Darkness.

Rob opened his eyes to a dark room. The murky black was only penetrated by a faint red glow radiating from an alarm clock. The clock read 3:42AM.

He had been thrown out of sleep by a dream that was now slipping from his mind like a bloviator into a rant. He could only remember a bright light, how his eyes burned. They felt coated and sticky, like a glue was hardening over his pupils. He tried to blink it away, but his eyelids seemed to be pulled back with hooks. The dream was still sliding away, slithering into his subconscious, but in that moment just after waking, Rob remembered his struggle against an unseen force, grappling to break free. As he shook harder and harder, desperate for escape, he began to smell chemicals. The chemical scent cut into his nostrils like a mishandled razor and tears welled up in eyes, his vision darkening. He heard faint sobs, and just before his vision dove entirely into the charcoal depths of slumber, he became aware of a distant humming. It seemed not to be coming from the outside world, but from directly behind his forehead.

But that was gone now. The dream no longer existed to him as he entered full consciousness. Rob let out a sigh of weariness as he sat up in his bed, displacing the textbook he had been writing in the margins of, stretching his elbows upward. The muscles in his back tensed, bursting with energy in the same way that the wind pushes against an airplane on the verge of taking flight. The faster you travel, the more resistance you face, pushing, shoving, until…liftoff. Rob sank back down into his pillow with an “oof.”

Gradually, Rob became aware of a second set of lungs exhaling in rhythm with his. He sat up again, full of alertness, and reached for the lamp that he knew sat behind his clock. It was the only thing not eluminated by the faint crimson glow. He watched as the light of his clock caught in two small, glinting orbs. He froze, and the orbs remained where they were as well, floating about six feet in the air, red as his mother’s lipstick. Rob took a breath of fear and anticipation as he flicked on the light.

He was momentarily blinded as his pupils readjusted to the change of lighting, but Rob was fully aware of his surroundings when the man facing him lunged.

The crimson glow of the clock had not been entirely wrong about the intruder’s eyes. The tall man’s eyes had a slight pinkish tint which contrasted starkly with his otherwise pigment-less features. Rob would’ve been interested to examine the man’s eyes and skin if the albino weren’t lunging with a rope and a fair amount of brute force.

Rob leapt to the end of the bed, just barely avoiding being flattened by the tall, pale man. He heard a loud thunk as the trespasser slammed his head against the wall. The man’s cranium left behind a cracking dent, much like a bowl, in the drywall. Hoping that this injury briefly halted the man, Rob rolled onto the floor and scrambled towards his closet. In the corner he would find a metal baseball bat with a single dent in it from when it had been smacked against a tree. It would do more damage than anything else he could access at the moment, and so Rob desperately struggled to open his closet door. He was nervous, though, and his sweaty palms kept slipping on the doorknob. Just as he managed to get the door open a crack, the man landed on Rob’s spine, closing the door with the boy’s head. Rob heard and felt a cracking sound from his spine.

The wind was knocked out of him, but Rob thought fast and reached a hand behind his head. He latched on to the attacker’s head, groping for the eye socket with his thumb. He knew he had reached his destination when the man growled in pain and rolled off of Rob, covering his eye. With the albino’s soft underbelly facing skyward, Rob had an advantage. Rob got to his feet with great effort and stomped on the albino’s stomach with all his force. Unfortunately, all this did was anger his opponent, who outweighed him by a good 80 pounds.

Rob once again dashed to the closet door, knowing that his only hope now was the bat. This time, the door opened much more easily, but what Rob found left him dismayed and vulnerable. His bat, which had placed in the right corner of his closet with great care after every use, was gone. He dropped to his knees, searching through the piles of clothing on the ground, hoping that the battle between his skull and the door had only dislodged the bat. He had no such luck.

Suddenly, Rob felt himself being hoisted to his feet via his neck. He couldn’t breathe and was struggling violently, but the albino was simply too angry to let a child win. Within seconds Rob found his feet dangling several inches above the ground where they were swinging wildly back and forth. It was at this point that Rob cursed the adrenaline coursing through the brute’s veins. One of his kicks seemed to have landed somewhere painful, for his assailant grunted and loosened his grip slightly. This split second of loosened grip allowed Rob to grab a gulp of air, but he soon felt his airways being restricted again. Once again, Rob had only inflamed the temper of the large albino, and he would pay the price.

