by C.L. Bevill
Sea of Dreams
By C.L. Bevill
PUBLISHED 2014 BY:
Sea of Dreams
Copyright ©2010
by Caren L. Bevill
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
The Beginning…
A sea of dreams washed over the entire world, and when it was gone, everything was different. It happened during the night. On one side of the world it was daylight and might have been much more dramatic. In the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, it was sometime between midnight and three a.m. Exactly when it occurred, I’ve never been able to find out because I’ve never encountered a survivor who was awake during the exact time. I, like many others, had been asleep.
I was lying in a sleeping bag just off the Pacific Crest Trail next to my father. The day before we’d ascended several thousand feet. It had been our plan to meet up with a larger group of hikers who were going to climb the northernmost mountain of the Three Sisters. When Dad and I had hunkered down ten feet away from the main trail, we’d made a cold camp and eaten freeze-dried foods reconstituted with water. Then just as the sun had fled below the horizon, we’d bundled up into sleeping bags and dropped off into a sleep that was dreamless and overwhelming.
I awoke with the sun chasing shadows across the trees above me. I didn’t move at first. My body was stiff from miles of hiking. We’d parked the car in a hiker’s parking lot near Santiam Pass and come up the trail at a brisk pace. My father was in better shape than I was and kept hurrying me along. He hadn’t wanted to miss the ascent to Charity, the northern sister of the Three Sisters. Me? I was a seventeen-year-old girl with typical wants. I wanted my iPod, a Caramel Frappaccino from Starbucks, and a bed that was significantly softer than the cold, hard ground. I grumbled about freeze-dried foods that had the consistency of coffee grounds and wished for a feather pillow. After all, how would I ever live without a feather pillow?
Dad had said before falling gently asleep with a low snore, “Next year, you’re off to university. You’ll probably never have another chance to climb a mountain. The snow has melted down from Charity. The trails are clear. The group is meeting us at the base camp. You’ll never have a more interesting two weeks.”
Yeah, well, there was that. There was also the problem of no running water, no toilets, and no TV. I was thrilled nearly to death. Did I want to mention the bad feeling I’d had about the trip as if I had known something was going to happen? The same feeling that I had ruthlessly forced down because I had known how excited my father was to be going? Nope. Thrilled nearly to death covered it.
And I never did climb that mountain.
I woke up, and I didn’t move. I listened to the wind whistling as it pushed through the highest hills. It sounded strange and unlike what I knew before. There were only the sounds of nature and not much else. Finally, I realized it was later than Dad would have normally let us sleep. I looked at my watch, a Timex that was solar powered, and indignantly grasped that it had stopped.
“Crud, Dad,” I said sourly. “Did you sleep past your alarm?” I turned my head and saw that the sleeping bag next to me was empty. It didn’t alarm me per se. Dad had to answer the call of nature like every other person on the face of the planet. (Not that I enjoyed thinking about my father actually being human and having the call of nature. I did NOT.) For that moment, I savored the warmth of the sleeping bag and thought about going back to sleep until he returned.
But there was something that pricked at my subconscious. Even now I wouldn’t know what to call it. Perhaps an extra something that came with humans into the present; an instinct that warns us that danger is imminent. It was a little tickly feeling that made the hair at the nape of my neck raise up. It said, no, it yelled at me, “Something’s wrong, Sophie! Get up and see what it is!”
I thought, bear? But there was no shuffling through the forest floor debris, and bears stayed lower on the mountains. I slowly lifted my head and looked around. I saw the empty sleeping bag that belonged to my father. I saw the two backpacks, ripe with gear, lined up next to the sleeping bag. Further away, my father had hung a plastic bag with the remains of our dinner from a tree branch. Whatever we took in, we had planned to pack out.
No Dad. No grumpy but amicable fifty-year-old man with a day-old beard stirring up freeze-dried coffee for his caffeine fix. Nothing. No one. There were just trees, wind, and an odd emptiness that seemed to press against my chest.
