The man was Tate, the newcomer, and as they stopped to eat two power bars and drink some water, he reached up to his eyes and took out the green colored contacts that had been inserted there. His eyes were an intense blue, the color of a deep mountain lake. It was a color I had seen before. It was the same hated blue eyes that looked at me out of the burned man’s face. But Tate’s face wasn’t burned. His limbs were whole and unscarred. His hair was brown instead of dirty blonde. His face wasn’t ravaged by insanity.
But his words were blurred with hatred. “You’ll call them,” he hissed, more to himself than to Elan. “You’ll call them when I’m ready.”
Was his hair dyed? Was this man the burned man? All I could see in my mind’s eye was the blackened features of the burned man and his blazing blue eyes. He was tall the same as Tate and his build was similar, but he couldn’t have healed without showing some of the effects of the first night at the bonfire. His features had been burned; his hair had been half gone. Then there had been something wrong with one of his legs and one of his hands. Then I had bitten the good arm and caused a massive amount of bleeding. I had hoped that he would crawl off and die someplace to never bother us again, but Max and Thad had discovered the folly of my desire. But so was I, for that matter.
If these were not two distinct men then I would have never recognized Tate. His hair was back, unless it was a good wig. I could buy that, but the skin couldn’t have been repaired. I glanced at the pixies flying ahead of me, muttering amongst themselves, unhappy with my actions, and knew they could have healed the burned man as they had healed me. But they wouldn’t have done that. They couldn’t have done it.
The vision had Tate opening his coat and his shirt to allow the sweat on his chest to dry. He flapped the shirt to help and I saw the mark on his chest. It was a little larger than the one on my cheek and its shape was much different, but I knew instantly for what it was. The spiders had marked him as one of theirs, just as the pixies had marked me.
I thought of the dark shape skittering into the tall grass on the side of the road near the sign I had burned to the ground. A spider thing? Something that helped the burned man?
I blinked to the present. I looked through the darkness to the west. There was a compass on the end of one my knives. I stopped for a moment, pulling the weapon and freeing it so I could see the handle. The compass spun lazily. The pixies curiously waited for me as I studied the tiny dial.
There were two puzzles. One was whether Tate was the burned man or not. The other was figuring out where the trail was that I had seen in my head. Based on the way the sun was moving, they were heading south down the coast, the same direction I was going. They were on foot, most likely because Tate had no way of hauling Elan around. Additionally, it was obvious from my vision that Tate wanted Elan to call ‘them.’
Three puzzles. Who were ‘them?’ Was it the group? Was it something else?
I looked at the mass of fluttering pixies, waiting for me, waiting for their protector to make a decision. Elan talked about the pixies. He was infatuated with them. He wanted to see their home. He wanted the mark on his face like mine. He was able to talk to them and the pixies didn’t mind in the least.
The burned man had wanted me to tell him where the pixies were located. So he could destroy them because he blamed them for his ghastly injuries at the bonfire. If Tate was the burned man, somehow magically recovered, then was he still obsessed with the pixies? If he couldn’t get at me, then had he taken Elan thinking that the child could provide him with what he so desperately wanted?
Had the burned man somehow grasped that he could pretend to be normal with Blair for a few days, so that he could ingratiate himself into the group?
God, the questions that whirled frantically in my mind. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if the burned man was Tate or not. It only mattered that he had kidnapped Elan and that he was headed toward Eureka and a destination that gave me shivers. The previous premonition had shown what Tate had intended as a conclusion for Elan and it involved the scary spiders that Zach had told me about previously.
I needed to find a trail that went across the redwoods to the coast. That was where I would be able to find Tate and Elan and save Elan, if I could, long before they reached the place where the spiders lived.
Chapter Twenty-Four – Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet…
I stopped and slept for a few hours just after I found a trail that headed for the coastline. The sign was marked as the Coast Trail – 3.5 miles. The glow of the firefly pixies illuminated the words for me and I found a spot where I could put a sleeping bag under a rhododendron bush. My eyes were burning with exhaustion. The day had been long. I had been digging trenches for the latrines before going up the Bluff Trail with Zach. Although I had time for a bath before we went for our evening stroll, I wasn’t exactly prepared to go on a multi-mile, rushed hike in order to save someone’s life. However I thought my day was going to end up, this wasn’t it. The ground was cold. The air was damp. My stomach was tied in knots. The pixies were unhappy with me. Zach was probably thinking only God knew what about what had happened with Lulu.
And I dreamed of Zach. He wouldn’t sleep. Frantic with worry, he thought of Kara and of Lulu, and of the small photograph I had looked upon in Lulu’s hand. Mostly he was thinking about me. “How can I make her understand, Kara?” he asked anxiously. They were dressed, packs on their backs, on the highway, searching, searching, searching. Kara said, “Either she will or she won’t. She’s not unreasonable. But Zach, couldn’t you have picked a lesser secret to hide from her?” “She doesn’t talk about her parents,” he retorted angrily. “You don’t talk about your partner. You think I want to talk about them? If I talk about them all I want to do is cry. So I chose not to talk about them, because it hurts so deeply. I didn’t think it would really matter.”
