Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Our heads did grow back,” one head said mollifyingly.

  “We’re called humans,” I called. “If you’ll tell me what your territory is, the humans agree not to trespass without your permission. Furthermore, they’ll supply you with a flock of chickens once a month.”

  “Once a month?”

  “Every time the moon is full,” I explained.

  The heads whispered among themselves. Every once in a while they looked at me and the individual still hidden in the copse of twisted trees.

  “We’ll try the chicken,” the rightmost hydra’s head announced. But one limb held up the Snickers bar between its black claws. “But we really want more of these. This smells good.”

  That was the thing in the brave new world. New creatures with all kinds of interesting new habits. What did the humans do? They tried to go in, balls to the wall, and shoulder their way past a creature that was about the size of an African elephant and a hundred times more nasty. Also, they tried to kill it. Logic would also dictate that if humans couldn’t kill the beast, then something else had to be done.

  That’s where I came in.

  The other individual realized that a détente had been achieved and waded out of the trees, maneuvering carefully around the hydra.

  Her blonde hair gleamed in the afternoon sun and a gentle wind tossed it in a fetching way that only the wind would do for her. Bright blue eyes regarded the hydra with the proper amount of apprehension. She finally reached the base of my rock and shrugged eloquently. I hated how she could shrug like that. We both watched as the hydra divvied up the candy bar nine ways. Sharp claws worked just like Ginsu knives.

  “I thought it would be the chickens,” I said.

  Lulu sighed. “‘You’re not you when you’re hungry.’” The quote from an old television commercial fell flat.

  Once, Lulu had tried to manipulate me into becoming angry with my prince charming. Now, she helped to conquer the new world at my side.

  Haha. Fairy tales don’t have the wicked stepsister turning into the tongue-in-cheek sidekick, am I right?

  Chapter 2

  Life After Life Ends…

  Lulu and I watched the hydra eat the chickens. None of the birds or their parts were wasted. I felt sorry for the chickens, but they didn’t suffer very long. We had gathered them up from a nearby farm and were severely pecked in the process. (I was pecked. Lulu not so much.) Honestly, the chickens weren’t doing so swell on their own. They had overpopulated, and some of them were clearly starving. We’d had to find a cart for the horses and cages for the birds, but we found them, and they’d come in handy.

  “Guess we should have stocked up on candy bars,” Lulu said.

  I looked at Lulu. “Next time we go against a hydra I’ll remember that.”

  Spring laughed, a little tinkling noise. She was beginning to understand a lot more English, and while Lulu wasn’t one of her favorite humans (Sometimes when Spring was tetchy, she called Lulu “Lying-Grasping-Pretends-to-be-Dumb-Human.”), she had grown on the firefly pixie.

  Lulu blinked at Spring. “Did she laugh at my joke?”

  “That was a joke?” I asked.

  Lulu stared and sighed. “I’ll go round up those cages. The families up the road are going to need them.”

  The hydra approached me and settled down on the ground nearby with a generously sized thump. The heads rested on the ground, clearly happy and satiated. The rightmost head said, “Chicken tastes like humans. But better. Not as good as Snickers bars, but very good.”

  A man stood about fifty feet away and stared at me and the hydra. He was the farmer that lived closest to the hydra’s territory, and he had lost some of his people to the beast. However, I didn’t feel sorry for him. His people had attacked the beast first. He was in his early thirties, and his name was C.J. He hadn’t said what the initials stood for, and I hadn’t asked. He hadn’t been happy that the President had sent me. His look had expressed his sincere disbelief in my mad skills. But he didn’t appear disbelieving at the moment.

  “Once at the full moon, more chickens and candy bars,” I said to the hydra. “Right here? Morning or evening better for you?”

  “Morning at this spot,” the rightmost head said. “We don’t like the noonday sun much.” Neither did the firefly pixies, and they were starting to wilt. Most of them were wrapped up in my hair, simply resting until they could find a better spot to snooze through the daytime.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked the beast politely.

