Awake

Chapter Eighteen - The Creeping Doubt

"And you just kept at it?" the boy frowned. "Just kept on?"

"You have no idea," Ebb gave a faint hiccup of amusement. "You can't...life's terrible, right? And you're terrible. And then you take it and you're not anymore. And life's not. It's just...it's everything."

"No."

Ebb found himself scowling. "What do you know about it?"

"Did you deal in it?" Sandy ignored the question. "Sell it to others?"

"Yeah," Ebb grinned in remembrance of how easy it had been. "I used to own this place, a drug den, and people came from all around to become beautiful..."

"That how you died? Drug overdose?"

"No," Ebb felt a little derailed by the onslaught of questions. "No, I was gambling. Took a bullet to the brain."

Sandy turned away from him with a sound almost like a snarl. "That game. For those with the luxury of gambling their own lives."

Ebb sank down against the sheets, glaring up at him.

"Don't judge me!" he snapped. "What do you know about it? What do you know about anything?"

Sandy turned back and walked slowly to the bedside. Ebb blazed at him with fury but Sandy ignored it, dragging over a chair with his ankle and sitting down by Ebb's head. While Ebb flinched away, he reached out and began to sponge the vomit from his hair and face.

  Ebb was so surprised by the sudden contact that he cried out but Sandy ignored that too. He was gentle, for all his face was grim, and the water of the sponge was cool against Ebb's clammy forehead and he hadn't realised how filthy he had felt until he was being cleaned.

"So what's it like?" Sandy asked, in a softer tone of voice. "When you're high on that stuff?"

"It catapults my mind into outer space," Ebb said, dreamily. "It lets me feel peace, enlightenment."

Sandy shook his head. "A beautiful experience isn't the same as enlightenment. Enlightenment has to be real, on the ground. It can't happen floating in some alien world."

"Heaven is enlightenment," Ebb argued, without any real vigour.

"No. Heaven's the reward. You're taking heaven unearned."

"Is that wrong?"

"I don't know. No. But it's killing you."

Sandy cornered Cass in a storeroom and blocked the doorway, forcing him into confrontation.