Unreal City by A. R. Meyering Page B

me!” she grunted, trying to break free from my grasp as I clung tighter.
    The paramedics were trying to block the scene from view and disperse the crowd, but I could see it all. He had been laid behind a building in the center of campus. They lifted the dead boy’s body, and the sight of his stiffened and lifeless limbs turned my grip vice-like. The girl was screaming, and her friend pried me off with tremendous effort as tears slid down my face.
    “How did he die?” I gasped, the reeling in my head causing me to stumble. I could feel the gaze of the crowd shifting to watch me now. “How did he die?” I repeated louder, my tears flowing with abandon.
    No one answered, but I didn’t care. All I could do was stare. The meat of his throat was bulging as if it were saturated with water. And dear God, that skin. Yellow. Black. Blue. The form of a human being desecrated by the onset of rot already creeping in. But it wouldn’t have acted this quickly. His lips must have turned black as he died.
    “ HOW DID HE DIE? ” I shrieked, looking from face to frightened face, pleading with them, begging them. I reached out for another arm to hold onto and everyone backed away. A policeman was coming toward me, unsmiling. “ God, someone tell me! PLEASE! ”
    My unbalanced behavior elicited a reply at last: “He drowned!”
     
    FROM THAT MOMENT until I woke up hours later in the Student Health Center with a pounding headache, my memory is blank. Disoriented, I cried out, and a nurse came by to inform me that I had fainted. I tried to get my bearings, and noticed with horror there was an IV drip in my arm.
    “Did you drug me?” I demanded.
    “Just something to calm you. When they brought you in, they said you were pretty frantic. Now could you answer these questions for me, sweetie?”
    She went on, exploring my health history, asking personal questions and recommending I speak with the mental health counselor. I didn’t pay attention. My thoughts were haunted by the memories of the drowned boy. He’d been found in the middle of campus. Miles away from any bodies of water. Just the way Lea had been left.
    I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know who to call or who to talk to. Should I alert the police? Wouldn’t they connect the cases? How could this be happening here, of all places? Sure, Monterey was close, but it was too much of a coincidence. It sickened me to entertain the thought that I was somehow connected.
    After I’d passed the gauntlet of paperwork and prying queries, I requested to be released on the basis that I was not ill, and the staff complied with obvious reluctance. I fled the health center, finding myself wanting to talk to Felix more than anyone else. Perhaps because he was my own imaginary friend, and being completely insane himself, I knew he wouldn’t judge me. Or abandon me. I still don’t know why that thought comforted me that night.
    Students were hanging out in the hall, but went silent as I trudged by, my head down and hood up. I couldn’t get the image of the dead flesh of the boy out of my mind. It was stuck there, following me like the moon follows a traveler making his way down the road in the night.
    Lea probably looked like that when they found her. Just like that. Black. Yellow. Blue. I tried my best not to apply that condition to the memory of my sister’s face.
    I burst into my dorm room and shut the door behind me to find Felix sitting placidly on my bed, staring at a corner of the ceiling. I was about to speak when something about that corner caught my attention, too. The longer I looked at it, the dizzier I felt, though there was nothing there to be seen. I felt a rising sense of anxiety—a feeling of something buried, something trapped. I shook this off and brought my attention back to the matter at hand.
    “Felix. Someone on campus died today. They were murdered. In the same way my sister was,” I informed him. I don’t know what I expected from him, but he only