Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Some people might try to remove him from the park,” McCurdy said. “I’ll make sure they know they shouldn’t, but maybe we can get someone over here to make sure he’s not starving or that he needs better nutrition.”

  “You’re going to have to find someone to do your communications after I leave,” I said.

  “You’re leaving,” McCurdy said. It wasn’t a question exactly. In fact, it kind of sounded like an accusation.

  “Eventually. I miss California.”

  “Among other things,” Lulu said wryly.

  McCurdy turned east on Constitution Avenue with a terse farewell.

  Lulu and I watched him walk away. “Why did you want me with you?” she asked. “You don’t really need me here.”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to tell Lulu about my premonition. That was the problem with those visions. They could be changed, but sometimes I wondered if changing something wouldn’t automatically make it happen all the more.

  “Would you rather not have come?”

  “I— uh,” Lulu said, stuttering in a way that I hadn’t heard her do before. “I don’t know what I want. You asked once what I expected to find here, and I still don’t know. I’d like to know what my place is in this new world.”

  “So would I,” I answered. It was a good question and one that I was working on continuously.

  We went back to the hotel because it was close to lunch time, and the donuts hadn’t lasted long. I saw many other people up and about. Some were headed out in groups to scrounge. Others had other missions that I didn’t know about. Everyone seemed busy enough.

  In the elegant lobby of the hotel, there was a group of newcomers who had just come from the North. One of them had a creature the size of a Shetland pony standing beside him. He was just a teenaged boy, a few years younger than I was, with a spray of wild freckles across his cheeks and dishwater blonde hair that stood up in spikes. The creature wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before. The bluish-gray head and shoulders with their c-shaped wings resembled a great bird, while the body was horse-like. Its hooves were not horse-like, but more like a goat’s.

  “Hippogriff,” someone said wonderingly. They gave the kid and the new animal a wide berth.

  The firefly pixies immediately swarmed the pair, happily doing circles around the two.

  I approached gingerly and waited until the boy noticed the mark on my cheek. “My name is Sophie,” I said. I held out a hand.

  “Prosper,” he said. He took my hand and shook it briefly before releasing it.

  “That’s your name?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m in from California, although I originally came from Oregon,” I said. I looked at the new animal, and Spring landed on the tip of its beak. She sang to it, and it nodded its shaggy feathered head solemnly.

  “Those are yours,” Prosper said, pointing at the firefly pixies.

  “Not mine, but they’re with me. Just like that one is with you.”

  “She. She’s a she,” he said uncomfortably. “We’re from Maine.”

  “I heard someone call her a hippogriff,” I said.

  Prosper shrugged. “I don’t know what she is. There’s a group of them in Maine. We came because the others said there would be people here we needed to meet. Other people like me.” He glanced around and pulled his jacket aside at the neck. The t-shirt came with the jacket, and I saw the edge of the hippogriff’s mark.

  I smiled. “I’ve seen others.”

  I introduced Prosper to the others and learned the hippogriff’s name was Oki.

  Like Hanley and his dragon friend, we would meet many other survivors with that little extra special something.

  Chapter 15

  A Meeting or Two…

  The next day I couldn’t find Prosper or Oki at or near my hotel. I asked the firefly pixies about it, and they directed me to another hotel about a mile away. (They knew about new animals, like they were little miniature gossip divas with tiny silver toothpick swords and opalescent wings.) I trudged down New York Avenue to another place. After a half hour of walking through rapidly melting snow, I found more people with special connections to new animals. Some of them I couldn’t even begin to imagine what they were.

  I would have thought I’d be welcome there, but the looks I received were distrustful. They stared at me from the lobby as if I had come to kick their favorite puppy. Lulu had trailed along, not saying much at all. She looked at the new animals that gathered at the other hotel, and there was wonder in her expression. She wasn’t frightened of the one that looked like a Tim Burton version of Medusa. She didn’t blink at the one that was half a bear and half a reptile. She didn’t even wince when the one hanging on the huge chandelier above screeched at her.