“Dad?” I said quietly. I sat up and shivered with the cold that came in as the sleeping bag slithered down my body. It might be August, but the mountains didn’t know that. Slowly, I panned the area again. For all intents and purposes, I was alone. It was me and the world. And the world seemed disinclined to make itself known to me.
It took me a while, but I got myself dressed, answered my own call of nature, and got a drink of water from the packs. In the back of my mind I was explaining to myself why Dad would be back at any moment. It was daylight and had been for at least an hour. He wouldn’t leave me alone for more than a few minutes.
I watched the sun rise in the sky, and when I judged another hour had gone by, I dug in the packs for the satellite phone that Dad had brought. Unfortunately, it was dead like my Timex. In response, I said a few bad words that I was certain my father didn’t know I’d previously overheard him say. I thought about it and decided that he must have gotten up in the night to pee and perhaps had fallen or had a heart attack. He had to need my help. I removed the topographical maps from my dad’s pack and did some quick calculations. Then I did a grid search of the area. (See, you do learn things from Girl Scouts.)
Several sweaty hours later I was certain of only one thing. My father was still missing. There was no sign of him in the immediate area. There were no answers to my repeated calls. I brightened when I remembered that the sat phone had an extra battery. But the fresh battery didn’t make the phone work either.
Needing help to search for my father, I decided to return down the mountainside toward the parking area near Santiam Pass. I was more likely to run into someone either with a working phone or access to a park ranger. There were logging trucks in the area and men going to cut wood from dense forests. They had radios. I got the packs together and left Dad’s next to the trail. When I began to roll up his sleeping bag I found something very strange.
His shirt fell out of the bag when I upended it. I shook the bag, and his pants came out, as well. I found his socks and his underwear inside the bag. Furthermore, I noticed what I hadn’t before; his hiking boots were still sitting beside the bag just as he had left them the night before. It took me a minute to understand what it meant. Wherever Dad had gone, he had walked away stark naked and barefoot on a night that the temperature was barely above forty degrees.
I thought I knew my father, and this wasn’t something that he was apt to do. He was a rock-solid professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He had been married for twenty-five years to my mother, who sold Mary Kay and worked at the library. Hiking was his passion, and he had been looking forward to climbing Charity for the last six months. And although I had grumbled, I wasn’t completely unhappy with going on this hike.
When I gave the sleeping bag a last little shake, a gold wedding band that I had never seen separated from my father’s left ring finger fell out onto the ground. I became frightened. I packed up and headed down the trail. The wedding band went into a front pocket. In the frantic hours that followed, I stopped to restlessly sleep for a while, only held back from c
ontinuing down the trail by the lack of light. When the sky began to tinge pink in the east, I was ready. By the time the sun had hit its zenith, I was at the highway.
The entire hike I thought, I’ll find someone soon. They’ll help. We’ll find Dad.
But I wrong.
The lot was half full of cars, SUVs, and trucks. All were locked and empty. Half of them had stickers that revealed them to be members of Dad’s hiking organization. Most of them had been in the lot when Dad and I had arrived early the day before.
Digging out the keys to the VW Jetta, I soon discovered something else. The car wouldn’t start. The little electrical indicators that showed it was operating wouldn’t come on when the key was turned in the ignition. Nothing happened, not even the clicking sound that is a sure-fire bet that the battery is out of business.
I looked at my Timex watch. It was still dead. There was only one thing that popped into my head and that was there had been a nuclear strike. An electromagnetic pulse that resulted from a nuclear bomb detonation would answer the question of why all of the items no longer worked. Not the watch, the sat phone, or the car. I had done a paper on the effects of nuclear weapons, and this had been one of the interesting aspects to the horrors of discharging a nuclear device.
