Sea of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  We were in the cafeteria because it was sprinkling outside. Gibby had made something with the chicken leftovers that was like creamed chicken over toast, but tasted a lot better than any creamed chicken over toast that my mother had made and the bread was made from scratch. It was especially appreciated since I knew Gibby had used powdered milk to make the concoction. Power to Gibby. She was a culinary genius.

  Tomas, a short man with a bar handle mustache and a Texas twang, was talking about his wandering. It had gotten to be a ritual for people to tell their various where-they-were-when-it-happened-stories, although I hadn’t shared. Neither had Zach for that matter and I was very interested in that one.

  But Tomas had come from Sacramento where he had lived. His brother had lived in Redding, even if both of them had been born in Austin, Texas. There hadn’t been any indication of his brother being still around. But there had been Gideon’s sign. Similar to the one I had burned down, it said: ‘YOU ARE NOT ALONE!’ That one had an alternate line: ‘Go to Highway 101, head north toward the Redwood National Park, mile marker 47,’ to account for the different location of the billboard.

  Abruptly, I shot to my feet and knocked my tray on the floor. The clatter echoed for what seemed like forever. My face was burning as everyone stared at me in sudden silence.

  “What’d I say?” Tomas asked curiously.

  “Just clumsy,” I said into the silence that followed. Conversation came back as Tomas continued his story about crossing over the Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area. He’d walked because he didn’t like bicycles.

  “Gosh darn, they’ve got hills there,” Tomas complained good-naturedly. “Tuckered me plumb out. I don’t know how the rest of you ride on those bicycles. Gives my rump a headache thinking about those teeny tiny seats.”

  But that wasn’t what I was thinking about as I cleaned up after myself. Kara was sitting next to me and whispered, “What’s wrong, Sophie?”

  I shook my head at her. Was I the only one with a brain around there? I was beginning to think I was the only paranoid one. Finally I finished picking the remnants of my dinner and I couldn’t help myself. I looked directly at Gideon, who was sitting two tables over. Elan was on one side of him, and a thirtysomething woman named Elizabeth was on his other. Shocked, I saw that Gideon was looking directly at me.

  “We have to talk,” I said loudly to Gideon, and he nodded.

  As the banter died away at my statement of fact, I congratulated myself on being a real conversational killer. Yee-haw. But that old saying was coursing through my head: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

  Chapter Sixteen – Way to Start a Brouhaha…

  Gideon trailed after me once I put my tray away. Two someone elses had dish duty and I didn’t feel guilty over that. (The group was following the camp’s former traditions by bussing their own tables, much to my continued bemusement.) A great many pairs of eyes tracked us as we went out the double doors in the front of the cafeteria. I paused to allow Gideon to catch up.

  The temperature felt like it was in the low sixties and the sun was starting to plummet. I wrapped arms around my body and waited. Gideon took a breath and said, “Let’s take a walk.” He motioned with his hand. “It’ll keep us warm enough.” We moved around the building that housed the cafeteria and the kitchen and went through a copse of thick redwoods. The campground was situated in the thickest part of the National Forest. The land had been privately owned before the National Forest had been established.

  Privately I thought it was a wonderful place. Although I had never gone to camp, hiking had been my dad’s mainstay and I had been dragged along for the walk. Most of the time I hadn’t minded, but I always fussed as if I had. Thinking about my father made me glower so I clenched my lips together and tried to think of nothing at all.

  There were trails everywhere around the campground. A few had wood burned signs indicating where they led. One path said it was the Bluff Trail – 2 miles. Another said it was the Hill Trail – 5 miles. A third stated it was the Orick Trail – 8 miles. Gideon pointed at that one and said, “If you ever need to go to town, that one goes to the nearest small town. You have to ford Redwood Creek, which can be tricky if the water level is up, but it’s doable.”

  We passed someone coming in to eat. It was one of the men I didn’t know who did periodic guard duty near to the highway. “Hi,” Gideon said. “Gibby made a great chicken dish. Also peas, and can you believe it? Peach cobbler.”

