Awake Read online

  Awake

  by Matthew Blake

  Copyright © Matthew Blake 2013

  This story is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  It was on the day that he got his diagnosis that Lee first saw the demon.

  He had been having trouble sleeping for three months before he finally made the appointment. He’d always avoided the doctor’s office, as though he wouldn’t have anything if the doctor didn’t tell him he did. Only when he had gone seventy-two hours without sleeping had he hesitantly made the appointment. No matter how hard he’d tried to get to sleep, he just couldn’t.

  It had taken him so long to decide that something was wrong because since he had been a teenager, he had always gone through periods of sleeplessness. If he had something important to do the next day like a test, or an early shift at a job, he would never fall asleep easily. He’d toss and turn for what seemed like an eternity, getting only a few hours of sleep when he finally did pass out. When the sleeplessness had come back again, he’d figured it was just stress, keeping him up like it had before.

  But then it had started happening every night, regardless of whether or not he felt stressed. That wasn’t completely strange to him, but usually a few drinks would fix it in those cases. That no longer worked. No matter what was happening or how much he drank, he would toss and turn for ages, and when he finally did get some relief he could only stay asleep for a few hours, about five at the very most.

  Thankfully, he was self-employed and fairly successful, or else he didn’t think he could have continued to make a living. His energy and productivity had declined rapidly as his sleep dwindled. He was a writer and could normally easily write three books a year. At the rate he was going now, though, he would be lucky to finish the current book he was working on before New Year’s. If it wasn’t for the royalties from his past books and the money he had saved up, he would have been in serious trouble.

  It all culminated one morning, when he had woken from yet another night of bad sleep and sat himself in front of his computer to write as usual, a steaming cup of coffee next to him. The next thing he knew, it was noon and he had neither any words written nor any idea where the time had gone. His coffee was still sitting on the desk, the cup full, but cold as ice.

  And so he picked up the phone right then and there and called Dr. Siegel to make an appointment. He hadn’t been to the doctor’s office for a while, so it had taken the receptionist a few minutes to find his records and set the date for the checkup.

  He had to wait a few more days for his appointment, though he was finally able to sleep again, if only for a few hours at a time, though he started to have nightmares during the few hours of sleep he got each night, which made things even worse.

  The nightmares were always variations of the same thing: he’d be doing something regular, something he always did, when suddenly a red demon would appear next to him and motion for him to follow it. He couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like, just that it was a demon and that every time it beckoned him, he would turn and run, filled with a terror unlike any he’d felt before.

  By the time his appointment came around, he’d gotten about five hours of sleep over the course of three days. He had almost no energy and could concentrate on nothing. He prayed that the doctor would be able to give him some relief from his condition.

  The bus ride to the hospital, the paperwork he filled out and the time he spent waiting for the doctor went by in a blur. Why do they always make you wait when you set an appointment with them, but you can’t be late yourself, he’d always wondered. He could hardly remember any of it. He was on autopilot, only halfway human and going through the motions, while the rest of his brain tried to shut itself down from lack of sleep.

  Finally, he was in the exam room with Dr. Siegel. The doctor gave him a full physical, with all the normal depressors and uncomfortable probing that it entailed. Not to mention the uncomfortably personal questions about his sexual history and activity.

  “Well Mr. Fenton, I’m thinking that this could just be a regular case of insomnia. It can be caused by stress or a multitude of other factors. I’m going to write you a prescription for a sleeping aid and we’ll see if that helps,” the doctor said when he’d finished with the regular testing. “The only thing that worries me is that I see that a few of your relatives have died from FFI, your grandfather and an uncle?”

  “Yes, though I was really young when it happened. I don’t know much about the disease except for the abbreviation, Mom didn’t like to talk about it,” Lee said.

  “I see. Well FFI stands for Fatal Familial Insomnia. It is a prion disease that causes the sufferer to experience a particularly strong case of insomnia,” Dr. Siegel said, with clinical coolness. It was like he was describing the flu, he was so casual in talking about a disease that Lee could potentially have. “It tends to run in families, so I want to take some blood samples from you to check for that and a few other things.”

  “Wait,” Lee said, “you’re saying that my grandpa and Uncle Josh died from insomnia? I’ve never heard of a disease like that.”

  “Well I don’t know about their particular cases, but it’s almost certain that’s how they died. The disease is a terminal one. Don’t worry though, it’s still rare even for those with a genetic predisposition. I’m just doing the test as a precaution.”

  “I see,” Lee said. “How long will it take to find out the results from the test?”

  “Oh, it won’t be too long,” Dr. Siegel said. “Our lab has been a bit slow lately, so only a week at the most I’d think.”

