The Dream Hopper (Those Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy Book 2)

by Shawn Mackey

  “He’s coming,” Sentinel said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Draxius.”

  Black zigzags spread across the egg. White light shot out as the lines widened, sending bright rays in several direction, sizzling anything that came in contact. The red egg shattered into shards, which shattered into tinier shards, and then dispersed into nothingness. A white light swallowed everything, and a split second later, only darkness remained. An earth-shaking roar signified that the madness hadn’t ended, I had just been blinded.

  An arm wrapped around my waist and my feet were no longer touching the ground. As my sight returned, I felt the sensation of flying long before I saw the city below. I heard Beatrice yelp next to me after another bestial bellow echoed across the sky.

  “You could’ve warned me to close my eyes,” I said.

  “What’s that sound? Where’s it coming from?” Beatrice panicked.

  “Draxius,” Sentinel said. I felt my feet touch solid ground. I saw the blurry outlines of my two companions, as well as the edge of a rooftop, but not much else.

  “I think you better start explaining,” Beatrice said.

  After a few hard blinks, everything started to come into focus. In the distance, a red-winged lizard circled around the burnt bank. It opened its mouth, letting loose another roar, forked tongue dangling from the side of its maw. A ball of fire shot from its throat and hit the streets below. The flames rolled like a fiery snowball, leaving behind a trail of ash and smoke. The ball crashed into a small building and instantly erupted into an inferno.

  “Wasn’t expecting a dragon,” I muttered.

  “I should have known,” Sentinel said. “Why else would they have burned all that money? It was a sacrifice of money and blood. Damn you, Reaper!”

  “It’s okay,” Beatrice said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “If a guy in a tin suit can kill a dragon with a toothpick, what have you got to be afraid of?”

  “That’s no dragon,” he said. “That’s like calling a tadpole a frog.”

  “Well, kill it while it’s still a tadpole,” I said.

  “Only the Superpower Society could defeat Draxius,” Sentinel said, then whimpered: “They’re dead.”

  I couldn’t blame the poor guy’s fear. Draxius was a fire-breathing lizard-bat the size of jumbo jet. The dragon belted out one more fire ball before perching atop a high tower. It spread its wings with another roar, this one almost triumphant sounding. The way it craned its neck toward us seemed like mockery.

  “This guy needs to get it together,” Beatrice whispered to me.

  “Any ideas?” I asked. She shook her head grimly. As I watched Draxius wiggle his long neck around like a snake, a plan sprung to mind. “I just realized something. Maybe we’re not so doomed after all.”

  “What?” Beatrice asked.

  “Did you see the stuff in Executioner’s head fly up into that thing? Maybe it wasn’t really a sacrifice. Maybe it just had to look like one. Wouldn’t this whole city be a pile of ash by now if that was really Draxius?”

  “Yes!” Sentinel shouted, followed by a bout of merry laughter. Any trace of fear had wholly disintegrated. “That trickster! It’s just another one of his illusions.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. The fire seems pretty real.”

  “Nothing but mechanical mimicry. We’ll make quick work of it,” Sentinel said. “It’ll require teamwork. Luckily, we’ve got the perfect skillsets. Pyre, you’re invulnerable to its flame. Flexigirl, you’re unbreakable wiring. I’ve got a strong enough punch to break it in two.”

  “You sure it’ll be that easy?”

  “Nothing is ever easy when dealing with Executioner. Have courage and we will prevail.”

  Draxius jumped off its stoop with a roar, spread its wings, and glided toward us. The dragon spat another fireball aimed directly at us. Sentinel grabbed Beatrice and me, leaped into the air, and flew at the incoming monstrosity.

  “Pyre, you need to go inside and remove Executioner. Flexigirl, I’ll help you bind its limbs. We need to act quickly,” he said. Before I could question our leader, he hurled me at the screeching dragon. As another torrent of flame formed at the end of its throat, I slipped into its gaping maw, sliding down the pitch-stained tongue and into its dark gullet.

