'O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?'
Edgar Allan Poe 'A Dream Within a Dream'.
Lucy woke with a start at the blast of a single shotgun. Its deep, throaty boom was muffled by distance and the thick walls surrounding her, but she had heard it fire many times before and knew it well. Even as the rags of the dream slowly untangled and fell away, she wondered why. Why just one?
She pressed her right hand to the wound in her chest, sensing a powerful pain there, waiting. She didn't try to sit up. The real world held cracked ribs, failing hearts, and cold necessity. She longed to linger in the halfway state between asleep and fully awake as long as she possibly could.
Needles and childbirth. An urge to weep filled her. The surgeon had told her she wouldn't dream under the anaesthetic. Maybe the gas had gone off. Less a dream than she would have liked, with shadowy, threatening figures reaching for her in a world remade from unfamiliar shapes. Some she recognised; some she did not. The sleazy prick who'd asked for sex in exchange for a lift had been in there, for sure. In real life, he'd called her a cunt and left her behind. Three days later, she'd seen the wreck of him and his bike, picked clean, from the safety of the semitrailer she'd stowed away inside.
The pain of losing her baby was worse than anything she faced now.
Another gunshot, then two more in quick succession. The same shotgun. No voices. That was a bad sign. If the surgeon didn't check on her soon, she would try to sit up, staples be damned. She was lucky to be alive at all, her heart the way it was.
The way it had been. Their crazy plan appeared to have worked, despite all its practical impossibilities. Perhaps she had been wrong to tell them to give up on her, although anyone else would have.
"What do you think we are?" the surgeon's wife had said. "Stone-hearted?"
"But a donor--"
"The dead are innocent," the surgeon had firmly said, and that had quelled all argument. Even as he had prepped her for the table, he had refused to tell Lucy who the donor had been. "Let her remain nameless," he had said. "I'd worry more about compatibility and rejection, if I were you."
The feeling of a stone under her breast came back to her from the dream, and the old man's words came with it. "How it weighs you down..."
The shotgun blasted again, and now she could hear heavy footsteps moving through the hospital. She tried to count them. At least two sets, maybe more. Maybe many more.
Tears pricked her eyes. She clenched her fists at her sides. It wasn't fair. The fence was supposed to keep anything out, at least until they could get moving again. That's what they'd promised her. "When you're eating and walking," the surgeon had told her, "we'll consider leaving. Not before."
She wished now that she had never come to them, that she had taken the vile ride offered by the biker and been killed with him instead. Her dicky heart had cost enough life already--the baby, for one, and very nearly her own. That's where the count should have ended. Now there was just one gun, which meant just one person left to fight, and she had dreamed right through it. She should have killed herself and spared them all.
It wasn't over yet. With a shuddering groan, she forced herself upright. The pain was unbelievable, but this was how she would meet her fate. With her eyes open, knowing what she had done.
One final blast, and then a door crashed open nearby, deafeningly loud. A thunder-roll of feet poured into the room next to hers. The handle to Lucy's door rattled.
Her heart--her new heart--convulsed in her chest.
When the first of the outsiders burst in, Lucy recognised her immediately. It was Leah, the girl who had helped get Lucy out of Sydney--but at the same time Leah from the dream and more recent times, pale-skinned and sick-eyed, with wet blood on her chin and a terrible hole where her chest should be.
Behind Leah, the ghastly tide wavered.
"That's right," Lucy told the outsiders, only half-lying. "I'm one of you."
Leah stared as though in recognition but said nothing. Despite the wound, she was still standing--and eating and walking, like everyone outside the fence. Like Lucy would have been, once her new heart became truly part of her--either way--thanks to Siekan & Sorien Pharmaceuticals, and the virus, and the accident.
Leah and the rest of her kind considered their options. Then slowly they began to retreat, shuffling and rocking from side to side. They would wander off in search of other prospects elsewhere, Lucy knew, now the compound was empty of fresh human hosts. But that was a small consolation.
Leah was the last to leave. Did she really recognise Lucy, or did the connection run far deeper than that? The hole in her chest was cleaner than anything a shotgun could make, and there was a wounded innocence in those eyes.
Lucy fell like a dead thing back onto the bed.
The surgeon had been right. It would've been far better never to know.
(Sean Williams)
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