My next maneuver was risky. I’d seen it backfire on one occasion a few years back, but I figured that the risk was worth it for the possibility of clearing this up quickly; I needed a few hours of real rest after the battering I’d taken the day before. Compared to turning night into day, it was simple to summon a Ford Focus police interceptor. It had a bullhorn on top and Metropolitan Police stenciled on the side; I’m not sure where the lucky rabbit’s foot on the rearview mirror came from. My trench coat was sitting on the seat, with a detective’s badge in one pocket and a standard-issue truncheon jutting from the other. A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead; if I pushed myself too hard to get this over with, it’d be counterproductive, and I’d feel exhausted in the morning from expending too much willpower.
I hopped in the car, started the engine, flipped on the lights, and announced: “This is the police. I am Detective Chief Inspector Mark Smith”—Yeah, not using my real name, and yeah, if I’m in control, I’m going to be the boss—“and I am here to help you.” With that, I flipped on the sirens and pressed down on the accelerator.
The much less ominous, sunny woods suddenly opened in front of me, and I cruised along at about five miles an hour, feeling no bumps as I swiveled my head left and right. As much as people liked to complain about the cops, I’d noticed that unless they were actually dreaming of being chased by the police, their deeply ingrained reliance on the structure of society caused them to come running for help when they saw one.
After another thirty seconds of driving, I spotted motion to my left. I stopped the car, leaving it running while I stepped out, put on my coat, and hung “Mark Smith’s” badge around my neck. I had just settled against the hood of the car when a woman burst onto the path in front of me. She was about forty years old, a bit overweight, and wearing a pink nightgown with a similarly pink bird from that one phone game on the front.
“Officer!” burst from the woman’s mouth breathlessly as her cheeks colored and her black hair trailed in the wind. She pounded toward me, legs pumping furiously as she tried to reach the protection of the car. She was seventy-five yards away when a pack of enormous, slavering wolves exploded from the underbrush only a few seconds behind her. I thought for a moment that the speed she had built up would be enough for her to reach the car before the wolves caught her, but then she slowed down.
When I say that she slowed down, I don’t mean that she decreased her pace. I mean that, as most of us have experienced in dreams, her relative temporal speed in relation to the rest of the Dreamscape was decelerating. In fact, within a couple of breaths, the woman looked like she was trying to run through treacle. I could have tried to effect the opposite operation and sped myself up to meet the wolves, but I was concerned about being able to deal with all of them before they reached her, potentially jolting the woman out of her dream. I’d noticed years before that whatever antagonist existed within a sleeper’s mind was exponentially more attracted to the dreamer than they were to me, and I just couldn’t risk having them slip past.
Most Metropolitan Police are not authorized to use firearms, and while that alone was perhaps the reason for the woman’s eyes widening as I drew my weapons, I thought that it might also have been related to just what I had pulled out. Your average civilian, and in particular your average European, knows next to nothing about firearms. This knowledge is what has made thoroughly average handguns like the Desert Eagle or Raging Bull so popular. Normally, I’d look at anyone using them and think “small penis,” but when it comes to my nocturnal activities, symbols are just as, if not more important than, the real-world efficacy of a given item. That’s why I had chosen not one but two copies of the Smith & Wesson Model 500, popularly billed as “The World’s Most Powerful Handgun.” If you haven’t seen one, imagine the .44 magnum from Dirty Harry on steroids.
In the real world, this plan would have had three distinct problems:
1. Trying to fire this pistol without a proper two-handed shooting stance might break my wrist.
2. I was at best a mediocre shot after nearly seven years of living in London and getting no real-life practice.
3. The kick from each shot would be sufficient to spoil my aim long enough for the wolf pack to pull down the woman and savage her horribly.
Luckily for me, it wasn’t the real world.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Fire flashed and thunder roared as I emptied both revolvers in a stream of 350-grain bullets traveling at 1,975 feet per second and generating muzzle energy of over 3,030 foot-pounds of force. Each projectile slammed into its target, and the wolves screeched in agony as bones shattered and chunks of meat flew. An even dozen steaming corpses littered the clearing like pins in God’s own bowling alley. I hadn’t even had to reload.
Before the bodies even settled to the ground, I streaked past the running woman, dropped the pistols, and drew my well-worn gladius, thrilling at the feel of its leather grip under my fingers. Even though I had dispatched the threat in front of me, I knew that if I didn’t take care of them permanently, it was entirely possible that reinforcements would arrive before the painfully slow woman ever reached the still-running police interceptor.
“It’s okay, ma’am, just get to the car!” I yelled, trying to distract the woman from the fact that I’d just hijacked her somnolence and keep her focused away from the weirdness that was about to occur behind her. While she concentrated on reaching the safety of the car, I summoned up memories of the feeling that you get when a name is on the tip of your tongue. I concentrated on that feeling while pushing with my willpower and stabbing the ground with the short sword. There was a soft, sighing sound, and then a rip of pure nothing formed in the fabric of the dream. Crouching down low, I ran in a looping circle around the corpses. Holding my attention on the required mental state left me wishing that I’d summoned a longer sword but within a few seconds, the job was done, and with a popping sound the carrion, along with the ground around them, dropped out of existence. I turned my head to check on the woman’s progress, seeing that she was nearly at the car. When I swiveled back, I was pleased to see that nature still abhorred a vacuum, and as is the way of dreams, the forest now stretched in front of me as though nothing had happened. I walked back to the car.
