Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  The tide had turned.

  President Maston was clearly unnerved. His mouth opened and shut. He shifted on his feet, uncertain whether he should try to talk his way out of the hole he had dug or whether he should run. People moved uneasily but accepted the new animals. They had been around them before. They knew they weren’t a threat to them. Maston did not.

  The President backed away on the stage, and McCurdy started forward. I leaned forward and snatched the gold handle of his sword. It came away with a pop because it had been attached to a belt. McCurdy cast me a hurried expression of irritation.

  Still underestimating things because they’re small, I thought. The scabbard dropped away and clanked onto the ground.

  Mario shoved himself back away from me, not knowing whether or not I would skewer him or not. Maybe later flew through my head.

  Jack attempted a lunge at me, and I slashed the sword at him. It was so much lighter than the broadsword that I almost twirled in a circle as I slashed. But Jack got the idea and rapidly backed away with his hands in the air.

  Lulu finally made it to my side. “What now, Sophie?” she asked, glancing around her. She’d managed to conceal the KA-BAR somewhere, and I was going to have to ask about that later. She held the knife in her hand and waited for an answer.

  The President was issuing commands to the other bodyguards. He was going to retreat into the Naval Observatory where he could regroup and rethink his position.

  I leapt onto the stage. “I don’t think so.” Two bodyguards dispersed, panicked by my abrupt presence. Well, that and the fact that the hippogriff appeared on the stage next to me.

  I took a single step, and there was that feeling of weightlessness combined with time stopping. I was at the border of the bubble, pushing my way through. “Lulu!” I yelled. “Stay back!”

  Then I popped through, and Maston was staring at me with horror and realization that his house of cards was inescapably tumbling down. “Shoot her!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ! SHOOT HER NOW!”

  One of the other bodyguards pulled out a big black pistol, bringing it to bear down on me. I didn’t know what kind of gun it was. It had a large barrel and it was pointed at me and I didn’t like it much. I heard people crying out. Lulu shrieked with rage. She had a set of lungs when she chose to use them. She had followed me onto the stage, standing close by me, waiting to help with her KA-BAR held capably in one hand, but she was on the other side of the dividing line.

  I threw myself back across the invisible border before Lulu could push her way in front of me. I swear it was a tunnel of about two inches that lasted forever and more, stretching out in something like an infinity mirror. Then I was across, and I tossed the blonde right off the stage into the band.

  Then the oversized bodyguard shot me because Lulu hadn’t been there to throw herself in front of me as she had in my vision.

  Chapter 21

  It Wasn’t a Little Scratch…

  My chest hurt while my ears heard an eternity of thunderous noise rebounding endlessly. It was like the sonic boom of a military jet as it zipped past, once upon a time, and it kept going. It reverberated in time with the mammoth throbbing of my chest. When I opened my eyes, I was lying on my hurting back, and my front felt as if someone had slugged me with a baseball bat. Suddenly the booms were gone, and I could hear voices. A slew of questions and statements fought for who would be the loudest. “…shot her!” “The guns work!” “Has the world changed back?”

  Lulu leaned over me. Her blue eyes were large and round. “Dumb as hell,” she said to me. She saw that my eyes were open, and she shook her head. “Really dumb. You should have let me…oh.” Comprehension transformed her expression. “You saw something dealing with me? With a gunshot wound? Why didn’t you just say something?”

  I groaned. “I thought the bullet would bounce off the vest. Like Superman, except not.”

  Lulu’s gaze went to my chest. “Well, it kind of did. The other one not so much.” Terrific. I had been shot twice. Something to mark off my bucket list.

  People were shrieking and yelling in concert around us. I had to get up, no matter how much my flesh ached and burned. It hurt more than when the Burned Man had broken some ribs. Getting shot hadn’t been on my agenda, but once I thought about it, I realized that Washington D.C. was chock-full full of stores catering to security issues. The one I had been in had lady-sized bulletproof vests. Specifically, they had ones specially made for evening apparel. I had gotten two; one for me, and one for Lulu, just in case I didn’t make things change. And well, Lulu looked to be hole-free for the moment, so it was working out so far.

