The Immigrant Song

I'll sleep when I'm dead, I'll sleep when I'm dead, I'll sleep when I'm dead...

It became his mantra at times like these. There was always a window of honest to goodness pain, at about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, where staying awake actually hurt, and he just wanted to close his eyes and let himself drift off, but never allowed himself, waiting until the early risers were up and coffee shops were open so he could go get breakfast and energy drinks to keep him going until the next 3:00 or 4:00 AM.

He didn't ever give up. Let that be known. He was too, well, scared, really: it came down to that. He didn't want the fear, the twisted nightmares, the flashbacks from Andre, he didn't want the actual physical pain--also, and perhaps most of all, he was scared of what the visions meant about him. They made him a freak. So if he didn't have the visions, didn't have the dreams, he wasn't a freak.

He was just an insomniac. Real cool, Rome...

So, when he did slip into sleep, in the wee painful hours of the morning, he chalked it up to the blood loss. Usually he was better than this.

The laptop slipped off his knees onto the seat next to him.

His head fell back, mouth open.

His eyes weren't even fully closed. They'd forgotten how to close properly, completely, having been forced to stay open all hours.

But he was dreaming.

He was remember-dreaming. This was where he usually found out--lucky him--about the things Andre had been up to with his meatsuit that he didn't remember with his waking mind. Like murdering that store clerk and burying her carcass in the woods. Drowning that family dog so they wouldn't be alerted to him stealing their car. And leaving the gas stove on in the kitchen, so that the house exploded as he drove away, with a blinding white flash of--

Oh no.

BAM!

Rome was in a wooded clearing. It reminded him of Pembroke, that sort of cold, east-coast woodlands. There were a few nondescript buildings around him. There was snow on the ground.

And there was blood in the snow. He dropped down to a knee to inspect it, followed the trail, found a pair of Chanel boots.

"G!" he cried, picking her up out of the snow.

Her eyes snapped open, but they weren't her eyes. With a bloodcurdling shriek she knocked him back, flicked open her pink folding knife, and jumped on top of him. He tried to hold her back, but she bore down on him with superhuman strength.

"We have to shoot her!" Someone was saying, and another voice shouted "Shoot her!"

The wildness in her eyes was pants-wettingly terrifying. It was all he could focus on. So it came as a shock when the knife was no longer in his field of vision and there was instead a sharp stab of pain in his chest--

BAM!

He was back. In the cold car. Drool dribbled out the corner of his mouth, and tear tracks were drying on his cheeks. His laptop was frozen on bustyasianbeauties.com.

He snapped his head back up.

It was still dark outside--hopefully no one had seen him. He checked his watch. 5:00 AM. Awesome. At least McDonald's was probably open. And a walk in the cold dawn would do a good job of keeping him awake.

Rome hard-rebooted his laptop. He flicked on the radio in the car, listened for news reports, and eventually found the Top 40 station. He slipped his shoes back on, put on his belt, and found a sweatshirt.

If only his brain could do a hard-reboot.

But Rome didn't want to think about it. He didn't even want to think about how much he didn't want to think about it. So he downloaded a Podcast on restoring classic cars, plugged it into his ears, walked to the McDonald's his GPS told him was closest, and arrived with breakfast back at the motel when the others were just beginning to wake.

And at 6:00 in the morning in the dead of winter, he was definitely wearing sunglasses.