Waking Nightmares by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online

idiots!”
    Most of them scrambled away as though burned. Only Ben Draper did not flinch at Miles’s approach. The kid hovered around Amber in alarm and confusion, looking like he wanted to do something but clueless as to what.
    “Did someone call 911?” Miles snapped.
    A chorus of replies assured him that help was on the way. He spent his days grappling with an internal debate over whether he loved his students for their potential or hated them for their lack of interest. But suddenly they weren’t his students anymore, and he felt a momentary pang of regret for calling them idiots.
    He dropped to his knees and pulled her head into his lap to keep her from slamming it against the floor. A light froth bubbled at her lips, and he tried to remember training from years before that would have told him whether he needed to do something to keep her from choking on her tongue.
    “Mr. Draper,” he snapped at Ben, “hold her legs, please. Let’s try to keep her from breaking anything.”
    But even as Ben knelt to help, Amber went rigid, frozen in place. Her hands clenched into fists and the muscles in her neck stood out. Her eyes had rolled up to the whites, but now she blinked and then stared at the ceiling as though something terrifying hung above her.
    Amber started talking, muttering in a tiny, frightened, little-girl voice—the same three words over and over, although Miles had to bend closer to make them out.
    “She knows me. She knows me. She knows me . . .”
    And then it stopped. Amber sagged in his lap, eyelids fluttering closed. Her breathing steadied and the rigidity went out of her. The seizure had passed.
    “Jesus,” Ben said, looking up at Miles. “What the hell was that?”
    “Duh,” one of the students said. “She’s epileptic, dumbass.”
    Miles ignored him. If Amber Morrissey had epilepsy, it was the first he’d heard of it. Not that students always shared such information with the administration or their professors, but over the years he’d had a number of students with diabetes or epilepsy who did share that news, just in case of a situation like this.
    “Amber?” he ventured, gently sliding her head from his lap and kneeling beside her instead. He took her hand. “Amber?”
    “I don’t think you should move her, Professor,” Ben said.
    “I’m not moving her,” Miles replied. He bit his tongue on the rest of his intended reply. What he wanted was to make sure the girl wasn’t going to lapse into a coma, and that the seizure hadn’t caused brain damage—or the other way around. He was pretty sure that an aneurysm or tumor could cause seizures.
    Amber let out a long, shuddering breath, and Miles tensed, afraid she would start to seize again. She coughed, and then one of her hands floated up to wipe spittle away from her mouth.
    “She’s coming around,” a girl said softly, just over Miles’s shoulder, crowding him.
    He hated to be crowded. His mother had called it a kind of claustrophobia when he was a child, his teachers said he had antisocial tendencies, and his ex-wife had said he didn’t like people getting too close because he was a coldhearted bastard. Most days, Miles thought they had probably all been equally correct.
    “Go away,” he said, looking up.
    His students looked back, wondering who he was talking to. He scanned the room, trying to get it through their beer-soaked and college-sex-addled brains that he meant all of them.
    “Go. Class is over. EMTs are on the way. Read chapter four and take notes. Refer to the syllabus for themes. I’ll make up for lost time on Friday, so missing that class would be a spectacularly bad idea.”
    Some of them started to leave immediately, reaching for books or bags or backpacks. Others looked worriedly at Amber, who had begun to blink and look around like Dorothy stepping out of her black-and-white farmhouse into fullcolor Oz.
    “Is she—” a girl named Yasmin began.
    “Miss Joyce, I’ve got it from here. You’re all