her lap, directly in her field of view.
Numb, Lara gawked at what she saw.
She may have had all her fingers and her thumb, but her palm was gone. Hollowed out. The middle of her hand was an open crater. Almost nothing was left of her muscles and tendons to connect the digits. Arteries and veins brutalized. Even areas of bone had been sheered away. It was a wonder blood flowed to her fingers at all. The whole mess was swollen and angry red.
“This needs surgery,” Kit Guy said. “Or she’s going to lose the hand.”
“She doesn’t need two hands to run,” Grey Man said.
“I don’t think you understand. It’s already infected.”
“She’s not going anywhere.”
“It’s not only her injury I’m talking about. The wound is septic.”
“Look,” Grey Man squatted down again, put a hand on Kit Guy’s shoulder and commanded the man’s complete attention. He smiled and spoke congenially, but Kit Guy shrank from his touch. “I don’t think you understand. We’re pressed for time. We, I, would really appreciate your help.”
Suddenly nervous, the medic answered. “Yes. Yes. Of course.”
“Good.” Grey Man patted the man’s shoulder softly. “Good.” He rose to his feet. “I know you have something in that kit to cover it. Some type of fake skin. Put it on the wound and wrap it up again.”
“Yes. Of course.” Kit Guy reached into his kit.
Consumed solely by the sight of her hand, Lara didn’t follow his actions.
How much longer will I have it? Is this one of the last times I’ll see my hand?
A needle stuck the side of her neck, her eyes rolled up in her head, and she collapsed backward onto the cement.
Chapter 18
Jack drove, not back to his hotel room in Alexandria, but west toward Frederick, Maryland. He stopped only long enough to grab a take-out burger from a diner on the edge of the city before he continued south and west into West Virginia, crossed the northern tip of Virginia and then back into rural, mountainous West Virginia again.
During the entire trip, his mind was on Lara.
His mantra held. She wasn’t gone. He harbored no doubts. In the same way he shared an empathic bond with her when she was near, able to detect the emotions swirling about her, he’d know if she were dead.
What are they doing to her?
Over and over again, the worst scenarios Jack could imagine looped through his thoughts. Offshore-style torture methods, a panoply of mind-altering drugs, brainwashing, the playbook of covert techniques the Greys could apply was staggering. More than once over a drink, he and Gavin had discussed the probability that their enemies had already captured Lost Ones in the past and attempted to use them to target the Society. Lara was the first case they could verify as such. It was also the first instance of the Greys possessing a photo with the potential to breach society defenses. In Lara, Jack had witnessed firsthand the effectiveness pain and drugs had to break down a captive. The question was what happened to her when they added brainwashing to the mix? If Lara survived long enough—and Jack knew it in his heart she could outlast most finders, perhaps even himself against the Greys—it wouldn’t be long until they began a re-education program on her. So far, she had no knowledge of the Society, but he suspected that would quickly change. What would she be told about dreamrunners?
“My guess?” Gavin had said. “They’ll indoctrinate any Lost One they get their hands on. Convince them they need to hate their own kind.”
“How do you counter that?” Jack had asked.
“You don’t. Or you can, but not easily. Because their very survival, whether they live or die, is tied up in accepting that indoctrination, you’ll have a psychological fight on your hands with any Lost One you try to rescue from the Greys. It will be like trying to free someone from a cult. Can you ever trust them not to run back to their captors?”
Remembering that conversation weighed heavily on him as he drove into the setting sun.
Jack, for all the Lost Ones he’d found over the years, had always maintained a safe emotional distance. From everyone. He had no close friends. No relatives left anymore, close or otherwise. Because of who he was, and the mistakes he’d made in the past, two deaths in particular for which he was responsible, he’d decided years ago that separateness was integral to doing his job. His job was everything. He built the wall to keep others out and nothing had come close to taking it down before finding Lara. He’d seen her a grand total of three times, yet something in her connected to something in him. It was as simple and basic and dangerous as that.