Where Nightmares Ride

by R A Baxter

  “It don’t work like that. If you had the confidence to think us to them knights, you’d have thought us there already. You gotta have a lot of confidence in yer thought afore you can just think something contrary to the reality yer used to.”

  “I must have a lot of confidence in being heavy and strong,” Clara said.

  “That’s how it seems. Everybody has extra confidence in some ability. I always obsessed about weapons, so mine turned out to be an ability to shape military machines and weapons.”

  Avard looked up and raised his arms. A subtle wisp of black smoke condensed and formed into a matt-black Apache helicopter, hovering above the treetops and bending the trees, blowing the yellowed grass in waves. Katie could see the terrain beyond Avard, showing through his now-translucent body. He lowered his hands and turned solid again. The helicopter flew higher and started circling the area.

  Katie glowered at him. “You mean to tell me you can create helicopters out of thin air, and you’re making us walk? We’d find those Ghost Knights in two seconds from a helicopter.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Yer getting on my nerves. You two are leaving inch-deep footprints in solid soil. I ain’t getting inside a moving vehicle with you. I’m barely holding my Aspect together as it is, and I intend to keep it ’til I know Park’s dead.”

  “Why aren’t Clara and I just like you?” Katie wrung her fists. “You say we’re not acting like ghosts, so what are we? This is not just a normal dream!”

  “How should I know? I reckon yer in a coma. No doubt yer lying unconscious under a ton of rock. I can’t imagine they’ll be digging you out, neither. You might as well accept that you’ll either be ghosts soon, or yer souls’ll be saying sayonara for good. Thank your pal, Park, for that. He’s the one who put you in a coma.”

  “There’s got to be a way to wake ourselves.” Katie slapped her face twice.

  Avard laughed. “You’d have to kill your Aspect to wake yerself up, but if you do that while yer in a coma, you’ll be brain dead till you die. You see? Park killed the two of you, same as me. You have as much reason to want him dead as I do.”

  “He didn’t set off the explosives,” Katie said.

  “He brought the lighter! He knocked me out! My daughter’s all but brain dead ’cause of him! He’ll pay for what he done. He deserves to die!” Avard aimed his automatic rifles at two lodgepole pines nearby and fired at them, eyes bulging. Shredded bark and chunks of sapwood flew in every direction until the noisy spray of bullets exposed the ragged heartwood of the trees. He lowered his guns and stared out into the open fields, a deep frown on his face.

  Jack listened intently to Avard’s conversation with the girls when he felt tiny wet fingers wrap around his left pinky finger. He looked down and found the little frog pulling at him with all his strength.

  “We must go,” the frog said. “That man is insane!”

  Jack shook off the frog’s hand, causing the creature to fall and roll into a nearby fern.

  The frog stood up, scowling. “You have the fortunate advantage of being able to come back to life after being killed, but I have but one life, I’m afraid. I’ll look for you later, when you come to your senses.” He hopped away, into the safety of the ferns.

  Jack shook his head, then turned toward the clearing.

  Avard stared back at him, his eyes wide and his mouth stiff in a wicked grin.

  The attack helicopter circled behind Jack, tipped forward, and dived like a bird of prey. Its chain guns fired rapidly on its chin turrets, advancing successive explosions toward him in two lines along the ground and sending plants and soil flying into the air.

  Jack leaped forward, dived over leafy shrubs, and rolled on his shoulders in the tall grass near Avard. The helicopter buzzed past Jack and curved upward, circled over the trees, and returned for its next attack.

  Avard laughed, his wild eyes fixed on Jack. He lifted his arms forward, his body quivering and fading. The sharp angular form of a beige M1 Abrams tank materialized ten feet from Jack, already in motion, crushing fallen branches and scraping bark from tall tree trunks. It moved toward Jack, then slowed down. Its main gun swiveled and stopped at a point aligned between Jack’s eyes.

  Jack froze.

  “Stop it!” Katie rushed toward Jack, Clara running a few feet behind her. Avard swung an arm toward them. Rows of taut wire materialized in their path, emanating an electric buzz, and stopping them in their tracks. Circular strands of razor wire topped the fence, stretched between ten-foot-tall wooden posts. Katie searched every direction but found no way past the wire.

