Forest of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  “I know a nice place not far from here,” I said. “It was on the map. There was a golf course there. And springs. Lots of flowers for butterflies.” Hopefully, I could hit a bucket of balls, too. I hadn’t done that since before the change.

  “Excellent,” Light said in the manner of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. She would have tented her hands and tapped her fingers in his signature gesture had her clubbed hands not stuck together. The pixies had watched a Simpsons marathon from outside the bubble. They thought the cartoons were hilarious, although they couldn’t understand why some of the characters were so senseless.

  I sighed. Now I was just procrastinating. I didn’t like it. Once I got down into the ravine, there was only the solitary decaying asphalt road with no place to hide. Someone could easily take potshots at me if they so desired.

  “Okey dokey,” I said. “If they shoot me in the head, make sure you take out their eyes.”

  “BOTH EYES!” Light shrieked. “The sisters will avenge Man-Thief-Knife-Girl with the heart’s blood of our enemies! The sisters will roll in the remains of the brains!”

  “You know, I haven’t stolen a man since before the big change,” I commented. “I tried just the one time. Maybe you could let that go.”

  Light sang something in her language, and the closest translation in my head was something like, Where would be the fun in that?

  Chapter 3

  Lulu Does a Thang

  The Present - Colorado

  The sun had dipped below the western side of the mountains. We needed to make our foray in the early evening because the firefly pixies tended to be nocturnal. I didn’t want to be perceived as sneaking up on the facility in the dead of night, but neither did I want the girls to be worn out from staying up during the day.

  “So I go in,” I said to Light, “I knock on the door. I talk to the occupant for a bit. Try to open up a dialogue. Establish good communication. Try not to immediately get assaulted. If I raise my right hand, you come in and attack.”

  “Which one is the right hand?” Light asked. I lifted my right hand up. “Your other right,” she cackled. Someone had been telling the firefly pixies jokes. (There were several knock-knock ones that really cracked them up. They still told some of those on a daily basis.)

  “I’m going to sing,” I threatened. The firefly pixies loved to hear songs. They especially liked it when humans sang because our range was so much more diverse than theirs. They had a particular fancy for Christmas songs, a fact of which I didn’t understand. However, what I should have said was that they loved to hear most humans sing. There were exceptions, of course.

  “No,” Light said. “Man-Thief-Stabby-Girl has a terrible singing voice.”

  “You don’t have to rub it in,” I said.

  The other pixies moaned in distress. Apparently, my voice did to them what a trained soprano could do to a crystal glass.

  “Look, let’s do this thing,” I said. “I’ll smile, bat my eyelashes, and try to be all cordial. I’ll invite them down to Sunshine to see our setup. We’ll work out a deal for them. A percentage for some assistance. It’ll be win-win.” I showed my teeth.

  “That’s what Man-Thief-Slicey-Girl always says,” Light sang to the other pixies. “Then there’s the running and hiding. It’s very depressing.”

  “I understood that,” I sang. “That only happened the one time.”

  Light sighed heavily. “The sisters think you should pass this time.”

  I thought about that. There was something they weren’t telling me, but the truth was that we couldn’t afford to pass on any of the tech bubbles. The firefly pixies could be so inscrutable at times. It might have been as simple as the fact that they didn’t like the color of the bushes, but it could have been more complex in the form of immediate danger. They abruptly took to the air. The other pixies followed Light as they retreated into the copse where they could observe me without being seen.

  I put the binoculars back into my pack and left it in the heavy shade of the trees. I didn’t want to have to dodge and run with a fully loaded pack. I still had to give it a shot because we needed the tech bubbles, and this one looked to be particularly valuable.

  Making my way down the hill to the old roadway, I picked my way through brush and trees. The scenery on this side of the mountains was somewhat sparse. It was the edge of high desert. The piñon-juniper woodland and the Gambel oak trees were grouped where they could get water. The sagebrush would have been at home in Arizona or in one of those old black-and-white westerns.

