Awake Read online

  “Keep calling in. Your wife ran out on you to join the Faithful? I wanna hear about it! You discover the cure is shooting ketchup up your bum? Lemme know. I’ll try anything once!”

  A congregation of skeletal people kneels in the center of a public park. They’re all wearing gas masks. Gloria slows down, Edu peers out of his window, keeping the shotgun trained on them as one of the men walks around, plugging every kneeling person in the head with a handgun.

  Gloria barrels down a slice of suburbia in the middle of the city. Weathered houses are covered in graffiti, their windows busted in, their doors broken down. A man carries a small, body-shaped bundle wrapped in a sheet. He takes it to the edge of an open hole in his front lawn. Next to it are several fresh mounds of dirt. He regards the semi with contempt as Gerardo drives away.

  A group of men in police uniforms lies on the sidewalk, facing the sky. Their eyelids are missing, exposing dried up eyeballs like yellow raisins. They twitch as Gloria rumbles by. One of them stares at the tires longingly…a way out of his misery. The rock song comes to an end.

  “This is it, people, the Red Eyes are banging on my door. Guess they found my secret clubhouse after all. But don’t worry, my lovelies, that’s not how I die. I’m just gonna sip my special cocktail here.”

  The radio plays inside the truck. Edu raises the volume. Gerardo grips the steering wheel, yawning, blinking his eyes excessively to force the road in front of him into focus. That’s half the battle these days…your eyes, your fucking eyes, always drying up, always feeling heavy and gunky, like they’re offended from being denied the eight hours they’re supposed to be shut for.

  “I’m down to a pound of grass, a couple baggies of cocaine, a psychedelic rainbow of Adderall, Xanax, and Vicodin tablets…nice buzz going already. Find something like that, ladies and gents. Make it feel good. Go out like you’re partying. I’m right there with you, my beautiful friends, my loyal audience, my badass surviv—” The station cuts out, buzzing with static. Edu cracks the dial, cutting off The Last Voice for good.

  “Guess it really was his last ride,” Edu mutters, “so long, man.” Then he spots something. He pokes his shotgun out of the window.

  A woman lies in the street. Her eyes are open. She’s gasping at the sky like she’s drowning and looking at the surface. Edu aims his shotgun at her, lining the gunsights up with the woman’s head, closing one eye to bring everything into crystal clear focus.

  Diana leans out of a rifle slit, knowing exactly where Edu’s gun is pointed.

  “Hey!” she shouts, “don’t fuck around!”

  “Goner anyway!” Edu shouts back, “fucking Lazies, should’ve planned better!”

  “Dumbass! Save the shots for the Red Eyes!”

  Edu sticks his shotgun back in through the window, grumbling under his breath, “fucking Faithful bitch.”

  Gloria squeals around a corner. Around the massive semi, buildings are in various stages of decay, windows smashed in or boarded up. A family lies in the sidewalk, gunshot holes in their heads. One of them holds the gun...the father.

  Up ahead, a dozen people in pajamas march down the street. Several are hurt, their wounds badly dressed with anything they could find, from duct tape to bits of tarp and plastic bags. A woman carries an older man with an arrow sticking out of his shoulder, a group of women carry a stretcher smothered with dead bodies.

  Diana opens the trailer door and waves at the group. “Hey!” she shouts, “what are you guys doin’ out here?”

  A man walks up to the trailer. He’s got a rifle slung over one shoulder, boots on his feet, a backpack and a bulletproof vest…he didn’t leave unprepared or in a hurry. None of them did. The pajamas aren’t what they happened to be wearing during the First Sleepless Night. They’re a calling card. A uniform. “We’re looking for a girl. She’s eleven, long brown hair. We got separated. Have you seen her?” he asks, hopeful.

  Diana keeps talking as the truck moves down the block. Gerardo knows who she’s talking to and he doesn’t want anything to do with them. “I’m sorry, we haven’t seen her,” she says, “but we’ll keep an eye out! Keep searchin’ for the Sleep!”

  “Keep searching!” The man shouts back.

  Edu sticks his head out of the window, “Diana! We can stop if you wanna get out and join them!”

  “It’s my truck too, fuckwad,” Diana says.

