Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  “What about those people who did the prepping for Doomsday?” she asked, taking the Rand McNally from me. “Didn’t they have food that would last for 25 years or something like that?”

  I shrugged. “We could eat earthworms.”

  Lulu stared at the map. “D-22,” she repeated. She stared some more. “I don’t see any town called Sunshine, but this map doesn’t go into detail. We should grab a Colorado map from the next gas station. A bigger map would have the town on it. You know, we’re in section D-22.”

  Spring sliced off a segment of earthworm and yelled something appropriately gruesome. It translated as something like, “Wiggling earth creature, prepare to be consumed!”

  I shuddered.

  “You cold?” Lulu asked. “It doesn’t seem that cold today. The wind stopped blowing in from the north and—”

  I looked around slowly. “You’d think we’d see more people.” There was a cold feeling inside of me. I didn’t think it came from the weather. I had gotten used to being chilled. Sooner or later spring was going to come, and the weather would change. I hoped we would be across the United States by then because I wasn’t looking forward through slogging through January and February. I had visions of snow shoes and not a solitary sled dog in sight to pull a sleigh.

  Lulu handed the map back to me. She finished up her Ding Dong and licked her fingers. “Gonna miss those. That one was starting to go stale though.”

  I systematically scanned the horizon even more slowly than before. U.S. Highway 34 headed east through the northeastern part of Colorado. The land was gently rolling hills. There were trees albeit sparingly. Brush dotted the landscape. Dozens of farms were littered along the landscape we passed. Great rolling sprinkler systems rusted in place where they had been left during the change. Some of the systems had already fallen apart. Windmills occasionally broke up a bleak landscape. It hadn’t snowed for a week, but there was still some left from the last time. The road was basically clear, and we hadn’t seen anyone or signs of anyone since we’d seen the footprints on the side of the road.

  There were various herds of cattle and horses. Some of them looked at us as we passed but didn’t mind us. The fences along the road were already breaking down. Rolls of hay had been broken apart by hungry ungulates. Once in a while we saw signs of other predators who decided they liked the former farm animals.

  But here and now, there was nothing. We had passed a series of radio towers. Some of them swayed precariously in a gentle winter breeze. Others had already collapsed. In another decade there wouldn’t be anything left.

  “Do you feel something weird?” I asked finally.

  Lulu put her hand on the handle of the KA-BAR knife strapped to her leg. She slid off the hood of the Mustang and started checking out the environment. It was odd to watch since the old Lulu would have probably hid behind the car instead. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It feels like someone’s reached inside me and is tugging at my intestines.” I rubbed my stomach. I could have said it felt like someone was dragging their fingernails down the chalkboard of my soul, but I wasn’t that poetic. “Not like food poisoning. Just a sick feeling. Something isn’t right.”

  “A premonition?”

  “Maybe, but nothing’s popping into my head.”

  “We should leave,” Lulu said and began packing up.

  Spring returned to my ear and sang, “Yellow-Haired-Grumpy-Nose-Girl is right. The sisters don’t like this place.”

  That was enough for me.

  We made sure the gerbil cage was secure and got on the bikes. We rode east for a few miles, and then I coasted to a stop. To the direct north was a town. The highway had clearly been built after the town because it looped to the south, avoiding the neighborhoods and industrial area. The highway also avoided the trains that ran parallel to it.

  I stopped because I was compelled to do so. After a few hundred feet, Lulu stopped because she realized that I had. She came back and stared in the direction that I was looking.

  Pulling out my map, I looked. There wasn’t a town indicated where I was looking. It was like a ghost town, except it wasn’t. But Lulu pointed at the railroad station that sat not a hundred yards from us.

  “Burlington Northern Railroad Depot,” she read. “Sunshine, Colorado. Established 1878.”

  I sighed. The feeling wasn’t going away. It was getting worse. It wasn’t like a warning, but it was something else that was telling me all wasn’t right in the world. It yanked at me, telling me I needed to do something.

  “I hate all this psychic crap,” Lulu commented mildly.

  Chapter 6

  Remember, No Matter Where You Go…

  Spring sang, “The sisters don’t like this place.”

  “You stay here,” I said. “I have to go look.”

  Spring and the other firefly pixies ducked inside the gerbil cage, as if it would better protect them from whatever it was that was spooking them. Lulu made a noise that I took to mean, “Yeah, okay, but we don’t like it much. Also don’t stop near a van without windows. Don’t forget to wear underwear without holes.”

  I walked across the tracks and past the train depot. When I reached Railroad Avenue, I walked along it and carefully proceeded. There weren’t any footprints in the mud nor were there any in the patches of nearby snow. The windows and doors of the closest houses were closed. The curtains were shut. No trails had been made to any of the dwellings here.

  There were two cars that had hit a utility pole and one that had come to rest against a picket fence. The doors were shut and they appeared like dozens of others I had seen in the months since the change had occurred. But the obvious about the rest of the town was unmistakable.

  No one had been there for a long time.

  The birds weren’t singing. There wasn’t even the noise that the tree branches made when they brushed against each other. It was a silent, empty world. If I said something it would echo, and no one would answer.

