Christine Doornbos

Infected Dreams Christine Doornbos

She suddenly felt caught between two worlds, a heinous existence in what she knew as reality and a dire situation in what seemed to be a dream about the end of the world. The troubling part was that she didn't know which was better . . . Eighteen-year-old Kali, a poor girl residing in a garbage-filled, decrepit trailer with her mentally ill mother, while being repeatedly abused physically and sexually by her alcoholic father, finds escape from the brutality of her everyday life only in her dreams, where she imagines a picture perfect home and a family who loves her. During an exceptionally viscous attack Kali is beaten into unconsciousness and wakes up in a warehouse with a strange man named Ryatt. Ryatt seems to know Kali, but Kali has no recollection of him or their surroundings. Kali soon learns that she has been dropped into a new fantasy, a viral apocalypse. Sliding back and forth between worlds, Kali tries to figure out what divides these two places, there are no doors or roads to follow to the other side. It isn't long before her grasp on reality and nightmare begins to falter. Which is better, her inhumane life or a world where everyone she knows is gone and the only people left walking are dead?