In a flash, Rob felt a sharp stabbing in the back of his skull as his head smashed into the mirror his mother had hung in his room.

“This way you won’t have an excuse to go out looking like you just rolled out of bed,” she had said when she hung it. She had chuckled, ruffling his hair. At this point, Rob cared less about how his hair looked and more about whether he could escape the clutches of this mysterious man who seemed so bent on his annihilation.

Rob dropped to the floor, gasping. His head was throbbing more rapidly than a metronome and a warm sticky liquid was running into his eyes. As he flopped onto his back and brushed the hair out of his face, Rob realized it was blood. He was so relieved to be breathing again that he forgot about the severely angered intruder standing in his room. The man made sure that he would not slip the boy’s memory for long.

“So, have you had fun during our little playtime, kiddo?” the albino asked. He kicked Rob in the ribs with what felt to be a steel toed boot. Rob whimpered in pain. “Oh, you whine like a puppy. It’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you anymore. I’ve had enough practice already tonight.”

Rob rolled onto his stomach, wincing. His exposed elbows were sliced open by the glass that littered the floor.

“First off, I’m fifteen, ‘kiddo,’” Rob informed the albino. The tall man chuckled in a deep voice, showing that it was not his victim’s age that mattered but his small body size. “And secondly, what’re you talking about, practice? I doubt that you can take a class for this sort of stuff.”

“Not true,” the albino snickered. “I’ve taken several classes on this, and I aced all of them. Of course, it did help that I persuaded my instructors.” Rob grimaced at the man’s brutality. “Oh, shut up. Anyway, those classes were years ago. I’ve had much more recent experience. The equivalent of a runner’s stretch, if I do say so myself.”

The man walked over to the door of the bedroom, his footsteps crunching as he walked through the shattered glass from the mirror. As the door opened, Rob was shocked into silence. Sitting in the hall were his mother and father. Their corpses had been propped up to face Rob’s door, their glassy eyes staring in at him. Their lifelessness was startling, like puppets with severed strings. Each had a trickle of blood coming out of their temple…Rob looked away in disgust.

“Not so pretty, eh?” the albino mocked him. “Well, don’t worry. You won’t have to deal with the pain long.” Rob looked up, confused, only to find himself looking down the barrel of a gun. Rather, the silencer on the barrel of a gun. Before he could react, he heard a dull clicking noise.

Rob sat up in bed with a start.

He was covered in a cold sweat and panting. He looked around, slowly realizing that he had just awoken from a nightmare. As his breathing slowed down, he laid back down in bed. He glanced over at his clock; 3:42AM. As in all dreams, the earliest part is the most easily forgotten. In this way, Rob forgot what time his clock had read in his dream.

Just as he was about to dive back into the realm of the Sandman, Rob’s breathing was impaired by a terrible stench. The odor filled the air, making him think of dung and old books with the pages rotting away. Rob leaned over the side of his bed, gagging. He managed to suppress the vomit that was rising to his throat, but only barely. He reached up to turn on the light, but paused as he remembered what the result of such action had been in his dream. Deciding that it was better to die in his sleep, Rob sank back down into the warmth of his bed and possible final resting place. He buried his face in his pillow, attempting to block out the rotten stink.

As he once again began to drift back to sleep, Rob sat up, clapping a hand to his mouth. He realized he would have to turn on the light so that he could make it to the bathroom without spewing vomit all over the floor. He reached over to where his lamp stood with the hand that was not covering his mouth, knocking his clock to the floor as he hurried. The dull red glow shone under his bed where Rob couldn’t see that the time still read 3:42AM. As the light clicked on, Rob found himself face to face with a putrid bag of flesh.

Rob leaned back in order to get as far away as possible from what turned out to be the face of a two-legged beast. Its eyes were completely white, surrounded by congealed blood and pockets of puss, a few of which had burst. The thing’s skin was a pale green and sagged from the clearly visible bones. The monster was covered in blood, and through its ripped clothing Rob could see several bones poking through the dead flesh. As the beast’s eyes bored into him, Rob noticed that its face lacked a nose.

The thing stared at him, not breathing or moving. Its left eyelid drooped, covering half of the white orb with rotting flesh. The creature didn’t seem to notice. It simply stood, half stooped, ogling Rob’s face. The thing finally let out a long, low moan that filled the room not only with the sound of a dying animal but with the stench of perpetually putrid breath. Rob gagged, alarmed at the sudden noise but overcome by the horrible scent. The monster, which can only be described as a zombie, took this as an opportunity to attack.

