Dream Riders

by Taylor Kole

  “What do you get, you piece of shit.”

  “You want my help learning you how to fight.”

  “What’s that over there?” Walt said with a nod behind Schmitty. As soon as the man turned his head, Walt stepped in and delivered a serious uppercut.

  The sound of teeth clanking together created a loud, distinct crack. Walt howled at the moon. He had definitely shattered enamel. Dancing back with his fists at the ready, the duffass only stumbled, and flexed his eyes wide.

  The homeless man regained his balance, squared his feet, and lifted his balled fists.

  “You learn best if I fight back. That’s what all my friends who punch me say.” He flipped his hair to the side and hawked a spray of blood dotted with bits of tooth.

  A split divided his lip to gruesome proportions. Yet, despite the obvious injuries the bum seemed unharmed.

  “Want me to go first?” Schmitty said.

  Walt’s anger surged. He lifted weights. Over the past twenty-five years he had trained in martial arts, boxing, escape and evasion, and actually accomplished things, and this invalid presumed comparable value.

  Schmitty stepped in with a telegraphed punch. Walt side-stepped and jabbed twice with the left. Bap. Bap.

  “Get him, Walt,” Cooper cheered.

  The bum swung a wide arc, slow and off target.

  Rather than parry, Walt stepped into the shot, dropped his head, and blocked the glancing blow. The move pitted him low, setting up a punch to the abdomen, followed by an uppercut.

  When Schmitty regained himself, Walt pressed the attack. Left. Right. A kick to the shin that missed. Right hook. Right hook. The fool dropped.

  It was better when he fought back.

  Three additional kicks to the face created total submission. Walt mounted the bum, who covered up with his forearms, but said nothing.

  Walt sneaked partial blows through the defenses as the man squirmed. Needing more, he called Cooper to hold Schmitty’s arms.

  With them pinned down and the man writhing under him, he rained down three powerful right hands to the face until the vertical-faced bastard went limp.

  “Hell yeah!” Walt yelled.

  “Check your gloves for tears,” Cooper said as he let go of Schmitty.

  Moving his hands under the car lights revealed a layer of blood coated them. Walt smiled. He went back and wiped the goop on Schmitty’s clothing. He inspected the knuckles further and found the leather intact.

  As the bum’s eyes fluttered open, Walt slapped him. Winded, with sore fists, Walt spun to find Cooper had moved to the front of the car. Cooper gently padded the area around Walt’s face with a wet cloth. Walt noticed blood speckled much of Cooper’s chest and goggles.

  Finding a generous amount of the substance staining his front, and knowing his effort had extracted the fluid filled Walt with pride.

  Cooper held his hand up for a high-five. Walt smacked it, hard.

  Cooper removed the cap on the near-empty pint. Using the tips of his fingers, and careful to avoid touching the opening, he offered it to his boss. Walt declined and watched Cooper drink the last of it. A bitter face, then, “How do you feel?”

  “Ready to take on the world.”

  “You’re going to change the world, Walt. Don’t forget that.”

  “Change the lives of every person that matters.”

  “You good with him?” Cooper motioned to the man, who though clearly breathing, remained on his back, knees drawn up, arms out wide.

  “You’re tonight’s instructor,” Walt said. “What do you think?” A beat later, he worried Cooper would want more. He believed Cooper could stroll over to the downed man, slit the bum’s throat, and forget the defilement by the time he turned over the Malibu’s ignition. Walt himself might be up for taking things further at a later date, but he was done for tonight.

  “You did excellent. When he got pissy and wanted to fight back, it let me see the real you. You went right at him. A lot of men—rich or poor—would have backed off, even called for help. You showed spunk tonight. You should be proud.” He then stepped to the side of the car, stripped down, and piled everything in a dug-out hole.

  He instructed Walt to follow suit. Once all of the items were in a pile, he laid two fire logs across the top, squirted lighter fluid on the tainted materials, and tossed in a match.

  Standing in the buff in front of the fire, like warriors, Walt peeked at Cooper’s hog; at his own.

