Dream State

by K. Z. Howell

  She waited only a minute, when there were no more sounds echoing along the rock she slipped out and timidly took off for the open area. She peeked out from the shadow of a tall column at the very edge and saw seven men with guns speeding toward the end of the crevasse. Her blood ran cold as she realized will’s ruse had worked. He was leading them away, but that meant he would soon be at their mercy. A sound drew her attention; she looked up and waited as the drone passed overhead and curved left away from her planned direction. As soon as it was out of sight she ran as hard as she could for the opening and didn’t pause as she passed through and turned right. She had two hundred yards of open space to clear before she would be back in the protection of the narrow canyon beyond and out of sight of the men or the drone. She had been here twice with Will, the path back to the Old Miller cabin was through a series of twisting and deep ravines. This late in the day she would be in almost full darkness as she moved. She ran full out, expecting to hear a shout or feel a bullet at any moment.

  She made it to the next rift and kept going. The winding, dimly lit trail was difficult to follow. She almost fell several times as an unseen stone turned under her feet. She backed off of her pace. Twisting an ankle would leave her helpless and trapped. Pausing to catch her breath, she turned and listened. There was no sound but that of the wind as it wound its way along the canyons many rifts and crevasses.

  She started back along the shadowy path at a steady jog, her eyes rarely looking ahead in her concentration on her own footsteps. She suddenly found herself at the edge of a more brightly lit open area. She recognized it from her previous visits. There were two exits but she couldn’t remember whether the one she needed was the wide one that led to her left or the narrow one directly in front of her. She scanned the sky overhead, when she saw no sign of the spy craft she bolted for the wide path and ran nearly a hundred yards before she realized that she had chosen wrong. This trail was level and had boulders strewn along the floor. The one she needed sloped upward and led out of this canyon to a narrow strip of flat escarpment before sloping down to the cabin.

  Jen sprinted back to the opening and checked for the men or the drone before running hard for the narrow ravine and her way out. The sun was setting quickly below the canyon rim. She sped along the slope as fast as she could, her legs pounding the sandy stone and her lungs burning at the exertion. She burst out onto the flat plain and didn’t slow down or look back. She had no choice but to risk it. There was a half mile of flat open nothingness before it would slope back down and carry her out of view from anyone or anything on the surface.

  The strain on her legs and the gasp of her breathing forced her to slow just as she reached the far slope. Her eyes burned from the sweat but she could still just make out the cabin to her left. It was nestled at the bottom of the slope with its back to a steeper section. The Millers had lived in it for over sixty years and had been close friends of Wills parents. They had both passed away last year, Mr. Miller from a stroke and soon his wife of 63 years from a broken heart. They had never had children and left the old place to Wills parents. Now it was where Will and Jen had always come to get away for a weekend since graduating college and moving to Sonoma. Will kept his old Honda motorcycle here in the shed. He had taught Jen to ride it on the flats and they came out often to ride and just feel the quiet.

  Right now though, Jen felt nothing but her own heart pounding in her chest and the exhaustion of her run. She had no time to rest. She ran into the cabin and grabbed the old Honda’s key from the coffee table and her small travel bag. She made sure her purse and her phone were still in it and went straight to the shed. The dusty blue bike was sitting where they had left it. She checked the tank, almost empty. She spilled a little gas down the side as her hands shook but she needed to get as far away as she could before she stopped.

  With the tank topped off she rolled it out, her eyes scanning the darkening sky for any sign of the drone. She straddled the bike and turned the key, the motorcycle was old but Will took excellent care of it. It cranked on the first try and purred quietly as she strapped on her helmet. Ready to go, she suddenly lost all energy. The fear and the sense of urgency had sapped her will for a moment. She drooped, her arms falling to her sides like dead limbs on a tree. Tears filled her eyes and for a moment she couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t feel. She sat lifeless on the humming bike until all sensation left her and only the wetness on her cheeks remained to prove that she had ever been.

  Years later or mere seconds, Jen didn’t know, she felt her body turn itself back on with a jolt and a deep breath. She brought the kickstand up and pulled out onto the dirt road. There was still enough light to drive and she didn’t want the only headlight for miles to be hers. Pointing the Honda west she rolled toward the highway sixteen miles away, only turning the headlight on when she began encountering traffic as she neared the crossroad. She had decided that her only real option was to go as far as she could away from this area. She had enough fuel to make it over 100 miles and even though she was parched and hungry she didn’t want to stop until she absolutely had to. Without thinking she turned east when she reached the highway.

  Will stopped again. He knew the men were still behind him somewhere among the boulders that packed this area of the canyon. The sun was so low on the horizon now that the shadows of the rocks were hiding the smaller rocks. He had run straight into one already, he needed to slow down or risk breaking a leg and becoming a sitting duck for his pursuers. He stood in the dark shadow of a very tall stone and carefully looked for the men. He needed to know that all of them were still on his trail. Jen must surely be gone by now if she hadn’t been captured. There, just coming out into the more open area about a hundred yards away. He counted seven men. That meant they still thought Jen was with him. He scanned the sky, he hadn’t noticed before but he couldn’t hear the drone anymore.

