End Game

Prelude: Dreams

He'd had the dream so many times it was more something he remembered than something he invented. Tiny bits of reality blurred into a jumbled progression that began and ended the same way. The beginning: running up Meadowview Street back to his condo, pursued by the sun. This was not a normal sun — he felt its stretching fingers grope his body, burning holes in his arms, neck, and face.

The end: the black wing of a redtail hawk sailing suddenly across and through the windscreen of his aircraft.

Neither of those things had an exact parallel in real life, even when the grotesque distortions were stripped away. Zen had gotten back to the house from his run well before the sun rose, and the robot plane that caused the air accident struck well behind the cockpit, snapping off his tailplane. But the logic of the dream crowded out history, sometimes even when he was awake.

The middle of the dream was always different. It usually involved bits and pieces of recent events, sometimes from sorties he'd flown for Dreamland, but more often just things that happened during the day. Often his wife Breanna was in the dream, talking to him or flirting or even making love. Today she was cooking him breakfast and complaining about the people who owned the condo downstairs. Their baby was screaming at the top of its lungs, keeping them awake.

"How can you let a baby cry like that?" she asked. "Let's have a barbecue."

The scene changed from their kitchen to a friend's backyard patio. Instead of working the stove, Breanna was working the grill. When she turned away from it, Zen saw that it was piled high with wood.

"Too smoky," he said, sitting in the cockpit of his F-15 rather than his wheelchair.

It's too soon for the dream to end, he thought. But he coughed, and he was awake.

He still smelled smoke. Real smoke, from burning wood. The baby was still crying.

A baby the people downstairs didn't have.

Not a baby, the smoke alarm.

"Bree!" he yelled, jerking up.

She wasn't beside him.

"Bree! Breanna!"

Zen started to get out of bed. His dazed brain forgot he was paralyzed, as if that fact belonged only to the dream. He tumbled to the floor.

Just as well — thick smoke curled above his head. He coughed, nearly choking.

Someone else coughed in the bathroom down the hall.

Breanna, his wife. "Help me!" she cried.

Flames shot up from the floor ahead, illuminating the pitch-black condo. Zen pushed forward despite the heat and flames jumping in front of his face.

Part of his mind was still back in the dream. Was he dreaming? What was dream, and what was real?

He remembered getting into the airplane on the last day he walked, whacking his shin on the side of the cockpit as he got in, thinking the bruise was going to hurt for weeks.

"Help me!" cried Breanna.

He pushed his head next to the carpet and kept going. The bathroom door was closed.

"Open the door, open the door!" he yelled.

He heard a sob, but the door remained closed. Pitching himself to the right, he reached up with his left hand and pulled down on the handle. Smoke flooded into the room. It smelled like metal being incinerated. Zen started to cough and couldn't stop.

"Breanna!" he yelled. "Where are you? Bree? Bree? Bree?"

He lay on his back as the flames climbed over him. He felt himself falling as the room collapsed.

Zen woke with a shudder so violent the bed rattled. It had been a dream, a new variation of the familiar nightmare.

He reached instinctively for his wife, but she wasn't there. He remembered now: She was in Chicago with relatives; she'd intended on flying back last night but had been snowed in, her flight canceled.

Just as well, Zen thought, squirming to get himself upright in the bed. He was still shaking from the dream. He wouldn't have wanted her to see him like this.

But she'd seen him worse, much worse. He wished she were here, to touch.

To save.

If there had been a real fire, she would have been the one saving him, a notoriously deep sleeper.

And a cripple. A fact that didn't vanish when he opened his eyes.

That would change. He'd walk again. He was starting his treatments today, experimental treatments, but they would give him his legs back.

Maybe that was what the dream meant, why the ending had changed. He needed his legs back to save his wife, to be with her for real.

Zen ran his fingers over his scalp and glanced at the clock at the side of the bed. It was only a few minutes past three. But there was no way he was going back to sleep now. If

Breanna were beside him, he might have managed it, might have hugged her warmth and shaken off the memory of the nightmare, but without her, the only thing to do was get out of bed and get some coffee, check the overnight sports scores and get a jump on the day.