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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Saturdead on 2024-11-09 17:02:12+00:00.

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Nick and I had to isolate ourselves. Not only because we had to stay up for 72 hours straight, but because we were scared we might spread what we had to others. Neither of us knew what this SORE thing might do to us, but if 72 hours of being awake was what was necessary to keep us and others from getting sick, we were gonna do it.

Luckily, the weekend was just around the corner. A couple of us had Memorial Day off. Nick managed to get a hold of Reggie, who could cover his shift in return for Nick taking a shift on Independence Day. Fair deal. So with a three-day weekend, we had our work cut out for us.

Caffeine was a given, but Nick also had to get some heavier stuff. The kinda thing that gets your heart racing to levesl it shouldn’t. I’m not gonna go into detail, but we needed a serious push to get past those last few hours. Remember; both of us had already been up for a full day when we first got exposed to this thing, so we were looking at almost four whole days, and no preparation.

We made the best of it. We played games, we ate takeout, we set new records on Nick’s old Guitar Hero games that he dug out of storage. The plastic guitars were a bit stiff and sun-yellowed, but they worked just fine most of the time. The green button would get a bit stuck though.

We went for walks, we took turns taking cold showers, we had a spontaneous karaoke thing going on in the living room… anything we could to keep the ball rolling and our eyes open. Sometimes I’d almost fall asleep standing up. Just leaning against a wall was bad enough. My knees would lock into place, and my body would slump a little. That’s when Nick would shake me back to life.

I had to get him a couple of times too. He once laid down face first on the couch, and I immediately flipped it over; almost wrecking his coffee table as he came tumbling down. It was stupid, but we had to be stupid to make it through this.

We’d been up for over 40 hours, and neither of us were making sense. We were out for a walk, hearing the frogs croak in the distance. The sun had just set, but we could still see the light peeking over the horizon. We tried to keep a good pace, but we could both feel it; we were slowing down. I had to keep us focused on something, so I brought up the first thing that came to mind.

“Your wife left you for a Salt Lake City stripper?”

“Yup,” Nick nodded. “Had the biceps and the stomach thing and all of it.”

“They still together?”

“What? No,” he laughed. “They were never together. But she tried, you know.”

“I’m not following.”

“She went for the guy. She called me up, said it was over, and went for the guy in this big, romantic hullabaloo.”

“And he blew her off?”

“He was gay,” Nick shrugged. “So it wasn’t really like that.”

Nick looked up, as if counting the stars. He sighed. The bags under his eyes looked darker than usual.

“I guess when you’ve seen the greener grass, everything else starts to look gross, right?”

“You ain’t gross, Nick. You’re just another kind of grass. Sorta… bluegrass, you know?”

“Bluegrass,” he chuckled. “I like that. Bluegrass kinda guy.”

Those last few hours, we ended up watching re-runs if Family Matters and chugging Four Loko. I had the Swedish Fish flavor. Nick knew a guy with boxes of the stuff. It was vile, but we had to get over those last few hours. Nick was pacing back and forth but was tired enough to almost fall over.

“Done,” Nick slurred. “I’m… I’m done. It’s just… it’s two hours.”

“You can do two hours,” I assured him. “You can do it.”

“I’m gonna go stick my head in the freezer.”

He did just as he said and stuck his head in the freezer. I was trying to keep up with the Winslows and their goofy adventures, but it was hard to pay attention. I had to fill in the blanks a lot, and it didn’t make a lot of sense. I barely registered the strange colors on-screen as Steve Urkel.

“You know what we can do?” Nick said. “We can… we can prep.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can … make it comfortable. I’m gonna make my bed with all new stuff, you can crash out here. And we get like… tea. And… ice water, for when we wake up. And I get, like… scented candles. And we put on whale song, and-“

“And we sleep like goddamn… royalty,” I added. “Right?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, getting more enthusiastic. “Yeah, that!”

