Pretty Dead City Running down the stairs winded him, like he was in no fucking shape at all, which bugged the shit out of him, frustrated him enough to make him spit and scream, but he didn't have the breath to do anything but wheeze.
Opening the front door of the hotel took all his strength, but he did it and he was outside, in the eternal, hazy afternoon, and they were still there, small, ratlike black things crawling all over the sidewalks. They didn't seem to notice him.
"You fuckers, what ARE you?" he yelled after them, but they ignored him and crawled right on.
It occurred to him that he might want to be scared now, but he wasn't. They didn't look dangerous. They were toothless and hairless, like weird mutant rats with clear, blue eyes and short legs.
He counted thirty, forty, forty-five just on the sidewalk outside the hotel.
"This is stupid," he told them. "This is another fucking dream."
He tried to catch one, ran after it and it squealed and slunk away, and suddenly the ground heaved and hit his face.
He tried to get up but it felt like he was going blind. He knew it was just because his eyes were rolling up in their sockets, that he was passing out, but it FELT like he was going blind. He wasn't the passing out kind.
He clawed at the asphalt and tried to make his head clear and let him feel things again, but it didn't hurt, even when he knew he'd scratched his fingers bloody. He was tasting blood, too, and thought he might have smacked his face pretty bad. He couldn't feel any pain, and that scared him more than anything.
Dream: He's in a bedroom, a big, white bedroom. He's sitting on a four-post bed, on white, pristine sheets. White, pristine curtains flutter gently in a breeze he can't feel. He's naked and his body feels different. He stands up and the floor is too far down. When he touches his own skin, it's smoother and the muscles underneath it are firmer than his have been in years.
There's someone in the bed. Someone who groans softly and turns over and blinks and fixes him with dark eyes and says,
"Are you okay, baby?"
His face, his voice, and he backs away from the bed and bumps into a wall and the wall is a mirror. He doesn't turn around because he doesn't want to know.
He didn't think he'd screamed, but when he forced his eyes open, JC was staring at him with wide, frightened eyes.
"I thought you were dead," JC said softly. He didn't look angry now.
Chris tried to tell him to get his shit together or something, no one was fucking dying here, but his mouth hurt like a sonofabitch, and it felt like he might have chipped a tooth.
He heard sobbing and raised voices somewhere off in the distance. That would be Justin having a nervous breakdown, then, and Joey and Lance trying to talk him down.
JC touched his face, his fingers curiously gentle. Almost like before. "I guess I didn't want you to die," he said. It sounded like he was talking to himself.
"I dreamed about--" Chris whispered, but cut off. He didn't know. He could almost feel the blank, cool surface of the mirror behind him. He could turn around and look. Now he felt like his own mouth wasn't his own.
"This place is a dream," JC said.
When Chris finally managed to stand up, Justin was there, touching him carefully, like he'd suddenly turned into fragile crystal. Justin's eyes were swollen and red. It looked weird to see his eyelashes flutter and his mouth tremble. Most of the time, these days, he looked like a slapheaded thug, but at times like this, Chris was sure the whole transformation Justin had gone through was skin deep only. He walked proud and talked loud, but he had a soft, weak place in him that all the walk and talk in the world couldn't hide.
Chris looked around, but the ratcreatures were long gone. He'd touched the one he was chasing; felt its soft, dry skin.
"Did you see those things?" he asked.
"What things?" Justin said and that pretty much answered the question. He put an unsteady arm around Justin's shoulders. Justin leaned against him as if he was the one with the bump in the forehead and the split lip.
Chris leaned his head against his shoulder for a second, turned his face into his neck and closed his eyes. When he pulled back, there was a smear of blood on Justin's pale skin.
When they got back to the second floor, the door to the room they'd used was locked.
They slept on the floor in the hallway, and Chris was sandwiched between Justin and Lance, and JC's arm was around Justin's waist, and Chris felt Joey's hand reach for him across Lance.
He didn't dream.
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