  If I was a little higher up on the hills, I could see Almagre Mountain and Pike’s Peak, among others. (Depending on the map, Almagre was also called Mount Baldy. I didn’t have a local to tell me what it had or hadn’t been.) Almost every day was cool for looking at the Rockies. But instead of sightseeing, I had to go chat with someone in a tech bubble.

  Lulu of Sunshine, Colorado to the technological rescue of mankind. Maybe they’d have a nice cup of coffee.

  I slithered the last ten feet down a loose-rock grade and stumbled into a drainage ditch. I picked my way through sagebrush and finally stood on the asphalt road. The asphalt was already disintegrating into ragged chunks because of the sunshine and the rain and the lack of maintenance. Throughout the deterioration was a clear path where someone had been coming and going.

  “Hello the…uh…big steel door place!” I called loudly. I raised my hands up to show how amicable I could be. “Not trying to be hostile or anything!”

  I came up to the edge of the bubble and stopped. If I had closed my eyes, I could have felt the edges like a gigantic floating sphere bumping into me. Pushing through the one at Sunshine felt like going through a wall of thick fog. It was everywhere all at once and pushed back at you just as if it was trying to keep you out. I had a suspicion that once the change occurred people weren’t supposed to go back, and it didn’t feel right when we did.

  The world tried to warn us. The world had changed but so had we. The wall of the bubble tried to warn us, too.

  I paused there waiting for an answer. It was possible that there wasn’t anyone near the entrance to the facility. I could see only a little ways into the shadows of the tunnel. From what I could see, there was a blast door about fifty feet back, which may or may not have been open. This was the back door into part of the greater complex. The magazine I’d seen said the other part is built under 2,000 feet of granite and spread over five acres. We haven’t been inside that one because, although it was a place of incredible technology, it hadn’t become one of the tech bubbles we looked for. Consequently, the blast doors on that part of the complex, all twenty-five tons of them, were locked permanently in place, and I didn’t know of any creature that would be able to open them again. That went for both entrances to that site. The northern access tunnel was the one I’d seen in the movies, and it was locked up tighter than Las Vegas slot machines. The southern tunnel had a concrete abutment, but the inner blast doors were closed, as well. I had checked, just in case.

  Cheyenne Jr. was more of the same, according to the lurid magazine article. It was a mini Area 51 with all the rumor and innuendo that a single journalistic hack could spout. I wouldn’t have even bothered, but the article had a few golden nuggets about how certain techs had been developed there first. (Supposedly, it was the prototype for the bigger one.) Tech bubbles tended to be formed out of places that were innovative.

  Plus, not many people knew about the place, much less the survivors. Ergo, it needed to be checked.

  “Hello,” I called again. I was reminded of another time when I had been saying the word over and over again with increasing hysteria when no one answered. I felt a shiver pass down my back. It was almost summertime, and I hadn’t needed a jacket for three days, so the shivering wasn’t a result of being chilled.

  There was a keening noise that echoed around me, and I glanced about, startled. Something moved out of the bushes on one side of the road. It stopped to stare at me. It had the
appearance of a large-sized mix of spider and turtle. The size of a dinner plate, it had eight legs, a black shell, and glaring, garnet red eyes. Just on the outside of the bubble, it was one of the new animals, I was certain. Two of its legs tapped at the ground, and the others moved restlessly.

  Funky spiders. Damn, I thought. I should know something about that. Something nontangible prickled the back of my brain.

  It made another chittering noise as if it was talking to me and then retreated into the brush on the side of the road. Either I was too big for it to take down or it wasn’t particularly interested in eating me in particular. It was also possible that it had been trying to talk to me.

  I raised a hand and slowly inserted my fingers into the tech bubble. There was that funny pressure that tickled my flesh. My blood pounded inside me for a moment, singing a rousing song of “Keep out, keep out, keep out.” “Hello,” I called again. “I just want to talk to you. There’s no need to shoot lil’ ole me.” Okay, that was a bad line, but there was this one time that it really worked on this guy in New Mexico. He made the trip to Sunshine and offered three mules and a bag of iPods in exchange for my hand in marriage. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

  I could feel the weight of the KA-BAR at my side. I had used the knife many times before. It was likely I would use it again. I had gotten pretty good at sharpening the blade. In another twenty years there wouldn’t be enough blade left to put a decent edge on it. I would have to find another knife. Mr. Stabby II. Or maybe Mr. Stabby, Jr.