It swung its arm out like a wrecking ball swinging towards an abandoned building. It struck Rob’s shoulder and clamped down. Rob panicked, struggling to escape the undead creature’s clammy grasp. The thing was too strong. It seemed to sense Rob’s heightened fear and did the only thing that could have struck terror even further into his heart at this point; it swung its other arm out, reaching for Rob’s delicate neck.

Though he was by no means proficient in zombie literature, Rob was well aware that the only goal of his undead villain was to consume his grey matter. This realization seemed to instill in Rob a new sense of purpose, and this time he not only managed to evade the monster’s disgusting hand, but break away from the hand that was fixed to his shoulder. Actually, though he did not notice it at the time, Rob simply pulled the thing’s hand off. It was neither saddened nor enraged. It simply tried a new tactic.

The beast used its remaining hand and the stub Rob had left it with to seize the quilt on the bed where Rob was still located. It seemed to be trying to climb up to where Rob was seated in a pool of his own perspiration, but only succeeded in removing the blanket from on top of him. Coming to his senses, Rob jumped up and off the end of his bed. The zombie was not very fast in reacting to this, and took a full ten seconds to turn to where its prey was standing. It once again let out a low moan that sent shivers down Rob’s spine. He bolted for the door of his room, uncertain after his last dream if his bat really was located in his closet and determined to not allow his room to become his eventual sepulcher. When he opened the door, Rob was shocked at what he found.

Yet another recently deceased person was lurking in the hall. This one had scraps of long, perhaps brown hair dangling from its almost completely exposed skull. This savage lacked the bags of puss around its eyes, but for what it lacked in puss, it made up with in jagged, broken teeth. It also seemed to have small lacerations around the bridge of its nose, which Rob suspected came from the glasses that were dangling off of the one ear that the creature still had. The glasses looked oddly familiar, but Rob couldn’t seem to remember from where. The dead woman, or so the corpse appeared to be, turned to him, her spine snapping. This one let out a snarl of anger and vengeance as it lunged for his neck. Rob ducked out of the way just at the right time, allowing the woman to crash on the ground behind him.

He turned so he could see the ghastly thing’s next attack and found the two zombies standing side by side. They looked like a sort of demented couple, perhaps dressed up for a Halloween party. But Rob knew that this was no night of candy and polyester witch hats. Rob backed into the hall when he suddenly heard a crunch from below his feet. He lifted his bare foot, which now contained tiny shards of glass, to find the glasses of the female zombie lying there, shattered. It suddenly occurred to him where he had seen these glasses before. His mother wore these exact frames, wire rims around thick bifocals. She had always loved the style, no matter how “unfashionable” they may have been.

Rob slowly lifted his head as the facts of his current situation began to snap into place. The undead couple that stood in his room matched the height of his parents. The woman’s hair, though coated in blood and filth, was the same shade of brown as his mother’s. Rob was about to shake off such a terrible thought when he spotted his father’s college ring on the remaining pinky of the taller zombie. Rob stumbled backwards in shock.

The female, rather, his mother, took this as a cue to attack. She lunged at him with seemingly impossible speed for someone whose kneecaps were fully exposed. Her teeth made a clicking noise as her jaw bounced. Following his wife’s lead, the male zombie began to stumble forward as well, though not nearly as fast. Rob backed into a wall, unsure of where to turn. He felt a sharp pain at his ankles and looked down to find his dog, which had also turned into an undead creature, gnawing, contented and demented. He shook his leg and sent the little demon flying down the stairs, snarling.

Rob’s former mother was mere inches away from him. In a panic, Rob looked from left to right, searching for any possible escape. He spotted a small patch of moonlight on the ground that was spilling from the window in the bathroom. He dashed towards it, not pausing to consider what would happen if there was another zombie lying in wait there.

As he slammed and locked the door, Dr. Todd Wilson groaned.

“What’s the matter, Wilson?” his associate asked nonchalantly as he strolled across the observation room.

“The damn kid’s in the bathroom,” Wilson muttered. “I thought that people weren’t supposed to function like this in front of zombies, let alone in this scenario! And it was your idea, too.”

