by Gareth Otton
“Has anyone checked on Miles? I’m assuming your friend must have done something to him to—”
“He’s here in the building and he’s fine,” Leon interrupted. “Deo never touched him, he just posed as him and pretended to have forgotten his keys to get one of the tactical guys to let him into the building.” After a slight pause he added, “I should go if I’m going to check on your friend. Who should I ask to take me there?”
Stella was about to suggest one of the dreamwalkers when Freckles chuffed loudly, drawing the attention of both Leon and Stella.
“You want to take him?” Stella asked, and Freckles chuffed again. “He’ll take you,” she said to Leon, who was looking at her and the dog like she was crazy.
“Of all the strange things in the world, those dogs might be the weirdest,” he said. “Dogs aren’t supposed to be that intelligent.”
“Well, Freckles is and he can also dreamwalk, so do you want the lift or not?”
Leon held up his hands in surrender and stepped back into the cell. “Sorry, I meant nothing by it. I’d be happy for the help.”
“Good. Just touch his fur and then jump, he’ll take care of the rest.”
“Touch his fur and jump, right,” Leon said, raising a hand hesitantly toward the dog. To be fair, while he had travelled via dreamwalker before, it had always been with Tad and it hadn’t been often. It had taken Stella ages to get used to travelling that way.
“You’ll be fine. Call me if you have any news.”
“Will do,” he said. “Alright then, buddy. Shall we do this?” he asked Freckles who looked at him with his head cocked. “It’s almost like he’s asking me what I’m waiting for,” Leon pointed out.
“Because he probably is,” Stella agreed. “Now stop being a baby and grab his fur.”
Leon scowled at her and did as asked, and a moment later he was gone.
Stella looked at the space he had just left and wondered at how somehow something so crazy as people disappearing was normal to her now, and then she turned her attention to the cell door. She needed to find Trevors and face the music, then she needed to get back to work. There was still a lot that needed her attention today, and she had just lost two hours.
Groaning at the thought of her never ending to-do list, she headed out the door and went looking for Trevors.
23
Wednesday, 29th November 2016
00:36 (local time)
“Ryan Brown, come with us.”
Ryan looked up from a winning hand of cards to find he was surrounded by three hulking bruisers with mean faces and beady eyes. They looked like they broke legs for a living. However, it wasn’t those scarred faces that made Ryan so cautious, but the black swirling patterns inked into their skin. It was like putting lace on a rhino, beautiful but out of place.
However, Ryan knew those tattoos were more than decorative. Not only had he seen dreamcatchers before he went undercover, but he had spent the last month in this camp receiving special training from men with the same designs. He had impressed his instructors at the last base and laid the groundwork for making them think he had a problem with dreamwalkers and anything supernatural. It had earned him an invitation to a special program that he was all too quick to snap up.
He climbed to his feet, threw down his cards and nodded to his fellow recruits, telling them everything was alright. It didn’t serve him to upset them as he didn’t know what they would do if he kicked up a fuss.
“Lead the way,” was all he said, and he fell in behind the first of the three men while the other two followed.
Surrounded, he thought. This can’t be good.
They stepped out of the building that served as a common room and into the fresh air of the forest. The trees were gigantic, the kind that took hundreds of years to grow and would be here long after Ryan was gone. However, where this forest was located, Ryan couldn’t say. He’d arrived in a bus with blacked-out windows and had long since lost access to the internet.
It left him without an exit should things go wrong. As he was marched away, surrounded by three men who could crush him with a thought if given the opportunity to activate one of their dreamcatchers, he wondered if maybe this time he’d bitten off more than he could chew.
They walked in silence through the wooden buildings that Ryan suspected had been a summer camp at some point. The only sound to accompany them was the wind through the trees and the snapping of twigs under their feet. As they approached the edge of the camp, he realised just how isolated they were and wondered who might hear him scream if they killed him.
Not that he’d give these bastards the satisfaction of screaming.
“Where are we going?” he dared ask as they stepped past the border of the camp.
“To meet a special guest,” the man up front said. Ryan was half expecting to be shut down and told not to ask questions, but maybe there was hope after all.
“This special guest have a name?”
“If he choses to tell you that, you’ll find out soon.”
“And if not?”
“Then learning his name will be the least of your worries.”
No one spoke for the next five minutes as they trudged through the forest, the undergrowth growing thicker with every step. The light from the camp had long since faded, and in the forest’s darkness it was hard to see where they were going. However, soon the darkness receded as they approached a clearing, one wide enough to let in the silvery luminance of the moon’s glow.
They stepped into an open circle that was a hundred foot wide. Clusters of picnic benches were scattered over the circle and a small child’s park sat off to one side. At the centre stood the stump of a tree that must have once dwarfed all the others. It was so large that it had been fashioned into an enormous, round table with a built-in bench that could comfortably fit thirty people.
Sitting on that table with his feet on the bench, watching as Ryan stepped from the forest, was the largest man Ryan had ever seen.
