Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1)

by Pettit, Gregory

  She knew she should still be feeling guilty for all of the pain that she’d inadvertently caused, but facing her own mortality and armed with a plan to do the most good possible with the time she had left, a sense of forlorn serenity had settled over her. In any event, up until a couple of days ago, she hadn’t had any idea that their clients actually suffered from OMG’s interference.

  The redhead considered this was possibly going to be the last good night of sleep she experienced for the rest of her life. She’d never seen any of the victims of OMG’s special brand of persuasion avoid their fate, and she didn’t expect to avoid it either, but a tiny corner of her mind held out the hope that somehow Julian Adler could change that equation.

  Rising from the couch, the IT engineer’s surprisingly lithe form padded across the studio apartment and shucked off her sweat-encrusted suit before crawling into the strange bed.

  For a few seconds, as the cool sheets ran along her skin, she was tempted to slip out of the apartment, to the club underneath Shepherd’s Bush Green to find a hookup, but she told herself that she could do that tomorrow night. Then she sighed, closed her eyes, and settled into dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER 32 0230–0330, Tuesday, August 4, 2015

  ***Julian***

  I opened my eyes. Twisted spires rose up around me, monoliths of tortured basalt that cast their lines upon the ground in ominous patterns. Unbidden, a quote formed in my mind: “I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.” I wondered briefly if the author had visited this place. I immediately assumed the worst and called up my trench coat, gladius, and an AK-47, all of which blurred into existence so quickly that I blinked in surprise.

  Spending my nights in the dreams of other people had let me see many odd things over the years, but even when they’d been from wildly different cultures, I’d always been able to identify some common reference point. But not here. To my right, I saw something that looked like a cross between a sponge and a mountain, and I couldn’t be sure if it was fifty feet tall and a mile away or a mile tall and fifty feet away. A cold wind blew among the stones, the ground was covered in close-cropped red grass, and mist swirled. There was a clattering noise, and I shivered involuntarily when something the size of my fist, with too many legs, skittered in the gray half light that infused the landscape.

  I reached out with my will, as I had so many times before, and was surprised to feel a distinct pressure emanating from ahead of me, indicating that there was a dreamer in that direction. I crouched low and crept forward, wending my way through the hillocks of stone and odd masses of purple wire that rose thirty feet into the sulfurous sky. After a few minutes of easy walking, I noticed that, unconsciously, I had wandered onto a path, and I chided myself for being careless. I hurried for cover next to a towering wire tree while willing my feet to be silent—which made it so. It also made it easier for me to hear the now-continuous clattering and skittering behind me. FML.

  Questing forward with the senses that I’d developed over years of practice, I felt the pressure pushing back against my will increase. There wasn’t any close approximation in the real world, but the best way I could explain it would be like trying to orient yourself solely by the feel of sunshine on your skin, if sunshine tasted blue. In any event, I was getting closer to the dreamer, and I noticed with a start that the contact I’d initially interpreted as a single dreamer was coming from more than one location. If I hadn’t had my preconceptions around the working of the universe pretty thoroughly trashed over the past few days, I might have lost it at the implication of this impression. It was a testament to the mind-opening power of multiple near-death experiences that the presence of more than one other person in the Dreamscape came as only a mild surprise.

  Slowly, I crept on for what felt like ages but must have been no more than an hour, during which I covered perhaps two miles of the unfathomable, alien landscape. Then a chorus of utter despair sounded out of the mists a couple hundred yards in front of me, and I closed my eyes as a wave of hopelessness threatened to drown me. I held on to memories of Olivia and rode out the storm.

  Suddenly, the fog parted. Whether by chance or because I wanted it to, I wasn’t sure, but if I had wanted it to part a moment before, then I certainly didn’t once I saw what was revealed. A field two hundred yards long and half as wide loomed in front of me. Spread across the field at wide intervals were what I initially thought to be five- or six-foot-tall masses of the same purple cables that I’d been passing through. However, as my eyes focused more clearly in the gloom, I realized that although at the end of the field nearest to me, they were indeed the same purple masses written small, forty or fifty yards away, they were slowly undulating. With a growing sense of sickness infusing my soul, I squinted and realized the shapes farther away were not only moving slowly from side to side, but at the far end of the field were some that were horribly, recognizably human.

