Chapter 9: Naptime

  Emma fell asleep at 3:02 PM.

  Dave knew the exact time because he'd been tracking her since the overpass, where she'd napped for maybe ten minutes before the confrontation woke her. Ten minutes didn't count. Ten minutes was a car-seat nap, the kind that ruined the real nap without replacing it, and he'd been watching for the crash ever since. She'd been babbling at a lower frequency for ten minutes, her fingers loosening on Raf, her head starting the slow tilt toward the carrier pad that Dave recognized the way a sailor recognizes the wind shifting.

  "She's going down," he said.

  Noor looked at the baby. "Going down?"

  "Falling asleep. When she's out, I lose—" He didn't know how to explain it. "Things get harder."

  Noor waited for the explanation that would make this sentence make sense. Dave didn't give one, because he didn't have one. He just knew, from the nursery, from the frog-things, from the overpass, that Emma asleep meant Dave unplugged.

  She went under at the entrance to Millfield Memorial Park.

  The warmth vanished. One step he was walking with the road ahead sharp in his vision, and the next step he was thirty-four years old with a bad knee and fifty pounds of gear and the world went blurry at the edges the way it did when he'd been staring at a screen too long.

  His calves burned. His shoulders ached. The bruise from the frog-thing fight throbbed with sudden, petty enthusiasm, as if it had been waiting in line and its number had finally been called.

  The system text in his vision dimmed to near-invisible. Washed out but still there, technically.

  ~*~

  Shhhh.

  Naptime.

  ~*~

  "She's out," Dave said. His voice sounded different to his own ears. Thinner. More human.

  Noor was watching him. The assessment was running. He could see it in her eyes, the way they tracked his posture, his gait, the sudden tension in his shoulders. "Your color changed," she said.

  "What?"

  "You were… I don't know how to describe it. Brighter. More saturated. Like you were shot with better lighting. And now you're..." She gestured at him. "Normal."

  "Thanks."

  "That wasn't a compliment or an insult. It's a clinical observation. When the baby is awake, something about you is physically enhanced. When she sleeps, it stops."

  "How long does she usually sleep?"

  "Depends. Twenty minutes minimum. Could be an hour."

  "And during that time, you're…"

  "Just me."

  Noor looked at the park entrance ahead of them. Looked at Dave. Made a calculation.

  "Just you isn't nothing," she said. "You still have the crowbar."

  Millfield Memorial Park was the reason Dave had been cutting through this part of town. Route 9 curved north here, adding half a mile, while the park path cut straight through to the residential neighborhoods on the other side. On a normal day it was a twenty-minute walk through soccer fields and oak trees and a pond where geese terrorized joggers.

  It was not a normal day.

  The park had transformed. The oak trees had tripled in height. Their trunks were wider than cars now, bark ridged and darkened, and their canopy had knitted together overhead into a continuous ceiling that blocked the orange sky almost completely. Under the trees, the light was green. The green of deep water, of things that grew where sunlight didn't reach.

  The soccer fields were gone. In their place, a carpet of moss so thick it looked like upholstery, broken by clusters of ferns the size of small trees. The park benches were still there, Dave could see them at intervals along the path, but they'd been absorbed. The moss had grown over them, around them, incorporating them into the landscape the way a forest incorporates a fallen log.

  The path itself was intact but narrowed. The moss had eaten the edges, leaving a corridor of asphalt about four feet wide, winding through the green dark like a trail through a cave.

  "This doesn't look great," Dave said.

  "I was going to use a stronger word," Noor said.

  "The alternative is the highway. Adds thirty minutes, and it's open ground."

  Noor looked at the park. Looked at the highway. Made the same calculation Dave had already made.

  "The park," she said. "Faster. And the canopy is cover."

  "Also full of things that weren't here three hours ago."

  "Also that." She shifted her pharmacy bag higher on her shoulder. The box cutter was in her hand now. Open, the blade catching the green light. "Let's move. Quiet."

