Where Nightmares Ride

by R A Baxter

  “It’s one of the perimeter lights Farley installed,” Travis said. “I thought he was nuts installing those, but now I know why he did it. He was trying to scare away those flying things we saw.”

  “What were those things?” Barbara pulled a stick of gum from her pack.

  No one answered for several seconds, then Jack spoke. “Whatever they were, they helped us. I think one of them put that note in Katie’s room.”

  Katie looked ill. “Just one more reason we need to find the quickest way out of these woods.”

  “Silverton is north of here, straight past camp,” Jack said. “Farley trail won’t take us there. I don’t remember seeing any cliffs, so our best bet would be to cut through the woods and head straight north.”

  The sound of a distant helicopter echoed in the trees.

  “We’ll be safer off the trail anyway.” Travis climbed up on the embankment and everyone else followed his lead. Jack slid his hand along the prickly lichen of a rock on the embankment, pulled himself up, and walked up behind Ming. They hiked in single file, Travis at the front and Jack at the back.

  “Won’t we be in view of the camp if we go this way?” Barbara pointed forward. “We’ll be crossing the mountainside above camp.”

  “It’ll be better hiking above the camp,” Ming said. “I can hardly see a thing. Maybe the light from the camp will help us see where we’re going.”

  “We just need to stay in the shadows.” Jack stared at the dark ground. Each of them took turns, at random intervals, slipping on pine needles, moist ferns or loose soil.

  Jack thought about Taylor and wondered what was happening to him. He wished he was here. He thought about the things Sherry had said and what he’d seen in the research facility. He looked forward to breaking the greatest news story ever told.

  Jack walked into Ming, not having noticed his companions had stopped to rest. A wide expanse of rocks covered the hillside and provided places to sit and watch the campground far below.

  “Let’s hope this is the last time we ever have to look at that travesty,” Ming said.

  Jack gazed down at the metal rooftops and pines, surrounded by a palisade protruding amidst a sea of pine trees and aspens. A helicopter searched the mountains beyond the camp.

  Clara sat on a rock, took a deep breath, and turned to Katie. “Is someone going to tell me why on earth we’re running away from camp?”

  Jack climbed onto a boulder and sat facing the group. “Actually, there’s a lot more you all need to know.”

  Katie grinned at the blank expressions on her companions’ faces, then realized she’d had the same look on her own face. She could hardly process the information Jack had shared with them from what he’d learned from Sherry and read in Lynch’s Intershroud training manual.

  He’d answered so many of her questions about her father’s business—all people dream to the same dream world every night. Montathena Research destabilizes people’s minds and takes advantage of them in their dreams. People can control their own dreams by being aware they are dreaming and establishing a prime token, then subduing their subconscious.

  “This changes everything.” Ming broke the silence. “Think about it, we can’t run away from them. We’d have to hide from them in our sleep, too.”

  The boulder Katie sat on suddenly shook and an apocalyptic noise ripped through the trees. Rocks rattled, loosened, shifted and rolled down the mountain around her. One slammed into her left hand and she groaned in pain. She stood up and raised her hands, squinting at the bright orange light filling the sky from the direction of Camp Farley. Tiny objects floated and fell from the sky amidst vast plumes of dark smoke.

  Katie couldn’t accept what she was seeing, and she turned to the stunned faces of her companions, all of whom stood, staring. Clara ran and hugged Katie, staring at the sky with terrified eyes.

  “What just happened?” Barbara looked back and forth at the camp several times, then at Jack.

  Jack could only stare with everyone else at the debris falling in apparent slow-motion, some pieces landing and shaking the trees only a few hundred yards down from them.

  The smoke started to clear, and Katie watched campers, staff, and guards emerge from cabins and other buildings, now lit only by the burning remains of the gaping hole that minutes earlier had been the research facility. Jack’s cabin had disappeared, along with Katie’s.

  “Impossible,” Travis said. “No one could’ve penetrated that building. It had walls a foot thick!”

  Barbara shoved him. “Who cares about walls? Marina was down there! Someone just blew her to bits and all you want to talk about is a stupid building!” She slumped onto a pile of stones, her face contorted in her effort not to cry.