  Gloria shoots down a desolate main road. Several Lazies are lying in the middle of the street. They’re awake and still alive, but just barely. Their mouths open and close like fish out of water as they fade away. A pale man lies among them. He looks a little like Gerardo. There’s a bullet in the middle of his forehead.

  As soon as he spots him, Gerardo hits the brakes. He twists the steering wheel and Gloria screeches from side to side. The semi’s wheels crunch the asphalt next to the exhausted bodies.

  Gerardo rubs his eyes. Ahead of him, the Lazies grunt and moan in their painful limbo. Half-awake. Half passed out. The Pale Man is now standing among them. He grins. Gerardo revs Gloria’s engine and rushes forward, gunning to run down the man. Just as he drives through him, the Pale Man disappears.

  Snap. One of the Lazies in front of Gloria shrieks. A front wheel rests on top of the shattered mess that used to be his arm.

  A horrified Diana scrambles to open the trailer door. “Gerardo! Stop! What the fuck are you doin’?” She yells.

  Gerardo steps on the brakes. The Lazy beneath Gloria continues to scream. Edu breathes uneasily, hugging his shotgun like a teddy bear.

  Gerardo rubs his eyes. Hallucinations weren’t unheard of, even at fifteen hours. They’d been staying up for twenty-four every other day, after all. The stress, the strain…it all added up. They are much more tired now than they would have been in the old days, had they stayed up this long. ‘So pull yourself together,’ he thinks. ‘The world’s a straight line. Think of the physical, concrete things around you and focus on that.’

  He didn’t mean to drive over the Lazy. Unlike Edu, Gerardo doesn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone, not usually. The Lazies aren’t even worth the energy. They are the damned even among the damned.

  The beginning was a desperate, chaotic scramble. They heard it on the TV at around noon. People in Asia got it first, after all, reporting their First Sleepless Night hours before America’s and seeking medical attention and answers from the rest of the world. The internet was flooded with speculation and misinformation. Then people found out themselves, trying to nap wherever they were. They shut their eyes and settled into the comfort they expected every night, but all they saw was darkness and all they felt was the stranglehold of lucidity and consciousness. It never faded. Never blurred. And then they knew it was real.

  People rushed to the pharmacies, shoving past the bumping, clutching throng to the front doors only to find the price of sleeping pills had increased a hundredfold. Even then, the lines looped around the blocks and it wasn’t long before the cardboard signs and the improvised posters got tacked above the glass doors and the barred storefronts…‘NO PILLS.’ ‘SOLD OUT.’

  So the black market was born. People cut sleeping pills the way they used to cut cocaine. Most of the time though, it was just something else, whatever looked right.

  Then it was the hospitals. People piled in and begged, and when that didn’t work they attacked. Nurses dead by the hundreds, storerooms stripped of anything that resembled a sedative. Most people didn’t even get a single pill or a single cracked vial.

  So it was the churches next. Thousands smothered the entrances and collapsed the pews, but the priests welcomed every last one. They prayed in unison for hours, days, prayed until they couldn't kneel or even sit anymore. So they prayed from the ground. That was alright. The priests were on the ground too, before long. They were the first to go, didn’t even try to go after pills or anything else. They dropped and faded away, convinced God would spare them at first and willingly surrendering to His plan, and their deaths, in the end.
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br />   Ninety days later, the Lazies hadn’t come from the desperate souls that had died in the churches or waiting for care that would never come in the hospitals. Instead, they were now people that had managed to get their hands on some kind of sedative but had run out. They were shameful, self-loathing, discarded and shunned and knowing they deserved it. They had clawed and bit and ripped and killed just to get a baggy here or a needle there...and it hadn’t helped them in the end. They’d just prolonged the inevitable. The only difference between them and the Faithful that had succumbed in the first days was that they’d die monsters. If God had really done this and this was a test, they failed, and they knew it. They used to be survivors, until they weren't. They were people like Gerardo. And now he was one of them, his whole crew was. Because of him.

  “I’m sorry,” Gerardo says, “I didn’t notice.” He puts Gloria in reverse and, as she moves backward, the Lazy’s whimpers die down.

