The Sleepwalkers (28 page)

Christine smiles. “I knew you’d listen. I knew you wouldn’t leave. Somebody had to believe I wasn’t crazy. I’m glad it was you.”

“What’s going on at the Dream Center?” Caleb asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You have to talk about it if we’re going to help everyone else there.

We have to let the world know what’s happening.”

She’s looking over her shoulder out the back window.

“I think they’re gaining on us.”

“Put your seatbelt on,” says Caleb.

Christine smiles again, then pulls the belt over herself and clicks it in place.

“How did you get out?” Caleb asks, and Christine tells him the story of going to sleep in the Dream Center and waking up in Ralph and Lee’s shed with blood crusted all over her head and a five-alarm headache.

She tells him how Ralph kept saying she was a demon, how he tried to burn her alive, and how Margie had tried to stop him and killed him with a shovel.

“Wow,” Caleb says.

“Yeah,” she says. “Ralph was always nice guy too. Except for the whole ‘trying to burn me alive’ thing.”

Rain is pounding on the windshield, and even with the wipers going full tilt and Caleb leaning forward as far as he can, he can still only barely make out the yellow line in the center of the road.

“This is bad,” he says.

She looks back. “They’re closer.”

The rain speaks in its mumbling, liquid language and the digital clock on the dash switches numbers.

“So what made you come back, all the way from California?” Christine asks.

“Your letter,” says Caleb. “I just graduated. I was going to go to Africa. Your letter made me come here instead.”

“What letter?”

“The letter you sent me, saying you were in the Dream Center and needed help.”

He looks at her. Her face is puzzled.

“Here,” he says, and he pulls out the letter.

She stares at it.

“I didn’t write this.”

“What?”

“I didn’t write it. I mean, I wrote letters to you all the time, but I never sent them. I never had your address. This is definitely something

I would have
written, though. It even looks like my writing.” “Maybe you wrote it and don’t remember.”

“They didn’t let me have pens.”

“Why would somebody else send it?”

“Maybe, whoever it was . . . I don’t know . . . maybe they wanted you to come.”

This sinks in, but neither of them speaks.

She glances over her shoulder.

“They’re a little farther back now.”

They sit in silence for a moment.

“So why Africa?” asks Christine.

“I write. I want to be a journalist. I wanted to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, for one thing, but mainly I was going to write about the AIDS epidemic. Orphaned kids. There’s a whole generation of children over there growing up without parents.”

She smiles.

“What?” says Caleb.

“That’s very noble of you,” she says. “I hope somebody does something about it.”

Caleb digests this for a moment.

“Of course they will. Once people really understand what’s going on over there, the government will send more aid and medicine, and more international workers will come to educate the population about safe sex.”

“Then you’ll make a difference,” she says. It’s a tone that, to Caleb, seems patronizing.

“People will take action,” he says, miffed. “What’s going on is horrifying.”

“People like to be horrified,” Christine says, as the wipers screech across the windshield.

Caleb opens his mouth to say something, then shuts it and decides not to push the subject anymore.

“Caleb, STOP!”

He had been looking at her, and when he looks ahead again, he sees flashing red and blue lights up ahead. Two cop cars are parked lengthwise across the road, a roadblock. He slams on the brakes.

They both brace themselves against the doors, and Christine grabs the front of Caleb’s T-shirt into a ball with her fist.

First they fishtail left, then right, then they overcorrect and begin spinning out of control. The flashing lights get closer and closer, racing past like a strobe on each rotation.

Now: the impact, a terrible sound of ripping metal.

Caleb grits his teeth.

And they stop. They’ve knocked the two squad cars onto the shoulder like bowling pins. The sheriff ’s car comes sliding in behind and skids to a halt just a few feet short of their bumper.

Caleb sits, stunned, staring at the rain in the headlights of one of the wrecked squad cars, but Christine is working, frantically turning the knobs of the radio.

“What do we do, Anna? What do we do?”

Static fills the car, and Anna’s little voice comes through, wavering.

great>

“Play dead!” whispers Christine, and Caleb nods.