  After the excitement, his dog had some blood in it, and came close to matching Cooper’s. He grinned when Cooper lightly slapped the back of his arm and said:

  “This is becoming my all-time favorite job.”

  “Better than the FBI?”

  “Loads better,” Cooper walked a gallon of water over to the bum, placed it near his head, and stuffed money into his pocket. Strolling back, he said, “Get dressed killer. You’re ready for our next mission.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Corey dreamed he was drifting upwards from an inner confusion. His essential character solidified on an earth of salmon-colored dirt with banana yellow grass. Uniformed deciduous trees created singular rows to either side of him, stretching to infinity.

  A wing-back chair appeared. His closest childhood friend, David Rood, rested on its cushion. He wore no clothes and had sky blue flesh, slick with bursts of traveling sparks. His eyes were eight times their normal size and midnight black. He lacked a nose, mouth, and ears. David Rood, but with the body of a blue Being.

  Their friendship, which rivaled the closest of brothers, spanned the ages of nine to eighteen. Their rare disputes ended within hours. Every birthday and holiday centered around the other. At eighteen, when Corey went off to college, the contact lessened until age twenty-one. With no event or defined conflict, the bond vanished.

  Standing in this field of oddity, Corey wondered how a union so strong had fizzled so quickly, and why.

  With David visiting Corey’s dream, he had to question if they remained friends on hiatus, or had they devolved to strangers? Corey wasn’t positive the man still lived, if he had children, a wife, was heterosexual.

  “Buddy,” the blue Being version of David said without the use of a mouth.

  Laughing, the answer hit him: yes, they were still friends.

  “What are you doing here?” Corey asked.

  “Educating.”

  Corey saw no book, no literature. David maintained eye contact. “And I’m married to a woman. We have two children.”

  Corey’s lucid dreaming ability informed him he was dreaming. Knowing this, he wondered if David’s answer was a mere reflection of his own thoughts. They felt like updates emanating from an outside source, but dream content seemed accurate until you woke, and reflected on it with a conscious mind.

  “Am I your friend,” blue Being, not David, spoke that time. Its voice had the soothing intonation of a professor explaining a beloved subject. The tone also carried a steady, but slight vibration, like the trailing off of a tuning fork.

  “I want to be your friend,” Corey said, and found himself in an identical chair, positioned so close to the blue Being their knees were almost touching.

  “You’ve done something, Corey the Third.”

  Corey ignored at the possible meanings to the title and said, “What have I done?”

  The lane of trees rooted to the strange soil rotated around them at the pace of a windmill caught in a listless breeze.

  “Awakened desire.”

  “In the Jinni?”

  The Being’s onyx eyes reflected Corey’s image. The Being nodded.

  “What does he desire?”

  David Rood replied, “It, buddy. Not he. It.”

  “What does it want?”

  The Being shrugged, as if the answer was self-evident, simple, or irrelevant.

  A sheet of ordinary typing paper appeared between them. The Being lifted a finger toward the offering. The moment Corey touched the page, the dream warped in backdrop and sensory
perception. He no longer sat in a chair. He shared a body, or a vision, from the perspective of the Jinni in Walt. They hovered with an omnipotent view inside a high-end New York neighborhood condominium. Below, a couple feuded.

  The Jinni relished the rage and was able to amplify it. It hated all organic life, free will, the idea of having a range of emotions, the highs and lows that accompany a perilous existence.

  Though the boyfriend’s hand had been empty a second before, he now held a paring knife. He lunged and buried it into his girlfriend’s throat.

  He wiggled the weapon to bury it deeper. The scene drew back, expanding Corey’s view over an urban setting where rival families shot it out between alleys and across cars, leaving bodies on both sides. The view pulled out farther, revealing neighborhoods at war, fires, barricaded roads, smoking skyscrapers.

  He was witnessing the Jinni’s hope for the future.

