Her Last Memory
C.A. Wittman
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Epilogue
Sleep Martyrs
Free Short Story, Reset
About the Author
Prologue
July 1996
“Merda! She's not waking up!” Enzo hovered over Taylor Davis, who lay curled up on the sofa. His hands patted her body like a blind man, identifying markers of head, face, and shoulder. One of the girls from the dinner party, Serene, stepped forward pushing him out of the way. She grabbed Taylor's arm, pressing her fingers into the underside of the limp, lifeless wrist, feeling for a pulse. There was a faint flutter of a beat, but then it was gone. Was she only imagining a pulse?
“Taylor?” Serene gently shook Taylor's still form. Drool snaked out the side of the girl's partially open lips.
“Call 911,” Enzo said, his voice coming out a rasp. No one moved.
He grabbed Taylor's shoulder and shook her hard. “Wake up! Wake up! Cazzo!” His voice caught and his hands flew to his face, the palms pressing hard against his eyes. “Cazzo!”
“What happened to her?” Serene asked. The others stood mute as wax figures.
“I don't know.” Enzo grabbed the phone off its wall mount and walked back over to Taylor, nudging her this time. “I don't know.”
“But I thought she left.”
Enzo didn't respond. He pressed the buttons on the phone and placed it to his ear.
“Something's happened,” he said in response to the dispatcher. “Something's happened to my girlfriend. I think she's dead.”
1
Dora - January 2020
Nothing looked familiar. She stared up at the giant billboards advertising products, fashions, movies and TV shows that seemed like they belonged to another era. A giant cannabis ad promised home delivery. Another billboard pictured a black woman with wild afro hair laughing uproariously. The caption read, “Shot on an iPhone 11 Pro.” What was an iPhone? People were dressed differently—a lot of linen and high-waisted jeans, crocheted dresses and shirts with disco collars. Men had carefully groomed facial hair and tailored slim cotton pants in unmanly colors of hot pink and robin's egg blue. In fact, there did not appear to be any cohesive style. She only knew she was in Hollywood because, well, it was Hollywood, that much was plain. But she recognized nothing else. Familiar restaurants had vanished, and in their place were boutique eateries that served vegan food and promised no gluten. Gluten? Two girls breezed past her with frothy coffees in small white paper cups, talking animatedly.
"Dora?"
She kept walking, ignoring the woman behind her.
A touch on the arm. "Dora?"
She spun around and stared blankly at a smiling woman, the skin around her amber eyes a crinkling mass of wrinkles, dark hair cropped short to the scalp. The woman wore a jumpsuit, the kind of outfit she'd seen her mother wearing in pictures from the 1970s. Something large and rectangular bulged at the woman's front, a leather 1980s fanny pack strapped around her narrow hips.
"I thought it was you," the woman said. She had a tinny British accent. "What are you up to?"
"I'm not Dora." She made to turn away. But this woman in her 1970s outfit and 1980s fanny pack gripped her arm harder. The smile flickered and then died on her lips, its absence taking ten years off her face.
"I'm not Dora."
The hand tightened more. The amber eyes softened with confusion. "You don't seem yourself. You okay, love?" She was squeezing her arm too hard.
"You're hurting me."
The woman looked down at her hand, surprised, as if it didn't belong to her at all. “Your arm. It's swollen.”
She wrenched herself from the woman's grasp, picking up her pace, and scurried away, traipsing over the big gold celebrity stars. She tried to catch her breath, order her thoughts, to square all of it somehow. The oddly dressed people, strange restaurants and advertisements. A pain shot through her right temple and an ashy grey darkened what was moments before a bright blue sky. When she fainted, she crumpled into a young man walking his toy poodle. The dog, taking offense, attacked her exposed ear.
Cuppa saw it all happen like a surreal Fellini film. Dora claiming she wasn't Dora, her pupils expanded in that way they do when a person is high. Dora running away from her and then stopping to look up at the sky. That was when she fainted, folding in on herself, collapsing slowly, almost gracefully, into some guy staring down at his phone while walking his dog. When she fell against him, he'd looked up, startled, as he simultaneously stumbled back, his phone flying from his hands. They both crashed to the sidewalk. The poodle scurried away, yapping like a wind-up toy, and then lunged at Dora's face, teeth attaching to her ear as it shook and shook, a frantic guttural sound bubbling from its throat. Cuppa raced to her best friend's wife, just as the dog's owner came to life and began wrestling with the little beast, but it had a good grip on her ear. By the time Cuppa made it to Dora's side, he'd managed to tear the dog away from her ear lobe now as lacerated as minced beef, her brown face turned the color of wet cement. The commotion drew a small crowd. Some called 911. Others filmed the incident.
"Christ!" Cuppa exhaled, dropping to a squat and placing her hand on Dora's head.
"Don't move her," one of the onlookers called out, an older woman wearing a funny straw hat with fake yellow flowers stuck in it. "She might have a neck injury."
The dog yapped a high-pitched bark over and over as its owner tried to contain it. A
