Monday mornings had been for the longest time, Dave Sanders (better known as Jake Smiths to his readers) Saturday mornings. Even though he’d left the waiting job that had instilled that, he’d still kept the friends. Monday was still their Saturday and that was why this Monday his head hurt, and his stomach had that oily feel that demanded grease and terrible coffee. That was if he could handle the smells of cooking said grease without dry heaving all over the kitchen.

Rolling to the side of his bed, he swung his legs over and cradled his head in his hands. He then brushed the unruly brown hair out of his eyes and somewhat up onto the top of his head.

The light from his bedroom window stubbornly streamed through telling him it was at least twelve, the clock on his nightstand said it was 1:33 in stubborn red neon.

He wasn’t supposed to be drinking on the meds, but the promise of having just one White Russian had seemed good enough. He could switch to something else after easy enough. Surely no one would give him a hassle for not drinking.

And no one had, except the other part of himself that refused to adhere to the rules. After one, it hardly seemed like one anyhow, he figured he could have another. In fact, he’d had four before the ativan and celexa helped him over the edge, and he was beautifully drunk, teetering on black out if he had been able to look at himself from his friends point of view.

He remembered the rest of the night in true and proper hangover fashion, absolute horror. There were off the wall comments paired with pauses of puking and laughing. The rawness of his throat backed up the memory of sitting on the porch smoking cigarette after cigarette until the pack ran dry.

Then? Well, then he couldn’t remember, and it happened to be the worst part of the night not to recall; how he got home. Besides his cat, his bed was empty as always so that ruled out a few possibilities. He did remember a redhead that had wanted to come home with him, but that must’ve not panned out. Which was probably better for everyone involved. If he wanted to find a new girlfriend, sleeping around the dating pool wouldn’t help. It hadn’t in recent months. He remembered talking at length with Justin and Molly about his theory of three after a breakup. He had stared into Molly’s eyes as he told her in all honesty that it would take at least three woman before he’d actually be ready to date. And after Sasha, he might need five or ten.

He knew drinking was a bad idea now, but wasn’t all hindsight 20/20? But why the fuck had he decided to talk about that last night? Once again in his life, he swore he wouldn’t ever drink again.

Daring to stand, he labored to his kitchen and found a note on the table. It was from Erin, telling him she had his car and to call when he woke up, if he woke up she’d actually written. She’d also left him a bottle of aspirin and bottle of water. He’d thank her later (when he could actually live) with lunch.

Mystery solved, and vehicular manslaughter averted, he stared blankly past the table and into the kitchen. Already there was a threatening gurgle followed by an unpleasant belch that sent him to the sink, hoping he’d just be getting a drink and not vomiting up whatever crap remained in his stomach. He leaned over onto his forearms and took a slow breath in. The rumble suggested he hadn’t eaten anything, but he remembered going somewhere for food. In fact he remembered offering to pay the bill in true drunken “I don’t care” fashion.

Denny’s. That’s where they’d stopped, and he spent the time vomiting in the parking lot, not eating (or paying) for anything. No that wasn’t true, he had yelled about pancakes and eggs. Another Ah-ha moment. Somewhere in the house was a box of food with his name on it. Erin never failed to take care of him when he was drunk, especially when the promise was the only thing that made him leave the house in the first place. The assurance to his stomach that there would be only eating and no smells of cooking before calmed it enough to relent the assault and he was back to standing over the sink instead of leaning.

He would eat, go back to bed for a short coma and worry about the world later. It seemed his body agreed and the pounding in his head slacked as he yanked on the fridge door. God bless Erin. As he hoped she had gotten him food, and he didn’t bother with the silverware as he opened the carton and

ate in the coolness of the fridge. After all, wasn’t that one of the benefits of growing up? We could eat with our hands, as long as no one was looking. Or at least he did.

