Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1)

by Pettit, Gregory

  I’d managed to rest a bit over the last half hour, and I was on my home turf, but I didn’t harbor any illusions about whether or not I’d be able to defend both of us from the creature if it attacked now. I turned to my wife and without warning, I screamed in her face as loudly as I could.

  “WAKE UP!”

  The world wavered, and the last thing I saw was a confused, hurt look on Dana’s face as the Dreamscape broke up around us, but that wasn’t the last thing I heard, which was a mind-piercing shriek of frustration, anger, and outrage.

  CHAPTER 35 0630–1030, Tuesday, August 4, 2015

  ***Julian***

  I sat up in bed, gulping down a huge lungful of air as a scream rent the air next to me. This time, it had nothing to do with the dread exhalation of a cosmic evil and everything to do with the lungs of a twenty-eight-year-old woman whose lower face was covered in blood from a sudden nosebleed. I grabbed Dana with both arms and held her as she calmed down. After a couple of minutes, her sobs subsided, and she cleaned her face with a tissue. She turned toward me and, wiping a tear away from her eye, she opened her mouth, paused, and finally broke eye contact before speaking.

  “I just had the strangest, most frightening dream,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  “Yeah, it was pretty scary when the creature tried to batter his way into our house, but you’re awake now,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have been that brutal, but I didn’t want Dana to try to pass off our conversation as just a nightmare. I still encircled her warm, soft body in my arms, and I felt it tense as her breath caught at my words and she glanced away. From the other room, I could hear Olivia starting to stir, woken by her mother’s screams.

  “If that’s real, then are we safe here?” She didn’t look toward me as she asked, but I guessed that her face would be a mask as she analyzed the situation. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t know the truth.

  “Remember, we have a couple of officers stationed outside the house, so we should be safe from any normal attacks. I don’t know about the rest, though. Like I said in your dream, I haven’t been marked, but somehow the bastard thing keeps finding me,” I said. I had to get ready to meet Kelly, so I reluctantly rose and peeled off my nightshirt. I felt the bruises and damaged ribs as I lifted my arms above my head, but it was Dana who gasped as my shirt came off.

  “Jules, baby, your back!” she exclaimed in the sort of worried tone that was usually reserved for the times when our daughter hurt herself. I backed up to the mirror and struggled to turn my head against the bruises and swelling in my neck that still hadn’t subsided. Finally, I caught a glimpse of what she meant: the three small scratches that the shadow-thing had made on my flank, during the battle in the elevator yesterday afternoon, were red and swollen to the point that my skin glistened like a sausage. I suddenly was pretty sure I knew how it was following me.

  “I’ve got to get ready to meet Kelly, but when I get back, we’ll figure out what to do about keeping you and Olivia safe.” I rushed to the shower without another word and, ruffling Olivia’s hair as she wandered down the hallway to our room, I went about the business of getting ready for the day. Thirty minutes later, I was on my way out the door when I noticed that Dana wasn’t getting ready for work.

  “Sweetheart, are you all right? I don’t think you need to stay home. I’m sure we can arrange for the officers watching our house to follow you to work or something?” I realized how lame that sounded as soon as it was out of my mouth, and the words earned a sharp look from Dana.

  “I don’t have to go to the office today. I want to talk to Father O. about this, anyhow. You’ve been getting herded from one ridiculous situation to another, and I don’t like it. I’m going to see if the two of us can come up with something to help you, or at the very least a plan to make sure that no one can use us against you,” she said. I stopped in the doorway at her speech, surprised at how swiftly she’d embraced the weirdness that I’d just thrown at her, and I decided to say so.

  “Dana, you don’t know what it means to me that you believe me. You don’t have to do all—”

  She cut me off with a slashing motion. “Well, either I believe you and am proud of what you’ve done and what you’re trying to do, or you’re cheating on me and are a few screws short of a hardware store, so I’m going with the one that doesn’t mean my marriage has been a total balls-up.” She covered Olivia’s delicate ears on the last part of the statement, and the little girl laughed.