  I glanced around the huge, elegant area, and I was not exactly dismayed. There were a dozen humans and more than half a dozen new animals. They watched us as if we were going to hurt them.

  Spring and the firefly pixies protectively swarmed around my head.

  Lulu muttered to my back, “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered back. I had asked where Prosper was, and one young woman with green hair had told me. Prosper was out with Oki. The hippogriff needed to hunt regularly for food, and they’d gone to Rock Creek Park.

  After a long, painful minute where I had a purely imaginary vision of me standing in the massive lobby wearing nothing but granny panties and an old white cotton bra with everyone standing around laughing at me, a man stepped forward.

  Landers stared at me. His stare was a malicious scowl. His white-blonde hair still spilled to his shoulders, and his icy blue eyes were like the equivalent of a guided missile with me as the target. “What do you want?” he asked, and the hostility was palatable.

  “Why wouldn’t I come here?” I asked, honestly confused.

  Landers chuckled. “You had your shot,” he said after he stopped laughing. “You’ll have to figure it out for yourself.”

  Lulu stepped around me. “Maybe you should stop being cryptic,” she said. “You wanted answers from Sophie on the train. I don’t remember you doing any volunteering, except to say you were hiking on the Appalachian Trail.”

  “She’s one of us,” the green-haired girl said, and she was clearly speaking to Landers. A snake that wasn’t a snake wrapped itself around her body starting at her leg, going all the way up her body, twisting itself around her arm with the two heads bobbing near hers. The heads hissed softly.

  “Maybe so,” Landers admitted. “She’ll have to decide for herself. I’m not going to make it easy for her because—”

  The wide bronze-framed doors slammed behind me disrupting what Landers had been about to say. I turned my head slightly and saw that it was the two bodyguards for the President. Everyone in the room immediately shut up.

  The names of the two beefy men escaped me for the moment. I glanced back at the people there, and one caught my eye. The generous chair in the corner of the luxurious lobby nearly swallowed her slight form. Her eyes were huge in her face. Her dark hair hung in clumps around her head. She looked sick. When she looked at me, I thought there was a plea in her expression. There was a mark on her cheek much like mine but not the shape of a firefly pixie. Instead, it looked like a black puma running.

  The problem was that I didn’t see the animal around her. My gaze slowly went across the room, and I didn’t see anything that looked like a cat.

  The beast might have been hunting, like Oki. Like the girls sometimes did. We weren’t always together.

  I took a step toward her. I wanted answers, and I thought she might have them. Landers wasn’t going to be cooperative. But—

  A brawny hand clamped on my shoulder. One of the bodyguards held my body in place. I looked into his face and remembered it had been Mario with the mirrored sunglasses and Jack with the Capitals hoodie. Mario still had the sunglasses on, even inside the lobby. Jack was wearing another hoodie, but this time it didn’t have a sport
s team logo. Oh, those inconsistent, freewheeling crazy guys!

  “The President would like to invite you to lunch,” Mario said gruffly. His fingers squeezed into my flesh, pads pushed into my muscles there until they met the resistance of bone. I didn’t think it was really an invitation. It was more like it would behoove me if I went because I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t. The firefly pixies launched into the air, and he swatted at them idly as if they were merely irritating insects. One of them poked his ear with a silver toothpick, and a vein in his forehead twitched.

  “Get your hand off my shoulder,” I snarled.

  Mario squeezed a little harder and then released me, showing that he did it because he allowed it to be so, not because I demanded it.

  I turned slightly and without looking away from his face, stomped on his foot. If there was one thing these heavy combat boots were good for, it was stomping on someone else’s foot. Possibly, I should mention that I put my entire body weight into it. When Mario bent forward with an agonized cry because he wasn’t wearing combat boots, my knee connected with his lower jaw. (He was wearing tennis shoes and not even really good tennies. That would teach him to go cheap.) Mario fell over just as Jack started to rush me.

  Lulu stepped smartly in front of me and put the KA-BAR to the base of Jack’s throat. Jack froze in mid-charge because he wasn’t really anything except a big guy who thought he could intimidate people with his size. He didn’t even have a weapon out. Lulu wasn’t impressed, but I was impressed with Lulu. Bad ass Lulu.

