Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1)

by Pettit, Gregory

  By the time I’d finished reviewing the previous night’s extracranial activities, I’d had time to board the bus, cram myself under a fat man’s sweaty armpit, and arrive at Greenford station. While waiting for the train, I looked through the Metro, reading the headlines, comics, and business sections. While flipping through the business section, I noticed an article titled: “Thirty Under Thirty: Our Countdown of the Capital’s Top Thirty Business People Under Thirty.” First of all, I love lists, and second, I couldn’t ignore the gorgeous redhead at number twenty-eight. I’ve often wondered: Why are redheaded women Jessica Rabbit, but redheaded men are Alfred E. Neuman?

  By the time I arrived at Paddington station, the train was almost lethally full, and when the doors whirred open, the passengers spilled out with an audible groan. Sweat was pouring off of me by the time I arrived at the office. I was proudest of the work that I did at night, but during the day, I made ends meet by working in the Procurement Department for a large, multinational drug manufacturer, in their Paddington Central office. It was a nice location, very easy to get to, and overlooked the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal. It wasn’t like being in Venice, but for west London, it would do.

  By the time I reached my desk, it was about five minutes past eight, and the office was just starting to get busy. I was disappointed to see that my boss, Janice, had beat me in this morning. I’d spent the last two years pushing hard, and I knew that Janice was feeling challenged and uncomfortable in her position. She’d started her career at a time when doing a good job was all about who you knew and not what you knew and had succeeded in her own way. There had even been a small scandal last year when it emerged that she’d awarded a contract to a long-term supplier even though they hadn’t had the most competitive bid—but they had taken her to dinner a couple times in the previous year. I hadn’t had anything to do with the revelation, but I knew that she suspected I might have.

  “Julian, I need to speak to you.”

  My head turned toward Janice as she continued to look at her laptop screen.

  “How can I help?” I asked, trying to start on a positive note.

  “First of all, you can help by showing up to the office on time. Second, I need you to take the lead on a new project to set up a media relations satellite office somewhere inside the M25. This one has a high profile, and you’ll have to work with the executive support team. I’ve forwarded you the details, and I want to see a procurement strategy by close of business,” Janice replied as I groaned inwardly. This project was clearly a poison pill: the kind of assignment that at first glance looks prestigious and exciting but in reality has almost no chance of succeeding within budget or on time. I’d worked with the executive support team previously, and the head of the department, Nick Hargold, would resort to speaking to the executive team directly if someone disagreed with him. This new task was, of course, in addition to the two other major projects that I was still trying to close down before I took vacation in three weeks. We were flying out on August 9 for a holiday with the in-laws in Florida that I hoped would also give Dana and I a chance to patch up some of the rifts that were growing between us.

  At half past ten, I looked back up from my screen when I was surprised by a call of, “Mate!” It looked like my good buddy Toscan was back in town. He’d been posted to our Boston office for a big hush-hush project a few weeks ago, and I hadn’t heard from him since.

  “Hey, man,” I started in reply, “I’ve got to get this document ready for Janice by noon, but after that, do you want to pop out for lunch?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got to do my expenses for the last few weeks, but let’s grab some grub, and then I’m calling it a day. I’m still jet-lagged as shit,” Toscan shot back in his thick Aussie accent. I chuckled inwardly as I thought about how much he sounded like Steve Irwin or Crocodile Dundee. The best part was that when I made fun of him about it after a few drinks, he’d reply with the worst fake American accent in the history of the universe. If you didn’t know what he was trying to do, then you might guess he was trying to do an impression of a Swedish man with a potato in his mouth. My wife always said that he just sounded Danish.

  I finished up the first draft for Janice an hour later and then caught up on e-mails until Toscan came over and signaled, raising an imaginary beer bottle to his lips, that he was ready to head out. A few minutes later, we were comfortably ensconced in a corner booth of the Grand Union with a beer (I went with London Pride, and Toscan bucked Aussie tradition by actually drinking a Foster’s) in hand and a couple of burgers on the way. The Grand Union definitely leaned much more toward the trendy side of the trendy/traditional pub spectrum than I usually appreciated, but it had the distinct advantages of being next door to the office and running a decent lunch special.

  “All right, buddy, can you finally tell me what in the hell was running so well in Boston that they had to ship you over there to mess it up?” I poked, as Toscan drained half of his pint, clearly savoring his workday already being over.

  “Well, mate, I never told you this but apparently, they’re working on some kind of a new antipsychotic, something that will make Xanax look like snake oil. The problem is that they need bonzer amounts of some rare plant that only grows in one tiny part of Maine, of all places. This stuff is going to make gold seem cheap by comparison, but early tests show that one treatment could be enough to rehabilitate long-term manic-depressives for years at a time.” He punctuated that statement by finishing the rest of his pint and letting out a pleased sigh. “The best part is that they want yours truly on the case. If I nail this, then the next time you see me, I’ll probably be your boss, mate, and that is why you need to get the next round. This is your opportunity to butter up management ahead of time,” he gloated.

  “Some of us need to get work done this afternoon!” I replied with a laugh, just as our burgers arrived, but I was secretly impressed and a bit envious.

