Dream War

by Stephen Prosapio

  “For later,” the soldier yelled. He then pushed the man, redirecting him back into the flow of the crowd on the Tangenziale.

  It must have been a lie. It made no sense not to move as many people as possible out of danger as quickly as possible. Given what Stanley knew of the Sogno di Guerra plans, he trusted no one, especially those dressed as military.

  As foot traffic and Vespas streamed past the lines of cars, people began to abandon their vehicles.

  Three million people were bottlenecked behind them.

  The radio spit out news of explosions along the freeways to the south, and the railroad’s failure to assist in the evacuation. The reports hinted of sabotage. Meanwhile, the massive ash cloud had grounded all flights out of Capodichino.

  A lime green Peugeot pulled out of the crawling line of cars and approached the roadblock. Its driver gestured to the vacant freeway. One of the soldiers waved back and forth, indicating there would be no exceptions. The tip of his rifle twice pointed toward the detour. The scene played out in Stanley’s mind before it actually happened. The vehicle lurched forward, its gears cranking and churning. It had gone no more than thirty feet before machine gun fire sprayed the car with a torrent of bullets. The Peugeot stopped abruptly, its horn blaring until the guard reached in and silenced it.

  Palpable shock ran through the crowd. Italy had been no stranger to murder, and the culture supported an attitude of minding its own business. However, the act of cruelty in the face of crisis was less a straw, and more a tree trunk breaking the camel’s back. Panic ensued. People poured out of their cars and began running down the Tangenziale.

  Two soldiers shouted in Italian and English. “For the safety of all, our orders must be followed!”

  Two army helicopters advanced from the north. They flew low, just a hundred feet above the vacant freeway, their searchlights sweeping back and forth across the mass of humanity. Soldiers on the ground took note and huddled.

  Stanley got out of his car and considered his options.

  Screw Ponterosso. Screw the Sogno di Guerra!

  Vespas continued to zip through the stalled traffic. Two vehicles ahead, a stocky, middle-aged man exited his car; his features resembled those of a bulldog. He slipped around to his trunk, opened it, and reached inside. Stanley understood what he was up to even before the man pulled out the gun. As the next motorbike approached, he extended his arm and fired two quick shots. The scooter careened into a white Fiat, spilling both driver and passenger. The man held his gun at chest-height and surveyed the crowd as he strode to the crashed bike. No one dared get too close.

  The passenger threw off her helmet, revealing a head of black curly hair. She pried her leg from under the driver and kneeled over him.

  “Massimo!”

  She pressed two hands to his chest, but the widening blood circle on his white T-shirt left no doubt that he was dead.

  The helicopters passed overhead, the beat of their blades momentarily drowning out everything. Then, they circled back toward the soldiers at the roadblock.

  Stanley walked past the couple. As the shooter lifted his leg over the bike, Stanley pulled out his own gun.

  “Drop your weapon!”

  There was no reaction. Stanley pressed his gun to the swarthy man’s neck.

  “I said, drop it!”

  The shooter let his gun fall to the ground; immediately, two bystanders pulled him off the bike. Others punched and kicked him.

  Stanley retrieved the fallen gun. Then, with a wave of his gun toward anyone paying him attention, he commandeered the bike.

  I can’t drive and shoot at the same time.

  He looked back at the girl sobbing next to her former driver’s body. She was as good as any to trust.

  “If you want to live, come with me,” he said.

  She looked up, tears dripping from her hooked nose.

  “I said, get on if you want to live!”

  The girl took a last look at the body as she rose to her feet. In the distance beyond her, Vesuvius continued to spew pumice, earth, and ash from its crater, the northerly winds blowing it all onto the city’s packed streets. In the distance, small rocks began to cover the road with a layer of gray, volcanic soot. Larger stones, having dropped thousands of feet, instantly killed those they struck.

  She picked up her helmet and straddled the bike behind him.

  “Put this around your neck,” he said, taking off and holding up his medallion. She cast him a suspicious look.

