Charlie Huston - Sleepless

I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my greasy fingers and lips.

“Something to look forward to.”

He dropped his cigarette butt and let it hiss out in a puddle of melted ice that had drained from the coolers.

“Yeah, something to look forward to. Who couldn’t use something like that?”

I carefully folded my handkerchief away.

“Vincent, there was something I did want to have a word with you about.”

He reached over the counter, took one of the empty frying pans from the grill, and banged it on the side of the El Camino. In response, the passenger door creaked open and a chubby brown teenager in a bloody white apron and checked pants climbed out, rubbing his eyes.

Vinnie rose and replaced the pan on the grill.

“Gonna take a walk, Ciccio.”

The boy nodded, yawning.

Vinnie pointed at the coolers.

“Push the eel before it goes bad.”

The boy scratched at a head covered in curly red hair.

“Sí, Zio Vincenzo. Anguilla. Sí.”

I rose, dusting my backside, and followed Vinnie away from his fish stand, winding through the aisles of the carnival, away from the food stalls and carts that clustered near the gates where they could be easily accessed by visitors who did not care to take in the esoterica that lay deeper within.

If those outer layers of the carnival bore the character of a frontier marketplace, long on commerce and short on law enforcement, the interior felt much like a war-zone souk, bristling with opportunities to lose oneself, figuratively, literally, mortally. It was entirely of your choosing how far you cared to penetrate.

As the desires catered to became more perverse, the density of the sleepless increased. Existing on the far verge of human experience, there were tastes only they could reasonably be expected to acquire. The appeal, for instance, of being injected with mass volumes of amphetamine and then sealed in a sensory deprivation tank escaped even myself. But it was a service with popularity attested to by a long and twisting line of the haggard.

The concentration of sleepless in the darker zones of the carnival had led to rumor and superstition. A belief among the ignorant that one could contract SLP in this area simply by breathing the air. As if the sleepless were shedding and exhaling the SL prion in thick clouds. Not so. Of course one could be infected if one inhaled a sufficient quantity of SLP, but the sleepless did not walk about in a miasma of the illness.

Now, if there had been an incinerator on the site cremating sleepless remains, that would have been a definite threat. Prions, notoriously resilient, remain active even when burned. Prion ash is every bit as infectious as a wad of it residing, for the sake of argument, in a hamburger. Early in the course of the pandemic, before it was even known as such, CDC guidelines had called for the burning of SLP corpses.

SL response teams in orange vests would appear at hospitals, and increasingly at homes, unpacking electric saws. The bodies of the sleepless dead were decapitated so that tissue from the brains could be catalogued. Anomalies were sought, anything that might give promise of a cure. No one wanted to throw away the brain that might hold the key. But once the heads were packed in dry ice and sealed in a bucket, the bodies had to be dealt with.

Infection rates around crematoriums and landfill incinerators were well above national and global averages. Eventually the incongruity was noticed. Sleepless were no longer burned. They were limed and buried in concrete-lined mass graves. Deep.

Some countries were still burning. If one cared to track such things via the many thousands of SLP-related blogs, one gathered that the hinterlands of civilization had not gotten the word. In wide swaths of Africa and Asia, corpse pyres burned nonstop, the new dead piled on by the lowest castes. The longer the fires burned, the larger they grew, their plumes of smoke and infection creating more fuel. I’d been told by a Navy airman I’d met in casual circumstances that his carrier strike group fighter wing had flown escort for tankers dropping flame retardant on those blazes. The natives restarted their fires in short order, and the strategy shifted. Before his group had been recalled to waters closer to home, the airman had flown multiple missions firing Maverick missiles at towering piles of burning human bodies. The logic behind this new strategy, if one can use the word “logic” in this scenario, was not only to decimate the burn site but to terrorize the populace out of the practice of corpse burning. The fact that the attacks rained SLP ash and mist upon the locals seemed to be considered an acceptable level of collateral damage.

I never saw the airman again, naturally, but I have occasionally thought about him. He woke in the middle of the night, crying. He had reason. And I held him until the sun brought some light into the room and he said he had to go. His CSG was setting sail again, for where he was not certain. But the George Washington was soon offshore of Venezuela, and I am certain he became embroiled in that bit of twenty-first-century gunboat diplomacy. Finding new raw materials for his nightmares.

No, contagion was not an issue, no matter how deeply or extensively one chose to plumb the Midnight Carnival. Which is not to say that there wasn’t an ample supply of unpleasant deaths available to the unwary. Along with perversity in their desires, many sleepless also brought with them an absolute disregard for their own well-being. So it was that Vinnie and I maintained a prudent watchfulness as we strolled.

A thick-bodied boy in a faded Los Angeles Raiders hoodie shuffled past, offering a whispered chant.

“Dreamer. Dreamer. Dreamer.”

It would be bootleg, of course. A compound of heroin and ketamine most likely. Called double horse, it was the most popular home brew version of the real drug. So potent, it could knock even a late-stages sleepless to his knees and offer a brief period of sensation that I’d been told felt much like severe food poisoning without the diarrhea and vomiting. That this should be desirable was all one really needed to know about the ravages of SLP.

At a table filled with hand-painted miniatures of stock nonplayer characters and creatures from Chasm Tide, Vinnie paused to look over the selection.

“The kid back there, Ciccio, he loves the game.”

I stood at an angle to him, keeping an eye on the aisle at his back.

“A nephew?”

He shook his head, inspecting the detail on an ogre.

“Grandson of one of my uncle’s war buddies. His mom is Italian. His scumbag dad who split on the kid and his mom, he’s American. We were able to get some paperwork done, make something happen. Got him out of the Mid-European Quarantine Zone. Traveling with that accent, kid must have caught shit everywhere. You know, they still haven’t unsealed the Italian border. Known for how long that SLP and FFI aren’t the same thing, but the UN still won’t open the damn border.”

He put the ogre down and picked up a Chasm Wraith.

“Once he was out of the MEQZ, he went into the pipeline. A guy who used to handle mostly Bulgarian girls for the skin trade when you had to reach overseas for that kind of thing, got him across for us. Dealing with INS once he was here, that was an exercise in bullshit that I never want to repeat. Finally, I asked some guy in an office downtown what the hell it would cost, theoretically, to get the kid out of processing, with or without papers.”

I nodded.

“And what was the theoretical cost?”

“Ten theoretical grand. U.S. Cash money. Asshole. I could have done double that if he’d asked. Cheapskate corruption.”

He held a Kraken between thumb and forefinger.

“How much?”