“Want to tell me about them?”
Jubal didn’t like the way her complexion suddenly paled.
“It was so strange…yet so realistic. Whenever I’d wake up,?guring it was okay to drift back to sleep, I’d have the same exact dream again. That’s never happened before-ever. Finally I just gave up and got out of bed around four AM.”
Fiona’s grip tightened on Jubal’s hand.
“So,” Jubal said. “Do you want to tell me about it? My ma always says if you tell someone your nightmares, they’ll go away.”
“It was so weird. In the dream…the air all around is smoky. ”
“Smoky?”
She nodded. “And yellow.”
“Holy shit.”
“What?”
“…Nothing…go on.”
“In the distance,?gures move toward me across a barren plain. For the most part, they appear to be people, but they are people who seem to have problems walking; they sort of…shamble and shuf?e forward.”
The skin on Jubal’s neck tingled.
“Maybe you’re dreaming about all the sick people in town.”
“No…this is different. Anyway, among these people are stranger shapes, inhuman shapes. There are only a few, but they are nothing like I’ve ever seen before, even in my wildest imaginings. I guess they’re… monsters.”
Jubal chuckled. Maybe this dream wasn’t so prophetic after all. Monsters?
He stopped laughing when he saw the hurt in Fiona’s eyes.
“It was very realistic, Jubal Slate.”
Jubal felt like a heel.
“I’m sorry. Really. Go on.”
“The most terrifying part of the dream-the part that always scared me awake-had to do with the?gure that walked out in front of this group. Like, he was the leader or something.”
Damn, there went Jubal’s hairs again, standing at attention. What was wrong with him? He wasn’t some little kid who was frightened by ghost stories.
The silence in the store seemed ominous now. Some part of Jubal wished Fiona would stop, but he said nothing to her.
“This guy was taller than the others, except for maybe one or two of the monsters. And as he moved closer, I could see he was dressed in red,?owing robes. And in his hand, he held some sort of weird walking staff, or something.”
Jubal watched the clear tan skin on Fiona’s arm suddenly break out in goose pimples.
“His head…well, he had a large helmet on his head that was disproportionate to his body. It was like one of those Aztec masks. And as he drew closer, I saw that he moved in an odd manner; it wasn’t noticeable at?rst compared to the way the others staggered and shambled about.”
“Then what happens?”
“Then he raises his staff above his head and makes some sort of shrieking sound, but I think it’s some sort of freaky language…”
“Then?”
“Its voice is so horrible that I wake up.”
Jubal put his arm around Fiona and patted her far shoulder. She laid her head on his shoulder.
“Damn, that’s some wild dreaming you’re doing there, Fee. It’s bad enough you had the nightmare once, but to have it all night long-maybe you are getting this?u or virus or whatever the hell it is.”
There was a jingle and a bang and then someone was running down the aisle of the store straight toward them.
Jubal recognized Billy Owens, a local teenager.
“Jubal! There’s something going on outside.”
Jubal bolted out of his chair and ran, nearly knocking Billy over in the process.
Down the street, at the western edge of town, a trail of dust plumed. A car. Judging from the sound it made: it was a solar. And it was moving fast into town.
Too fast.
Before Jubal could even leave the sidewalk, the car whizzed by down Main Street. Jubal watched it shriek into a sharp turn and pull into an abandoned car wash.
A thwooping sound, unnoticed until now, grew louder as a black helicopter?ew low above him, rattling his shirt and sending his hair into disarray. As it cleared town, it barely missed smashing into the billboard atop the auto shop across the street.
“What’s going on?” Billy said from behind him.
He looked back at Billy. Fiona and some other townspeople gathered on the sidewalk around him, watching the sky and the abandoned car wash.
Just as Jubal was about to respond, the solar car pulled out of the car wash and sped back down the street in the direction it had come from, racing past them at full speed.
Jubal started round his car to give chase.
Fiona called out, “Look!”
Someone was crawling, hand over hand, out of the car wash.
Jubal jogged down the sidewalk toward the crawler. The others followed close behind.
The person stopped moving. As Jubal approached, he saw something that made him halt in his tracks. He turned around toward the trailing crowd.
“Okay, everybody. Don’t move any closer; I want you to stay back. This is of?cial police business.”
Everyone stopped, some nearly running into the person in front of them. They all looked at him with blank faces. Some nodded their heads in response to his instructions. Others tried to look around him at the person on the ground.
“I mean it, now,” Jubal said, then turned away.
The Wet ’N’ Dry wash had been abandoned for a decade. Once the Amoco down the street had set up its own drive-through car wash, business had dwindled. Dry weeds surrounded it now and graf?ti covered its graying cement walls.
“Oh, my god.”
The woman on the ground had rolled onto her back. She whimpered through dry, parted lips. Her exposed skin-face and hands-was as gray as the car wash’s cement walls and covered with large, ugly blisters. She was so dis?gured, her face a swelling mass, that the only way Jubal knew it was a woman was from the large breasts beneath her buttoned shirt. As he watched, one of the blisters on her cheek popped-he could hear it pop-and yellowish pus splattered across the woman’s face.
“Jesus,” said someone from behind Jubal’s right shoulder. It was Fiona.
“I thought I told you…”
The woman on the ground mumbled something.
“What’d she say?” Fiona asked.
Jubal leaned his head closer.
“Dead army…” she hissed, then passed out.
Dead army?
Was it some sort of military accident that had caused this woman’s terrible dis?gurement?
But then, everything clicked into place and Jubal did not like the result: this woman, whoever she was, obviously had an extreme case of the sickness that was spreading throughout Serenity. He hoped to God his logic was inaccurate and that it was something else entirely-anything else.
Jubal felt faint.
“We have to get this woman over to the hospital in Carlsbad. Right away,” Fiona said.
Snapping out of his spiral of despair, Jubal said, “Okay, but get the hell away from her, Fiona. Now!”