  “Just do it.” He motioned for her to duck her head. She did. He draped the chain over her neck, and let the medallion fall to her body.

  He handed her the guns.

  “Take these. Shoot anyone who gets in our way. Anyone, especially…” He nodded toward the soldiers.

  She shrugged.

  “Okay, screw them.” She leaned into him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  Stanley kick-started the bike.

  Just beyond the overpass, one of the army helicopters had landed. Several Italian military personnel leapt from it and hastened toward the Sogno di Guerra soldiers manning the roadblock. The Sogno di Guerra troops waited until the real soldiers were close, and then opened fire.

  Screams erupted. Already panicked, now the crowd tried to flee the gunfire, but in the crush of humanity, couldn’t retreat. A wave of people ran up the Tangenziale ramp, shoving those in front of them up out of the way or to the ground. Some hopped onto cars to avoid the mad rush; others, not so fortunate, were trampled. A group of young people climbed the fence that lined the freeway to escape the stampede.

  The airborne helicopter began firing at the Sogno di Guerra as the other helicopter lifted. The Sogno di Guerra took cover behind their vans or beneath the underpass. They aimed their guns skyward and unleashed a barrage of bullets. One helicopter attempted to fix the Sogno di Guerra with cover fire, while the other swung around to flank.

  Stanley glanced over his shoulder. Behind them, bodies had begun to pile up in the gaps between the abandoned cars.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  The girl was right. With the Sogno di Guerra preoccupied, he’d ignore the detour and ride to safety.

  Stanley revved the engine. It whined in a high-pitch octave, and then lurched out into the open space. He halted just before the roadblock. Others followed. Sogno di Guerra gunfire stopped. There were shouts in Italian. The girl gasped. Gunfire began anew.

  My God! They’re shooting at the crowd! AT US!

  Stanley turned his head and shouted, “Fire!”

  He pointed the bike to the open road. Luzveyn Dred had promised death for His cause meant rebirth upon His ascension. Stanley had nothing to lose. He opened the throttle.

  POP – POP – POP – POP

  The girl’s rapid discharge emptied one gun’s cartridge. The spray of bullets couldn’t have done much more than provide covering fire. The empty gun clattered to the pavement below.

  He felt her shift the other gun to her right hand. They passed under the shadow of the overpass.

  Again, she fired off several shots. Bullets whizzed by. As the vacant asphalt stretched in front of him, Stanley felt a burning pinch in his lower ribs.

  What the hell?!

  The bike jerked to the left, and he almost lost control. The girl blazed off a couple more. The speeding motorbike continued to eat up more and more of the black road and soon, except for the purr of the engine, it was quiet.

  He wondered if she’d hit any of them. Wearing a medallion, anything was possible; each bullet could well have been a bullseye. The wind in his face felt exhilarating, but he struggled to breathe. A sharp pain shot up his right side when she put her hand on his waist. Immediately she pulled back.

  “Are you hit bad?” she shouted in his ear.

  It didn’t register.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re shot. They got you.” She pressed her faceguard against his back.

  The kilometers clicked by. He didn
’t know what to do; he felt tired and cold. And he was so thirsty. Ahead, a large red sign with a huge white letter ‘A’ signaled that they were approaching an Autogrill, a roadside restaurant/gas station. He was slumping forward.

  Even the roar of the motor didn’t mask her concerned tone. “We should stop.”

  Stanley parked the bike beside a row of trees not far from the exit. She got off and stood to the side. It looked as though she’d been shot; blood covered the entire side of her outfit.

  Down deep, Stanley knew it was his blood. His shirt and jacket had absorbed much of it. Stanley’s knees felt weak, his head spun, and breathing was even more difficult than it had been with the wind in his face. His lips were parched and tasted faintly of insecticide. Or was it formaldehyde? He was so thirsty, he couldn’t think straight.

  He stumbled across the cracked concrete sidewalk and sat down on a plastic bench. She gawked at him, but he was too exhausted to be annoyed by pity in her eyes.