  The President was bellowing something that didn’t sound very nice. He wanted his people to shoot into the crowd, but no one was shooting anything.

  McCurdy was shouting, too. “Stand down, sailors!” he yelled. “Stand the hell down!”

  “Help me up,” I said to Lulu. Lulu gathered one arm, and Prosper got the other one.

  I stood, and my head spun. I had a hard time taking an assessment, but I slowly looked around. McCurdy was keeping the soldiers from attacking anyone by virtue of his forceful rapid-fire commands. The humans and the new animals had circled around Lulu and myself and were holding them back. Somehow I was lying down on the ground. When I was shot, I had fallen off the stage, which explained why my back hurt, too.

  The President was pushing the bodyguards around and screaming orders. “Fire on them! Fire on them! They’re bloody animals! Shoot them!” But his bodyguards had seen that they were outnumbered, even in a one-sided firefight. They were hesitant, and their confused façades showed it.

  Hetta fired a crossbow bolt and nailed the side of an M16, causing the man to cry out while he dropped the weapon. The President shoved the man aside and grabbed at one of the M16s. The man yanked it back from the President and then tossed it across the line that earmarked the edge of the bubble. It slid into the changed world, and I knew it wouldn’t work there. How did the bullet find its way to me across that same line? An object in motion stays in motion, even when it passes through a magical border?

  New world. New laws.

  Some of the other men were doing similar things. Soon they had all thrown their weapons away.

  President Maston was practically gibbering. He pushed a man to the side and rushed to the covered thing I had seen earlier. I had thought it another statue, but as the gray-haired man yanked at the cover, I saw that I was wrong.

  It wasn’t a statue. It was something else altogether. I had discounted it because I had bronzes on my mind. I had thought that Maston had someone make a big statue of himself petting a new animal or conquering it or doing something stupid. It was big, as large as a bus. It wasn’t a bus. It was a military Hummer. I couldn’t see beyond it because of the darkness, but they had probably covered up with the wheel tracks from the top of the hill, as it had been driven through the heavy vegetation to its present position.

  The President continued to yank at the tarps covering it. The front one fell to the ground and then he pulled at the rear one. It looked like a typical Hummer to me except with a camouflage paint job. McCurdy could probably tell me what it was called. An A-2345-X or something equally moronic. McCurdy could have fun driving it around the perimeter of the Naval Observatory until he ran out of diesel fuel. And he would run out of diesel fuel sometime. He’d run out of bullets, too, if he thought about it.

  Oh, my chest hurt.

  But the last tarp pulled away, and the Hummer didn’t look so Hummer-like anymore. There was a large piece of equipment mounted on the back. It was square shaped and pointed toward the party and the spectators. It was olive drab green, and the color matched some of the camouflage paint. It looked like a large plasma television with glass insets and a black hole in the middle. Several other smaller black holes surrounded the largest one in the middle.

  Someone ducked through the people and animals surrounding me, and they allowed him through without comment. It was the doctor
, and I winced as I turned my head. Ignatius Taggert, M.D., touched my collarbone and said, “Does it hurt when you laugh?”

  “I haven’t laughed,” I said as I eyed the machine on the back of the Hummer. Maston continued to yank at the rear tarp, using his entire body weight. I looked for McCurdy and saw him watching the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. The captain’s mouth was open as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

  Had that thing on the Hummer been sitting at the Naval Observatory waiting for the change and waiting for someone to think about utilizing it in a new, ugly fashion? No, the President had it towed over here. Then once it was past the gates, he had someone start it up. Perhaps the diesel was good enough to last months, I didn’t know. Perhaps a fresh battery was used. I didn’t know anything about vehicles sitting around for months, so someone like Craig or Stephen was used to get it going.

  Voila. A shiny, new…weapon. Why else would Maston be so anxious about it?