  They entered the park.

  The sound changed immediately. The ambient noise of the outside world. The distant rumble of things moving, the occasional far-off crack of something collapsing, cut off as the canopy closed overhead. Under the trees, the sound was different. Organic. The rustle of things growing. A low hum, almost subsonic, that Dave felt more than heard. And water, trickling water, everywhere, as if the park's irrigation system had ruptured and was feeding the transformation.

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  The moss was soft underfoot, even on the path. Each step sank slightly, leaving a print that filled in slowly behind them. Dave walked as quietly as he could, but the path was wet and his boots squelched no matter what he did.

  Emma slept on. Oblivious. Her breathing was the only normal sound.

  They were a hundred yards in when Dave saw the playground.

  The swing set was still standing, but the swings had been replaced, or transformed, or grown over, it was hard to tell. Where the rubber seats had been, there were now pods. Translucent, amber-colored, roughly the size of footballs, hanging from the chains. They pulsed with a faint inner light, slow and rhythmic. Inside each one, something dark moved. Gently, the way a sleeping animal stirs.

  "Don't touch those," Noor said, which was unnecessary because Dave had no intention of touching them and was already angling his body to put maximum distance between Emma and the swing set.

  "What are they?" he asked.

  "I don't know. I know they're growing. I know there are things inside them. And I know we're not stopping to find out what."

  They kept moving. The path curved around the pond, which had expanded to three times its original size. Things moved under the surface. Bigger than fish. Dave saw a shape rise and sink about thirty feet from shore, humped, ridged, the color of wet stone. It surfaced for two seconds and went back under without a sound.

  The water itself had changed color to a deep, luminous teal, the color of tropical water. Beneath the surface, light moved in slow geometric patterns. The smell was sweet and heavy, overripe fruit, one degree from rot. Dave breathed through his mouth and walked faster.

  The dock where people used to fish was half-submerged, the wooden planks green with algae that hadn't been there this morning. A pair of sneakers sat on the dock's railing, neatly placed, as if someone had taken them off before going in. Dave looked at the sneakers. Looked at the water. Did not look at the water again.

  "Dave." Noor's voice was careful. "The sneakers are a child's size."

  "I know."

  "Small. Maybe a ten-year-old's."

  "I said I know."

  They walked. Dave didn't look back at the dock. He thought about the sneakers. The way they were placed, neatly, side by side, the laces tucked in. The way a kid places shoes at the edge of a pool before jumping in. Because the thing in the water, whatever it was, hadn't pulled someone in. Someone had gone willingly. Someone had heard whatever the water was saying, and decided it sounded like a place to be.

  He held Emma tighter against his back. She slept on, warm and small and utterly unaware that the world she was sleeping through contained water that called to children and swing sets that grew pods and things in the trees that paced you like wolves.

  Noor walked beside him in silence. She'd said what she needed to say and was now processing it, adding the sneakers to the model she was building.

  "You okay?" Dave asked.

  "I'm a twenty-eight-year-old EMT walking through a forest that didn't exist three hours ago with a man whose baby is a battery pack, asking myself whether a child's sneakers on a dock constitute evidence of drowning or voluntary immersion in an alien pond." She paused. "I don't think 'okay' is a useful category right now."

  "Fair."

  Halfway through the park, Noor stopped.

  "Listen," she said.

  Dave listened. Under the hum, under the water, under the breathing sounds of the transformed forest: footsteps. Something else, moving parallel to them through the moss, about fifty yards to the left. Heavy steps, slow and steady, each one landing with a wet compression.

  Whatever it was, it was keeping pace with them.

  "How big?" Dave whispered.

  "From the sound?" Noor's face was very still. "Big."

  Dave adjusted the crowbar in his hand. It felt different without the system. Heavier. Just iron. He'd thrown a man through a ceiling with this thing three hours ago. Now it was a bar of metal and his arm was tired from carrying it.

