Cat Clarke and the Nightmare Hunters

Chapter 1

The smell of grease and cheese was thick in the air, nearly to the point where Cat was amazed that it couldn’t be seen like a fog, hovering around everyone’s heads. By this point, however, Cat was accustomed to it. She still hated it, and on days when she came in to work full it made her never want to eat pizza again, but it was manageable. She reached to her left with the metal tongs and pulled a pizza free from the massive oven, slid it onto the cutting board, cut it four times, then slid it into the open box at her right and closed it up. She looked up at the grease-speckled monitor at her station and saw that she had approximately three minutes before the second deluge of pizzas came. She sighed and pulled her phone from her pocket to check her messages. She had none. She slid her phone back into her black work pants and sighed again.
“Man, you are like a machine,” David said, coming up behind her and looking at the monitor. “Those are some great times.” He was a taller man, rotund, with short black hair and a short mustache and beard. He seemed genuinely pleased as he smiled at the monitor, then at Cat as he looked to her. She gave a faux smile in return and shrugged.
“I just, you know, get in the zone,” she said. It was basically true. She didn’t like the job, but it required practically no thinking at all to accomplish. After getting the basics down and learning what the acronyms on the monitor meant, it was all just rote muscle memory. She would just turn her brain off and cut pizzas until there were none coming out of the oven.
“That’s good!” David said, nodding his head. “Everybody should work like that. Just come in, get to it, and get it done.” Cat nodded, though she was inwardly baffled by how seriously her general manager seemed to take his job. She didn’t know his exact salary, but it wasn’t a tremendous amount more than her own. She guessed that he was hoping to be promoted soon, as that job would give him far more benefits than his current one did.
Either not knowing how or not wanting to commit to any actual conversation, David walked away, back to his tiny office at the far end of the store. Cat looked back at the oven, and saw the pizzas coming her way. She sighed for a third time, then flipped her brain off to work.
After five more hours, Cat was free. She told David that she was leaving, clocked out on the computer, then walked out the front door, undoing her apron as she did so. The sun had gone down about an hour before, so the outside was cool and refreshing, even though the store was right next to a major highway. Cat pulled off her work cap and stuffed the now bundled up apron into it. She ran thin fingers through her short blonde hair to make it stand up properly instead of being flattened on her head like an old school Chicago mobster. She felt the oiliness of it as she did and grimaced. She really wasn’t sure if she had the energy for a shower after the thirty minute drive back to her home, but she also knew that she would sleep better if she did.
“The trials of being alive,” she muttered to herself as she hopped into her car. As she turned the ignition, her phone buzzed loudly against her leg. She slid it out and saw that her friend, Jo, was calling her. She smiled a little, popped in her headphones, then answered.
“What up bish?” Jo asked in his almost Valley Girl-esque cadence.
“Just leaving work, what’s going on?” Cat replied, pulling out of the parking lot and onto the highway.
“You wanna go to the comic shop tomorrow?” Jo asked. Cat made a few mental calculations of her schedule for the next few days. Other than work, she had an online book club meeting the day after tomorrow, and her weekly D&D session the day after that.
“If we go in the morning,” she said. “Like leave my place around nine?” Jo audibly groaned.
“Nine in the morning?” he asked, drawing out nearly every word as if even the thought was causing him pain. “That’s so gross.” Cat scoffed, a toothy grin on her face.
“Most people wake up before that, you know,” she teased.
“Not in our generation!” he said. “We are so tired, emotionally and physically, as a generation. We are Gen Sleep.” Cat laughed a bit.
“True,” she said. “But we leave at nine, or I can’t do it.” Jo groaned louder.
“Fine,” he relented, as if the word had been pulled out of him. “The things I do for you, Cat, it’s unreal.”
“I know, you’re so selfless,” she said sarcastically.
“Oh!” Jo exclaimed. “Speaking of us being Gen Sleep, did you hear about that guy in Dalton?” Cat shook her head, then vaguely remembered that Jo couldn’t see her.
“No,” she said. “Another epiales attack?” she asked.
“Yes, girl, oh my god, the article about it was so wild,” Jo said. “This guy had been having bad dreams for weeks, about like the sun and heat and stuff or whatever-”
“-He’d been having bad dreams like that for weeks and didn’t do anything about it?” Cat asked incredulously.
“Well, you know, his friends said that he thought it was just a minor epiales, that he could just live with it instead of paying out the ass to have it taken care of,” he responded. Cat shuddered at the thought of living with the knowledge that a monster had colonized your brain.
“I couldn’t do that,” she said. “Minor or not, I’d want that thing evicted.” Jo laughed.
“Right? I feel the same way when I see a spider in the corner. Like, buddy, this is my house, get the hell out or get squashed,” he said. “Anyway, this dude had been having bad dreams for weeks, but just thought he could deal. Epiales are rarely fatal unless they’re big ones or whatever. But then he doesn’t show up for work one day. No call no show. So his friend comes by to check on him, and he finds him totally burnt to a crisp!” Cat’s hazel eyes widened.
