Short Story: Perchance to Dream
Jack McKinney emerged from the theater and took a deep breath. The air was heavy with the damp, earthy smell that only came to the city after an extended rain. Wendy and Kendra lagged behind, still laughing over the movie.
Though it had been clearing before they entered the theater, the sky was now an ominous gray. Jack sighed.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, stooping to look his daughter in the eye. “No swinging in the rain.”
Kendra looked at him with wisdom only a five-year-old can possess. “S’okay, Daddy.”
Jack tousled Kendra’s hair and looked up at his wife. He felt like his heart would burst. Wendy was far more than beautiful; she was radiant.
“What is it, Jack?” Wendy’s voice was low and sweet. It flowed like a gentle stream, lifting Jack’s spirits to a higher level than he thought possible.
“Nothing, honey. Let’s go home.”
Jack walked to the curb and pressed a button on the lamppost. Traffic was terrible on the avenue at this time of day.
The brilliant white icon of a walking man flashed on across the street and Jack stepped from the curb. His foot disappeared into a puddle. Under normal circumstances, he would have sworn, but he tried to keep his language clean in front of Kendra.
“Jack!” Wendy screamed, but it was already too late. The truck skidded across the pavement as the driver struggled to keep the behemoth under control.
The bumper of the truck caught Jack in the hip, shattering almost every bone below his waist. He screamed, the force of the impact throwing him into a crumpled heap on the sidewalk. His lower body throbbed with each beat of his raging heart. The pain was incredible.
As he tumbled into darkness, a wailing entreaty echoed from storefront to storefront.
“Daddy!”
—
The darkness was suffocating. Jack’s lungs burned with the need to breathe, but breath would not come. He seemed to be paralyzed, unable to move as he fell toward an expanding light on the horizon.
Jack woke up gagging, his nostrils burned with the overpowering stench of ammonia. He blinked frantically, trying to clear the tears from his vision.
“Relax, Mr. McKinney. It takes a moment or two to come around.” Jack turned his head and saw the nurse standing beside the bed. She tossed the crushed ampoule into the trash bin and walked into the corridor, disappearing from view.
The heart monitor beside his bed increased in tempo. Why couldn’t he feel his legs?
Jack strained to sit up but failed. He was bound to the bed at his wrists and ankles. Why?
A buxom young nurse stepped into the room, making notes on her clipboard. She checked several instruments and reset the heart monitor. Jack’s heart hammered against his ribs as she turned to leave.
“Wait! Why can’t I feel my legs? Why am I tied down? Where is my wife?”
“The doctor will be with you shortly.”
“What do you mean?” Jack’s fingernails dug into his palms. “I need to know now!”
“The doctor will explain everything to you, Mr. McKinney.”
“Wait!” He screamed as the nurse exited his room. “Please!”
The restraints bit into Jack’s wrists as he struggled to free himself. Tears of frustration streamed down his cheeks and he sank back into the bed. A cold lump of despair settled into the pit of his stomach.
He was a prisoner, both to the restraints and to his own mind. All he could think about what the anguished cry of his daughter.
Minutes turned into hours. He waited what seemed like an eternity for someone else to come to his room, but no one came. Claustrophobia overtook him and he set out to find a way to keep his mind busy.
Jack settled for predicting when the automatic antiseptic system in the corner of the room would fire. He became quite good at it, able to predict the release down to the second.
Sleep had just begun to creep up on him when he heard footsteps approaching his room. Jack sat up as much as the restraints would allow. He was going to get some answers this time, even if he had to scream bloody murder to do it.
A stout man in a pristine white lab coat entered the room. He had an expensive looking leather attaché tucked under one arm and moved with a stiffness that betrayed him as a doctor.
He was older, with beady black eyes that peered out from under thick, shaggy eyebrows. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses. They had to be for appearance, as vision correction was done at birth. An unkempt moustache lay under his nose like the specter of a dead field mouse.
Jack winced as the doctor pulled a chair beside the bed, causing the metal legs to make a horrid screech on the tile floor. The older man seated himself, regarding Jack for a long moment before speaking.
