Biohazard

12

And she had been. I knew it. I could see the recrimination in her eyes, the way she looked at me like some squirming thing that had slid out from under a rock. Maybe it was my imagination. I don’t know. She’d been giving me the evil eye for so long it was hard to be sure.

That night I dreamed of The Medusa moving east to west like some immense malefic vacuum cleaner sucking up the last of the human race from decaying cities like dust from a carpet and leaving nothing but polished white bones behind.

It was getting closer and closer and I could not get away from it. I saw its face. And worse, it saw me. It called me by name.

And then hands were shaking me awake.

“Nash,” Janie said. “It’s just a dream. That’s all it is. Just a dream. You have to be quiet. I finally got Morse to sleep.” She told me this like he was some little kid she had to tuck in. Maybe he was.

I laid there, looking up at her, sweat running down my temples. “I saw it,” I told her. “It’s coming for us. It’s getting closer.”

She just nodded. “It’s been coming for a long time.”

“You’ve…you’ve seen it?”

“In my dreams. We probably all have.”

“Janie…”

“Go to sleep, Rick.”

“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave me alone.”

She shook her head. “It can’t be that way anymore and I think you know why, don’t you? Go to sleep. When you wake up you can tell yourself it was only a dream.”

I never felt so alone before.