Never Wake (5 page)

Emma took a deep breath, picked up the quilt her great-grandmother had sewn, and wrapped it around herself. She wasn’t cold, but sometimes the quilt was enough to push the anxiety away.
I’m safe. I’m safe. There’s no need to be afraid
. Emma ignored the pain that shot through her knee and back as she drew her legs up. She placed her chin on her knees and closed her eyes. She hadn’t felt this anxious since her mother’s last phone call. So where was this coming from? Was it the nightmare? No, although she could guess the nature of the nightmare, she didn’t remember it. Emma gazed at the bars that covered her windows. She could have had the bars removed when she moved in; most of the other tenants in the building had and would no doubt take up a collection for her to do so, too. The bars were an eyesore, she knew, but Emma gave her realtor the excuse that they added to the mystique of living in an old factory. If you got rid of the bars, it was just any other apartment-style home. But Emma was glad of the bars for other reasons. The unease wafted over her and settled. Something was wrong.

Emma swallowed and stared at the street below, looking for the root of the dread that was stealing over her. She would not panic. What was it? There was nothing there, nothing she could see that would be giving her this odd feeling of…

Where were the trucks this morning? There were always trucks. It wasn’t a weekend or a holiday. There should be trucks delivering products to stores. Emma should hear men unloading and yelling things to each other from blocks away. She could never make out exactly what was said, but the sounds were always there in the background: doors slamming, brakes squealing, and the faintest smell of fumes. But today there was nothing but the wind. Nothing at all. Nothing.

Emma’s heart quickened. She hadn’t felt like this in… She stopped herself. That’s what was making her so uneasy. This feeling of disquiet, this warning; she hadn’t felt it in so long that it was making her jumpy.

“You’re eighteen months too late, you fucker,” she said, and then felt ridiculous at how angry she felt.

Maybe there was a strike or a parade. Emma’s mother had complained that Portland seemed to have a parade for just about everything. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they had the streets blocked off so that trucks couldn’t get through and people couldn’t park. Emma almost had herself convinced and raised her cup to her lips. She took a large calming gulp of tea that stung the roof of her mouth and the back of her throat as she swallowed. That would explain the lack of cars and even the lack of trucks. But not the complete silence. Emma leaned forward and listened harder than she ever had in her life.

She heard leaves rustling and the sound of small debris being pushed along the streets and sidewalk by a gentle breeze, and she could hear the sound of her own raspy breathing. But what she didn’t hear was the one thing that a pending parade would not curtail.

“The birds. Where the hell are all the birds?”

Portland was dark, cold, and too goddamned still. The latter bothered Troy the most. The last time the streets had felt this lifeless was when most of Portland had been glued to their TVs watching replay after replay of airplanes hitting the World Trade Center. Troy had watched it once before she hopped on Dite and rode until her legs burned as much as her chest and her tears had dried like spilled eggs at her temples.

She felt the familiar dueling emotions of joy and sorrow when she rode her bike through Southeast Main Street. She had regained her bearings as soon as she’d turned off the unpaved path leading from the hospital. In less than five minutes she could be at Mountain View Cemetery. What the hell was she doing so far past the cemetery?

Maybe I was making a delivery and I got into an accident over there.

No. Traffic was too light for it to be a weekday. Besides, Raife would never ask her to cross a bridge for a delivery when he could send one of the others. Mountain View’s gate, overgrown with ivy and tiny pink flowers, called to her over the buzz in her head. She would love to go in there and lie on the grass for a few minutes, but the niggling feeling in the back of her head made her hook a left on Southeast Twentieth Street toward the Burnside Bridge.

She wasn’t surprised when her legs began to feel rubbery and her fingertips started tingling. “Breathe, damn it,” she told herself. She squeezed the handlebars every time her right foot neared the ground and she counted under her breath. “One, two, three, four…” Her voice sounded like she had been riding for several miles instead of just a few. “Twenty…” She blew out a deep breath and continued her count. Sweat dripped down the center of her back until the elastic waistband of the scrubs stopped it. She shivered and gripped the bars tighter.
Come on, just thirty more counts. Breathe
. She interrupted her count with the command and blinked several times to keep the sweat from her eyes.

At thirty, she felt the relief that always came at the end of the bridge flood through her, and by fifty her legs had regained their strength and the prickling at her fingertips had dissipated.

For the umpteenth time, she cursed complete strangers for forcing her to do this, and for the umpteenth time, she said, “See? It’s getting easier.”

It wasn’t getting easier. Every time she crossed this bridge, any bridge, she felt the same knife-sharp surety that the concrete would disappear from beneath her tires and the water would reach up and pull her into its darkness.

With the exception of Raife, no one knew about the panic attacks. She had admitted it to him so that he would stop asking her to deliver on the east side. “Things will get better. You just need time to heal,” he had said.

Time. She had too much time. Time to think, time to remember, time to hurt. And things still hadn’t gotten any better. She hadn’t begun to heal. She wasn’t sure she wanted to if it meant she had to forget.

By the time she realized where she was going, the U.S. Bancorp Tower was already in sight. “Big Pink,” as some people called it, had the friendliest security staff in the city. It wasn’t unusual for Troy to find herself in the building at least three times on any given weekday. They would let her use their phone to call Raife. After he bit her head off for losing her cell, he would come pick her up.

Pedaling was second nature, as was her glance to the right as she made the turn onto Northwest Fifth Street. How many times had she made that same turn, only to have to throw on her brakes in order to keep from being hit by a car speeding through the yellow light?

But there was no Subaru to dodge. In fact, no cars waited at the light. She felt uncomfortable and exposed sitting in the middle of the empty street. She imagined an audible click as the light changed.

