Awake Read online

  The demon was on the other side of the restaurant, smiling a hideous grin of satisfaction. It was already getting up from its table. Ivy screamed so loudly that Lee’s ear that was pointing towards her hurt like someone had jabbed a freshly-sharpened pencil into the canal.

  Not thinking about anything other than getting away, Lee grabbed Ivy’s arm and made for the door. He didn’t have to tug her as she was already a step ahead.

  “Is there something wrong,” the hostess asked as they flew by her desk. They just kept going.

  29

  They threw the doors open and burst out into the night. Lee had just enough of his mind left to notice that the earlier humidity had completely disappeared, giving way to a withering dryness. Still holding hands, they sprinted for the RV across the street. A car driving down the road screeched to a halt, just shy of hitting them as they blindly crossed the road. The driver rolled down his window and yelled something at them, but they were already too far away to hear him.

  When they got to the RV Lee let go of Ivy’s hand and fumbled open the door so fast that he skidded on the gravel and fell on his side. Hopping up in an instant, he ran into the rig with Ivy right behind him. “Go now! Go NOW,” Ivy yelled as he hopped into the driver’s seat. Not inclined to disagree, Lee jammed the keys into the ignition and pulled out as fast as he could get the RV to go.

  He scanned around for the demon as he pulled out onto the street. At the last second, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye and stopped just shy of hitting Ben and Stella, crossing the street in front of the rig. Lee almost drove off without them, but after a split second he blared the horn and motioned for them to hurry and hop in.

  As Ben and Stella were getting in the side door the demon came out of the restaurant. It pointed at Lee and leered. “Jump in already!” Lee yelled, moving the vehicle out of the parking lot while Ben still only had one foot inside the door.

  “Fuck man!” Ben said as he leapt the rest of the way into the moving RV.

  “What the hell is going on, do you guys know that guy in the costume or something?” Stella said.

  “Yeah, what the fuck?” Ben said. “The hostess said they’d have to call the police if we left without paying for our drinks and appetizers right when I saw you start up the RV and start backing up, so I just threw my card on her table and we ran out to catch you guys before you took off without us.”

  Neither Lee nor Ivy answered. When they were a couple of blocks away from the restaurant he saw the Diablo parked on the side of the street. For the first time he noticed the license plate on the back of it. It was blood red with white letters that spelled out OTHRSDE. It had no state listed or registration tags, nothing but the letters. Lee picked up the speed of the RV up to ten over the posted limit.

  “If you don’t tell me what’s going on I’m going to freak out,” Stella said as they left the town limits.

  “There’s no way to explain it without you thinking I’m crazy,” Lee said.

  “Well don’t you think that could be a sign then?” Ben said

  “It wasn’t a hallucination, you guys saw it too,” Ivy murmured in a dazed voice. Lee glanced at her and saw that she was on the verge of losing it. He took his right hand off the wheel and placed it on her thigh. She grabbed it with both hands so hard that her nails pressed into him painfully, but he didn’t care.

  “Saw what? That guy in the devil costume? Yeah it was a really creepy and realistic costume, but it didn’t call for you screaming in the middle of the restaurant and running out,” Stella said.

  “It wasn’t a guy in a costume,” Lee said. “I’ve been seeing it ever since this trip began. Before it began, actually. Even if it were a guy in a costume I think that him following us across the country would be enough reason to be scared.”

  “Wow, you’ve lost your goddamned mind. And convinced Ivy to go along with your craziness,” Stella yelled. She was practically screaming, her voice was so loud, but he kept his eyes on the road.

  “Stella,” Ben said. There was something odd in his voice.

  “No, this is not alright!” Stella said, turning to Ben. “When we saw you guys in Montana and found out he who he was, we thought it would be great to come along. Now it turns out he’s a nut job and he’s making Ivy crazy.”

  “Stella, look out the fucking window,” Ben said quietly. Startled, Lee took his eyes off the road and glanced around. He noticed it immediately, his already near-mindless terror taking on a new height. Ivy hadn’t noticed it yet, but she would.

