In another state, in another county, in Maine, Fran and Harold still were working on their was smart that they did They were having for the most part, the same dreams. But some of them, Harold didn't share with her. Nor did she with him.
He kept dreaming of a nightmare in which he was about to die. Harold dreamt of a golgotha, a place of the damned.
"I'm sorry, Harold, but... it would be so much worse. Faraday. he thinks, if you'd betray your friends, he'd betray us.." There was a faceless woman. Beyond her, there was an endless tower, as black as can be seen. A bed of roses before it.
"Fuck you! You... you whore!" the words slipped out of his mouth, with a spray of fresh arterial blood.
"It's kinder this way, you have to understand! You don't understand what he'd do to you!" Said the faceless woman.
"This is just a nightmare... Something that won't happen!"
Harold woke in a cold sweat, while Fran was still dreaming. She shook and moaned in her sleep.
The faceless man wasn't chasing her. Instead, he presented her with a vision of the future. Harold had done something terrible. There was a clock ticking down. The timer went from three, to two, to one... Then everything went white in an inferno, and she jolted up, horrified.
"No! No, for the love of God!" She cried.
"Frannie, are you okay?!" Harold responded. She looked at him with distrust.
"Keep your distance!" She screamed.
"It was just a dream. I promise, it was just a dream!" He looked confused, and anxious.
"What ever these dreams are, they're designed to separate us. It isn't what this has to be." Harold held out his hand to her. Reluctantly, she grasped it.
"We're going to be okay, Frannie." He looked at her. She looked back. For another time, it was close. He stared into her eyes. He kept his urges locked away.
"If the CDC isn't there anymore..." He put his hand on her shoulder, staring at her.
"I don't know. It's a long shot to go off half-cocked on a dream." She rebuked.
"We'll head to the CDC, and... If we don't find anything worth looking into..." Harold doubled back on his thoughts.
"They might shoot us on sight. Might think we're carriers." He thought.
"Let's recap on our dreams. Let's each write them out separately. That way, if..." He looked into her eyes.
"What?! I've studied psychology. Folie a' deux." She spat.
"These are unnatural times, Fran. We could be the last people here. The last people left."
"Bullshit, Harold. This is a small town. As you said, what was the percentage...".
Outside of Ogunquit, many miles away, Larry was in New York. He was high on as much as he could get his hand on. He was sped up and slowed down. His mind was a windmill of what he thought of as better living through chemistry.
"Who's the fucking King of New York?!" Larry Underwood demanded of his subjects. Slung across his hip was an automatic rifle firing gas-tipped slugs. Each one contained enough cyanide to drop a man dead in his tracks in a second.
He had gathered them from the checkpoints in which so many of the soldiers he had seen cough their guts out and drop dead.
"Listen to me, men, women, I am your king, I am your rightful ruler. And this is it. You either bow to me, you respect the ring, or...* He pointed east, towards the mass grave.
"You will wind up like them." He took a line of coke off of his keys, obviously, no use. He wielded a crowbar now, and a .45.
He took another pill, this one a stimulant. Anything to fend off the dreams. He mixed it with a sedative. His heart went like a conga drum, but still, he didn't die.
He stared out over the sea of the dead, and cackled.
"My troops, to me!" Suddenly, the dead and the dying came alive, climbing over the vehicles, advancing. They were riddled with bullets, their throats swelled up, colored purple and black. Their nostrils dripped with blood and phlegm.
"We're here, Larry. We're here for you. Won't you play for us?" They asked in unison. Larry began to recoil. He started to run, but they were in front of him, every direction he went in. He was in a tunnel, and on both sides, they were there. They closed in, and as his voice cracked, and they began to rip into his flesh, he awoke.
"Jesus-fuckin'-christ, man. Bad dreams?" Said Daniel. Larry did a line, and looked back without answering.