by Erik Carter
Dream On
Erik Carter
Copyright © 2017 by Erik Carter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Author Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Thank You
Get More Carter
Also by Erik Carter
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Author Note
The intrigue is this thriller is based around a controversial religious theory. This theory comes from a 2006 text by Joseph Atwill and its subsequent documentary. In Dream On, the theory is attributed not to Atwill but to fictional characters in the story. Additionally, the theory has been simplified and modified slightly for the novel. All credit for the original theory goes to Atwill and his associates.
Importantly, it must be said that while Atwill presents his theory as fact, its inclusion in this work of fiction is not an endorsement of factuality by either this author or, indeed, the fictional characters of the story. Interested individuals can delve further into the theory by investigating Atwill’s work.
Seaside, Oregon
The 1970s
Chapter 1
“Jesus never existed,” Isaac Bennett said. His voice shook. He looked up at the man looming over him. The man who held a knife to his throat.
The man was tall with wavy, brown hair. His face had a couple day’s worth of stubble. His eyes were so piercing, so blazingly blue that they seemed unnatural. Like blue ice. Small wells of shimmering glacial water, flash frozen. There was fury in those icy eyes, and the man was struggling to contain it.
The knife was sharp, and Isaac could feel it cutting his skin even though the man was putting little pressure against it.
Moments earlier, the man had come bursting in through the unlocked front door of Isaac’s small beach house. Isaac had been sitting at his desk, reading an invoice. A bowl of tomato bisque sat to the side, cooling. Now it was overturned. Soup ran off the side of the desk and dripped onto the carpet.
Twice the man had told Isaac to say it—that Jesus never existed. The first time Isaac refused. That’s when the man took his knife—which he had been holding at chest level—and put it to Isaac’s throat.
After the man had heard the words he wanted, there was a sneer to his lips, but the fury still burned in his eyes. “That’s right. I know that’s what you believe with your filthy, blasphemous mind.”
“But I don’t believe it,” Isaac said, trying to convey his utter sincerity. It was a plea. A plea for life and a plea for sanity. “I believe he existed. And I don’t care either way. I’m an atheist. What is this?”
“An atheist. Oh, yes, I know exactly what you are.” The sneer on the man’s face broadened into a look of bemusement. “And what if I were to tell you this?” He paused for just a moment before continuing to speak. “Actiones secundum fidei.”
A wave of sensation rolled over Isaac. He felt the room close in around him. A cold sweat. A door in his brain had been opened, and memory flooded in. He remembered himself and the others. Five young men with an idea. A theory. And the other two men. Who would do anything to stop it.
One of those two men was now standing over him.
“Owen?” Isaac said. “It’s Owen, isn’t it? Owen Kelso.”
Owen was older now, but Isaac recognized him. Those eyes. Those icy blue eyes. Isaac remembered the eyes, and he remembered Owen as being hateful but somehow idealistic. Now the man looked cold. Like a man who was prepared to kill him.
Owen’s sneer turned into a smirk. He scoffed. “That’s right. You’ve remembered. Everything. Yes?”
Isaac nodded. “Yes.”
“Including your little theory.”
Isaac inched away. His heart beat frantically. The knife to his throat was no mere threat. Owen was going to kill him.
“Don’t you move,” Owen said and grabbed Isaac by the back of the head, pulled him into the knife.
Isaac yelped and felt a drop of blood trickle down his neck.
“Now you believe it, don’t you?” Owen said. “That Christ Almighty never existed.”
The pieces of theory were rapidly reconnecting in Isaac’s mind, but the sense of urgency had come back to him instantly. The importance of it all. He knew that this idea was something bigger than him, something that had to be told. The world had to hear it.
“Yes, I do,” Isaac said and looked straight into the rage of Owen’s blue eyes.
Owen shook his head. “Wretch. I will pray for your soul.”
There was a flash of movement, and a quick, sharp pain. Just as quickly, a calm realization came to Isaac. It was like when he broke his arm as a teenager. One moment he had been riding his bicycle down a hill, heading toward a patch of oil, and the next moment he found himself on the ground looking at his arm. It was bent in an incorrect angle and wouldn’t respond. The thought had occurred quite plainly to him then: his arm was broken. Now a new sensation struck him in the same plain, rational manner.
His throat was slit.
His hands went to his neck. Hot fluid gushed over his fingers, cascading down his neck and onto his chest. His shirt clung to his skin. The blood was sticky between his fingers.
He fell forward off his chair to his knees, and in the process he brought the small desk down to the floor with him. It made a loud crash.