Unbenounced to him, behind in the bathroom a light flashed, and was accompanied by the smell of gunpowder as a man materialized. The smell came first oddly enough and then the rustling of clothes and boots filled the hall. David attributed it to his hangover as he stood frozen in the light of the fridge. But as the hairs on the back of his neck stood up he instinctively turned to find Ezekiel Thomas West, better known as Zeke standing by his coffee table. The half chewed egg fell out of Dave’s mouth onto the linoleum as he gaped at the character of his long abandoned novel. A moment later, Dave fainted into the open fridge, taking out leftovers and juice as he went.

------ Dave had never fainted before. Not when he broke his leg playing a friendly game of street hockey and it stuck out of his skin like a tent pole, with the skin still hanging onto the bone stubbornly from the left side of his calf. At twelve though, he was too scared to do anything but stare at his leg and eventually start yelling for his mother. He thought he might faint once, at fourteen, when his father sat on his bed and announced that his brother had died. He sat on the end of his bed, his fair skin turning red to his ears by the time a tear rolled out stubbornly.

“Fuck you.” He remembered saying. Fuck you to the man he loved and respected most, and his father simply nodded yes before he began to cry himself. It was the only thing that could confirm his father wasn’t lying. Stanley Stevens did not cry, not unless someone died. Mark Stevens, Dave’s older brother, had died simply going out to dinner with his new girlfriend his first year of college. An allergic reaction had left him clawing at his throat, with his eyes bulging from his now plum face in a restaurant in California with a bus boy frantically yelling for someone to call 911.

Those two thoughts greeted him when he woke up and they both left a sour taste in his mouth. When he sat up he wasn’t looking at his kitchen, but was laid out on the couch with a window open and a pillow propped under his feet.

Had he laid there long enough for someone to come and discover him? And if it was that long why, why wasn’t he in the hospital? Unless....

“Hello?” He tried to sound confident that he was not afraid of his latest notion, but there he lay on the couch afraid of what might call back.

“Hello.” Came the smooth voice over from the kitchen. It was what Dave had expected. Hallucination. Or break from reality hallucination. In other words, he’d gone from near the fence to over it and on the other side of crazy hill. Was he even supposed to know that? Wasn’t that one of the benefits of going crazy? You went along with your imaginary friends and never came back? Not sit wondering about your sanity on a crappy couch with a headache and a fat lip.

“How far on the crazy train have you gotten? Far enough that we can skip the conversation?” Zeke looked expectantly at Dave, hoping this meeting would go as well as the story Dave had written long ago where they spoke. It had just been something short, a page to three at most and a comedy rather than the serious business that brought Zeke here now, but still he hoped.

“Still figuring I’m gone from reality and soon I’ll be drooling on myself.” Dave’s mouth had long ago went dry, and his tongue stuck on the roof of his mouth even when he was done speaking. “I need my pills.” He heard himself say, if he wasn’t having some weird panic attack, he knew he shortly would be.

“I already took the liberty of packing a sack for you in your bag. They’re in there with everything else. I just need you to get your journals and some pens and then we’re out of here. I don’t think you’ll have a panic attack right now. But hey, you’re the creator aren’t you? I’m just an idea in your head. Or from it. I think from it now.”

“Shut up for a second. Shit. You are a stupid hallucination and you don’t know shit.” Dave leaned

down again, much like he had when he’d first woke. He started with slow measured breaths, breathing in a four square pattern they’d taught him at Dawn Health Care (read:looney bin) he’d recently been released from. Though released wasn’t really the right word since he had been there voluntarily. But still, despite the P.C correctness of it all, he’d been released from the looney bin. They did have good food though, at D.H.C and the company hadn’t been half bad. Most of the advice had been useful too, like the breathing. Even with all the preparation he somehow hadn’t gotten to the point where he could avert them naturally yet. But there he was trying to get ahold of the tiger before it came out of the cage and left him dragging behind.

Zeke seemed to know his part of it was to stand there and shut up. Dave took a deep breath in and held it for four seconds and then let it out for four more seconds before starting the process over by breathing in again. He knew better than to write off the slight tingling in his fingers, and he hoped all that time spent pouring over anxiety workbooks and in therapy that something would step to the forefront of his mind and take the wheel to get him out of this.

