by R A Baxter
“Whew, I thought that vermin’d never go,” Jeb took his eyes off Jack’s dead body and it disappeared, leaving only his sword laying on the ground.
“Where’d he go?” Katie ran to Jeb. “What’d you do to him? I hate you! I hate all of you! You knew he was innocent. He didn't kill that monster! I hate all of you!” She pounded on Jeb’s shoulders.
“Miss,” Jeb patiently enduring her strikes. “Ye don’t understand. That vermin woulda pursued yer friend fer the rest o’ his life. It’s a win-win situation. We gave him his rest so he’d go away. Jack’ll be thankin’ us. Tis certain. Ye’ll see.”
“He’s dead!” Katie dropped to her knees. “Can’t you see, you crazy old loon! You’re all crazy. You helped that man murder him!”
“No, miss. Here, I’ll show ye.” Jeb lifted his pistol to Katie’s head and pulled the trigger.
Katie bolted upright, shaking and holding her breath. She felt the side of her head for a bullet wound. Jack stared at the wall of their hideout, taking deep breaths.
“We fell sleep,” Katie said. “Those imps, your execution, Avard’s moving on—it was all just a dream.”
Jack nodded.
“It seemed so real, I thought you died,” Katie said.
“I know. I keep looking for a hole in my chest.”
Katie smiled. “You think that’s dumb, I woke up looking for a hole in my head.”
Jack laughed for a second, but then frowned. “Thing is, it was real. Somewhere out there, the Ghost Knights think they executed me, and Jeb helped them.”
“I didn’t think of that. Our dreams aren’t just dreams anymore. Jeb actually shot me in the head. We’re in a world where nightmares really happen.” She shivered at the thought.
“Katie, I can’t do it. I don’t want help from Jeb or any other ghost anymore. Avard thinks I’m dead and I want to keep it that way.”
“Avard’s gone. He faded away when he thought he killed you.”
“Wow. He’s really gone. I can’t believe it. But still, I can’t…”
“I know. I’m sure we can make it to Jeb’s haunt without him. I wish I could find my sister. She’d help us.” She turned to look for Clara, then started. “Clara! She’s gone!”
Jack stood and searched the hideout, then climbed through the invisible ceiling and out of the pit. Katie climbed after him and scanned the meadows but found only a trio of swallows skimming the tall grass for insects.
She searched the tree-filled ravine. “You don’t think she went down there by herself?”
Jack’s eyebrows rose. “She might have gone searching for that frog.”
“Wait. Do you hear that?” Katie cupped a hand behind her right ear and detected faint voices filtered through the trees to the southwest.
“She’s down there.” Jack waved for Katie to follow him and she sprinted after him to the edge of the ravine. They curved around three boulders and past dozens of pine trees dotting the sloped terrain. She watched every direction for soldiers and camp staff, finally arriving at a cluster of low spruces. She peered between two pines and gasped at the dozens of Sleeper soldiers swarming around Clara in a clearing, some relaxing on dead logs, others sitting cross-legged in the dirt, smoking, or sipping water from their canteens.
“They got to Marina." Katie bent a branch aside so Jack could see Marina, donning a camouflage military uniform and sitting on a log next to Clara.
“I figured they’d get her sooner or later,” Jack said.
“What should we do?” Katie moved behind the trees out of view of the soldiers. “Should we turn ourselves in? We can’t leave without Clara. As bad as Intershroud is, I don’t see another option.”
Jack stared at her for five seconds, then started when a jet-black crow alit on the ground near their feet, hopping and pecking at the ground. It tilted its head and studied Jack and Katie for a few seconds before stretching out its wings and fluttering away.
Jack nodded his head. “You’re right. We can’t abandon Clara. We’ll have to try to rescue her, and if we fail, we’ll have to try to escape again when we get back to Materia.”
“Let’s see your hands,” a voice sounded behind them.
Katie turned around and faced six soldiers, each staring at her, their high-powered rifles fixed on her and Jack.
“We were just about to surrender.” Jack raised his hands.