  He moved to the other side of the rock and saw it he thought. It was moving away and looked tiny against the falling sun. It must have been running low on fuel and now that threat was diminishing as fast as the light was failing. He readied himself, he was only a few hundred yards away from the canyons mouth. That meant he would soon be unable to use the stones to mask his movement or the fact that he was alone.

  One last dash. If he could make to the opening ahead of the armed men he might be able to sprint to the other outlet and then lose them on the old miners path. There were dozens of abandoned shafts along that trail and any one of them would hide him. He made his decision and dashed out, running full tilt for the cover of another series of tall stones and deep shadows.

  He didn’t hear the shot. Three steps into his Hail Mary run he felt something hit his side and throw him to the ground. He was still telling his legs to move him forward, but they wouldn’t listen. Something wet soaked through his shirt, reminding him cruelly how thirsty he was. As he lay there he saw it pooling on the dry rock in front of his eyes. Just before it became too dark to see he marveled at how black his blood looked in the shadow.

  “Dammit, Martin! Our orders were to take them alive!” NSA Special agent Art Simms said.

  “What them? I told you an hour ago he was drawing us away from the girl, and my orders were to take her alive. Mills never said anything about taking him alive.” NSA Field agent Stan Martin retorted angrily.

  Martin continued, the heat and the brutal chase giving an exasperated edge to his tone. “That man knows the terrain and he knows the environment. We all saw the maps, if he made it to the other rift he could have hidden for days in a mine shaft with us searching for the girl and obviously she ain’t fucking here.”

  Field agent Ramirez chimed in, “Knew the terrain. This one’s gone.” He said quietly. “Your shot grazed the arm and went straight into the chest. The kid never had a chance.”

  Simms pursed his lips and stared daggers at Martin. The other field operators gathered around the body, waiting for the pissing contest to explode or for Simms to issue new or
ders. They were all experienced soldiers and operators, they were aware of the problems that came with killing an American civilian on an op and this debacle was under the supervision of a known hardass, Director Mills. Martin was toast if this op went balls up because of his impatience and none of them looked forward to the Director finding out.

  Simms stayed silent for several minutes. He ran a dozen possible scenarios through is mind and none of them ended with the girl in his custody now. He had known the boy was drawing the, away from his girlfriend. He actually admired that kind of loyalty, he had planned to run him to ground and use him to find the girl. Stan Martins impatience and a .308 caliber bullet had brought that plan to a screeching halt. Director Mills would have a hissy fit over that. She had made it plain that her most important target was the girl, but she had made it clear as day. She had wanted both.

  Simms sighed, “Ramirez, call in the incident. Have a team come secure the body. Then call for another search team, they must have a camp here somewhere. I doubt she would be dumb enough to go there and wait for us to show up, but maybe we’ll get lucky. Also, have a BOLO sent out to the locals, if she somehow makes it out of this God forsaken rock garden maybe some Barney Fife will pick her up on the roadside for us.”

  The team followed him as he headed back to the road and their vehicles. As he walked, Simms got on his radio and called their contact at the Air Force base, he wanted another drone sent out to check the canyon. Maybe the girl was lost in the dark, an infrared scan of the area would pick her out easily soon. The desert temperature was already falling. Soon a warm and lost woman would stand out like a lighthouse.

  Dream State

  Chapter 6

  There is, I believe, a universal connection between all men.

  This connection is accessed through dreaming. That is certain.

  Professor August Bench

  North Eastern New Mexico

  Jen sat in the corner of the too bright and too loud truck stop diner. Her hands barely registering the heat of her coffee cup against the bare flesh. Her eyes darted around the room, the garish orange booths and the rust speckled stainless steel of the chairs made no impression on her mind. That was lost in her desperate attempt to pick out any familiar face that may indicate she had been followed. She saw nothing, she hadn’t really expected too. Whoever had been stalking her over the last few weeks had obviously made their move in the canyon and only Will’s bravery had allowed her to escape.

  But escape to what? The old motorcycle had carried her this far, well over a hundred miles now from where she had last seen Will and the stone of the desert canyon. Over a hundred miles since men with guns had come to find them. She had no idea why they had come for them, no idea who “they” were. She had managed to slip out of their grasp, but only because Will had sacrificed himself to lead them away and give her the chance. He was now in their hands, or worse. That thought forced her eyes to close and her hands to bring the steaming cup to her lips in the vain hope of holding off the tears. It failed as she felt the first drop roll down her dusty cheek.

  Jennifer shook her head. No! Will is fine. They wouldn’t hurt him, after all they went to great lengths to track them and sent many men to find them. That proved they wanted them alive and well for something. She knew she was grasping at straws, but it worked. She regained some measure of control and forced herself to think about what came next. She had ridden east, away from the New Mexico desert on the only highway nearby.

  Her home with Will had been his home state, hers was Oregon but if those men were still looking for her, she could not go back to Spokane. Besides, her only family left there now was her grandparents and they both lived in a retirement center. Her parents had moved with her to New Mexico years ago, now that she had graduated college they had retired to Florida. She needed a plan, one that kept her under the radar.