  The man smacked his lips in appreciation. He said reverently as he went past, “That woman sure can cook.”

  “What difference does it make if I know what trail goes where?” I asked, more sullenly than I would have liked. People at the camp probably thought it was my permanent expression.

  Gideon studied the forest before us and made the turn onto the Bluff Trail. I followed without exception. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said precisely. “I think it matters to you. It’s an escape route for you. It parallels the highway, comes close sometimes, but it’ll keep you off the main road. If you should have to go, you might have an easier time on the trail, rather than the road.”

  I hesitated. Well color me easy-to-read. Resident obsessed teenager. “Where are we going?”

  “Up on the bluff,” Gideon answered straightforwardly. “It’s got a great view. I want to show you something.”

  Okay. I followed along slowly because I wasn’t as chipper as I was pretending to be. Gideon set a mellow pace and before long we were going up a gradual incline. I had to stop half way to the top and Gideon didn’t mind waiting as I huffed and puffed.

  “The lung’s still healing,” he said. I looked up at him and silently cursed his younger, healthier, non-injured body.

  “Been talking to Sinclair?” I panted.

  “Got his permission to bring you up here,” Gideon grinned at me. He looked like a cheerful fifteen year old boy. Red hair like the color of carrots. He had blue eyes and that didn’t seem right to me. A boy with hair that red should have had green eyes. His shoulders were broad and he had yet to fill into a man’s body. He was about five inches taller than I was and I thought that he wasn’t done growing yet.

  When we finally made it to the top, I was delighted, i.e. mucho relieved, to see a bench that had been made from fallen logs. It was parked in the middle of a clearing that looked out over the Redwood Forest and over the Pacific Ocean and at the end of the trail. Gideon said, “You should sit before you fall down.”

  I grimaced at him and sat before he became correct. I didn’t think a little hill and a meager two miles would have bothered me that much, but I had been sedentary and sick for too many days. Gideon stood beside me and looked out to the west. “Look,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

  I struggled for my breath and scanned the forest before us. I finally settled on what appeared to be a trail through the great trees. I didn’t get it at first but I craned my neck for a closer view. The size and width of the trail was contrary to the size of the redwood forest. “Did something make that trail?” I asked warily. “Something really, really big?”

  “They’re like a mix between an elephant and a brachiosaurus,” Gideon said wryly. “Kind of, anyway. Apparently, they migrate through the forest to the sea. They made that trail, and look, there’s a few of them.”

  Faintly, I heard the crunching and thumping of distant large creatures. They followed their readymade trail and headed toward the ocean. All I could see was the gray humps and the heads as they bobbed up and down. They were a little too distant for me to make out details. I could see their oversized ears and a long tail that stretched far back. They appeared to be several times bigger than any elephant I’ve ever seen. It was one for the notepad. “Vegetarians?” I asked hopefully.

  “Herbivores,” Gideon confirmed. “Grass, trees, leaves. Lucky for the Redwoods there aren’t very many of them. They head for the grassy plains of the coastal ranges to eat. Th
en they migrate back to the ocean.”

  “What, they sleep in the ocean?”

  “The islands there,” Gideon pointed. “They swim out there every day and swim back in the morning like clockwork.” The shapes were faint in the distant lights. The sun just barely silhouetted their forms.

  I frowned. “I don’t remember California having islands up here.”

  “They didn’t,” Gideon said solemnly. “They weren’t here before the change.”

  “Sweet,” I muttered, awestricken. What was next? Dragons? “They hang out on the island? And what do you call them?”

  “I haven’t been over there,” Gideon said regretfully. “‘Big Mamas’ is the going phrase for them. It’s still open for debate.”

  I took a minute to tell Gideon about the big green fish thing we’d seen up the coast, AKA Big Green. “I don’t think going out in a boat is a good idea,” I added.

  Gideon shrugged. “Maybe not. Why did you want to talk to me?”