“Mr. McKinney. I am Doctor Fowler. I’m the resident psychiatrist here at the hospital. We need to talk.”
“What do I need a shrink for? I need a real doctor to tell me what’s going on with my legs and someone to tell me where my wife and kid are. Can you do any of that?”
Fowler sighed, folding his hands in his lap.
“Mr. McKinney, I’m afraid you don’t understand the situation. I’ll do my best to explain.
You are not who you believe you are. In reality, you are suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain induced by a traumatic dream event.
“You want to run that by me again? In words I can understand?”
“Let me ask you a question first. What is the last thing you remember before waking up here?”
“My daughter screaming.”
“Quite impossible, Mr. McKinney. You don’t have a daughter. You aren’t even married.”
Cold sweat broke out all of Jack’s body. What was Fowler talking about? Of course he was married! “You don’t know what you’re talking about. We went to the movies this afternoon!”
Fowler rubbed his temples with his fingertips.
“There is no easy way to tell you this, Mr. McKinney. You are not who you think you are. You are a convicted felon serving a life sentence at the Greater Baltimore Incarceration Facility. After your trial you were placed in a deep-sleep capsule to serve out your sentence.
Everything that you think you know is all a dream. An unfortunate mistake, but a dream nonetheless.”
Jack leaned back as a wave of nausea passed through his body. Fowler was lying. He had to be.
“No way. Whatever you’re trying to pull isn’t going to work. I have a good job and a family. I’ve never been convicted of anything in my life.
Even if I believed you about my identity, which I don’t, you’re still lying about the capsule. I remember when the funding bill was passed for the first deep-sleep prison. Part of the charter was that people would age without dreaming. It was supposed to be a humane alternative to the death penalty.”
“Mistakes do happen.” Fowler couldn’t have looked more insincere if he had tried. “There was a computer glitch on your capsule. A software error prevented the control module on your tank from suppressing your dreams. The result was a dream that has lasted, more or less, for the past ten years. We only detected the problem after your body reacted to the trauma in your dream. Now that you are awake, your mind is having trouble adjusting. Or, more precisely, your mind isn’t adjusting.”
Jack scowled. He felt like himself. He didn’t feel like someone who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in a deep-sleep. Jack stopped short; too many thoughts were buzzing inside his head.
How had he come up with murder? Fowler hadn’t said anything about the nature of the felony, only that he had been serving a life sentence. Maybe it was a natural assumption, an intuitive leap from murder to a life sentence. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t.
“So what you’re telling me is that I’ve been living a dream for the past ten years, and now my mind believes that the dream is reality. That about right?”
“That is exactly right. Now we must move forward to try and correct the damage caused by this incident.”
“And how do you propose we move forward?” Jack felt the warmth of blood flow to his face.
“Well, we’ll start by moving you to a secure facility where we can better suit your needs. We obviously won’t be putting you back into deep-sleep. We’ve already started you on a regimen of drugs to help you sleep without dreaming.”
“Without dreaming? A human being can’t live without dreams. This is my life you’re talking about!”
“Listen, Mr. McKinney. This is not your life. Your life ended fourteen years ago when you murdered a man outside a bar. Your life ended the day that they put you in a capsule, not to be removed until your body was too old to survive on its own. This is not your life, it is a dream.”
Jack’s stomach lurched at the finality in Fowler’s voice. Was it true? Was all that he felt, his wife, his child, all of it, really a dream? Bile rose in his throat and he choked it back. This had to be some kind of a sick joke.
“I’m not the man you think I am,” Jack said softly, staring at the plain white sheet. “The Jack McKinney you know may have died that day, but I’m not him.”
“I can’t say that I know how you feel, Mr. McKinney. I can’t say that I would want to know how you feel. We’ll speak again in the morning.”
Fowler rose and started to walk toward the door.
“Wait,” Jack called after him. “What about the restraints?”
The doctor turned, his eyes glittering under the fluorescent lights.