So we got to work. Nick prepped his bed, and I went to his car to get a couple of extra blankets for the couch. Problem was, those were really soft blankets, and there was something about the back seat of his car that calmed me. Maybe the smell and feel of the synthetic leather. So I crawled in the back seat. There was a cold wind blowing, so I closed the door. And in that silence, I figured… what’s one hour? It’d just be an hour. Would that really be so bad?

And so, I crashed in the back seat of his car.

I was out for 14 hours. Nick got about 12. I woke up with a massive headache, but the ice water that Nick had prepped helped a little. I’d made us a couple of sandwiches. I thanked the past-us for thinking ahead, as the two of us prepped for work. By all metrics, we ought to have been fine. 72 hours had passed. Nick drove me to work – my car was still back at my place.

The conversation dulled as I chugged a full bottle of ice water, pouring the last few drops on my face. Nick looked like he’d been trampled by some kind of depressed parade. Even his hair looked tired.

“We’re not doing that again, “ I said.

“No, we’re not,” Nick agreed. “So we’re… we’re dropping this.”

I didn’t answer. I had pulled Nick into some bad shit one time too many. And yeah, the ends justify the means. I was looking for this lost girl, and I’d stumbled upon the very thing that got her lost in the first place. Nick looked over at me and sighed. He took a moment to choose his words.

“I get it,” he finally said. “You wanted to help. You still do. But let’s just… let’s think about it. Let’s be careful.”

“If you want me to back off, you gotta promise me something, Nick.”

He rolled his eyes, then looked at me. I wasn’t joking, and he could tell. With a sigh, he nodded.

“You gotta promise me that if you pick up any lead, whatsoever, on Adam’s missing girl – you’re telling me. You can call the shots, but there’s gotta be shots to call. I’m not the only one here to serve and protect, right?”

Nick tasted the words, throwing a glance in the rear-view mirror.

“Alright,” he said. “Deal.”

It took us a full work week to get back on our feet. My sleep schedule was a joke. One night I’d be in bed by six, another night I couldn’t sleep at all. I’d zone out at work, missing a word every now and then, much like I’d missed the story beats on Family Matters. I’d lag behind a bit, trying to piece together the context and make it make sense.

As I slowly got my routine back in order, May rolled into June. We started getting some proper heat. People were talking about a dry season, with no hint of rain for a long time to come. They weren’t wrong; there wouldn’t be a drop of water for two and a half weeks.

Midway through June, I was back on patrol duty. Charlie and Reggie were back to covering dispatch. Nick and I were on the same team, courtesy of a thankfully short conversation with sheriff Mason. I got the impression that the DUC were backing off – like some kind of situation had sort of resolved itself, seemingly.

I was on my way home from a particularly rough shift. A couple of tourists had tried to shoplift from the local grocery store. After resisting arrest and racking up two counts of obstruction, they managed to fail themselves all the way into a felony charge. Hysterical people were part of the job, but they were a shitty part of the job. But yeah, Tomskog doesn’t have a lot of those. It was nice to have something regular to do, for once.

Coming home from that shift, I felt like things were getting back to normal. The first drops of rain spattered against the hood of my car as I pulled into the driveway of my house. The moment I stepped outside, it felt like bliss.

The water was cooling. Reassuring, in a way. Like Mother Earth was whispering to me that things were gonna be okay. I just stopped for a second, put down my groceries, and basked in it. I found myself with my arms outstretched, and my mouth wide open – just drinking it all in.

I stood there for 35 minutes.

I’m not gonna lie, that was worrisome. Up until that point, I’d been fine. Could that one hour of SORE linger in your system that long? Could that be what caused it?

I tried to rationalize it, thinking I was overreacting. But in Tomskog, there’s no such thing as overreacting. If anything, people tended to shove life-threatening bullshit under the rug way too fast; myself included. So just to make sure, I gave Nick a call, explaining what I’d done.

“Yeah, that’s a symptom,” he said. “But I think some folks would just sort of stop at that, especially at the ass-end of things.”

“So it could mean that’s the last of…

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