Isaac saw Owen’s feet jump forward and then felt the knife jam into the back side of his left shoulder. This hurt much more than his throat, and he screamed. He saw the window to his right and through this he saw the window of Mrs. Simpson’s house, a few feet away. A light came on, and her elderly voice called out from the distance.
“Isaac? Everything okay?”
This must have startled Owen because Isaac saw his feet dart away. Isaac looked up. This brought a surge
of pain, and he felt the skin of his neck separate. He saw Owen momentarily pause at the door then bolt out, shutting it behind him.
Isaac knew what he had to do, but he also knew he only had moments left to do it. He was fading. His vision lightened and blurred around the edges. There were beads of sweat on his forehead and the back of his hands, a cold, shivering sweat.
His left arm was limp, so he dug his right hand fingers into the shag carpeting and pulled himself around to face the scattered effects of his desk. He needed something to write with, something with a wide writing surface. The letters had to be big; it had to be visible.
There was a pencil and a few ink pens, covered with soup. Too small. He brushed them aside. He needed a marker. He knew there had been one somewhere on his desk, but where had it gone?
He scanned the floor, didn’t see the marker. His forearms tingled. Black spots appeared in his vision. Hurry. He had to hurry. His eyes closed, and he dropped forward, his chin crashing into the floor. This jolted him awake, and he gasped
Behind him there was a knock on the door.
Then he saw it. The marker. A black permanent marker. A few feet away against the wall. He dug his right hand into the carpet again and crawled toward it.
Banging on the door. “Isaac? Isaac, you alright?” It was Mrs. Simpson.
His trembling fingers grabbed the marker. He considered writing on the wall, but realized that could be misinterpreted. It had to be clear that the word was referring to himself.
He took the marker between his teeth and pulled off the cap. He pulled his lifeless arm into position, struggled with the button on the cuff, then yanked the sleeve up to his elbow. He put the marker’s tip to his forearm and scratched out the first two letters.
JO
He heard the door open behind him then Mrs. Simpson’s voice and the sound of her footsteps as she rushed over to him.
“Isaac!”
A wave of whiteness swept across his vision, and there was another flash of sweat. His right hand and the marker dropped to the floor. Seconds. There were only seconds left. And there was more he had to write. He brought the marker back to his forearm.
SE
Mrs. Simpson came up to him, bent over, and put her hand to his shoulder.
“Isaac. My god!”
A black, fuzzy haze closed in around his vision like a closing iris. He could no longer see his arm as his right hand blindly scribbled out the remaining letters.
He rolled onto his back. He heard Mrs. Simpson scuttle off to his telephone in the kitchen and speak rapidly to a 911 operator. He could just make out the sound of the waves in the distance before everything faded out and there was silence.
Hollow silence. And a black expanse before his eyes. He was in a void. He felt small, alone, scared. But then there was light and the void was gone. He saw his mother. And his father. The old house. His first girlfriend. Jennifer. The spot behind the bleachers. His mother again. Her hand touching his cheek. His ex-wife. An old, nameless friend. The apartment on 9th Avenue in Portland. A mattress on the floor, no box spring. His first gig on radio. How nervous he’d been. Then he saw the facility. The concrete walls. The crumbling floors, plants growing in the cracks. Glassless windows with large pine trees beyond. Wet. Everything was wet. The long hallways. The dark rooms.
Isaac screamed.
Chapter 2
Special Agent Dale Conley crashed through the doors of Thomas Mall in Phoenix, Arizona. He squinted his eyes, adjusting from the blazing desert sun to indoor lighting. The temperature shift, too, was dramatic: from nearly a hundred degrees of dry heat to chilly air conditioning.
He came to an abrupt stop, the soles of his motorcycle boots squeaking on the polished floor. He panted, taking just a moment to scan the crowds of shoppers roaming the hall in front of him. His eyes bounced from person to person as he looked for his mark: Guy Hudson.
The shoppers crisscrossed the hall, going into the different stores, walking the halls. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty, twenty-five feet, with large crossbeams traversing it at regular intervals. Above the stores was a strip of wall painted in multi-colored, geometric patterns with plants spilling over the edge. There was a large aquarium in the back, filled with oscar fish.
Mothers with children in tow. Old folks with strollers. Amorous teenagers. Guy Hudson should have stood out in this crowd. He was weird looking enough. But every second that passed vastly increased the chance that Dale had lost him—having slipped into a store or a bathroom or out one of the emergency exits.
But then he spotted him.
