C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

He glanced at me, frowning, then at his hand, and scowled even more deeply. “From medical school, yes.”

A thin band popped around my heart, releasing a thin wash of satisfaction. African evil spirits seemed ever-more unlikely, but my enemy did seem reluctant to mess with topaz. I didn’t know how, or by whom, the stone had first been recognized as conducive to easy sleep and pleasant dreams, but I thanked them for it. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something, and I was grateful for a reprieve, small as it might be.

Right on cue, my cell phone rang.

I was really beginning to detest that thing. Strike that: I detested cell phones on general principles. I was starting to have a deep personal and abiding hatred for mine in specific. Visions of taking a sledgehammer to it drifted pleasantly through my mind as I took it out of my pocket and said, “Please tell me nobody’s dead.”

“Can’t help you there,” Laurie Corvallis said. “Sorry.”

I reached for the railing on Mel’s bed, using it to support myself. “What do you mean?”

“Tell me something first. How’d you know to start on the seventh of January?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. What do you mean, you can’t help me there?”

“Try me,” Corvallis said. “You’d be surprised what I believe.” She left it alone, though, a note of cockiness coming into her voice. “There was a whole burst of sleeping sicknesses around the tenth of January, down in the southwest. Half of the Navajo Nation dropped off the planet for a couple days—”

“Half?” I demanded, genuinely alarmed. “Isn’t that about a hundred thousand people, Laurie?”

Silence was followed by an impatient sigh. “All right. Maybe one percent. There’s no drama in that, Officer Walker. Regardless, literally hundreds of people dropped off, then woke up two days later and quietly started making preparations for the end days. There’ve been some news stories about it, but they’ve gotten about the same amount of attention than your average Christian sect predicting the end of the world does.”

“I’ve heard of a couple of those,” I objected. I could almost hear Corvallis shrug.

“There were thirty-seven separate dates that various sects believed the world would end in the year 2000. How many of those did you hear about?”

“Does the Y2K bug count?”

“No. You see my point.” She went on without worrying about whether I did or not. I did, anyway. “That was it. No more of the Dine went to sleep, and un—

“Dine?”

“The Navajo, Officer Walker,” Corvallis said, impatient all over again. “It’s their name for themselves. It means—”

“The People,” I guessed. The Cherokee’s original name for themselves meant more or less the same. A lot of Native American tribe names did. I felt vaguely guilty for not knowing the Navajo called themselves something else.

“Would you like to tell this story?” Corvallis asked. I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut, and after a moment she said, “Until a few weeks ago, nobody else did, either.”

I tightened my grip on Melinda’s bed frame. “How many?”

“Ten or twelve. Nothing like what’s going on here.”

“Do they have anything in common?” I pushed my glasses up to rub my eyes.

“Yeah. This is the weird bit. The new group who’ve gone to sleep worked in the University of Phoenix physics department. Grad students, professors, you name it. The CDC is still down there trying to figure out what did it, but it looks like it was something called Project Rainbow. I haven’t gotten past the classification yet, which probably means it’s a weapon of some kind under development for the military. You were right, Walker. You gave me a story. I really didn’t expect it. Maybe somebody’s been running tests on their weapon or, hell,” she said, sounding suddenly enthusiastic, “maybe it’s a terrorist attack. My God, that’d be a story.”

I sat down on the edge of Melinda’s bed and stared at the floor. “Physics?” I thought shamanism was outside my realm of expertise. I didn’t have any idea what to do with a bunch of physicists. “Has anybody died? Are they still asleep?”

Corvallis hesitated, which I hadn’t known she could do. “Nobody’s died, but nobody’s woken up, either. No, that’s not true.” I could almost hear her shrug, and then sly pleasure came into her voice. “Two people did wake up from the university plague. The weird thing is that they apparently have Navajo blood themselves. If I worked for a tabloid I’d be all over that link. Magic Indian blood saves—”

I pushed my hand against my stomach, feeling power flutter there like, as my younger self had said, a burp. “Ms. Corvallis. Who were they?”

I didn’t even need to hear her say it. She did, anyway, of course, triumph in her voice as I mouthed the same words she announced: “Mark and Barbara Bragg.”

I would’ve laughed, if I’d had it in me. I didn’t, so I only got off the phone with my vision blurred and my stomach roiling. I didn’t know what the link between a physics project and the sleeping sickness was, or what either of them had to do with Mark, who was an English major—

—Mark, who had told me he was an English major. I hadn’t had any reason to disbelieve him, except he was too good to be true. But then, so was Thor, who was good-looking and genuinely into cars and who apparently thought I cleaned up well enough to ask me on a date. So was Gary, whose steadiness and good heart had gotten me through the past seven months with something like my head on straight. So was Morrison, who might be short-tempered and grumpy with me, but whose inherent qualities were inarguably golden. I hadn’t exactly done an extensive background search on Mark, but I honestly thought that this time I’d approached the new arrival in my life with enough skepticism to give myself some credit.

And I’d been wrong despite my caution. That was bad enough. What was worse was that, however Mark was tangled up in the sleeping sickness, at least I was semiprepared for it. I’d had enough brain cells to wonder if the person who’d been dropped into my life was too good to be true, even if I’d settled into an incorrect complacency.

Morrison didn’t have anything like that kind of warning. I had to tell him, and I didn’t want to have that conversation while standing in front of Bradley Holliday. I waited until I was safe in Petite, who offered me some kind of psychological comfort, before dialing my boss’s cell phone.

He didn’t answer, which was so incredibly unlike him I immediately began to worry. Then I remembered it was well after midnight, which might just have something to do with it. I was about to redial the number when my phone rang, startling the bejeezus out of me.

“It’s a quarter after one in the morning, Walker,” Morrison growled in my ear. “This had better be very good.”

“This sleeping sickness. First it was Billy and Mel, but when I went in to try to help Mel, I had this dream. Everybody in the dream was asleep by the time I got to work yesterday, Morrison.” I thought it was yesterday. I was pretty sure it was the wee hours of Thursday morning now. I hadn’t truly slept since Tuesday afternoon. My grasp on when things had happened was starting to slip. So was my coherency. I struggled for a point: “Everybody but you, Barb, and Mark.”

“You called me up at one in the morning to tell me you’re dreaming about me, Walker?” Morrison sounded utterly disbelieving. I didn’t blame him.

“No. I mean, yes, but no. They’re tied into this sleeping sickness somehow, boss. I don’t understand how yet, but I just talked to Laurie Corvallis, and the point is, you’ve got to stay away from Barb.”