  “I swear to god, the next stop we make I’m getting off, and Ivy you’d better come with me or I’m going to call the police. You can come too if you want Ben, but we’re getting away from your friend. He’s lost it.”

  “Stella. Look. Out. The. FUCKING WINDOW!” Ben practically screamed. Lee had never heard him talk in that tone in all the years he’d known him.

  Stella started to say something else, but then glanced out the window and stopped talking for a full minute, trying to process what she was seeing. Ivy was looking around too. She noticed before Stella, giving a startled cry. A few seconds later Stella followed with a scream.

  They were no longer in New England. They were on a highway that went through a black forest of tree-like things that had no business being on Earth. The forest was filled with creatures; he could see shadows moving , shaking the trees. Something about it felt strangely familiar to him, but Lee couldn’t think clearly enough to recall why.

  The road had changed color too. What had been light gray concrete had turned into a pitch-black, shiny substance that resembled obsidian. A maroon sign came up, and Lee squinted to read it before he sped past it. In white letters in a font that he didn’t recognize - which was unusual, considering he usually recognized all of them - it read:

  Pandemonium: 333 Miles

  You won’t ever leave!

  “Lee, what the fuck is happening!?” Ben said. Stella’s scream had descended into a hyperventilating sob. Ivy was gripping Lee’s right hand so hard that he could feel blood trickling from where her nails had broken his skin.

  “I don’t fucking know, don’t you think I’d tell you if I did?” he hissed.

  “I’m… going to sit down,” Ben said.

  “Do,” Lee said. He did a mirror check and saw headlights coming up behind them. He knew it was the demon. Already doing seventy, he picked up the speed, pushing the engine to its limit, a little over eighty. Where are you going to go to, Pandemonium? There’s no escape, he thought wildly.

  “Ivy, I’ve got to focus on driving. It’s behind us,” he said, shaking his hand loose from her grip and clutching the wheel as tightly as he could in both hands, the blood on his palm making his right grip slightly slippery.

  “Lee, you’ve got to do something,” Ivy said as she glanced into her mirror, eyes wide with fear.

  Lee tried to snap out of his own overwhelming fear as best he could and think of something. What the hell can I do, turn around? Where would that lead to? A strange hybrid of a spider and a coyote darted across the road in front of the RV, barely avoiding being mown down. Lee didn’t even try to swerve.

  “I just… would like to know what’s going on,” Ben said from the back. Stella was still sobbing, now into Ben’s shoulder.

  Stella rose up from her sobbing and looked out the window cautiously, screaming again and yelling “We’re going to die, we’re going to fucking die!”

  The headlights were only a hundred feet behind the RV now. Lee knew there was no way the rig could outrun the Diablo.

  “He’s in that car behind us, isn’t he?” Ivy asked, suddenly sounding almost calm and rational. Resigned, even.

  “I think so.”

  “I want you to know that no matter what happens I love you and don’t regret any of this.”

  Lee took his eyes off the road and looked Ivy in the eyes. “I love you too,” he said sincerely.

  He snapped his eyes back to the road. The forest was disappear
ing, giving way to plains filled with houses and buildings of a style Lee had never seen, even in photographs. Another sign listed the upcoming exit for a town called Alighier. The Diablo had gotten right behind them and was switching lanes to pass the RV.

  “Oh god,” Ivy whispered, barely audible.

  The Diablo picked up speed faster than any other car could have and flashed by them in an instant. To Lee’s shock it didn’t swerve in front of them and stomp on its breaks as he anticipated. It just kept going, the red eyes of the taillights disappearing into the night.

  “Where is it going?” Ivy whispered.

  “I don’t know.” His face and hands were dripping with sweat so profusely that a puddle was forming on the leather seat around his crotch area.

  “I’m getting out, I don’t care if you stop or not,” Stella said, and made for the side door.

  “Stella, stop!” Ben yelled, and ran after her. He grabbed her just before she got to the door and pulled her back to the couch. She didn’t try and stop him, but broke into a fresh round of sobbing.