  Jack stood but froze again when the helicopter veered behind him at high speed, firing its guns. He rolled to his left and the main gun of the tank followed him. An identical tank appeared to his left, its main guns swiveling.

  “Alright! You win!” Jack raised his hands.

  “You think this is a game, Park? This is justice!”

  “Leave him alone!” Katie leaned down, grabbed a palm-sized rock, and hurled it over the fence. It disappeared in the tall grass twenty feet from Avard.

  He ignored her and approached Jack, assault rifles nestled in each arm. “I sure hope you’re a ghost, Park. It’s only right I should get to end yer life!”

  “I didn’t do anything to you! You attacked me! Your friend caused the explosion!”

  “It was your lighter and now your body’ll rot forever with mine, below a pile of rocks.”

  Gunfire shook the air and the assault rifles rattled in Avard’s hands, emptying casings into the grass at Avard’s feet. Jack recoiled, raised his hands to protect his face, and turned to look at Katie, wanting her face to be the last image he’d see in this life.

  He wondered, however, why death hadn’t already come. Sharp bursts of pain stung his arms, hands, chest, stomach, and legs, with a few attacking his forehead and chin. He stepped backward, compelled by the force of the mass of bullets, but soon realized he could bear the pain. The gunfire felt no different than a child pelting him with pebbles. After what seemed like several minutes, he summoned the courage to peek between his fingers. Avard’s maniacal expression twisted into a look of bewilderment, followed by extreme disappointment. The gunfire stopped and he hurled his guns into the grass.

  Jack lowered his hands and glanced down at the spent bullets laying scattered at his feet, bullets that hadn’t even torn his clothes.

  “I guess we’ll need the big guns!” Avard turned to his tanks.

  Jack ran, but each tank swiveled its main guns to follow him. The helicopter rotors grew louder and a third tank barreled from the trees in Jack’s path.

  “You can’t run, murderer!” Avard laughed.

  Explosions rang in Jack’s ears and his feet left the ground, the massive tank in front of him disappearing behind a bright ball of orange fire. Another fiery explosion went off to his left, altered his airborne course sideways. He hit the ground, rolling through tall grass and low shrubs, stopping when his back found a pine tree, which flopped to the ground with a thump.

  Jack’s ears rang as he lay hidden in the yellow grass, flashes of orange brightening the sky amid loud pops. Ordinance whooshed over his face and found nearby pine trees, reducing them to burning stubs. The helicopter dived into view and released two rockets before buzzing over him. Jack rolled aside, and the rockets plowed into the earth, exploding behind him. His body left the ground, flew over the grass, and landed near the fence where Katie and Clara stood trembling, terror in their eyes.

  Jack used a fence post to pull himself to his feet, rushed backward, and narrowly avoided the barbed wire that slammed in front of his feet when the fence tipped over. He rubbed a dull pain in his ribs and observed the helicopter coming around for another dive, this time not pulling up. Jack dived sideways and rolled on the ground, the helicopter crashing in the grass near him and exploding in a fiery orange ball of twisted metal and shattered glass, which rained around him and across the clearing. His face and clothes blackened with di
rt and his hair disheveled, Jack pulled himself up, turned to Avard and leered at him.

  Avard’s mouth hung open. “How?” His arms dropped to his sides. “This is impossible! No Aspect could’ve endured that! Not even in a coma.” He stared for a moment, then placed a hand on his stubbly beard. “That’s it. That has to be it. You’re not in a coma. You’re neither ghost nor Aspect. You’re not even asleep!”

  “You’re insane!” Jack limped toward Avard at an increasing pace, his face contorted with rage. “I’ve had enough of you!” He barreled his right shoulder into Avard’s chest and sent him flying twenty feet through the air, landing with a thud against the trees he’d shot at earlier. His body faded out of view for two seconds before solidifying again.

  Avard straightened himself and gave a weak smile. “I know what I’m dealing with now, boy. I thought it was a myth, but here you are. Yer Dream Running—all three of you. Don’t know how you did it, but you’ve passed into the Dream World with yer bodies intact. You ain’t tough. You just ain’t made of essence like everything else in this world.”

