Sea of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  Sea of Dreams

  By

  C.L. Bevill

  Sea of Dreams

  Published by C.L. Bevill at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Caren L. Bevill

  Chapter One – The Beginning…

  A sea of dreams washed over the entire world and when it was gone, everything was different. It happened during the night. On the other side of the world it was daylight and might have been much more dramatic. In the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, it was sometime between midnight and three AM. Exactly when it occurred I’ve never known because I’ve never encountered a survivor who was awake during the exact time. I, like many others, was asleep.

  I was lying in a sleeping bag just off the Pacific Crest Trail next to my father. The day before we’d ascended several hundred feet. It had been our plan to meet up with a larger group of hikers who were going to climb the northern most mountain of the Three Sisters. When Dad and I had hunkered down ten feet away from the main trail, we’d made a cold camp and eaten freeze dried foods reconstituted with water. Then just as the sun had fled below the horizon we’d bundled up into sleeping bags and dropped off into a sleep that was dreamless and overwhelming.

  I awoke with the sun chasing shadows across the trees above me. I didn’t move at first. My body was stiff from miles of hiking. We’d locked the car at the pass in a hiker’s parking lot near Santiam Pass and come up the trail at a brisk pace. My father was in better shape than I was and kept hurrying me along. He hadn’t wanted to miss the ascent to ‘Charity,’ the northern sister of the Three Sisters. Me? I was a seventeen year old girl with typical wants. I wanted my iPod, a caramel Frappaccino from Starbucks, and a bed that was significantly softer than the cold, hard ground. I grumbled about freeze dried foods that had the consistency of coffee grounds and wished for a feather pillow. After all, how would I ever live without a feather pillow?

  Dad had said before falling gently asleep with a low snore, “Next year, you’re off to university. You’ll probably never have another chance to climb a mountain. The snow has melted down from ‘Charity.’ The trails are clear. The group is meeting us at the base camp. You’ll never have a more interesting two weeks.”

  Yeah. Well, there was that. There was also the problem of no running water, no toilets, and no TV. I was thrilled nearly to death. Did I want to mention the bad feeling I’d had about the trip, as if I had known something was going to happen? The same feeling that I had ruthlessly forced down because I had known how excited my father was to be going. Nope. Thrilled nearly to death covered it.

  And I never did climb that mountain.

  I woke up and I didn’t move. I listened to the wind whistling as it pushed through the highest hills. It sounded strange and unlike what I knew before. There was only the sounds of nature and not much else. Finally, I realized it was later than Dad would have normally let us slept. I looked at my watch, a Timex that was solar powered, and indignantly grasped that it had stopped.

  “Crud, Dad,” I said sourly. “Did you sleep past your alarm?” I turned my head and saw that the sleeping bag next to me was empty. It didn’t alarm me, per say. Dad had to answer the call of nature like every other person on the face of the planet. (Not that I enjoyed thinking about my father actually being human and having ‘the call of nature.’ I did NOT.) For that moment, I savored the warmth of the sleeping bag and thought about going back to sleep until he returned.

  But there was something that pricked at my subconscious. Even now I wouldn’t know what to call it. Perhaps an extra something that came with humans into the present; an instinct that warns us that danger is imminent. It was a little tickly feeling that made the hair at the nape of my neck raise up. It said, no, it yelled at me, ‘Something’s wrong, Sophie! Get up and see what it is!’

  I thought, Bear? But there was no shuffling through the forest floor’s debris, and bears stayed lower on the mountains. I slowly lifted my head and looked around. I saw the empty sleeping bag that belonged to my father. I saw the two backpacks, ripe with gear, lined up next to the sleeping bag. Further away, my father had hung from a tree branch the remains of our dinner in a plastic bag. Whatever we took in, we had planned to pack it out.

  No Dad. No amicable grumpy fifty year old with a day old beard stirring up freeze dried coffee for his caffeine fix. Nothing. No one. There were just trees, wind, and an odd emptiness that seemed to press against my chest.

  “Dad?” I said quietly. I sat up and shivered with the cold that came in as the sleeping bag shuffled down my body. It might be August but the mountains didn’t know that. Slowly I panned the area again. For all intents and purposes I was alone. It was me, and the world. And the world seemed disinclined to make itself known to me.

  It took me a while but I got myself dressed, answered my own call of nature, and got a drink of water from the packs. In the back of my mind I was explaining to myself why Dad would be back at any moment. It was daylight and had been for at least an hour. He wouldn’t leave me alone for more than a few minutes.

  I watched the sun rise in the sky and when I judged another hour had gone by I dug in the packs for the satellite phone that Dad had brought. Unfortunately, it was dead like my Timex. In response I said a few bad words that I was certain that my father didn’t know I’d previously overheard from him. I thought about it and decided that he must have gotten up in the night to pee and perhaps had fallen or had a heart attack. He had to need my help. I removed the topographical maps from my dad’s pack and did some quick calculations. Then I did a grid search of the area. (See. You do learn things from Girl Scouts.)

  Several sweaty hours later I was certain of only one thing. My father was still missing. There was no sign of him in the immediate area. There were no answers to my repeated calls. I brightened when I remembered that the sat phone had an extra battery. But the fresh battery didn’t make the phone work either.