  “A name?”

  “We call something that is similar to you a hydra,” I offered.

  “Hydra,” the head said. “We like that.”

  The other heads grunted ambivalently.

  “The human over there won’t speak your language like I can, although I think we can get him started on learning,” I said in the hydra’s language. “We won’t always have as many chickens or candy bars, but if you’re open to substitution, we can figure out if there’s some other things you like.”

  The right-hand head considered me. “If the humans provide us with food, we can give the humans things, too.”

  Not so selfish, the creature. I loved learning stuff like this. Right away the hydra had cottoned on to the fact that if the humans offered something to it, then it could get more out of the deal by offering something back. Bartering was back, baby, and this time it wasn’t restricted to a single species.

  “C.J.,” I called. I motioned with my fingers for him to come closer. C.J. didn’t want to come closer. “The hydra’s eaten already,” I said impatiently in English. “It’s agreed not to eat humans. I told it that we’re not food. In fact, it loves the chicken. Loves the candy bars, too. Really loves the candy bars.”

  C.J. finally inched a little closer, keeping a wary eye on the hydra, and the three of us made a deal. It took a while for C.J. to relax enough to get into the groove of it. The hydra was full of chicken and content to lay in the sunny field while discussing what each party could bring to the table. I suggested that C.J. and his people work on the hydra’s sweet tooth, seeing as there wasn’t an unlimited supply of candy. The hydra offered to bring cattle to the homestead that C.J.’s people were working. It turned out that the hydra didn’t much like beef.

  “All that mooing,” the rightmost head explained. “The red meat doesn’t taste very good. Yucky.”

  When we finally rode off, everyone was basically content.

  I could be a diplomat. Yea me!

  I had come east last November and found my way to Washington, D.C.

  Spring and the girls had decided I couldn’t be left alone and joined in on the fun.

  Lulu hadn’t felt very welcome with the redwoods society after what she had done and followed me. I’m not sure if it was because she was being treated differently or because she couldn’t stand the guilt.

  Once Lulu had gotten past the whole I-can’t-be-without-a-man thing, she wasn’t so bad. She didn’t speak so much anymore. She pitched in. She had saved my butt on a couple of memorable occasions, and she knew how to make a vanilla blend from a generic supermarket brand that almost tasted as good as a professional place. Almost.

  C.J. rode his horse close to mine and said, “Thank you.”

  “Didn’t think I could do it, did you?” I tried to keep the smug look off my face. I wouldn’t be telling C.J. that there had been a moment when I didn’t think I could do it either.

  C.J. winced. “I thought I was going to have to send a messenger to the District with your bodies, or, err, what was left of them. The hydra doesn’t really leave much.” He shuddered, and there was a pause before he added, “It’s like blackmail.”

  “Remember who attacked what first,” I said coldly, immediately losing whatever good humor I had left. “The hydra doesn’t have a reason to lie. It could have simply listened and then eaten me and gone about its day, but it didn’t.” I paused and took the time to find a little self-control. I didn’t really want to berate the man, b
ut really, people could be stupid. This was a new world with new beasts and a new learning curve. Figure it out.

  Finally, I said, “If you take the time to learn how to speak with the beast, I don’t think you’ll have many more problems.”

  “How did you know how to talk to it?” C.J. asked curiously. He eyed the mark on my face. The glittering shape was obvious in full daylight. Then he looked at Spring who was tangled up in my hair.

  “It’s my gift,” I said simply. I didn’t want to encourage anyone else to make attempts to get what I had. Some of the others knew how I had gotten it. The firefly pixies had given it to me. I was special. Yeah, so special. Some of the other new animals had affinities to the survivors. The Burned Man had the same attachment to a thing that resembled a turtle/spider. They had healed him and marked him, but he was insane, and in his insane attempt at revenge, he had alienated himself from the new creatures. I hadn’t helped either.