  The footsteps continued. Paralleling. Holding distance.

  "It's following," Noor said quietly.

  "Because of Emma?"

  "Maybe. The, what did you call it, the aura? If she projects something that keeps creatures away, maybe even asleep there's a residual..."

  "Or maybe it's just not hungry yet."

  They walked faster. The footsteps matched. Dave's heart was hammering in his ears and his hands were slick on the crowbar and he was, for the first time since the overpass, truly afraid. The slow, corrosive fear that came with being hunted by something you couldn't see and couldn't fight.

  Emma stirred. A small sound, just a sleep adjustment, the kind that made parents freeze mid-step because it might be the beginning of consciousness or might be nothing. Dave froze. The sound settled. She slept on.

  But the warmth flickered. Just for a second. A flash of gold in his chest. Just enough to remind him what he was missing.

  The thing in the trees paused. The footsteps stopped.

  Dave waited.

  The footsteps resumed. But further away now. Moving at an angle, drifting left, away from them. The flicker had done something.

  "It felt that," Noor said.

  "When Emma stirred, the thing backed off. Even in her sleep, she's broadcasting something."

  "Can you stop talking about my daughter like she's a cell tower?"

  "Can your daughter stop acting like one?"

  Dave didn't have an answer for that. They walked.

  The park narrowed as they approached the north exit. The trees pressed closer, the canopy lower, and the path dwindled to barely three feet wide. The moss was thicker here. Dave could feel things underneath it, hard shapes under the soft surface, like walking on a mattress laid over stones. Roots, maybe. Or something else.

  The light changed. Brighter ahead, the canopy thinning, the orange sky visible through gaps in the leaves. The exit was close.

  They walked. Emma slept. The thing in the trees was gone, or far enough away that it couldn't be heard, which wasn't the same thing but would have to do.

  They came out of the park into orange daylight and Dave's body sagged with relief. The residential neighborhood beyond the park looked damaged but navigable. Rooflines warped, yards overgrown with the wrong plants, but the streets were there and the sky was open and nothing was following them through hundred-foot trees.

  Emma's eyes opened.

  It happened the way it always did. Instantaneous, as if someone had turned on a switch. She went from boneless sleep to alert wakefulness between one blink and the next, and the warmth hit Dave like a wave.

  The system blazing back to full brightness in his vision, the world sharpening, his muscles filling with strength that wasn't his. The bruise on his knee went quiet. His back stopped aching. His grip on the crowbar tightened with authority that belonged to a Level 5 Dad, not a thirty-four-year-old IT guy.

  Emma looked around. Noted the new surroundings. Looked at Noor, who she'd met before the nap and apparently found acceptable. Looked at the transformed trees with curiosity rather than fear, because babies haven't learned yet that some new things are supposed to be scary.

  Noor was watching Dave. Watching the change happen. The color returning to his skin, the posture straightening, the eyes sharpening.

  "Your pupils dilated," she said. "Your respiration rate doubled. Your color went from gray to saturated." She looked at Emma. Looked at Dave. "When she's awake, you're enhanced. When she sleeps, you're normal. It's a binary switch."

  "It feels more like a dimmer."

  "It looks like a switch." She paused. "Do you know how remarkable that is? A nine-month-old is functioning as a biological amplifier for an adult's nervous system. That's… symbiosis."

  "Can you stop calling it symbiosis and just call it my daughter being awake?"

  "Ba," Emma said. Conversational. I'm up. What did I miss?

  "The park," Dave said. "You missed the park."

  "Ba ba ba."

  "You didn't miss much. Scary trees. Scary pond. Something following us."

  "Ma?"

  Dave felt the pull. Northeast. Stronger now, sharper, Emma's power amplifying it into something that tugged at his ribs. Sarah was that way. Still far. But closer than she'd been.

  "Yeah," Dave said. "We're going to Mama."

  He walked faster. The system hummed. The warmth burned steady.