Dreamwalker

by Russell James

  He rewrapped the mirror and they secreted it in the pitch-black stairwell.

  “We’d better split up,” Rayna said. “There’s a pack of hunters two blocks over at the palace and we attract more attention together.”

  Pete’s mouth opened in protest, but he gave a resigned nod.

  “I’ll start recruiting some volunteer warriors,” she said.

  “I’ll backtrack to my tunnel home. It’s got to be easier without carrying home furnishings.”

  “Be careful,” Rayna said.

  She grabbed him and gave him a desperate, passionate kiss. Pete went numb with pleasure. The world of Twin Moon City disappeared and it was just the two of them in a soft blanket of white. He wrapped his arms around her, relished the warm touch of her lips. When they parted, she buried her face in his neck.

  “You come back to me,” she whispered.

  “Every time,” Pete said. It took all his strength to release her. “You still have the key?”

  Rayna patted a lump in the back pocket of her jeans. “My prized possession.”

  “You may need that before all this is over. Don’t lose it.” He passed out into Twin Moon City.

  He re-traced their route back to the apartment, without a thought about the VPD that hobbled him in the tactile world. He stopped at every doorway, double checked every crossing. Every creak made him pause, every stirring on the street sent him for cover. The sound of gunner Jeeps, no matter how far away, made his hair stand on end. Only one patrol passed before he made it to the apartment building where this dream began.

  The roar of a gunner Jeep sent him ducking for cover in the apartment hallway. It zoomed by. The rear position carried neither hunter nor machine gun. The Jeep disappeared around a corner and Pete ran up the stairway two steps at a time. He entered the apartment and skidded to a stop.

  A hunter stood between the bedroom and living room, its back to Pete. The back of its T-shirt carried the faded logo of Sunny Times Tanning Salon in West Memphis. The edges of the shirtsleeves had come unraveled and one of the rear pockets was gone from its jeans. A gaping red hole replaced the creature’s right ear, and strips of ragged flesh hung from its arms. In its left hand it held the improbably heavy machine gun, dismounted from the gunner Jeep. The barrel rested against the floor. In the hunter’s right hand, it held Rayna’s can of ravioli, raised for inspection. It stared inside with one glazed, confused eye, as if the sight raised a memory the creature never knew it had.

  Pete spied the curtain rod he’d yanked from the wall. He pulled it off the floor. It was solid metal, as thick around as his wrist, with pointed ends. He tucked it under his arm like a jousting knight and charged.

  The makeshift lance caught the hunter in the spine. It roared in surprise. Pete pushed it across the floor like the head of a mop. Its machine gun fired and a stream of bullets cut a path through the floor. The hunter hit the wall face first. The curtain rod ran it through and sank into the sheetrock. The gun went silent and fell to the floor. The ravioli can rolled out of its hand. The zombie looked like a pinned insect.

  Pete released the rod and took a step back. The hunter raised its head.

  “Heh, heh, heh,” the creature chuckled in a guttural tone.

  It raised its arms to the wall in slow motion. Inch by inch it pushed itself away. Its chest slurped around the rod as it worked itself free.

  “Oh, hell no.”

  Pete ran to the bedroom, yanked open the trapdoor, and scrambled down the ladder. He slammed the door shut behind him and made a circle around the edge with his finger. The seam disappeared and the door turned to earth.

  He sat back against the wall, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. Sitting in the dirt never felt so good. He was going to have to wake up to get some rest.

  As soon as Pete left the office, Rayna collapsed against the wall.

  That was amazing.

  She’d tried to put any romantic thoughts about Pete out of her mind, but he thought to bring her food and he was so devoted to helping rescue Estella. Then when they passed through that mirror, she felt like they were joined, sharing something she never thought was possible, never even knew existed. She was kissing him before she knew she’d decided to do it.

  She’d told herself a hundred times that it couldn’t work between them. No matter what happened here, she and Pete existed in two worlds that only a demon could cross between.

