Sometimes—rarely over the years and then almost exclusively over the last few months—Mike’s dreams changed into very regular and specific nightmares. In those dreams he would be walking through a dark swampy hollow. The bushes and trees around him were on fire and there were people lying everywhere. Dead people, covered in blood, torn apart. In those dreams Mike always carried a samurai sword, a katana, in his hands, which was odd because in his adventure dreams Iron Mike Sweeney always used either a blaster or a big knight’s sword, never one of the slender Japanese blades, but in these new dreams it was always a katana, and its blade was always smeared with bright blood.
In these dreams the dead people were people Mike knew. Crow was there a lot, and he almost always wore a big tank on his back of the kind that exterminators or lawn-care guys wore, and the hose was clutched in Crow’s dead hand. The only part of him that wasn’t covered in blood was the front of his T-shirt, which showed the logo for band called Missing 84, which Mike had never heard of. Crow’s fiancée was usually alive, but she’d been beaten to her knees and was weeping over the body of her father, Henry Guthrie. There were other people: Dr. Weinstock from the hospital, sprawled with his throat torn out, and the chief of police sitting with his back propped against a tree and his legs spread, a piss stain spreading on his pants as he dribbled blood from his nose and mouth and ears. Others, too, like his mom. She wasn’t dead, but stood naked and covered in blood—and when he was awake Mike wondered how sick it was that he dreamed of his mother naked and tried to imagine how much of his life would be spent in therapy because of that image—and his mom was laughing as the forest burned and people died. There was a dark man standing next to her, also laughing, but he was hazy like an out-of-focus photograph and Mike could discern no details.
Last night Mike had been through that dream again, all of the familiar images of pain and loss and horror, all the way up to the point where a shadow passed over Mike and he turned to see what had cast it. He turned and looked up…and up and it stood there: impossibly huge, monstrous, towering above the flames, laughing in a voice that rumbled like thunder. A vast creature like something out of horror movies, with hairy goatlike legs, the muscular torso of a man, a whipping tail with a barbed point, and vast black wings. A mouth that was filled with teeth the size of daggers and horns that were splashed with gore. A monster Mike had seen on TV and in films and that he’d read about in books, but though this was the form of the devil in every aspect, Mike knew that even its shape and appearance were a lie. A special effect, or at least done for effect. Not that it made the creature any less terrifying. If anything, the deliberate choosing of this image—an aspect intended to be reviled and feared on a primal level—showed the subtlety and mockery of the beast. In these dreams the monster would spread its great arms as if to encompass the burning hollow, the forests, the town, and the world, and he would hiss “Mine!” just before reaching for Mike.
This is how his dreams had started last night, and then at the moment those massive hands were closing around him the dream changed as abruptly as if someone had clicked a TV remote and immediately Mike was on his bicycle out on A-32, pedaling fit to burst his heart, his breath burning in his throat, as behind him the Wrecker barreled down on him, its horn blaring like the howl of a hellhound and the spiked bars of its chrome grille breaking apart in the middle to form two rows of jagged metal fangs. That dream also played itself out, all the way to the point where the wheels of the trucks rolled over him from the toes upward, pulverizing his bones and pulping his flesh while worlds of fire exploded in every cell and his mind absorbed all of it without escape.