  The keening sound came again. I turned my head slightly to look toward where the turtle-spider had vanished. The noise came from it. I couldn’t speak its language. I desperately needed Sophie at my side, since she could speak all the languages now. That had been a nice gift from the firefly pixies. I would have liked that one for myself. There were a few others who could do it, but Sophie was really good at it. She could tell me what the little freaky reptile-arachnid things were talking about.

  I glanced over my shoulder at where the girls were hanging out and saw nothing. Either Light and the other pixies were okay with it, or they weren’t sure if they should be okay with it. The pixies had kept me out of all kinds of trouble over the last two years, so I knew they had my back.

  They would have warned me about the turtle-spider things if they thought they were a threat.

  I had a sense of déjà vu. People had talked about these critters before. There were a lot of people talking about a lot of new beasties. A few were developing a record of everything they saw, down to mapping coordinates. Giant moths in Nebraska had once swarmed a steam train I was riding in. (Sophie had saved our asses that time.) There were the Big Mamas in California, who were actually like a ginormous combination of elephant and brachiosaurus and who, incidentally, liked to eat fire. (Sophie again.) Zach had run into the phoenixes and become one with them. (I didn’t know how that is going to work out between Sophie and Zach, but they love each other, so they’ll likely make it work. I don’t think the pixies really liked the phoenixes, but maybe it was just a size thing.)

  I said a few pixie curse words. They roughly translated into dung-eating snake balls and butterfly’s butt, but it seemed to fit the situation.

  A shiver coursed down my spine. My inner self was trying to tell me something. I hadn’t listened to it once before because I was desperate. (There was probably more than one time, but that one time had been a deal breaker.)

  I stepped inside the bubble and stood there for a moment letting my body adjust. It was such an odd feeling. The first time I’d experienced it, I chalked it up to something else. There was magic outside the bubble; there was technology inside. It was yin and yang in my mind, two parts of a whole. One could never truly exist without the other, but the world had tried its best to eliminate the black part.

  “Hello,” I called again. “Really. Not trying to be a PITA, but just want to have a quick chat about your whole setup here. I can lay it out in just a few minutes and then be on my way. The people I represent aren’t thieves. We don’t want to steal from you. We want to make an arrangement.

  I looked over my shoulder and noticed a cascade of glittering sparks headed down the hill from the copse that Light and the girls had taken refuge in. I frowned as I comprehended the firefly pixies were rushing the bubble.

  “You brought them with you!” a voice suddenly shrieked. It sounded as if it came from all around me. It was a man’s voice, and I couldn’t tell where he was. There weren’t too many places to hide, so I assumed he was in the shadows just inside the interior of the tunnel. He hadn’t been there earlier, so he’d come up from the facility and was watching me from the blackness. He hadn’t even turned on a light, so it was possible he didn’t have generators up and running. I knew that the other part of Cheyenne Mountain had run on power from the city of Colorado Springs with two sets of backups. They had industrial- sized batteries for severe emergencies that would enable NORAD to keep running for fifteen crucial, nuclear-strike minutes. They also had a series of diesel generators for more extreme situations. It wasn’t like diesel was falling from the skies, so this part might have been almost as dead as the other part. However, provide the inhabitants with diesel, and this one would be operational with all kinds of possibilities for future use.

  I brought who with me?

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the girls were clustered just outside the bubble. I glowered as I realized that Light was shrieking something at me, and I couldn’t hear it.

  Did the man mean the firefly pixies, or did he mean the turtle-spiders?

  My stomach twisted into a knot of epic proportions. Get out. Get out! GET OUT!

  “It’s just me right here, right now,” I called, keeping the nervousness I felt out of my voice. Running wasn’t an option. I didn’t have anywhere to hide. Just me. I won’t hurt a fly. I won’t cause a fuss. I’ll just back away if you’ve got a problem. “I don’t want to cause any problems, so if you want me to go, I will.”