“Good job, men.” Carl pushed between the troops, who sneered at him when he wasn’t looking their direction. Carl folded his arms, stuck his chin out, and looked Katie and Jack up and down. “March these two over to Marina. General Farley will be pleased."
“You heard him,” said a heavyset soldier in front of the group. He motioned Katie and Jack to follow him with a jerk of his rifle. Katie followed Jack around the pines and marched to the clearing.
Clara glanced at her, jumped up, and ran to her with her arms outstretched and eyes brimming with gleeful tears. “I was so confused; I didn’t know what to do.” Clara held Katie tight.
“You shouldn’t have left the hideout. You were safe there.” Katie said.
“I know. I’m sorry but I heard the scariest grunting sounds and it woke me up. It sounded like people fighting. I thought I heard Jack’s voice, but he was lying on the rabbit furs, sleeping right next to you. I was so scared, I couldn’t move. After a few minutes, that frog showed up and told me it was safe to come out, so I climbed out to look around. He said a bunch of flying monkey people took you and Jack away, which didn’t make any sense.”
“He was right. They did take us away,” Katie said. “But they only took our dream selves.”
“I wondered if that was what happened, but that frog kept arguing with me. Then he ran off to hide again when the soldiers showed up with Carl and Marina. I couldn’t get back to the hideout without them seeing me, so I ran after that frog, but they caught me.”
Katie hugged her tight one more time.
“They were bound to catch us sooner or later,” Jack said. “We just saw one their crows spying on us.”
“We don’t use crows.” Carl faced the nearby soldiers. “Don’t take your guns off these three.”
“We’re not going to run, you idiot!” Katie glared at him. “We need you to help us get to a haunt.”
“Why would you need a haunt? Dreamers don’t need haunts. And if you were ghosts, you’d already have a haunt. If you hadn’t run off, Derek would’ve filled you in on all this, like he did for the rest of us yesterday. Face it, you’re just a couple of Sleepers dreaming about the woods.”
“We’re not sleeping. We’re Dream Running,” Clara said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Carl,” Marina said, “you’re just agitating them. Let me talk to them, alone.”
“Fine,” Carl said. “But hurry up. I’ll send a bird to alert the other patrols. Can’t wait to see Tony’s face when he finds out I captured them.” He whistled, and a bluebird dived from a treetop fifty feet away, landing on his arm and tilting its head. Carl whispered something to it and it darted away, gliding high over the ravine. Katie watched it in the distance, then spotted a white hawk shoot out of a tree and slam into the bird, sending blue and white feathers drifting in the breeze.
No one seemed to notice except Marina, who afterwards turned and winked at Katie. She shuffled Katie, Jack, and Clara twenty yards down the hill, away from Carl and the troops, and huddled with them. “Listen. First, Clara says she saw you two sleeping and then heard one of your voices somewhere else. Then, if I’m hearing her right, your dream selves were doing things while your bodies were sleeping next to Clara. And now Clara mentioned Dream Running. Who told you about that?”
“Avard told us,” Katie said. “And you’re right. We fell asleep in our hideout, then Jack and I dreamed the Ghost Knights captured us. Then we woke up in our hideout.”
Marina stared at Katie for several seconds, then looked around. “This is incredible. I don’t know how it’s possible, but Avard may ha
ve been right. It’s important that you don’t tell anyone. Who else knows?”
“No one but Avard, and he’s apparently moved on,” Jack said. “We told Jeb and the Ghost Knights, but they refused to believe us.”
“That’s good.” Marina looked around the hillside. The ground rumbled. “What’s going on?”
The rumbling intensified and the ground quaked with such force Katie had to stretch her arms out to keep her balance.
“It’s an earthquake!” a soldier yelled.
“Everyone get out of the path of those rocks!” yelled another.
Hundreds of boulders, large and small, shook from their resting places and plummeted down the slope above them, cracking against each other and filling the air with thick dust. A dozen small gray sparrows darted from the tall grass. Soldiers slid behind trees only to find them lifting from the earth by their roots and crashing over them. Carl tumbled to the ground in a plume of dust, disappearing below a cascade of tumbling rocks.
