As I bounded through the air, I watched the creatures suddenly looking around, and I smirked when a particularly large hailstone smashed a leg-spider into green goo. When I came down behind a human form that was barely encased in the purple, ropey growths, I focused on quiet and stealth, hitting the ground with hardly a sound. I ducked my head around to see if my plan had worked. Then I swore. Loudly.
“Screw you, you motherloving jackasses!” The horde of now slightly damp, clattering, and dashing beasts hadn’t been confused at all by the hail pounding down all around them, and after needing a moment to locate me, they were coming again. I let the storm dissipate and slid my gladius into its sheath, reaching over my shoulder to grab an AK-47 off my back but coming up with nothing. I was running on empty. I took a deep breath of the stale air and closed my eyes; this time, when I reached back, the weapon was there as expected, so I took a rest off of the upraised arm of the poor bastard that I was sheltering behind.
Aim, pull, aim, pull. I squeezed off a dozen rounds in half as many seconds, killing a fleshpile with each shot. But still I would have been overwhelmed except that the horrors, especially the leg-spiders, seemed to be peeling off from the main body. The cable bundles hadn’t seemed to interest them at all when we had been on the far end of the field, but it seemed that some threshold had been crossed, and there were dozens of the creatures streaming toward the more-clearly humanoid piles near me.
I glanced over my shoulder and groaned. There was still enough room to make a couple of jumps, but the ropey growths at the edge of the clearing were shaking; it looked like I’d have a fresh batch of creatures to deal with soon. I scanned my fallback position and was just about to turn back to the oncoming horde when I noticed her. Janice was in the front row of the field, struggling slightly but generally staring into space with the same vacant expression on her face that I’d seen far too often since OMG had marked her at the first meeting. There were ropey growths lightly draped over her legs, but compared to most of the forms in the field, she was hardly encumbered at all, and I wondered why she wasn’t struggling harder.
“Janice!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, and she turned toward me. Screaming.
“Help meeeeee! Oh God, Julian, get me out of here!” Her terror was complete, and I wondered what she was doing in the real world. Was she thrashing madly, hitting out at everyone around her, or just staring vacantly into space? Janice’s animation was like some kind of lure for the creatures, and a mass of things swerved in her direction, while many of the other entombed people struggled harder against their bonds, causing growths to tear and leak dark fluids.
With all of that going on, there were only around a dozen fleshpiles and maybe fifty leg-spiders bearing down on me. My heart pounded and my head swam as I considered my options. I considered making a jump that would lure them into joining their brethren that were already swarming over the immobile victims.
I love Dana, and Olivia is my reason for getting up in the morning, but after what had happened in the hospital, I couldn’t let more innocents suffer on my behalf. It seemed to me that somehow these things were detecting the consciousness of the trapped people, like lights in the darkness of their eyeless worlds.
“Let’s see if I can blind some sightless eyes,” I muttered, a smirk pulling at the corners of my stubble-covered cheeks.
I’d seen the creatures become momentarily disoriented by the hailstorm and had thought at first that they might have been baffled by the vibrations, but I finally understood that it must have been the impact on the Dreamscape of the massive amounts of willpower I’d expended that had actually caused them to scrabble in mad panic for a few seconds. So if I wanted to really piss them off, then I had to do something flashy and big that also wouldn’t injure any of the people trapped here. My mind went back to the woman in the forest a few days before. Yeah, that would work.
Jumping back another ten yards, I was just at the edge of the field and could hear a clattering behind me, but I shut it all out and once again envisioned the sun beating down on green, green grass with cobalt-blue skies and Olivia pounding unsteadily across a small field, giggling with her little white dress on and yelling, “Dada!” There was no change, and the sky stayed the same low, leaden, featureless gray that it had been since I’d arrived…so I furrowed my brow and concentrated until I hardly saw the world in front of my eyes, sweat beaded on my forehead, and already taxed limbs began to shake. Something small struck the middle of my back…and the sky brightened.