  I froze. In front of me a slight shimmer of light illuminated the day for only a second. It was as if something had reflected off a glass wall, but there was no wall there. It made me blink, as if it had been something I had imagined. But I had learned how to trust myself and my instincts. (Mostly, I did.) Incrementally, I walked within a few feet of where I had seen the shimmer and I stopped. There was debris strewn across the asphalt there, like someone had dropped piles of laundry.

  I shifted my feet as I stood there, and my left foot hit something. A wristwatch skittered a few inches and stopped. I stooped and lifted the watch into my hand to look at it. It was a Timex Expedition. The only reason I knew was because I had been considering buying one for my father, so he could use it on his hikes. The face said it was waterproof and had the Indiglo feature on it. Push a button and it would glow greenly in the dark so you could see what time it was or what your countdown was…before. It didn’t work anymore. I haven’t found one that did work, but I was optimistic.

  Thoughtlessly dropping the watch to the road, I winced when the glass cracked loudly as it broke. There wasn’t another single sound about.

  Beyond the houses I could see a river snaking its way by. Past the river were some commercial buildings. Further on in that direction was a strip mall and a large grocery store. This place seemed as dead as any that we’d been in. Those figures that I had been messing with came back to me. In a given county, there should be about 7.5 people. More or less. Perhaps in this particular county there would have been less because the county hadn’t been overpopulated. We should have been running into a few people.

  Someone. Even something would have been cool. I would have taken the yeti again.

  My mind couldn’t come up with a logical formula for calculating how many people I should have run into. Clearly I wasn’t going to encounter all of them. Seeing a set of footprints didn’t really make up for the lack of them. But on the other hand, how did I know that the owner of the footprints wasn’t someone who was like the Bur
ned Man? I didn’t, but I needed to take the chance.

  “Hello?” I called. “We’re not here to hurt anyone. We’re just passing through.”

  Someone should have answered. I could feel it in my bones. It was so strange there.

  I took a step forward, and the air pulsed around me. Feeling thick and greasy at the same time, it felt like a weird sort of net that pushed at me. I had to force my way through it and abruptly my body popped like a cork.

  “What the heyhey was that?” I muttered.

  I looked around. The area seemed the same as it had before, but something had happened. Just when I thought I knew that unexpected things were going to happen and that I had a handle on most of them, something newer and more unexpected happened.

  Was this what Gideon wanted me to see?

  My foot knocked against some of the rags and something rattled. I looked down and saw a bone poking out one of the many lumps around me. It’s a thigh bone, I thought. Where was Zach when I needed a second opinion?

  I nudged it with the toe of my boot. It didn’t disappear, and it didn’t change into something else. It was encased in clothing that I finally identified as jeans. There were other bones, too, but they had been scattered around. I identified some more legs bones and then a rib or two. There were smaller bones. The winds here had blown dirt and vegetation on top of the piles, making them blend into the other various debris that was to be found everywhere. After all, no one was cleaning anything up now.

  I nearly jumped a mile as my eyes found more sets of bones within clothing. My eyes went from one to another to another. These bones weren’t burnt and chewed upon like the Burned Man had done to his victims. Instead, they were light brown or white, as if the earth and the wind had scoured them. These had been out here for a while.

  My eyes went back up and surveyed the area. Nothing seemed an immediate threat.

  Then I looked back at the ground before me. I counted ten sets of bones before I stopped counting. A few didn’t have skulls. A few others were missing arms. Two looked as if the forearms had been neatly surgically cut off at the midsection of the forearms. One looked as if the forearms and one leg had been surgically sliced away. The leg had a precision angle cut into the tibia and fibulas. The leg would have been in movement as best as I could determine.

  But I wasn’t a coroner or a forensic doctor, so everything I was thinking was pure conjecture.

  People had come down the road. Running? I reasoned they had been fleeing from inside the town. They had been leaving. The road was a main thoroughfare to the freeway. They had rushed here, and something had killed them. They had been left here for their flesh to rot away. The wind and perhaps animals had scattered the bones but not much.

  Praying wouldn’t help these lost souls, but I did say one.

  Before the change, people had lived here in Sunshine. After the change or during the change, they had fled in panic, and they had died.

  Statistics. The thought speared my brain like an instantaneous wake up call. Seven point five people in a given county. More in a densely populated area. This part of Colorado couldn’t be considered densely populated in any circumstance. So here were the remains of at least ten. I stopped and counted again. Fourteen people had died right here. Fourteen. It might have been fifteen.

  I thought about the math again. The percentage I had come up with was haphazard at best. Fancy guesswork based on a single high school class I’d taken the year before.

  Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. The population of Sunshine was 344 according to the index of the Rand McNally map.

  I found a stick and double-checked to make sure it wasn’t a bone I had picked up by mistake. The magic number of survivors was .000125 %. (Honestly, it was Sophie’s magic number. A dozen other would-be statisticians would come up with a dozen other magic numbers.) I rounded up 344 to 500 to include people who didn’t live inside the city proper. Oh, maybe I should be generous and just say 1000 to be on the safe side. So .000125 % of 1000 was…I crouched and scratched figures into the dirt. I double-checked my math. I didn’t like the answer and did it again. Since it was the same all three times, I could only assume that it was correct. At least, the math was correct.