I wanted to reach out to him in my sleep to say I understood about secrets. I understood that there were things that no man or woman ever wanted to talk about. How could we? We had all faced one of the worse events our kind could endure. The end of our world, yet we were also facing something that was very exciting – the beginning of a new civilization, the establishment of a new humanity.
Was I not a living example of what the new existence was going to be like? A partner of the pixies, one of the sisters, sworn to protect them, and to protect the people who wanted the change to continue into goodness and decency. (I was going to write promos for the firefly pixies, I swore.)
Because I felt that way so strongly I hadn’t waited for Gideon and the others to discuss options about Elan in excruciatingly slow details. Elan’s providence wouldn’t wait for people to make long-winded decisions, whether they were right or wrong.
Despite Zach’s need to keep the information about his family undisclosed, he was not a bad person. Every moment I had spent with him had convinced me of that integral facet of his personality. He felt the agonized hurt as much as any of us did, and somehow he had found something to care about. He was afraid to lose it, just as I was afraid to take chances.
“Zach,” I called and my voice was as sincere as I felt. “I’ll come back.”
And I swear, in the dream, the conscious Zach with his tormented expression heard me.
♦
I woke and it was still dark. The stars still twinkled above me. Far and away, the distant light of massive suns had died away millions of years before their light reached the place where I could look on them. It was a symbol of how life persevered. Although the stars had died away so long ago, something of them still existed here and now.
The pixies stirred to life as I did. Some of them had snuggled against me for warmth. Others patrolled the forest, looking for signs of Tate or Elan. Packing quickly I got back moving again, heading west for the coast. The pixies flew about me, slightly sluggish but keen to make progress. My exigency had rubbed off on them.
When the sun rose before I marched through my own shadow even as it moved ahead
of me. The trail was well established but months of disuse had brought up dozens of sprouts. The trees and bushes would reclaim the narrow stretch of pathway before a year or two had passed. In five years, because of rain, erosion, and new growth, there would be little left that would show anyone had come this way. Certainly, there was no sign that two people had come this way before I had.
It didn’t mean anything. There were dozens of trails that led to the ocean from Highway 101 from the Redwood National Forest. There were dozens of roads, some paved, more not, that people had used to explore the section of wilderness that had been set aside for preservation. Tate could have used any of them.
Spring was riding on my head, holding on to some of my hair, as if she was riding a horse and holding its mane. I sang to her, “Go and rest, Spring. Take the sisters with you so that they will be able to help me tonight.”
Hesitating as she still held onto my hair, Spring was silent for a moment. “Soophee should avoid the old places of the forest, the places where humans once worked,” she sang to me, the caveat blatantly obvious in her tone.
I grimaced. More information, please. Don’t hold out on me now, girlfriend. I need your help more than ever. “What kind of old places, Spring?”
The pixies returned to me in an agitated swarm. They chattered nervously. I supposed they wanted me to realize the urgency of Spring’s message. “The before places,” Spring called to me. “Soophee asks about the before and the sisters only know of the now and the after now, but it is the before place that we see as the dangerous place, the place where Soophee will be most at risk.”
At risk. At risk was better than the pixies foreseeing Soophee at death.
Oh, but I had options. I could call on the pixies to guide the group to me, to help me, if they would do that. I believed they would fight to protect Elan, perhaps they would even kill the burned man, or the man who might have been the burned man, Tate. But it was those people I didn’t want to put in more jeopardy. I had no premonitions about myself or about Zach or Kara. It was only Elan who figured in my mental portents.
Then there was the fact that half of the group didn’t believe in the abilities that the others possessed. They wouldn’t believe that I could lead them to Elan. Convincing them would take more precious time.
I knew that I was better by myself. I had beaten the burned man before and now I was in better condition. I could beat him again. And I could beat Tate, whoever he was.
“Spring,” I sang. “Go and rest. I’ll follow the path that leads to Elan.”
“This is the proper direction,” she sang to me. “We feel Little-Man-With-Big-Eyes-And-Hurt-Smile. He is very sad, but thus far, is unhurt. He’s not far from Soophee. The sisters will stay with Soophee.”
Sighing, I nodded. Not far for the pixies could mean anything from three feet to a walk of several days. Several of the pixies landed on my head and my shoulders. Some of them descended on the pack. They would conserve their strength. I tried to question them about the before places and what that meant, but it was next to impossible to understand their answers. Almost everything was before to them. They lived for the now. The redwoods and the humans who lived near them were now. Everything else was before.
A before building could be a 7-Eleven store or an hundred year old cabin. It might not even be a building, but something that had been built, like a bridge. The more information I tried to get out of the more, the more indescribable their answers became. They were tired as was I, and doubtless hungry too. I had water, but I hadn’t planned on a long trip. I don’t know what I was thinking when I packed. (I knew that Elan was in horrible danger and I packed weapons with which to defend him.)
“Food,” I said to Spring. “I need food.”