  Violence escalated and compounded as time passed. Life and society gradually diminished. Decades later, the last two humans, a burly man and a dangerous woman, wrestled over a blade, each intent on forcing it into the abdomen of the other. The woman persevered, ending the last seed and dooming the human race to extinction.

  Winded, she clasped the sides of her head and bellowed from atop a heap of trash. Her face contorted. Tremors quivered from her forehead down her face. Ripples sluiced across her front.

  Hovering close to the woman, Corey understood that with all the woman’s hate and hopelessness, the Jinni could leach into her body.

  David Rood’s voice, timid and inquisitive, asked, “Do you know what’s happening?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither, buddy.”

  Then the blue Being spoke, “He’s entered a vessel. Liberated, mortal, but without opposition to end him and skew the balance. He now has senses, and options unavailable to his kind.”

  The woman had been altered. Flesh split in random spots from a new type of bone growth. Her eyes dazzled with flakes of gold. She applied pressure with her foot to a section of trash. She kicked debris. She slapped herself. She grinned. The Jinni in a woman’s body extended a hand toward small flames crackling over a pile of plastic rubble. When it became too hot, she pulled her hand back and inspected it.

  It stood alone, as absolute ruler of the Earth, God to this realm.

  “Let us palaver,” the blue Being said.

  Corey sensed a pull to return to his chair. Too fascinated with the demon woman, he resisted.

  Seemingly unaware of him, the possessed woman sniffed the air, licked her hand, and roared with a baritone of evil rarely voiced on the human plane.

  As her call expended, Corey heard a woman yelp. It’s familiarity activated alarms in his mind.

  “Come talk,” the blue Being said with more urgency.

  From some faint distance, a woman screamed in surprise and agony. That was Marci’s scream.

  Rotating in his spirit form, he searched the destruction and saw only waste, and the Jinni lumbering away from him.

  Remembering he occupied a dream, that he could rise into a waking world, that he would find her—healthy or hurt—he pushed himself upwards and woke.

  In the bedroom, he saw the bedside lamp was spilled on the floor, and missing its shade. Icy perspiration pierced his throat. It was hard to breathe.

  The residue of sleep always clung to Corey. Sitting up amplified the disorientation. He felt drugged, and lethargic. He smelled iron, and something more grotesque. The lighting was muted, almost as if outside fog had seeped into the home.

  Marci’s spot in the bed next to him was empty. The blankets and sheets were wrinkled and tossed heavily over him.

  A thud banged opposite his bedroom wall, in the kitchen.

  Propelling out of bed, prepared to lend aid, he planted one foot and froze. Their bedroom was a scene of reckless disturbance. Movement skipped, for one moment he stood next to his bed paralyzed with shock, and then, somehow, he knelt near the back wall under a bright light he must have activated. Marci lay slumped against the wall, unresponsive, her mouth open, and slack.

  Blood soaked the front of her shirt. There was a chest wound below her left breast, a widening funnel of red was beneath that. Her left hand rested on the floor, palm opened to him. A deep laceration divided the skin.

  A low deep moan escaped Corey. He had heard her scream, but woke too late.

  Marci’s eyes popped open. Her bloodied palm snatched his shirt.

  “Hold on,” Corey blurted. “I’ll call for help. Don’t move.”

  Her grip tightened with inhuman strength. The room around Corey grew darker as if it had sprouted membranous wings which were retracting, and wrapping them in its shade.

  Marci shook her head and spat blood. “Ja-” was all she managed until a bubble of blood filled her mouth and popped with extreme force. “Janey.”

  Another loss of time as Corey found himself paused in the bedroom doorway, torn between leaving his dying wife and racing to his daughter.

  A crash in the kitchen ended the indecision.

  Corey rocketed from the room. If the assailant hadn’t left, he would stop them, or die.

  The equilibrium imbalance intensified as the dark hallway, lit only by the moon slanting from the end, seemed to elongate and tilt to the right. Twenty strides later, he focused on lucidity, believing he had run much farther than should have been necessary.