  “Don’t care!” Jack yelled. “Just tell us how to get back!”

  Avard laughed. “You think I’m a fool, don’t you, Park? This is perfect. I get to kill you after all. I don’t even have to do nothing. Sooner or later, Essentia will swallow you alive.”

  “We’ll find a way out,” Katie said. “My father will help us.”

  Jack turned to Katie and Clara and saw them stepping with slow precision between the toppled electric wires and razor-sharp barbed coils until they reached the open field.

  Avard sneered and looked up at the nearby mountainside, eyeing a wide cluster of boulders resting precariously near the hilltop. “Let’s see you walk away from this!”

  He squinted his eyes and tilted his head, then clenched his teeth and stretched his hands out to each side. Olive-drab wheeled platforms appeared, aligned with his arms on each side of his now nearly transparent body. Each platform supported an angular rotating metal turret that held eight slender, white missiles. The turrets swiveled until the sharp-tipped rockets aligned with the base of the boulder-strewn hillside.

  Jack glared at him. “What are you doing? You’ll bury us all!”

  Katie and Clara started to run and signaled Jack to join them, but he saw no point in running if those rockets went off.

  “Say hello to sweet justice!” Avard laughed and flicked his wrists.

  All sixteen missiles hissed and smoked, then lifted from the missile launchers. In midair, however, they lost momentum, flipped, and spun around. Then, somehow transforming into liquid, they splashed against the rocks, their remains dripping between the stones.

  Avard’s eyebrows creased. He jerked glances at his rocket launchers, now also deforming and melting into the earth in large gray-green puddles. The three tanks out in the field morphed into blobs of greenish clay and melted into the tall grass.

  “What?” Avard’s body solidified again and he searched every direction for an explanation. He stopped when a stranger approached him out of the shadowy thickets.

  A scraggly man with a long, grizzled beard traipsed through the trees in ragged patchwork clothes that gave him the look of an old nineteenth-century prospector: dingy gray coveralls, a torn straw hat, and an old Winchester rifle strapped to his shoulder. A black pouch hung from his belt.

  Jack felt around for the pouch he’d tied to his own hip, but found it was gone. He’d lost it sometime during Avard’s attack.

  Jack’s frog companion peeked around the old miner’s right leg and grinned at Jack, but ducked back behind the old man upon spying Avard’s fuming face.

  Avard raised his arms forward and two more assault rifles materialized in his hands. At a flick of the stranger’s left wrist, however, the guns melted into a thick goo which oozed down around Avard’s arms and plopped in small globs onto the ground at his feet.

  “Mind yer business, old fool!” Avard shook the sludge from his arms and flung globs of it into the nearby shrubs.

  The old man approached Avard, focusing intensely on his face, his feeble hands outstretched. “Methinks it durn unkindly of ye to go on like that. I cain’t allow ye to bring harm to these young’uns, that be certain.”

  Avard started to fade, warning Jack that he was forming another military weapon somewhere. Sure enough, another drab green tank appeared behind the old stranger. The old man stretched an arm behind himself and the armored vehicle transformed into a gelatinous mass that dropped into the grass.

  Avard scowled and wheeled his left arm to his side for another attack, but his body dropped suddenly until only his head remained visible above the grass line.

  “Ye’ve had yer diversion, me friend.” The old man waved his hands and four granite slabs shot up from the ground around Avard. A horizontal slab appeared and slammed hard on top of Avard’s sunken prison cell.

  “Jeb Colton!” Avard’s muffled voice yelled. “Let me out of here! So help me, I’ll kill you! Don’t think I won’t!”

  “Sorry, me friend. Ye cain’t convince me these younguns offered ye any harm. This here frog told me all. He told me this boy be a might simple, and it don’t take a genius to see these young lasses be as innocent as babes.”

  “Yer taking info from a stupid dreamed-up frog?”

  “Tis certain these younguns be a dreamin’, if ever I seen it. Let ’em dream in peace. Save yer vengeance for the deservin’.”

  “Colton! Yer a ghost! You know I deserve my revenge. Let me out of here!”