  He wanted to ask more about the disease, but didn’t. The doctor told him to make a follow-up appointment for the next week with his secretary, and directed him where to go for the blood work before wishing him a good day and went on to his next patient. Lee had his blood drawn, filled his prescription at the pharmacy, and then took the bus home, even more light-headed than he had been before.

  Over the next week, things went okay. Lee pushed the possibility of having the disease out of his mind and concentrated on his writing. The sleeping pills helped and with them he could sometimes get five or six hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. The rest helped him recover enough that he was able to write halfway decently again, which made him feel a lot better.

  Though he was moderately rested on the day of his follow-up appointment, he felt anxious the moment he woke up at four in the morning. He tried to write, but his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t type. He had a horrible certainty that the results weren’t going to be good. He tried to reason with himself, but he couldn’t shake the feeling and it put him in a state of near-panic.

  When it was almost time fo
r his appointment he could hardly function. He didn’t trust himself to drive in the state he was in, so once again he walked down the block to the bus stop. Seattle had one of the few decent bus systems in America and he enjoyed taking the bus from time to time.

  After paying the fare, he headed to the very back of the bus and took a seat. He knew that with his slightly strange behavior and the dark circles around his eyes, he seemed like a crazy person and he didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. Knowing he had a half an hour ride ahead of him, he leaned his head against the window and tried to get some sleep.

  It didn’t work. Ever since he had been a kid he had found it easy to fall asleep on buses, but no longer, it seemed. For the rest of the ride he alternated between glancing around the bus and staring out the window, seeing nothing in his daze. He almost missed his stop, but several other people were also getting off at the hospital and while they were shuffling off the bus he came to and realized it was his stop too.

  He didn’t have to do any more paperwork or sit around waiting for Dr. Siegel. As soon as he walked in and identified himself to the receptionist she ushered him into a back room, which put him even more on edge. The doctor came in a few minutes later.

  “Well Lee, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your results came back positive for FFI,” Dr. Siegel said, getting right to the point. Lee supposed that maybe the doctor didn’t want to waste Lee’s time now that it was officially limited.

  Lee sat, staring at the doctor blankly, blinking his eyes and trying to process what was happening, while the doctor gave him a concerned, sympathetic look. He wanted to have had misheard Dr. Siegel, but he knew he hadn’t. He had the disease that had taken his grandfather and uncle before he had turned five. It was almost a relief to know for sure.

  “What… what are the options now?” Lee finally asked.

  “Well, like I told you last week the disease is terminal,” Dr. Siegel said, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t treatments. You said that the sleeping aid we gave you last week was helping, so we’ll keep you on those and give you a couple of other ones on top of them. They will probably start to lose their effectiveness, but if you rotate them it may help them to work longer. As each one stops being effective we will give you a different prescription and see if any of them do anything.

  “You’re also going to want to eat a healthy diet. This disease is rare so there isn’t a lot of information on it, but those who were able to keep a good diet seemed to have… done better than those that didn’t, though of course the end result was the same.”

  “How long do I have, exactly?” Lee asked, wanting to know what he had to work with.

  “Well, like I said, there isn’t a lot of information on the disease, but by our best guess the prognosis is between five months to a year,” Dr. Siegel said. “I’m really sorry about this, giving this kind of news is the worst part about the job.”

  “And there’s no chance I can survive it?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry, but every known case of FFI has resulted in death.”

  Lee wasn’t sure what else he talked about with the Doctor after that. The rest of the appointment was a blur as Lee realized that he was going to die. And he was going to die soon.

  Somehow he scheduled another follow-up appointment in two weeks’ time, and filled his new prescriptions at the pharmacy, though he didn’t remember it. The next thing he remembered, he was riding the bus home.

  He tried to sleep on the bus, but found it to be just as impossible as before. Giving up, he sat up and looked across the aisle. The demon from his dreams was sitting right there in the sideways seats near the front of the bus that were reserved for the disabled and the elderly. It was reading a newspaper.

  It looked a lot like a man, albeit a very large one. It was even wearing a neat black suit. What set it apart was its blood red skin and its horrible, hideous head and face. It had long horns coming out of its forehead that swept back like a gazelle’s. There were large tusks in its lower jaw that jutted out from its mouth and its yellow eyes were almost the same color as the golden ring through its nose, the kind a warthog has so that it won’t dig its way out of a pen. The newspaper the beast was reading was entitled The Pandemonium Screamer. As if it sensed his gaze, the demon looked up from the newspaper and returned Lee’s stare.

  Lee gave a startled cry, and the other passengers looked at him. They followed his gaze to see what he had alarmed him, but to his amazement no one else seemed to be able to see the creature and they looked at him with furrowed brows, muttering things about him. He heard a woman say something along the lines that they “…shouldn’t let the freaks on the bus”.