“Ma’am, you’re safe now, and you’ll be happy to know that we’ve just exterminated all the wolves in Britain,” I stated to her in my most reassuring voice. Considering that wolves have been extinct in Britain for two hundred years, I was powerfully confused that they’d been chasing her in the first place. Maybe it was a symbol, or maybe she was reading too many bad novels.
Eventually, she quit sobbing and turned a tear-streaked face toward me. “Thank you, officer. I’ve had the worst fear of big dogs ever since I was chased by my neighbor’s husky as a child. I really thought I was going to die. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you…” The thanks became less distinct as the dream began to break up. I smiled and replied just before I lost connection with the woman.
“Just doing my job.”
CHAPTER 13 0800–1800, Saturday, August 1, 2015
***Julian***
I woke up thinking that the previous night’s work, while satisfying, had been stunningly normal compared to my recent waking life. I noticed that Dana was already up and could hear her watching television in the living room with Olivia while I spent the next half hour going through my normal morning routine.
“Dana, I’ll do my best to get back before five, but if you want to have any chance to go on vacation, I need to go into the office and try to catch up on everything that I missed.” I finished speaking as I hefted my laptop bag onto my shoulder.
Dana’s brow wrinkled. “Are you really heading into the office again? You just got out of the hospital yesterday,” she said sharply, pursing her lips.
I shrugged and sighed. This again.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “Try not to be too late, but I know it’s import
ant that you do what you have to, to clear your plate for vacation. I still can’t believe that detective Mole—”
“Badger,” I corrected.
“Yes—anyway, that detective Badger wants to charge you with a crime. All you did was protect yourself, and they’re treating you like the bad guy! For God’s sake, I can still see the marks on your neck where he tried to strangle you! I love you, Julian, and I want to spend some time with you,” she said with more warmth than I’d expected.
“I love you too, sweetheart, and I’ll be home by five,” I replied slightly distractedly as I considered all of the activities that I was planning to get done today. My neck was still pretty sore, but given how close I had come to never feeling anything again, I rationalized that injury and the greenish-purple bruises covering much of my body as welcome reminders of still being on the right side of the River Styx.
After giving Olivia a hug and a kiss, I went out the door, angling toward Greenford train station. The midsummer sun beat down hotly on my neck, and it promised to be another in a long string of hot days. I could hear my neighbors arguing about dishes from their open window, so I mentally added “neighbors won’t hear your obnoxious fighting from open windows” to my long list of reasons that central air conditioning was the real cornerstone of modern civilization.
I was happy that Dana had given me her blessing, in the end, to go into the office, but I was frustrated that she’d made any issue of it at all. I had to get these bids nailed down, not just to let us go on this vacation but to give myself enough time to get to the bottom of what was going on so that I could clear my name.
I did feel a twinge of guilt about not telling Dana that I didn’t just plan to stop by the office but also planned to swing by Ealing Central Library on the way home to start doing some research on OMG. I knew that I could look them up from the office or from home, but if they actually did have something to do with my attack, then those were the last places from which I wanted to do the kind of searches that it would require to find evidence of anything fishy.
I arrived at the station and presented my Oyster card to the reader, which beeped as it registered the contactless ticket, before going up the steep flight of steps to the platform. I was pleased to see that I hadn’t missed the train, as the current schedule only provided for two services per hour, and I had plenty on my plate for one Saturday.
By the time we were pulling through West Ealing, I was considering again how relieved I was to have experienced a normal (for me) dream the night before, especially after not seeing anything during the time I’d spent in the hospital. I passed through Ealing Broadway and Acton Central stations, and soon I found my train pulling into Paddington. I’ve always enjoyed that grand old station, and recent refurbishment meant that I no longer had to walk the best part of a mile through the station just to get to my office. Considering the green bruising that still discolored my neck and face, the less time I spent wandering around in public, the better.
When I reached the office, I was relieved to discover that my badge still permitted access to the building. Even better, after I had a chance to boot up my laptop and access my mail, I read a message from HR stating that, “based on unambiguous security footage,” I was free to return to the office and carry on working until such time as any formal charges were issued. I don’t know how they had expected me to receive the message without actually visiting the office in the first place, but…because HR. I penned a quick message back and asked if someone could keep me updated on Phil’s condition. He had been in serious condition still when I was released from the hospital but under the circumstances, I couldn’t really go about inquiring on my own behalf. I didn’t really hold a grudge against Phil anymore, because the more convinced I had become that the odd issues were related to OMG, the less upset I was with my hopefully still alive colleague.