  My entire body felt like it was on fire. It wasn’t the dragon’s fire, but a watery substance ate through my clothes and seeped into my skin. I grabbed onto a yellow gland at the bottom of the throat. My fingers were drenched in the acid, the spongy organ I clung to being its source. I squeezed as hard as I could, bearing the pain much better than Draxius. His screeching had nearly burst my eardrums. Each breath rained the acidic substance upward, accumulating a large glob at the top of its mouth. The pool ignited, and the next breath shot a jet of flames.

  The acid was beginning to dissolve my clothes. Within seconds, I’d be a tumbling down into its gullet and dissolved even quicker from digestive juices. I tested Sentinel’s theory and lit up the yellow gland. It absorbed the flames like a gasoline soaked sponge. The organ started to fall apart, leaving me nothing to grip.

  I hit something wet and soggy before tumbling in a downward arc, hitting something else soggy, and then tumbling again. This happened about a dozen times until I fell into a bright green pool. The liquid burned far more than the flammable acid. I swam through the tiny lake of digestive juices, the excruciating pain fueling my already weary body. Before I could reach the edge, the entire body of liquid flipped over, dumping me and the green juice back upward. I held onto a thick layer of tissue, narrowly dodging a chunky stream of greenish yellow, its contents consisting of soggy bones and half-digested limbs.

  With the beast’s stomach emptied, I continued to climb the tissue, descending further into the bowels. My clothes had been utterly dissolved, as well as a few layers of skin, exposing the pearly white bone of my elbows. I reached the bottom of what I assumed to be the intestinal tract and found another organ. I torched the bean-like shape in a matter of seconds, deciding to wreak even more havoc and burn through as much tissue as possible. I doubted Draxius could survive with melted innards.

  For a creature that spat flames, its insides sizzled up like chewy fat. I focused the fire at the most combustible portion in an attempt to make a pathway. I burned through skin and bone and scale, my own body almost as torn up as the dragon’s by this point. Utterly exhausted and on the verge of collapse, I beat my fists against its stomach lining. A hand burst through and seized me by the throat. I was tossed onto the cold pavement under the bright sun.

  Even at death’s door, I couldn’t deny that the outside of Draxius was more devastated than the inside. Beatrice had expanded her limbs to coil around each of the dragon’s limbs, including her neck around his neck, as well as the fanged jaws, dripping with green and yellow vomit. Sentinel had his arms inside the beast’s open belly like a demented surgeon searching for a tumor with his bare hands. He pulled out a scrawny, balding man with glasses and roughly tossed him onto the pavement.

  “Damn you!” the man shouted, getting to his feet.

  “That wasn’t a robot,” I said. No one seemed to care.

  Beatrice let go of the beast, leaving it to deflate like a hot air balloon. The tough scales now appeared more like rubber than armor. The man in glasses looked at the carnage around him, the streets empty other than corpses and piles of burning wreckage.

  “I was so close,” he growled and then looked at me. “This is all your fault, Pyre. You betrayed us over a woman? With the Superpower Society gone, the city was ours!”

  “You couldn’t even take it. How were you going to keep it?”

  The man’s forehead turned bright pink. He shouted, procuring a knife from his pocket as he charged me. Sentinel put out his foot. The man tripped over it and fell face first, smashing his head against the pavement, shattering his glasses and sending his weapon sliding across the ground.

  “I should have known you were behind this all along, Doctor Manglemann,” S
entinel said. “And you were wrong. The Superpower Society isn’t gone. The members have changed. What do you think, Flexigirl? Or should I say, Flexiwoman?”

  “I quit,” Beatrice mumbled, rubbing her lanky limbs.

  “Who would have thought Pyre would become a cofounder of the new Superpower Society? It truly is a glorious day, my friends, and the dawning of a brave new world!” Sentinel said, raising his fist into the air. “To the future Superpower Society. Huzzah!”

