Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1)

by Pettit, Gregory

  I pushed hard with my willpower, and the almost imperceptible grin on Kelly’s face as her consciousness fled told me that she’d seen Predator too. The attack didn’t make any sense within the paradigm of Kelly's dream, so the creature had no way of anticipating what was coming when I threw my arms forward and bellowed, “If it bleeds, we can kill it!”

  On the final word, a tree trunk swung through the back wall of the room with devastating force, its sharpened end driving into the creature’s back, and the puca gave a throat-tearing scream of shock and pain. The movie must have played on television recently, because the tree smashed through the bricks so hard that they disintegrated, and I had to duck inside of my trench coat to avoid the shards of masonry that tumbled around the room like bullets. As the dust cloud cleared, I worried that Kelly might have been hurt, and I hoped that the enormous mass of the shadow creature had shielded her from the worst of the collateral damage.

  My hopes fell as the room continued to darken, and I watched in near despair as the puca leaned on the knuckles of one grotesquely long arm and levered itself back up from its knees. Shadows loomed in the space around it until only Kelly’s red hair stood out against the inky darkness. Its magma-like eyes locked on to me and blazed brighter as its maw gaped open. I quickly threw together whatever defenses I could, imagining a heavy metal concert’s worth of noise being piped directly into my ears through a set of headphones.

  The puca screamed like a tortured soul, shredding my defenses. making the wound on my back writhe and send slender needles of agony lancing into my brain again and again, while my left eye went instantly blind as something burst. Even though I was deafened, I felt my ears pop as air rushed out of the room. Looking around with my remaining eye, I saw that the puca and Kelly were gone, replaced by a spider-web pattern on the wall. When my damaged brain processed what I was seeing, my heart hammered against my chest.

  Black cracks ran up and down the walls, floor, and ceiling, lengthening and widening with every second. To most people, the sight wouldn’t have meant anything particularly threatening, but nothing else could have gotten me back to my feet as quickly. It was oblivion, the same complete nothingness that I’d cast so many nightmares into, and it was coming for me as the dreamerless dream collapsed.

  As I said, the creature was gone, but it left a mark in its escape: a portal shining with gray light hung in the air ten feet away. Chunks of floor to either side of me were devoured, and I stumbled toward the portal as the diameter shrunk from the size of a door down to the size of a hula-hoop. I looked down and saw a four-foot gap of nothing at my feet, gathered my battered body, and flung it forward in a desperate, spasmodic leap…

  CHAPTER 45 0200–0300, Thursday, August 6, 2015

  ***Julian***

  I landed with a whump of breath. I’d like to claim that I dove through the portal in the instant before it closed, but that would be overstating the level of gracefulness on display. Let’s say I bumblehumped through the portal. Yeah, that would be more accurate.

  As I rose to my feet, the same landscape that I’d encountered days before was on display: a leaden sky and crazed geometries framing a large clearing. The cable-covered mounds had grown in number since I’d been here last, and they were festooned with even more of the growths than before, with only the row or two at the far edge of the field retaining any discernible human shape. My face twisted and guts churned in revulsion at what that meant and, seemingly in sympathy with the surroundings, the tendrils on my back shifted and tugged at the edges of the wound. Ewww…

  It took a moment to orient myself, but that was almost long enough to cost me my life. I’d been confused at not seeing the puca or Kelly anywhere as I came out, but what I hadn’t considered was that each of us had entered the portal from a separate direction. That meant that we’d emerged from opposite sides. The creature had understood the situation and was prepared for me, but as one massive limb came crashing down, the pain in my side made me stumble, so the shadowy claws that would have left me several inches shorter simply whistled harmlessly past.

  Unable to rise, I focused on memories of my trench coat withstanding horrible punishment, hoping that I could ward off the next attack because there was no way that I could dodge it. But the killing blow never came. I just knelt there, baffled, for a few seconds before I remembered what Kelly had explained to me: I realized that whatever imperative was driving the puca was forcing it to focus on carrying out commands specifically related to Kelly.

