Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Really, what in God’s name is a boo hag?” Lulu reiterated.

  “They’re kind of like vampires,” I said, “without the sparkly stuff and the fangs and the whole ‘Listen to the children of the night’ thing.” My Bela Lugosi accent obviously didn’t impress Lulu.

  Lulu said, “Oh, that isn’t true.” She looked at me as if I was pulling her leg.

  “They suck the breath out of their victims and live off their energy.”

  Lulu stared at me with wide blue eyes. “Seriously. Energy-sucking vampires.”

  “They’re also supposed to be red and come for you at night. Short, too. Not more than four feet tall.”

  “You haven’t dealt with any of them before,” Lulu said skeptically.

  “There was a report on them from one of the people in North Carolina,” I said. “The President let me read all the reports on new animals.”

  “A boo hag,” Lulu repeated. She covered her mouth with her hand. Like that was going to keep them from sucking out her energy. Lulu was full of amusing moments.

  “They really like people,” I said with a smile. “They don’t kill you. They just want to have some of our energy. They’re kind of like energy parasites. Apparently, they keep their humans from getting sick. Feed a boo hag, don’t ever get colds again. So it’s a win-win thing.”

  “So why would they be closing down a train line?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they don’t like trains.”

  “Who doesn’t like trains?” Spring sang sleepily.

  “I think I understood that,” Lulu said.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I said to Lulu. “The hags seem to live in North Carolina only. And there’s a human that’s theirs. He’s the one who wrote the report for the President.”

  “Like you and the firefly pixies,” Lulu said.

  “Yes, like me and the firefly pixies.”

  “Sometimes I feel like we didn’t survive, that this is all some kind of weird dream, and it’s only a matter of time before we wake up.”

  “I think we all do,” I muttered. “Why would anyone paint a building to look like a dog food bag?”

  * * *

  By the time the train arrived, I was besties with a man from Florida and his dog, Spot. Spot wasn’t actually a dog, but I don’t know what he really was either. He was about the size of a dog and he had wings and the man from Florida, whose name was Harry, kept referring to Spot as a him, so I went with it. The wings were about a foot by a foot in size, and I didn’t think they would work. The rest of it looked dog shaped, and the snout was doglike. His coloring was mottled brown on lighter mottled cream. The eyes, however, were about the size of a tangerine and the color of brightest neon yellow. Spot didn’t like the light so much, and Harry had jury-rigged goggles for him. Harry showed me Spot’s eyes while we were inside the restaurant, waiting for a brief spring shower to pass. While Harry showed me Spot’s peepers, I saw that Harry had a mark on his upper bicep that looked a lot like a miniature Spot. It wasn’t as cool as my mark.

  Harry and Spot were going to see the President. So were a lot of people. Heck, that was exactly what I had done, too. I had come from California, just to see the brand spanking new President of these here United States, or should I say, the new and improved United States?

  The journey had been an adventure, a beginning, a discovery, and an accomplishment all wrapped up in a single package. And as I sat in the old train station, I began to think about that journey.

  Chapter 3

  The Road Less Travelled…

  The first part of my journey across the United States had begun in an understated manner. Kara, one of the three survivors I had first encountered after the change, escorted me to Arcata, the town around the bay from Eureka. Eureka was the town that the Redwoods Group had settled into once we had escaped from the fires the Burned Man had set.

  With a brusque “Be careful. Don’t take candy from strangers,” Kara watched me as I headed east on State Highway 299. It was one of those scenic byway roads on my Rand McNally atlas. It led up and over the Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, past some mountains and down into Redding. The last I saw of my friend was her still watching me as I peddled a bicycle around the curve of the road. Zach hadn’t come to say goodbye. He had said it before, and it was apparent, even to me, that he couldn’t stand to see me ride away.

  But my other friends joined me the first evening I camped by the side of the road. Spring and a horde of firefly pixies fluttered in just as my eyes were growing heavy with sleep. Somehow I wasn’t surprised even when Spring had said something about keeping me out of trouble. The firefly pixies tend to speak in a group mentality, so when she had told me not so long before that, “Return to us soon, Soophee. You will be missed,” it didn’t mean all of them.

  I had to fix up a special holder for the firefly pixies. Basically, I found a birdcage that could ride on the storage rack on the back of the bicycle, and I enclosed it with heavy fabric. The inside had a foam bed obtained from the same store as the fabric. It didn’t look pretty, but the girls got to sleep the day away while I rode my bicycle up into the mountains of Northern California. They didn’t like the cold, and it did get cold. Later, I had to make little coats for them with cut-outs for the wings to stick through, and I’m not much of a seamstress.

  One day not too long after, it started to snow and didn’t stop for about three days. It was a good thing I had the thick mountain tires on the bicycle. I did walk the bike in some places. At times I heard strange distant noises as if something tremendous was walking through the brushy rolling hills, just out of sight. There was a brief respite of warmer air that melted the snow from the roads and that got me over that section.

  November was a terrible time to pick to go over mountain passes, and I stared at my map, looking for the best route to make it to D.C. so that I could avoid any more mountain passes. I didn’t want to spend months on the road, but that was exactly what I was looking at. There wasn’t an easy way to travel to the east, and I ultimately came to that conclusion.

