“Then you need to understand,” he insisted. “We were never…in love.”
I squared my shoulders and glanced at Ethan. The big man was grim and breathing hard, but dour amusement danced in his eyes. The others were absorbed on making their bodies work to their capacity.
“Okay,” I said.
Zach said a bad word. I gathered I was supposed to capitulate at this point and maybe throw myself in his arms. “Do you understand, Sophie?”
“God, please tell me you understand,” Gibby gasped from somewhere behind us.
I glanced at Zach. His face had turned a very interesting shade of red. Well, an audience didn’t really work for this.
“No, I don’t understand,” I bit out.
“We got married because we thought we were supposed to get married,” he gritted. “Then we had Daniel and I’ll never regret that in a million years.”
“No one expects you to regret your son,” I threw in, panting harder. I tripped on a root and Zach pulled me to my feet with his hand on my arm.
“But Lila left me for another man. She filed for divorce. She didn’t even want to have joint custody of Daniel. She wanted her freedom and I found out that I was relieved. I had Daniel and although I was disappointed, I wasn’t unhappy. Then when the dreams started…” His voice trailed off. We went down a steep hill and everyone was skidding to keep upright.
When we had regained a level path, Ethan prompted, “Then when the dreams started…?”
Zach shot Ethan a dirty look. “I found out something very important. I had loved Lila but it wasn’t really love.”
I held my breath for a second and then choked on it. Ethan reached over and pounded my back helpfully. Gibby called from the back, “Tell her, Zach. Just tell her.”
“It’s you,” Zach said. He came in front of me and skidded to a stop. He forced me to stop as well, and everyone pounded to a halt around us. His hands gripped my shoulders and he stared intently into my eyes, ignoring my heaving chest and the perspiration dripping from my forehead. “I didn’t know what love was before. Like I do now. I love you, Sophie.”
My mouth opened to answer him. My eyes were lost in the forthright expression of his face. He was trying so hard to impart the silent message to me. Believe me, Sophie. Trust me, Sophie. Love me, too, Sophie.
But just when I started to say something, I realized we had stopped at the spot where the paths crossed. Crushed trees lay to each side of us. Brush had been flattened to bits all around us. A weathered path was beginning to take shape in the twenty or so yards that spanned the corridor.
Then the Big Mamas trumpeted a warning alarm not a hundred yards from us. Zach and I turned to look at the same time. The lead animal was bellowing out a warning to us, and the remainder was following in its wake.
Zach’s fingers tightened on my flesh, and he started to push me back into the standing redwoods. But I stopped him. We stood there and waited for the Big Mamas to come closer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven – Can Someone Say Duh?
Gideon had said that the Big Mamas were a mix of elephant and brachiosaurus. Their color was gray like an elephant’s. Their tails were long and trailed away like a brachiosaurus. Their heads were hunched and their ears large like paddles. Really, really, really gigantic paddles. They had long noses that seemed kind of like an ant eater’s, except they were longer, but not so long as an elephant’s trunk, however. Their feet were broad and multi-toed, the better to stomp things down in their paths. Each footprint looked like the size of a round deck table. (I didn’t have a measuring tape on me and I meant the kind that would seat at least four people.)
In the dying light of the sun those ginormous stompers looked like they could mash us without even noticing we were underfoot. The lead animal bellowed another warning to us. Peripherally I could see the rest of the group (my group or homo survivorous as I sometimes called them) trying to fade back into the forest that was still standing. Zach stepped in front of me and squared his shoulders determinedly. I nearly laughed. I didn’t think his hundred and eighty pounds was going to protect me from fifty tons of new animal.
The remainder of the group of Big Mamas trailed behind the leader, twenty or so in all. A herd of the creatures returning to their nightly home. How in the world did they swim? Were they so big that they simply waded out to the islands?
Lumbering-Beasts-That-Eat-Constantly-And-Never-Bother-Anything-Else-Living was what Spring called them. They didn’t like us in their path and the lead beast was showing its agitation.
