Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

The transient pleasures as a vision seem,

And yet we think the greatest pain's to die.

~John Keats

“They said I wouldn’t dream, but I did – I dreamed about my family.”

The warehouse is dim, full of unmarked crates and unspecified rustlings that would have unsettled someone less desperate. Tracey is willing to force suspicious feelings out of his mind in order to concentrate on the larger concern of his impending death. Would he see a bright light? Would there be angels, or were those only for the kind of death you weren’t meant to wake from?

Would the angels tell him the bad men will stop coming?

A man with dirty fingernails clutches a syringe. Tracey doesn’t know his name – that’s part of the deal.

“You will lie down now,” says the man with a heavy accent. He looks like the sort of doctor you’d pay not to see you.

“Should I close my eyes?”

“I do not care, just so long as you do not struggle when it is time.”

Tracey closes his eyes. It makes him think of dying in a bed, as an old man, and that idea is simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

“Will I dream?"

"No." That is the last word he hears.

Without warning, the needle plunges into his arm. The pain surprises him, even though there was no conciliatory “you’ll only feel a prick.” Maybe he imagined one.

Another man’s heart beats uncontrollably in his chest. Through the translucent skin of his eyelids he is aware of the dim light being eclipsed; he hears a muffled snap, like he’s listening through balls of cotton, as the top of his coffin is secured. He wants to scream. He needs to tell the doctor that there’s been a mistake, that he’s still awake, but he can’t open his lips or drag his tongue between his teeth.

He remembers, all in a flash, the haunting stories during the war, of men and women who were mistakenly buried alive among the hordes of dead soldiers. Man should never see the inside of his own