  “Don’t move!” he suddenly screamed.

  Butterfly’s butt, I thought. I shifted to one side and motioned at the pixies to back away before he started shooting at me, and them, too.

  Abruptly, I could hear the keening wails of the turtle-spiders. Light was making noise. The other things were making a noise. I wasn’t making any noise. Still inside the bubble, I sidled for the side of the road where there was a little bit of cover. I wasn’t as tiny as pixies and needed the coverage.

  “DON’T MOVE!” he screamed again. I stopped. I was good at finding the tech bubbles. I wasn’t so good at nosing out the crazies. This one sounded dafter than most.

  I held my hands high in the air. “I’m not a threat to you,” I called. “I don’t want trouble. I’ll just go.” I stepped to the side. I wanted to get behind a bush. A tree or a cement wall would have been much better, but I wasn’t going to nitpick about the quality of coverage.

  “Too late!” came the eerie call. It echoed around me, making me aware that there was only one way in and one way out of this ravine. Maybe I should have just left a fruit basket and a nice note on his doorstep. The next time, I swore.

  The ground crackled around me. I scrambled to move, but I was too late, just as the voice had said. I tumbled downward and fell into a hole that had unexpectedly appeared beneath my feet. I had stepped on a camouflage layer on top of a flimsy trapdoor built out of branches. It had been expertly covered with brush and dirt and looked like the rest of the dirt and brush on the side of the decaying asphalt road.

  One of my hands caught the side, and I was caught there while the earth spun around my head. My shoulder socket screamed with the unanticipated pressure placed upon it. I said some more bad words because I couldn’t help myself. I dimly perceived that the pixies were screeching, and the turtle-spiders were still making that keening noise. I looked down and saw something that curdled my blood. Under my feet were a dozen sharpened stakes, all pointed upward, and fixed in place with what looked like
concrete.

  I closed my eyes and tried to get a better grip on the ragged dirt edge. My fingers began to slip. “Butterfly’s butt,” I said again. “This isn’t the way I wanted this day to go.” I braced one of my feet against the wall. If I had to fall, maybe I could avoid the worst of the stakes. Then I could wait for Mr. Happiness to come over and take a looksee. Trapped in a pit would make it easy to pick me off.

  Or he might apologize, help me out, offer me a cup of coffee that could have come from Peet’s in San Francisco, (Peet’s made one called The Black Tie. It was layered condensed milk, iced coffee, chicory-infused syrup, and other luscious goodness, and the inanity of my thoughts bounced about in my head), and agree to be the newest technological representative of our ever-growing group of nice humans. Ever the optimist, I adjusted my position. The dirt at the edge began to crumble.

  “Little help here!” I yelled. I wasn’t sure whom I was yelling to. The pixies couldn’t do anything for me except watch. Clearly, they didn’t want to cross into this bubble, a fact which they might have mentioned earlier. The guy from the tunnel probably didn’t want to come out until he knew if I was alone or not. The turtle-spiders didn’t look like they had the upper-body strength to do me any favors. “I have instant cappuccino and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in my backpack!”

  Anything that would give me the edge. No pun intended.

  When I fell, it was almost anticlimactic. Turns out that those stakes were fixed in concrete. Someone had spent a lot of time on them. I didn’t appreciate the effort.

  Chapter 4

  Lulu’s Sordid Past

  The Past – San Francisco, California

  The man ringing the handbell was in his late forties. I took his measure over a matter of milliseconds. He was a little younger than my father, but I liked that he wasn’t the same age as I was. Why? Perhaps it was that older meant more paternal? Older might have meant safer, which was patently untrue. He was a tall man with white-streaked black hair. He had the cool sideburns; snow white sideburns faded into the darkness on the sides of his head. I would have said he’d done it deliberately, but I knew without asking that he hadn’t. His eyes were the color of the fifty-year-old Glenfiddich in my father’s study. (I had sampled it in a fit of annoyance that my parents had forgotten my 21st birthday. What I didn’t know was that the bottle cost more than my first car, but my father quickly pointed out that fact when he realized I’d enjoyed a two-day bender on his posh whiskey.)