The Sleeping Dead by Richard Farren Barber

desperate to hear that you’re okay.” There was a thin, strung-out note in Susan’s voice that suggested to Jackson that she needed to believe this alternative reality almost as much as he did.
    “Maybe.”
    He walked across the café. It felt strange to see the bare wood, as if the furniture had been pulled away to create a dance floor. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the aching gap in the middle of the floor. The gap that made it impossible to pretend that everything was okay.
    He stopped a couple of feet short of the wall. The magazine rack had been pulled from its fixings. The wall bore the telltale marks—four holes where the screws had been. They looked like well-organized bullet holes.
    Donna should have been sitting here . Jackson stopped and looked down at the ground, as if he expected to find a note lying on the floor for him. There were faint indentations where the table and chairs had scratched back and forth over the wooden floor.
    “She’s gone.” He lifted his head to make the pronouncement.
    “No. She’s just not here. We can keep looking.”
    Of course we can keep looking, but we’ll never find her. Because she’s gone. The idea came to Jackson with perfect clarity. Donna had been sitting here with her drink and watching the world pass by outside. She had her back to the wall, as she always did, so that she could look over the room. And then something had happened. The same something that caused Malcolm Laine to beat his brains out against the glass and John Fairls to rip at his arteries with a pair of scissors. The same something that had caused Jackie and Angie to decide that the best option was to find a way out, and that anyone sensible would feel the same.
    “Why?” Jackson asked. He thought that soon there would be no one around to care about what had happened.
    Maybe it was for the best. It wasn’t like things were getting any better. The job at MedWay Associates had been just another half-step up a crappy career ladder that would take him exactly nowhere. Could he honestly say it made any difference? Any of it? Could he honestly say that if he lay down on the floor here and just…
    He took a deep breath and tasted dry, stale air in his throat. His eyes were stinging and he wiped away a nonexistent tear with the back of his hand.
    If he just lay down here and died, would it make a difference? Would anyone care?
    He laughed. A harsh bark of a sound. Not so much would anyone care, would anyone even notice? He could lie down on the floor, cheek against the smooth wood. He could draw in the smell of dust and floor polish and coffee and he could close his eyes and…
    Sleep. That was it. That was all it was. Just a long sleep.
    There was something incredibly attractive about the idea. About the nothingness of death. No more pain or disappointment. No need to worry about what might or might not happen. He didn’t know if there was anything after death, and Jackson was surprised to discover that he didn’t really care. What came next didn’t really matter, he wasn’t running toward a better existence, he was running away from the madness of his current one.
    “Stick or twist?”
    “What?” Susan asked. She was sitting on the floor beside him. He didn’t know when that had happened.
    “It’s one of those decisions you keep having to make. Like when you play cards and you can either stick or twist. And then when your time comes around again, you have to make the decision again.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    Jackson laughed. “No, I don’t either. But then I never did. I always thought someone was going to come along and explain it to me. Everything. Why we’re here. What we’re supposed to do with our lives. Why it matters. I don’t think that’s going to happen now.”
    “No. I suppose not.”
    He looked out through the windows. He couldn’t see the sky from where he was sitting—just the row of shops on the other side of the street. The quality of light filtering