  “The Ghost Knights’ll be returning afore long to set you free. Revenge be their line o’ work.”

  Avard continued pleading, but Jeb ignored him. He turned to Clara and stared at her motionlessly for half a minute, his eyes softening and a subtle smile peering from behind his grizzled mustache. He turned to Katie and Jack. “Don’t be afeared. I’ll protect ye from the likes of this scoundrel. Follow me.” He waved his hand and a stretch of tall grass vanished in a long line in front of him, creating a narrow path. He walked forward, glancing back to make sure Jack and the girls were following him. “Best o’ luck to ye, sir,” he said to Avard.

  Katie and Clara ran to Jack with outstretched arms, but he put up his hands and pointed at his aching ribs.

  Katie held Clara back from hugging him. “You must be covered in bruises.”

  “I can’t believe you survived all that,” Clara said.

  Jack nodded. “I’m just glad I found you. I don’t know what I’d have done if anything had happened to you.”

  “We thought you died.” Katie’s voice cracked.

  Jack patted her arm. “If we don’t get back to our world soon, you won’t be wrong.” He limped past Clara, Katie, and the frog until he arrived at Jeb’s side. “Is it true, you’re a ghost? Do you have a haunt? Avard said we’re Dream Running. We need a haunt, so we can return home.”

  Jeb grinned at him. “Tis easy to be fooled in a dream, me friend. Ye can make any thought become true. Don’t be listenin’ to that ol’ rascal. Tis certain ye’re dreamin’. I’ll wake ye if ye needs proof.” Jeb raised the steel barrel of his rifle toward Jack and Jack pushed it back down, his heart beating fast.

  “No. No. You don’t understand. Avard was telling the truth. We are Dream Running. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Look at our footprints. We’re Material. We came here through a haunt, somehow. If you won’t take us to one, we’ll have to head back to that mine and try to force that mountain to let us in.”

  “Ye cain’t reason with a mountain, that be certain. I ask ye to trust an old miner who’s been wandering these woods for more than a century. Ye dreamed them deep tracks along with everything else. But I suppose, if it calms ye troubled mind, I can lend ye me own haunt.”

  Katie, Clara, and Jack followed the ghost of Jeb Colton through the forest, sharing with each other their stories of what had happened to them since they separated back at the cave. Katie soon grew impatient, not knowing when they’d arrive
at the haunt. She looked ahead and smiled at the weirdness of the situation. Jack massaged his bruised ribs and limped along a few feet in front of her, leaning on an old crutch Jeb had formed for him. Clara walked in front of him, a skip in her step and chatting with a little frog that had taken residence on her shoulder, its feeble left arm holding tight to her golden hair. The two seemed meant for each other, Clara laughing at whatever the frog was saying to her, and the frog grinned wide, basking in her undivided attention.

  Then there was Jeb, a century-old miner leading the way to his haunt and singing an old folk song while controlling matter around him without hardly giving it a conscious thought. He flicked his left wrist, and a large rock on the trail in front of him vanished into the dirt. He approached a depression, gouged by a long-gone creek, and waved his right hand. A thick pink slab of sandstone appeared, bridging the depression mere seconds before he arrived to walk across it. Now and then, the old man would swing a hand behind his back and the terrain behind him would return to its former shape, erasing all footprints or any other evidence he’d seen there.

  Katie quickened her pace, offering Jack a smile as she passed him. He looked up, about to speak, but instead winced and looked down, then rubbed his sore side. Katie clenched her teeth to show some empathy for him, then moved on to Clara’s side.

  “This is what life is all about, my good friend,” the frog said to Clara. “Walking and talking and staying close to someone who can encase your enemies in a box of solid rock.”

  Clara laughed. Katie smiled and pushed on to catch up with Jeb, whose singing continued:

  “Sellin’ my soul for a vein o’ silver,

  Moon shines down on the lazy river,

  Fix’n my meal and a cot for dreamin’,

  Tomorrow, her heart’ll be mine…”

  He stopped singing when Katie stepped up to him, then came to halt and leaned toward her on his walking stick. “Good day, miss. What cain I do fer ye?”