Forest of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  I could cut the rope. I could slice at him. I could jump the railing and run toward the north and hope my brain hadn’t been broken. I could do a dozen things.

  My arm made a nearly 180-degree movement as I slammed the knife into Theo’s hand and pinned the palm against one of the suspension wires. I don’t know how it was possible, but the knife sank into the wire and held him there. As he shrieked, I let go and backed away, my fingers yanking at the second knife. A moment after that, the rope was cut.

  I didn’t hesitate in climbing up the side of the barrier and thrusting myself over it. I looked back to see Theo yanking at the blade. He howled with pain and cursed me vigorously. The wind picked up and sang a tune in time with his words. He jerked at the knife once, then twice, and the third time he put his body weight into it. The hand came away from the wire while he cried out with triumph. The knife slipped away, twinkled once in the meager sunlight, and was gone. I immediately saw what he didn’t see.

  Theo had jerked his hand so much that he leaned backward over the edge of the girder. His weight caused him to overcompensate, but he was too far to the outside. He basically overbalanced and tipped over the edge. I saw his bloody fingers reach for the cut end of the rope, but his hand slipped over it and then it was too late. There was a look on his face as his eyes connected with mine. It was equal parts bewilderment and fear as he comprehended what was happening to him. Abruptly, he disappeared.

  I was so astonished that I couldn’t move for a moment. I stepped closer to the barrier and looked down. I didn’t see anything, not even a splash from where he had gone in. Four seconds had passed in what seemed like an instant.

  Theophilus was gone.

  I glanced at the knife in my hand and wondered how someone had gotten the edge to be so sharp. I sat down and took a deep breath. Even while adrenalin coursed through my veins and my heart still thundered, I started cutting my hair off. A promise was a promise, after all.

  As I systematically hacked away at my hair, I remembered another one of Poppops’s favorite Bible quotes. “‘Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you,’” I said. It was all the memorial Theo was going to get.

  Just a few minutes later, two people stopped near me, but not too near me. I knew they were thinking that I would run screaming if they got any closer than they did. Both of them held their hands in the air to show they weren’t armed. I looked up at them and realized they had come from the north. One was just a teenage boy with orange-red hair and blue eyes. He stared at me as if I had horns on my head. The other one was a large man with salt-and-pepper hair and the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. He had an equally awestruck expression on his face. I had an idea it wasn’t because I looked like a supermodel at the moment.

  “I’m Leander,” the older one said. He jerked a thumb at the teenager. “He’s Gideon. We have a place up the coast. It’ll be safe. There’s no one like that one—” he pointed off the side of the Gate— “there.”

  “I have a body to bury in San Fran,” I said.

  “You need a doctor,” Gideon said.

  “You have one of those?”

  “A surgeon,” Gideon said. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  I paused in cutting my hair. They both looked at me like I was nuts; maybe I was a little at the moment. Louise cut in then. “Someone can protect you there, stupid,” she whispered in my ear. “You need that. You should do whatever you need to do to survive.”

  “Who was the one who spoke in my head?” I asked the two people. “Besides Louise I mean.”

  Gideon glanced at Leander. Beyond them I saw another small group of people approaching. There were even women with them, and none of them looked particularly repressed. More importantly, no one was wearing sackcloth.

  I twisted the knife in my hand and finished my hair. Then I got up and readied myself for Louise Part II.

  Lulu and the Sound of a Distant Bell

  The Present - Colorado

  I woke up again. I was nearly surprised that I had, in fact, woken up at all. My shoulder ached. My thigh ached. For a long moment I was confused about where I was. Was I in San Fran again? Waiting for Theophilus to take another crack at me? Or was I under a mountain in Colorado waiting for another whackjob to do a number on me?

  The cloud began to lift from me, and I opened my eyes to see the darkness of a dimly lit room. The rechargeable lantern sat on the vintage green footlocker. It had once been some kind of office, but now it was a makeshift clinic. I lay on the same cot from my dream. Three other cots sat next to mine. The last one had someone in it who was attached to an IV line. The saline bag hung on a clip on the closest wall.