  Thinking that maybe he was experiencing some sort of hallucination from not getting enough sleep, Lee stared out the window and tried to forget about the demon. Each time he looked up though, the creature was still sitting there, reading its paper.

  The bus stopped; the demon folded up its newspaper and got off. As the bus drove away, the thing turned and stared at Lee from the sidewalk , its yellow eyes seeming to see into his soul. Just when it was almost out of sight, it pointed at him with a long, clawed, red finger.

  As he rode the rest of the way home, Lee tried to convince himself that he hadn’t seen anything, but he couldn’t do it. Even if the others on the bus hadn’t been able to see it, it had seemed so real. It had been chasing him in his nightmares and now that he wasn’t sleeping enough it had somehow figured out how to come into his waking world, his delusional mind told him.

  By the time he arrived back home he was feeling the overwhelming desire to run, to get as far away from Seattle and Washington as he could. He was convinced that the creature from the bus was after him and he had to get away from it.

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. Even if he was just imagining the whole thing, he might get to travel some before he died. He most likely had less than a year left, possibly only a few months. He’d always told himself he’d travel one day.

  He wouldn’t be able to leave right away, he knew. He’d have to get some stuff together first. He had a substantial sum of money, and a steady income coming in from his books, but many of his assets were tied up in retirement accounts and investments. He’d have to cash those out; he wasn’t going to need a retirement fund anymore. With no children and only a few relatives, all of whom could fend for themselves, he could cash out all of his accounts and have a large sum to play with.

  It made him sad that he only had a year at the most to spend what he had saved up so diligently to get him by for the rest of his life, but it also made him strangely excited. He hadn’t planned it to go like this, to be sure, but at least he could live it up for the time he had left.

  He decided to do it. He’d almost forgotten about the demon sighting that sparked the idea, he was so excited. In all his life, he had only managed to go to Canada twice, Idaho a few times, and California and Oregon once, both states on the same road trip. He was usually too nervous to travel, even when his agent would beg him to go out and do publicity tours in the early days of his writing career. For some strange reason, his public shyness had contributed to Lee’s success at least as much as the publicity tours would have. People loved an eccentric — though he hadn’t been aiming to be one.

  Over the next few days, he cashed out his accounts, sold his stocks and bonds, and transferred everything to his main bank account. At first, both his accountant and stockbroker had protested and tried to talk him out of his plans, but when he explained his illness they were understanding, sympathetic even. It would take a while for all of the stocks to be sold and the accounts to be transferred over, they said, but they’d take care of that part. He was good to go as far as his finances were concerned. Everything went smoothly.

  The next matter was his transportation. He was originally thinking he’d take his car and stay at hotels along the way, but after giving it some thought realized that with his condition
it would be best if he could sleep any time he wanted to, and not have to rely on finding a hotel every night. “An RV would be perfect for that,” he said to himself one night, as he sat in his study, the idea coming to him out of nowhere. He knew he wouldn’t be able to drive much as his condition worsened though, so he’d need a driver too.

  He knew the perfect person. Ben Hall was Lee’s closest (though not exactly close) friend in the world, and the only person he spoke to with any regularity. He and Ben had gone to high school together, and since they’d both ended up in Seattle after college they’d hung out sporadically.

  He’d last spoken to Ben a week before his first doctor’s appointment, a late-night phone call he made on a sleepless night. Ben had mentioned that he was having trouble finding work in his field (big surprise, with a philosophy degree), and wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to pay his bills. Lee had offered to help him out, but Ben stubbornly refused.

  Lee didn’t think he’d refuse a job though, especially when Lee told him it would only be for the last months of his life. He picked up the phone on the study desk and dialed Ben’s number.

  “Shit man, that’s awful. I’d want to drive across the country if that was happening to me too,” Ben said after Lee told him about the disease and the plan, asking for his help. “I’ll do it, I’d be happy to help you with the driving. It sounds like a cool trip, and I don’t have anything going on, anyhow. Besides, I want to hang out with you before… you know.”

  “Thanks,” Lee said. “I’ll of course cover your rent and expenses while we’re gone, and I’ll pay you for your time on top of that.”

  “Sounds good to me. When are we doing this?”

  Almost before Lee knew it, he and Ben were at Reinhold RVs to buy the vehicle that would take him on the last trip of his life. Money wasn’t an issue, so they only looked at the highest-end RVs. If it was going to be his house for the rest of his days, he wanted the rig to be a comfortable one. They toured the inside of several RVs with a smarmy salesman, as if there were any other kind, and test drove a few.