  When I reached Redding, California I passed one of the signs that the Redwoods Group had painted. It was a billboard beside Interstate 5 that screamed “YOU ARE NOT ALONE!” It also listed directions to the redwoods area where the group had originally resided. I took about two hours to paint the new directions on the sign. It wasn’t easy because my hands were cold, and the paint was extremely tacky. I added a smiley face because I couldn’t help myself. There was a brief thought of burning the sign down as I had done before to one of the group’s other signs.

  The reason for destroying the sign was prominent in my mind. The Burned Man was still out there, and he could see the new directions on the sign. But the Redwoods Group with its very young leader, Gideon, knew about him. They also knew that one arm was cut off, and unless he had managed to find a way to regenerate it, that would be the way he would remain. They would know him if they saw him again.

  I could only hope that the Burned Man got eaten by a hungry new animal or that the turtle/spiders that had marked him caught up with him once and for all.

  Razing the sign wouldn’t prevent the Burned Man from finding the Redwoods Group again. They set up shop in the Eureka area and planned to plant crops in the lush river bottomlands where Freshwater Creek runs into Arcata Bay. Farmers had been using that land for a century and more. So too, would the group. Evidence of the group’s occupation would be plain for the Burned Man to see. If he was so inclined.

  I could only hope that my lopping off his arm had disinclined him.

  I had a lot of time to think about what-if’s while I travelled east. The firefly pixies were up for the adventure but avid conversationalists they weren’t. They admired the snowy mountains. Lassen Peak was closest and made them ahhh with veneration. It turned out that they were trying to imagine what kind of creature was able to make such a thing. I got the impression that they thought some long-ago enormous giant had pooped onto the landsc
ape, and I didn’t feel like explaining the concept of plate tectonics and volcanic growth to them.

  As we headed away from the mountains and got to going downhill at times, the travelling went faster. On a flat straight of land, I could do fifty miles in a day. But what did I say about life not being easy?

  I kept an eye peeled for the odd and insane because nobody knew better than I did, that things happened. Crazy people wandered out of the woodwork, and well, there were new critters everywhere. I saw some elk. I think they were elk. They trampled across the road somewhere around the Lassen Volcanic National Park. There was a great herd of them, and they moved out. A few cast me curious looks, and Spring peeked out of the birdcage to sing, “What is that?”

  “They’re called elk,” I sang back.

  “Were those here before?” Spring asked.

  “Yes, but I think they were in decline,” I sang. The word “decline” didn’t translate well into the firefly pixie’s language, so Spring wrinkled her tiny little face.

  “It means they were dying out,” I explained.

  “Because of humans,” Spring surmised.

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “What do they do with the horns?” another firefly pixie asked. I couldn’t tell them all apart, but God forbid I should say that to them. I think her name was Flies-with-Red-Gold-Pink-Flowers, so I shortened it to Flowers. I can’t remember everything.

  “They fight with them,” I sang, waiting for the herd to clear the road, but they kept going and coming. It seemed endless. “Shows which one is the biggest and baddest of the males. They get the best females.”

  Flowers sniffed. “Females are the biggest baddests in our world. The sisters don’t need a male to tell us that.” My budding teensy-weensy feminist fantasy creatures. Peace out, sistah.

  And I couldn’t argue with Flowers’ statement either. The males of the firefly pixies lived in the stream where their hive was located. They tended to the eggs and made sure the young had the best of care. It was a matriarchal community and worked well for them. Sometimes they were confused about the human males and females because of size differences. For a long time, they thought that the ten-year-old Elan was just a very short adult human. Wait until they got an eyeful of how humans gave birth.

  We saw other things, too. There was a stretch of road that went from Susanville to Sparks, Nevada that had little to nothing on it. The pine trees dwindled away, and the brush took over. Snow lay like a blanket over the land. The asphalt of the road had maintained enough heat to melt most of it, but the rest of the world was a winter postcard. It was on this lonely length of road that we saw something moving along a nearby bluff.

  It must have seen us, as well, because it stopped and watched as I pedaled down a hill. I nearly went off the road when I saw what it was or rather what it looked like.

  “It’s got fur over its whole body,” Spring sang. She had her head out of the birdcage. She had wallowed out a spot on the top level of the birdcage where she could snooze and occasionally look out a part in the heavy cloth. She thought I could use an extra set of eyes since no other humans were with me.

  Two other firefly pixies looked out. “That’s a lot bigger than the other humans. Look at his feet.”

  “I don’t think that’s a human,” I said and then had to sing it in their language because I was somewhat dumbfounded. I couldn’t really correctly gauge the height, but if it wasn’t basketball player sized, then I would eat my left boot.

  “What is it?”

  “They have different names for it,” I sang slowly. “Sasquatch, Bigfoot, yeti. I think.”

  I slowed to a stop along the side of the road just to see what the very large animal would do. Was it a new beastie? Not according to urban legends.

  It watched me watching him. The girls watched him, too. We were stuck there for a long minute. The snow-filled valley between us was the no-man’s zone.