“What?” she asked in disbelief.
“Yes! I know! Apparently, it was one of the big ones. It had softened him up for almost a month, then just got rid of him.” he said, excited at the gruesomeness of the story.
“Shit,” Cat said. The epiales had to have been in the upper echelons if it could affect the dreamer’s reality like that. Most epiales deaths looked like heart attacks or strokes, with some tell-tale signs that it was, in fact, an epiales. Cat had only ever read about decades old accounts of epiales powerful enough to do something like burn someone in their dream, and have it burn them in the waking world as well. The thought that a epiales that powerful had struck so close to home was unsettling.
“Yeah,” Jo said. “The police have their Epiales Division investigating it, but we'll see how that goes.” Cat blew a raspberry in response to this. The state police’s Epiales Division could take out epiales ahead of time fairly well, but their track record for finding them after the fact was negligible. The talk also reminded Cat of her crushed dreams of becoming an Epiales Hunter. She had studied furiously, only to discover that she would have to become a police officer first, then join the Epiales Division. The thought of becoming a cop turned her stomach. There were private Epiales Hunter organizations, of course, but they were far more difficult to join, especially for someone as consistently broke as Cat.
“They will never find that thing until it holes up in somebody else,” Cat said. “Maybe Sam will find it.” Jo choked out a harsh laugh.
“Yeah right,” he said. “Maybe if it was Opposite Day, and Sam wasn’t a lazy piece of shit.”
“Hey, come on,” Cat chided them, but not very seriously. “He’s not that bad.”
“He sucks so much, Cat. He only sucks more now that he’s an ED cop,” he said. Cat shrugged. Sam Skelton had been a friend of theirs all throughout High School, but had radically drifted away from their friend group senior year, before completely breaking contact after graduation. Cat missed him sometimes, but not enough to reach back out. Jo practically considered him their personal enemy now, so they were likely never going to reach out to him either.
“Yeah, well,” Cat said noncommittally. “Oh hey, lemme let you go, I’m nearly home.”
“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jo said in a sing-song voice. “At nine, I guess!” Cat laughed, then disconnected. She turned onto the road that led to her house and glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. Her oily hair, standing up nearly the way she liked it now that it had been freed from the prison of the hat, glistened. She groaned. Now, she would have to take a shower before bed, or get up well before the eight-thirty she planned in order to get ready to leave with Jo. That was, honestly, probably for the best.
Cat pulled her car into her driveway, and parked underneath the awning next to her mother’s little red car. She pulled herself out, locked it out of habit, then walked around the house to the back door. As usual, it was unlocked. She walked inside, then locked it as well. She heard nothing in the house, save for the low hum of the fridge in the kitchen. Generally, her parents were both asleep by the time she got home, but occasionally her mom would still be awake watching something terrible on Netflix. She peeked into both the living room and kitchen, but saw no sign of them, so she walked through the dining room to the stairs.
Once upstairs, Cat peeled off her work shirt and pants and threw them in a laundry hamper, where they would inevitably infect the other dirty clothes there with their pizza stink. She tossed her bra and underwear in as well, then walked down the darkened hallway to the bathroom. As she walked to the shower, she stopped in front of the mirror and noticed a new, large red bump on her cheek. She touched it gingerly, though it was only a little sore. Cat desperately wanted to be done with acne forever. She didn’t mind the slight pooch of her stomach, nearly flat chest, or general pear shape of her body, but she hated acne and the few scars she had as a result of it being particularly awful in early high school. Her reflection bared its teeth at her, and aside from not being blindingly white, Cat was happy with her teeth. There was a constant, irrational fear of her teeth suddenly becoming rotten one day, or misaligned, that plagued her. She knew it was stupid, and impossible to happen over the course of a few hours, but she still checked them every time she thought about it in front of a mirror.
As the hot water sputtered out of the shower head and over Cat, she relaxed every muscle in her body and felt like collapsing to sleep right there. Instead, she cleaned herself, then went through the horrible ordeal of getting out of the shower and drying off. Briefly, she considered putting some months-old acne cream on her new face bump, but decided she was too tired to take fifteen seconds to do it. Cat turned on the television in her bedroom, turning the volume so low that it might as well have been muted. She crawled into bed and pulled the cool sheets and comforter over her. She smiled as she closed her eyes, thinking about hanging out with her best friend tomorrow once she woke up.
However, Catherine Clarke didn’t wake up the next morning. Or the morning after that. When the ED Division of the state police identified it as an epiales problem instead of a medical problem, they sent in two officers to Cat’s dreamscape to destroy the epiales and wake her up. Within twenty minutes, both officers’ chest cavities violently burst open, killing them. In an act of desperation, Jo Davis used Officer Sam Skelton’s connections to speak with a representative from a private organization of epiales Hunters. Jo, Cat’s parents, and even Sam threw their money together to pay for one of them to come out and save her. He arrived the next day to begin his work.