When she reached the front door of Big Pink, she lifted Dite on her shoulder. She had expected to get curious stares from people heading up to the numerous offices and financial firms that populated the building. A girl carrying a bike wasn’t unusual, but one wearing scrubs and no shoes might be. But no one was hurrying through the doors. In fact, when Troy pulled on them they didn’t budge. Whether it was a weekend, holiday, or a presidential visit, those doors were always open between six a.m. and seven p.m. Even outside of those hours, a security guard was posted at the desk.

Troy cupped her hands against the glass and peered into the darkened building. Something bad had to have happened for that many people to stay home from work. Troy tried not to notice the eerie quiet of the area, the lack of outside noise from the city. But her clenching stomach acknowledged it before she did. There was an explanation for all this. She just had to find it. She set Dite on the sidewalk and looked down at her bare feet.

Pioneer Courthouse Square. Benny and Toni F should be there right now, leaning against the wall, sipping coffee and eating something crappy.

They’ll know what happened
, she thought as she hopped on Dite and pedaled toward the square.

Troy coasted down Broadway and almost begged for a car to whip around the corner and come barreling at her. None did. The first people she came across were three young men crouched in the doorway of a stationery store. All three were leaned back, their eyes closed, and knees up as if they had been playing a game of jacks and had stopped for a nap. Troy stopped but didn’t get off Dite.

People slept in doorways a lot in Portland. Doorways meant survival—from the cold, the rain, and from steel-toed boots looking for a soft place to land. With your back against a doorway you only had to worry about danger from one side. Three teenagers huddling in a doorway hadn’t been an unusual sight in Portland in years.

But Troy knew in an instant that this was different. The store wasn’t abandoned, for one thing. At least it hadn’t been the last time she had passed it, no more than two days ago. If a homeless person were desperate enough to sleep in an occupied business’s doorway, they would be sure to leave long before start of business to avoid being hassled by police. These boys’ clothes looked too expensive for them to be homeless, though. And she could see from where she stood that all three were Asian. Most of the homeless youth that roved the city were white. Troy’s eyes were drawn to three spots of red on the ground between one of the young men’s feet. Two items she had mistaken for leaves stirred in the wind and Troy recognized that they were dollar bills. They hadn’t been playing jacks.

“Hey, ya’ll all right?” Troy called out, but no one stirred, and her voice sounded sharper and louder than it should have been. “Whatever.” She rode hard toward Pioneer Square and blew through a red light as if it were green and right past a patrol car. She slowed and turned on Dite’s seat. The balding head pressed against the car window glistened, but did not move as she rode past. She could no longer ignore her terror. She kept telling herself that there was an explanation, but she refused to think about what that explanation could be. Nor did she allow herself to wonder why she no longer felt the need to push her legs to the limit.

The Square had no fewer than ten occupants, not to mention several people waiting for the MAX train, all asleep and all very still.

Across the street, a red warning light blinked from the wall of the Fox Tower, although Troy could hear no car coming out of its parking lot. Troy rode up to a woman lying on the ground with a department store bag sitting upright next to her, as if she had just set it down before she herself ended up, inert, on the sidewalk.

Troy laid Dite down and squatted next to the bag and then moved closer to the woman. She hesitated, her fingers hovering just above the woman’s neck as she pictured the woman waking up and screaming at her for touching her. Cold air cut through the thin cotton pants as if she were wearing nothing. She shivered and placed two fingers on the side of the woman’s neck. “Oh, thank God,” she said as she found a pulse.

She stood up and knocked over the woman’s shopping bag, spilling out what looked like exercise clothing.

“Not dead. They’re not dead.” The words made her feel better, but not by much. She checked the pulses of the people lying closest to her next. A high-school-aged boy had a strong pulse, as did the older man next to him. She tried shaking the older man, but she wasn’t surprised when he didn’t wake up. Troy ran to the short wall that separated the MX shelter from the square.

“Hey, can anyone hear me?” she yelled, feeling stupid, scared, and cold. It was as if they had all decided to just lie down and take a nap. Another chill hit the back of her neck and she looked back at the people on the ground behind her.

Just as when she’d left the hospital, she half expected to see one of the lounging bodies move, unable to hold its pose, but not one did. She couldn’t remember seeing one person moving since she had awakened.

*

“Please continue to hold. Your call will be answered shortly.”

Troy pressed what had to be decades of ear grime onto her own ear, and she welcomed the contact. She even welcomed the sight of the brown paper bag that had been stuffed into a hole in the corner of the phone booth. For the last ten minutes, she had kept her eyes focused on a grayish wad of gum that had been placed so precisely on the top of the phone that she was sure its owner had intended to pop it back into his mouth after his call was finished.

“Hurry, please hurry,” she whispered into the phone. There was a small click, followed by a buzz of static. “Hello?”

The frantic quality of her own voice scared her.

Troy rested her forehead on her free hand and let a sob escape. She had thought the day couldn’t get any worse than waking up in a hospital.

“Please continue to hold…”

“Answer the call, goddamn it!” she yelled into the receiver. She was answered seconds later by the same monotone female voice repeating her promise that an operator would be with her shortly.

Dizziness swept over her and the familiar prickling began at her fingertips. She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on calming her breathing. It would do no good if she passed out.
Just think of something else
. The operators had to be dealing with thousands of calls from panicked people trying to figure out why their friends and neighbors were asleep.

“Please continue to hold. Your call will be answered shortly.”

The emergency operator would be able to tell her what to do. She just had to do as they said and continue to hold. That’s all she could do, right?

She would give anything for that bottle of vodka she had seen at the hospital. She had assumed more alcohol had been there at some point because, well, there just had to be. The punch bowl was still full, the present unopened. It looked like they had just gotten started. As wasted as those people seemed to have been, there should have been empty bottles all over the place, but there weren’t. Just the one.