Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  The room was dark except for candelabras resting on architectural features I couldn’t quite see. There weren’t windows. Only dark shadows ringed us and pushed in on our elbows.

  But I didn’t want to look at anything but Zach. He was a veritable feast for my eyes. Although he was on the far side of the table, I could see his exotic and handsome face. His hair was darker than normal in the gloom, but if it were in the sun, I would see the golden highlights and the chocolate gleam of his eyes. He was tall, taller than I was by a half a foot, and his shape had only been honed by the rigors of the new world.

  I had wondered what kind of bloodlines ran in his family. Somewhere there was something more unusual in his tree. A grandparent had been Asian or Polynesian perhaps. He was a pretty man, which was why Lulu had been so fascinated with him. Lulu hadn’t been the only one. Other women seemed to fall like ten pins at his feet, but wonder of wonders, Zach had eyes only for me.

  I didn’t want to love him. Like everything else in the old world, I didn’t want to lose him. Making connections seemed like a surefire way to lose someone else. If you allowed it to be put in your hand, something would only yank it away when it seemed like you were happy.

  I guess that made me perverse.

  “Where are you?” he asked, and his voice was deep, throaty, as if he had been longing to speak with me.

  “Nevada,” I replied. The firefly pixies’ conversational genius had obviously been rubbing off on me.

  “Only Nevada,” Zach said wistfully. “I could come after you.”

  “They need you there.”

  “I need you here.”

  “I need to grow up,” I said, willing to be honest for a change.

  “I know,” he said, and it wasn’t a happy set of words.

  “A few of the firefly pixies came with me,” I said, offering a little something to placate Zach.

  “Elan told us,” Zach said. He looked at the tea and sandwiches. “What, no crumpets?”

  “I have no idea what a crumpet is,” I said promptly.

  “It’s your dream,” Zach explained. He smiled sweetly at me, but there was bitterness behind the façade.

  “Then you should be sitting…”I said and pointed to my immediate left. When I turned my head, Zach was sitting in the chair to my immediate left. He was no longer at the head of the table. Furthermore, he was wearing an ornate crown on his head.

  “Oh,” I muttered. “Prince Charming, right?”

  Zach touched the crown with one hand. “Not my cup of tea,” he said with a quirk of his lips. “You should see what you have on.”

  I looked down and saw an elaborate ballroom gown made from peacock blue silk that shimmered fabulously in the candlelight. The neckline was somewhat risqué, revealing my attributes in a way that instantly made me blush. I was pretty sure that I needed a special bra to put this one on, if it hadn’t been poured on me. “Oh, for the love of God,” I mumbled. My subconscious really sucked.

  His hand curled around mine. I could feel the searing heat of his flesh. I could feel the pulse of his heart under the skin. My eyes skittered back to his, and I was lost.

  “I saw a yeti today,” I said helplessly.

  Those beautiful lips quirked again. “It’s not like you could tell me about your day in class or how you hung out at Starbucks with your best buds,” he said.

  “Yes, well, tea?”

  “Yes, with cream please. One lump of sugar.”

  Reluctantly releasing his hand, I poured the cream in his cup. His table setting had magically come with him. I used a set of sparkling silver tongs to deliver the cube of sugar into the cup. He used a small teaspoon to stir it up, even while he stared at me.

  “You look…” he trailed off. After a moment, he said, “You look wonderful. A little drawn maybe. Have you been eating enough?”

  “Probably not.” I smiled brightly. “Next time I’ll dream about crumpets, and I’ll eat more than my fair share.”

  “Okay, try to eat more, Sophie. I don’t want to have to worry about you.” For an achingly poignant slice in time, his dismay and worry was revealed in his face, but he relaxed. “Let me tell you about what I learned today. There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand.” His hand touched mine again, and he began to recite the names of bones.

  But it was a dream, and I wasn’t really memorizing the names of the eight short bones of the wrist, or the carpus, as Zach called it.