  Suddenly, as I knelt on the dead grass of an alien plane, Ena’s words came back to me, and I knew where the puca had been all day long and on whose orders. The buxom, auburn-haired woman had somehow, without the book, the chain, or the rest of her little coven, directed the otherworldly thing to search for Kelly. I pictured it trawling through the mortal dreamers of London in search of its prey and wondered what effect that would have on the general population.

  By the time I rose to my feet, the creature was thirty yards away and moving quickly on three limbs as it dragged Kelly’s limp form by the hair with no regard for the brutal knocks that she took on the way. It opened up the gap on me with every step, but I didn’t have any choice except to follow it, and a new worry began to nag at me: If it got far enough away, would I have to deal with the other disgusting denizens of this place? I really, really hated those things, so I gritted my teeth and put on a burst of speed.

  After about twenty-five yards, my path intersected with the puca’s, and I whooped aloud as I saw the sizzling pools of midnight-colored ichor that splattered the ground in a line behind the creature’s trail. “If it bleeds, we can kill it!” I whooped again.

  My steps felt lighter, and I quit losing ground as the thing in front of me slowed down. It ground to a halt, stopping at the front row of the purple-red growth-covered figures. The people entombed there were still recognizably human, and a couple even managed to lift arms or swivel their heads to face the puca and its prey.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I crouched down and circled around the creature as it carried the now-unconscious Kelly under one arm and began to position her facing the rows of its long-suffering prey. Holding her up with one arm, the thing began to make a series of noises which, while sounding like no language known to man or beast, gave the eerie impression of cadence, rhythm, and purpose that made me instantly identify it as some form of ritual chanting. As I was pretty sure that the puca wasn’t a Gregorian monk, I guessed that that probably wasn’t a good thing.

  Circling, I closed on the ropey-growth-covered figures as a crazy idea struck. What would happen if I could free the creature’s prisoners? It seemed likely that the people who were entirely entombed would be useless, but what about the ones at the front? At the very least, it might distract the creature from whatever it was trying to do.

  I picked one of the shapes that was least complete; it was a woman who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, Caucasian, with wisps of brown hair sticking out and eyes fluttering as if she were trying desperately to stay awake. I brought my gladius up and swung at a long purple cable stretching down from her arm. The sword’s keen edge, backed up by my intent, was more than enough to shear the tether with a single blow, and I saw the woman’s eyes open a bit wider as the puca’s chant picked up in pace. Another two chops freed her from the ground, and I quickly imagined a small blade into existence that I used to frenziedly hack at the rest of the entwining growths.

  It was when I fully uncovered the woman’s head and chest that things really started to happen. Her eyes shot open, and a single long howl of pain and fear, like none that I had heard in a lifetime of living other people’s nightmares, ripped its way out of her throat, and her hands flew maniacally as she tore free of her remaining bonds. I waved my hands frantically, trying to get her attention.

  “Hey—do you have any idea what that thing is doing?” I yelled as the puca’s clicking and screeching chant reached a crescendo, without either the woman or the creature
deigning to notice my exertions. Taking off like a shot, the woman ran helter-skelter toward the ritual playing out twenty feet away from us, her hands tensed into claws and her teeth bared in mindless rage. I would have expected her to be stiff and slow after being held in one place for so long, but maybe physics didn’t really obey the same laws in that place that it does in the real world, because she accelerated to a sprinter’s pace within just a couple of steps. She definitely had some idea of what was going on and knew that it needed to be stopped.

  I tried to figure out what she thought she’d accomplish attacking it bare-handed, but glancing at the puca added a new horror to the set of experiences I’d had in that place as I saw what it was doing. If you’ve ever seen a snake trying to swallow a goat, then maybe you can imagine what I observed; somehow, Kelly’s jaws had distended so that she looked like one of Munch’s painted figures with her beautiful face stretched, warped, and torn where the skin of her cheeks couldn’t possibly take the strain. I couldn’t see her eyes, but her knees trembled like the palsied limbs of a dying man in the last throes of a fever.