  This close, I could feel the presences of other minds radiating outward from dozens of the mounds in front of me, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that I was sick to my stomach. Twice. This was quite a feat, considering that my stomach was only a figment of my imagination.

  I examined them in more detail. The minds nearest to me felt dull and exerted almost no pressure on the Dreamscape, but the ones farther away were largely indistinguishable from those that I’d usually encounter, and I wondered how there could only be this bleak and alien landscape instead of a riot of their thoughts and dreams. On hands and knees, I crawled forward, moving from one loathsome mound to another for cover. I was almost fifty yards into the field and just approaching the first of the masses of thick, purple, human-shaped cables that showed signs of motion when they rushed me.

  I’d been so distracted and repulsed by the sight that had greeted me in the field that I’d forgotten about the clacking and chittering that had accompanied me on the journey to this point. The one creature that I’d seen before had been like a fist-sized spider made of nothing but legs, and while there were plenty of those in the horde that swarmed forward, I was much more worried by the bigger monstrosities dotted among them. They were eyeless things with dozens of thin, claw-tipped legs supporting large, pink, fleshy bodies three feet across and standing four feet tall; there was nothing about them that wasn’t revolting, with more jiggling flesh, dripping slime, and random tufts of hair than a Juggalo orgy.

  The whole mass of crawling vileness skittered forward like cockroaches, driving all rational thought from my mind. The sight of those unnatural things and the uncaring malice in their every movement made blood pound in my temples, and a red mist descended in front of my vision. I fixated on memories of a house fire I’d seen as a kid, and an inferno burst into life in front of me with a whoosh of displaced air. I was surprised at the intensity of the blast and dove behind the nearest cover: one of the barely moving piles of twisted purple cables. I fed my anger into the fire and was rewarded by a symphony of sizzling, popping noises.

  When I stuck my head out from behind my refuge, I saw that my strike had cleared an area the size of a basketball court. Each and every one of the small leg-spiders had burnt to a crisp, and the walking fleshpiles were either dead or writhing in their final death throes. Looking behind them, I could see that there were still more coming out of the forest of twisted rocks and cable trees, and a few fleshpiles and leg-spiders that had been to the left and right of my firestorm slunk in from the sides, threatening to surround me.

  The nearest of the ugly things were only a dozen feet away, and some of the leg-spiders started to make a high-pitched whistling that sounded suspiciously like squeals of anticipation, but I held my ground until, suddenly, the monsters surged forward. Then, with only the tiniest expression of willpower, I vaulted into the air like a spring-heeled Jack, soaring twenty yards and landing lightly in a crouch, AK-47 pulled in tight to my shoulder. I took aim down the sights at the now-compact mass. Reliable as ever, the assault rifle, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s
masterpiece, obligingly belched lead and flame as I flipped the selector to semiauto, and a steady rain of bullets covered the distance between me and the walking fleshpiles at 2,350 feet per second. Each impact blew a fist-sized hole of ichor and foulness out of the creatures, and I snarled as three, then four, then five of the things went down.

  My guts unknotted a bit as I saw that the tidal wave of beasts boiling out of the forest was finally tapering off, but I was now nearly halfway across the field, and there had to be at least forty of the larger creatures and several hundred of the leg-spiders still coming. My hands felt slick with sweat, and I wondered whether or not I was simply backing toward a fresh army of hunting things on the other side of the clearing.

  Unfortunately, I must have been too focused on gunning down one of the clattering fleshpiles, or maybe the bastard thing was just a bit more stealthy than his fellows. But in any event, a weight crashed into me from the side—it felt like a horse had kicked me (and yes, I know how that feels, don’t judge me)—and I went to my knees. I hadn’t noticed any mouths on the fleshpiles previously, but one glance at my attacker cleared up that mystery as a sharp beak protruded from the underside of the thing, erupting out of what I could only describe as a big hairy asshole, proving that, like stupidity, there are no limits to ugly.

