• Chapter 1 The Sleepers' Place


    I can see the lights in the distance
    Trembling in the dark cloak of night
    Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
    A waltz on All Souls Night.
    --All Soul's Night, Loreena McKennitt

    I looked over my shoulder, my hair sparkling dimly in the dark. Lights from the large buildings of rich men cast a corona around the darkness of the slums. I was passed the slums, out into the field and on the gravel road that led to the Sleepers' Place.

    At least, that was our name for it. Our being myself, my raggedly clad male fellows, and others of our kind.

    We moved to the door. The inside smelled rankly of ice and rarely cleaned bodies and the pitiful attempts to spray away the reek. One of the workers in his white coat came up to us. On my right, Lucky wrinkled his nose. This one, barely over being a child by our standards, smelled as if he'd lost the spray-tag war.

    "I know," he muttered. "Epic fail." He smiled wryly, his round face lit up. No wonder they'd been friends...

    "Hey," Lucky barked, "can we get on with it?" I glowered as he showed his pointy little teeth--he'd had to file them to get them to where they'd been--and we marched down to the revival room.

    The room consisted of what looked like a steel bathtub and nuclear-waste-dumped-in-green water. Leading to the tank on the ceiling was a set of tracks along which a Sleeper's container rolled. Sleepers...those lucky few who were frozen, preserved to wake later, free from a horrible death and an unburied corpse left to rot...

    I watched the tank bubble as the container descended in. The space filled with a sea salty smell. I stepped closer to the tank. Wake up... I jerked around, eyes wide.

    The others smelled them as well.

    "Cops!" Lucky hissed. The doors burst open. A yelp sounded next to me as we ran. I heard the yell dully come after us as we raced to the slums: "Damn Dogs!"