But Seymour wasn't alone as he had reckoned. He realized this when the sound of a gunshot brought him to consciousness. He sat up and cringed back reflexively as an arm grabbed him by the front of his pajama top and lifted him out of the bed. He managed to take in that the bedside lamp was on, casting a sepia glow around the room and the man who held him aloft. He looked into the man's pale green eyes for an instant before clamping his own shut.
Lovitz felt himself being lifted entirely out of the bed and out over the floor. It seemed the man was lifted all of Seymour's two hundred pounds with one arm.
"Open your eyes." came a gravelly voice a foot from his face. The smell of a chainsmoker drifted into Lovitz' nostrils. He opened his eyes to see a gaunt face framed by greying brown hair down to his assailant's shoulders.
"Mornin', Seymour!" said Darrus. The alarm clock on the nightstand read 4:37.
Thus far, Darrus' plan was working perfectly. Lovitz was a lower level administrator inside the administration complex known as Tower Zero. Darrus was keeping Lovitz terrified and off balance until he got what he needed. "Sleep well?"
"Who are y--"
Darrus put the barrel of his gun between Lovitz' eyes. "Ah ah. I'll be asking the questions. And you're going to answer them. Because if you don't, I'll shoot you. Maybe in the head, maybe in the stomach. Do you know what happens if you shoot a man in the stomach? Nod or shake your head, Seymour."
Lovitz shook his head as best he could with his skull pressed flush to the wall.
"It rips through your stomach lining, pouring your stomach acids out onto your other organs. It takes about fifteen minutes of agonizing pain before it finally kills you. You don't want me to do that, do you, Seymour? Shake your head no."
Lovitz shook his head again, eyes wide with panic.
"Very good, Seymour. I think you and I are going to get along just fine. Now then, I want to know how many backup devices exist for the surveillance system in Tower Zero."
"T-two power stations." stammered Lovitz.
"Power stations? What about the central processing unit? Does it have any backup devices?"
"No, b-but it's a 64 core processor. It doesn't n-need a backup except for power."
"Very good, Seymour. Now, what brand is that processor? Think hard."
Lovitz swallowed hard. He was soaked in sweat. "M-Micrologic!" He had no idea why the green eyed man wanted to know technical details of the Tower Zero CPU, but was acutely aware that there was still a pistol in his face.
A smile spread across Darrus' lips. It was exactly as he'd hoped. "Very good, Seymour. Well, I think it's time you went back to sleep. Deep sleep."
Lovitz nearly wet himself in terror at the implication.
"No, not what you're thinking." said Darrus. "This is all a dream. Think about it. You haven't lived in this house for years. Just wake up!"
Seymour Lovitz sat bolt upright in bed--the right bed. Marla, his more-than-friend-less-than-mistress, slumbered to his right. There was no trace of the tall man with the piercing green eyes.
"It was a dream." he whispered to himself. "It was just a dream."
Within fifteen minutes, sleep returned to Seymour Lovitz, and this time, it was dreamless.
*
Darrus stepped back into Hell. He talked to his son in the dreamscape from time to time and was aware Nightmares were sometimes harvested from it, but that made the transition no less disorienting. Regardless, he had a piece of what he needed, and had left a man with no more evidence of his information gathering than a bad dream that would be no more than idle breakfast time chatter.
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