  TWO

  Gerardo catches a glimpse of the finger-smeared digital clock on the dash. 5:45. He grabs the Sharpie and changes the ‘15’ in ‘15 hours’ to a ‘16.’ One hour closer. One hour more. One hour less. Move. Keep moving.

  As Gloria rolls around the corner, Gabo switches out the CD in his player, yawning as he does so. He stuffs ‘Nevermind’ by Nirvana into a portable wallet case with dozens of slots. Every one of them is filled. These are Gabo’s days, his hours, his minutes, down to each second of bliss in audio form. Without them, every waking moment is a painful slog. But the music keeps him going, keeps him focused, dulls the pain behind his eyes or in his joints when it arises. He pulls out ‘OK Computer’ by Radiohead and sticks it in, then presses play. Radiohead’s the best for these moments. Wandering, psychedelic melodies that might just trick Gabo’s brain into thinking it's dreaming.

  Then the trailer bucks and the CD skips. That’s the downside to a CD player over just listening to music on his phone, like everyone constantly reminds him...but it’s just not the same. He’s had these CDs since his dad gave him the first one along with the player itself for his eleventh birthday. He loves the feel of flipping through the portable wallet. It’s like a modern book with CDs instead of pages, each one vibrant and unique and evoking specific memories in the covers printed on the hard plastic discs.

  The headphones are worn, the faux leather ear cups flaking and crumbling off like black dandruff, but Gabo likes how they feel all the same: comfortable, familiar. When every turn into every corner is unpredictable and potentially fatal, familiarity’s a rare commodity. The handle of his rifle is also familiar, but not in the same way. Nothing is comforting about the wood smoothed over by the constant grip of sweaty palms, nothing reassuringly recognizable about the rifle’s weight. It only reminds him of the many people he’d shot at, and the few he’d shot. But he holds it anyway, almost begrudgingly, and looks out of the slits into the streets outside, scanning from side to side, hoping he’ll just see Lazies lining the sidewalks and the roads.

  Behind him, Diana rests a notebook on the trailer’s wall. The pages are filled with hand-copied passages from the Bible. One of them is written in all caps across two pages. It seems to be original. Diana reads it out loud, in the quiet, confident voice reserved for prayer, “‘I shall take from you your Sleep and give it only unto those that are Worthy. And I will destroy from the face of the Earth all livin’ things that I have made.’”

  Diana’s notebook is her coping mechanism. Everyone has one. Hers is reading and rereading these passages. The mechanical, ritualistic way her eyes process the words in quick succession is comforting and dependable. Like breathing.

  Gerardo and the others don’t understand. They make fun of her, talk behind her back, wonder how you can believe in a God that would do this to the people He supposedly loves. But Diana understands. It’s a test, and all around her, she sees people failing it, giving in to their worst impulses.

  Gerardo and the others had failed it too, a long time ago. But she and Gabo were so far in the clear. They hadn’t killed anyone, had only stolen what they needed to survive, and, at least in Diana’s case, still had faith. Gabo claims he’s agnostic, but that’s better than being a flat out cynic like Edu and Gerardo. She looks out of the hole in front of her and prays that she won’t have to fire that rifle and kill anyone. ‘Please God, not today. Not tomorrow. Not before fading away into the eternal rest beyond this waking nightmare.’

  The gargantuan semi blasts around a corner onto a street that cuts across a tangle of small office buildings. It’s weird, seeing most of the buildings so intact. Given the empty streets, the bodies lining the sidewalks, and the shattered windows, it seems like a war has ravaged the city, claiming most of its population. But the buildings are whole, no rubble clogs the streets, there are no tanks or mortar craters on the asphalt.

  There was a war, in the beginning, one for pills and sedatives instead of water or oil like some had predicted, but the fighting had died down quickly and the damage had been minimal. Fighting of any kind was too taxing on people’s fatigued bodies. Expending energy just meant you’d collapse quicker, looking up at the sky in a waking coma as your body broke down from pure exhaustion. So most of the buildings look like they did ninety days ago. Some stray vegetation has invaded the sidewalks here and there, but otherwise it looks like there was a massive exodus or a rapture. Abandoned cars line the streets and luggage and personal belongings are strewn about, dropped at the first hint of fatigue. Nothing moves. Nothing but Gloria.

