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TAM

Morning Isn’t The Only Thing Broken

  A single beam of sunlight drilled at Tam Wilder's eyelids, but she refused to open them. The hangover from the previous night's frustrated tequila binge at Club:MOS pounded jackhammers against the front of her head, and there was a smell -- musty, thick, and mildew-rich -- that she couldn't quite place.   She almost remembered returning to her room, not even bothering to shuck off her jeans before falling face-first onto the bed. The air was stifling, motionless, and incredibly hot. Without opening her eyes, Tam wiped a sheen of sweat off her forehead and groaned. AC was obviously broken again.   "I can't, for the life of me, figure out why I decided to move to Houston, deep in the ninth plane of Hell." Even the sound of her own voice made her head ache as she cracked open an eye against the red haze that said 'daylight'.   She was momentarily blinded by a spear of sunlight in her eye, the beam clearly outlined by a thick haze of dust, but the rest of the room was darkened by blackout shades, which should have kept even that intrusive beam away from Tam's bed.   "Blinds…" Tam called out into the room, raising her voice so that the AI house bot would pick up the request. She lay there for a few seconds, but there was no response from the bot. She raised her voice even louder, but the bot gave no acknowledgment. Tam rolled over to look at the clock, raising a cloud of dust from the mattress that set off a violent coughing fit. The clock's face was warped, cracked, and dull, and it was brutally apparent that there were no numbers showing on the clock-face. She sat up and put her feet down, looking around as she turned away from the window and letting her eyes adjust to the relatively dark, still, room after the sun-flash that had temporarily blinded her.   Tam's jaw dropped as she sat and looked around. The room she was in was clearly hers -- the artwork on the walls was a dust-muted and faded version of the same paintings she'd put up there. The layout was right, and everything else was where it ought to be, sort of. The reason for the spear of sunlight became rapidly apparent, as the blackout shades had rotted, leaving a patchwork of holes in the plastic-backed fabric, the entire rod broken free of the wall on one side, so that the blackout shades hung, limp and sad, propped against the metal framework of the once-modern high-rise's floor to ceiling windows.   The light seeping through the holes was insufficient to completely light the room, leaving the space in a dust-swamped twilight, but it was definitely bright enough to make a white dagger right into the middle of Tam’s sensitive eye, effectively negating the possibility of pretending ‘bad dream’ and rolling over to go back to sleep till it was all over and her real life came back online. The most apparent thing was, of course, the explanation for the heat -- no power. Not a single hum or hiccup, and all of the electronic clocks, bells, and whistles were as dark as the shadows of the dim room. All of the fabrics were tattered and touching them turned them instantly into dust; a dust that covered everything in a thick powder, intermittently brightened with patches of greenish something that was probably mold. The walls were cracked and drywall chunks littered the carpet.   The carpet, visible in the gloom over the edge of the wreck of a bed, was a whole other thing. As Tam watched, the carpet seemed to shift and roll, and she realized that it wasn't the carpet that was moving, but that the carpet was full of… crawly… something. They might have been pill-bugs, but they were gray and, well, huge. Easily thumb-sized or larger. There were also a LOT of them.   Tam wondered, for a moment, whether this was some horrific tequila dream, at least, until one of the pill-bugs crawled over the bare foot she had dangled off the other side of the bed. Tam screamed, yanking her foot back up on the bed, which promptly collapsed to the floor with a crash, teetering as it balanced on the plastic underbed storage boxes that Tam kept her off-season clothes in. The remnants of the scream and crash seemed to echo, hanging in the silence and slowly falling back to the ground like the clouds of dust that danced in the light-beams of the tattered blinds.   Tam sat, mute and in shock, looking around the dim, sticky-hot room in its state of abject decay, utterly uncertain what to do next. Of course, this could be a dream, right? I mean, you could feel shit in dreams, you just didn’t usually know it, right?   Tam edged herself to the tilted rim of the bed, the mattress rocking on the remnants of the frame and the storage boxes, listing precariously as she looked over the edge and tried to see down the long hall towards her kitchen. She had to pee like nobody's business, but she'd be damned if she'd walk across that carpet without something on her feet. She spied her Keds from last night, just as they fell off the bed onto the floor, and she snatched them up, one hand scooping at the pre-tied, elasticized neon laces just as a curious giant pill-bug started to head in their direction.   Tam attempted to grab a pair of socks off the shelves near her bed that she'd used for a wardrobe. They fell to dust in her hands. "Well, then. Sneakers, no socks it is." She yanked on the Keds, her bladder busting.   The first step off of the bed and towards the bathroom crunched. A lot. A lot-lot. Gorge rose in her throat and she swallowed it back. She might hover over the toilet to take a piss in this, but she would NOT stick her face over the toilet bowl in this dreamscape. No effin’ way!   Tam picked her way between the wandering giant pill-bugs to the bathroom, trying to step on as few of them as possible. She waited for them to get pissy about the deaths of their compatriots and swarm her, rushing over her body and eating her alive, but fortunately, that scenario only appeared in her head, and not as any sort of reality. The massive gray roly-polies just trundled along on the carpet, paying her absolutely no mind. Not even enough to get out of her way when she had no choice but to bring her feet down in a mass of them.   