  Chapter 17

  Farewell to an Old Friend

  I found myself beneath a black sky dotted with stars. I looked up from the open field and noticed these stars formed several constellations, appearing to surround the brightest dot of them all: the planet Venus. It was as though every constellation competed for its glimmer. The figures spun and dispersed, reformed and dispersed, all the while the Morning Star remained fixed, indifferent to their cosmic dance.

  A domed structure sat at the hilltop. Through the dim lamplight in the window, the shadowy outline of a man peered into a telescope aimed out the dome’s opening. The stars continued to shift to the left and to the right, as though controlled by some kind of dial. This astronomer was unable to find the right adjustments, and I was starting to get dizzy.

  “Thunder,” said a loud whisper from behind me. I turned to find Beatrice rushing up the hilltop.

  “Lightning,” I said as she joined my side. “You seemed awfully confident it was me.”

  “There’s no one else out here. Isn’t it beautiful? It looks like the sky’s raining stars. But where’s the moon?”

  “You’ll have to ask our new friend.”

  The observatory entrance was wide open, the whole interior visible from the outside. Piles of books and a few long chalkboards full of nonsensical scribbles surrounded a large telescope at the observatory’s circular center. The man was utterly immersed with the sky, completely obvious to our entrance despite the loud footsteps.

  “Nice place,” I said. He leapt backward with a shout, gripping his chest and shaking.

  “You scared to daylights out of me!” he said, inhaling a deep breath with a nervous smile. “Who are you?”

  “We were just passing by. My girlfriend’s interested in astrology, so I insisted we check this place out.”

  “I understand,” he said, rubbing the cottony white hair under his chin. “It’s surprising. Not to sound rude, but you barged in.”

  “My curiosity tends to overstep my manners. Besides, I figured a recluse could use the company. Unless you were suspecting some.”

  “Well,” he said, laughing giddily. Its high pitch made him sound a bit unhinged. “As a matter of fact, I was expecting someone. It’s a bit complicated, however.”

  “Martians?”

  “Not quite,” he said, laughing again as he placed his eyes under the telescope. The moment they gazed through the glass, the star outside once again moved rapidly. “Young lady, did you know all matter can be traced to the same source if you looked back far enough? That little seed. Did you know that all of existence is smaller than a mote of dust? One trillionth of an atom, to be exact, so it doesn’t come close. What good are eyes when everything is smaller than the smallest known unit of matter? And the doctor tells me to get a better eyeglass prescription! There’s no use.”

  “What did he say about your head? Is it full of pink elephants and flying pigs?” I asked. He laughed again.

  “I enjoy your friend, Miss.”

  “Beatrice,” she said.

  “Professor Rufus,” he said, still looking into the telescope. After a moment of silence, he asked: “Are you truly interested in the celestial, Beatrice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a stirred curiosity or obsessive longing?”

  “I’m stirred by all things beautiful, but there’s nothing beautiful about obsession.”

  “No, I suppose you’re right. However, you’re accustomed to the mundane. I suppose a certain romance is attached to stardust and moon rocks. Not to condescend, my dear. It’s all just messy splattering on an immaculate canvas to me. If only we could find enough paint remover for a fresh start. No, we must discard the whole canvas instead, and that won’t do.”

  “I don’t understand, Professor. Did I offend you? My interest is casual at most.”

  “I taught students like you for twenty years. I left behind that kind of elitism long ago. In my old age, sharing knowledge has become more and more appealing. My life has been changed by all I’ve seen. Perhaps it will change yours, as well. For the better.”

  “What have you seen?”

  “Did you know that life as we know it began on the planet Venus?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The first organism emerged from Cytherean foam. Not to be confused with the planet’s titular goddess. It was a closer relative to arachnoids than the ideal form of beauty. An ugly wretch that only grew uglier with time. It dined on lichen and moss with an appetite much like their carnivorous descendants.”

  “What did they call it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what the Cythereans called themselves either. I don’t know if they even had a language,” he said, finally moving away from his telescope to one of the bookshelves. He pulled out a worn hardback and handed it to Beatrice. “Have a look. I must warn you, it may seem bizarre, even a bit offensive to the senses.”

