Insomnia

“Two thousand people are going to die here tonight if we don’t do something. I’m pretty confused about the rest of this business but that much I can grasp with no trouble at all.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “Just keep your arm around me so I don’t crack my head open if I faint.”

It was ironic, Ralph thought. They now had the faces and bodies of people in the early years of a vigorous middle age, but they shuffled across the parking lot like a pair of old-timers whose muscles have turned to string and whose bones have turned to glass. He could hear Lois’s breathing, rapid and labored, like the breathing of a woman who has just sustained some serious injury.

“I’ll take you back if you want,” Ralph said, and he meant it. He would take her back to the parking lot, he would take her to the orange bus-stop bench he could see from here. And when the bus came, getting on and going back to Harris Avenue would be the simplest thing in the world.

He could feel the killer aura which surrounded this place pressing in on him, trying to smother him like a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and he found himself remembering something McGovern had said about May Locher’s emphysema-that it was one of those diseases that keep on giving. And now he supposed he had a pretty good idea of how May Locher had felt during her last few years. It didn’t matter how hard he sucked at the black air or how deep he dragged it down; it did not satisfy. His heart and head went on pounding, making him feel as if he were suffering the worst hangover of his life.

He was opening his mouth to repeat that he’d take her back when she spoke up, talking in little out-of-breath gasps. “I guess I can make it… but I hope… it won’t take long. Ralph, how come we can feel something this bad even without being able to see the colors? Why can’t they?” She pointed at the media people milling around the Civic Center, “Are we Short-Timers that insensitive? I hate to think that.”

He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know, but he thought that perhaps the news crews, video technicians, and security guards clustered around the doors and beneath the spray-painted ba

Co

Rosenberg nodded. Chung’s face was pale and solemn, and at one point during her conversation with the bearded cameraman, Ralph saw her pause and raise a hand uncertainly to her temple, as if she had lost her train of thought or perhaps felt faint.

There seemed to be an underlying similarity to all the expressions he saw-a common chord-and he thought he knew what it was: they were all suffering from what had been called melancholia when he was a kid, and melancholia was just a fancy word for the blues.

Ralph found himself remembering times in his life when he’d hit the emotional equivalent of a cold spot while swimming or clear air turbulence while flying. You’d be cruising along through your day-sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done… and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the how the use would slide over you-unco

Maybe this is what causes feelings like that, he thought.

Maybe it’s ru

Now it was trying to suck them dry. Maybe they weren’t vampires, as they both had feared, but this thing was. The deathbag had a sluggish, half-sentient life, and it would suck them dry if it could. if they let it.

Lois stumbled against him and Ralph had all he could do to keep them both from sprawling to the pavement. Then she lifted her head (Slowly, as if her hair had been dipped in cement), curled a hand around her mouth, and inhaled sharply-At the same time she flickered a little. Under other circumstances, Ralph might have dismissed that flicker as a momentary glitch in his own eyes, but not now. She had slid up. just a little. just enough to feed.

He hadn’t seen Lois dip into the waitress’s aura, but this time everything happened in front of him. The auras of the newspeople were like small but brightly colored Japanese lanterns glowing bravely in a vast, gloomy cavern. Now a tight beam of violet light speared out from one of them-from Michael Rosenberg, Co

Her grip on him loosened, and suddenly the leaning pressure of her weight was gone. A moment later the violet beam of light disappeared.

She looked around at him. Color-not a lot, but somewas returning to her leaden cheeks.

“That’s better-a lot better. Now you, Ralph!”

He was reluctant-it still felt like stealing-but it had to be done if he didn’t want to simply collapse right here; he could almost feel the last of Nirvana Boy’s borrowed energy ru

Chung’s aura was the same lovely shade of wedding-gown ivory as those which had surrounded Helen and Nat on the day they’d come to his apartment with Gretchen Tillbury. Instead of a ray of light, something like a long, straight ribbon shot from Chung’s aura.

Ralph felt strength begin to fill him almost at once, banishing the aching weariness in his joints and muscles. And he could think clearly again, as if a big cloud of sludge had just been washed out of his brain.

Co

“All kinds,” he said, “but it’s still like being zipped up in a body-bag.”

“I think-” Lois began, and then her eyes fixed on something to the left of the Civic Center doors. She screamed and shrank back against Ralph, her eyes so wide it seemed they must tumble from their sockets.

He followed her gaze and felt his breath stop in his throat.