Guy was by the aquarium. A group of people was gathered around the tank. Some of the children were running their hands along the glass, giggling as the oscars—a very interactive species—followed them. And toward the back corner of the crowd, hiding among some of the adults, was Guy Hudson.
He was tall—about six foot two—extremely thin, and ghostly pale with a jet-black dye job to both his hair and his mustache. He wore faded black pants and a gray, long-sleeve shirt. He was monochromatic.
In Guy’s hand was a ceramic vase, primitive, pinkish in color decorated with red painted designs. It was a piece of Hohokam buff ware that Guy and his group had dug out of a protected area—so protected that it was designated a national historical landmark, monument, and historic place and was closed to the public. The vase was incredibly old, maybe as much as 2,000 years.
Guy made eye contact with Dale ... and dashed off.
Dale ran after him. People screamed as he came rushing toward them, and they cleared out of his way.
Guy took off down the hallway. Dale was several feet behind and watched as Guy ran into a candy shop. Panic bustled through the store, and people ran out as Dale sprinted in. Bins of brightly colored candy. Helium-filled balloons. But no Guy Hudson. Dale pushed through the people running out of the store. Several of them pointed toward a counter in the back: He went that way.
Dale eyeballed the counter. No sign of Guy. If he was back there, Guy would be crouched down, hiding somewhere behind the counter. Dale reached behind his back, beneath his T-shirt, and drew his snub-nosed revolver from its holster, which was tucked into his 501 jeans. Dale put both hands on the gun and crept toward the counter.
Slow steps, his gun aimed downward to the floor. He readjusted his grip. Heartbeat quickened. Palms began to sweat. A couple more steps. He put his finger over the trigger. In one swift movement he whipped around the corner and leveled his gun.
A brightly-colored disc sailed up into his face and smashed into his left temple and ear. Large, solid. It was a lollipop, Dale realized. An oversized lollipop. One those two-foot jobs. Dale’s vision blasted white momentarily, and his ears rang. Guy had swung that damn piece of candy with a form that would’ve made Ty Cobb envious.
The lollipop shattered on impact with Dale’s head. The pieces clattered on the floor. Dale staggered back several feet, and as he put a hand to the left side of his head, he saw Guy scramble to his feet and dart off toward the front of the store.
Dale shook his head, cleared his vision, and took off after Guy again. He now had a splitting headache.
Dale saw Guy sprinting down the hall to the left, and he ran after him. He kept his gun in his hand, his finger safely outside the trigger guard. Now there was panic among the people in the halls as they saw two men chasing each other, one of them carrying a firearm. The shoppers darted into the stores.
Dale was a decent runner, being an avid fitness buff and running regularly. But Guy was lithe and tall, and his speed alarmed Dale. He would have pegged Guy Hudson as the kind of nerd who hadn’t exercised since he was required to do so in grade school. But the man was surprisingly skilled. And it was a strange sort of skill. He moved like an insect, a praying mantis shuttling at breakneck speed down a Phoenix shopping mall hallway.
Dale could see that they were running toward a fountain with choreographed waterworks, small spouts of water shooting into the air in rhythmic patterns. In the cen
ter of the fountain was a sculpture, about eight feet tall with large holes in it, resembling an oversized piece of coral. A small group of people, mostly children—who had yet to notice the two men running at them—was gathered around the fountain, watching the show. Guy screamed at them as he approached.
“Get the hell out of my way!”
Dale’s chest was heaving. He’d been pushing himself as hard as he could to catch Guy, and finally he was gaining on him. He was only a few feet behind him.
Guy ran straight into the fountain and right toward the sculpture. He dove, face forward, arms outstretched toward one of the holes in the structure, a hole about three feet in height. He flew straight through the hole, landing in the water on the other side with a splash and sliding on his stomach like he was on a water slide.
Dale was mightily impressed. He wondered if Guy was some sort of macabre gymnast when he wasn’t robbing the federal government of precious antiquities.
Dale knew if he tried the same leap-through-the-sculpture trick, he was going to end up with broken bones, a bruised ego, and a lost perpetrator. He bounded into the fountain, his boots splashing and filling with water. His jeans clung to his lower legs. Dale despised the feeling of wet clothes. He ran around the sculpture, catching up with Guy just as he was trying to stand up. Guy kicked from his crouched position, catching Dale in the chest. Dale gasped, feeling the air escape his lungs. Then, summoning his inner insect once more, Guy stood up, grabbed the sculpture with both arms, and swung his entire body at Dale, hitting him with both feet in the chest again. This blow sent Dale flying, and he landed on his back with a splash.