  “Does it like to eat humans?” one sang.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Reputedly it likes to stay to itself. If I don’t bother him, he won’t bother me.” With that, I put the bicycle back into motion and asked Spring to tell me if the abundant being started to come after us.

  I looked back once after I gotten well down the road. The animal was still standing on the bluff observing us. In this desolate landscape, I would have thought that he was lonely. Maybe some of his brethren had vanished on the day of the change. And perhaps the only thing left were those other pesky bipeds who often screamed at its appearance.

  I understood lonely, but I wasn’t going back to strike up a friendship.

  We saw other strange things. A canyon that wasn’t on any of the maps bisected the road near Sparks, and I had to make a rough track around it until I reached the roads on the other side.

  But in my whole transit east across California, I didn’t see another single human being. The very sad part of that was that I didn’t particularly miss them, with a solitary exception.

  What I got to thinking about in the high desert country, was statistics. Perhaps, I should have been worrying about gryphons or predators that would be interested in a small person on a bicycle that looked like prey, but instead, I was thinking about numbers.

  The U.S.A. had a population of about 300 million people. I had to think about it, and I didn’t have the Internet to double check my facts, so I might have been off a little. But then the change had whittled that down to about five to ten people per county per state. (This was pure speculation on my part until someone did a census, and how were they going to get an accurate count? They would miss those who died in the frantic first weeks after the change, like the man on the Oregon coast who had committed suicide because his beloved wife vanished into nothingness.) I wasn’t a statistician, so I expected that higher population areas would have a higher amount of survivors. For example, there would be more survivors in the greater Los Angeles area than in the state of Montana, but that wasn’t using a scientific method. Who’s to say that there wasn’t a higher percentage of psychics in Montana than in Los Angeles?

  Anyway, my mind clunked along, and I even stopped along the side of the road to use a stick in the dirt for my calculations. If the average state had about 100 counties, and yes, I know that isn’t correct. I happened to know that Hawaii had three while Texas had something over two hundred. (Obscure factoids that only I remembered. I believe it was for a social studies test I had three months before the change.) If that was a solid 7.5 people per county, it was 750 people in a given state. Then 750 times the number of states equals 37,500 people in the United States of America. Here’s where I had to check my figures a few times.

  37,500 people is what percentage of 300,000,000? I did the math three times. The answer was that a given person had a .000125 % chance of being a survivor. What did that mean?

  I needed to go back and finish high school is what it meant.

  While meandering through Nevada I should have a slight chance of running into a human or two, but the smart ones who well knew they didn’t have electricity probably had gone south for the warmer climes.

  It was a lonely world out there.

  * * *

  The night before I reached Elko was slow going. Cracks in the highway had started to appear as if the road had suddenly begun to age overnight. In a few years there would be only patches left, unless we figured out how to repair the asphalt and cement. The bridges would fall soon after.

  I followed the freeway until my legs ached with agony. I was pushing it because I could, and finally, even Spring complained that she and the girls needed to stop to hunt. The valley suddenly spread out, with a river on one side and snowy mountains all around. The valley floor was as flat as a pancake, and I didn’t like the idea of choosing one of the many motels along the corridor. Instead, I peddled off the main road looking for recent human habitation. Happy that I couldn’t find any, I chose a house that was located well to the rear of its plot. The doors were locked, and dust covere
d the porch. No one was home and hadn’t been for some time.

  I broke into a rear window that led to a mud room. There were lots of sizes of boots and coats hanging there. I waited for a moment, thinking that someone would have heard the breaking glass and come to see what was going on. But no one came.

  One of the biggest problems of the change was that most people had been asleep at the time. Not everyone, of course, but in the Pacific time zone, you could break into a house and find empty pajamas in their beds. This house wasn’t an exception.

  There were two sets in the master bedroom. I found the guest bedroom and changed the sheets. I had to shake out the dust from months of accumulation, but I didn’t mind. The water was still running in the house. Although it was chilly, I still washed up and was happy to do so.

  Spring and the other firefly pixies donned their little coats, looking like home ec. projects gone horribly wrong, and flew out to find something to eat. They preferred insects, but occasionally, they didn’t mind canned tuna fish. The firefly pixies were out-and-out carnivores. I left a crack in the window, so they could come back in when they wanted and crawled under a very thick down comforter. One of the pixies was guarding the entry. If something other than Spring tried to come in, she would stab her little toothpick sword in my arm or my butt or whatever was accessible. I placed the Japanese broadsword by my side on the bed so I could reach it.

  Tired from thirty or forty miles of bicycle riding, I fell asleep without eating anything. Then something really weird happened.

  * * *

  Zach sat on the other side of a long table. He was at the head. I was at the foot. We were having tea. There were tiny porcelain cups and little saucers. The tea steamed from the matching porcelain pot, which was partially covered with a crocheted pink cosy. My grandmother had a cosy just like it. She had made it, along with about twenty others, and it was the Christmas present of the year whether one drank tea from a pot or not.

  There were also platters of cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed and cookies that were larger in diameter than the saucers.