  Needing help to search for my father, I decided to return down the mountain side toward the parking area near Santiam Pass. I was more likely to run into someone, either with a working phone or access to a park ranger. There were logging trucks in the area and men going to cut wood from dense forests. They had radios. I got the packs together and left Dad’s next to the trail. When I began to roll up his sleeping bag I found something very strange.

  His shirt fell out of the bag when I upended it. I shook the bag and his pants came out as well. I found his socks and his underwear inside the bag. Furthermore, I noticed what I hadn’t before; his hiking boots were still sitting beside the bag, just as he had left them the night before. It took me a minute to understand what it meant. Wherever Dad had gone, he had walked away stark naked and barefoot on a night that the temperature was barely above forty degrees.

  I thought I knew my father and this wasn’t something that he was apt to do. He was a rock-solid professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He had been married for twenty-five years to my mother, who sold Mary Kay and worked at the library. Hiking was his passion and he had been looking forward to climbing ‘Charity’ for the last six months. And although I had grumbled, I wasn’t completely unhappy with going on this hike.

  When I gave the sleeping bag a last little shake, a gold wedding band that I had never seen separated from my father’s left ring finger fell out onto the ground. I became frightened. I packed up and headed down the trail. The wedding band went into a front pocket. In the frantic hours that followed, I stopped to sleep for a few restless hours, only held back from continuing down the trail by the lack of light. When the sky began to tinge pink in the east I was ready. By the time the sun had hit its zenith I was at the highway.

  The entire hike I thought, I’ll find someone soon. They’ll help. We’ll find Dad.

  But I wrong.<
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  The lot was half full of cars, SUVs, and trucks. All were locked and empty. Half of them had stickers that revealed them to be members of Dad’s hiking organization. Most of them had been in the lot when Dad and I had arrived early the day before.

  Digging out the keys to the VW Jetta, I soon discovered something else. The car wouldn’t start. The little electrical indicators that showed it was operating wouldn’t even come on when the key was turned in the ignition. Nothing happened, not even the clicking sound that is a sure-fire bet that the battery is out of business.

  I looked at my Timex watch. It was still dead. There was only one thing that popped into my head and that was there had been a nuclear strike. An electromagnetic pulse that resulted from a nuclear bomb detonation would answer the question of why all of the items no longer worked. The watch, the sat phone or the car. I had done a paper on the effects of nuclear weapons and this had been one of the interesting aspects to the horrors of discharging a nuclear device.

  Screwing up my face I tried to remember what I’d studied and written about. The impact of an EMP burst depended on the weapon itself, the altitude of the burst, the yield of the bomb, and the geography of the area over which it was detonated. I suppose that the men and women in charge of the military didn’t see an EMP weapon as effective as say, a Daisy Cutter bomb. But take away a country’s access to all things electrical from toasters to televisions and the people would be crippled.

  Could that be the answer? I pondered. Could my father’s mental health been impacted by an EMP burst? I didn’t know but I did know Dad needed help as fast as I could possibly bring it to him. EMP bursts were hampered by large geographic features like mountains and the simplicity of distance. I’d have to hike for help. Fortunately the highway was well traveled and someone had to find me before I hiked very far.

  I looked up and saw that the sun was starting to plunge behind the horizon of endless trees. I ate an energy bar, chugged some water, and debated starting down the highway in the dark. Instead I huddled in the Jetta, hoping that a ranger would pull into the lot soon, just to check to make sure no one had forgotten their hiking permits or to rescue those affected by the pulse, if that was what it had been and not some awful coincidence. I pulled a blanket out of the trunk and let the front seat down.

  The next thing I knew the sun was shining into my face. The parking lot was the same as it was before. Praying under my breath for my father I did what I had to do, packed up my pack, and started west on the highway. East was closer to the town of Sisters, but west was downhill and my energy was waning.

  I came across the SUV two miles later. The momentum had carried it off the highway, over a ditch, and it had stopped against a large silver fir. The forestry service emblem on the side of the SUV caught my attention. I thought, EMP. The SUV had been driving down the road. The pulse had detonated. The vehicle stalled out. The power steering had failed. The driver had lost control. It wasn’t so hard to understand.

  The problem with my theory was that the driver was gone. The door was unlocked and the front seat was empty. There wasn’t any blood and the airbag wasn’t deployed. But there even another problem that I really didn’t want to deal with. There was a brown cap with the forestry service emblem sitting on the driver’s seat. The brown pants and shirt pooled on the floor belonged to someone who wasn’t around anymore. There was a pair of underwear and a set of black socks. The boots that the pile of clothes covered were still tightly laced to the very top and tied with a double knot. The Bulova watch lying next to one of the boots didn’t work either.

  There was a cry that startled me until I comprehended it had come from my own lips.