The earth below Katie’s feet gave way and she found herself weightless, dropping straight down. Jack fell alongside her, his arm wrapped around Clara. Marina was gone. Katie prepared to slam into the floor of the sinkhole, but instead found only a spongy, shock-absorbent surface that forced her forward onto her knees. The earth folded over the top of her and her companions, casting the world into inky darkness.
Jack lost all sense of distance, imagining himself falling dozens of feet before being buried in an inescapable, lightless tomb. He charged across the bouncy floor blindly before slamming into a hard, earthen wall. Clods of soil rolled down his cheeks as he clawed at the wall, dirt crumbling between his fingers. His shoulder brushed against an adjacent wall and he moved his hands over to it. He yanked dirt to the ground by the handful. He turned around and stumbled in the dark, making his way to another wall ten paces away, paying no attention to the complaints of Katie and Clara over whose legs he’d tripped.
“Jack, calm down!” Katie’s voice echoed.
“I’ve got to get out of here! Help me climb out!”
The earthen walls began to brighten, and Jack stopped to look around the roughly twenty-foot square pit, desperate to find an escape route. He found only Katie and Clara, pulling themselves up off the floor, which now started shifting along with the walls.
Katie hugged Clara and they sidled closer to Jack, staring at the walls of earth above and around them. It reformed into smooth, white wall planes and a high ceiling. Jack shifted to keep his balance and stared at the dirt below his feet, now flattening into a plush, beige carpeted floor. Two soft brown sofas and a blue armchair melded up from the carpet along with a wooden side table, a coffee table, two tall turquoise lamps, a stocked bookcase, and a wooden armoire. Light-blue curtained windows appeared on two of the walls, diffusing warm daylight into the cozy room.
Clara smiled and rushed to flop onto one of the sofas, bouncing a few times on its airy leather cushions. An ornate wooden door creaked open and revealed a similarly furnished adjacent room and a young blue-haired woman Jack hadn’t expected to see.
“Sorry,” Marina rushed into the room without closing the door. “I had to make sure my rockslide woke up everyone. Hope I didn’t scare you. Hungry? You must be starving.” She held out her right hand, palm up, and a white china plate appeared in it, holding six triangular-cut turkey and cheese sandwiches and a stack of thinly sliced carrots. She handed it to Katie.
Dumbstruck, but starving, Jack grabbed a sandwich and shoved it in his mouth, then grabbed another. Katie and Clara each did the same.
“What just happened?” Jack took another bite. “I seriously thought I was going to die.”
Marina winced. “Sorry. I forgot you were claustrophobic. In my defense, I had to act fast when you started talking about Dream Running. Believe me, you don’t want Intershroud to know you’re Dream Running.”
“I’m just glad you’re alive,” Clara said. “We thought you died in that explosion until Avard said someone carried you out of the cabin.”
Marina laughed and pointed at the coffee table. A plate of chocolate chip cookies and three tall glasses of water appeared.
“Actually, I saved myself. I pretended I was asleep when you entered the cabin. I came to investigate the Camp—not to run from it. After you left the cabin, a ghost discovered you’d left open the panel below one of the beds. I kept my eyes shut, but I know at least four of them entered the research facility through that opening. They bragged about how they were going to break a gas main and blow up the place. So, I ran to the other cabin and dragged Carl and Tony a safe distance away, then laid down near them and pretended I was asleep again.”
“How do we know you’re not working for them?” Jack grabbed a glass of water and chugged it down, ecstatic at the feeling of cool liquid rolling down his parched throat.
“You don’t, but that’s the right kind of question to ask. Truth be told, I’m risking my life for you right now. Lynch’ll want to know why I didn’t wake up in that rockslide.”
“Why were you helping him at all?” Jack set his glass on the table harder than he’d intended.
Marina glanced back at the open door. “Look, I can tell you what you want to know, but right now, we need to get away from here. Now that you know dreams are real, Lynch sees you as a huge threat.” She rushed to the exit and waved for Jack and the girls to follow her. Katie and Clara each took another sip of water, then ran after her.
