The Mindless Man's Paradise

Chapter fifty-five

  I arose gasping for air, as if I hadn’t breathed at all.

  How long had I been passed out? Too long. My stomach growled and my tongue was parched.

  Turns out, those pills had been Dream Land, which had been a sort of myth among my girl’s dormitory. Dream Land was a pill that made your worst fears a reality. Well, a sort of reality, at least. Everything in Dream Land was designed to feel one hundred percent real, and the only way you could wake up, was to become self aware.

  But once you woke up, you would always remember what you had endured in Dream Land. Dream Land haunted the best of us, or so the legend goes.

  I had always thought it was something the older girls had made up. Or maybe that is what everyone believed.

  My mind filled with images of Cyrus dead, Cyrus making me feel guilty, Aurora slapping me, me putting a knife in myself at the execution podium, Cyrus kissing thousands and thousands of different girls; so many fears had played in my mind. Each new scenario I had been inserted to, I had forgotten the previous, that way, when or if, I woke up, it would all come rushing back to me, driving me just as insane as being in Dream Land itself.

  I began to cry, huddling up into the fetal position, watching as a puddle of my tears formed. But then I heard something else in the room.

  A whimper. A cry. It was slowly growing into an outright shriek, and when I looked around, I realized that it was Cyrus.

  He was clawing at the floor, creating slashes parallel to his body, but he was still asleep.

  Perhaps seeing Cyrus in such pain was just as bad as being in Dream Land. What if Cyrus never woke up? What if he died in Dream Land? It seemed plausible. Without water or food, the body would just die while Cyrus’s brain was still in Dream Land.

  But something told me HQ wouldn’t allow that. They’d put him on an IV if they had to.

  I rushed to him, and sat down by him. I gently laid his head on my lap, stroking his hair, brushing the tangled mess with my fingers. I wiped the tears from his cheeks, and then I held his arms until they stopped flailing.