  “Take down your signs,” I said vehemently. I wasn’t going to pull any punches. Based on Gideon’s reaction, he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “What makes you think he hasn’t already seen a sign?”

  “I don’t know that he hasn’t,” I said, frustrated with Gideon’s perceptiveness. “But the burned man is dangerous. He’s a threat to your people. Think about it, Gideon. He won’t come in here and cut your throats in the night. He’ll set a fire one day when the wind is blowing fiercely to the south. He’ll wait until the forest is dry from lack of rain. He’ll set it and he’ll laugh when he does it.”

  “Lightning starts fires every season, Sophie,” Gideon said gently. “It’s one of the risks we have by living here.”

  I nearly groaned. “If you destroy the signs he might not be able to find this place.”

  “I sent two people to replace the sign you burned down,” Gideon said, almost idly.

  I stood straight up and measured myself against him. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “There are others out there who are looking for something,” Gideon told me compassionately. “They need other people too. They need people like us. They have to have a way of finding us.”

  I wanted to chew something just so I had something for my teeth to grind upon. “I realize that,” I said. “But you’ve got an open invitation to this…freak show. This man wanted to carve my lungs from my body. What makes you think you can stop him from killing people here?”

  “You stopped him,” he said calmly.

  “I broke his jaw with my foot, Gideon, not because I knew what to do, but because I got lucky,” I told him coolly. “I took a bite out of his arm the size of a walnut. If I hadn’t hit an artery, I’m not sure if he would have stopped. You, Zach, and Kara would have just found a big red stain on the highway and nothing else.”

  That got a slight reaction out of Gideon. His body jerked. He knew exactly how close I had come to dying. “How did you know he would be there?” he asked deliberately.

  My mouth snapped shut.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you instead. You had a hunch. Something in your mind told you he’d be there and that you had to hold him back somehow. Maybe you thought that burning the sign would do the trick. He wouldn’t find the invitation and wouldn’t be able to track you.”

  There was a distant roar from the Big Mamas. It was a trumpeting sound that reverberated around us. It made me think of being cast into a time machine that had taken me back to the age of dinosaurs. I guess the Grimm brothers missed the Big Mamas.

  “Am I correct?” he asked.

  I sat back down on the log seat. The sun had completed its descent and all that was left was orange and pink clouds. “Not exactly,” I said.

  Gideon seemed surprised. I guessed he thought he had all the answers. “Where am I wrong?”

  “I didn’t go there to stop him. I went to save Zach,” the words were out of my mouth before I could help myself. I could have thrown myself on the ground in mute aggravation when I realized what I had done. If my mouth was any larger they would name it after a president and have tours.

  Gideon considered my words. “But Zach didn’t go because you drugged him and Kara.” He looked back toward the ocean and smiled slightly. “And you didn’t tell Zach why.”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s angry with you and you won’t tell him?” Gideon asked incredulously. He reached up to stroke his chin. “Puzzling. Why wouldn’t you tell him?”

  I knew that Gideon wasn’t asking me the question. He was asking himself instead.

  “We’ve had a few people come in who didn’t warm up to the others right away,” Gideon said quietly. “Like you. You’re the longest shutout, however. You like to stay by yourself. You talk to Kara and that’s about it. Sometimes you talk to Sinclair. Thad tries hard with you. Elan’s got his claws into you, too. Despite that, when you talk about our group, you don’t use the word, ‘our.’ You use ‘your,’ and ‘you’ve.’ I think it’s something to do with being isolated for so long.”

  “It wasn’t that long,” I inserted rapidly, wanting him to stop his wretched psychoanalysis.

  “And the first person you run into isn’t someone like me or Kara or Zach, but a crazed maniac intent on killing you,” he went on evenly.

  “I think he’s of the cannibal persuasion,” I put in, sarcastic now.