  The afternoon saw me sitting down with Janice to review the plan for the new media relations office and then cleaning out some e-mails. By the time I was ready to leave at six p.m., I’d finished the wording for the initial request for information bid and provided it to Jen in the support team to upload into the e-procurement system for Janice’s approval.

  I fought my way home through stifling heat, and my mind turned back to the riots of a few years past as the train pulled into Ealing Broadway, where an old man had been beaten to death within sight of a Met Police mobile command center at the station. The city felt almost as on edge now as it had then, with the heat stretching into a third week and the latest round of banker’s bonuses rumored to be approaching record levels. Even taking all of that into account, though, it still felt like there was some additional undercurrent fraying nerves, turning what should have been small incidents into the blazing rows that I’d been hearing up and down Windmill Lane whenever I stepped outside my front door for the past few weeks.

  It was nearly seven in the evening by the time I stepped back through the door, carrying a carton of milk. I wasn’t sure whether I was happier to be met by the smell of pizza or by Olivia’s screams of “Daddy, Daddy!” The rest of the evening was fairly uneventful, with supper followed by getting the kid to bed and then a couple of hours in front of the TV with a small rum and Coke.

  Dana was already in bed, reading, when I finished my drink, clearly taking it easy in preparation for her big night out with Sky tomorrow. Changing into my pajamas, I heard her say, “Julian, I just realized that we didn’t go to church last weekend. We should go more often. You know how it would kill my mom if she knew we weren’t bringing her grandbaby up right.”

  I sighed mentally at the old argument. We’d both been raised Catholic, but my parents, uninfluenced by the fervor of Florida’s big Latino community, hadn’t been nearly as strict about attendance. “Okay, let’s try and go next weekend,” I replied, placating her, but really just wanting to get to sleep without an argument. Night after night, month after month, and year aft
er year, I saw the very worst of what people could do to each other played back through the filter of the victim’s unconscious mind. There were times I had trouble believing in much beyond myself.

  “Father O’Hanrahan will like that. He really does like you, Julian,” Dana said to me as she stretched out to flip the light switch. A moment later, she rolled toward me, planted a peck on my lips and said goodnight.

  Before drifting off to sleep, I considered her statement and hoped that it was true. While I might not have a lot of time for religion, I had as much time for Father O’Hanrahan, the priest at Our Lady of the Visitation, as he asked for. An old Irish Jesuit, before age and deteriorating health had forced him to retire back to Europe, he’d spent forty years teaching and ministering in impoverished places throughout the world. He’d asked for his final posting to be in Ealing so he could be near his elderly sister, a member of the borough’s traditionally large Irish community. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered what he’d think if I ever told him what I did at night.

  CHAPTER 3 0800–0900, Tuesday, July 21, 2015

  ***Kelly***

  “Ena, did you seen this new tender for a media relations office that came out last night?” Kelly asked, her Irish accent almost undetectable after eight years spent in London. “Do you think we have time to bid for that one with everything else we have on?” she continued, not bothering to turn her head to address the redhead next to her. A third woman, with curly brown hair and wearing a surprisingly casual floral print dress, breezed through the door to the partners’ area of OMG Property Consultancy’s third-floor office, in a trendy block just off of Old Street.

  Kelly MacDonnell, Ena O’Brian, and Tara Grady had met at Kings College on their first day at university and had immediately formed a tight clique based on their shared Irish origins. Although they’d all ended up studying different subjects, Kelly’s degree in computing, Ena’s studies in business administration and estate management, and Tara’s law degree had been wonderfully complementary in allowing them to start their own real estate company with a minimum of overhead. Five years after founding the company, the women had achieved virtually unprecedented success in their field by creating a business that specialized in renovating unwanted properties for their clients and matching them with prospective buyers or tenants almost immediately upon completion. The three women had such a sterling track record—and no hint of having used anything but their business skills to achieve it—that all had been in a recent “Thirty Under Thirty” countdown of young business people in the capital, and their combined wealth was already in the low eight figures.

  “Let’s do it,” Tara replied before Ena could answer. “We have that little conference center in Vauxhall that we need to flip,” the lawyer continued as she put down her purse and pulled out her new MacBook.

  A short silence followed until Ena pushed back her long copper hair and pulled the Bluetooth headset off of her ear. “Sorry, lads,” she purred, “I just closed the deal on the twenty-third floor of the Hilton Tower in Manchester. I do believe that the commission should buy me the new Aston that I’ve been looking at. That’s a car and not a boy, Kelly,” she finished, getting in a swift verbal jab at Kelly’s mystifyingly complete lack of interest in nice cars and correspondingly strong interest in nice-looking men.

  Ena quickly put the headset back to her ear, but when she’d finished that call, she picked back up on the previous conversation. “I agree, though, that we should go after the conference center bid. When it pans out, we’ll have a great in with that company, and they’re loaded. Not only do they apparently spend over £20 million per year on property rental, but they own legacy offices all over the country that we can help them get rid of. I’m a bit disappointed, Kel, that you’d even ask!”