Screwing up my face, I tried to remember what I’d studied and written about. The impact of an EMP depended on the weapon itself, the altitude of the burst, the yield of the bomb, and the geography of the area over which it was detonated. I suppose that the men and women in charge of the military didn’t see an EMP weapon as effective as say, a Daisy Cutter bomb. But take away a country’s access to all things electrical from toasters to televisions, and the people would be crippled.
Could that be the answer? I pondered. Could my father’s mental health have been impacted by an electromagnetic energy burst? I didn’t know, but I did know Dad needed help as fast as I could possibly bring it to him. EMPs were hampered by large geographic features like mountains and the simplicity of distance. I’d have to hike for help. Fortunately, the highway was well traveled and someone had to find me before I hiked very far.
I looked up and saw that the sun was starting to plunge behind the horizon of endless trees. I ate an energy bar, chugged some water, and debated starting down the highway in the dark. I decided to stay put, huddled in the Jetta, hoping that a ranger would pull into the lot soon just to check to make sure no one had forgotten their hiking permits or to rescue those affected by the pulse, if that was what it had been and not some awful coincidence. I pulled a blanket out of the trunk and let the front seat down.
The next thing I knew the sun was shining into my face. The parking lot was the same as it was before. Praying under my breath for my father, I did what I had to do; packed up my pack and started west on the highway. The town of Sisters was closer to the east, but west was downhill, and my energy was waning.
I came across the SUV two miles later. The momentum had carried it off the highway, over a ditch, and it had stopped against a large silver fir. The forestry service emblem on the side of the SUV caught my attention. I thought, EMP. The person behind the wheel of the SUV had been driving down the road. The pulse had detonated. The vehicle stalled out. The power steering had failed. The driver had lost control. It wasn’t so hard to understand.
The problem with my theory was that the driver was gone. The door was unlocked, and the front seat was empty. There wasn’t any blood, and the airbag wasn’t deployed. But there was another problem that I really didn’t want to deal with. There was a brown cap with the forestry service emblem sitting on the driver’s seat. The brown pants and shirt pooled on the floor belonged to someone who wasn’t around anymore. There was a pair of underwear and a pair of black socks. The boots that the pile of clothes covered were still tightly laced to the very top and tied with a double knot. The Bulova watch lying next to one of the boots didn’t work either.
There was a cry that startled me until I comprehended it had come from my own lips.
I continued hiking down to the west. I found another vehicle that had careened off the side of the road. It was a Lincoln Navigator. This time there were two sets of clothing in the vehicle. One belonged to a woman who wore a size-six dress and who liked Nine West shoes. (There were three pairs in the back seat, all size 7.) She’d also left a diamond ring that was at least two karats. The car wouldn’t start, and the two cell phones I found were dead. The next car I found, I looked inside long enough to find a pair of Levi jeans and a polo shirt. A set of prescription glasses sat on top as if someone had simply dropped them there and walked away. I noticed something I hadn’t before. The seat belt was still fastened.
The next cars I saw were twenty miles beyond that, and I was walking through the blisters on the backs of my feet. I could feel the blood flowing down to the bottoms of my boots. I paused because one of the vehicles had run into a ditch, and the front end was crumpled. But I didn’t look inside. I was afraid to do it.
I slept alongside the road in a culvert and dreamed that my father was calling to me. He called hoarsely. I was fighting to get to him. I could see a sword flashing in my dream-capable hands as if I were a veritable expert in my night visions. I was using everything I had in order to reach my father before it was too late. Then he called again. Then his voice was cut off in the middle of a cry. It was cut off so dramatically and so finally, that I knew that he was gone. He was really gone. Dad would never be coming back.
When I woke up on that second day I was crying silently; the tears streamed down my face in a river of chilling contribution. But that wasn’t what really got my attention. The culvert drained out into a wide meadow of tall green grasses full of autumn promise. Without moving my head much, I could see the entire meadow, and I could plainly see the herd of twenty-something unicorns grazing there.
Unicorns.
EMP? Not. Something else completely freakilicious. Yeppers.