  “Even Tony and Carl didn’t deserve to go like that,” Ming said.

  Travis grabbed a rock and hurled it down the hill.

  “We’ve got to go back!” Barbara said. She stood up, resolute, looking Jack in the eye.

  “Maybe she’s right,” Ming said. “If we keep running, people will think we did it.”

  Jack frowned and looked at his friends. “That’s why they did it. I wouldn’t put it past them. We escaped, so they destroyed all the evidence.”

  “And they can claim we did it,” Ming said.

  “No,” Katie said. “Even Lynch wouldn’t go that far. They’re still looking for us.”

  “Like I said, we have to go back,” Barbara said. “They can’t claim we did it if we go back.”

  “No one’s going to believe what we say, no matter what we do.” Jack pulled his cellphone out of his pocket. “This video is our only hope. We have to get this to the police.”

  “They just blew up a building and killed a friend of mine!” Barbara stepped up close to Jack. “People who’ll do that won’t sit back while we hand evidence to the cops. We don’t have any options. We never did.”

  “Then all we can do is stand up for what we believe in,” Katie said. “Lynch didn’t blow up that building. Whoever attacked the camp wanted Farley dead and it looks like they got what they wanted. But they did kill Alison. Maybe we can’t beat them, but I’m willing to try—for Alison’s sake.”

  Barbara stared at Katie and nodded. “You’re right. We’re doing this for Alison, and Marina, and anyone else they’ve hurt.” She yanked a branch off a nearby dead tree and dug the end of it into the soil. She started walking, and Katie and the others followed behind her.

  A blanket of thin clouds immersed the forest in a kaleidoscope of ghostly gray shapes. Katie stared at the crescent moon and grinned. “I feel a lot safer now that I can see where I’m going.”

  Rotors echoed off the hills of the gulley in which they hiked, and Katie ran for cover in a thick grove of pines. Jack squeezed into the pine branches near her and they waited for the sound to go away before running to find Travis and Barbara.

  “We better wait for Clara and Ming,” Katie said.

  “They need to keep up,” Travis said.

  “Give ’em a break,” Jack said. “We’re all dead tired, but Ming took in a pretty good bite of that brownie. There were a few times back there when I thought he was going to trip and roll down the mountainside.”

  “Clara breathed in a good dose in the sleep lab, too.” Katie said. “It seems to be wearing off a little, but I still have to keep holding her up.”

  “We’re totally lost out here,” Barbara said. “Maybe we should’ve stayed by that gate until someone showed up.”

  “I told you,” Katie said, “they never intended to meet us there. I think they just wanted to protect me.”

  “Why’d they single you out?” Barbara leaned on her walking stick.

  Katie shrugged. “I can’t even image.” She didn’t dare bring up her sister’s ghost. She knew, however, that she hadn’t hallucinated. She believed Abby wrote the note and had guided her and Clara to the gate, but she knew the others would call her crazy.

  “Barbara’s right,” Jack said. “We can’t affor
d to get lost. We need to head more to the west until we find the stream, or the road.”

  “There you are,” Clara trudged over to Katie, Ming hanging on her shoulder, and her face contorted from struggling to hold him up. Katie put an arm around her, glad Clara was still able to hold herself up. “Lucky I heard your voices. I almost went the wrong way.”

  Clara pulled Ming’s arm off her shoulder and gasped when he slumped down on his knees in a patch of dry pine needles. He rolled onto his side in a fetal position.

  Travis walked up and gave him a shove with his foot. Ming didn’t stir.

  “You know,” Travis said, “we all should get some sleep, unless one of you wants to carry Ming. I doubt we’ll find better cover than this area.”

  “We can’t sleep,” Jack said. “Weren’t you listening? They can find us in our dreams.”

  Katie shook her head. “We can’t stay awake forever. Clara’s exhausted. Ming’s comatose.”

  “We’ll get caught,” Jack said.

  “We’ll get caught anyway if we’re so dead tired we can’t think straight,” Katie said.