  She got her phone out of her bag and almost turned it on. She read the news, like everyone else she knew that it was an easy matter for her to be tracked through it. She remembered a television show she had watched only a few months ago that had shown how easy it was for even a stalker to track a person through their phone, anyone organized enough to track her and will with a military drone would have no problem finding out exactly where she was if she used it. Now, all of those action movies Will had watched with her paid off. She walked over to the truckers shop and found a cheap reusable pre-paid cell phone. It was nothing fancy but it was cheap and no one would know it was hers. When she paid the clerk, she asked if it was hard to set up and the clerk told her it was already usable, he mentioned that a lot of the truckers used them because having a regular phone on one network often wouldn’t work well and the throwaways cost more to use but would connect to any network available.

  Jennifer went back to her booth just as her order arrived. While she ate, she opened the package and tried the phone. It was pre-charged and only took a few minutes to figure out. Now she had a way to call or text, but who?

  Benji!

  Benji lived near Amarillo, it was several hundred miles but he was the closest friend she knew. Even after college, Benji, Will Jen and Kathryn had remained very close. She and Will had gone back to New Mexico, Benji had found a job working for an oil drilling company in Texas and Oklahoma. Kathryn had moved to Indianapolis and become an on air reporter for a local television station. Will had been flabbergasted when Jen had told him that Professor Powell had gone with her. He had left his teaching position and was now working for a think tank that did intelligence analysis for international corporations.

  She hesitated. Whoever was after her would probably know about Benji. Even with a new number, a call from this close would be suspicious if they were also listening in on Benji. She decided to wait. If she could make it across the Texas line then it would not be out of the ordinary for a new number to be ringing Benji’s phone. His popularity with the ladies had not diminished after college. A womans voice would not be out of the ordinary. Satisfied that she had at least some semblance of a plan, Jen finished her food and topped off the gas in the old Honda. It was a long way to Texas and she was already tired but she needed more distance between her and those men.

  NSA Research and Development Center

  Arlington, Virginia

  Kendra Mills sat in the conference room with her immediate superior, Robert Hall. His superior, Assistant Director for National Security Kurt Minuchen was also present via video conference. Director Mills was carefully observing the facial expressions of both men as best she could. She realized that looking for tells in the faces of professional spies was a useless gesture, but continuing her position here at the NSA depended on what these men thought of the briefing they were listening to from her lead technician, Sharon Daunten.

  “The last experiment brought together all four elements of the project” she said, flipping to the next page in the Powerpoint presentation. “This slide shows the digital EEG as we introduce the different wavelengths to the computer. Watch as the last one is added in.”

  The screen showed the four bars of the dreaming ‘brain’ control line and the new, digital version they had developed. As each wavelength was fed into the machine, the wavelengths that the machine was sending and receiving began to change. Each successive addition bringing it closer and closer to being a match for the four graphs of the theoretical model that Kendra Mills had supplied. Dr. Daunten was unaware that the model was actually that of a real human and that her job was to emulate that real brain in her machine. Robert Hall knew though, and when the last wavelength had been added and the graphs matched perfectly his face did, at last, register a reaction. The almost imperceptible uplift of his eyebrow was a relief to Mills.

  As Dr. Daunten gathered her things and left, Mills gestured for her to leave the powerpoint on. Once the scientist had closed the door behind her, Mills typed in her passcode and continued.

  “What you see here on the upper four graphs is our ability to make a machine duplicate a dreaming human br
ain.” She tapped another button and a new graph appeared under the old. This graph showed three EEG lines, each one representing another frequency. “Now, just because we can make the machine emulate a dreaming brain doesn’t mean we can direct it or control who the machine ‘reads’.”

  “These three on the bottom represent the final steps in our attempt to recreate the Cayce phenomenon and actually control what we see and whom we see. Our experiments so far have been successful in seeing the sleeping mind of random people. But seeing some house painter in Philly is not our goal. The Russian foreign minister is and that will require the three other bands to match.”

  She played the video of the experiment, the three additional graphs each gained an active, new line. As the replay progressed it became obvious that the new lines were in no way a match for the lines Mills had tried to match from the experiments of Professor Bench.

  “As you can see, we have reached a tipping point that we have no means of crossing.

  Mills saw the tiny flicker of understanding cross Director Halls face. “Without an understanding of how these other frequencies were produced, we cannot proceed to the final phase.”

  A.D. Minuchen seemed perturbed “Doctor Mills, I was given to understand that you were involved in the original trials that produced the results you are trying to duplicate. Was I misinformed?”

  “No sir. I was the Chief Administrator on the Dream State project for Professor Bench. The problem is that just as the experiments began to show their true potential, the financial grant was expiring. I was being kept out of the loop as the university began rearranging personnel and Professor Bench was, to put it mildly, going senile I believe. He began doctoring and often times, falsifying the results he recorded in my absence. His untimely death from a stroke made it impossible to locate the files from the last few months.”