  Lee sped past two more exits for Alighier, and the obscene city gave way to rolling planes filled with spectacularly-colored shrubs. The landscapes were starting to make him feel ill. He fought the queasiness down as best he could, not wanting to vomit on the dash.

  He knew that if he kept driving it wasn’t going to get him anywhere, but he knew in his bones that exiting or turning around would only take them into a different part of the same, hideous world. He could see no other option other than to drive as long as he could, to buy them a little more time in the sanctuary of the moving RV.

  “Lee, we’ve got to do something,” Ben said.

  “I’m open to suggestions.” There were large things flying in the air in front of them, though Lee could barely make them out in the dim light. They were larger than any bird on Earth, but he couldn’t tell anything more about them.

  “There are two moons,” Ivy said, sounding calm. Lee followed her gaze, and sure enough there were two swollen, reddish moons floating in the sky.

  “Fuck,” Lee said. It was all he could muster. The two moons was just one more oddity in a new world of insanity. Maybe I’m in an insane asylum; the literature did say that people had a tendency to slip into a stupor in the late stages of the disease.

  He drove on for ten more minutes without anyone saying a word. As he drove, he noticed that the clock on the dash was flicking through random numbers. The GPS was switching between places every thirty seconds, from Albuquerque to Paris to Usk to Sydney. Ben and Ivy stared dazedly out of their windows, while Stella sat quietly, save for the occasional sob.

  Lee turned on the radio and pressed the seek button, not knowing what he was expecting but simply needing to do something. The radio flickered through the entire spectrum twice without finding anything, but on the third pass it stopped on a weak signal. Lee could just barely make out voices. The voices didn’t sound human, and were speaking a language that didn’t exist anywhere on Earth.

  Ivy started to cry at the sound, so Lee shut off the radio again. The road narrowed from two lanes to one, and they came to a beach, next to an endless, dark sea. He could just make out leviathan creatures swimming, with half of their massive bodies out of the water. Bulging and purple, with no discernible eyes and covered in huge, squirming tentacles, each of them would have made a blue whale look like a guppy.

  “We’re insects here,” Ivy said, and Lee realized that she had seen the creatures as well. They were hard to miss.

  A low rumbling sound heralded the arrival of something even more massive that rose up out of the water and swallowed up the leviathan monsters, the incomprehensible beast’s upper jaw reaching as high as any of the skyscrapers in Manhattan when fully open. It sank back into the vast, ink-black sea as fast as it had risen, causing a huge wave that washed across the beach and towards the RV.

  Ben and Ivy screamed, both watching the scene unfold. “Hold on!” Lee yelled, speeding up.

  The wave hit the RV and started to push them off the road, though most of its force had dissipated by the time it reached them. Lee jerked the wheel as hard as he could to the right and hit the gas, trying desperately to get the vehicle back under control.

  He barely managed to keep the RV from being washed off of the road. The wave was over in a second, leaving the roadway so soaked that he had to lower his speed to forty to keep from hydroplaning.

  After a few miles had passed, the roadway seemed to gradually dry out. Lee urged the RV’s speed back up to seventy. A sudden worrying thought popped into his head and he glanced down at the fuel gauge. It was almost on the “E”. He still had no plan.

  There was a cow-sized, caterpillar-like creature lying dead in the middle of the road, with a shadowy creature perched on top of it, feasting away. Lee had to pull onto the shoulder to get around the carcass.

  “This isn’t happening,” Ben said. “I’m having a nightmare.” Lee glanced to the back and saw that Stella appeared to be asleep, or perhaps she’d fainted. Under the circumstances, the latter seemed more likely.

  Ivy leaned over and looked at the instrument panel. “What are we going to do when we run out of gas?” she said. “We can’t go out there.”

  “I’ll think of something, I promise,” Lee said. He hoped he’d be able to keep his word, but the realist in him doubted he would.