  A few scattered Vespas that must also have breeched the roadblock sped past on the freeway toward Rome. Stanley looked up and saw nothing in the sky overhead. Except for the occasional zooming motorbike, it was quiet. No gunfire, no erupting volcano, there weren’t even any birds singing.

  “You will be okay.” Her assurance was not convincing.

  She glanced over her shoulder at another passing motorbike.

  “I want to thank you for what you did,” she said. “You are very brave.”

  Stanley didn’t feel brave. He was shivering and his eyelids were heavy. She was so beautiful that he didn’t want to close his eyes, not yet. He wanted to tell her something so profound about her beauty that she would want to stay with him. But he couldn’t even remember her name. Her name, had he even asked her?

  She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. “I will never forget you.”

  He wanted to call to her but he was too tired to speak, to weak to say anything at all.

  The last thing he saw before his lids dropped was the black-haired girl on the motorcycle, riding away.

  - Chapter Forty Four-

  “So, ya got any bright ideas?” Kat asked. Dark circles of exhaustion framed her eyes. The intense black-light made her look like a vampire.

  Drew shook his still-throbbing head and grimaced. “Afraid not.”

  Hands bound, they were free to walk around the cavernous room; but it did them little good. They had no power inside the castle. Above them a translucent, cathedral ceiling provided distorted views of the dream images in the Spatium Quartus sky.

  Drew walked to a window and looked down. Beasts ten-deep surrounded the castle walls. An army of them packed the entire path leading out. The dead bodies encircling the castle looked like a massive human junkyard.

  From behind, a door slid open. Objects whizzed by quickly. It felt as if the two of them were moving, being rearranged like the set of a play. An instant later, they stood around a flickering, black bonfire.

  Luzveyn Dred was there. His pus-laden flesh popped as he flickered like a shadow.

  “Welcome,” he snarled. “Unless you are here to repent and serve me, coming here was rather foolish.”

  “Fuck you,” Kat said in a calm voice.

  The beast chuckled and waved his tail behind his back.

  “Now, now, no such language in front of the child.”

  As he spoke, Alexis materialized by Luzveyn Dred’s side. She wore the gold medallion she’d taken from the assassin, and held a whip in her right hand. Blood drenched the sleeve of her nightgown, and there were red blotches of it all over her body.

  “What have you done to her?” Drew screamed. “Alexis!”

  She stared blankly ahead.

  Luzveyn Dred wrapped an arm around her. He peered at Drew and mockingly grinned.

  “No need to worry. The blood is not hers.”

  Drew couldn’t move his feet toward Alexis. He bent his knee and tried to pry his foot from the floor until his ankle popped from its socket. Pain shot up his leg.

  “Alexis, can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Leave her alone,” Kat shouted at Dred.

  “Ahh, but alas I cannot,” he said averting his attention to Kat, a wicked smile spread across his dark face. “I have promised to bring her mommy back for her. Sound familiar?”

  “You’re a liar!”

  “Perhaps,” he said without emotion, “sometimes.”

  Luzveyn Dred raised a hand in the air, swirled it around, and then pointed beyond Kat.

  “In this sign I shall conquer!” Luzveyn Dred shouted.

  Kat flew backward, colliding with a wooden cross that had appeared behind her.

  Before Drew could protest, he too was propelled backward, a beam slamming against his spine. His bindings disappeared; his arms stretched out; metal ropes snapped around his wrists, fastening him to the cross.

  Captivity apparently did nothing to squash Kat’s defiance.

  “You’ve got nothin’, dude. I killed your big ugly doofus! Your assassin, went bye-bye.”

  “Ah, Tapusscar, yes,” Luzveyn Dred said moving closer to them. “He was a necessary sacrifice. After all, not only did I get my gold medallion back, I was able to secure this lovely child.” He motioned to Alexis.

  “And where exactly is your boy, Stanley?” Kat asked. It seemed as though she were stalling.

  “It is not time for you to ask questions or make demands. This is my night!”