It didn’t. The tingling crept up his arm and that caused him to leap into action. Yanking himself up from the couch, he fumbled his way down the hall and tore into his medicine cabinet, pulling out jars and salves until he got to an unmarked pill bottle in the back. With one hand now numb from panic, and the paralysis quickly spreading, he unscrewed the bottle and pulled a pill out to shove into his mouth to chew. The bitter taste always felt welcome in his mouth, and the water straight from the tap washed it down beautifully, a complete ritual.

Backing down to the floor, Dave put his head in his hands and started breathing again, waiting for the blissful sleep that would take him out of the grip of panic. Fifteen minutes later, Dave was passed out on the bathroom rug, with no thought to his new partner that had taken up watch outside the bathroom in the hall. He couldn’t think about anything when dreaming, and that was the point.

------

“David.” The voice woke him long before he wanted to be awake, but since he knew the nagging waking beast wouldn’t let him go again he opened his eyes and sat up to wipe the drool off his cheek.

He’d passed out in the bathroom, again. Disgusting. But nothing new. He had a lot in common with his cousin in that regard he suspected. He often wondered about the other prisons people put themselves in. Would being an alcoholic really be better than the panic attacks and anxiety that plagued him? At least they got to escape for a few hours into drink, feeling invincible the whole while. But the hangover that still lingered told him otherwise. Everyone paid in some way to the prison that kept them, some just took more than others.

“I know you’re awake. You breathe different.” When had sitting up and opening one’s eyes not been a signal of being awake? Zeke could hear the reply before Dave had said it. Sophomoric as their first conversation had been, Zeke knew his creator.

“When you dream, and you bring it here, you’re not all the way awake.” Zeke pointed to the receding brown curtains on the wall, and the blue tile that was fading slowly to white once again. For a moment, Dave knew, they had been in his cousin’s apartment and the lingering smell of cherry kool-aide and cheap vodka confirmed it.

“I am full blown crazy.” Dave said as he got to his feet and looked slightly up at Zeke. He had the same blue-green eyes that sometimes flecked gray at the edges just like he’d written, the handsome and rugged face had come out somewhere between John Wayne and that guy that had played the new batman, which made him look more or less dangerous like he’d intended. Overall it was what he had imagined in his mind’s eye, with Zeke himself having filled in the blanks somehow.

As hallucinations went, this one looked solid, so without much hesitation Dave reached back and

threw his best punch, hoping to rid himself of this problem then and there. Only actual problem was, he felt the crunch of bone and cartilage under the blinding pain from having broken a finger. Apparently, adrenalin came later when one was in a fight.

Much to his good character, Zeke reeled back into the hallway wall, putting an elbow through the drywall as he caught himself. Oddly, he climbed back to his feet and spit a wad of blood out onto Dave’s carpet and cussed in a miracle of swears as he adjusted the tilt of his nose to center.

“Shit!” Dave shook his hand as he watched that, silently wishing he hadn’t tested his theory like that. At least it was only a finger. God had given him nine more just in case he liked to say.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” When Zeke stood to his full height, some five inches above Dave’s six foot frame, he looked down to glare at Dave with the intensity of someone trying to figure what to break first. In every other situation like this that Dave had put Zeke in, he’d responded in kind to the attacker and usually did them one better.

“Sorry, Christ. I thought...” “If you could punch me I’d shatter into a million fake pieces? Or go away in a puff of smoke? You really are crazy.” Zeke said, anger bordering on amusement suddenly. In fact Zeke did grin after a moment’s time.

“Good hit though. I wouldn’t have pegged you for any kind of a fighter, considering.”

“Considering what?” “You know, how scared and anxious you are all the time.” Zeke still grimaced while giving an apologetic shrug to Dave and he turned when the doorbell rang. He left Dave standing there as he went to the front door.

“Foods here.” Zeke said as if they had been rooming together forever. And maybe they had. Part of Dave hoped that somehow another person entering the equation would solve this mystery. Clearly it had when Zeke came back with the pizza. It seemed he was real enough to place an order and get it.