  The road continued, winding its way next to the black ocean. Things continued to dart across the road in front of the RV, almost relentless in their need to cross the highway. Lee made no effort to slow down or evade any of them. He hit one with a thud, purple goo flying across the windshield. Almost calmly, he pressed the button to spray windshield washer fluid across the glass and turned the wipers on. He heard a few more thumps after that, but didn’t reduce his speed.

  A bright, orange glow appeared in the distance. “What is it?” Ivy said.

  “I don’t know.” His terror was muting to a feeling of desperate worry. He wanted to cry. The only thing he wanted was to get his friends back to the sunny world. The world in which they belonged. He didn’t care if he was lost here, but he didn’t want them to be. He had no idea what to do though, besides drive, and he wouldn’t be able to do that for much longer.

  The orange glow became brighter, to the point where it became a sickly impersonation of daylight. “Lee, I think it’s a fire,” Ivy said. “We have to turn around.”

  “I can’t, there are no turnarounds and the road is too narrow to turn the rig around. And besides, we don’t have enough fuel to cover half of what we’ve already driven.”

  “Maybe we can try an exit, we can’t drive into that fire.”

  “We just can’t do it. It doesn’t look like there’s room to turn around, and even if we could, we’d have to stop several times to get turned around, do you want us stopped here?”

  More tears started to trickle out of her eyes. “No.”

  They drove around a bend and a huge column of flame came into view on Lee’s side. Hundreds of miles away, and larger than anything Lee had ever seen, was a gigantic mountain made out of fire. It looked as big as Everest. Looking directly at it was like staring at the sun.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ivy said in awe.

  Lee peeled his eyes away from the fire and glued them back to the road, afraid of hitting a creature large enough to disable the vehicle. He turned back just in time to catch another red sign by the side of the road, this one reading “The Inferno - next exit.”

  “I swear to god, Lee, you’ve gotten me into some serious shit before, but this takes the fucking cake,” Ben said. He sounded like he’d gotten a hold of himself slightly, but there was a high falsetto to his voice. Maybe he convinced himself he really is in a dream. Hell, maybe we are.

  “Is that hell?” Stella asked, sitting up from beside Ben. No one answered her. No one knew.

  They came around another bend that brought them down a steep hill. The hill went on for ten miles. No one said anything for the en
tire stretch, and Stella started to cry again.

  At the bottom of the hill they entered another forest. The forest seemed to suck away the light of the mountain of fire and before long they were back in the dark again, the rig’s headlights the only source of illumination.

  The line on the fuel gauge was now below the empty mark.

  “We’re not going to be able to go much further are we?” Ivy asked, registering what the look on Lee’s face meant.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean we’re finished. We can still find a way out.”

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. She didn’t sound hopeful.

  A mile up ahead in the distance, a white and a red light appeared. Lee leaned forward in his seat to try and get a better view, but couldn’t quite make out what it was. It looked like it was right in the center of the road, so Lee eased his foot off the accelerator as he approached it.

  When he was three quarters of a mile away from the object, he realized what it was - a car. It was parked across the entire road, blocking the one lane and enough of the passing lane that the RV wouldn’t be able to go around it. He knew it was the demon. “Oh god,” Ivy said.

  A half a mile to go and he could make out the demon. It was standing in front of the driver’s side door of its car, facing towards the RV. Even from half a mile away he could see the creature’s awful grin.

  Going with the only thing he could think of, he jammed his foot down on the gas as hard as he could. “Get into the back and buckle up,” he said to Ivy.

  “Don’t do it.”

  “It’s our only option. There’s no room on the road to turn around or even go around it.” The single-lane road had narrowed even further over the last several miles. “Get back there now. Please.”

  Ivy jumped out of her seat, and hesitated one last time. “I love you,” she said, looking deep into his eyes before tearing her gaze from his.

  “I love you too, now go!” he yelled. The car and the demon were coming up rapidly. He could see the demon was smiling at him. “Stella and Ben, you guys need to buckle up right now, we’re about to hit something!”