  “We have to try, at least until we get to Silverton,” Jack said. “I don’t even know if we’ll be able to resist dreaming about camp. This whole escape will be for nothing.”

  “We’ll just have to find each other in our dreams,” Katie said. “We can help each other stay away from Farley and his people.”

  “One of us can stay awake and wake us up every hour or so, make sure we’re alright,” Barbara said.

  Jack shook his head, but he knew they were right. Ming was already asleep. There was no point in fighting the inevitable.

  “Clara and I can take first watch,” Travis said.

  “She needs sleep.” Katie smiled at Clara and waved her over to a heap of pine needles below a cluster of tall pine trees.

  Travis turned to Barbara.

  “As if,” she said.

  “Whatever.” Travis tossed the sling of the M16 over his shoulder.

  “You don’t even know how to shoot that thing.” Jack pointed at the rifle.

  “No. But if anyone shoots at me again, you can bet your life I’ll figure it out. I’ll go find a good lookout spot and wake one of you in an hour or so.” He looked for a path through the ferns and wildflower beds, then started up the mountain and disappeared beyond the trees.

  “I’ll stay with Ming,” Jack said. He took Ming’s hands and dragged him below a pine bough.

  Katie nodded. “Wake us if anything happens. Come on, Clara.”

  Moonlight illuminated the ferns, bear grass, and flower beds, but not enough to ease Katie’s fears of what might be skulking in the shadows.

  “That looks like a good spot,” Barbara said. She pointed at a cluster of lodgepoles with a wide-open space at the lower part of their trunks.

  Katie plowed through a field of moist purple wildflowers to a bed of pine needles, then dug three thick sweaters from her bag. She intended to use them as a blanket, pillow, and mattress, but then she became aware of both Clara and Barbara hugging themselves against the cold. She handed a sweater to each of them.

  “Looks like pine needle mattresses tonight,” Katie said. “I should’ve grabbed some comforters; it’s going to be cold.”

  “You saved my life. I was freezing.” Barbara wrapped the sweater around her shoulders and dropped to her knees, then pulled a thin nightgown from her backpack and rolled it up to use as a pillow. She laid down and pulled Katie’s oversize sweater over herself.

  Katie turned to Clara and found she’d already fallen asleep, snuggling her stuffed elephant. Katie tucked her sweater over Clara and laid down near her. She stretched her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, discovering the pine needles to be surprisingly comfortable.

  Jack stared into the thick branches above him, tucked his felt blanket around himself, and scratched his neck where the pine needles were tickling him. Hours had passed, and he hadn’t slept. He couldn’t stop his mind from churning.

  “We should’ve tried to save Marina,” he said to Ming, though he knew he was sound asleep. “She was small enough, any of us could’ve carried her. I should’ve tried to convince Tony and Carl, too. We didn’t even give them a chance.” Images of the explosion ran on a loop in his thoughts.

  Then he remembered the flying creatures that had attacked the camp guards with no concern for their own survival. “What were those things? Intershroud experiments? Was Farley combining human DNA with chimps and bats? It’s all so unbelievable.”

  He frowned, and a tear rolled down his cheek. “I know I should be glad they blew up that research facility, but Marina didn’t deserve to die.”

  He turned and stared at Ming whose only response was a light, steady snore.

  “I need Taylor. This is making my mind spin.” He wiped his blurry eyes. “Who am I kidding? Lynch and his army will find us. Even if they don’t, we’ll get lost out here, or starve to death. Why didn’t I just listen to Sherry and act dumb? We’re all going to die because I never listen.”

  Jack started at a sudden thumping noise to his left and he clenched his fists.

  “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?” Katie laid down next to him and tucked a thick gray sweater around herself. “I never thanked you for trying to warn me. I feel so stupid.”

  “I’m the stupid one. I should’ve found a better way to tell you. I just hope we don’t die out here because you all listened to me.”

  “I almost died because I didn’t listen to you. Clara and I would’ve been sleeping in that building when it blew up. You saved our lives.”

  Jack grinned and watched her stare up into the trees, her dark eyes sparkling in the moonlight. “Thanks, but all I did was show you what I found out. You’re the one that escaped the lab. You saved Clara.”