  But now she believed. She believed their plan would get them into the tower. She believed they would rescue Estella. And when it was done, there’d be a way that somewhere between her world and his, she and Pete would be together.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Pete’s muscles ached as he climbed the stairs into the mansion. He was tired, though he was never tired in his dreams. Even his most taxing adventure dream left him exhilarated, but never exhausted. Whatever subconscious recharge a human being logged during sleep, he wasn’t getting his recommended daily allotment.

  He needed to prep his part of the plan before he woke up to the tactile world. There was hardware to conjure for his next trip to the land of the living dead. The weapons were too important to trust to his subconscious.

  He wished he could master this conjuring trick in Twin Moon City. Estella’s rescue would be a lot easier with a helicopter, or better yet, a Star Trek transporter. But Twin Moon City seemed to impose its own limits. Perhaps the rush of life force he felt flowing into the palace included enough of his that he wasn’t as strong as he was in the mansion. Maybe Cauquemere exerted some dampening force within that reality. Whatever it was, the only time Pete felt powerful on the other side was when he held Rayna’s hand and went through the mirror. Even when he left the reflection, Rayna had been nearby.

  Creating Rayna’s key had just been a matter of will. He thought about it, and where it would be, and it was there. The weapons of war he needed shouldn’t be any different.

  He needed assault rifles. A dozen of them. With ammunition. And of course, a bomb. He’d leave the technical details to his subconscious. All these things would be stored in…an armory. One of those places with weapons racks and shelves full of other implements of destruction. He summoned that room at the end of the main hall.

  He walked down the hallway and the last door had changed. The solid oak was now solid steel, with a wheel in the middle like the water-tight doors on a submarine. His subconscious apparently had a sense of humor.

  He pushed open the heavy door. A gray industrial epoxy coated the floor. The steel-sheathed walls and ceiling looked like a bank vault. Two racks of jet-black M-16 rifles stood at attention in the center of the room, an even dozen. Twelve bandoliers of ammunition sat in neat rows on a shelf behind them, packed and ready for transport.

  He stepped forward and plucked a rifle off the rack. He had never held an M-16 before, never even seen one. The plastic hand grips made it feel like a toy. It felt surprisingly light. Down to all the details, it looked just like ones from the movies. Of course as a product his imagination, what else would they look like?

  In two trips, he transferred the weapons to a spot next to the trapdoor in the hall. The ammunition took two more journeys. He considered moving it all into the tunnel, but he wasn’t sure what would happen when the shaft shifted to a new location. He was positioning all of this to minimize, not maximize, the risk.

  He still needed the bomb. He returned to the armory. On a back wall shelf sat a cylindrical device about five inches across and not as deep. It was made of silver metal and hard black plastic. On the face were five red LED numbers all set at zero. Three small switches sat under the red numbers.

  Pete burst out laughing. It was the detonator Louis Jordan used in the James Bond film Octopussy. As a big Bond fan, he’d seen how to set this explosive a dozen times. He added it to the pile of munitions in the hallway.

  His part of the plan was ready. The
easy part. Now Rayna had to deliver on her promise, to find a dozen people in Twin Moon City who were both sane enough to trust and still suicidal, who were willing to end their existence to help a stranger. He found it hard to imagine a great deal of altruism floating around in Twin Moon City.

  A vibration made the floor tremble. Then a low, far away rumble filtered in from the front of the mansion. Its pitch and volume rose. The boards in the floor began to flex. The thought that somehow Cauquemere had found the mansion made Pete’s blood run cold.

  Pete yanked open the door and stood on the porch. Brilliant summer sunshine burst from between robust green trees, the antithesis of Twin Moon City’s gritty grays. The rumble came from the right, where the ground sloped away from the mansion. The din rose. The porch swing danced on its chains.

  A pounding, saddle-colored mass crested the hill. The rolling thunder it created washed past the house. Pointed white shafts flashed within the approaching, undulating sea of brown.

  It was a herd of antelope. Thousands of them.