  He stared at his fingers. They were long and knotty. Attempting to discern his hand and failing brought a revelation. He was still dreaming.

  Accepting he had suffered a false awakening, he bolted upright. Awake, for real.

  Nighttime. No distortions. He smelled normal scents, heard the din of silence. The calm and peace contrasted his tense body and slamming heart.

  Marci slept soundly next to him, on her side. He squeezed her shoulder gently, and spent a moment listening to her breathing. Satisfied this was real and she was okay, he kissed the back of her head, and then scooted against the headboard.

  Janey staying at Lisa’s lent reasonable credence to her safety.

  He ran both hands down his face as he exhaled.

  He would let Marci sleep and attempt to get more rest after the decompression period, but they needed to talk.

  Corey believed he had been given a message, a warning. He also believed he had received an invitation to talk.

  To prove the latter, he’d need to enter the dream construct of Justin Collins, and exchange notes with his blue tenant.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “That’s him pulling up now,” Corey said, and then allowed the drape covering the small window next to the door to slip from his fingers.

  “You might want to suggest it, get his opinion,” Marci said from their couch as she sipped her nightly glass of warm water.

  “I’m not asking Justin to pay for a Dream Ride I’m requesting.”

  “I’m not saying he has to pay full-price, or give us cash tonight. Maybe we just subtract from the total when we pay him back.”

  “He’ll provide plenty of value.”

  “Oh that’s right, because his subconscious is going to fix all of our problems.”

  “Here’s some facts.” Corey breathed two deep breaths to level out his current annoyance. “Since this started, we’ve killed a man, had our home violated, been forced to hide our daughter, and created a human monster. I’m trying to stay positive by believing there can be an upside.” Knowing her mind would race to the financial benefit, he added, “A noble, ethical side to what’s happening. If I’m right, tonight will give us a strategy toward that.”

  “If that was guaranteed, I’d be okay with one free Ride.”

  “Hush,” Corey said as Justin slammed his truck door.

  “Kind of chilly out tonight,” Justin said as he entered their home.

  “Yeah,” Corey replied. “What is it, seventy-three?”

  “It’s sixty-nine degrees out, thank you very much.”

  Imparting her own smile, Mar
ci said, “Sixty-seven with the wind-chill.” She hugged Justin and led them to the kitchen table.

  “Okay team,” Justin said. “You needed me, and here I am. So what gives?”

  “Jon Stossel here wants us to give you a Dream Ride so he can interview your subconscious,” Marci said.

  “Ah,” Justin beamed and leaned back. “You mean my guardian blue angel?” Playfully, he added “I’m not sure he takes appointments.”

  Too wound up for jokes, Corey placed his elbows on the table. “I think I can communicate with your friend and get helpful information on how to rein Walt in, or a better grasp on what we’re dealing with.”

  “We know what we are dealing with. Right versus wrong.”

  “I can accept that,” Marci said. “It’s more palatable than good versus evil.”

  Justin tilted his head, as if to say, we’re dealing with that too, but aloud he said, “My gut says to support your family in any way I can, and I’ve been listening much closer to my intuition.”

  “I’m sure you were listening before, too,” Corey said. “It was simply we didn’t know to whom.”

  Justin nodded, “I’ve come to believe my angel has been with me for some time, that he guided me to call you on that first morning, when we visited the soup kitchen.”

  “I’m glad you called,” Corey said. “Or were instructed to call. However it happened.”

  “Me too.”

  Marci laid her hand on Justin’s. The petite fingers hardly covered half of the hairy maw. “Regardless of your insistence to assign your ego a name, I third the support for us having met.”

  Justin breathed deeply and patted her hand. Addressing Corey, he said, “So you think you can climb inside my dream and talk with an angel?”

  “I do.” Until that instant, Corey’s he hadn’t realized how excited he was. “Your guest wasn’t too interested in me last time, but… I had a dream last night suggesting things might be different.”

  “We’d be fools to ignore our dreams. So let’s do it,” Justin said. “For all we know, you’ve been sent a dream guide as well.”