  With the rest of the horde bearing down on me, I needed to open up some distance again, and my attacker’s surprise at not being able to penetrate my trench coat with his opening thrust almost gave me time to jump away again. Almost. My feet had already left the ground with ease, and I was in the process of muttering thanks to whatever property of this place made it so pliant to my will, when a flex of the fleshpile’s legs propelled it into the air, and it hit me like a big, flabby, smelly cannonball.

  I had very strong suspicions about what the cable-mound things in the field were, so I’d tried to avoid hitting any, especially those that still were moving, but my suspicions were confirmed as my momentum shifted and I rocketed backward into one of the slightly pulsating and swaying mounds.

  I struck, interposing the stock of the AK between myself and the fleshpile’s snapping beak that tried to find a chink in my defenses. As we impacted, I heard a noise like snapping bone and ripping muscle, and a chunk the size of a football exploded out of the purple mound. My trench coat took most of the blow, and I had just manned up for the rest while the fleshpile's claws raked at any exposed surface, digging quarter-inch-deep furrows into my thighs. I got the good end of this exchange, though; I grabbed my gladius and pumped my arm in and out three times in a single second, and with a wet, popping noise and burst of reeking fluid, the fleshpile collapsed limply, and I flipped it off of me.

  I grabbed onto the mass of rope-like cables to regain my feet and felt surprised to encounter a texture like supple leather. Turning my head, I came literally face to face with the fate that awaited my colleagues if I was unable to free them from the shadow-demon. Whether by luck or fate, the chunk that my struggle had knocked off the cable mound had been just at my head height, and one perfect—and perfectly mad—eye stared back at me. There wasn’t enough flesh showing to be sure if it belonged to a man or a woman, and I stared in horror as fresh tendrils of purple, rope-like growth covered it up, plunging the poor bastard inside back into darkness.

  I didn’t know how and I couldn’t say why, but somehow the dreamers in this field were being devoured or fed on by the purple growths. I wondered what kind of beings had been consumed to create the thirty-foot-tall cable-trees that I’d passed on the way here, and I shuddered. All of this introspection took too long, and I had to duck behind a trapped dreamer again, stomping on two of the leg-spiders. I cursed myself as three of the fleshpiles flung themselves at me at almost the same instant, impacting with a wet splat on the cable pile. With a sick tearing noise, the whole thing tipped over. Selfishly, I’d hoped for a second that the prospect of tearing into the patches of flesh that were suddenly exposed among the thick purple ropes would slow down my pursuers, but they completely ignored the fortysomething woman that was partially visible. I felt the slight mental pressure from her disappear, and I assumed the worst.

  Blood pounded in my ears, and I ground my teeth until they ached as I raged at seeing another death caused by OMG’s greed. As easily as I’d been able to manipulate this Dreamscape, I considered simply calling up another firestorm and immolating all of the goddamned things, but I didn’t know what effect that would have on the trapped dreamers. I shook my head, mastered myself, and leapt high into the still air once again.

  Instead of unleashing fire and brimstone on the roiling mass, I landed, bounded again, and opened up another twenty-yard gap from the main body of pursuing…things. This time, I didn’t have a chance to wait for them to concentrate themselves, and there was a trio of leg-spiders within a few feet of me when I landed. The creepy little things rocketed at me, and my gladius batted the first one out of the air, shearing it nearly in half. Since my assault rifle had been left behind, I imagined a small wooden buckler appearing on my left arm, and as quick as thought, it was there. A sweep of the buckler pulped another leg-spider, but the pivot that that had required caused me to lose track of my third assailant, at least until I sensed a small pricking on the back of my neck.