A flash of unfaded neon color in the dust-colored, faded, dimmed space caught her eye, because of course it did. Tam bent over, using her foot to kick pill bugs of the patch of out-of-place fuchsia in the middle of her bedroom floor, sticking out like a sore thumb that stood between her and emptying her bladder. Bright and intense in this environment cannot possibly be good, dammit. Don’t read it… whatever it is, you don’t want to know, girl. Just… put it back on the floor and pretend it’s one of those memos from Finance that have lots of words and don’t mean squat as long as you can code a solution before they realize you’ve already figured out their shit.   She shook her head, arguing with herself even as she grabbed the slip of paper and slipped into the bathroom, then snorted. The bathroom had no windows and was black as pitch. Without lights, it was far too dim to read the page, even if she wanted to. Even with the door open, very little light made it as far as the toilet.   There was a rustling above her head that made cold fingers crawl up Tam's spine. She scrunched the paper in her hand, her fingers spasming into a fist around the brightly colored sheet. She shuddered at the rustling sound, like dried leaves but way bigger. Looking up into the darkness was useless, of course. If barely a speck of light made it to the toilet, zero made it up to the luxury of twelve-foot ceilings. She could hear, but couldn't see what was above in those dark recesses. She was pretty sure that whatever it was, it was bigger than one of the lumbering bugs and, beyond that, if there was a Need To Know scale she would make sure she was on the absolute BOTTOM RUNG of that, because she had every intention of ignoring that rustling noise and making damned sure that she didn’t pay it the least little bit of attention. I do NOT need to know. Just get the eff out of here and let whatever it is have the bathroom.   Tam remembered, finger on the flushing mechanism, the major inconvenience of a power outage and bathrooms. Flushing the toilet would not only use the last of any potable water in the apartment, if there was any such thing in this particular environment. It would also mean that she couldn't use the toilet later, and with no idea how long she was going to be stuck in here before she woke up or had to figure out where else to go, she sighed and put the lid down without flushing. Tam was getting used to the sticky, crunchy sound and feel of Keds meeting bugs as she made her way back out into the post-apocalyptic horror that used to be her expensive, high-end apartment. The scrunched up ball of neon paper was forgotten in her hand, except as a substitute for a stress-ball, as her fingers clamped and scrunched the bright scrap.   Tam tried to process the mental tally of some kind of exit strategy. Whether it was out of the apartment or out of the dream she was trapped in, she didn’t specify. Her brain seemed satisfied to just plan on the strength of “out”.   After a brief walk-through of the apartment, Tam perched on the edge of a counter. She was afraid to sit on any of the furniture. Even though it looked to be mostly in one piece, every bit of fabric or paper or other textiles that she'd touched had fallen to dust moments after she'd laid hands on it as she moved through her apartment, leaving skeletons of their former glory behind. That also meant she was stuck in the jeans, tank-top and jacket she'd passed out in. The rest of the clothes in her closet had been nothing but tattered, moth-ridden rags, and then, dust, the moment that she tried to lay a hand on them. Thinking about the clothes brought Tam's attention back to the piece of paper she'd had in the bathroom. She had a momentary burst of logic, as she realized that the paper had to be like her and the clothing she was wearing or that had been right next to her on the bed — those things — her jeans, tank, jacket, and Keds — were the only survivors into this surreal existence. The paper should have been faded, and should have become dust the moment she touched it… unless… unless it was like her, and wasn’t … whatever this place that looked like her apartment was. She gripped the piece of paper tentatively with two fingers and lifted the crumpled ball out of her palm. The piece of paper hadn't crumbled, even when she'd balled it up and squeezed on it for a good bit, on top of that. She picked at one of the visible corners, ginger pressure, carefully applied, pulling the paper out of its crumbled ball. She was so intent on the careful unfolding that she hadn’t realized how close she had wandered to the cracked-open coat closet beside the former kitchen until that same, dry rustling sound shivered into the room and crawled right up her spine. I do not need to know. Still, she stared into the dark confines of the closet. There was nothing to see in the deeper shadows of the closet. She let out the breath she held and managed to get the paper open enough to start smoothing it out. She didn’t want to read it, but she also hated when things didn’t make sense, and the neon fuchsia paper didn’t make sense. The opened sheet had a slew of writing on it, in a strangely formed kind of block printing. Some of the print was barely large enough to be legible. Tam’s throat closed. Fine print was NEVER good. Not even in dim light and barely legible. Maybe especially in dim light and barely legible. Tam clambered back onto the sturdy counter, supporting herself against the frame of the breakfast bar before smoothing out the sheet of paper.   The not-fine print was certainly easy enough to read, but the fine print attached to the words ROULETTE, you, which was in bold, THE WHEEL, game objective (also in bold) and THE COUNTDOWN HAS ALREADY BEGUN was mostly meant to be read -- a crisp, stiff machine font meant for human eyes to easily discern. But the words made absolutely NO sense.