“Aw, hush,” his partner snorted, sipping his coffee. “Just get rid of the door.”

“If I do that, the kid will notice. He’ll realize what’s going on.”

The mustachioed colleague glanced at the humming monitor. He sipped his coffee again as the boy on the screen panted, his back pressed to a dark wooden door.

“Make it plausible. The mom’s fast, right? Just add some strength to her speed.” He clapped the younger and clean shaven man on the back. “You’re creative, buddy.”

The seated man grunted.

Rob slumped to the floor, relieved that he was temporarily safe. His mother might be one of the more agile living dead, but she appeared to be otherwise weak. He remembered from her time as a human that she could barely lift a loaded wheelbarrow, and he highly doubted that her altered state would change that fact. He soon discovered that he was wrong.

There was a creaking, a terrible, grating sound from behind him. Rob looked all around him, finally noticing that the top of the door was bending backwards. The hinges on which the door hung were bending as well, and it seemed apparent that they would soon break. Seconds later, the top of the door broke away, sending shards of wood flying into the room like darts. Rob scrambled up from where he was sitting. He could now see his mother’s terrible face looking over the splinters that jutted up from the base of the door. The top portion of the door, though broken, still hung on its mutilated hinges. His mother shoved it out of the way and it swung into his father’s face. At any other time, he would have laughed.

“Hey, I knew you could do it. Look at you!” the second scientist said as he plopped down next to Wilson.

“I’m working,” Wilson sang, annoyed. He was typing like mad.

Rob’s mother reached her hand over the top of the door, the flesh on her arms being scraped away by the jagged wood that poked up from the bottom of the door. Rob knew what he had to do, though it would be painful not only to his mother, but to him.

“I’m really sorry, Mom,” he pleaded, almost wishing that his mother would snap out of her trance with those words. She continued to reach for his neck. Seeing no point in delaying any longer, Rob reached out his shaking hand and placed it on top of his mother’s head. Closing his eyes, he pushed down with all his force. When he opened his eyes, his mother’s head was facing down into the splinters into which Rob had forced it. Her arm was lying, lifeless, across this sharp barrier as well.

Rob wiped his hand on his shirt, ashamed. His eyes began to water as he stepped towards his mother’s body, devoid of life for the second time. His vision had become blurry, and as such, he couldn’t see his father rising up from where he had fallen. Tears dripped from his face onto the broken door as Rob mourned his mother’s second death.

Suddenly, Rob felt his head being grasped with one hand. He struggled to pull away, but the hand latched onto his ear, threatening to rip it off. From the angle at which his head was forced, he could see that his mother was still limp. His father let out another low moan.

“Dad, Dad, Dad!” Rob screamed. “It’s me! You know, your kid? You love me! Right? Right?!”

There was a short silence during which Rob wondered if he had somehow gotten through to his zombified father. Though he couldn’t see his face, Rob imagined the change in his father’s expression as he began to realize what he had become, the panic he would be feeling about missing a hand and being a walking corpse. This delusion was short lived.

Rob felt the pain when his father’s disgusting teeth pierced the skin of his neck. However, his father was no vampire. He didn’t drink Rob’s blood. He let it spill onto the carpet as he continued to bite again and again, gobbling up pieces of Rob’s flesh every time he did so.

“He’s going into cardiac arrest,” Wilson said as he leaned back in his chair. “This thing is over. Boy, I cannot wait to relax. We’ve been here for three days, and I plan to get some sleep.” He patted his friend with the mustache on the shoulder as he got up. “See you tomorrow, Wolfe.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Wolfe muttered. He turned to two nurses who were playing cards at a small kitchen table. “You two! Get in there. Get the kid back to normal.”

The nurses groaned and slapped their cards down on the table as they got up. They ran out of the observation room, nearly knocking over the coffee pot that sat on the counter nearby. They were next seen in a white room that contained one hospital bed. On the bed lay a teenage boy.

Somehow, when his father bit into his spine, Rob was still fully conscious. All this time, Rob had been struggling against his father, losing blood as he thrashed his arms. Suddenly, he could no longer move. But he could still feel the pain. He tried to scream as his father began to chew on his face, but his chest felt paralyzed. The blood was coming out in spurts, now.

“They’re not moving fast enough,” Wolfe muttered as he drummed his fingers on the meter-laden display. Every instrument on the panel was flashing, telling him something was wrong. He already knew this.