  Gloria rumbles down the desolate road. On the far end is a large church, only it’s been through a slight transformation. Several police barricades surround the walls around the church, complete with barbed wire looped around them to make them more formidable. There are sandbags behind them and most of the windows have been boarded up with wooden planks, the rusted metal of street signs, and the faded plastic of bus stop ads. It’s not just a church anymore, it’s an outpost in the middle of a battlefield.

  Two police officers lounge on top of a patrol car. It’s been driven up on the sidewalk, blocking the stairs that lead to the church’s ornate wooden doors. They’re wearing black, blue, and white camo fatigues underneath bulletproof vests. They’re special forces used to combatting gangs, and were accidentally trained to deal with the aftermath of the Insomnia in the process.

  The two officers are tired, laying on their backs and panting, sighing, and yawning, like two beach bums on the hottest day in recorded history. Only, it’s the fatigue, not the heat, that has them breathing heavily. Like everyone else, they haven’t been sleeping. The Insomnia doesn’t discriminate, it hits everyone equally, whether you’re wearing a uniform or not. Behind them, a sloppy, handmade sign by the church entrance reads, ‘SACRED HEART CHURCH: COME REST IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD.’

  Gerardo kills Gloria’s engine. She rattles to a halt in front of the patrol car. He pushes the driver’s side door open and hops out. One of the officers slides off the roof of their car, mustering whatever energy he’d squirreled away in those loose, drooping muscles to rise to full attention.

  “Any weapons?” he asks.

  Edu, Diana, and Gabo open their doors and step out of Gloria. Edu locks the door behind him.

  “In the truck,” Gerardo says, “we’re not bringing them inside.”

  The other officer unslings the shotgun hanging around his neck, not pointing it at anyone in particular, but not letting it droop toward the ground either. Gerardo notices this. An empty threat. These guys are guarding a church, not a militia outpost...but maybe things are worse than he thinks.

  “Gotta pay tribute,” the officer says, clearing his throat and spitting into the scuffed up asphalt. Diana scoffs, rolling her eyes, clutching the duffel bag closer, but not for reassurance or comfort. Her fingers are white with effort and anger as if the mere notion of assholes like this guarding the house of the Lord is enough to turn her blood into venom.

  Edu chuckles, walking forward casually, then his hands fly up like pistons a
nd he shoves the officer back.

  “Fuck off,” Edu spits, “you’re not the Red Eyes.”

  The other officer fiddles with his belt, finally raising a handgun and aiming it right at Edu’s forehead. His hand’s shaky and the barrel dips and fidgets from side to side, but it always stays within the confines of Edu’s head.

  This is bad. It'd take one single thought bubbling up through the muddied waters of the officer’s tired brain, and the thought will travel from that brain to that finger to that trigger and then Edu will be lying in the street with his own tired brain opened for all to see.

  Gerardo steps forward, hands up like he’s being arrested. “Sacred Heart doesn’t ask for tribute,” he says, “Father Jaime know you two are up to this?”

  The officers hesitate. They share a nervous look. This guy knows their boss. The gig’s up. The officer aiming at Edu relaxes, the finger leaving the trigger, then the arm swinging back down toward his hip.

  “That’s what I thought,” Gerardo continues, his voice raspy with lack of use and shaky with weariness, but calm and confident all the same. “We have business with the father. Let us pass.”

  The officers part, retreating to their spot on top of the patrol car. Gerardo notices there are pillows up there, with a few blankets, candy bars, and comic books of all things. He clambers up the hood of the car and hops over it, landing on the stairs on the other side. The others follow his lead until, pretty soon, they’re all walking through the front doors.

  ◆◆◆

  Sheets of all colors cover the floor. Pillows are in piles. Mattresses crowd the corners. There’s a strange sleepover vibe to it all, but it’s tinged with fear and desperation. There are more Bibles out than Gerardo can count, along with other personal items held like sacred totems: pictures of the missing or the dead, statuettes of saints and the Virgin Mary, even urns and dog collars. It looks like a bomb made out of domestic items has gone off inside the church’s foyer. Bundles of clothes, suitcases, shopping bags filled with food, shoes arranged in rows like at the doorway of a Japanese home…it exudes coziness and comfort. And tragedy. That too.