  Then as all dreams do, it faded away, and I woke up in the morning.

  Chapter 4

  The Road Less Travelled…

  Continues To Be Travelled…

  In the morning I set off on my way to the next big town in Nevada. It was about sixty-something miles, or so Rand and/or McNally informed me. We approached a tunnel, and the firefly pixies absolutely balked at the entrance. “It’s like a cave,” I sang.

  “It’s straight,” Spring informed me. “Caves aren’t straight. And it smells funny.”

  “Humans made it before. With machines.”

  “All the more reason not to go in it,” she insisted.

  The reason there was a tunnel, actually two of them side by side, and another two that were for railroad tracks, was that there was a pretty good-sized hill there. The builders of the road had decided that going over was too out of the way, hence the tunnels. I wasn’t going to leave my bicycle and hike around, or over, for that matter.

  “You want to fly around and meet me on the other side?”

  Spring and her fellow pixies sniffed at the air as they peeked through the folds of material on the birdcage. It was somewhat nippier than the day before. They liked being carried in the cage during the day. (They wouldn’t have liked it if I had explained to them what a birdcage was really used for, which is exactly why I didn’t explain.)

  “It’s a third of a mile. It’ll take me two or three minutes on the bike,” I entreated. I coughed as I added, “You can see the light on the other side of the tunnel.” It wasn’t very nice to make fun of the firefly pixies, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Spring looked at me suspiciously. She knew very well that I was amused by something and she wanted to know what it was, but she was too proud to ask.

  I brightened. “It’s too cold to fly around. Perhaps, what I really need is some brave scouts to see if there’s risk ahead.”

  Out came the silver toothpicks. They pointed at the tunnels in a demonstration of their disregard for danger. Three of the firefly pixies went ahead to make sure it was secure and passable.

  Spring thumped my ear with her tiny fist. She had flown to my hair and was perched beside my face. “Magic lies all around us, Soophee,” she sang.

  I took a breath and waited. There was a message there.

  “The world now is awash with magic and things unseen by many and invisible to a few,” Spring sang. I didn’t like it when she got all mystically prophetical. It made my head hurt, but then, a lot of things made my head hurt. “Old magicks live in places where the before-humans built their contraptions.”

  I couldn’t look at Spring because she was on the side of my head. She wasn’t prone to teasing or making things up. “I don’t always understand what you’re saying, Spring.”

  She thumped my ear again. “The sisters know this. But Soophee needs to understand that the world is not the world you left behind.”

  “I think I got that.”

  “Does Soophee think that there is safety in old places?” Spring sang.

  The firefly pixies once warned me about a “before-place,” but the warning wasn’t because it was old, but because the Burned Man had taken refuge in it and had set a trap for me and the firefly pixies.

  Sometimes I had premonitions, but my premonitions were usually for other people, and I was getting nothing on a cold November day.

  When it was all said and done, I went around the tunnels. When the firefly pixies came streaming back, their luminescent green skin a little paler and their limbs trembling, they wouldn’t
talk about what they had seen.

  I took about five minutes to carve a word into the yellow traffic signs. The signs initially said “Narrow Bridge,” which indicated the set of bridges that passed over the Humboldt River. The firefly pixies wouldn’t indicate the kind of threat in the tunnel, but I went ahead and scratched it into both signs. Someone who came after me might want to know. I wrote danger in large black letters and then did a skull around the word.

  Spring made an approving noise in my ear.

  There was a parallel road running alongside the freeway. I simply walked my bicycle over to it and followed it as it trailed the c-shaped curve of the river. I made similar carvings in the signs there. I don’t know what was inside the tunnels, but it belonged to them now, and they could have it.

  I got on the bicycle again and rode east once more. I only looked back at the tunnels once, and I saw something. Instead of stopping, I pedaled harder. It had looked like a very large set of red eyes staring at me from the interior.

  I caught Spring looking at me from the birdcage. She had a smug expression on her little face.