Next, I was intrigued to see a slightly vague e-mail from Janice indicating that she had been contacted on Friday afternoon to request a meeting again with all three of the partners from OMG. Against all good practice, she’d agreed to the meeting for Monday afternoon without contacting the other bidder. Usually, I’d have raised an issue with that kind of behavior, but I was interested in the opportunity to meet the principal players again, and at this point it hardly seemed like a meeting could make this procurement any less regular.
A few hours later, I had caught up on my missed e-mails and had made excellent progress on clearing up the last few points on the Swedish stationery contract. I stretched hugely; pending any legal issues, I would only have the mystery surrounding the conference center bid keeping me from clearing my workload come Monday morning.
Shutting down my laptop, I cast a glance at the discolored spots on the cheap, industrial office carpeting that indicated where my life-and-death struggle had taken place just a few days ago. While I was relieved to still be alive (understatement of the week), the surroundings only reinforced what I’d felt over the past few days. In those last few seconds, as my vision faded, I’d been sure that Phil was going to choke me to death before help came. Then, when I was at my most desperate, I’d somehow grabbed a weapon that shouldn’t have been there, using it to make my escape.
I’d done similar things in my dreams ten thousand times, but doing it in the real world made my head swim with possibilities. I wanted to spend time looking around for the gladius, but I didn’t want to do anything that might appear suspicious to the police if they were keeping an eye on the security camera footage, and I was pretty sure that searching a crime scene for a concealed weapon might come off as suspicious. I think it must be impersonating cops that gives me that kind of insight.
By the time I finished packing up, it was nearly three in the afternoon, which only gave me about two hours to get home if I was going to keep my promise to Dana and get to spend any time at all with Olivia. A brisk few minutes of walking along Praed Street took me back to Paddington, where I was disappointed to see that I’d just missed the previous train to Ealing Broadway. With about twenty minutes to wait until the next train (roll on, Cross Rail!), I impulsively decided to head to the small toy store on the second story of the concourse. Browsing for a minute, I figured that if I was going to spend time in the office today, then I was also going to spend some money on my family. So, fittingly, I chose a well-made Paddington Bear toy. Walking to the cashier, I recalled sitting with my elderly great-aunt while she read me stories about a small abandoned bear from Peru exploring the big city. I stepped onto my train a few minutes later with a smile on my face and took a seat on the mostly empty service for what would be an entirely uneventful twelve-minute trip back to W5.
After I arrived back to Ealing Broadway, I headed left out of the station, past Metro Bank and over the Uxbridge Road. Entering the library, I was met by a pleasant blast of climate-controlled air and felt both my sweat and any annoyance at working on Saturday evaporate. I can be a simple soul at times; just give me air conditioning and a book and I’m happy. Unfortunately, this trip to the library wasn’t going to feature any books. Instead, I searched for a minute until I found a free computer that had been left logged in by the last user (take that, Computer Misuse Act).
My first search was simply for “OMG Property Consultancy.” This returned approximately five million results, beginning with the company’s own home page at the top of the list. Not having a better starting point, I clicked on the link and saw a smiling picture of Kelly with two other good-looking women of roughly the same age, who I could only surmise were Ena O'Brian and Tara Grady, the other two partners in the firm. Twenty minutes later, I had exhausted all of the publicly available information without finding anything particularly interesting, but I took note of the names of people giving testimonials, and the company details for several previous clients. At the very least, I could contact those people and organizations under the cover of doing due diligence for the conference center bid.
The first of the three names on my list was Donald Rutland, represente
d by the picture of a gray-haired Caucasian man with blue eyes and a quote declaring that, “OMG Property Consultancy took three of our underutilized buildings in Milton Keynes, arranged a renovation, and helped us consolidate our staff into a single office while securing payback on the entire project investment in less than twelve months by getting ideal new tenants into our other buildings! Working with OMG was a dream come true!”
His final sentence sent a shiver down my spine, convincing me that I needed to get at least his details before I left the library, and I was pleased to see that typing “Donald Rutland Milton Keynes” into a search bar only gave back a few thousand results that all seemed to correlate to the same person. At the top of the list was a LinkedIn profile, which seemed like the natural place to start. I drilled into his profile and found his public contact details. I was also interested to see that he had left the firm that had worked with OMG, and he hadn’t started a new job in the eight months since.
Checking up on the other two referees hadn’t been quite as interesting, but it still held some intrigue. The first was an Asian man who’d praised OMG several years ago for helping him renovate and rent out a block of flats. His name and city didn’t bring up any business profile, but it did bring up an obituary from last year that seemed to relate to the same person. When I clicked on that link, I found a short, 150-word article that praised his work in the community and expressed regret for his passing at age forty-two.
The final referee was a young white woman who’d engaged the Irish trio to get a new recruitment center set up for a blue-chip corporation. She had no public details on her business profile, but she did have an easily accessible social media page. I sent her a friend request and made a mental note that she lived in Bristol.
Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1) Page 7