Page 16 of The Nightmare King

Instead, nothing but black greeted me in my slumber. He never came. Fall asleep and wait for me. Well, I did, and the waiting hadn’t paid off for seven full nights.

If Mare were real and this was real, then I was really annoyed.

He’d left me with the visions of ghost face fucking me on Halloween night. Remnants of ghost splinters ached my back as I recalled Jason and his hockey mask. He’d been angry, insisting he was real, that I was somehow hurting him… and then nothing for seven days.

Well, you know what, Mare? I’ll go watch a stupid show with Brandon and his friends. That would piss him off. He mentioned Brandon a lot, how he was jealous, well, if he were as real as Brandon, this would set him off, and he would visit me in my dreams again. If only to be a jerk, I didn’t care.

Maybe I was baiting him.

Brandon’s friends mingled with several coworkers I recognized. He returned and took a seat next to me, passing me a red plastic cup of beer. I wasn’t supposed to have alcohol with my meds, so I simply held it awkwardly and smiled. Was this how flirting went? I wasn’t sure, but he was smiling back, and he rested his arm on the back of the couch behind me.

I waited for days, hoping for a familiar nightmare or for Mare’s voice to resound in my mind again like it did that day in therapy. Nothing. If he were real, he was a jerk.

If he weren’t real and somehow my delusions were fading… my shoulders tensed at the possibility, and suddenly I really wanted to watch something mindless.

“So, what episode is this?” I asked.

Brandon took a sip of beer straight from a glass bottle. “Well, in this episode, zombies will try to kill people.”

Another coworker chuckled and added, “And the people will try to kill the zombies.”

“Shush, don’t spoil it for her!” Brandon teased, and I forced a smile. Flirting was annoying.

I fake cheers’d. “Looking forward to it.”

A girl and a guy stood in the corner, giving me a sympathetic look. I hated that look and reached for my headphones around my neck. “The service was really nice,” the girl said with a small, pitying glance. Ignoring her, I put my headphones over my ears and let the automatic static setting dull the noises around me. Thankfully, subtitles were on. As if we even needed subtitles for pointless bloodshed.

The episode was mindless and gory. A fine distraction, I guessed. Though somewhere in the middle of the main dirty man grabbing an axe and chopping a green zombie in half, my beer cup was half full. Had I drank it?

Oops.

The show ended and partiers dispersed, leaving me and Brandon on the sofa, though somehow, he’d gotten closer to me than I’d realized. “I should get going,” I said as he eased nearer.

“No way am I letting you go. You’re a lightweight, I can tell, and even that one drink was too much. Sleep over. Come on, I’ll let you take my bed.” He stood and extended a palm, helping me up. The room spun. Wow, half a beer made me dizzy? He was right, somehow, I was completely out of it. There was no way I could drive.

“Okay,” I agreed, following him and leaning on his arm for support as he took me to his room and sat me on the bed.

But he didn’t leave.

Then his shirt was off, and he was next to me.

“Glad I’ve finally gotten you alone.” His breath was rancid with alcohol. “You know I always had a crush on you in school. But never could get near you.” Everything in me wanted to push him away, to demand he get out, but my limbs felt heavy and hard to move. Even the words stop, don’t, got lost in my throat. He eased a hand under my shirt, touching my stomach. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you, Lucy.”

This was happening, and this was scarier than any nightmare I’d encountered. I braced myself for what would come, when all of a sudden, he jerked his hand away and cupped his forehead.

“Fuck, my head is, it’s?—“

He fell over on the bed with a sharp groan as I lost the battle to my sinking eyelids. Darkness overtook me.

And then screams rattled in the distance.

My preferred nightmare had arrived.

The sky was a muggy green, and the air was thick with sweat and blood. I stopped running for a moment, panting with my hands on my knees. Brandon stopped next to me, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me. Terror marked his dirt-stained features.

“Lucy?” He shook my shoulders and cried. “What the fuck is happening? Where are we?”

I’d never seen Brandon in a nightmare before. When I had seen people I recognized, they played a part in the scene and I was just putting the pieces together, playing catch up to the setting I’d landed in. Brandon wasn’t acting like a player in this nightmare… he was acting like an outsider.

---