  Ignatius poked intently. I nearly threw up because of the pain. “Don’t do that,” I snarled.

  He pressed cloth against my chest. “We need to stop the bleeding,” he said. He was using the jacket of his tux. So much for that one. It was okay. He could get another. It would be a while before we ran out of unused fancy suits.

  But hey, Ignatius had said something about…I couldn’t remember because my mind was a little befuddled with pain. I pointed at the Hummer. “Ignatius, what is that?”

  President Maston shouted at a man near the Hummer. The man shook his head, and the President slapped him across his face. It wasn’t a recommended way of treating employees, but I didn’t think Maston would listen to me.

  The people and new animals around me were getting antsy. Meka said, “We should get her on Horse and get away from here before they decide to listen to the nutjob after all.” The girl with the green hair had her snake back wrapped around her figure. “Where will we go?” she asked.

  Ignatius impatiently turned his head to look at what I was pointing at. “That?” He frowned harder. He blinked and then deliberately blinked again. “Jesus Christ. It’s the prototype. They must have gotten it from the defense contractor developing it.”

  Lulu said, “A prototype of what?”

  “Uh,” Ignatius muttered as he stared.

  The man that the President had slapped scrambled to the back of the Hummer, where I assumed there were some controls for him to use.

  Suddenly, the great array on the back of the Hummer moved. It smoothly rotated about in what seemed an effortless motion. It didn’t make a noise as it swung around and pointed toward the audience. People gasped in unison. The glass and holes in the olive drab green square were directed at us. The array suddenly dipped downward, and the President screamed, “Stop!”

  The single man unfathomably dressed in a suit operated the machine on the rear of the Hummer. He was clearly confused about the operation. The array swung back up, pointing toward the skies.

  “It’s what I talked about when I was examining those bones,” Ignatius said.

  “A laser?”

  Lulu’s head immediately twisted back to look at it. The array moved again pointing down toward the front of the Hummer. The man operating it couldn’t get it lined up quickly enough.

  “Not a laser, a directed-energy weapon,” Ignatius said.

  “Did you happen to tell McCurdy about that, too?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And he went and found it for Maston,” I finished. “It didn’t cut those bones, but it was something they use for the purposes of intimidation.”

  “We should go now,” Lulu snapped.

  “How is it powered?” I asked.

  “How can it be powered?” Ignatius asked. “Nothing works, but it is working. You got shot when bullets don’t work.”

  “That,” I said forcefully, pointing at the Naval Observatory, “is a place where tech still works. It’s a giant bubble where technology still reigns. We stop it now. How is it powered?”

  “A generator,” Ignatius said. “It’s got to be hooked up to some electrical source. The Naval Observatory is a backup secured facility for the President and members of Congress. They have generators and fuel and food for months, maybe years.”

  The array came up again, and the President shouted, “Fire it!”

  I screamed, “GET DOWN!”

  The weapon went off. Most of the people and animals present were completely out of its trajectory. The others had listened to me and dropped to the ground. One of Maston’s own soldiers hadn’t listened and stood there, surrounded by a streaming blue light. He began to scream, and the noise was piercingly gruesome.

  In a single instant of time, the light coursed across the clearing, slashed over some tables and the solitary soldier, and traversed the street. It went through the trees on the other side and then hit the side of the Embassy of the United Kingdom, which was pretty much the end of that building.

  It didn’t explode. It didn’t burst into a brilliant display of visually explicit fireworks. It didn’t just vanish either. The blue light sliced across the party area and the poor boy in a uniform, across the road, through the trees, and hit the building. The soldier, trees, and the building sort of melted. I heard the Wicked Witch of the West crying out in my head.

  I lifted my head incrementally and was nearly blinded by the sheer intensity of the beam. After what seemed like forever, it stopped.

  The silence was like a cloud that descended over all of us.