“You’re a convicted felon, Mr. McKinney, no matter how you feel about it. The restraints are for your protection as well as ours.”
Folwer stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Jack imagined that the sound was similar to a coffin lid being shut. It was the same thing.
Jack struggled against the bonds for an hour and then gave up.
Trapped in a world that was not his own, under the pretenses of a man who he no longer was, Jack McKinney was truly alone.
As the night passed, feeling returned to his legs. The tingle he felt was almost maddening. By the time his eyes got heavy, he could move his feet.
Jack slept, but he did not dream.
—
Fowler arrived the next morning with two armed guards. They looked exactly alike in every detail, from the dull gray uniform to the opaque visors they wore over their faces. Each toted an ugly laser carbine slung over one shoulder. These men meant business.
“Good morning, Mr. McKinney.” Fowler smiled, then apparently decided that it didn’t fit and put it away. “The attending tells me that you are strong enough to be moved. That said, we’re going to transport you to a secure hospital where we can work out your problems.”
“I think I’ve got more problems than your hospital can ever touch.”
“Well, be that as it may, I think it’s time we get you into a more stable environment.”
“You don’t mean more stable. You mean more controlled. I might be living in a dream world, but I’m not stupid.”
“On the contrary. You’ve proven yourself quite intelligent.” Fowler turned to one of the guards. “Let’s get him off the bed and into some mobile restraints.”
The guard handed his carbine to his counterpart and approached the bed. Fowler polished his glasses on the hem of his lab coat.
As the guard unfastened the first restraint, a thought slithered through the back of Jack’s mind. It was dark and slimy, something he never would have considered under normal circumstances.
The guard moved to the opposite side of the bed, freeing his other arm. Jack’s heart skipped a beat, his anxiety echoed on the monitor beside him. Doctor Fowler glanced up, confusion rippling through his features.
His arms free, Jack rubbed his wrists. They hadn’t secured him yet. They didn’t know he had regained the use of his legs.
Jack’s pulse began to race as the guard approached his feet.
What had it felt like to kill so long ago?
The guard freed Jack’s left foot.
Drawing on a reserve of evil he hadn’t realized he possessed, Jack swung his foot into the guard’s helmet. Pain shot up his leg, but he ignored it. Jack lunged for the last restraint, tearing it free. Ripping the electrodes from his body, he dropped to the floor.
The second guard, startled at the sudden turn of events, struggled to aim one of the two weapons at his prisoner. Fowler stood in the doorway, his jaw working silently.
Grabbing the carbine from the shocked guard, Jack reversed it and brought the stock down on the man’s helmet. A satisfying crack filled the room and the man fell to the floor.
Jack flipped the weapon in his hands, surprised at the familiar feel of the cold weapon. Military training, long suppressed by a dream, bubbled to the surface. Technology had changed in the past ten years, but a gun was a gun. He thumbed a switch on the grip and the whine of a capacitor charging pierced his eardrum. Fowler took a step out the door.
“Move an inch, Fowler, and you’re a dead man.”
Jack brought the weapon in a low arc, firing a shot into each of the guards on the floor. Even in his extreme, Jack felt his stomach turn at the murders. He might have been a killer once, might even still have had some of those instincts inside him, but it was no longer what he was.
The doctor flinched at the sound of the shots, but did not run. Jack stepped up behind him, pressing the tip of the charged carbine into the small of his back.
“Know what, Doc? I’m not real interested in getting my world straightened out. I want to go back to my wife and kid and live the rest of my normal life. You can do that. You can make sure they put me back in the capsule and let me dream.”
“Well, I don’t…”
“You can do it,” Jack screamed, his nerves reaching the breaking point. He jabbed the gun into Fowler’s back, forcing the doctor to stumble forward. “You can do it, can’t you, Doc?”
“Yes, I can do it.”
“Good.” Jack was close to tears. His entire world rested on the shoulders of a hostage, and even a reasonable man could understand how dangerous a position that was. “Let’s move.”
Fowler took a step forward and stopped, craning his head over his shoulder to try and catch a glimpse of his captor.