Even sitting he couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a giant. Despite the cold he wore only a thin cotton shirt which did nothing to hide his bulging muscles. He had the physique of a comic book hero come to life.
Intelligent eyes fixed on Ryan. His sharp face was set in a serious expression that was made more severe by the shaved sides of his head and the slicked back hair in the centre that was tied behind him. Combined with his native American heritage, this man was the what Ryan used to imagine as a child when he played cowboys and indians with his brothers and friends. This was a hunter and a killer, and Ryan no longer needed to hear his name, he already knew it.
Kuruk Campbell.
The pictures Ryan had seen of Kuruk didn’t prepare him for the reality of this man. He had changed a lot since someone last used a camera around him. The hard set to his face made him look older and more menacing. But most of all, there were the tattoos.
Tad had destroyed his tattoos, but someone had given him an upgrade. The skin of his arms were plastered with Dreamcatchers, both small and large. He had full sleeves of them that extended onto his hands and even onto his fingers. Likewise, those black lines crept out from under the collar of his t-shirt, up his bull-like neck and even up the sides of his shaved head. Save for his face, the man was a walking dreamcatcher.
“This is him, sir,” the man in front of Ryan said, his voice containing a note of hero worship. He stepped off to the side so he was no longer in Ryan’s way, and when Ryan glanced behind him he saw that the other two men had spread out as well.
Strangely, Ryan felt less secure even though he was no longer surrounded.
“You know who I am?”
The giant’s voice was deep and booming, the kind of voice you’d expect rocks to have if they could talk.
“You’re Kuruk Campbell.”
The man’s face split into a smile, though it looked more like he was simply baring his teeth. Inwardly, Ryan shuddered. This was no longer the friendly teenager who peopl
e said was the salt of the earth, but a man made hard by dark experience, a hunter and killer. Ryan knew more than ever that he needed to be cautious.
“Yet you’re not surprised to find me here,” he said. “Why is that?”
“I’ve been training against people wearing those since I arrived. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. Last I heard, your sister was helping the Brits. With you disappearing and these guys showing up, I could guess the rest.”
“So you have a brain between your ears. Your instructors said as much. You’ve made quite the splash since arriving at this place.”
Ryan did his best to hide his wince. He wanted to stand out, but had he made so much of a splash that he had given himself away?
“Your instructors tell me you have natural talent,” Kuruk continued. “They’ve been impressed with you for a while, which is why I’m here.”
“You were watching today?” Ryan guessed, and again Kuruk bared his teeth in that terrifying smile.
“I was. That whole event was set up so I could watch.” For the first time he leaned forward with what looked like genuine interest. “Tell me, how did you do it?”
This morning started out like any other, physical training followed by drills. They were being instructed by men with dreamcatchers who were recreating some of the powers of dreamwalkers, showing them potential defences against such powers. Mostly they focused on avoidance rather than countering the attacks, and they stressed the importance of taking dreamwalkers out before they could put their powers to use.
Where the day had differed was that after lunch they were told they were being put into a real world example and they would be tested on everything they learned so far. A course was set up and a group of the best performing recruits had been told that their objective was to make it through the course to the other side. Hidden amongst the obstacles were their dreamcatcher-covered instructors, and they were warned that they wouldn’t be holding back. This was as real a test as they were likely to face, and they had to take it seriously.
As the person who performed best until that point, Ryan was given command of the group.
He knew from the start that they weren’t supposed to win. He suspected it was an exercise to humble them and prove they needed to take Dream powers seriously. A few of the men were growing complacent in the training and were getting full of themselves.
However, Ryan had other plans. He didn’t like losing, even when he was trying to stay under the radar.
“I just used the techniques we’ve been taught since we got here,” Ryan answered, trying for humble.
Kuruk burst out laughing, the first genuine human sound from him.
“Give yourself more credit. No one told you to set traps, to lay ambushes for your attackers and to make them come to you instead of going to them. I think you know as well as I that we expected you to move through the course at a steady pace and try overwhelming force to take out your instructors before they had chance to use their abilities. Yet you didn’t do that. Why?”
Taking a risk, Ryan said, “I assumed that was what they expected and its never good to play to someone else’s plan.”
Again Kuruk laughed and he climbed to his feet, towering over Ryan like one of the surrounding trees.
“I love it,” he said. “I’m assuming that same sort of thinking was how you dealt with their combo attacks, even though you’ve never encountered them before?”
Just as Mitena had continued to advance the dreamcatcher designs that were being produced in the UK, Kuruk had advanced in what he was good at, finding ways to use those dreamcatchers. In the exercise this afternoon, his instructors had surprised Ryan by using multiple dreamcatchers at the same time, increasing the effects of the power they wielded. Ryan’s understanding was that they could only use one at a time, which created moments of vulnerability when their dreamcatchers weren’t active.
