Dreamwalker

by Russell James

  “They’re here,” she whispered. “Stay in the shadows.”

  A taxi cab-yellow, open-top, two-door Jeep screeched to an abrupt halt in front of the building next door. It stood a good five feet off the ground and the fenders were extended two feet to cover the oversized tires that sported a thicket of knives for hubcaps. Their sharpened points glistened under the street lights. The doors bore the stencils of crossed snakes, one black, one white. Pete recognized the symbol from the last nightmare he had, on the medallion around the neck of the gray screaming creature outside the mansion.

  In the back of the Jeep rose a spindle-mounted .50 caliber machine gun. A belt of black and copper rounds snaked from the weapon into the bed of the truck. Standing behind it, training it on the first brownstone’s entrance, was a gunner more horrific than Pete thought he could imagine.

  The creature wore the remnants of a business suit. Its shredded pants flapped in the breeze. The jacket’s missing right sleeve exposed the once-white shirt beneath, now nearly black with dried blood and dirt. The gunner’s tie had switched to headband duties. By the look of it, it could be all that was holding the creature’s head together.

  The thing, clearly once human, had transformed into something else. Half its head was burned and horribly scarred. The sole remaining eye shot back and forth like a caged animal, out of sync with the direction of the head. The other half of the head was simply bone, all flesh and muscle blasted away by whatever broiled the other side. The eye socket was dark and empty. The creature spouted a maniacal laugh. Its withered hand pulled back the machine gun’s charging handle to load it for firing.

  The Jeep’s driver was a similar ghoul, reduced to mostly skeleton and dressed in the matching green rags of a gardener’s uniform. Its skull swung back and forth like a cattail in a breeze.

  A second set of lights in the bumper came to life and lit the brownstone like a sunrise. With a scream of delight, the zombie ex-stock broker at the .50 caliber fired. Brilliant tracer rounds flew through the shattered windows. Spent shells and links pinged like metal rain onto the Jeep’s floor. The vehicle rocked back and forth on its springs as it absorbed the massive concussion of the machine gun’s recoil. Hundreds of rounds pounded into the building and churned the interior to dusty pulp.

  Vaporized plaster wafted in through the window over Pete’s head. The sharp smell of spent gunpowder followed it in.

  Pete fought back a cough. This felt so real.

  “They looking for us?” Pete asked.

  “No,” Dream Girl said. “They’re looking for anyone. We just happen to be here.”

  Pete wondered why he had to ask. Even in his wildest adventure dreams, Pete always slipped into it seamlessly. Usually he already knew whatever backstory had led him to this point in time, and everything, no matter how bizarre, made perfect sense. But his subconscious had skipped the background briefing. He was flying blind.

  The gunner in the rear of the Jeep ceased fire and laughed like a crazed hyena, head lolled back, lone eye staring at the two moons. The driver killed the extra spotlights and threw the Jeep in reverse. He punched the accelerator. The engine bellowed in response. Flames flew from the side-mounted exhaust. All four blade-studded rims spun in unison and the Jeep screamed backward down the road. The driver never even looked over his shoulder to steer. The city swallowed up the Jeep and the howl of the engine faded.

  Something rustled in the shadowy corner of the room. Pete and Dream Girl spun to face it. Just outside the rectangle of illumination from the missing front window, a terrified man huddled in the corner. Pete advanced into the light and knelt beside him.

  He was about thirty, but had a haunted, sallow look that aged him an extra twenty years. Long, solid-white hair stuck out from his head at odd angles. His eyes displayed the red irritation borne of lack of sleep, and dark gray bags had taken up permanent residence below them. He wore a stained Hawaiian shirt and a pair of dirty Bermuda shorts. Thick grime blackened his bare feet.

  “I’m Pete.” Pete’s voice sounded like someone trying to coax a kitten from a tree. “Are you okay?”

  The man’s eyes darted right and left, as if searching for an escape route. He clasped his hands between his knees and wrung them together.

  “Are they gone?” he said. “Is it safe?”

  “They’re gone,” Pete said. This poor soul didn’t look like he could take any other news. “Relax.”