  I also had the same military-issue blanket lying across me. Someone had stripped away the ripped t-shirt, but they had covered me up. My injured leg was propped on several pillows, and the bandages had been changed. (Probably because I had ripped everything open again when I had freaked out. Or possibly when someone had jumped on me when I freaked out, if I was going to give credit where credit was due.)

  Someone sat in a chair next to the cot and watched me. I couldn’t see their face because it was in the shadows. However, I knew who it was and what it meant, and it wasn’t goody mcgoodness on goodly crackers.

  “What is it with you people?” I asked with only a slight slur in my voice from whatever they’d injected me with. “First it’s Tate with a Taser and then a shot of God knows what in my shoulder. Drugging me isn’t a nice thing to do. Should I mention the pit with the stakes in it?”

  “Have some water,” the person said. A water bottle was proffered. It was like I had told Landers in the dream. I was still breathing, so they must not have wanted me dead yet. However, the day was still young, and I had been known to grate on a person’s nerves. I took the bottle while bracing my elbow on the cot. The blanket slipped a little, and I turned away from the person to crack the seal on the water.

  “It must be nice to have bottled water considering you have freaky albino mermaids swimming around in your reservoir,” I said around a few gulps of Aquafina.

  “Salome told you that wasn’t the one we drink from,” the person chided gently.

  I took a few more gulps of water, not because I was thirsty, but because I wanted to have a few extra moments to quell the fear that was rushing up out of my gut. I thought it was all over, but it wasn’t. (Today’s Facebook status: Why, look who I ran into! #Oldbudsfromthepast.)

  Tate stuck his head in the doorway. There was a bloom of light from behind him, and I guessed someone else was nearby with another one of those rechargeable lanterns. “She looks okay,” he said to the person next to me.

  “I’ve been better,” I said dryly and glanced pointedly at the person. “And I’ve been worse.”

  Tate laughed. “She sounds better, too. Not hysterical. That’s always a plus.”

  I lay back on the cot and balanced the Aquafina on my stomach. “Tell me, is everyone in the facility like you?”

  Tate made a tsking sound. “You should know we’re all different. Some of us are better than others. I’ve heard that you went to D.C. with Sophie, and she killed the President by making him vanish like all the others. Doesn’t that make her just like me? Or is every murder different?”

  “Not exactly,” I said easily. “There were circumstances that you had to be aware of.” The dead President had been power mad. He’d had his navy lackey kidnap animal familiars and blackmail the humans into doing things. Sometimes he did it by threatening other people. He’d done it to Landers. Landers.

  “Sounds like you’re a wee bit biased,” Tate said. “Certainly there were circumstances in what happened to all of us.”

  “You killed and ate people, Tate,” I snapped. “What circumstances could justify that? There was and still is canned food on supermarket shelves. It wasn’t like you were on a mountain in the Andes after your plane crashed, playing ‘Let’s make beef jerky out of Harry.’”

  The pe
rson to my side sat forward, and his head came into the light. The hair was still black with gray streaks. The sideburns were still white. In addition, he’d grown a beard that was all white. It made him look older. His nose wasn’t the same. It had healed crookedly, and it gave his messianic face a little character.

  “It’s good to see you again, Hasadiah,” Theophilus said to me.

  Chapter 12

  Lulu and Stuff Happening

  The Present – Colorado

  “That isn’t my name,” I said very slowly, “any more than yours was Theophilus.”

  “Martin’s fine,” Theo said easily, and it was extremely difficult for me to keep thinking of him as anything but Theo, although I had previously made a point of calling him Marty to be irritating.