Zach abruptly tensed up. He said to me, “Can you smell it?”
I hadn’t before that moment, but then I did. Smoke was in the air. The wind was briskly blowing to the south, and the smoke from the north was traveling with it. Ashy and acrid, it burned the nostrils, letting everyone know it was on the rise. Fire was coming. The burned man had been happily at work, attempting to destroy again.
A moment later, a herd of elk exploded across the Big Mamas’ path, hesitated at the sight of us, and then plunged past, causing several of the people behind me to gasp. “Is it too late?” Ethan snarled. “Is it too late? Ask me that question again, Sophie. Right now.”
The lead Big Mama bellowed again, using her elongated nose like an oversized, organic trumpet. They’d slowed. A black bear crossed the emptiness between us and the Big Mamas. Then there was a pair of foxes, who scurried. The Big Mama turned its head to the north and appeared as if it was sniffing the air. They could smell the smoke too.
“Not now,” I hissed to Ethan, intent on what Spring had told me. “All that is new has familiar connections,” she had said. “The great sisters will defend us as well as you and your human kind.”
I stepped around Zach. A sea of dreams had come one night and changed the world. It had brought the new and the frightening. It had erased people and animals and things without defining why it had been done. It had changed all of us.
We weren’t the same people who had gone to sleep that night. Some of us couldn’t accept the fact, and some of us couldn’t face what we’d become, because how could we still be ourselves without our lost loved ones? How could we ever be happy again?
I didn’t have all the answers. But I knew I had changed. The firefly pixies had an intimate connection to me. They had helped me because they knew that I would help them, that in some way I was one of them.
A rush of green light suddenly overwhelmed me. Spring and her fellow pixies had caught up to me. They were twittering in alarm. Their jittering was unnerved and anxious. Instantly, Spring landed on my head and held onto my hair for support. She muttered irately above my ears and I didn’t catch what she was saying, except that it was negative.
I didn’t have the time to explain to them, when I took in a deep breath and bellowed at the Big Mamas. Zach jerked back from me in alarm. Spring launched herself while still holding my hair, and then came back down again.
Silence ensued. Then the lead Big Mama bellowed back at me in a questioning tone.
Ethan said, “Holy macaroni and cheese.”
“Did it just…ask you a question?” Tomas said gravely.
The Big Mamas didn’t speak like the pixies. They had small brains in comparison to their bodies, and they understood about three major things. Food, safety, and danger. They spoke in single syllable sentences. “You small thing. What?” was what it said to me and I understood. I didn’t know how, but I suspected.
I just about killed my voice talking to them. “Pain. From. That way. We need help from you.”
The lead Big Mama conferred with her group.
I explained quickly to Spring, who was astounded. “Well, you said they would help,” I sang to her.
Spring even managed to tell me a pixie joke. It went along the lines of why did the Big Mama cross the stream? The answer, not exactly translatable, was something along the lines of because they weigh 50 tons and felt like crossing the stream. The pixies thought it was hilarious and sniggered endlessly.
The humans wanted to know what I was doing.
“She’s actually talking to them,” Gibby muttered.
Leander was reading my thoughts and was dumbfounded. He could see the premonition in my head. “You want us to do what, Sophie?” he said before I could finish saying what we were going to do.
“You volunteered, Leander,” I said grimly, finding a certain amount of amusement. Then I bellowed to the Big Mamas again. The strongest animals stayed. The remainder headed for the sea and the safety of their island.
When the leader stepped close to us, Zach nearly yanked my arm out of its socket. I moved Tomas’ sword to my back where it wouldn’t be in my way and strapped it tightly. “It’s all right, Zach,” I told him calmly. “Just do what I do, and get ready to enjoy the ride. Kick with your legs to indicate which way to go, and hang on tight so you don’t fall off.”
“What?” he said. He gave me a look that indicated that he fully doubted that all my marbles were together in one place.