  The man who had come looking for representatives had another affinity to a creature that looked a lot like a lion-sized dragon. His name was Hanley, and he was still out touring the new and improved United States for groups of survivors.

  In any case, I could Dr. Doolittle my butt off. It came in very handy.

  In the case of the hydra, it was likely a language someone else could learn readily. After all, I guess the Greeks had met up with their kind before.

  C.J. sighed. “Sounded like Greek to me.”

  “Haha.”

  “Really, it sounded like Greek.”

  “I’ll find someone to track down a language book in D.C.,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think it’s modern Greek. Maybe it’s something like Proto-Greek. You’ll have to figure it out.” I stared at the mane of the horse. “Don’t provoke the hydra.”

  C.J. said, “It’s not like it’s a stray dog.” He didn’t like me talking to him like that. I knew what I looked like. A teenager with a sword strapped across my back. I didn’t look like I was supposed to be in charge.

  “Exactly.” I reconsidered. Nope. No diplomat me. “You want it to eat more of your people, fine, then don’t come crying to the President about your situation. All of your people need to agree on it. The hydra won’t eat your people, if your people don’t provoke it. As a matter of fact, you might want to think about protecting it.”

  “Protecting that big green piece of cr— ” C.J. started and cut off.

  I interjected a bad word. “Sure. It feels a little bad that it ate some of you. Also, it likes to barter. It could be like a really great watchdog, if you were willing to play ball.” I glanced at C.J. to see if he was getting the picture. This seemed to be a conversation I was having over and over again. Most humans wanted to kill first and ask questions later. I was willing to let that go, considering they were facing something that looked like it was straight out of a midnight nightmare. (Nine heads, flashing orange eyes, claws that would make a velociraptor shiver. Yeah, me too.) But here it was. I brokered the deal, and if it went south because someone was too much of an idiot to follow through, then the hydra wouldn’t want to merely talk to me next time I happened to see it.

  “You’ve got to stop thinking in terms of us and them. Some of them are us. And some of us are them.” I couldn’t keep the deep-freeze out of my voice and C.J. was well aware of it. He reined in his horse and went to speak with some of his people. He glanced back at me once, and his expression no longer held disdain. It looked like it held a little bit of fear.

  Lulu said, “Oh, your political acumen.” She had ridden up on my other side and was examining the group that C.J. was talking with.

  “For a dumb blonde, you’re using awfully big words,” I snapped.

  “I was bored last week and read a dictionary. I had to sound out some of the bigger ones, but it was better than reading an old T.V. Guide.”

  “Where did you find an old T.V. Guide?”

  “Why do act like that around people?” Lulu asked curiously. She looked at me, and her frank expression made me want to hide my face. “You push them away. The only one you didn’t push away was Zach, and well, you didn’t push him because, instead, you ran from him like your butt was on fire.”

  I stared at Lulu. “Really, you want to bring up Zach. You?”

  Lulu shrugged. I couldn’t help but admire her elegant movement. It didn’t matter what Lulu was wearing or if she was covered in swamp muck and stank like she had been running a marathon, she still looked good. She had found someone to cut her short blonde hair, and it didn’t take but some fingers running through it to make it look good. A dirty smudge on her cheek didn’t detract from her beauty.

  On the other hand, I looked like I had been dragged through a wringer and spit out and then spit upon with black-colored bog puke. If I ran my fingers through my hair, it would stand straight up and moan with agony.

  “I was stupid,” Lulu said. It was half a whisper, and I didn’t respond. We hadn’t discussed it much. I hadn’t brought it up, and Lulu hadn’t offered. “I thought it was like the old world. I needed to mark my spot, and Zach was the most eligible bachelor around. It was stupid. No, I was stupid. Really stupid. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t exactly know what to say. It hadn’t been hidden before, but then again, it wasn’t right in front of me. We had been busy traveling and then we had been busy being representatives and then we had been busy being problem solvers. But here it was, and I was going to have to say something.

  “I know you’re sorry,” I said finally.