  “Silly Mommy,” Olivia said. We all smiled, and I crossed the room, kissed my wife, and left for West London Magistrate’s Court.

  ***

  I was going to court, so I had left the house suited and booted, just as I would have on any workday. The weather was still oppressive, and as I walked to the bus stop, I took note of the amount of trash on the ground, wondering if the heat was making the general public, garbage men, or both lazy.

  I dropped a text message to Kelly on the way to the bus stop, where I grabbed the E3 down to Northfield station. From there, a short, sweaty tube ride on the Piccadilly line took me to Hammersmith. I was so tired that I zoned out most of the way there, but I wondered idly what the little old lady that exited with me would have thought if she had known that she was walking next to someone who was responsible for the deaths of half a dozen people.

  The green-and-beige building on Talgarth Road wasn’t especially impressive, but I was still nervous as I entered. The papers blared their shock and outrage over the incident at the hospital the night before, dubbed the St. Mary's Massacre, which had brought the Met out in full force. The policing levels hadn’t been this high since the 2011 London riots, and I felt more than a bit uncomfortable about my involvement as I entered the building through a phalanx of uniforms.

  I went to Reception, and the steely haired matron directed me to a waiting area. I spotted Kelly entering just before eight, wearing a conservative gray business suit. The effect was slightly ruined by the fact that her long red hair had exploded out to epic proportions in the humidity. I kept as much distance as possible between us, and before we could say more than brief greetings, Detective Badger showed up and addressed us: “Good to see you again, Mr. Adler. The men that I stationed outside your house told me that you’d left, but I didn’t think you’d make it this easy to keep tabs on you. Ms. MacDonnell, if you’ll come with me, Superintendent Singh will listen to your statement; your lawyer is already waiting.”

  I spent the next forty-five minutes sitting around and browsing the Internet until Kelly returned with a uniformed officer, and we quietly accompanied each other out of the building. As I exited, I was entirely focused on mental images of hospital orderlies exploding like the losers in a game of chicken with a train. That was, until I saw him.

  The smarmy Redderton detective was directly outside the doors of the building, and he grinned, displaying a full set of teeth, as I stepped into the sunlight. My eyes locked on him, and he nodded slightly, reaching into his pocket. For a split second, I was convinced that he was going to draw on me, and my back muscles tensed. Given the shape I was in, there was no way I would have been fast enough to throw off his aim, let alone dodge entirely, but that wasn’t necessary. The thing that he produced from his pocket wasn’t a weapon but a roll of paper. To be more precise, it was a rolled-up picture of Kelly and I having coffee together. The man smiled. “I think your wife found this picture interesting when I put it through the mailbox yesterday. Like I said, cute family. Be a shame if you lost it,” he said.

  “YOU SON OF A BITCH!” I screamed, lunging. Kelly grabbed the back of my suit coat with both hands and hauled backward hard. She wasn’t a big woman, but her grip was strong, and I was in rough shape. Instead of restraining me, her efforts dragged me down like a horse-collar tackle. My legs folded underneath me, and I twisted when I hit the ground as the computer technician landed on my chest.

  The Redderton man jumped back and shouted, “That’s the guy who stabbed Phil Buckley!�
� It was with Kelly sprawled on top of me, her tits shoved in my face, that the first flashbulbs started to go off. I blinked away the strobing lights as a dozen different reporters seemed to apparate around me, babbling questions:

  “Were you involved in last night’s massacre?”

  “Do you know that UKIP is calling for your deportation?”

  “Did you and Mr. Buckley often engage in asphyxiation play?”

  I ignored these and other, stupider questions as I desperately searched the faces in the crowd for the Redderton man, but between the flashbulbs and the crowd of reporters, he’d managed to vanish. Kelly’s red lips bowed with a question half formed, but I ignored her too as we untangled ourselves.