  “I think he deserved it,” she said coldly to Jack. The tip of the blade bit into the man’s flesh. She even wiggled it a little bit. “Don’t you agree? A man shouldn’t get all grabby with a woman, not even when the world is like it is. Wouldn’t you say so? Don’t all those great laws protecting us still apply? Or are you above the law?”

  Lulu should have been a lawyer.

  Jack mumbled something and took a step backwards.

  Mario took a deep, gasping breath and clambered to his feet. He didn’t seem especially happy as he rubbed his chin with one hand, but I couldn’t blame him for that. “Come on,” he said to us. His eyes blazed at me, but I kept my face neutral.

  Spring sang into my ear. “We will slay Ugly-Mirror-Eyed-Man! We will put our swords deep into his brain! Provided his brain is normal sized!”

  I sang back, “It’s all right, sisters. He won’t harm us.”

  Spring poked my ear with the tip of the silver toothpick. “Soophee has lost her marbles! She should not go with the big-eared lout!” Actually, Spring didn’t say that but something that was very close to it.

  I tried to explain office politics to the firefly pixies, but they weren’t going for it.

  As I left, I glanced over my shoulder at Landers and the rest. I particularly wanted to talk to the woman with the sad eyes and the black puma mark on her face, but I didn’t want to bring attention to them.

  Lulu followed me while staring piercingly at Jack. We got to ride in yet another Stanley Steamer but this time with Mario driving. Jack sat in the front seat and kept looking back at us. Lulu began to clean her fingernails with the tip of the KA-BAR. I didn’t think she was getting them clean all the way, but clearly that wasn’t the point. (No pun intended.)

  When we got to the circling road that ringed the Naval Observatory, Mario stopped the vehicle. It huffed some more steam into the air in a great gray cloud and died away. He turned to me. “The bugs nor your friend won’t be going in,” he said gravely.

  That same sick feeling came to me that had come before. It was that icky gut sensation in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t like being here. I didn’t want to be here. If I had to be here too much I was going to hurl, and I had eaten a lot of bacon that morning, so it would be a tremendous waste.

  I sang to the firefly pixies, “They don’t want you to go in.”

  Spring sang, “The sisters will wait here with Golden-Haired-Knifey-Girl.” Great, Lulu had a new name. I guess she’d impressed the girls, too.

  The guards were still at the gate, watching all of us. I nodded at Lulu.

  “No problem,” she said, understanding why it needed to be this way. She replaced the KA-BAR in its sheath and settled back in the Stanley Steamer to relax. The vehicle was warm enough from the lingering heat of the engine and the boiler.

  I followed Mario and Jack out of the car and to the gate. They didn’t ask for my weapon, and I didn’t volunteer to surrender it. Two different soldiers looked at me, evaluating me as I passed. Then I was in the invisible murk again where time and space stopped and elongated all at the same time. The sky was blue. Fluffy white clouds stopped bobbing above me. A slight breeze halted for an endless moment. The world ceased its spinning on its axis.

  Then I was through, and my stomach relaxed minutely. I glanced back, and I could see Lulu in the car with her feet up on the back of the front seat. Her body might have appeared relaxed, but her eyes watched everything.

  Mario and Jack both motioned at me to come after them. This time, the President hadn’t wandered down to meet me at the gate. As I walked up the little hill and through the stand of oak trees, I saw a roving group of soldiers on patrol. They looked us over, and when they saw it was Mario and Jack, they disregarded us. I thought that was shoddy security, but then, I wasn’t in charge.

  President Corbin Maston was inside the Vice President’s residence, in a room that looked like an extravagant home office. He sat at a huge wooden desk, writing letters with a disposable Bic pen. There was a map of the United States pinned to the wall beside him. Sticky notes were attached to many places on it. An oversized, gilt-framed painting of an agrarian scene had been removed from that spot and sat on the opposite side of the room waiting for God knew what.

