Chapter 17: The Others - A Dream of Waking Life

Jolted awake by the explosion of his flesh against the steel ground of the video game dream, Matt immediately willed himself into a state of calm, bringing his shallow breathing under control.

The old man I talk to in the other dreams isn’t me, Matt reasoned carefully. It’s just a voice in the game designer’s head – my head. And yet, I can’t deny the voice’s reasoning: I have to die in this world to know for sure if it’s real or not.

He pictured himself cutting his own throat with a scalpel or some other sharp instrument he could surely find in one of the rooms within the infinite corridor. Shivers ran the length of his spine as he imagined suffocating to death on his own gushing blood.

But I’m nearly certain this is the real world, Matt reasoned measuredly, not allowing himself to start thinking through the deranged mind of himself in the video game designer’s world. He felt his heart beat at the pace of the beeping machine behind him. I’m not at all certain, he corrected himself, but I think it must be true that those other places are just dreams. I just...I just don’t know what’s going on, he concluded as always, and he damned his mind for failing him in its clearly advanced age.

He almost called out for a nurse, but the endless stars outside the windows directly in front of him caught his eyes, forcing him to turn and peer at the icy world outside the doors behind him. I have to know what’s going on, Matt resolved. And if I die, Matt thought through a lens of detachment as he gawked at the cruel, obsolescent age of his sagging skin, then I was going to die of old age anyway. How much time could I possibly have left?

A failed attempt at picking up his shriveled body made him almost admit defeat and submit to his nightmares.

Up! Matt demanded of his frail bones. Wake up! he urged his decrepit muscles. He felt a bit of vigor, and he marveled at what the mind was capable of.

This old man has one last hurrah in him, Matt hoped, and his eyes welled at the pain involved in straining his body far beyond his age’s limits. I need to get outside this place. There were others outside. Or maybe there weren’t. Maybe I dreamed that. But...I have to know for sure.

With mountainous effort, he swung his atrophied legs over the side of the bare bed, but neither his arms nor abdominals had the necessary strength to hold him upright. He fell face first onto a hard ceramic floor, audibly cracking his forehead and shattering his nose, smearing it across his cheek like mere puddy.

He howled in pain and exhausted a forceful breath to flush the gushing blood out of his throat. Disoriented and dizzy from the physical trauma, Matt tried to stabilize his vision by placing his hands firmly on the floor, but it was slippery with his still-flowing blood.

A glance upward through the fluid, sanguine lens of his own life flowing across his field of vision told him that the icy world still raged outside.

Damn it, Matt lamented, reaching out his blood-drenched arm toward the doors. Too much blood, he noted in horror as blood continued pouring out of his body without any sign of slowing its pace.

I’m going to die, Matt realized. Whether I like it or not.

An alarm sounded suddenly, and the corridor strobed crimson and gold with urgent warning.

“Jus’ le’me die!” Matt gurgled through painful sobs and free-flowing blood.

Nurses rushed out of doorways like an endless stream of identical hounds on a sacred hunt.

“Mr. Willish!” they yelped and screamed in a cacophony of urgency.

Let me die and know for sure, Matt pleaded with the world itself, though another part of him reeled at the thought of true death.

With a jarring slam and icy gust, the double doors Matt had been trying to reach burst open. Two nearly naked figures stood in the doorway, unaffected by the blistering cold already threatening Matt’s fragile flesh with pinpricks of frostbite. The figures wore simple, neolithic-like scraps of cloth over their genitals, and one of them, the woman, wore a second strip of cloth over her chest. The woman didn’t have the familiar scar across her face, but Matt still recognized both of them from his dreams.

Souvik and Fernanda, Matt realized. But they weren’t old like him. They looked even younger and better built than the hyper-muscular video game characters. Matt no longer had the strength to speak, nor did he even have the ability to move his numb, lifeless body.

I’m dying, Matt told himself with mounting trepidation. He didn’t want to die in fear, but the frigid cold and his still-gushing blood made it terribly difficult not to view his environment with absolute terror.

“What’s he doing?” Fernanda asked Souvik.

Souvik just shrugged easily as Matt’s vision of the others blurred into an actively mixing mosaic of quickly fading sanguine saturation.

“They fucked him up bad,” Souvik mused with passive intrigue.

“Yeah,” Fernanda confirmed simply. “But maybe it worked this time.”