  In the black sky above, people in all of the dream images screamed in unison.

  Alexis maintained her trance-like stare. She may as well have been a rock or a statue.

  Luzveyn Dred circled them. He seemed to thaw the castle walls. Purplish-black liquid ran down them and disappeared into the floor, but despite the appearance of melting, the walls never seemed to shrink.

  “Enjoy your time up there,” he said motioning to them. “Hundreds of years before Jesus of Nazareth, the Romans used crosses to kill off the army of Spartacus, my people. Ironic is it not, that Christianity has used my symbol for thousands of years?”

  He flickered and swayed from side to side in uneven, rapid motions. He paused, perhaps hoping to bait them into a religious debate. Drew didn’t bite.

  “Over the next several nights, in your world,” Dred continued, “those who do not join me will hang from them and die. The most absurd, perhaps even humorous aspect is that they will think themselves martyrs for some Christ figure. However, the strength that I will bestow upon humankind shall empower you to fight for what is rightfully yours, the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “Really?” Kat asked. “You sellin’ tickets?”

  Despite it all, Drew chuckled.

  “Like we’re buying this crap, dude? Sell ‘Satan’ someplace else.” Her tone was defiant. “You want to continue your war in heaven. This has nothing to do with us. You’re just looking for—”

  “Silence!” Dred bellowed, extending his arm. From nowhere, steel coils wrapped around Kat’s mouth.

  “Your world is in need of this change. Your people are weak.”

  “What exactly do you really know of our world?” Drew asked.

  The shadow warped and contorted before answering.

  “I see what I need to know from your dreams.”

  “What,” Drew repeated as condescendingly as he could manage, “do you know of our world?”

  “I see images and I see tendencies. I wait for moments to enter and assist. I plan for opportunities to join with your world on a massive scale.”

  “To join with our world? Don’t you mean to destroy our world?”

  Luzveyn Dred sneered.

  “Come and see! I see a woman’s corpse lying in a pool of blood. I see her unborn fetus’s blood used to spell words igniting the imaginary revolutions of Charles Manson. Just one generation later, mass murder is the national obsession of a nation that purportedly stands for freedom and justice.”

  “But you choose to see only evil. You ignore the beau
ty, and you detest what is good.” Stalling for time, it was the first thing that came into his mind.

  “You ask me what I know of your world?” Luzveyn Dred focused his full attention on him. “Your response to anger is more anger. Your answer for violence is more violence. Every day, every year, every passing minute, I watch the human race becoming more and more like me!”

  “Then what is it that you really want?”

  “I want to connect your world, to lead it.”

  “Bullshit. It’s not good enough for you to play god in this place—this dimension that you were sentenced to—banished to—that God created to contain you. You want to be a god in our world. In the world He made for us.”

  Alexis still hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked.

  “Spare me your ignorant, psychoanalytical theology,” Luzveyn Dred demanded. “Who are you? What have you contributed to your world? Your people think being a religious person is getting baptized, then abandoning the faith. You believe being a patriot is sometimes going to the polls to vote. Yes, you have stopped drinking, Drew, but I have seen your dreams; you are certainly no saint. In fact, you are a liar most of the time in your waking life, as are most members of the human race. You sit and watch TV, go to the movies, read magazines, while thousands upon thousands die. Most of them rot away from disease and pestilence that you think I create? No, no. Ask your god. Better yet, since you cannot actually speak to him, ask your religious zealots about poverty, death, and pain. All you will get are pathetic rationalizations about not being able to see the big picture. You are treated like imbeciles.”

  “And your way is better?” Drew continued to probe, despite feeling like a fly that had flown into a spider’s web.

  “My people make choices. I tell them what to do. I reward and punish depending on their obedience and performance. You can’t say that about His Holiness.”

  Before Drew could object, the shadow hissed. “You love the little girl so much? There is still time to save her. It took longer than expected to get control of my powerful child. She is undergoing a difficult…adjustment period. Help me and I will spare her life.”