  I didn’t look back again. The firefly pixies weren’t concerned, so neither was I.

  When I stopped to eat, I made a note on my map, just as I had made one about the yeti. I checked the map that Hanley had given me, but he hadn’t gone this way.

  Elko wasn’t too far down the road from the tunnels. I passed the town because I felt good enough to keep going. It was all high plains desert. Snow-covered mountains loomed in the distance. A river, I wasn’t sure if it was still the Humboldt or not and I didn’t feel like checking my map, snaked around as it flowed in a generally parallel path to the interstate.

  I hadn’t seen such a place before. I would have said that it was all dusky grays and browns underneath the light mantle of snow. But there were vivid oranges and yellows that contrasted with the absolute blue luminescence of the skies. Fluffy white clouds floated at their leisure, huge cotton balls of lightlessness that almost seemed meaningless. Despite the advent of winter and a layer of snow, the desert wasn’t without some green, and it contrasted with the rich browns of various shrubbery.

  It was only when the sun began to set behind me that I acknowledged I had to stop. I had gone so far that my legs felt like numbed pieces of wood, and my butt no longer registered any sensation.

  There wasn’t a house around, and I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I went off road, toward the same twisty-turny river and found a place in between two hills to set up camp. I had a sleeping bag, and I knew how to make a fire. Before long, we were all curled up around a little blazing fire. The firefly pixies took off periodically to find food for themselves, although some of them attempted to share with me.

  I had to listen to commentary about the Twinkie that followed the can of Beanee Weenees. Yes, I had a cultured appetite that would have made social debutantes green with jealousy.

  “It looks like an enormous yellow fungi with fluffy stuff inside.”

  “Soophee got half of it in her mouth. She could eat the whole thing in one bite.”

  “Could the sisters taste some?”

  I unenthusiastically shared. I didn’t think they would like it, and I was correct. It was the last of the Twinkies and one of the few that I had found that the expiration wasn’t that dated. In a few years, no one would have any Twinkies, just like in that movie except without Woody Harrelson and shuffling brain eaters.

  As I fell asleep, the girls were arguing about a lizard they’d found. They’d hunted it to its burrow and dragged it out. Vicious little meat eaters, but none of the meat went to waste.

  The next morning I woke up, and I had company, the kind that was completely unexpected.

  * * *

  My first thought upon awakening was I was warm, and I could hear the fire crackling loudly. The problem was that the fire shouldn’t have been crackling loudly. It should have burned up over the night. It should have been nothing but a few banked coals and I may or may not wanted to build another one to heat some water for tea or instant coffee.

  So I lay there. Very still and thinking about what to do next. Caution always proved to be a buddy for the greater good. I wasn’t feeling any nauseating premonitions but then I didn’t get them regularly and I’ve never had one about myself. Furthermore, I hadn’t had one of those weird dreams about Zach dressed as prince charming. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  But the crackling fire could be a good thing or a bad thing. Someone was there. They had built up the fire while I was sleeping. The girls hadn’t stabbed me in the neck in order to wake me up. Either they had been taken out, or they didn’t consider the visitor a threat.

  Zach?

  I opened my eyes and saw the back of a person crouched by the fire. That person had a heavy sheepskin coat on and a knit cap covering their head. Heavy boots rounded out the ensemble. They were stirring something in a small skillet. They took the spatula and spun it in their hand while the something cooked in the pan.

  Moving cautiously I reached for the handle of the Japanese broadsword. It was half under me and within the confines of the sleeping bag.

  “I found eggs on a farm yesterday,” the person said. “But scrambled is all I’m up to, and hey, I even have salt.”

  The Burned Man wouldn’t have cooked eggs. At least, he wouldn’t have used a skillet.

  She looked over her shoulder, and I admit I was surprised. Lulu crouched there and evenly returned my stare. I was going east, and she had decided to go with me. It had been a hard decision for her to make.