Jack grabbed a few cookies and followed them from the room, entering an identical room—an exact copy, right down to the three empty glasses on the coffee table. He looked ahead at an endless succession of identical rooms with identical open doors.
“Pick up the pace, guys. I doubt Intershroud will find us down here, but we can’t take any chances. We’ll be safer far away from here.”
Jack glanced over his shoulder in time to see the room behind him grow dark and fill with solid earth, the door fading until it turned to soil along with the wall. He faced forward again and scrambled into the next room and the same thing repeated, with Marina guiding them from room to identical room. She stopped for a second and flickered in and out of view.
“What’s happening?” Katie placed a hand on Marina’s shoulder.
“I was worried about this. Someone’s trying to wake me up. I saved some of Farley’s drugged brownies for tonight, so I could stay asleep, but I don’t know how much longer they’ll work. We need to hurry. I won’t be able to help you if I wake up.” She quickened her pace, abruptly turning to her right, and guiding them in that direction through another succession of identical rooms.
“So, how about it? Why were you helping them?” Jack pushed past Katie and Clara and locked step next to Marina.
“After the gas main blew, Lynch and his stooges gave us the option to serve Intershroud for life or become belated casualties of the explosion. Let’s just say the first option had its appeal. They gave us a crash course on controlling dreams, then they forced poor Media to visit us in our sleep to secure our loyalty with mind control. You witnessed some of that, if I’m not mistaken.”
“How did you resist her powers?” Katie asked.
“Media’s so mentally drained, it wasn’t hard to fool her into thinking she had me under her control. The others could’ve resisted her too, if they’d known what was happening.”
“She still must’ve had some affect on you,” Jack said. “You’re not acting like the Marina I know.”
“I’m not the Marina you think you knew. I’m a lot older than I look. I belong to a rebellion that’s been fighting Intershroud for decades. We call ourselves Purites. Sherry came to us, begging us to help her escape from Intershroud. She helped me infiltrate the camp. You provided some priceless info on your cell phone, by the way.”
“So, you’re the one Lynch said was helping Sherry,” Katie said.
Marina nodded. “Now I need to figure out how to help you three. Dream Running isn’t just rare, it’s dangerous. Essentia is unp
redictable. I’m surprised you’ve survived this long.”
“How did this happen?” Katie asked. “How can we be Dream Running?”
“Wish I knew. I hate to say it, but until now, I thought Dream Running was a myth.”
“It feels like a myth,” Jack said. “None of this seems real to me. If dreams are real, why doesn’t anybody know it?"
“Intershroud works tirelessly to keep the world shrouded. The reality of dreams makes sense if you think about it. There are three basic components to existence: physical material, laws of nature, and the power of thought. Those three components of reality are constant and eternal. Physical things never cease to exist in one form or another. Laws of nature, likewise, always exist. Why, then, would ‘thought’ be any different? Thought can never stop functioning.”
“I think I get it,” Clara said. “When your brain sleeps, it doesn’t let you continue to think, so your thoughts are forced to leave your brain and go somewhere else. They come to this world where they can keep thinking.”
“Exactly. Your mind goes to Essentia and takes you wherever you think yourself to be, at the speed of thought.”
“But, I have nights when I don’t dream at all,” Katie said.
“Not true.”
“Scientists have been studying dreams for ages,” Jack said. “We don’t always dream.”
“You assume you remember all your dreams, but you don’t.” Marina turned to her left and led them through another line of rooms. She flickered from view again for a split second.
“Are you waking up again?” Clara grabbed Marina’s arm.
Marina nodded. “Don’t worry. If I do wake up, I’ll do whatever it takes to fall back asleep. Lynch should have a hard time finding us. Now, what was I saying?”
“You said we don’t remember all our dreams,” Clara said.
“Yes. Intershroud falsifies dream studies before they’re made public. Trust me, you dream all night long. Scientists can only observe physical brain activity. They can’t measure what the mind is doing in another dimension.”