  “Does this place—” I waved at the interior of the room, indicating Cheyenne Jr.— “have the same effect on you as it does him?” I pointed at Tate. My innards were quivering because I had come face to face with the biggest fear that I’d ever known. I had fought a hydra before, and the thought of the hydra eating me didn’t make me quake as much as confronting Theo again. (There was the whole Theo’s-Dead-Thing, too. Most people who fell/jumped/dived off the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t live. The grim reality that there weren’t many post-change rescue services to have dragged him out of the bay didn’t add to his survivability factor. Seeing him on the podium was a jaw-dropper and that was before I temporarily lost touch with reality.)

  I cautiously eyed Theo from top to bottom, registering all the threats that he was or that he could be. He wore another one of those military t-shirts like Salome had been wearing. He also wore a loose pair of jeans with fraying ends and a ripped knee. (Fresh out of sackcloth?) His feet were bare. He wasn’t holding anything in his hands. Those scotch-colored eyes looked at me expectantly, and they were exactly the color I remembered. It was the same shade of that whiskey which sat on Daddy’s sideboard in his study alongside all the other bottles of expensive liquors like the Dalmore 62, Pasión Azteca tequila, and Bacardi Millennium. (For all I knew, they were still sitting there to this day.)

  “It’s like taking Prozac, lithium, and olanzapine all together,” Theo said mildly. “One foot outside the zone, and you’re a madman with an insane purpose and ready to die for your God. However, your God could be the radio or the voices in your head or the sound of honeybees flying around looking for flowers. Inside— ” he paused and waved a hand at the world around us, the interior of a Cold War relic— “you’re normal. You feel normal. You act normally. You think normally. The world doesn’t stab at you with thin, deadly stilettos and shove you into lunacy.”

  I swallowed convulsively. Tate looked on as I glanced at him. I was surrounded by them. And were some of the others the same? It was possible. Was this place a magnet for those who had become mentally unbalanced after the change? That was possible, too. I finished the Aquafina because I couldn’t think of what else to do.

  I mentally composed a list of why I was here. None of the things I came up with were good. Furthermore, it had never helped to argue with Theophilus or whatever he wanted to call himself at the moment.

  “Okay,” I said carefully. “You’ve got a good toehold here. That’s positive. Why bring me down here? Why not dump me outside your…zone, and be done with it?”

  Theo smiled. Dear God, it gave me the creeps. I couldn’t help the shiver that coursed down my back and arms. Goosebumps rose immediately. My fingers itched to find the KA-BAR. “You’ve got a suspicious mind now, Hasadiah,” he remarked.

  “My name is Lulu,” I said, keeping the tone as neutral as I could. (If I had a suspicious mind it was because Theo had taught me that I needed to have one.) “It was then, too.”

  “I seem to recall it was both Lulu and Louise,” Theo said. He stroked his beard with his right hand. I had the idea that he’d been watching Kill Bill: Vol. I. Possibly there had been a Quentin Tarantino festival before the James Whale one.

  “Lulu is what I am now,” I said.

  “And you weren’t the best person,” Theo went on blithely.

  “Pot and kettle,” I snapped. “You want to see the scars on my back? You made them. Those were your creations!”

  Theo deliberately lifted his head up so that I could see the scars from where I tried to strangle him. I hadn’t realized I had gouged his skin so deeply. He also lifted up his left hand, and I could see the vivid scars where I had stabbed him through the flesh. “You still carry those little knives,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

  I didn’t have them now, nor was Mr. Stabby available. “You’re not asking me,” I said. “What difference does it make?”

  “Poor little rich girl from the Heights,” Theo said. “Trapped in a world not of her making. What did she have to do to survive? Did she murder someone to stay alive? Did she commit mortal sins?” It was ironic, but I don’t think he was intentionally trying to taunt me, but rather, trying to make a point.

  I gathered the blanket around me because I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want to talk with Theophilus. I didn’t want to be in this cold place. I wanted to be outside where I could feel the sun and have a little hope that I had redeemed myself. “I know what I was,” I said, “and I know what I am now.”