  “This is amazing, Professor,” Beatrice said, sitting cross-legged and quickly flipping through the book, which contained many loose pages with crude drawings. She went back to the first page and began to read.

  “How much do they pay per word?” I asked.

  “I assure you, this is not science fiction. I have more than enough proof to back up my claims. Those notes are barely even a sketch,” he said, pointing at his head. “Most of it is here, exactly where it belongs. However, if my words are worth so little to you, I can show you something more definitive.”

  “Take a look at this,” Beatrice said, showing me an incredibly detailed drawing depicting an open clam full of creatures that could only be described as fanged barnacles. The Professor painstakingly added each individual tooth to these barnacles, as well as the nearly invisible hair-like feelers surrounding their mouths. After looking at it for a while, it seemed like a mouth full of thousands of tiny mouths.

  “What do you call this?” I asked.

  “Science fiction,” he chuckled. “Not of my own creation. The Cythereans had gods of their own. That’s one of its mouths.”

  “Which one?”

  “They had an obsession with orifices. Dentistry was a common practice, even among the most primitive life-forms. Can you imagine a chimp brushing its teeth on a regular basis? Hygiene took precedence over all things.”

  “Why?” Beatrice asked.

  “They feared waste materials. Sweat, urine, excrement. Everything. It was like a mania. Man developed space travel to explore; Cythereans developed space travel to find a dumping ground. However, it’s not a simple matter of refusing to eat where one shits. They used the scent of a certain flower indigenous to their planet. Before discovering this flower, the Cythereans were very much like primitive man. Agrarian, territorial, tribal, and violent. One of these tribes found a patch of these flowers and life was never the same. The first city was erected on this site, and even after it perished, it was divine until the end of their days.”

  “How’d it end?” I asked.

  “Disease. Contracted from their flower. They realized this, and some attempts were made to eradicate the plant. Alas, the Cythereans couldn’t give it up. I first suspected a religious attachment to the flower, and though this is definitely true, the primary reason was obviously a severe addiction. The introduction of this drug helped develop their culture at an alarming rate. I can’t begin to fathom its effects.”

  “They must have smelled great.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “That correlates with their excessive hygiene. They couldn’t bear their natural scent. If t
here were anything beyond the scent and its addictive side effects, I can’t say for sure.”

  “Is this it?” Beatrice asked, pulling out one of the sketches.

  “Yes,” he said. It looked like a generic flower to me. “The Cythereans and their carnal obsessions amused me for some time. Then I became more curious about the one watching them. Perhaps I should explain the process of viewing such extraordinary things first. In layman’s terms, of course.”

  The Professor returned to his telescope, and the stars returned to their strange dance. As they started to slow, he let out a sigh, then a grunt. The stars ceased to move, and the Morning Star flickered and seemed to suddenly explode. Residue spread in a spiral pattern, its center growing brighter and brighter. The spread stopped, but the center continued to glow and became as unbearable to look at as the naked sun.

  “The stars are aligned properly,” he mumbled. “The pool is still. Yes, the reflection is in place!”

  “Mind explaining to us?” I asked.

  “Okay,” he stammered after a long silence. “The Cytherean bathing festivals. The pools of Venus. A liquid with a psychic connection to the Cytherean collective consciousness. They evaporated long after their extinction. The remains float around the atmosphere. With the right amount of light on their vapors, you can see them form into tiny droplets. It’s a matter of catching these droplets as they combine and cause a ripple. The reflection shows an image.”

  “Of what?” I asked. His mumbling and bouts of silence were becoming irritating.

  “Of time,” he said. “Their entire existence in the equivalent of a long film frame, compressed into one big jumbled image. Art of the gods, as I like to call it. Indecipherable to the naked eye. The mind, on the other hand, can understand it far better than our languages. The greater picture, at least. The details are lost to smaller minds, such as mine.”