  I reached back, grabbing the writhing thing. Wrapping my fingers around the squirming horror, I squeezed as hard as I could, expecting to feel chitin like a crab’s. Instead, I pulped the creature like breaking an eggshell, and in fact several long strings of what might have been some kind of eggs dribbled between my fingers. I took a breath and then concentrated on the AK once mo—AGONY—

  CHAPTER 33 0330–0500, Tuesday, August 4, 2015

  ***Julian***

  I must have blacked out for a moment, because when I had my bearings again, there was a ring of fleshpiles and leg-spiders around me, screeching and chittering excitedly, and this time I was sure that there was more intelligence than there should have been in the loathsome things. The pain was still present, but instead of being a single spike of unrestrained suffering, it felt like it was diffusing across my neck, jaw, and upper shoulders. Some combination of events and observations made me remember a nature documentary that I’d watched years before, and I shuddered as I realized what had just happened.

  I knew what I had to do, and I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant. My arms quivered and sweat tickled my top lip as I struggled to my knees, and the motion excited the things that hemmed me in. The fleshpiles somehow started to make a low, wet, hooting noise, and the air filled with a carnivore reek. I silently whispered a prayer of thanks to inept lunch ladies everywhere and focused on a memory that I’d never thought I’d need in the land of dreams, recalling the time when I‘d been fifteen and got a case of food poisoning that had put me in the hospital and onto a saline drip. At that time, I'd felt as empty as a rolled-up tube of toothpaste, and now I clung to that feeling as sweat blossomed on my brow. My arms and legs trembled, and I felt my insides roiling, but the slow spread of the pain in my neck stopped. Encouraged by my “success,” I doubled down.

  I thought of every time I’d ever been ill during those forty-eight horrible hours and concentrated every iota of my years of honed willpower on the memories of “expelling” that illness from my body (if you’ll pardon the euphemism). The pain around the wound sharpened, and my vision started to tunnel again, but this time I was ready and held on to consciousness, not wanting to contemplate the consequences of failure. Finally, I felt a boil start to rise around the puncture on my neck, and with a barely audible tearing noise, it ripped open. Reaching back with horror-borne speed, I clamped my hand down and then brought it in front of my face. There in my palm, smaller than grains of sand, were dozens of tiny translucent eggs. I retched and shuddered again as I speculated about the fate that I’d just managed to avoid, imagining tiny hand-spiders tearing their way through my flesh.

  Of course, I didn’t get to speculate long as suddenly the whole landslide of horrible things
surrounding me went silent…and charged. The purge that I’d just completed had left me feeling spent, and I knew that even in this easily manipulated Dreamscape, I wouldn’t have the energy to repeat my cleansing again, which meant that I couldn’t afford to make another mistake.

  From my hands and knees, I did a push-up as hard as I could while holding on to a frequently used memory of being strapped into a bungee chair at a local funfair, and I rocketed upward. Shaun T., eat your heart out. I only managed to get around fifteen yards of clearance from the nearest of my pursuers, and the walking fleshpiles seemed to be catching on, almost immediately moving in my direction. I couldn’t keep playing leapfrog; at the rate I was going, I’d run out of field in another couple of bounds, so I needed to come up with a different plan.

  Thinking fast, I knew how to buy some time. Neither the fleshpiles nor the leg-spiders had any discernible eyes, yet my supernaturally silent creeping on the path had been followed; the stench of the things assured me that they couldn’t have any noses, which meant that either they were detecting me by touch or some other sense. I decided to try the easy option.

  First, I reached into my pocket and concentrated on being totally unsurprised to find a .40-caliber Browning Hi Power, which I immediately drew forth and started firing with one hand like a noob.

  I think I managed to splatter a couple of fleshpiles, but I wasn’t sure because the booming gunfire was only a distraction. While I was pulling the trigger, I remembered huddling in our family’s camper van when a massive hailstorm came through during an ill-advised family vacation back when I was little, before my mom disappeared. I was finally thankful for the leaden sky and gloom in this place, because it reinforced my will. I held the stormy memory in my mind and gritted my teeth as the first stinging bits of sleet began to come down; partitioning my thoughts, I leapt again.