  Theo smiled coldly. I shivered again. I had a thought that percolated into my brain: If I killed him right now, would he come back again? I immediately felt shame at the thought. I hadn’t tried to kill him when he fell off the Gate. I’d wanted him to leave me alone and not kill me. However, when I had wrapped the chain around his neck, it had all been homicidal behavior, no question about it. I could go on and on in my head about this.

  “How are you feeling, Lulu?” Tate asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I wasn’t okay. Everything still ached. Some parts were worse than others. I felt good enough that I could give certain people a run for their money. The plastic bottle crumpled in my hand. I would have crushed it against my forehead in a power display if I’d thought it would do any good.

  “Good,” Theo said loudly and I jumped. The Aquafina in my hand diminished in size by half, and I forced myself to relax my grip before bits of plastic cut into my palm. “Salome will help you get dressed and then we’ll take a little tour. It’ll be educational.”

  “That would be swell,” I said insincerely. Theo glanced at me once, stood up, and left the room. Salome slipped into the room holding another rechargeable lantern, and Tate grinned crookedly at me. I didn’t like his smile any more than I liked Theo’s. “It’s so nice to see you’ve made friends, Tate,” I murmured so that it wouldn’t carry down the hall.

  “I understand a little of your sarcasm, Lulu,” Tate said. “I get that you’re afraid. All alone here, meeting someone you thought was dead. That’s a good story, by the way. Hanging people off the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe I would have thought of that when I was crazy, or maybe not. But try to go with it on this one. You’re not going to be harmed now.”

  I looked at Salome, and she gazed at me blankly. “How about you? Are you a serial killer when you’re outside the zone?”

  “I’ve made my share of mistakes,” she said softly. One hand presented me with the crutch that I’d originally used.

  Tate chuckled. “Is there anyone around who can’t say that?”

  He had me there. He abruptly exited, but his voice carried into the room. “The big guy wants her in the security center in ten.”

  “The big guy?” I asked.

  “Martin,” Salome answered. She moved to the footlocker, putting both her lantern and the lantern there on the floor in order to open it. She pulled out another plain t-shirt and a pair of urban camouflage pants. She added a black military issue belt. “These pants will fit loosely over your wound. We stitched it shut again and gave you another couple of shots. You should be feeling better pretty quickly. The doc said you shouldn’t have to worry about an infection.”

  The folded clothing landed on my lap. The belt bu
ckle clanked against the metal side of the cot.

  “Do you need help getting dressed?” Salome asked. “I mean, you might get dizzy or something.”

  I carefully swung my legs over the side of the cot, bracing the crutch against the wall. I disregarded everyone else in the room. I let the blanket fall and let Salome get an eyeful of my bare back. Let her think what she wanted to think. If she had been standing behind Tate the whole time, then she knew where the scars came from, and they hadn’t been found in a cabbage patch. “What’s with the guy in the last cot?” I asked instead of answering. I took stock of everything while I waited for her to answer. It hurt, ached, pulsed, and was revealed to me that I had been rode hard and put up wet. I wasn’t, however, dizzy. Yippee. One thing was going right for me.

  “Anthony got stabbed,” Salome said. “The doc operated on him, but the doc wasn’t a surgeon. He was a general practitioner, so he wasn’t sure if he got Anthony all perky. Guess if he dies, then that was a no.”

  Way to be compassionate, Salome. “So who stabbed poor Anthony?” On the inside I hoped it wasn’t Tate, Theo, or someone who would come and stab me, too.

  Salome smiled secretively. “Well, that’s something like a horse of a different color.”

  I slipped the t-shirt over my head wincing because I could feel where I had been given a shot and where Tate had tasered me. I wished I had someone like the firefly pixies to watch my back, but I was alone here, as alone as I ever was. Just when I thought I was getting the hang of being a responsible adult, something else happened. It was probably a decree in a rulebook I hadn’t read. Underlined and in bold, too.