  In this area, that meant that 1.25 people should have survived. One person if I rounded down for realistic figures’ sakes. One person should have woken up on the day after the change and wondered why no one was making breakfast or why their alarm hadn’t gone off. One person should have wandered from door to door, endlessly seeking people who simply weren’t there anymore.

  One.

  But here were fourteen sets of remains. Granted they weren’t all there, but there were still fourteen of them. Maybe fifteen, but I honestly couldn’t tell.

  I dropped the stick and stared stupidly at the first bone I’d seen. It was a leg bone. The thigh bone. I suddenly couldn’t remember the correct name. Something with an F. It was the longest bone in the human body. Sure, I could remember the odd fact but not the actual name of the bone.

  It looked as if they had all met their end at roughly the same spot, across a line that crossed the road. They had come to that line and something had happened.

  “Sophie!” Lulu yelled, and it sounded as if it came from a great distance away. I turned my head and saw her only twenty feet away. “The girls are going nuts! I think you need to come back.” She glanced around almost frantically, as if she was expecting something to come barreling out at us intent on homicide.

  I couldn’t find a reason to disagree, and my gut couldn’t find a reason to disagree. If there was something I had learned in the new world, it was listen to my gut. (Sometimes that rule even worked.)

  I went back the way I came but not before I picked up a tibia that had been sliced as if a machine had cut it. I stuck it in my belt and cast a look over my shoulder. Hollow was the right word for this place in the world. It felt hollow, and only hollow people had lived here.

  Returning through the shimmer that crisscrossed the road felt much the same. I pushed my way through. It was easier the second time. It was as if the real world was gleefully pulling me back.

  Lulu gazed past me into the town of Sunshine. “That’s…” she trailed off and bit her lip. “It was like you passed through a wall of light. But it’s gone now.”

  “Do you see all the bones?”

  “What bones?” Lulu took a step closer to where I had been. “Oh, those bones. It looks like something had a killing streak here.” She glanced warily about. “I can see why the Tinker Bells are upset.”

  “There’s nothing fresh here,” I said. “I didn’t see anyone or anything. Just those remains.”

  “There were people there,” said another voice.

  Boy, I was so not ready for another person to talk to us. The sword was out before I blinked. Lulu had the KA-BAR in her hand a moment later.

  The man stepped from behind a house. He had crossed behind it to come out at our blindest side. I said, “Keep an eye on him, Lulu.” Then I systematically scanned around us. I could have sworn there was no one else there.

  “There is no one else here,” the man said. He was a few inches taller than I was, and his heritage was American Indian. His skin was the color of an aged copper penny, and his eyes were so dark I would have called them black. He wore similar clothing to us. Heavy pants, winter coat, winter boots. He didn’t look threatening, and he stopped by the edge of the house, not moving any further. He slowly raised both hands to show that he didn’t have a weapon.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Bansi,” he said. “I was drawn to this place. Much like you, yes?”

  “Are you alone?” Lulu asked.

  “Are we not all alone?”

  “He’s a philosopher,” Lulu said to me. “Leave him and let’s go.”

  “Do you know what happened in this place?” I asked.

  “Nothing happened here,” he said. I couldn’t place his age. He might have been thirty years old. He might have been f
ifty. He looked like he was in good shape, and he had been eating well enough. I was on Lulu’s side. I didn’t know him. I didn’t trust him. And there weren’t others around to back us up if this man proved to be unfriendly.

  Abruptly, Bansi folded his legs up and sat. He put both hands on the ground, palms down. “There’s no need to fear me.”

  “Sorry, bud,” Lulu said, “I don’t trust diddly-squat now. You might take it into your head that you have a need to have two new girlfriends.”

  He laughed and I flinched. I didn’t like the noise. I hadn’t heard laughter since I had left the Redwood Group in Eureka. Not real laughter from a human being, anyway, and it sounded surreal.

  The echo of the noise surrounded us; it almost enveloped us. “Ah, young children of a new Earth,” he said, after he stopped laughing. “I missed the bright and inventive, the ones with sharp tongues. Humans are usually so boring.”

  I didn’t need an invitation to back away at that. If someone who looked like a human had just implied that he wasn’t a human, then it was time to get away from him.

  “If you follow us, I’ll show you how boring I’m not,” Lulu snarled at him.

  Go, Lulu.

  His nearly black eyes glittered with amusement. He studied Lulu for the longest time.

  There was a sudden flurry of wind and green kaleidoscopic wings as the firefly pixies surrounded us. Spring nearly rammed into the back of my head, as did several of the other pixies into Lulu’s head. She wasn’t sure how to react because they’d never used her hair as a place to perch before.

  “Old magicks!” Spring sang into my ear. Her melodic voice was almost hysterical. “Remember the sisters’ warnings, Soophee! Remember!”

  Bansi smiled, and it was a cold smile. It reminded me of a teacher I once had. He knew he had all the power, and he wasn’t afraid to use it for his own benefit. The lesson was that most people have their own agendas. Maybe the lesson should be that most beings have their own agendas.