“Wolfe, why are we keeping this kid alive?” Wilson asked, confusedly. “I thought we were supposed to see what killed him and that was that.”

“Well, we know that now, don’t we? Clearly it’s nothing to do with the experiment.”

Rob was in agony. His father had moved to the base of his skull, which he was sure was exposed by now due to the crunching he heard. Rob couldn’t breathe, and his vision was becoming fuzzy around the edges.

Rob sat up straight in bed, breathless. He gasped.

All the instruments stopped blinking. The boy’s heart rate returned to normal as the nurses put their paddles back on the crash cart and left the room.

“You know, when we brought him in, his mom was crying like a baby,” Wolfe said quietly.

“I know. I was there.”

Wolfe was shaking his head. “She was screaming, too. She just kept begging me, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t take my boy! He’s too young!’ It was pathetic. I mean, the boy volunteered. He should be able to do what he wants, right?” He nervously twisted the ring on his finger.

Rob was suddenly blinded as a bright white light filled his room. When he regained his sight, he noticed that where his desk had been, there was a huge window. He looked to his right, curious as to what time it was. He usually only had these sorts of insane delusions when he woke up for school around 6AM. Instead of his alarm clock, he found a heart monitor with various readings on it. He finally found the time in the bottom left corner. The red numbers told him it was 3:42AM.

The nurses came back into the observation room and sat down to their card game.

Rob turned to get out of bed, thirsty and needing to empty his bladder. He was prevented from doing so by a rail on the edge of his bed. He stopped and looked all around him. Rob realized he was in a hospital bed. This bed was sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty white room. He reached up to wipe the sleep out of his eyes only to find a clear tube sticking out. He was trying to pull it out when a man walked up to the side of his bed, holding a scalpel.

“You don’t want to do that, Rob.”

“Oh, god he’s remembering,” Wolfe covered his mouth with his hands. “Can’t you change it? Make it go away? For C*****’s sake, do something!”

Wilson shook his head.

“Dad, what am I doing here? Where’s Mom? You know I have a track meet tomorrow. I have to be sleeping right now,” Rob whined, relieved to see his father.

“Don’t you remember?” his father asked, sterilizing the scalpel. “You volunteered. Today’s the big day. Your country’s going to be in debt to you.”

“Dad, you know I was joking, right?” Rob asked, getting nervous. “I don’t really want to do that testing. I’m just a kid! Right? Besides, what’s so bad about the Canadians? They’re nice people. I’ve even got some Canadian friends.”

“We all do, Rob. But it’s got to be done,” his father stated clinically as he lifted a small piece of machinery. He sterilized this item, too.

“What’s that, Dad? You going to teach me something about robotics? That’s cool, I guess,” Rob stuttered. His hands had begun to shake.

His father looked down at him, disapproving. “You know what it is. There’s no need to play games. Now lean back, Rob. It’s time to do some surgery. This might sting a little, but it’s in the name of science. Right, my boy?”

Wolfe leaped up from his chair. “That’s not what I said! I didn’t do that!”

No one responded.

He turned to Wilson, pleading. “Just turn it off. We’ll know when a new dream starts, and we can turn it back on then! Okay?”

“You know we can’t do that,” Wilson said quietly, looking down. “It’ll void this whole experiment.”

Rob struggled against it, but his parent pushed him down into the hospital bed. His father had always been unusually strong, though his slightly flabby arms didn’t show it. He fastened a restraint across Rob’s chest, the edge of the long black band scratching his throat. Rob tried to fight against it, though he knew that it was impossible to break free of a medical restraint like this. They were specially designed for Rob’s age group, accounting for a teenager’s every strength and weakness.

His father placed a mask over his own face as he informed Rob, “Oh, just so you know, we couldn’t spare an anesthetic. You know, all the soldiers up north? Just remember, stay strong.” With this, he began to cut. He cut a square of skin off of Rob’s forehead. Rob was screaming in pain. Then, using a different tool, his father made an incision into his skull. Rob couldn’t feel this as well, but he heard it. The sound of metal on bone made him shiver in additional agony. This square of skull was also removed and placed beside Rob’s left leg. The small machine was placed in this hole. Rob felt four wires come out of the device and slide their way under his skull to various areas of his brain. When these wires latched onto their intended location in the brain, Rob felt a slight pinch. His father flicked a switch on the outside of the machine and it turned on, as evidenced by the humming that Rob immediately heard.