Through the dazzle of headlights, he sees the silhouette of a cop approaching Christine’s window.

The cop knocks on the window with the barrel of his drawn gun.

He leans down and stares at Christine for a second (she sits completely still), then he straightens up and turns back to somebody and says:

“Hey, Merv. I think this one’s cooked.”

Caleb barely hears: “What’s the other one look like?”

He takes that as his cue. He stares at the dashboard, staying very still, fighting not to blink even as the Maglite’s blaze burns into his retinas. Finally, the light turns away, and he hears the cop call:

“Yep, we got a coupla fried eggs. Too bad,” he laughs.

Caleb hears the other voice:

“Check the sheriff ’s car, make sure he’s alright.”

Caleb hears screaming. It’s a woman.

Careful to move only his eyes, he looks in his side mirror and sees Margie fighting with the sheriff, then gesturing to the approaching cop.

He can barely make out the words: “Tried to kill her . . . just a girl . . . ” over the sound of the rain.

Caleb hears the sound of footsteps on the pavement and looks forward. He sees the other cop approaching Christine’s window and plays dead again. This time the flashlight scalds his eyes for so long, he’s sure he’ll blink. He has to blink, but the instant before he
does
blink the flashlight turns mercifully away. The new cop at the window calls:

“Hey, did you even check the pulse of these perps?”

But just then more screams pierce the rain, and in the side mirror Caleb sees Margie. She’s running away up the center of the road. The sheriff and the first cop are chasing after her—and having some trouble on the slick pavement.

“Jesus Kee-rist,” says the cop at the window, and he sticks his flashlight in his belt and jogs up the road after his comrades.

Maybe twenty seconds pass, and all is still—so still, in fact, that Caleb’s afraid Christine might have gotten hurt after all and passed out. Paralyzing ice seeps into his heart at the thought that she might actually be dead.

But just then she jerks to life. She shoves her door open, hisses, “Come on!” and sprints toward the shoulder of the road.

Caleb lettered in track three years in a row, and it’s all he can do to keep up.

She’s not as weak as she looks,
he thinks, and the thought gives him comfort—because although he still doesn’t know what they’re up against exactly, he knows they’ll need a lot more strength than he has on his own.

He watches her break into the woods ahead of him like a tailback through a defensive line. She doesn’t slow as the branches gouge her skin and break against her rush. She doesn’t slow as her bare feet pound over slick, sharp rocks and roots. And to Caleb’s great alarm, she doesn’t slow as she reaches the steep, almost sheer slope leading thirty feet down to the river below. Instead, she jumps, lands, slides, then jumps again and again until a final landing—
ploosh
—puts her knee-deep in a racing stream.

Caleb almost loses it twice trying to follow her. Once he slips and descends on his ass for a few feet, then he almost twists his ankle when a rock rolls out from under him.

One more jump and he lands next to Christine, grimacing at the sickly feeling as his running shoes fill with water, their soles oozing slowly into the mud of the riverbed.

“Come on!” Christine whispers.

She grabs Caleb’s wrist and leads him under the bridge, into the deep shadows. Fifty feet away the shadow of the bridge ends and the river runs away in the blue of the moonlight, but here he can see nothing. There could be an army of sleepwalkers right next to him and he’d never know until it was too late.

But again, Christine does not slow. She pulls Caleb behind her at a relentless pace, weaving around what he can only guess must be rocks with perfect grace and precision. How can she see so well? Are her eyes that adjusted to the dark? Did they deprive her of light in that place, that asylum?

She leads on. They’re only a few feet from the end of the dark, from the place where they’ll step into the moonlight and out from under the bridge, when a flashlight beam slices down from above, cutting through the gloom just a few feet ahead of them. They both pull up short.

Two voices drift down from above.

“ . . . see anything?”

“I can see enough to know they didn’t jump down into that gully.

Prob’ly they took to the woods.”

“We could get the dogs.”

“I don’t know. Sheriff said the girl was from the Dream Center.

That means no shoes, unless she got some someplace, and no shoes means no woods.”