I hadn’t been able to move while I put my distraction in place, and as I came back to myself, I saw that the remains of the nearest fleshpile were no more than five feet away and there were half a dozen leg-spiders surrounding me within stomping distance. I was surrounded. I braced for an attack…that never came. My plan had worked, and the horrible things had broken off their pursuit of the helpless people trapped in the leprous purple growths, focusing on me instead, like moths drawn to a flame. The nearest of them were singed and writhed madly on the ground, while the ones farther away wandered aimlessly, suddenly devoid of guidance.
The sun beat down on my face, and I grinned as I lifted weary feet off of the ground and started putting leg-spiders out of their disgusting misery.
“When Johnny comes marching home again hurrah, hurrah…” I sang as I smashed. It felt damn good to save the trapped dreamers. I stomped, crushed, and stabbed my way gleefully across the thirty yards to where Janice stood, hands covering her face and sobbing at the edge of the field.
“Janice, do you have any idea how I can help you? You need to calm down and help me help you, Janice.” I honestly didn’t know how to help her, but perhaps she would have some idea, and even if she didn’t, then I could at least reassure her that I was going to get help from Kelly the next day.
The middle-aged woman visibly struggled to master herself, and I implored her again: “Janice, please give me any information you can. I’m going to try to come back to help you, but you have to help me. What’s wrong, Janice? I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong.” It was pretty condescending to talk to my boss like that, but I didn’t know how to get through to her and didn’t know how much time I had.
Then she spoke, and I understood why she trembled. “It’s coming, Julian. You can’t help me, and it’s coming…” As her words ended, I heard a tearing noise behind me and spotted a familiar black rip in the air. Then terror stepped through.
CHAPTER 34 0500–0630, Tuesday, August 4, 2015
***Julian***
The thing I’d seen in the hospital had been massive, shadowy, and vaguely apelike. What came through the rip in the air now wasn’t simply shadowy—it was like an extension of the nothingness from which it emerged. It stepped forth on all fours, and I decided that it looked more like a monstrous, carnivorous horse than an ape, but perhaps that was an understandable observational bias because the thing didn’t emerge alone; on its back was a small, frightened shape. It had Richard.
The thing had brushed aside my attacks easily earlier in the evening (had it only been a half-dozen hours since then?) and now I was exhausted. The creature’s red eyes, seemingly fixated on its prize, didn’t immediately notice me, so I scrambled a row away from Janice and took cover behind one of the wildly gesticulating and only partially covered figures.
My stomach and all the rest of my sphincters clenched, but I couldn’t look away as the creature paused to taste the air. Then, apparently pleased with what it’d found, it carried Richard to a particular spot in the field around twenty feet from me and ten feet from Janice. The accountant, kicked, screamed, and bit the whole way. To no effect.
Arriving at an apparently preordained spot, the creature extruded a jet-black tentacle and plucked the accountant off of its back, but just before it set the man down, a fleshpile happened to wander dazedly past. Quicker than thought, a tendril of darkness shot directly out of the horror’s side and impaled the smaller creature. The fleshpile thrashed ineffectually for a
few moments, but just before it quit moving, it made a final loud trumpeting noise. I thought that maybe I was seeing an ecosystem out of David Attenborough’s darkest dreams, as the leg-spiders and fleshpiles, blind as they were, scattered in every direction.
Watching raptly, I saw the shadow-thing set a wildly struggling Richard down and then moved directly in front of the small man, who was impaled on a lance of darkness. Pits flared in the creature’s face like a pair of burning eyes, and if darkness could produce light without illumination and without hope, then that’s what shone from the creature. Richard’s head swiveled involuntarily until he was staring directly into those eyes, and suddenly, like someone had thrown a switch, all of the fight went out of the finance director.
My palms itched to fling fire and lightning at the thing in front of me, but I didn’t know how to hurt it, and my back was covered in a cold sweat at the memory of staring down its throat as I dangled, paralyzed, above its maw. If I hid, I’d be exhausted…but I’d also be alive. Sweat trickled down my neck, but the cool air wicked it away quickly, and I thought for several minutes that I might succeed in staying unnoticed as the horror did something I didn’t understand to Richard, peering into his eyes and pacing about him in short circles.