The Big Mama fell to its knees and bowed its head. The ground shook around us and everyone started to retreat before I waved impatiently at them again. Looking at the animal closely, I was stricken by how both dissimilar and comparable it was. Although it was gray like an elephant and had some similar features, it wasn’t one. But the way it presented itself to me was like I’d seen elephants doing before. I wondered what the Big Mamas would think of an elephant if they ever saw one.
The Big Mama’s leg was larger around than my body and Zach’s combined. “You heard me,” I said to Zach. The nose came close to me and wrapped around my body while Zach started to urgently grab at me again.
“It’s all right,” I told him and pried his hand off my arm. “Get ready for the ride of your life, cowboy,” I added with a little smug smile. “I don’t think we’re going to do this every day of the week.”
It put me on its shoulders just behind its head. The group of people peered up at me as if I had gone completely insane. It seemed insane to me for a single instant, but I knew what they didn’t. I knew what had to be done.
I asked the animal if it was a boy or a girl, and I received an annoyed bellow in return. It turned out to be a she. She had a name that was completely untranslatable into English. It was kind of like Bellow-Snort-Roar-Cough-Snort-Snort. The pixies had arranged themselves around me like a green cloud. The lead animal turned her head sideways to look at me curiously. Her black eye studied the pixies with acute interest.
“They friends,” I yelled at her.
The animal bellowed again. “They look like bugs.” She snorted and it was only a snort. Then she added, “Bugs yuck.”
Then each of the remaining animals lined up and took all of the humans on their backs. Everyone looked like they were in a state of shock. I explained to the Big Mamas again what I wanted. The lead animal, which I started calling Bellow, explained to the others using rip-roaring trumpeting noises that were both frightening and exhilarating at the same time.
Then I called to the group of humans, “Use your legs as steering guides. Kick the way you want to go. They’ll understand. And hang onto the ears. They won’t mind.” I grasped the ears of Bellow and paused at the hard leather feel of it. The skin wasn’t just thick, it was incredibly thick. It felt as if it were five inches deep.
Bellow turned and headed north, pummeling the redwoods and the other trees underneath her massive feet. Great trees went down underneath her massive limbs. Sometimes her head butted the shrubbery out of the way. The others followed and the people hung on for dear life. I glanced back and could see Zach holding on and an odd little smile on his face.
After a little while, we came up a ridge and saw the fire. The sun had dropped beneath the horizon and the spreading flames were busily scattering along wherever the embers chanced to fall.
I could feel Bellow tensing underneath me. She shouted something to her comrades and they all trumpeted gleefully. Then they aimed for the fire. We didn’t need to direct them or anything. Soon I was ripping material off the bottom of my shirt to wrap around my lower face. In the light of the fire I could see that the others were replicating my actions.
Perhaps I thought that the animals would be frightened of fire. My premonition had only been enough of a flash to propel me in the correct direction. They spread out in a line and got to work. The flames burst in front of us like explosive devices. Bellow reared up and I held on for dear life.
I heard Zach yelling from off to my right and saw that his animal was rearing as well. Then they were all rearing back, coming back on their rear legs, their tails whipping out behind them, and down they went like heavy weights dropped from a tall building. They hit and the ground shuddered. The fire under their feet was instantly stamped out.
The pixies shot up into the air, fearful of the flying embers and I sang to them to leave before they were singed. Spring sang, “We’ll pull back and watch, Soophee!”
“Yee-haw!” Gibby yelled cheerfully. The animals were rearing again and stomping before I could take a breath. After a while, it was up to the riders to spot the problem areas. The Big Mamas didn’t have our range of vision. Hours later I felt like I had been on a roller coaster all night long. When I got off I was going to walk just like that, too.
The Big Mamas had caught the fire before it had begun to sweep down a long valley of redwoods. They had surrounded it and pushed it back like a team of highly trained firefighters. Their immense feet stomped out every bit of the sparks that lit the night.
