Book 16: Forgotten(96)

Wait—her boot heels? Frankie looked down at her feet, frowning. She didn’t own boots—there was no point, living in Tampa where you could live in flip-flops almost all year round. But sure enough, she had on black, shiny boots that came up to her knees. They were kind of nice, actually—if a little too masculine for Frankie’s taste. Only…why did her feet look so big? And what else was she wearing?

Black trousers with a red stripe up the side and a red uniform type shirt were what met her eyes when she looked down. That was weird—Frankie didn’t remember owning any outfits that looked like this! As she looked around, she noticed that everyone else in the crowded subway was wearing strange clothing too—all of them were in one kind of uniform or another.

Here a group of blonde women in dull blue jumpsuits with red sashes wrapped around their waists rushed to catch a train. And passing on her right were a bunch of tall men wearing olive green trousers and matching green uniform shirts. Like the women, they had narrow shoulders and white-blond hair. Each had a large black badge pinned to his right shoulder and some kind of weapon tucked into his broad, black belt. Everywhere she looked it was the same—people wearing clothing like she’d never seen before. And most of them seemed to have white-blonde hair. Where was she anyway, Sweden?

And what was the deal with this subway station? Instead of plain or tiled concrete walls, it appeared to be lined with large, flat TV screens. Every spare inch of wall space and some of the ceiling space too was filled with a never ending stream of images and information. Between the screens, the echoing sound of many feet, and the rush and hiss of the trains which must be running somewhere in the distance, Frankie could barely hear herself think. And yet, as she looked around, she noticed that no one seemed to be talking to each other very much. They all had serious, intent looks on their faces as if they were in a hurry to go do something very important.

Apparently she was in a hurry too. Her brisk strides carried her along through the crowds until she came to a long row of turnstiles. They were floor-to ceiling affairs with metal bars separating the crowded underground tunnel into two parts. The more she looked at them, the more Frankie thought they looked more like jail cells than turnstiles. The fact that tall men in black uniforms were patrolling back and forth on both sides of them only enforced the image.

As Frankie watched, someone at the front of the line apparently tried to cheat the turnstile or get in when he wasn’t supposed to. It was a man in a ragged brown outfit that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a while. When he got up to the tall metal bars, instead of sliding open for him, they stayed shut and a red light began blinking over his head.

At once one of the officers in black uniforms came around and dragged the man out of the crowd, over to the side. He had some kind of weapon or truncheon in his hand. Frankie saw it rise and fall and heard the offender squealing in pain as the sudden, brutal punishment was administered. She couldn’t stop staring but no one else in the crowd even seemed to notice—apparently this kind of thing happened all the time.

Frankie became suddenly aware that she didn’t have a ticket or a card of any kind and she was getting closer to the jail door-turnstiles all the time. She began to panic but she was being pushed inexorably forward by the crowd behind her which had now swelled to either hundreds or thousands—it was very difficult to tell in the low, underground space lit mainly by the glow of the large, flat screens.

Up until now, Frankie had been allowing herself to be carried along in the momentum of the dream—because it had to be a dream, didn’t it? She had never been to a place like this or seen people like these. When words scrolled by on the bottom of the screens, she didn’t recognize the language or indeed, even the alphabet. So she had to be dreaming all this, safe at home in her bed, right?

But dream or no dream, she didn’t wish to take a vicious beating just because she couldn’t find her ticket. She began to fight against the crowd, trying to get to the side, to get away from the turnstiles and their guards.

To her surprise, she was able to make some headway, even in the packed area. She realized that she was taller than almost everyone here—taller and stronger too. Which was crazy—she was always shorter than almost everyone, not taller. And though she had worked a lot on her upper body strength in order to do a lot of the inversions and head and hand stands required in yoga, she still wasn’t strong enough to muscle her way through a packed crowd. Yet, that was what she was doing…only not fast enough.

Before she knew it, Frankie had come to the end of the row of turnstiles with only one person in line in front of her. She watched to see what that person—a girl in a dull yellow uniform jumpsuit—would do. To her surprise, the girl simply put her hand to a black pad on the side of the turnstile. Her hand was briefly outlined in brilliant green light and the barred door slid open for her. Then it closed again and suddenly Frankie was next.

She stood there, hesitating, wondering what would happen if she pressed her hand to the pad. She didn’t belong here—would the mechanism inside the turnstile sense that?

The crowd behind her was shoving forward, clearly wondering what was happening and why they weren’t moving forward. But Frankie was an interloper—what if she got shocked? Or what if the black uniformed guard who was standing to one side grabbed her and started beating her with the long, silver metal baton she saw shoved into his belt. Or what if—

“Who are you?”

Frankie looked around but the voice wasn’t coming from anyone around her—no one she could see, anyway.

“Who in the Seven Hells are you?” the voice demanded again. It was deep and masculine—a man’s voice. “And what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Frankie said aloud. “I don’t know where I am.”

Several of the people behind her were glaring at her now and the black uniformed guard was beginning to take an interest in her—doubtless for holding up the line.

“You’re in the pubtrans station. But more to the point, you’re in me,” the voice told her. “What the fuck are you doing in my body?”

And then Frankie realized…the voice was coming from inside her head.