Chapter 7: Fever Dreams

August 17 2134

By the time the alarm eventually goes off in the morning, I’m still in the bathroom. I don’t want to move, I’m exhausted and I feel like if I get ready now, they’re going to find me out faster. Better they see me at my most miserable and make a decision from that on what to do with me, it’ll be more work for all of us if I try to hide that fact that I’m already broken.

I think for a moment of at least getting dressed, but I still feel too hot to move from my spot pressed against the cold tile. Pants be damned, whoever comes to find me is just going to find me sitting here in my underwear. I don’t want to think too much about what they’ll do when they find me.

Time blurs again, and before I know it there’s a knock on the door to my room. I don’t move.

A minute passes, another knock, and then I hear Mac’s voice from the hallway. “Vin? It’s time for training.”

Training. That’s going to be my life now. Just training and eating and sleeping, until they see me fit to do whatever they’re planning on using me for. I don’t want that. I just want to be a nobody for once.

There’s silence for another minute, and I hope it means that he’s given up on me, but then the door opens. I feel nausea building in the pits of my stomach and creeping up my throat as footsteps draw closer to me, and I start crying again. I must look pathetic right now. I’m making that a habit at this rate.

The door to the bathroom opens after 15 excruciating seconds, and at first I hear no reaction from him. He walks closer to me, stopping just outside of the shower, and crouching down in front of me. “You look like shit.” He remarks bluntly. “Bad dream? Or are you just feeling like shit?”

I allow my head to lift just enough to make eye contact with him, expecting disgust or disappointment, but it’s mainly concern. I put my head back down. Does it even matter what happened?

He sighs, and I hear him shift a bit, I assume to sit down. “If you need the day off that’s fine, I just need to know what’s going on. If you’re sick, you need to get looked at.”

I shake my head, and curl further in on myself. “I don’t want these memories.”

“Yeah, I can only imagine.” He sounds weirdly casual. “But it’s part of the higher-ups’ grand design, I guess. Personally, I don’t really get why we have to rely on some guy who died last century to solve our problems.”

That almost makes me let my guard down a little, but I’m still overheating and I feel awful and I don’t want him here anymore. Just leave me here. Let me be miserable.

“Do you want me to get the nurse?”

I didn’t think they’d have any health care workers here, figured they would send me somewhere far away to deal with me. I peek back out from between my legs, then give a small nod. My nerves are starting to calm, and the nausea goes along with it.

“Alright, I have a feeling I won’t have to remind you to not go anywhere.” He gets up, walks out the door, and suddenly I’m alone again. Part of me hopes that my sense of time completely disappears again, so it won’t seem like too long, but instead each second stretches on far longer than it should. I can hear every rattly breath I draw in, the faint hum of the light in the bathroom, my heart beating in my ears, and even the subtle noises of my skin on the ceramic tile.

I can feel every inch of my skin, most of it exposed to the air with small sections pressed to the tile. It’s cramped in the shower, I take up more space than anyone should with my lankiness. Even curled up, it’s a snug fit.

An eternity later, what really couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes, the door opens again. Two sets of footsteps approach this time, and I can here an unfamiliar voice whispering to Mac, and him responding. When the bathroom door opens again, I shrink into the corner as far as the space will allow. I look up at the nurse, a well-built woman in gray scrubs. Her skin is a touch darker than mine, probably mainly from sun exposure, and she has chestnut hair and emerald green eyes.

“How are you feeling, Vincent?” She asks in a voice a touch gruffer than what I was expecting. “Cameron was telling me you’re feeling ill?”

Cameron? That must be what Mac is short for. The new information is helpful, I don’t have to only focus on myself. “It feels like I’m burning.” I hope I don’t have to explain anything. It’s embarrassing to think how sick my own mind is making me.

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She holds a hand to my forehead, then hums a little. “You definitely have a fever. We’re sure everyone’s clean, Cameron? No chance for viral infection?”

“As far as I know. You know we’re careful about that kind of stuff, Trish.” His voice is monotone, none of the emotion he had before when it was just the two of us. Weird.

“Yeah. Well, we should monitor him today to make sure it’s not some bug. His immune system isn’t at full strength yet.”

I don’t want to be monitored. I should have just sucked it up and gone to training, it would have been less effort than all of this. But it probably would’ve gotten even worse, then. Fuck. I curl up tighter.

The nurse grabs my arm gently, pulling me up slowly. I comply after a moment of hesitation. I don’t want to kick up a fuss, no matter how much I don’t want to be poked and prodded. I almost fall as soon as I’m on my feet, staggering while she drags me out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom, and down the hall. I immediately start heating up rapidly, and now the nurse’s concerns are ringing in my head. Is this a virus? Or some bacterial infection? Am I actually dying? The prospect seems worse and worse the longer we walk, and black spots start to form on the edges of my vision.

I barely make it to the infirmary before I can’t support myself anymore, and I immediately collapse onto the hospital bed. The bed sheets are too hot for me, even though I can tell that they’re really thin. I think about saying something, but decide against it.

“Okay Vincent, I’m going to put this clamp on your finger to measure your heart rate.” She explains gently, but I just groan and curl in on myself. She pulls my left hand away from me and clamps the device to my finger, looks at a monitor next to the bed, then takes it back off after about a minute.

“Okay, your heart rate is a little high, 106. Not high enough for me to be concerned, but you should stay here until your fever breaks.”

I just groan in response and pull my hand back to my chest. I try to ignore her as she runs a smooth object over my forehead, which lets out a gentle beep followed by a disappointed hum from her. “101.3. I’ll get you some acetaminophen.”

Her footsteps move away from me and I can feel myself drifting back to sleep, but I try to fight against it. I don’t want to have another nightmare, I know how bad dreams can get when you have fevers.

I hear the rattle of a pill cup on the table next to me, but my awareness is fuzzy. Don’t fall asleep don’t fall asleep don-

 

The first thing I register is the cold. A bitter chill hangs in the air, as does thick fog. Fitting for a funeral. Matt looks at the pile of freshly turned dirt; he couldn’t look at the coffin while they were lowering it. He just focused on the dirt.

He knew his dad didn’t have much time left. Brain cancer takes no hostages, and by the end he could barely speak. So he knew this was coming soon. Just… not this soon. Not a month away from his fifteenth birthday.

Suddenly, my feet are sinking into the ground. This is when it went bad last time, too. I try to pull myself up out of the dirt sinking around my feet now like quicksand, but I can’t find any purchase as all of the ground around me starts to sink down and pull me under.

I try to cover my eyes to stop myself from seeing anything else, I don’t like how this dream is going. But I can’t move, and the thing I was dreading happens — Dad’s corpse crawls out towards me, clawing through the loose dirt. His skin is rotting, his eyes are hollow, and there are patches of raw bone.

As soon as he’s in front of me I find that I can move my arms, so I hold my head tight and try not to have a complete meltdown. “This isn’t real. It’s not my dad. This is just a dream.”

I bolt upright in bed.

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