  The puca had always seemed pliable; one minute it looked humanoid, the next it was a hulking, apelike thing, and yet again it would appear almost equine while traveling on all fours. However, at this moment it seemed to have almost entirely lost any cohesion, as a tendril of its substance as big around as my arm disappeared into Kelly’s mouth. It was insulting to my sense of humanity just to see this happening, but I didn’t really understand what was going on. The woman that I had just freed did, though.

  I’ve heard it said that if an assassin is completely willing to die to accomplish their goal, then they are virtually unstoppable. I don’t know if that is universally true, but I saw a 130-pound woman launch herself with berserk fury and absolutely no regard for self-preservation at the puca, and I was witness to her vengeance.

  Whether I had actually hurt the puca, or whether the woman’s insane charge caught it off guard, the creature visibly flinched as she closed with it. I finally reacted and had crept just far enough forward that I could still see the grin of triumph light her face as the puca moved back just a few inches…just far enough to open a path to her real target.

  “Sarah!” I’ll probably never know what that one word meant to her, if it was her name, the name of a friend, the name of a lover, or the name of her mother. For my own peace of mind, I don’t think I’ll ever try to find out, but I like to think that it was the name of her daughter; that however long she’d been trapped in that hellish place, however many times she’d been fed upon, and however little of her own personality she had left, she had held on to one precious memory, guarding it with a mother’s love and vowing to take vengeance on the thing that had taken her from her child.

  “No!” I might have yelled, and the puca might have made a desperate lunge toward her, but we both realized her target an instant too late as the nameless woman hit Kelly at a sprint and fastened her teeth on the other woman’s neck. I don’t know if she would have had the strength to do it on her own but, in a beautiful moment of irony, the creature’s own power betrayed it, and the wild lash of a half-formed limb crashed into the woman, dislodging her but also helping her tear an entire mouthful of flesh from Kelly’s throat. I had to duck as the mystery woman’s body flew over me to slam into another encased person twenty feet behind me, and based on the boneless way that she struck, it was clear that Kelly’s killer was dead before she hit the ground. Just like the slender hope I’d had to reclaim my family.

  When I turned back, Kelly was still on her feet, and I had a delirious moment of relief when I thought that her wound, miraculously, hadn’t been fatal, but then the bright pumping of scarlet arterial blood registered on my battered senses. I fell to my knees.

  I had needed Kelly to perform the ceremony to destroy the book and, if we could get it back, the silver chain. Apparently, the puca had needed her even more badly, because it went into paroxysms of rage (and I know rage; I have a two-year-old).

  The creature had been about halfway through the process of invading the young woman when she died, and the parts of it that were still outside of her thrashed wildly, beating on the ground and flailing at the air. If it had still had a mouth, then I’m sure it would have been shrieking. The entire landscape seemed to react to the puca’s anger: the trapped people around me began to shake and writhe, the cable trees in the distance reverberated with the sudden gurgling cries of unknown predators, the sky darkened, and the ground trembled. While all of that was going on, I concentrated on being unremarkable and took refuge behind an unmoving victim, trying to figure out what to do next.

  My thoughts moved like sap on a cold morning as I thought about the horrible way that two people had just died and my part in those deaths. I tried to count all of the people who had returned to dust because of my actions over the past week and couldn’t even be sure if I remembered them all. I took a tiny measure of solace in the fact that I had helped to stop the nightmare thing from carrying out its ritual, whatever it would have done, and I reminded myself that if all of these efforts weren’t going to be in vain, then I had a responsibility to do everything in my power to stop anyone else from being hurt. I either had to find some method of killing it now or of getting back to the real world where I could regroup.

  And that was when the goddamned thing decided that it had had enough of pounding the ground in anger. Instead, it decided that Kelly hadn’t been abused enough and started trying to force itself the rest of the way into her corpse. The process lasted the best part of three minutes, the ruined body slowly swelling as whatever magic or power had allowed so much mass to squeeze into it previously was no longer working. By the time it was done jamming in its vile essence, what had been a slim and attractive young woman bulged like a morbidly obese sack of flesh, her skin stretching unnaturally as things inside of it pushed out and then drooped as her invader contracted.

