The Multitude, стр. 43
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Once again, Carla knew she was dreaming. Her amazing, newfound omniscience thrilled her with its possible implications. She was building up to something. Perhaps the time would come when she could break the shackles of a forced script and overcome her body’s refusal to forge an alliance with her will. Maybe that time had come.
But no, one of her legs moved, then the other, taking her the wrong way again, steering her down the despicable flight of stairs in the midst of bustling Manhattan. Frustration throbbed her temples from a corner of her brain so distant she might as well have been watching through the lens of a telescope. She repeated her death march into the forbidding cavern of the subway station. Once there, she engaged in the same brief verbal sparring match with the mystery man lurking behind her. The same train exploded into the station. She screamed and fell toward the tracks once again.
A flash blinded her. And then, for the length of a breath, a sweet intake of country air, nothing more happened. The train’s roar still rang in her ears and its headlight brought spots to her eyes, but she’d cheated death again by escaping to a different place. Something had snatched her away, a force more powerful than she could imagine, preventing her from falling to the tracks and meeting an inevitable fate that still hadn’t occurred in all these many iterations of the same nightmare.
A burst of inspiration eased her pounding heart and calmed her labored breath. For the first time, she considered whether the theme of her dream might be redemption rather than death. Perhaps if the reel ever played to the end, the man would latch on to her arm and save her from falling.
Carla tried to keep hold of this amazing notion and redefine her plight as a mere test, a gauntlet of sorts with a frail spirit at one end and a stronger one at the other. Then, a second flash revealed the folly of any attempt to tie a tidy bow around her dark wanderings. Another existence announced itself—softly at first, through the scent and tickle of grass at her face—then harshly. A net raked the exposed skin of her arms and legs where the fabric of her frock had bunched. The cruel hemp tightened, and bright sun glared into her eyes from the wrong angle, coming straight at them rather than from above her head. She’d been taken down and now lay on her back—the defenseless, desperate, doomed, and, above all, disappointing prey of hunters who simply couldn’t be allowed to win. But they had.
The two barbarians brought shade, bending over her to leer, guffaw, and even defile her with spittle before taking up the net and dragging her toward the woods. She screamed, hoping to alert those who needed to be spared, and then groaned, remembering her village lay well out of earshot.
“Quiet.” One of the men kicked at her, and his partner joined in, grunting with the effort and bringing explosions of pain to her back and sides. She curled into a ball and tried to cover her face. A glimpse of her abandoned crossbow lying useless where she’d left it shamed her. She’d failed her charge of watching for invaders. They’d caught her by so swift a surprise she hadn’t had the opportunity to light a signal flare and stall them with arrows until reinforcements might arrive. Families lived in the village around the meadow’s bend…children. She prayed these savages had stolen through the woods on their own and didn’t serve as scouts for a larger raiding party.
A final kick between her shoulder blades forced a choking gasp out of her. She writhed on the ground, helpless to fend off any additional blows.
Thankfully, the barbarians must have vented their urge for violence. The beating stopped. They gathered the net and began dragging her again.
Carla hadn’t lost her omniscience yet. She was able to distance herself from the terror and escape into a safe corner of her mind. A voice of logic rose above the clamor of pain and anxiety. She’d been whisked out of the subway to Sanctimonia, but her memory of another life, a calmer one in Upstate New York, lingered. At least for the moment, she maintained enough clarity to raise questions.
Would she be aware of these multiple personalities if she were crazy?
No, not according to any clinical literature she’d ever read. And she had her mother’s confirmation of duplicate worlds in the form of the talisman the woman had received in a dream.
Okay then. Presuming sanity, how sound was the back-to-back nightmare theory as opposed to the notion cosmic wormholes had sprung into action, bouncing her from one time and place to another? The subway scene’s repetitive cycle bore the closest resemblance to a dream, but even that horrid play came choreographed with sights, sounds, scents, and touches far too sharp for her simple subconscious to conjure.
Carla staked her money on wormholes. Her soul had hit the spin cycle again, beginning the circle from one reality to another, then a third, a fourth, and hopefully home. Better yet… Brewster’s engaging smile flashed through her mind. She wished herself into Northbrook and clicked the ruby-red slippers of hope. A dream might allow such a thing, enabling her to flee a desperate situation. On the other hand, a wormhole in charge of her wanderings and ultimate fate wouldn’t grant leave until it was ready. A wormhole would take its own sweet time.
Grass gave way to rougher ground, announcing her cosmic puppet master’s decision to torture her a while longer, scraping and bruising her as the barbarians dragged her into the woods. “Please give me leave.”
Her plea to the mysterious higher power torturing her soul elicited a laugh from one of the