“She still coulda gone in the woods without shoes.”

“Yeah, and she’d a poked her foot on a stick or gotten a sand burr and we’da heard her boo-hooin’ by now.”

Under the bridge, Christine frowns and wrinkles her nose at this assessment of her character.

Caleb smiles at her.

“Where’d they go then?” the voices continue. “Maybe they took off down the street?”

A new voice enters the conversation now, this one deeper. Caleb thinks this is the sheriff, but he can’t be sure:

“They’re under this here bridge.”

It’s a statement of dead certainty. Caleb’s heart sinks.

“I dunno . . . ”

“That’s right, ya don’t,” says the sheriff, “but I do.”

“Maybe we should call and ask
him
.”

The voices are silent for a minute. Caleb and Christine look at each other. Even though the night is warm, she’s shivering. Caleb puts his arms around her and pulls her to him. She keeps shivering, however, as the voices resume.

“He doesn’t much like to be disturbed.”

“He won’t like that we lost them either.”

“Yer right there.”

“Shut up now and let me think,” the deep voice says.

A moment passes, then one of the other voices says: “Look at those rocks down there. No way they’d have jumped. That’s a sure way to bust an ankle.”

“Shut up,” the deep voice repeats. The other two comply.

Caleb is getting antsy. Panic grips him. If they don’t get out soon, they might not get out at all. The certainty of that thought almost knocks the wind out of him. He looks at Christine. She nods. She knows it too.

From above, there are voices too quiet to be heard, then:

“Shine your light on that side. You shine yours under there. They come out either side, you shoot. Got it?”

Grumbles of reply, and a ray of light reappears just in front of Caleb and Christine along with a twin at the far end of the bridge’s shadow.

They look at each other, and Christine’s eyes say:

This isn’t good. What do we do?

There’s a scrambling sound at the far side of the bridge, and suddenly it’s too late to make a plan, too late to escape.

First one sleepwalker leaps down to the riverbed from above, landing as gracefully as a puma. Another follows, then another. They walk abreast, slowly. Because there’s no hurry. If Caleb and Christine step out from under the bridge, they’ll be shot. If not, the sleepwalkers will have them.

“Caleb . . . ” whispers Christine.

“I’m thinking.”

What do we do . . . ? Maybe the cops aren’t great shots,
he thinks.

Maybe we make a break for it.

The deep voice from above comes booming:

“I’m three-time national shooting champion with the .38 revolver, kids, just in case yer wondering.”

As if Caleb had spoken aloud.

The sleepwalkers come.

Caleb yanks Christine to him by the arm, so hard she nearly falls over, cups his hand to her ear, and whispers. “What I’m about to say, we have to do now. No arguments, no second thoughts. You run past the sleepers to the right. I’ll hold them back for as long as I can.

There’s only one cop on that side of the bridge, I’m pretty sure the sheriff and the other one are over here. Come out from under the bridge like you’re one of them, slowly. When you’ve gone like fifteen steps, sprint down the riverbed, and I’ll have your back. Go!”

He gives her a little push.

“But,” she says, her eyes pleading.

“GO!” he says, and she does.

It’s a play right out of backyard football, and not a very inventive one either. Christine streaks to the river’s edge, where dry sand pokes up in enough places to allow real running, and she takes off toward the far side of the bridge. Caleb runs along next to her as her blocker.

Though their eyes are closed, the sleepers turn toward them like plants to sunlight, all three at once. The nearest one springs at them, but is caught up in the deeper water and slows just enough to allow them past. The second one finds footing on a dry rock and makes a much more effective lunge. Just as it leaps, Caleb sees a piece of driftwood protruding from the water so close it’s almost in his hand. He snatches it up and swings it all in one motion. If the stick were stuck in the mud, things might have worked out quite differently, but as it happens, Caleb pulls it free at just in time and catches the creature (this one a handsome boy of about seventeen) just under the left side of his jaw. The stick snaps, but the force knocks the sleepwalker off balance and back into the water. Caleb looks up and sees Christine. She’s made it almost to the far side of the bridge.