  “Coward! Goddamn coward!” I started screaming a stream of invectives, and I half stumbled, half was dragged through the parking lot to a waiting sedan by Kelly. Once the doors to the vehicle slammed shut, she leveled a stern look at me, and I shut up. I only half paid attention to her as I ground my teeth and dug my hands into the upholstery so hard that my forearms cramped. I hadn’t been this angry this often since I was a teenager, yet unlike when I was a teenager, I was getting relentlessly screwed by everyone.

  “That’s going to make for an interesting headline in the Standard tonight,” Kelly said, sighing and massaging her temples.

  “Maybe I can get a cut of the profits?” I asked sarcastically.

  “You do know that the Standard’s been a free paper for like, five years?” she replied.

  I looked out the window of the car sullenly, knowing that I shouldn’t be blaming her but not having another target handy. I scooted as far away as I could in the backseat of the cab, and we tried desperately to ignore each other until we got back to the flat—afraid to talk more in public. It felt like there were eyes and ears everywhere.

  CHAPTER 36 1030–1200, Tuesday, August 4, 2015

  ***Kelly***

  Kelly sat, staring at the notebook in front of her. She’d tried writing down an abridged version of the last decade of OMG’s development, as the superintendent had requested. In fact, she’d tried half a dozen times since she’d arrived at the safe house, but each time, her words sounded too weak and each step that she had taken sounded too naive. She felt a bone-deep regret and shame at the role she’d played in ruining so many lives, but she simply couldn’t make it come across on paper. That made her feel even guiltier, as though she were trying to deny her culpability—a culpability that Julian had rubbed in her face several times before he’d finally gone to the store for some food.

  Finally, she put the pen down in frustration and grabbed the last sandwich from the fridge. She was a computer programmer, and a damned good one too, no matter what the creature had tried to take away from her over the years. She’d always left the words to Ena or Tara, and, now when she needed them, they weren’t there. However, what was there was the impeccable logic and analytical mind that she’d always had.

  The redhead finished her snack and went back to the paper. “I can’t write a story, but I can write instructions,” she muttered before taking up the pen again. A little over half an hour later, she looked up as the door opened to admit Julian, and she realized that she’d filled over two pages, front and back, with lines of heavily indented text that looked like it came straight from a .txt file, right down to the ASCII cat she’d doodled in one corner.

  They’d both agreed that it was best, for multiple reasons, if they spent as little time in close proximity together as possible, though it was hard to remember what those reasons were with Julian so near again…

  “That Redderton bastard sent the picture of us to my wife yesterday; Dana confirmed that it just showed up through the post box in the morning. On top of that, I just got off the phone with half the papers in London—most of them are planning on running the photos of us on the courthouse steps in their evening edition,” the American said, fists clenched and trembling at the latest turn of events. Kelly could hear the accusation in his tone as well. “Kelly, I’ve been more than patient. You’re going to tell me everything you know about this creature, everything you suspect about this creature, hell, anything anyone has ever even thought about this creature, and I’m not leaving until you do. You screwed up—and you owe me,” he continued. Julian’s pale skin was flushed red, and he suddenly slammed the door so hard that it bounced open again, and Kelly got to her feet, instinctively ready to flee. She knew it was a stupid reaction; first of all, there was only one door out of the flat, and he was standing in front of it; secondly, he was the only one who might possibly be able to help her.

  She closed her eyes and sighed as she replied quietly, “I’ll try to tell you anything that I can.” Julian moved closer, and Kelly felt a familiar but unwelcome tingle building in her belly; her face began to flush, but she wasn’t flushing from anger. She moved to the other side of the room and instantly felt her heartbeat slow and her face cool. The effect that this man was having on her was more than a bit disturbing, but she fought to put it out of her mind, remembering what she owed him.