  The herd charged and sideswiped the porch, missing by inches. As the antelope flew by, a varying symphony of snorts and thudding hooves filled Pete’s ears like a passing freight train. The earthy smell of the animals and a dusky cloud of dirt filled the air.

  The last of the herd pounded past, leaving the billowing dust storm in its wake. The cloud didn’t settle uniformly to the ground. Instead, it swirled and pulsed, selectively defying the gravity that pulled it back to its birthplace. Within the cloud, an outline became progressively clearer.

  It was a narrow brick building on a street corner. The second and third story had a tall window on the left and octagonal rooms that jutted out over the sidewalk on the right. The lower floor had a large window to the right of the entrance door. The writing on the window was too fuzzy to read, but the ornate scrollwork around the window was clear. It looked like olive branches, with a lion crouched in the center.

  Just as he identified the building’s features, they dissipated and fell to the ground in a waterfall of brown dust. The grains filtered between the blades of grass in the lawn. The lawn was still perfect, bright green and unmarred by a single hoof print.

  Pete had never seen the house before, but the design perfectly fit into his neighborhood. He had a feeling that all he had to do was take a walk through town and he’d find it.

  But why? He might have summoned the NRA dream-come-true in the armory, but the antelope weren’t his. The invitation to the house of dust came from someone else.

  Something else to investigate when he woke up. Right after he got out of Tyrone’s house so he didn’t bring down any heat on the boy and his sister.

  With that thought, he closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face and was tempted for a second to spend a little more time in this safe, comforting place between the worlds. Instead, he took a deep breath and swam upward into the unstable, uncertain, waking world.

  Chapter Thirty

  On Estella’s post-mortem journey, she’d passed exhaustion miles ago. She wished she could go back to exhaustion and spend a week in that comparative vacation spot. Cauquemere’s demands sucked the energy from every cell of her being.

  Her body bore witness to the strain. Her, luxuriant, blonde hair now lay matted and sparse, streaked gray throughout. Her round cheeks were gone and sallow skin framed her ashen lips. A white tunic hung loose over her shrinking body.

  Estella had no idea how long she had been chained in Cauquemere’s palace. There was no night and no day. No meals or sleep segmented the time into recognizable periods. There was only the tiring, perverse work. Had she been there a day, a week, a decade? She was exhausted enough for it to have been a century.

  Many moments of her life were now faded and fuzzy, but she would never forget her first disorienting arrival in the Hall of Dreamwalkers.

  She awoke from Cauquemere’s most harrowing vision yet, but nothing looked familiar, not the rough stone walls, not the expansive wooden table, not the glowing orbs that floated overhead. She certainly had never seen any of the three pale, wasted people who shared the table with her. Her fear spooled back up to full speed.

  Most terrifying was a disconcerting difference in her consciousness. This place had the slightly surrealistic gauze that her dreams always had. But when she dreamwalked, she felt a duality, where a part of her was still outside the dream, like dashing in for a coffee while your car idled curbside. Now, she sensed no existence beyond this plane. The loss of contact with the corporeal world could only mean she was dead.

  Unyielding, heavy, leather restraints bound her waist to the chair. The iron and leather had a faint glow. She tried to pull at them but her fingers were kept from the surface by some spectral reinforcement.

  “Welcome, my dear.”

  The deep voice from behind her made her jump. She whipped her head around as Cauquemere stalked the four at the table. Dread arrived like a medicine ball to her gut. She recognized his dreadlocks and the leather clothes from his visits to her nightmares. But this was no nightmare she could awaken from.

  “You are joining a loving little family,” Cauquemere said, gesturing toward the three burned out shells that shared the table. His voice dripped with sarcasm. “They share your skills, your dreamwalker skills, and have put them to work in my service. In fact, they helped create the nightmares that brought you here.”

  Estella scanned the three faces for signs of remorse. There were none. The other captives showed no emotion at all, not even any acknowledgement of Estella’s arrival. They just continued adding spheres to the group doing a holding pattern over their heads.