  “He can’t,” Dream Girl said.

  The man’s hand wringing went to half-speed. But his eyes continued to search in what appeared an ingrained habit of eternal vigilance, as if the man no longer knew how to exist without being in motion.

  “He’s already past the edge,” Dream Girl said. “He’s been hunted and moving for so long he’s forgotten how to rest.”

  “Almost safe,” the ragged man chanted softly to himself. “Almost safe. Make it one more day. Make it ’til dawn. Yes, I can.”

  The man began to flap his arms over and around his head. His hands flexed open and closed in sync. His head weaved back and forth and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

  “I’ll spin the webs around me,” he said. His voice grew more excited. “Protective webs of cloaking violet. None will find me in the cocoon. Radio darlings send biscuits of redemption. I’ll wake up in Waikiki with Karen. Sand and surf and only one moon.”

  Pete touched his shoulder to calm him. “How long have you been here?”

  The man stopped flailing, arms paused suspended in the air. His bloodshot eyes locked on Pete’s. His face acquired an expression of amazement, as if Pete had just materialized out of thin air. He answered in a voice calm and level, far more terrifying than his wailing rants.

  “How long is forever?”

  The bedraggled man sprang to his feet and knocked Pete back to the ground.

  “Nursemaids howl in silence!” the man screamed. “Get to morning! Wake on the beach!”

  He catapulted himself out the front window and disappeared into the darkness. Dream Girl reached under Pete’s armpits from behind him and helped him to his feet.

  “Simon’s almost fully gone,” she said. “It’s been too much for him. A few more encounters and he’ll turn completely.”

  “Turn into…?”

  The girl pointed out through the missing window.

  “One of them,” she said. “Not the way he thought his Waikiki vacation would end the last night he fell asleep.”

  A sympathetic twinge flexed in Pete’s chest. He wanted there to be hope for Simon, even if he was a figment of Pete’s own imagination.

  “I’ll dream he wakes up back in his resort in the morning,” Pete said.

  “He won’t,” the girl said. “There is no dawn in Twin Moon City.”

  “Hopeless victims in a hopeless land,” Pete said. “My subconscious has knocked one out of the park tonight.”

  “I’m Rayna,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of time. You need to—”

  The growl of engines cut her short. The sound filled the air outside the building and rumbled the brownstone’s rotting floorboards.

  “Damn,” she said. She stuck her head out the window and listened. “Multiple Jeeps, many directions. You need to go back right now. He sensed your presence here and the hunters are returning, this time in force. Get back through the tunnel and close it behind you.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” he said.

  Rayna shook her head.

  “No, I wish I could.”

  A Jeep pulled up behind the building with a crash as it bowled over loose masonry. The sound of crazed laughter pierced the house.

  “Leave a reflection and get going,” Rayna said.

  “A reflection?”

  She ignored his question. “Remember one thing…”

  She grabbed a shard of glass from the floor. She gripped his wrist. With one qu
ick slash, she put a deep scratch in his outer forearm. It hurt like hell.

  “What happens here does not stay here,” she said.

  Pete winced and pulled his arm back. Blood seeped from the wound. The pain should have awakened him, but it didn’t.

  Rayna ducked back through the hole in the wall and into the first brownstone. Across the street sat the passage back to the mansion. The street still looked clear.

  But she said to leave a reflection…

  Suddenly it was obvious. The feeling was quite bizarre. It was as if he had been turning a radio tuning dial, getting nothing but static, and then — POW— a station came in loud and clear. He knew exactly how to leave a reflection.

  He pulled off his T-shirt. He held it up waist high in both hands by the shoulder seams and threw the shirt straight up in the air. It hung motionless about four feet from the ground. He cupped his hands together like he was making a snowball. He raised them over his head and opened them toward the hovering shirt. A ball of light flew from his fingers and hit the shirt in the chest. The light passed through the cotton weave. Golden illumination crept down to the ground and out of the neck and arms. It morphed into the outline of a man, features vague and indistinct. Pete sensed something in the shimmering mass, like an inaudible echo, a ricochet of his own essence, a reflection of his soul.