  After she had done what she had done, Lulu had been forced to make a choice. There had been a witness besides myself, and so Lulu confessed to her misdeed. Under the rules of the Redwoods Group, she was exiled for a period of time. For a socially conscious girl like Lulu, it must have been like being committed to a living hell. Circumstances changed, and she was accepted back into the group eventually, just as I had been. (My misdeeds had been a bird of another feather, but I wasn’t trying to justify myself.) I could understand why she did what she did, but it didn’t make it easier to forgive. She wasn’t welcome in the California group anymore, and we all knew it. Zach in particular, couldn’t stand the sight of Lulu. Neither could some of the other Redwoods Group members. But Lulu hadn’t had a choice until now.

  “I haven’t had eggs for a week,” I said blearily.

  Lulu didn’t say anything. She ran a hand through her short blonde hair, and her eyes went back to the skillet.

  “You didn’t go through that tunnel about thirty miles back, did you?”

  “I saw the marks on the signs,” Lulu said. “I went around. Something was screaming inside the tunnels after I got about a half-mile down the road. Screaming with fury, I think.”

  I glanced up the hill and saw her bicycle parked next to mine. There was also a well-wrinkled sleeping bag on the ground on the other side of the fire. Lulu had come in late and slept, too.

  “The Tinker Bells guided me in,” she said as if reading my mind. For all I knew, Lulu could have been reading my mind. I didn’t know what her particular power was. Some of the Redwoods Group were frankly disbelieving of the idea that the survivors all shared some sort of extra sense. Some of the powers were readily apparent, such as Dr. Sinclair’s healing hands or Leander’s telepathy. Others were less obvious, such as Calida’s telekinesis or Ethan’s odd date-memory power.

  “Good of them,” I said.

  “I made vanilla caffè latte,” Lulu added, pointing at a kettle and two tin cups. “It’s instant, sure, but it’s better than bottled water on a cold day. If you whip it with a spoon, it almost tastes like Peet’s in San Francisco.”

  My mouth watered. “I could get out of a warm sleeping bag for that.”

  And eventually I did.

  After that, time seemed to slip away. Nevada became history when we first saw the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. There was a tremendous straightaway that led over the midsect
ion of Utah. It was straight, it was flat, and there was little to change in the distance. Once, we saw very large birds flying to the north, but they weren’t interested in us.

  As we got closer to the Great Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, it became apparent that things had changed dramatically there. It appeared as if the land had opened up and swallowed complete parts of the city, leaving the lake to rush in and take over. In the distance we could see the once-infamous temple sitting on the edge of a great cliff, still appearing like a majestic castle with its stunning architecture. At one point we had to backtrack, go down a state highway to the south, and then over to the east again.

  At night there were noises. It sounded as if women were crying for help. The first night we heard the noises, it was mildly demanding. As we got close to the Great Salt Lake, the nighttime noises increased in tempo and plea. The second night, I opened my eyes when Lulu abruptly got up and walked off, not even bothering to put on her boots.

  “Lulu,” I said insistently.

  “They need help,” she muttered.

  It was funny. It did sound like someone needed help. Someone who was alone and desperate. I wanted to help. Lulu wanted to help. I started to get out of my sleeping bag, but the firefly pixies stabbed me in the hand to get my attention.

  “It’s a falsehood!” Spring sang into my ear. She jabbed the end of the silver toothpick into the side of my neck for effect.

  The fog cleared. “What the fluggerpole?” I muttered. I could still hear the cries in the distance. They were coming from the direction of the lake and didn’t sound so desperate at that moment. Instead, it sounded cajoling and complacent.

  I looked around and saw that Lulu stumbled forward. Snow squooshed between her bare toes. The firefly pixies flew around her in a flurry of luminous vehemence. I could see the girls trying to poke at Lulu, but she absently brushed them away. I tried calling again. “Lulu! It’s not what you think it is!” My mind seemed to numb again. Finally, I cut a hole in my padded jacket and pulled out a wad of white stuffing. I plugged my ears. My head immediately cleared.