  “Killing you and eating you.” He rubbed his chin some more. “Must have scared the holy living crud out of you. I think I’d still be having nightmares.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake them up,” I said regretfully, referring to my cabin-mates.

  “They didn’t complain,” Gideon told me.

  My big mouth. Big. Big. Biggest.

  “And you’ve never talked about how you woke up the morning after the change,” Gideon went on. “People have asked, but you’ve avoided it, and deftly too.”

  “I have talked about it,” I said, sourly. “And I don’t feel like talking about it more.”

  “Kara said you were with your father on a hiking trip,” Gideon said kindly. “Alone in the mountains in Oregon.”

  Kara’s got a bigger mouth that I do. Huh. For a woman who didn’t want to get in the middle of Zach and I having power struggles, she didn’t mind starting a little something-something on the side. Must be a side effect from not having daytime television to watch anymore.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” I said sharply. I stood up again. “And let’s get off this bluff before its pitch black. I can’t see in the dark.”

  “We won’t need to see in the dark,” Gideon said. He smiled as the hoard of firefly pixies came over the side of the bluff and began to circle us avidly. They buzzed and whirled and chattered joyfully at me, and I smiled even though I didn’t feel like smiling. Several even jittered happily at Gideon.

  They lit the way for us and Gideon didn’t even rub it in. As we walked the trail, he hummed ‘Jingle Bells’ all the way down to the camp.

  When I got to the camp it didn’t even take a little coaxing to get one of the pixies to land on Elan’s arm. They did it as if they had been doing it for years. The broad-faced, sappy grin on the kid’s face was worth a million bucks, or in this case, a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  And when I looked up Gideon was smiling knowingly at me.

  Jerkinstein.

  ♦

  Did I mention that I was having this terrible feeling? A longing. A desire that wasn’t being fulfilled. It was centered on my gut, as if something was yanking at the bottom of my heart. Cookies didn’t salve the yearning, even if someone had found a huge batch of some bagged kind that was still out-of-the-oven soft. I wasn’t the drinking type so alcohol wasn’t an answer. (Besides which Gideon had a rule about alcohol, too. It wasn’t going to be allowed for several months until everyone had worked out their mourning periods. It didn’t matter to me but there were a few people who hankered for a beer after a hard day of work in the camp.) Reading the how-to-
swordfight book put my unnamable feeling on the back burner for a little while. But after my eyes were tired from reading, it came back with a rush.

  Putting a name to the yearning was the worst part. I think half the camp knew before I did. Elan walked past me a few days later and said, “He’ll be back soon.”

  I said stupidly, “Who?”

  Elan giggled and went to his class with Amanda. Shaking my head, I went to find a stick that I could use to start my stick fighting practice. I wasn’t going to start with the sword because I was more apt to cut off my leg than learn anything productive.

  Then the firefly pixies came to me while I was painstakingly making a sparring dummy out of a log. I had found all the tools I needed in one of the sheds and was giving the process some intense thought. Finally I decided to mount it with rope to a tall branch so it could swing freely.

  Tomas the carpenter came to see what I was doing. “Oh, yeah. Good idea. Not boxing. Stick fighting, right?”

  I nodded. “I need some help getting the dummy hanging.”

  “Sure. I’ll get a ladder,” Tomas nodded genially at me. “You’re still a little flakey from being injured somehow, right?”

  I nodded again, not so eagerly. Apparently, someone had resisted telling Tomas that story, or maybe it just hadn’t come up yet.

  “Well, then, Sophie,” he said. “I can give you some tips. I trained in a Philippine dojo when I was in the Air Force. Stick fighting is a fading art.” He considered. “Really fading now, unless we happen to run into a master who survived.”

  “I’ve got a book, but,” I shrugged and let the words fade away. “You know. Books aren’t like real life.”

  “Nosiree,” Tomas agreed. “We’ll make our own form, huh? You won’t mind if I pitch in?”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t talk much, do you?” He laughed. “Do I need to ask why you want to learn all this?” He waved at the wooden form I had scrupulously created.