  I was the first one to my feet, and I stared at Maston’s triumphant face. He stood next to the Hummer with the weapon mounted on it and gazed at me with unrestrained victory in his expression and in his demeanor.

  Simple facts ran through my head. The weapon was an unassuming tool. It was present to coerce those who wouldn’t bend. It would work, too, unless I took it out.

  After all, it wouldn’t run forever. The machine couldn’t be directed fast enough to eliminate all of its targets. The operator was as confused as anyone. He was just as likely to point it heavenward instead of at us.

  People around me were staring dumbfounded at the building across the street. Someone started to cry. I was glad it wasn’t me, and I hoped Queen Gertrude the 3rd hadn’t been inside.

  A repetitive noise that didn’t quite fit drew my gaze to one side. Bansi jumped up and down with glee, clapping his hands together. He was thrilled beyond belief that technology was still working. And look, it even crossed the natural barrier of magic to touch something on the changed side. After all, light hadn’t stopped working, so the directed energy would still impact things on the other side.

  But it was still just a machine.

  I leaped over Spot, sailing past before anyone could think to stop me, and Harry said, “Hey!”

  A smarter girl would have run away, but how many times did I have to say that I wasn’t the smartest girl in the world? Even when the population had been cut down to a bare minimum, I wasn’t in the top ten percent. Wah. Cry me a river.

  My chest still hurt, and I felt the blood splatter against my arm as I moved into a location that gave me an unobstructed view of the situation. I wasn’t that far away from the Hummer, but I stopped on the exterior side of the bubble. I brought McCurdy’s saber up. The gold handle glittered in the torchlight.

  The array of the machine was moving again. The controller was trying to point it at the largest concentration of humans and new animals, which was pretty much right behind me. A little bit of doubt coursed through my head. They could have run. They might have made it far enough away to…

  The President’s exultant countenance transformed into anger and curiosity as he witnessed my actions. He glared at me and screamed, “Shoot her! Shoot her NOW!”

  The array kept moving. The man in the suit overshot his mark, and it pointed at the front of the Hummer once again. He cursed and anxiously glanced at me as I tossed the sword in the air, changing my hold on it.

 
I held it for a moment, balancing it in my hand, arranging my shoulder and stance. I hadn’t done it before, but I didn’t doubt my aim and ability. It was something deep inside me that told me I could perform this one specific act. The wound on my chest burned and roared with my activity. The people behind me scrambled to get out of the way of the directed-energy weapon.

  Maston repeated his infuriated order again. “SHOOT HER NOW!”

  The man balked. I let the sword fly like a spear. I didn’t need a gun to fire my shot.

  The man at the controls made a wretched noise and dove for the ground, but I hadn’t been aiming for him. The sword flew straight and true and stuck in the control panel with a solid clunk. It wasn’t designed to prevent damage. It was expected that it would stay in a lab and no would drink coffee around it. Instead, sparks flew in great arcs, and popping electrical crackles ensued.

  Maston turned and with a gaping mouth, saw what I’d done.

  I looked at him and then at the man who had been controlling the machine. That man got up from the ground and scuttled away.

  A little fire started in the control panel. It wasn’t much, but the black smoke and sparks made a dramatic scene.

  I paused for a moment and picked up an M16 rifle. I held it in my hands and looked at it. I hadn’t ever held one before. Once, I had picked up a rifle from a wrecked Ford truck. Then I had tried a Glock handgun. I had also tried a shotgun. None of them had worked in the changed world.

  Without hesitation, I crossed over into the tech bubble. I looked back through the veil and saw so many faces watching me. Lulu had one hand on her cheek and her KA-BAR in her other one. Ignatius, shocked and white-faced, stared. Hetta, Meka, Harry, the girl with the green hair (I finally remembered her name, Leya), all looked at me, watching me with varied miens. And there was Bansi, who had been clapping so energetically and was so frenetic with his glee. Whatever he was or wasn’t, he grinned maniacally at me. He had another flute of champagne, and he downed it with one gulp before saluting me once again.