“You know that this might not work, right? You know that we can put you back in the capsule but you might not enter the dream where you left off, if ever.”
“I’m willing to take the chance.”
Fowler sighed, his gut heaving. “I thought you might be.”
As they walked into the hallway, an alert nurse ran to the wall and slapped a panic button. An alarm sounded, its rhythmic wail an odd comfort to Jack’s taught nerves.
People rushed into the hallway to see what was going on, but as soon as they saw the carbine they disappeared. These people worked in a hospital; they knew what kind of damage a charged laser weapon could do to the human body. They did not wish to witness it first hand.
Security arrived as Jack and Fowler reached the elevator. The doctor made a strangled noise in the back of his throat as the squad leader raised his weapon.
“Let him go, McKinney. We’ve got the building locked down, there’s no place to go.”
“There is always someplace to go.” Jack’s finger traveled the weapon, finding a small knob by instinct alone. As he turned the knob, the frequency of the whine increased, climbing ever higher on the scale of audible sound. “I’ve got the carbine on overload. If it goes off, it’ll take most of this floor with it. Back off.”
“All units, fallback,” the squad leader grunted into his headset. Even the toughest security leader would be hard pressed to justify the deaths of a thousand people.
The Security squad moved from the elevator as Jack and his hostage passed through the door. Fowler punched the button for the garage without being asked.
The doctor was beginning to look pained, as if he had just come to terms with the fact that he might not live through this ordeal. Jack turned the knob back to a normal level and the overload charge dissipated with a loud crack.
The doctor shuttered and Jack noticed a wet spot forming at the junction between Fowler’s legs.
“Relax, Doc. You’re the only guy who can get me home. Without you, I’m already a corpse.”
“The thought is somewhat less than a comfort, Mr. McKinney.”
“I know. I’m sorry, but as you said, I’m sort of living in a dream world.”
The elevator door opened to the empty parking garage. They stepped out into the dim light of aging spotlights.
An impressive array of soldiery stood behind hastily constructed barricades. The garage was underground. Security could force a confrontation here and win.
A bomb squad truck sat off to one side, perched high atop its tracked undercarriage. Jack was sure that it had been prepared in the event that he left the carbine on overload.
Jack stopped just outside the elevator. His time had come. This was where he would make his stand. Somewhere in the distance a megaphone squealed.
“The game’s up, McKinney. You can’t win. Let Fowler go and we’ll try to meet your demands.”
“You’ve done good, Doc.” Jack spun Fowler to face him, pressing the barrel of the gun into his ample belly. “I guess I have to do the rest of this alone.”
“You’re not…”
“No. I’m not going to kill you.” Jack looked at the soldiers, a sardonic smile spreading across his face. “I’d advise you to duck.”
“Why do this?” Fowler’s eyes searched Jack’s face.
“This isn’t my world. My world is only a dream, and it’s the only place I can be happy. They would never let me survive, even if you put me back into a capsule.” Jack’s smile disappeared. “But maybe I can find my way home on my own.”
Shoving Fowler aside, Jack whirled and raised his gun, as if he intended to fire into the crowd. The solders’ response was predictable and immediate.
The troops fired at him. Rays of ruby light streaked through the air, pummeling his body.
The world seemed to catch on fire.
Pain.
Agony.
Darkness.
—
Jack McKinney woke to the soft sounds of mechanical equipment in the background. A variety of buzzes and beeps fell on his ears, confusing him for a moment. He was aware of the distinct odor of antiseptic and could hear a hospital air freshener on automatic release.
Tears appeared in his eyes and consciousness overtook him. His lower body felt as if a cheese grater was working the nerve endings there. Jack forced his eyes to focus, staring at the plain walls of his hospital room.
A buxom young nurse stepped into the room, a clipboard tucked under one arm.
“You’re awake. Good. There are some people here who would like to see you, Mr. McKinney.”
Jack McKinney let the tears run unchecked down his face. Wendy stood in the doorway, Kendra’s hand clasped tightly in her own.
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