I was alerted to a new danger in a small way, like the clatter of a single pebble that triggers an avalanche, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Looking up, my skin flushed with shame as I stared into Don’s face.
“You killed me.” The acid in the man’s voice could have melted steel, and though I wanted to cry out my protestations—that he’d been a dead man walking, that he’d been trying to kill me, that I hadn’t had a choice—still, he wasn’t wrong. I stared at him without speaking, which he took as a prompt to continue.
“You killed me, and now I’m stuck here forever. I’ll be covered like the rest of them in days, and then I’ll spend the rest of my short eternity blind, deaf, and trapped until every ounce of what I am is gone. I can’t remember my children’s faces anymore, Mr. Adler, but I remember you. You killed me, so you’re going to pay,” he said. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I could see the depths of hatred carved into the lines of his face as he took a deep breath, fighting past the constriction of the thick purple cords that entwined his ribs and legs. I lunged to clamp a hand over his mouth, but I was too slow, and my heart shrank as Don released a terrible cry of fear, anguish, and rage: “He’s here!”
The creature of nothingness snapped around to face me; forgetting Richard, it began to immediately stomp in my direction. Adrenaline surged, and I turned to flee again. I felt Don’s hands try to grasp my coat, but fear gave me the strength to burst free as he wailed his frustration; suddenly, his yell cut off with a sickening abruptness. Without looking back, I dodged to the left and hurled myself upward, my desperation carrying me nearly thirty yards through the air.
I twisted as I came down so that I faced my dark pursuer and felt sickened at seeing Don’s torso snapped off just above the waist, his legs and hips held up by the encircling growths, the rest of him scattered like so much meat on the ground. The creature had a clear path to me; looking more horselike than ever, it charged. Five steps away. The ground shook, and I knew that if the thing reached me now, in this place, there was no way that I’d wake up sound and whole back in the real world. Four steps left. I had a split second to make a decision. The adrenaline that had powered me away from the creature’s initial charge was fading; I could barely stand and had no hope at all of bounding away again. Three steps.
When Phil had been driven to murder, I’d been desperate to live, so I had made a hopeless attempt to do something impossible and somehow conjured up a miraculous escape. Two steps. The last few days had been exhausting, but my desire to live was reinforced by the need to stop the thing bearing down on me and right a measure of the wrongs that I’d committed at the hospital. I reached for the impossible again. One. The darkness loomed up like a tide of oblivion, and I could feel the cold between spaces radiating from the nightmare in front of me.
Father O’Hanrahan’s story had got me thinking about links between people and things, and I only hoped that my plan wasn’t complete bullshit. I pictured Dana, knowing that, beyond just having just a lock of her hair to serve as a mystical link, we were actually in physical contact. I reached for a deeper bond between us…I reached for the connection between a husband and wife…and…PULLED. Zero. Fade to black.
***
I opened my eyes. My heart was pounding, and sweat soaked my trembling arms and legs. I was in my kitchen, and light streamed in from the open window. For the first time in my life, I’d attempted to intentionally move from one dream to another. And I’d succeeded.
My head spun with exhaustion, and I trembled so violently as I came down from my adrenaline high that I could barely stand. In the living room, I heard glass shatter. Shit. I wondered if the creature had somehow followed me here. Years of training kicking in, I gripped my gladius in my right hand and stumbled the two steps to the door in a few heartbeats.
What I saw stopped me in my tracks. Dana stood just inside the patio doors, a look of anger on her face and a broken vase that had clearly contained fresh flowers shattered on the wooden floor at her feet. Looking at the sofa, it was evident what had caused her to drop the vase as I stared at my own naked, hairy, pale-white butt. While I hoped in general that that view was still enough to stun my wife, I guessed that in this situation it was Kelly’s slim-hipped and equally naked form writhing underneath me that had done it.