But somehow the instructors had figured out how to use two at once, erasing these weaknesses. By tapping two dreamcatchers, like strength and speed, they didn’t need to draw so strongly on either to be effective. This increased the time that they could use those dreamcatchers without them getting too hot. It also eliminated the time it took for them to switch between dreamcatchers. They could now keep at least one dreamcatcher active by cycling through their dreamcatchers at different times.
It made their instructors far more deadly than the Dream Team, at least from what Ryan had seen. However, they still hadn’t been able to stop Ryan from completing the course.
“I don’t like to do anything without doing my research first, so I read a lot about tactics and leadership before joining up.”
“And it paid off,” Kuruk said. “You played it smart, lured your instructors into scenarios that gave you the upper hand no matter what advantages they brought with them.”
Ryan nodded, accepting the praise but decided not to speak. Kuruk waited, watching Ryan’s expression before he smiled even wider.
“Tell me, how do you feel about what we’re doing here?”
“I think it’s necessary work,” Ryan answered, having long since prepared for this question. “We need to protect ourselves against any threat, supernatural included.”
“Oh, is that all?” Kuruk asked. “There’s nothing personal in this for you?”
“No sir,” Ryan said, like he was answering a commanding officer.
“Not even when you found out about the dreamwalker in your neighbourhood. Marshall Tanners, right? He was one of the men I was forced to deal with last year.”
Ryan could have whooped for joy as he repeated the same trick he had been pulling off all afternoon. Kuruk had taken the bait he laid out so long ago in his backstory and was finally in a place for Ryan to take advantage of that.
“You know about Marshall, sir?” he asked, feigning being uncomfortable to hide his actual feelings.
“I do. A loner at school. Showing a lot of anti-social behaviour growing up. So far, just like all of these freaks. But he went further, didn’t he? Got himself arrested when he was barely even a kid. Do you remember why?”
“Arson. He used to like to set fires,” Ryan answered, remembering the story of the dreamwalker from the town that Ryan claimed to be from.
“That’s right. Can you imagine what a freak like that could do with the powers of a dreamwalker? An anti-social nut job who just wants to see the world burn. He’d be a walking disaster. The kind of man you’d want protection from, right? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That’s the real reason you joined the army. You want to learn to protect yourself from these freaks.”
“No sir, I joined so I could serve my country,” Ryan said in what might be an Oscar worthy performance. He did his utmost to make it sound like he was saying what he thought Kuruk wanted to hear, not what he actually believed.
“Please, I know a man who has seen the truth. You know the cancer that these dreamwalkers are to this world and you know what needs to be done to fight cancer. People like Marshall Tanners are tumors that need to be removed from this world.”
“You already removed that tumor,” Ryan pointed out.
“Yes, I did,” Kuruk said, proud of himself. “Just like I want to remove the rest. But I’m just one man. I need help with that. Does that sound like something you might be interested in?”
Ryan hesitated, glancing at the men behind him as though struggling to decide and wary that he might get in trouble.
“This isn’t a trap. This is what you’re here for. To learn to fight these people, to find out if you are the right person to help us rid this cancer from our world. We could use a man like you.”
“Would it mean leaving the army?” he asked.
“No. You’d just be joining a special division. One that is training to fight the true enemy of this country.”
Ryan nodded to the tattoos on Kuruk’s arm.
“You want to put those on me?”
Recognising the distaste in Ryan’s voice, Kuruk nodded and looke
d at his own tattoos, turning his arm backwards and forwards.
“Hideous, aren’t they,” he said. “I hate them as much as you. Every time I got a new one, I knew I was becoming more like them, doing things that no human should be able to. But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. You were smart today and you performed well. But you’re unique amongst the recruits we’ve tested so far, and we can’t rely on finding more people like you. We need to use the weapon of the enemy against the enemy if we’re going to survive this.
“So the question becomes, what are you willing to do for your country? For this world? Would you accept a dreamcatcher if it meant stopping a single Marshall Tanners? What about stopping a thousand of them?” When Ryan didn’t answer Kuruk stepped closer, now within touching distance. “What sacrifices are you willing to make to save our country and protect its values?”
“I’d give my life for that sir, that’s why I’m here?”
“Then you’ll join the cause and accept the tattoos?”
Ryan hesitated, trying his best to make this seem like a hard decision. Finally, he nodded.
“I will.”
“Good man,” Kuruk barked, clapping him on the shoulder with a hand the size of a shovel and nearly knocking Ryan from his feet. “I knew as soon as I saw you that you’d do the right thing.”
“Thank you, sir. So what now?”
“Now you go back to the camp and pack your things. I’m leaving tonight and you’re coming with me. We’ll get you some tattoos, and tomorrow morning you’ll start learning how to use them. Welcome to the real war, soldier. We’re glad to have you.”
Ryan forced himself to smile as he accepted the praise and even let a little of his excitement out. This had been one of his longest missions to date and he had been growing frustrated with it, but finally he was getting somewhere. As he turned to follow the thugs back through the trees towards the camp, he wondered just how long it would be before he got the answers he needed and could get the hell out of here.