  “Basically, I’m sure that sometime between sundown and midnight, they’ll perform the ceremony and send it after me. After that, the next time I fall asleep, I probably won’t wake up,” Kelly said, a tear trickling down her cheek. Her moods were swinging all over the place, from guilt to lust to anger and then to despair, but she didn’t want the judgmental arsehole on the other side of the room to know all of that. Julian took a step forward again, but a thoughtful look crossed his face and then he nodded once, slowly, and settled back against the door.

  “He doesn’t get everyone, every time,” Julian said. His flat accent didn’t betray any emotion, but the bitter twist of his lips told her that there was nothing sexual meant when he tore off his suit jacket and sweat-soaked shirt. He turned to display his back, and Kelly’s hand went to her side. She still had livid purple bruises up and down her ribcage from Tara’s beating, but she could only imagine the pain that Julian must be in, with the angry red wounds running down his back so swollen with infection that his skin was as taut as a fishing line when the hook was set.

  “I fought his minions, or whatever the hell those things were, all night and held him off until morning came. But what I don’t understand is how you used this thing to seal your deals? How did no one catch on?” Julian said. He shrugged his shirt back on with a wince and buttoned it as she replied.

  “It didn’t act like that in the beginning, obviously. For years, it was a matter of doing the ritual, thinking about the outcome you wanted, paying the price, and then things just…worked out?” She realized how lame it sounded as she said it. “It seemed harmless at the time. Maybe you forgot something important now and then, but we landed deal after deal, and the other girls were so happy to finally have some money. Even for me it was no bad thing to have some extra cash, especially during the credit crunch,” she said.

  The look on Julian’s face was scathing as he continued his questioning. “But you never had any repeat customers? That never made you suspicious? You picked up on my searches almost instantly when I started looking into you; how could you not have seen the pattern that I found?” His incredulity increased throughout the rant and at the end, he punctuated the sentence with the sharp crack of a palm to his forehead. Kelly’s lips pressed together hard, and her mood was definitely swinging back toward anger; she wondered how he still had a wife to disappoint if this was how he spoke to people.

  “They were good times! How often do you look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it keeps bringing in the wins?” Her reply was petulant, but she knew she was in the wrong. She prepared to give him a more reasoned reply, but he cut across her hotly.

  “This gift horse rode you, just like everyone else has from what I heard,” he said, taking a couple steps toward her. She prepared a stinging reply to his vicious comment, but he plowed on before she could speak. “I got six people killed because you couldn’t take a minute out of your good times to consider the
consequences, and what I saw of those people in just a few minutes told me that each and every one of them was worth ten of you. Regardless of your precious bank account.”

  Angry words froze in her throat as she realized that he was referring to the massacre at the hospital the night before; suddenly, the scene at the courtroom steps made sense. The Saint Mary’s massacre was splashed across the front pages and was the lead story on every news channel, but she hadn’t known that it was related to any of this madness. Six more lives to add to her tally. Kelly burst into tears. She ached to have someone hold her now, but waved Julian away when he tentatively advanced.

  Eventually she calmed down, and with puffy eyes and snot running down her nose, she answered his accusations. “I think we might have looked into this before. When I was doing my investigations earlier this week, I came across lines of code, fragments of programs, libraries already sitting in my servers…” She couldn’t come up with the right words, couldn’t explain it, and didn’t have the frame of references and then—Julian’s insult was the key—she had it!

  “I think maybe the thing is like a computer virus, like a Trojan horse. When we do the ritual, we insert a few instructions that it carries out, but when those are executed, it stays in the system, infecting the host and replicating again and again. Eventually, there’s nothing left on the host but the viral programming…” She was almost sure that she had it now and didn’t even look at Julian as she continued, “And those viruses are stupid. Simple, basic, and as the hosts fill up, they become more like the virus.” She stopped again as a terrible implication smashed into her. “But if it’s like a Trojan horse, then it gets more destructive as it infects more hosts…oh God.” She couldn’t even say the thought out loud. The man across the room from her saved her the trouble.