  “Yeah, Kel—time for you to get out of the office and make us some money!” Tara shot out from behind her massive pile of papers. Like most lawyers, she had a laptop, but she preferred to carry around several forests’ worth of hard copy.

  “All right. I’ll pick this one up,” Kelly replied as she tried to hide her nervousness at going back out into the field. She tried to avoid going out to client bids nowadays, and although she’d told herself that she still loved working with her best friends, she would have preferred to avoid getting involved in what she felt to be the dirty side of the business. She had secretly hoped that in the next year or so she’d be able to retire to working exclusively on the IT and data mining side of the company, but lately she’d sensed that the other women were getting annoyed with her reluctance to leave the office. The tension wasn’t too bad, but she figured that, at least this time, she’d have to just put on her big-girl panties and get out there. “I’ll go grab some lunch with Eric and get him started on putting together the bid pack,” Kelly said. The thought of spending a couple of hours out of the office with Eric was enough to make her squirm a bit in her seat as she considered whether anyone would notice if the meeting took longer than was strictly necessary or was too conveniently located to her penthouse flat than could be called coincidental.

  After Kelly had left the room, Ena turned to Tara with a scowl on her face that caused the small lines in between her eyes, which she hated enough that a trip to the Botox clinic was on her agenda for the following week, to form. “Kelly needs to shape up. I’ve loved that girl for years, but if she can’t remember how to do her job…” Ena started.

  “Then maybe we’ll just need to forget her!” Tara chortled as she finished the old joke that the two of them had been making on and off for the past couple of years—ever since they’d started to worry about Kelly’s commitment and her ability to keep her mouth shut about their company’s secret to success.

  CHAPTER 4 0800–1300, Tuesday, July 28, 2015

  ***Julian***

  The past week of nights had seen me banishing one demon, two psychotic boyfriends, a lion, a giant screaming baby, an ax-wielding ex-wife, and a horde of vampires (yawn). I’d managed to do all of that without violating any of the three rules that I’d set for myself:

  First, I wouldn’t do anything that would jolt the dreamer out of their sleep. If, for example, I made a slavering monster turn into a kitten, then the dreamer's subconscious was likely to reject it and wake them. Not only did this mean that I hadn’t permanently banished the nightmare, but it gave me one hell of a headache in the morning.

  Second, I needed to take care of the situation at hand with the minimum possible force. Within reason, in the land of dreams, I could conjure anything or any effect that I needed from the vaults of my memory, but there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The more willpower and concentration I expended, the more tired I was when I woke up in the morning.

  Finally, I had to keep my dreamwatching secret. That had been one of the reasons that I’d been excited to move to London when I was offered the position. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, I’d constantly seen people that I knew; every night held the chance that I’d be recognized, and every day held the chance that I’d let slip something that I shouldn’t know. As a kid, I’d tried to act on that knowledge on occasion…let’s just say that the results weren’t promising.

  The past week had also seen me close down a £2 million software contract. It added a little star rating system to the bottom of each customer-facing web page, which is what you get for £2 million a year when Ted from Marketing tells you that he already started using the system two months ago. At this point, I only had two big projects left to close down before heading off to Florida for a week of (in my opinion) much-deserved rest. The first project was to finish off a pretty straightforward-long term deal with our Swedish stationery supply company, and I was confident that we’d be able to renew our existing framework deal in the next couple of days based on the discounts that they’d proposed.

  The second project still on my plate was the selection of the new conferencing facility site. Janice had been nagging me daily, and, annoyingly, Nick on the executive support team had been less
than supportive. I’d tried to meet with him on at least four separate occasions to understand the requirements of the activity in more detail. Unfortunately, he was more interested in spending his time kissing ass than actually trying to do his job properly so that he wouldn’t need to kiss ass. Instead, I had one of his team members, a guy in his late thirties, named Phil. He actually seemed like a good bloke, but he didn’t have a clue why we were looking to get a new conference facility set up when we already had, in his words, “A perfectly good conference facility that had only been used twenty times—twice a year for the last ten years. At this rate, the company will get its money back on that facility in another two thousand years.” In any event, the steering group—composed of me, Janice, Nick from Exec Support, and Richard from Accounting—had agreed over e-mail to shortlist the bidders down to two, and I had initial meetings with both of their bid leads later today.

  “You aren’t going to be bringing your work along on holiday this time, are you, Jules?” Dana asked me as I was drying myself off from my morning shower. I didn’t answer immediately, because I was still mentally replaying my encounter with the horde of bloodsucking, nonsparkly vampires that I’d finished dispatching only ten minutes earlier.

  I was especially proud of my work last night and thought back on the thirtysomething IT manager that I’d “saved.” When I'd made my entrance, the guy had clearly been experiencing a recurring dream, as he’d been clinging to a tree with pasty white fingers straining to keep his doughy frame in place, whimpering, “Not again, not again, not again.” I’d waited a couple of branches above him, and when a pack of four bat-faced fang suckers had surrounded the tree and started floating toward him, I’d reached into my trench coat pocket and, drawing on a familiar memory, produced a ten-million-candlepower UV light. That kind of power can cause paper to combust from a foot away, but the effect it has on vampires is even more impressive.