  “Go back now!” Rayna’s voice called in his head.

  Pete turned from his radiant alter ego and ran through the front door. At either end of the boulevard, screaming Jeeps barreled down the road. Snarling exhaust reverberated between the buildings. He sprinted across the street and dove over the boulders that concealed the tunnel back to the mansion. He glanced back at the shattered brownstone.

  The two Jeeps ground to a halt on either side. Two decaying zombies manned the machine guns mounted in the rear, weapons trained on the brownstone. In one Jeep, a tall, thin, black man with long dreadlocks and a goatee stood in the passenger seat, hands locked on the top of the windshield. His long, leather duster flapped around his knees.

  The man wore a peaked officer’s cap, like something off a Nazi uniform. A clenched skeletal fist crest topped the cap. From his neck hung a medallion hung in the shape of two crossed snakes, one black, and one white. Pete flashed back to the shadow creature that attacked the mansion last night.

  That insight filled Pete with dread. This wasn’t a dream arc he wanted to continue.

  Simultaneously, both Jeep gunners fired. The muzzle flashes lit the street in blinding white. Bullets crashed in and through the building’s façade. The staccato crack of another weapon came from the rear as the third Jeep opened up. Bricks began to disintegrate under the hail of flying lead.

  My cue to exit, Pete thought.

  He ran down the tunnel and remembered Rayna said to close it up behind him. Without thinking, he reached behind him and snapped his fingers twice. The walls and floor at the exit of the tunnel began to converge. The light at the other end winked out. The collapsing walls moved forward, gaining on Pete, extinguishing the candles in the walls as they advanced. The shrinking space in the tunnel sent forward an increasing rush of air. Pete teetered as the wind pressed against his back. Feet from the trap door steps, he slipped. He went airborne and the wind blew him up the stairs.

  He awoke instantly in his bed over DiStephano’s and sat straight up. The room was still dark, lit only by streetlights coming through the one dingy window. He looked at his watch. 2:30 a.m. An hour of sleep?

  His arm brushed the sheets. It felt like he scraped it on sandpaper. He clicked on the light.

  Blood seeped from a red slice on his arm, just like the one from his dream.

  He remembered Rayna’s words, “What happens here doesn’t stay here.”

  He was a hell of a dreamer, but nothing from a dream ever manifested itself in the real world.

  But that was no normal dream. He hadn’t been omniscient and detached. Near the end, the soul echo trick and the magic collapsing tunnel came to him without thinking, but he would have been lost without Rayna’s help. And Rayna, why did she have to tell him her name? He created her.

  But this dream’s biggest difference was that he had been afraid, and his injured arm said justifiably so.

  He wiped some dripping blood. The flow had stopped. If he’d been caught in those machine gunner’s sights…

  Pete reached over and flipped off the light. He stared up at the shadows on the ceiling.

  None of this could be good.

  Cauquemere slammed his hand against the wall.

  “How could this happen?” he yelled.

  He stood in the devastated brownstone with the bullet-riddled shirt of the unknown dreamwalker in his hands. He wadded it up and threw it against the wall in frustration. He had been cheated out of a good execution.

  “I sensed him here,” he said. “His spirit was strong and clear. I could not have been mistaken.”

  He looked back at the shirt on the floor.

  “Unless he left a reflection. A cheap trick that won’t fool me again. But how could he learn to leave a reflection? This was the dreamwalker’s first trip to Twin Moon City. I am certain of that. I feel every soul that crosses the border. How could he learn complex magic so quickly?”

  A zombie gunner beside him looked at his master in blank confusion. Its jaw ratcheted up and down.

  “He must have had help!” Cauquemere said.

  He marched to the back of the brownstone. His long, leather duster trailed like a cape. He looked out the missing rear window at the combat Jeep idling beyond. The gunner in the rear moved the machine gun barrel to one side, keeping Cauquemere out of the line of fire. He averted his eyes from his master, more a gesture of fear than respect.

  Cauquemere placed his hands on the edge of the window sill, closed his eyes, and opened his senses. The soul trace came through. He smiled in recognition.