Spring moved on my head. It felt like she perked right up at the mention of food. “The sisters know a wonderful insect that has the most bittersweet taste. We’re certain that Soophee would enjoy this one. We believe the humans call it a butterfly. It’s crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.” Then she made a yummy sound that nearly made me groan.
“I don’t think we could find enough butterflies to feed me,” I sang back, trying to keep the dryness out of my tone.
“Oh,” she responded.
“But don’t let that stop you from eating,” I added helpfully.
The pixies decided that was a great idea and went to find a meadow.
Twenty minutes later I came across a campsite. Someone had pitched a small tent off the path. The red of the walls caught my eye. The packs were still present, hanging on a tree branch, in order to deter predators that might find the food smells interesting. I didn’t want to look inside the windblown tent that was rapidly tearing into tatters. If it hadn’t been staked to the ground it would have blown away long before. I could see the two sleeping bags inside. If there had been a shape to them once, it was gone with the rain and critters who had wandered through. But they had left a cache of granola bars inside a water proof bag inside one of the packs and that was good enough for me.
I came on the perpendicular trail a few minutes later. There was a sign that revealed it was a section of the old highway. Highway 1 had once coursed from the southern part of California, hugging the coastline, to the northern part of the state. Much of it had changed over to Highway 101, although obsolete sections had been left to rot, like this one. People walked the remnants of what was a major structural accomplishment for the early part of the 20th century. (At least that was what the sign told me.) A hundred yards beyond were the cliffs above the beaches. I could smell the sea spray and could hear the cry of seagulls.
Turning south I found the button ten minutes after that. It was large and blue, the size of a quarter. It was from Elan’s coat. The buttons were on the outside; there was a zipper on the interior of the coat. A down coat, it was designed to keep the snow out while a child was building snowmen or sledding down the bunny slope. Amanda had gotten one of the scavengers to pick it up in the correct size for Elan in preparation for the impending winter. I left the button in the middle of the trail because I knew that Zach and Kara would be coming after Elan and me.
A mile later I found a broken branch. It was fresh and the branch was still flexible. Then a few miles later there was another button. Then a tiger’s eye marble. Then there was a pencil with ghosts and black cats on it. It hadn’t been sharpened yet. Elan was cleaning out his pockets. Clever little boy.
I stopped in mid afternoon to rest. I leaned against a broad redwood tree, in between the enormous roots and looked up at the blue sky. Only a few puffy clouds marred the color. I was wondering what I was going to do with the Japanese broadsword when I fell asleep again. I hadn’t meant to, but the dreams started right away.
Gideon was talking to Ethan. “Follow them. They know where to go. She knows what’s going to happen to Elan. We have to trust that she’s right and trying to prevent it.”
Ethan scowled. “But you’re certain that Lulu is telling the truth.”
“She’s sorry for what she did. She doesn’t want Elan to die. Or Sophie for that matter.”
“I have volunteers,” Ethan said. “We’ll go at first light. Maybe we can catch up with Zach and Kara before too long.”
Gideon’s eyes glimmered. “I don’t think there’s a hope of that. Something else is going to happen. We need to prepare for that. I can see it coming but I don’t know what it is.”
Ethan started to sneer, but the expression melted from his face. “Something’s going to happen? Something bad? Do we need to leave this place?”
Nodding solemnly, Gideon said, “We’re all going to have to leave. It was just a matter of time.”
Then Zach was there. He was sleeping next to Kara, both in sleeping bags on the ground. Their faces were cut with lines of exhaustion. He was dreaming of his son. His name had been Daniel and he had been nearly three years old. A toddler, not a baby as in the photograph. He had been a bundle of energy and talking more than as if he had been four or
five years old. Zach had been teaching him how to play soccer and football. He had wanted to play T-Ball in the following summer.
Then Zach was dreaming of me. The powerful emotions that he felt for me were both overwhelming and endearing. I didn’t understand how he could have these feelings for me so closely after his wife’s vanishing, but the feelings were there all the same. He would wait as long as it took for me to get over my skittishness, and he was prepared to wait a very long time. After all, we were both relatively young.
Then his wife was there in his dreams and she was screaming at him, angry with his inability to understand her restlessness. They had married too young. They had been neighbors, childhood sweethearts. Both families had expected them to be together and they had been. They had decided not to wait until after college, but to marry first and support each other while they went to their collective classes. Daniel had been a happy accident, but never unwanted.
Lila had been her name. She had married too young, far too young. She had missed the life of a teenager. She had disliked the feeling of being tied down with a husband and a young child when all of her friends were attending college and having fun. She had wanted more and unwilling to wait, she had went out and gotten more.
The dream switched again. Zach was dreaming that it was I who was screaming. I wasn’t arguing with someone. I wasn’t having a fit or trying to make myself heard. I was screaming because someone was killing me and the pain was devastating. Zach reached for me in the dream but he was all too helpless. Like his son before, there was nothing that he could do about it.
Then he woke up screaming as well.
My eyes snapped open and I found something crawling up my leg.
Sea of Dreams Page 24