“Now, for the final step. This one’s going to sting,” Rob’s father said as he stuck his finger into a small jar of a green waxy substance. He rubbed this green material onto the edge of Rob’s skin where it had been cut. Rob screamed at this most of all. His flesh seared as new skin grew over the exposed bone. When this process had finished, all that was visible was the machine and a small portion of Rob’s brain.

“I’m going to be sick,” Wolfe shouted as he clutched is stomach and ran out of the room. Wilson’s eyes were still fixed on the screen. He was oblivious to the flashing instruments and meters across the panel. He was transfixed by the horror of the scene unfolding in Rob’s dream, a scene that had happened mere days ago.

Rob’s father pulled off his gloves. He walked over to the corner of the room where a silver trash can sat. He disposed of his gloves. He also took off his mask and dropped it in the trash. He smoothed his mustache with his fingers as he walked back to where his son lay.

“Now, I’m going to put in some eye drops. These will sting, but you’ll forget all about the pain as soon as you’re asleep. But first, I’ve got to make sure your eyes stay open.”

Rob’s father reached to the top of the hospital bed, pulling down two hooks attached to wires. He took one hook by the point and inserted it into Rob’s eyelid. As it pulled back the skin, the hook scraped Rob’s eye. He screamed more loudly than before. His father ignored this as he placed the second hook in his other eye. Rob was still screaming, but now he was also tugging his head forward in an effort to escape. The hooks tore large holes in the skin by each eye from which blood began to slowly drip.

“Moron,” his father muttered.

His father picked up the tiny container of green slime again and inserted his finger. This time, he not only rubbed the paste on the torn skin, but on Rob’s eyes as well. Rob felt the burning in his eyes more clearly than when the hooks had scratched him, and he continued to scream until his voice grew hoarse.

When his eyes had healed, Rob’s father took a small white bottle and turned it upside down over each of Rob’s eyes. The white liquid fell twice in each eye, and stayed there, beginning to harden. Rob continued his struggle to break free, threatening to ruin all the work his father had done.

His father grabbed a mask with a tube on the end of it from under the bed. He stood over Rob, holding the mask, clearly displeased.

“You know, Rob,” he said, tapping his toe. “You aren’t as smart as I once thought you were. Then again, that was years ago. You’re trying to mess up this whole experiment, and then neither you nor I will be famous. Is that what you want? To not have your name known? Well, it’s not what I want. You always were a trouble maker, and now you’re playing saboteur. What ridiculous fantasies.” With this, he lowered the mask onto Rob’s face. He attached it by an elastic strap behind his son’s head.

“Goodbye, Robert,” he muttered sarcastically. He then walked out of the room.

Rob began to get dizzy as the room got darker. He held his breath, trying not to fall asleep forever, like he knew he would be doing soon. He turned his head towards the door his father had walked out of, wondering if he could escape. The door had a window, through which he saw his mother looking in. Her usually bright eyes were watery and flat, and when he tried to smile at her, she burst into tears. He heard her loud sobs through the door. He also heard his father yelling at her, angry about her behavior.

“Shut up, Marsha, shut up! How many times do I have to tell you, woman? It was his choice. He wanted to do this. Don’t you go crying at me. Just shut up!”

Wilson looked up from the screen, attracted by some movement in the testing room. He saw Wolfe kneeling by the boy’s bed, crying quietly. He was shaking his head, mouthing something to the boy. His test subject couldn’t hear.

Rob could no longer hold his breath. As he inhaled, the room became grey. He was drowsy, but he was still aware of what was going on. He struggled to free himself again, but almost half-heartedly. The humming from the machine was quite loud now.

The screen went black. Wilson waited a few seconds for the next dream to start up, but nothing happened. Startled, he looked up. Wolfe was staring at the heart monitor next to the boy’s bed. Through the glass, Wilson heard a long, uninterrupted pitch coming from the machine. He looked up and down the panel at all the meters. Only a few were still flashing. He had been so absorbed in the dream, rather, the memory, that he hadn’t noticed the boy dying. He didn’t know how long the boy had been dead, so he simply decided to use the current time as the time of death. He glanced down at his watch and grabbed a scrap of paper from nearby.

In a slanted script, he wrote:
Robert Wolfe
Time of Death 3:42AM