  I continued hiking down to the east. I found another vehicle that had careened off the side of the road. It was a Lincoln Navigator. This time it had two sets of clothing in it. One belonged to a woman who wore a size six dress and who liked Nine West shoes. (There were three sets in the back seat, all sized 7.) She’d also left a diamond ring that was at least two karats. The car wouldn’t start and the two cell phones I found were dead. The next car I found I looked inside long enough to find a pair of Levi jeans and a polo shirt. A set of prescription glasses sat on top as if someone had simply dropped them there and walked away. I noticed something I hadn’t before. The seat belt was still fastened.

  The next cars I saw were twenty miles beyond that and I was walking through my blisters on the backs of my ankles. I could feel the blood flowing down to the bottoms of my boots. I paused because one of the vehicles had run into a ditch and the front end was crumpled. But I didn’t look inside. I was afraid to do it.

  I slept alongside the road in a culvert and dreamed that my father was calling to me. He called hoarsely. I was fighting to get to him. I could see a sword flashing in my dream-capable hands as if I were a veritable expert in my night visions. I was using everything I had in order to reach my father before it was too late. Then he called again. Then his voice was cut off in the middle of a cry. It was cut off so dramatically and so finally that I knew that he was gone. He was really gone. Dad would never be coming back.

  When I woke up on that second day I was crying silently; the tears streamed down my face in a river of chilling contribution. But that wasn’t what really got my attention. The culvert drained out into a wide meadow of tall green grasses full of autumn promise. Without moving my head much I could see the entire meadow and I could plainly see the herd of twenty-something unicorns grazing there.

  Unicorns.

  EMT? Not. Something else completely freakilicious. Yeppers.

  Chapter Two – Panic or madness?

  For the record, unicorns aren’t white, magical, prancing visions of elegance. Rather they are the size of lean, muscled Shetland ponies, are mottled brown in color, have a single, twisting, black horn, and tend toward aggressive possessiveness. They had grazed peacefully until I gasped loudly.

  Once I had made that noise, the dominant unicorn charged me, determined to drive away an imminent threat. Apparently I hadn’t been snoring and I startled them. I was lucky because the head of my sleeping bag faced the culvert that led under the highway. I was also lucky because I was able to scuttle inside before the beast stomped all over my sleeping bag and backpack with his deadly looking black hooves. When the animal was reassured that the threat was gone and that I was suitably subjugated, he paused to hiss at me with solid black eyes flashing. I moved further into the culvert, not at all certain that he couldn’t reach me. (And, although I couldn’t speak Unicorn, I thought he was saying, “Showed you, bee-otch.”)

  With a swish of his multihued mane the stallion wheeled about and rejoined the herd. Then with a trumpeting bellow he nipped and roared until they galloped into the forest at his obvious behest. Astonished, I stayed where I was.

  Shaking visibly, I waited for long minutes until I was certain the unicorns weren’t coming back. The sound of their movement had faded into a brisk wind that moved the branches of the trees around me. I retrieved my belongings, throwing away half the food and a few items that were no longer of service. Then I returned to the road with my knees still trembling.

  My logical mind wanted to make sense of the occurrence of what looked like unicorns. Certainly they were horse-like. Their subtle forms were lighter in weight. But there was a foot long black horn that spiraled up from the center of their foreheads. They looked similar to horses, but they were oh, so plainly, not.

  I pinched my arm viciously and discovered that I still bruised easily.

  The passing mile markers and the occasional road sign returned me to a state of normality. My father would have called it a state of shock. I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t anything. I just put one foot in front of the other, ignored the blisters that reopened, and continued on my way. If someone had appeared before me at that moment I would have thrown myself at their feet and cried with relief. They would have had to drag me around because I wouldn’t be able to let go of their legs. Even if that some
one happened to be Hitler or Charles Manson.

  However, there was no one and no one appeared.

  I passed three camp grounds and only stopped at the first one. The story was the same as the empty vehicles I had discovered. There were cars, trucks, RVs, and campers. All were parked in spaces that showed they were there during the dead of night when little was going on. Nothing worked. No one was there. Just outside one of the smaller campers I found an empty set of men’s pajamas and slippers. There was a flashlight lying on the ground next to the clothing and a roll of toilet paper. He’d been on his way to the public bathroom.

  Even though sunlight was pouring down on me I shivered. I nudged the flashlight and bit my lip. I found three other cell phones within a half hour and none of them worked. There was a public emergency phone in the campground that was as dead as everything else.

  I sat at a picnic table and decided I must be in hell, although I wasn’t sure what I had done to put myself there. It was just me and some ornery unicorns, which thankfully seemed to be herbivores.

  Then a chipmunk chattered demandingly at me. I jumped as if I had never heard such a noise before. He or she perched on the end of the table and squeaked and peeped at me. After a single minute of being in deep freeze, I let my arm slide back through the arms of the backpack and brought it to the table. The chipmunk stopped its vocal admonishments and tilted its head interestedly. With my hands still shaking, I found a pack of crackers and slowly fed nearly half of it to the chipmunk. I put the cracker as far away from as I could. The animal would wait for my arm to withdraw, then would rush in to collect its booty. Finally, the chipmunk would withdraw to the far end of the table to eat its prize.

  I kept expecting more chipmunks to come running for the dinner bell but I got nothing. It seemed as though I added a single creature to my count. It was me, the unicorns, and a chipmunk.