  Lulu shrugged again. “It’s not your fault I was a bitch. That was the old world. It isn’t this one.”

  “So, what’s for dinner?”

  “Chicken?” Lulu said and snorted.

  “Butterflies,” Spring suggested sleepily.

  * * *

  The good news was that we only had to ride to Fredericksburg on horseback. The bad news was that we’d have to wait for the train to come from Richmond. The train master said they had some problems with boo hags on the track south of Ruther Glen. That meant that the train might be there in five minutes or a week. It was a little difficult to tell.

  Wait. Did I mention trains? A flashlight won’t work in our world. We can’t fire a gun anymore. Electricity is history. But hey, steam works just fine. But steam trains hadn’t been sitting around waiting for the change. No, mostly they were in museums and on tourist locales, used by people who had been showing them off.

  Getting one of those puppies hadn’t been hard according to the first conductor I talked to. The hard part had been getting the trains on the correct tracks and the old non-steam trains completely off the tracks. Think about the problem there. You have a fifty-ton piece of steel and iron just sitting in your way, and you can no longer turn on the engine in order to move it. You can’t just push it off. You can’t tip it over. What it came down to was that the brakes were unlocked, and the old trains were pulled to a side track. Then there were other problems. Some of the old trains had been in movement during the change and had derailed without someone directing their motion. Rails had been torn up during those wrecks and needed to be repaired.

  And let us not forget that the sea of dreams had crashed upon the landscape and sometimes taken things away in a full-fledged fantastical flash. Bridges, tunnels, towns, mountains had all simply vanished, gone to the same place as all the other people had gone. This left gaps in tracks and terrain obstacles that had to be overcome.

  But survivors got creative. After a few months, the world had mass trans again. We were up to five whole trains.

  One single steam train ran from Baltimore, Maryland to Raleigh, North Carolina, following tracks that had been there for a century and more.

  Lulu and I waited around Fredericksburg for a day because neither one of us wanted to ride horses up to the Capitol. Apparently, her ass hurt as much as mine did. I would have gotten on a bicycle, but the roads were quickly going to hell in a handbasket.

  The best choice was the train.

  We hung
out with a small crowd of ten people who were waiting on the train.

  It was a spring afternoon, and I wasn’t sure of the date. Back in the Redwoods Group there was a man who could not only tell you the present date but the date you were born and the date you were going to die. I didn’t have that man around to tell me what the present date was, and I didn’t feel like being on a schedule. What I wanted didn’t really seem important.

  Spring yanked at a hair tendril and sang into my ear. “When will Soophee return to the place where all the sisters remain?” That could be translated into “I’m ready to go home, and you should be, too. So why don’t we? Huh?”

  I had been thinking about it for weeks now. I wasn’t so restless these days. I wanted to see the people of the Redwoods Group. I wanted to see Kara, my middle-aged ex-Army friend from Klamath Falls, Oregon. I wanted to see Calida, who was with the ultra-grumpy Ethan and who was very pregnant by that time. I wanted to see Elan, an enchanting ten-year-old with the same penchant for the firefly pixies. And everyone already knew, I well and truly wanted to see Zach. I wanted to see if the longing inside me went away when I first looked into his wonderfully chocolate-colored eyes.

  Zack, one should understand, was the prince charming in my epic story. Flawed and moody, but he was still the one with the fairy tale title.

  “I promise it will be soon,” I sang to Spring.

  “What’s a boo hag?” Lulu asked as she slid onto the section of the floor next to where I was sitting. We were waiting outside an old train station. It used to be a train station, but someone had turned it into a restaurant sometime in the distant past before the change. It looked as if it had been closed before the change. It was open now. People used the dining room and the kitchen as they saw fit. Someone was cooking out of a portable barbeque pit on the terrace. Not far away was a tall rectangular tower painted to resemble a Purina Cat or Dog Chow bag. At least I thought it was painted that way on purpose. Who would know now?