  “We escaped because you told me about the generator room door. Don’t try to deny yourself credit. If I hadn’t watched your video, I’d be dead now.”

  “I’m glad you watched it, then.”

  “I just wish I knew what I was looking at. It still creeps me out thinking about it.”

  Jack sat up. “I can help you there. I never had a chance to tell anyone. I found a newspaper in Farley’s office, written by enemies of the Intershroud. They must have spies among Farley’s staff because the articles explain the whole process.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Intershroud found a way to capture creatures from our dreams and transfer them into the real world. They create the creatures in a dream about Camp Farley. They know about nothing but Camp Farley. They call them ’dream inducers.’ They put them in specially designed jars and hid them below our beds, where they gradually dissipate. They were releasing fine essence particles directly into our heads, where they penetrated our brains, forcing us to dream about the camp.”

  “My dad has a research lab in my basement,” Katie said. “He probably created those creatures. But it doesn’t explain what was going on with Media and those frozen dead people.”

  “Media is what they call a ‘Mentalist.’ She was an orphan when Avard discovered her in a dream in India. She has an ability to leave part of her mind in the minds of other dreamers, where she can then influence their thoughts. People wake up with unexplained desires to give her food or money. Avard adopted her and used her to serve Intershroud.”

  “The way Media talks so slow, it must be taking a toll on her.”

  “Definitely. She’s done it so often, she’s literally losing her mind. The article said Intershroud operatives watch dreamers everywhere, searching for other Mentalists. They monitor hospitals to find out when Mentalists are on their death bed, then they put them into a coma state.

  “Intershroud bribes doctors to keep the mentalist coma victims alive after pronouncing them dead. Then, after the pretended burial, the bodies are stolen and placed in cryogenic chambers like the one I saw. The tubes we saw were designed to mix Media’s mind with the minds of those comatose Mentalists, allowing h
er to leave less of her own mind in other people and reduce her own mental deterioration.”

  Katie shook her head slowly. “So, that’s their idea of ‘assimilation,’ using the minds of creepy brain-dead people to allow Media to manipulate our minds? That’s what they must have done to turn Damien into a Montathena Research fanboy. I can’t believe my father was going to let them do that to me!” She clenched her teeth.

  “Why’d you even go to that lab?”

  Katie looked away. Jack felt more awkward with every second of her silence.

  “I wanted to give Damien a chance,” Katie finally said. She faced Jack and wiped a tear from her lip. “I was sure if I asked him to his face, he’d tell me the truth. The worst part is, I didn’t give a moment’s thought to Clara. I was so sure Damien would be there for me. I thought he cared about me.”

  “Some hero he turned out to be,” Jack said.

  Katie gave a slight nod, then laid her head back and closed her eyes. Jack worried that he’d said too much, bringing up her decision to go to the lab. He couldn’t force his eyes off her glowing, moon-lit face. Katie’s hand gently slid over his and an electric warmth radiated through his body. She showed no sign that she was aware of it, but Jack had never known such happiness. He dared not move for fear she might move her hand away. He shut his eyes and held on to the moment.

  Jack’s thoughts drifted until he found himself standing amidst a wide crater, surrounded by jagged slabs of concrete, twisted steel bars, and smoldering wood panels. The singed blue carpet on a nearby stairway informed him he was seeing the remains of the research facility.

  The gray sky welcomed wisps of smoke from smoldering couches and crushed cabinets. Jack looked around, fearful he might find casualties. He remembered his lighter and pulled it from his pocket. A sudden thought came to his mind.

  “I’m dreaming.” He grinned and shoved the lighter back into his pocket. “Let’s see how awesome lucid dreaming really is.” He looked up the stairs and jumped, then laughed at himself flying twelve feet into the air. He landed on an exposed steel beam and turned toward the front door. Where marble floors had once been, he found only chunks of twisted concrete dangling from mangled floor joists. Jack leaped up again and glided over the demolished hallway and lobby, then landed on a concrete slab near the exit doors, which now stood alone like a gravestone.