  “I know how enthusiastically you’ll pitch in to help them,” Cauquemere continued. He slipped beside her and whispered in her ear. “You’ll have such an aptitude for it.”

  Estella felt her blood start to burn.

  “Like hell I will,” she said. She reached up to twist his head off of his neck.

  Her arms crashed back to the chair as if yanked by wires. Her head slammed back hard enough for her to see stars.

  “So you want to fight about it?” Cauquemere said. He leaned back against the table and folded his arms across his chest. A wry smile appeared on his lips. “It won’t be a fair fight.”

  A scorpion appeared on the top of Estella’s immobile hand. Its sharp feet dug into her skin. Twin pincers sliced into her flesh. They pulled open a slit of skin and exposed the soft pink muscle beneath. The scorpion’s tail stabbed Estella. A bolt of searing pain blasted up her arm. The creature burrowed into the slit and under her skin.

  Estella felt her skin stretch over the scorpion’s body. It crawled up her arm. Pointed legs jabbed into her muscle. The toxic stinger rolled right and left and lanced her with excruciating pinpricks of pain. Estella screamed in agony.

  Cauquemere unfolded his arms and the scorpion vanished. Estella’s arm returned to normal, unblemished by the assault. Her head sagged forward in relief. A bead of sweat rolled down her nose and off into her lap.

  “See,” Cauquemere said. “Hardly fair at all. I broke you to get you here. I’ll break you again. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Estella looked up at him through her damp bangs, enraged by his smug smile and condescending attitude. The son of a bitch wasn’t going to make her do anything. He could burn her into the ground and she wouldn’t lift a finger to help him condemn another soul to Twin Moon City.

  Then the energy stream entering the palace changed. It was almost undetectable, like the addition of another flute to an orchestra in mid-recital. But Estella’s ear had been tuned for the notes of that flute for years. She felt Rayna enter the flow.

  Death was the only ticket to this world and there was only one way Rayna could follow her so quickly. Suicide. The image of Rayna ending her own sweet life was a nightmare all by itself. Estella forced it from her mind. Cauquemere would use Rayna
as leverage if he knew she was here. Estella had to protect her sister.

  She leashed her anger and made it heel. She dropped the corners of her mouth and looked away from Cauquemere like a submissive wolf. Cauquemere’s smile widened.

  “Excellent.”

  Estella watched the other dreamwalkers as they added details to the nightmares coalescing on the table. Her arms came free of the chair and she lifted one upwards. Power from the stream of souls swept through her. A globe materialized at her fingertips.

  Within it a savage dog tore a man’s arm away at the socket. Blood spurted out in a fan. The vision repulsed her. She couldn’t have given birth to that. She nearly dropped the orb.

  But she kept her grip and gently lowered the orb to the table. It rolled to join the waiting others. She shuddered in the aftermath of the energy’s transit to her fingers. A wave of guilty nausea swept through her. A part of her soul had died, and she could smell the decay.

  Estella redirected the meager energy she had in reserve. She sent it out in a trickle, weaving a path salmon-like against the inbound torrent. It blunted and reflected Rayna’s life force back into the city, then followed it to the source. She made it into a barrier, a shield to hide her sister. She’d have to constantly shift it to keep it between Rayna and the ever-searching eyes of Cauquemere.

  She’d serve this horrid master and sow terror through the night, but only to protect Rayna with the bit of herself she held in reserve. Unlike the shattered dreamwalkers across from her, she’d keep her personal consciousness alive, for as long as she could.

  Cauquemere had left the palace. Estella could feel that and thought the others could as well. The inflow of life force slowed, and small eddies swirled in the stream. The texture of the walls and fixtures in the palace grew rougher, as if their binding machinery lost steam. Though Cauquemere’s presence was the pump that kept the power flowing, the flow continued after he left, like a siphoning action, but the intensity waned. He was never gone long enough for it to wind down completely.