Quickly, I snaked my hand back around the doorframe and let go of the short sword, which obligingly disappeared before hitting the ground. The other version of me pulled a maneuver that I mentally filed away for future use, and the attractive redhead moaned as Dana stomped into motion again, eyes blazing.
“You goddamn asshole! Late nights in the office for months? Court cases? Put on administrative leave? I saw the note in your wallet. I saw you in new clothes after you didn’t come home. I can put things together, Julian. I’m a goddamn rocket scientist!” My wife’s pretty face flared red with anger, and I wasn’t surprised to see that she looked about five years younger than in real life. (On the rare occasions that I ended up seeing someone I’d known in their dreams, they’d never matched their real selves. I’d always figured it was something to do with subconscious self-image but made a mental note to consider this more if I managed to live through tonight.)
“Hello, sweetheart.” The look on her face as Dana took notice of me standing in the kitchen doorway was one more thing that I needed to add to the steadily growing list of things I couldn’t have imagined yesterday. She stopped in her tracks just a few steps from the rutting couple on the couch as the entire Dreamscape grew indistinct; the details fuzzed at the edges and the light dimmed as the shock of my intrusion threatened to jolt Dana out of REM sleep.
However, this dream was in the mind of my wife, in my house, where MY body was lying at that very moment. I was exhausted, but with that much reality adding structure and reinforcing the output of my wife’s mind, it was a trivial task to lock a recent memory of our house in my imagination, and the world abruptly solidified once again.
“Ignore them. This is a dream, but I need to talk to you,” I said. The perplexed look didn’t leave her face, but in the nonlinear way of dreams, the figures on the couch blinked out of existence, and I breathed a mental sigh of relief; no man should have to see himself from that angle. With great care, I walked toward her and put my arms around Dana as she buried her face in my chest, sobbing quietly for the best part of a minute. When she looked up at me, her eyes were puffy, but her inquisitive mind was once again in control as she breathed out a single word.
“How?”
It had been hard to tell Father O’Hanrahan, but his own experience had led him to believe the wilder parts of my story. I had worried about how I might achieve the same level of acceptance with Dana, but inadvertently the shadow-thing had helped me come up
with the easiest way possible to achieve that particular goal, as the truth of my words would be self-evident in this place. I held my wife close, smelling the scent of her hair and feeling a warm breeze blow in the window. Looking into her hazel eyes, I began to speak.
“It all started when I was a kid…”
“…and then I appeared here.” Twenty-five minutes later, I’d spilled out the abridged version of what I’d told the priest earlier that night, and after I’d filled in the gaps in the little white lies of the last few days, we simply sat in silence.
“So what is it?” She was staring away from me, so the question caught me off guard. I’d expected anger or maybe denial, but I should have known better. She was in sales for Europe's largest satellite communications company nowadays, but at heart my wife was a scientist, so, of course, it was her analytical side that came to the fore when presented with this volume of information.
“I, uh…don’t know,” I admitted lamely. The look she shot my way made me continue. “I’m meant to talk to Kelly tomorrow. She’s supposed to give me more information then.” I winced as soon as the OMG woman’s name was out of my mouth, and I corrected lamely, “Umm…I guess it’s probably today by now.” I flashed my winningest smile, and Dana cocked an eyebrow and shook her head in exasperation. She opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t get to find out what she had to say.
The version of our house inhabiting the Dreamscape had been bathed in early afternoon sunlight with a soft breeze coming in the open windows and a warmth that Florida-raised Dana found comfortable but which was just on the hot side for my tastes. Now, however, it was like the height of an eclipse as the sun dimmed and a blast of cold air made my wife shiver and gooseflesh rise on my arms. The heavy oaken front door of our house boomed with an impact that made a picture of Olivia fall off the wall. In a flash, the gladius was back in my grip, and Dana’s eyes widened in surprise as I instinctively tried to put my body between her and the door.
Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1) Page 21