  As the last few strands disappeared into the sack-of-meat-that-had-been-Kelly, it lost its support and toppled to the ground, motionless. I thought about using that moment as an opportunity to dash forward and stab the damned thing a couple hundred times, but just as I managed to clamber wearily to my feet, I saw one pale arm twitch, and I froze in place. I had half-guessed what the puca was trying to do, but the fact that it had, to some extent, succeeded was too much. There are times when someone can’t hold their stomach at a horrible sight and it’s a sign of weakness, but in the land of dreams, mind is matter, and what I had just seen needed to be purged…

  I wiped off my mouth, dropped my concealment, and stepped into the open. In the distance, the purple cable trees waved in the breezeless gloom, and hoots of hunger echoed from that strange wood. But in the clearing, all was calm as the misshapen thing that had been Kelly MacDonnell juddered and shook as it clambered to its feet.

  I watched as the bloated thing twitched and trembled, reminding me of some kind of twisted newborn fawn as it tried to adjust to the constraints of its new form. I drew my gladius, cinched my trench coat, and stomped to within five feet of the damned thing. It opened its eyes, and I flinched as neither Kelly’s green orbs nor pure black stared back at me. Instead, two glowing embers peered out. If eyes are the windows of the soul, then it was clear where this son of a bitch belonged.

  “Wives, mothers, daughters. Husbands, fathers, sons. Hopes, wishes, dreams. You don’t understand them, you don’t respect them, and you don’t care if you destroy them. Well, guess what? I don’t understand you, I don’t respect you, but I do care about destroying you!” I yelled, a green haze of energy enveloping my body as I railed against the thrice-damned puca. When I’d fought the creature before, I had followed my usual method of calling upon the content of my memories to provide my weapons, but now I thought back to what I’d done in the alley when Tara had come at me. A red mist descended, and I didn’t think of anything. I just acted.

  The puca turned to flee, its true substance straining against Kelly’s skin like
water sloshing in a glass. It was too slow.

  “Die!” I roared at the creature as I thrust my arms out and poured out my revulsion, my hatred, and my determination to see the creature obliterated, until my whole being was centered on the sword gripped in my right hand. The gladius bloomed with a coruscation of green flames, and I charged. The creature clearly wasn’t fully in control of its new meat suit, but sheer strength can make up for a lack of athleticism, and with a literally bone-popping contortion, the puca flung itself away from me, flying through the air at least twenty yards. But it wasn’t fast enough, and a bloom of energy shot out of the end of my sword and struck with a hiss and a shower of sparks, flaying the skin off of most of its right arm and sending a wave of weakness through me.

  My back spasmed in pain, and I closed on the puca at my best speed, trying to make up the distance before it could fully control Kelly’s body. The creature lifted its left arm and made a diagonal slashing motion through the air, opening a tear and reminding me of its appearance a few days before when it had abducted Richard. I had to choose between two options, and I only had a second to do it—I could stay here and try to free the trapped dreamers, or I could follow the creature and continue the fight while I had it on the run.

  Thinking of Don’s fate as well as of Richard and Janice trapped here, I had to push down a powerful urge to stay; it would relieve some of my guilt to save the people here. However, faced with not knowing if I’d be able to leave on my own again, and with the puca let loose on the real world, I knew what I had to do.

  The remains of the late OMG partner didn’t pause, and it threw itself into the shimmering portal as I hurtled forward, hot on its heels. I could see a familiar room on the other side of the portal. I wasn’t surprised, but it sent another jolt of anger through me, and as I dove through the rapidly shrinking gate, I heaved the sword from my hand and watched it turn end over end, a tumbling comet of green fire. I kept my eyes on the point until the instant that it stopped whistling through the air, and I shouted in triumph as it thunked into Kelly’s bloated corpse just as my head cleared the threshold of the portal.