Unless this was some kind of Fight Club thing where Dave was actually doing it and didn’t know. He couldn’t even deal with that thought. In fact if that was the case he was probably going to check out some way very soon.

“Eat, it’ll help your stomach.” Zeke put the pizza on the table as he called Dave from the small living room.

Zeke was already eating a slice when Dave came in as hesitant as he could be in the face of food. As soon as he smelled it, it seemed to jumpstart his appetite and he came in fully to the room.

“Guess I can rule out Fight Club for now.” Dave had given up the fight and grabbed a slice to fold in half and shove into his mouth. It was still reasonably hot and the cheese was hanging in stretched ropes from where he’d bitten it.

“This is pretty good.” Zeke was mostly talking to Dave, but a little to the pizza. “Yeah.” Dave agreed. “How did you pay for this?” Here would be a seemingly harmless question. “I used my own money. Don’t worry, we don’t have to go halfsies.” Zeke grinned across the table and that was that. Dave decided crazy or not, it was too complicated to care.

------ “So where are we going?” Dave finally had to ask. “To where I’m from. I call it the Barrons, but most call it The Unfinished Lands. You can’t really expect much from a bunch of half-formed people. They’re just as unfinished as the land itself.”

“Oh.” It was the only thing Dave could think to say. He’d asked and Zeke had answered, it couldn’t be Zeke’s fault that he didn’t like the answer. He hadn’t really liked much about anything Zeke had to say. He’d already spent the last few hours arguing why he couldn’t go, and Zeke just kept responding with variations of “It’s your destiny.” Zeke had finally ended the argument by getting Dave by the arm and just made Dave go where he wanted him to.

“So, we’re going to go now, just so I can avoid you having a nap on the other side. This is going

to be different. Kinda like getting sucked into a vacuum. It doesn’t hurt, just feels weird.” Zeke put both hands on Dave’s shoulder and he smiled, actually smiled, as the pendant started glowing blue around his neck. The door frame to the bathroom glowed the same blue as the pendant and the doorway started filling in. First in delicate webs forming in the corners, until only a little hole in the middle was left. It too disappeared and the fuzzy, blue film covering the door gave a small but bright view of another world.

One which was approaching rapidly as Zeke shoved Dave through, and not kindly. The bottles of pills clinked in protest of being shoved so roughly, but other than the stumble, Zeke had told the truth. He felt like once even a little way in you were going to be sucked through no matter what. It had been easier not to fight being shoved through, and other than his ears popping immediately, he was through and whole. Seconds later Zeke was behind him tilting his hat against the sun coming in from the broken ceiling.

Looking down Dave saw they had entered from his bathroom into some kind of giant bath house. Having never been in one, let alone one this lavish, he could see why the Romans loved them. The walls were gilded in gold, and the water that ran was clean and somehow smelled of flowers. But despite the place’s beauty something felt wrong about it. Like it wasn’t very solid.

“C’mon. If you’re going to have a freak-out let’s do it outside.” Zeke led the way one hand on the butt of his gun. How had he missed that before? Never mind now, an inner voice seemed to say. He was on autopilot as he walked after Zeke and craned his neck every which way. There was writing on the wall that Dave couldn’t read as they passed down a hall, now with skylights sans glass lighting their way.

Not stopping for sightseeing Zeke pushed his way through a curtain that led into a front office, straight out of 1968, one that had somehow smashed its way onto the old entrance to the bath house was still hanging in places waiting to fall off like a scab. Upon closer inspection, as Zeke checked the windows, Dave found it was a scab of some sort after all. He reached closer and gave a precariously hanging piece a tug. At first it only gave way a little, but with two more firm yanks the piece came off of the wall and took on a paper mache quality almost instantly and at the end where it had been attached to the wood paneling was a mess of dark liquid. Too dark to be blood, but familiar all the same.

“C’mon.” Zeke had the front door open and deemed it was safe to go out. Obeying like a good dog Dave followed after Zeke, letting him be the master. One small step for Dave, and all of Davekind. With that, he was effectively on the moon.