  Waikiki Simon, he thought. He could sense what was left of Simon’s energy on the window. To Cauquemere, it was still warm.

  There was no way Waikiki Simon would have been any help to the dreamwalker. Simon was down to three cards in his hand and was about to fold for the last time. While he couldn’t have taught the dreamwalker, perhaps he’d seen who did. Cauquemere needed to question him before Simon tossed in those last few cards and turned full zombie. After that, Simon would be able to follow commands, but independent thought and long-term memory would be history.

  The driver of the Jeep in the back yard wore full motorcycle leathers. The left leg and arm were worn through where the gunner had used them to sand a road at seventy-five miles per hour. One large scab covered the left side of his face where his left ear was missing. The rest of his face was a pallid lifeless gray, but his eyes burned bright with a fire only psychosis could keep blazing.

  “Get me Simon,” Cauquemere commanded the driver. “Alive. Bring him to the palace.”

  Both the driver and the gunner turned to Cauquemere to acknowledge the command. They exploded in rabid laughter. The Jeep pulled away in a flash of whirling wheel blades.

  Cauquemere wanted no dangling loose ends while his deal in the tactile world went down, and the seer named the dreamwalker a loose end. Better to catch the dreamwalker here on his own turf, where he would have all the advantages.

  Cauquemere first sensed the dreamwalker the day before yesterday. He searched the worlds outside of Twin Moon City and caught the scent of a dreamwalker in some ridiculous image of a Southern plantation house. However, the vision was unclear and the spirit he sensed vanished. That experience sent him to Prosperidad. She had confirmed his fears, though he was certain that the untrustworthy bitch held something back. A dreamwalker who could leave soul reflections could be a serious problem.

  He pulled his peaked cap down lower on his forehead and headed back to his Jeep. He had business back at the palace to complete this evening.
Whatever was planned for the tactile world, Twin Moon City still needed to be ruled and new citizens recruited. He would find the dreamwalker, here or in Atlantic City. It would make no difference. Either way, the dreamwalker would die.

  Chapter Nine

  The two Gothic spires of Cauquemere’s palace rose like daggers into the empty sky. Perpetually lit circular windows at each tower’s peak looked down on the buildings of Twin Moon City, artificial irises that reminded the residents there was no sanctuary from the petra loa’s view. The granite-sheathed palace at the base of the towers filled a city block. Crenellated turrets anchored each corner and battlements ran across the top of the wall. Thick iron bars covered the few windows. The palace’s first line of defense stood a hundred feet from the building, a ten-foot iron rail fence. The tips of the fence were sharpened to lance points, with human heads impaled upon them. The heads were in varying states of decay, some reduced to bare skulls.

  Yellow, zombie-driven Jeeps stampeded the barren streets outside the main gate. The combined blat of the engines roared like a symphony of chain saws. Some Jeeps careened in wild circles around the palace. With each pass, the vehicles leaned up on two wheels as they drifted around a corner, gunner hiked out in the cargo area, gripping the machine gun. Others idled by the fence. Those drivers’ heads bounced and nodded, their hands fiddled with the steering wheel, until, as if that expenditure of energy was not enough to relieve the rising pressure behind it, the crew screamed with laughter. Then the Jeep would join the feral melee whirling around the central den, often grazing another clan member as it found its place in the pack.

  The palace’s thick stone walls blocked the sounds of the chaos outside the gates from an enormous room within. Oak beams supported a cathedral ceiling that stretched up into the darkness. Burning torches on the walls cast a flickering amber light throughout the windowless space. Dusty tapestries depicting torture and murder decorated the walls.

  Dwarfed by the vast expanse around them, one man and three women sat at the center of the room around a circular mahogany table. Each wore a simple, white, ankle-length tunic. Though all had yet to reach age twenty-five, each had coarse, gray, shoulder-length hair. A sparse silver beard hung down from the man’s chin. Their hollowed cheekbones and sunken eyes testified to devoured youth, one not slowly erased by the tides of time, but scoured away by a single storm surge. Each had the vacant stare of one who had seen a lifetime of horror.