  “Sophie,” President Maston said cheerfully, rising to his feet. He gestured at a chair in front of the desk. It was a simple ladder-backed oak chair that might have gone with the desk, or it might have had George Washington’s butt sitting in it from two centuries before.

  Mario gestured toward the chair. I spared him and his bruised chin a brief biting look. “Mr. President,” I said.

  “Captain McCurdy tells me you have plans to leave already,” Maston said as he returned to his seat.

  “McCurdy got a promotion,” I remarked, pointedly ignoring his statement. If I knew anything about naval ranks McCurdy had skipped a few. I sat carefully, placing the end of the Japanese broadsword through the rungs in the back of the chair so it wouldn’t break any antique wood. Or so that I could draw it easier. One or the other. “How nice.”

  “His competition is somewhat lacking,” Maston said, “but he’s a good lad. Top of his class at Annapolis. He would have made that rank on his own. Probably be an admiral before long. We need good people to lead the military, and he’s a good troop.”

  “We don’t have much of a navy left,” I commented.

  “Oh, we’ll build it back up.” Maston waved his pen about emphasizing his point. “We’ll start off with some sailing ships and find all the steamers that are left. That’ll be a good start. We’ll find the folks who want to have a career in the sea.”

  “The Pacific Ocean had some new animals that might not like boats overly,” I said.

  “That’s what my man Stephen said,” Maston said with a smile. “You showed him your log of new animals. Big Green, was it?”

  “It was big and green,” I said. “I don’t know if it was hostile.”

  “You didn’t talk to it?” he asked genially.

  “I didn’t have that ability then.”

  “Have you been around a critter you can’t talk to?”

  “I haven’t tried everything,” I admitted. I didn’t think it would weaken my position.

  “Let’s go into the dining room,” Maston suggested with a grin. “My chef’s been making something that smells pretty darned good.” He rose up and motioned in the direction. I went along with him, trailing slightly behind him. We passed a few rooms
. There were other bodyguards there, or perhaps, I should have called them the New Secret Service agents. I didn’t know where Maston had dug up the corn-eating ex-football players but there seemed to be an abundant supply.

  “Obviously, Sophie,” Maston said genially, “I need to connect with all of the states and groups that I can. That’s why I sent Hanley out and others like Hanley. You know about Landers and how he can connect to certain people’s minds. It’s not the best communication system, of course, but this administration has to take advantage of the gifts it has been given.”

  We came to a dining room where a buffet had been set out on an antique sideboard. The table was set for two. Didn’t I feel special?

  The President washed his hands with an ivory pitcher and bowl. “We don’t have running water yet. It’s an issue we’ll have to keep working on.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to this man. I washed my hands, too. Somewhere my mother was nodding solemnly at me.

  “Sewage is also an issue. The pumps were electrical, but I’ve got people working on making them manual again.” (That was true and icky. The hotel’s water system worked because the water came from a storage unit on the top of the old building. The plumbing did not. We had chamber pots that were emptied twice a day. What service!) The President helped himself to biscuits and ham. He cut a few chunks of cheese and offered one to me. I took it without thinking about it. I popped it into my mouth, and it was cold.

  “I can see there are going to be problems,” I said around the mouthful of cheese. Somewhere my mother was now grimacing.

  “Let me serve you a few things,” the President offered. He put some biscuits on a plate, followed by ham and some more cheese. He put some apple slices there. “These came from a greenhouse nearby. There were some bananas, too, but those fellas in the hallway scarfed them all up lickity split.”

  Then he poured some coffee. “I’ve got sugar and the fake kind of cream.”

  “Load me up,” I said.

  We sat, and I nibbled on the biscuits. They were good. Furthermore, they were buttered. It tasted like real butter. The President’s people must have found a good source and put it in an icebox, the kind of icebox my nana had kept in her kitchen because that was what she’d grown up with. Since it was wintertime and just barely about to flow into spring, keeping things cool wasn’t hard. Once the days grew longer, we were going to have to do without some of the finer things in life. Unless the President’s people came up with a steam-powered refrigerator.