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Parker squeezed his eyes shut to steady himself against the vertigo that threatened to overtake him as he lay in bed. Often, his bruised ribs would protest the fact that he'd only been pounded half to death by Pond Scum back in Haskell Hall, his breath would hitch in his throat, and a coughing fit would erupt, and every time one did he was sure he'd wind up splattering that night's dinner into the trash bin he'd pulled up beside the mattress. He could only bury his face against the sweaty pillows and curse the ones who'd brought this on him while he rode it out.

It's all because of them, he thought. I don't know how, but they're behind this. Elijah, Pond Scum, and their flesh-craving friend. Why do I always attract the weirdos?

Not for the first time, Parker wished he was the forgetful type. He was sure there must be cases of rabies transmission between humans, however rare, and his brain was cycling through every list of symptoms he'd ever read on the Internet. His hand was now swollen and sore where he'd been bitten, plump and red like a nectarine.

He'd had acted on instinct earlier, reaching out to help Elijah support the weight of his unconscious friend when he'd begun to stumble under the burden of carrying him alone. The man had jerked awake as Parker neared (like a wild animal scenting a meal, he now thought with a shudder) and lunged for him, sinking his teeth into the tender flesh between thumb and forefinger which, he supposed, may have been considered a delicacy among the criminally insane. Parker was sure that most people would have resorted to pounding on the side of someone's head in order to stop them from eating their hand, but Pond Scum was just returning and, as usual, seemed to have the wrong idea about things.

After the second fight of the night, he'd been spitting out blood all the way back to his own room. The lesson had been an obvious one: never help anyone.

That's what I get, Parker seethed. I should have minded my own business and said no from the start. At least I got in a few good swings of my own. Hope it stings.

The nausea had begun to ease and his breathing slowed. The bedside clock informed him that he'd spent the better half of the night wheezing in bed, but the numbers began to blur as he drifted off and seamlessly transitioned from counting down the seconds to counting his steps in a world of silence that pressed in on him from all sides like a bad head cold. Buildings in colors both bold and dark twisted cartoonishly above the streets as he found himself walking through the ruins of a metropolis.

Clump. Clump. Clump. The rhythmic sound of his shoes on a blacktop littered with trash and refuse from the absent populace.

There was a kind of serenity to the dream world, where the governing rules of the waking world no longer existed and there was never anyone around to bother him. When Parker was 16, he'd often sat out lunch periods with one of the school's occult geeks who recorded his dreams almost religiously. The boy had kept a pocket-sized "dream dictionary", worn from being thumbed through as often as it was, on his person at all times so that he could look up fragments recalled during the day. Parker hadn't cared about what it meant to dream that you were being eaten by a bear or wearing your grandmother's socks, and was content to wake up feeling as though he'd come back from a long and satisfying journey down the kind of winding, woody roads he never saw anymore.

Unfortunately, waking up in a good mood was rarely the case when it came to dreams of cities. Parker's pace slowed as he neared the heart of the city and the muted, sourceless light that washed over everything dimmed.

He was being watched.

While his waking self might only suspect such a thing, his dream self always knew when there were eyes on him and he was being... thought of. The only question was whether it was from the alleyways to his right or the hundreds of cracked and dusty windows reflecting his progress through the streets.

One building stood out to him among the grim architecture of the city with its plainness and light colors. It was a simple brick school with cracked pathways leading up to the front doors and a flag that hung listlessly in the still, dead air. The windows were dark, showing no colorful art projects or finger paintings hung for the outside world to see. The silence was becoming unbearable, and if he stood and focused he thought he could feel the air around him buzzing, but he was compelled to walk down that path and throw open the doors.

The hallways were devoid of life and littered with crumpled papers, discarded trinkets, and all manner of refuse. The classrooms that he peeked into showed no sign of children or staff, but no dust had gathered on the tops of the desks or on the books in their shelves. Except for the trash, it was in excellent condition.

At the end of the second hallway he turned down was another door, and he hadn't laid eyes on it when he knew he had to open that one, too. Parker descended to the basement, kicking trash off the steps as he went, and his eyes fell on something hunched over in the corner. It looked up, and he knew what had been watching him.

The dream world began to peel away as he gasped and writhed in his bed. He wrenched his eyes open and found nothing but the walls of his room and his sweat-soaked sheets surrounding him, lit not by a sourceless light but by the muted green of his bedside clock.

Home. I'm home. In bed, Parker told himself with a swallow. It was a dream. I'm home.

That didn't make him feel better, so he rose to crack open a soda and drank it while staring, half-asleep, at his tousled reflection in the dark window. At least the sleep had helped to settle his nausea. He drifted off again as soon as his head hit the pillow only to see the school blossoming back up out of his subconscious with a vengeance.

The shadows on the walls twisted and metamorphosed until they were humanoid figures laying flat against the off-white paint, welcoming him back before he'd even gained his bearings. They made no move with the strange light from the streets outside still filling the room, but he knew they weren't there to help him or to show him the way out. He yanked open the nearest door and walked into a narrow hallway lit only by a single light bulb hanging precariously overhead, hoping they wouldn't follow him.

They followed.

"Leave me alone!" Parker snarled.

They just smiled their Jack-o'-lantern smiles, and he felt something tug at his sneakers as he took another step towards the far door. He tumbled to the ground and lifted himself up on his elbows to see inky blackness writhing around his feet, thin tendrils of tangled in his laces while larger ones coiled about his legs and crept upwards.

"Leave me alone," Parker managed to kick free and rise to his feet. "Stop following me. I mean it."

He stared them down as they contorted, frolicked, and pointed at him with their hands on their stomachs, shaking with laughter. One of them pulled itself apart from its brethren and made faces at him, stretching its already grotesque proportions into something more akin to a caricature than a human being.

Parker sensed something stepping out of the darkness behind him - something solid - and without thinking he turned to lash out with a hand that was not his own. The silence and the hostile, angry aura that had been permeating the walls of the school withdrew, and Parker looked down at his own outstretched arm covered in thick, dark fur. Curved claws that looked capable of tearing through flesh like wet paper had grown in where he was used to seeing only stubby fingernails.

The light bulb spun overhead and made the shadows dance on the walls, but they were no longer alive.

Sometime during the night his dreams deepened and the school vanished back into the depths of his psyche. Instead, he dreamed of the rich, salty smell of a beach tinged with the faint charcoal of summer. The ocean was a brighter blue than anything he remembered from childhood days toddling about in the waves, the kind of color you expected to find in digitally-enhanced photos and not real life. A monstrous black dog ran along the surf with its tongue lolling out of its mouth and its fur damp from the spray, leaving hand-sized paw prints in the sand.

Parker realized that it wasn't a dog but a wolf, and that the wolf was him. He also realized that he'd never felt better in his life.