Trial Run by Locke Thomas

Author:Locke, Thomas [Locke, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC028010, FIC002000, FIC031000
ISBN: 9781441223371
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-10T07:00:00+00:00

39

Trent had no idea when it happened. Only that afterward, everything had changed.

His shout had woken Shane. Now she sat on the couch, watching him with a wide unblinking gaze. She had the blanket from her bed wrapped around her. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I don’t want to sit. I want to pace.”

“Fine. So pace.”

“You can’t imagine how nice it is to have the room to pace. It’s worth wasting six hundred dollars to have room to move around. I live in a dorm room the size of a packing crate. The flies don’t have room to pace.”

“We didn’t waste anything.”

He swatted the air. “That’s inconsequential. I went to bed as one guy, and I wake up and I’m in a different dimension. A different universe.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I’ve already told you.”

“Tell me again.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I’m only asking because I’m pretty spooked by the whole thing.”

Trent kept stalking from one end of the room to the next. “The image started the same as every time before. The same nightmare.”

“You never mentioned a nightmare before.”

He didn’t want to answer. But the words flew out of their own accord. “I was eight. My mom was in the trailer where we lived. She was keeping company with a bad guy. We’re talking seriously evil.”

“Wait, you’re telling me this really happened?”

Trent dragged down the collar of his T-shirt, revealing a deep crevice at the point where his neck joined his shoulder. “That real enough for you?”

“What is that?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“He shot you?”

“Shot us both.”

“Oh, Trent.”

He let the collar slip from his fingers. “I’ve had the nightmare for so long it doesn’t bother me anymore. Well, it does, but not a lot. After each nightmare, the scar burns when I wake up. Then it fades with the memory.”

Shane slipped from her cocoon. She pulled the blanket off his pallet. Draped it around his shoulders. “Come over and sit down.”

“I don’t want to.” He sounded petulant to his own ears.

“I know. Do it for me.” She settled him down, wrapped him up tight, then slipped back into her own nest. She turned to face him. “So you had the nightmare.”

“Then I was back again in the classroom. Seated at my desk on the corner of the dais. And the older me is there at the blackboard. He doesn’t speak, just starts his projector—”

“Sorry, the what?”

“That’s my name for it. A three-dimensional image system. It just hangs in the air between us. And every time I see a new image, it feels like nuclear fission.” He clenched his fists and pounded his thighs. “Only this time, I see myself destroying my doctoral research. Demolishing two years of my life, then walking away.”

He looked at her. And whatever it was he saw in her face was enough to launch him from the sofa. It was either pace and rage at the night, or weep. “But that wasn’t the worst. It was how calm he was. He smiled at me. Like this was nothing.”

Shane watched him make another pair of crossings.

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