When the winds died down at dawn they did something more amazing. They were slowing down as the fire was contained to a smaller area. The burned man hadn’t had time to spread it further, or perhaps he had collapsed. We couldn’t be so lucky, I supposed. Tate had more lives than a cat.
But as I pondered his fate I realized the Big Mamas had stopped to graze. But they weren’t grazing on grass or tree leaves. Instead they were eating bits of burning wood, the hottest parts. The thickness of their flesh suddenly made sense. It was something they did.
Bellow stopped to look back at me. “Yum yum,” she said to me. “You want?”
“No, thank you,” I yelled at her.
During their impromptu meal, she explained to me that they migrated to the mountains once every season to partake of magna that they dug from the volcanoes themselves. Well, that was my interpretation. She used one syllable words and I got the bigger picture. I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask where they had been doing that before they came to this place or how they managed to dig being the way that they were. Those feet and those noses weren’t made for digging through hardened lava. Or maybe they were.
When the sun came up, the fire was all but gone. I stood on the Big Mamas shoulders and looked everywhere, but there was no sign of fire left. There was hardly even any smoke left. I felt elated at the success until something else occurred to me. I don’t know how long it took me to realize where we were at, until I saw the bits of a yellow painted wall in some debris below me. I wouldn’t have recognized the place. We had finished and stopped in the encampment.
All the log cabins were gone. Demolished by fire and by the Big Mamas. Nothing was left that was recognizable. The fire had been quick. It burned everything by midnight. Ethan’s date for Calida would have been correct.
The Big Mamas milled around and finally Bellow turned her head to say, “Done now. Yum. Yum. Small thing come to us for fire again. Yes?”
Her nose like appendage grasped me even as she bent to the ground. All around me the other Big Mamas were doing the same. We slid to the ground with an assortment of grunts and scuttled out of the way of the huge animals as they turned to find their way back to the sea. Not much for small talk, the lead animal bellowed a hardy, “Goodbye!” at us and trudged off.
“Sure!” I yelled. Then I sat down on the ground because my legs were made of rubber. All of the others were doing likewise. Even Zach was walking funny as he joined me and shoved a bottle of water at me.
&nbs
p; The pixies swarmed us and I consumed the water without hesitation. After a while, I turned to Ethan and asked him the same horrible question.
Ethan smiled grimly at me. “Not today,” he said. “Not tomorrow. Not for a long, long time.”
When we were somewhat rested we got ourselves organized and started off for the others. They would be waiting for us at the river. Perhaps Gideon would have sent people to see what had happened.
Spring circled me once and then again and then landed on my hand. “Soophee,” she sang. “There is something the sisters need to say.”
“Is the midnight pool all right?” I asked anxiously. I hadn’t even thought about the pixies’ home. Since they were with me the entire time, it didn’t seem like they were in any danger.
“Yes, the fire did not reach the sisters’ home,” Spring sang happily. “Only a little smoke and none are harmed.”
“Good,” I said in English and Zach glanced at me. “What?” he mouthed.
“The sisters have seen the spiders again,” Spring sang. “Far from the place that Soophee fought them. Going after the one we don’t talk about, the one we can’t see in our visions.”
“They’ve gone after the burned man?” I sang incredulously.
Spring nodded her head at me. Her meaning suddenly became clear to me. The spiders weren’t joining Tate. They had gone after him.
“He betrayed them,” I said. “He made a deal with them and then he killed some of them in the abandoned mill.”
Spring nuzzled my hand with her wings and then sprang into the air after her comrades. “Return to us soon, Soophee. You will be missed.”
As I watched them fly away, it occurred to me that Spring was saying goodbye to me as well. She knew I was going away and I wasn’t coming back for a while. Clairvoyant, glowing supernatural beings. Scary.
Then I joined the rest of our exhausted group. We wanted to be on our way and so we went.
Sea of Dreams Page 27