The Last Dreamer

by Nicholas Erik

  “How could you?”

  “I don’t know, child,” Catalina said, tears clinging to the edges of her eyes, “but at least we saved you. That much I’m thankful for.”

  Anya rushed out of the room and slammed the door to Devin’s closet, scrunching herself up in the corner. Now she understood why Miss Ena had lied.

  Because most times the truth is worse.

  41 | Let’s Call Him

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Anya didn’t move. The edges of the walls blurred, rattled, as she tried to shake the thoughts loose from her mind. Betrayal, deception. All that the jerking and nodding did was make her feel sick and dizzy.

  So she stopped and pressed her back up against the wall, rigid, stiff, like she was bracing herself for impact. But the impact had already come; the asteroid had dropped down on her world, sent it skittering into the universe covered in dust.

  Anya was familiar with chaos theory. A butterfly flaps its wings in New Zealand, a hurricane tears up the Florida Keys. An action that led to a chain of events. Indistinguishable from randomness, but deterministic.

  Ordered.

  But take the theory out, and all you were left with was chaos.

  Disorder. Disorganization. No elegance. No reason, beyond the petty desires of human beings and their feeble egos.

  Her mother was dead.

  And Miss Ena was responsible.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Anya shot to her feet and shoved the door open. Tommy fell back against Devin’s bed, clutching his forehead.

  “Goddamn, a little warning.”

  “I could say the same thing,” Anya said.

  “That was news to me, too,” Tommy said. He got to his feet, unsteady, a thin trickle of blood dripping from the wound, down on to the carpet. “Most of it, anyway.” He jerked his thumb to the door, out into the living room.

  “I’m not going out there.”

  “She wants to talk.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Sometimes you gotta do things you don’t wanna do,” Tommy said. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a smudge. The wound continued to bleed, but at a slower speed.

  “No I don’t.”

  “You do if you want to find Devin,” Tommy said. He shrugged, like that was the way it was, and Anya could take it or leave it.

  She was thinking about leaving it, thought about it for five, ten, fifteen minutes, maybe more, just standing in the dim, unlit room, unsure whether what she wanted was on the other side.

  She stepped out, and Miss Ena turned her head. A thin smile appeared for a moment, but disappeared as soon as she saw Anya’s stern, unmoving expression.

  “We—I have a plan,” Miss Ena said.

  “That’s the type of shit that got us here in the first place. Lack of trust and credit,” Tommy said.

  “Fine, it was all your plan—”

  “I’m not saying that either, I’m just wanting a little credit.”

  Catalina sighed and smoothed the wrinkles from her dress. Her face was starting to show the signs of time. Most of the aging, however, had come within the past few months.

  “Can we get on with it? Time’s limited.”

  “Proceed, your majesty,” Tommy said, and swept his arms out like there was going to be a royal procession.

  “This is going to be difficult to hear, child,” Miss Ena said. She gestured towards the couch. “You’d best sit down.”

  “I’m done listening to you. Talk.”

  “I didn’t want to blindside you,” Miss Ena said. “You’ve been warned.” Anya bit her lip and unlocked and locked her arms. “The plan, at the end of Project Dreamer, was simple.”

  “You might want to sit down,” Tommy said. “For real.”

  Anya stuck out her tongue.

  “The subject—the Dreamer—after all successful tests had been finished, was to be released back into the world. She—in Devin’s case, he—was to be monitored. We didn’t get to that stage in the first experiments.”

  “Because you killed her.”

  “I’m sorry, child. I think about it every day.”

  “She’s still dead.”

  “She is,” Miss Ena said. “And nothing can change that. But there’s one thing we can change.”

  Anya held her words for a minute or two before saying, “What?”

  “Whether Devin lives or dies. If the plan remained the same during Devin’s trial, then they planned to monitor him, see if they need any further information before they wrap on the project.”

  “You make it sound so neat,” Tommy said. “What she means is, once they’ve synthesized whatever makes Devin play dream master, reverse-engineered it, found out everything about it, they’re gonna kill him. Tie up loose ends. Don’t want the public to know where these advancements came from, that they’re natural. Chimera gets control of all the patents, all the credit, all the praise. Only thing is, there’s a problem.”

  Miss Ena rolled her eyes at Tommy’s interjection, but said, “And that problem is simple. Samuel Thane has the Dreamer. And my father doesn’t know that. His men watching Devin at the hotel, as Mr. Travis here put it so eloquently, were ‘taken out with the trash’ when they came to get Devin. So my father knows Devin is missing, and perhaps an inkling of who took him, but he doesn’t know where the compound is.”

  “We killed his goons,” Tommy said.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Anya said. “I got it.”

  “She’s growing up,” Tommy said, and winked at Catalina. “Doesn’t it make you so proud?”

  “So what do we do?” Anya said.

  “What we do, child, is simple.” The corner of Miss Ena’s mouth upturned into the faintest hint of a smile. Then, like lightning, it was gone, the situation’s bleak nature sapping any joy from the room. “We call him.”

  “Call who?” Anya said.

  “My father. We call my father.”

  42 | Enemy of My Enemy

  Although the old proverb might have been the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Tommy Travis wasn’t sure those words contained even a lick of truth. Three people—Samuel Thane, Mark Stanton, and Catalina Ena—together twenty years ago, now split by ideology, were all after the same prize, for different reasons.

  All of them involved Devin.

  But none of them cared about Devin.

  Which made Anya, the girl he’d almost shot in the dusty general store, his closest ally. Although she didn’t seem to see it that way.

  And the government, that was always a wild card. Although the fact that Sarah Parsons was also there could only give that Ghost Mr. Parsons added incentive to assist in the recovery operation.

  A host of prairie dogs ran out in the middle of the road and stared at the truck. Tommy brought his thoughts back to reality and swerved, almost sending the truck into the dunes.

  “What the hell was that?” Catalina Ena’s words dripped poison, like she would strangle Tommy if he didn’t explain.

  “Prairie dogs were in the road.”

  “They’re all over the place. They’re like weeds.”

  Tommy just shook his head, steadied the truck, and stared straight ahead. The damn things were like cockroaches out here in the Southwest. You could make a percussion track to a song from all the bumps and thuds. But there he was, jerking the wheel, almost flipping the damn truck, in an effort to save a family of them who were just gonna get smashed by the next four-wheeled monster that roared down the road.

  He’d helped the Reverend capture his own goddamn brother. He’d helped that psycho Boyd dump three men into a garbage bin at the Export. Like they were empty trays of Oreos. Trash. They were probably thugs; that much was certain. But had they deserved to die?

  And was he qualified to make that call?

  “How much further?” Tommy had kept his foot on the gas for hours, the scenery not changing at all, just the dawn ceding to dusk without
any sort of indication that they were closer to their destination.

  “Soon,” Catalina said. She stared at the desert expanse, the soil beginning to lighten, segue into a hint of something ethereal and unusual.

  “How soon?” Tommy jiggled his foot, trying to fend off a cramp. It was the most temporary of reliefs.

  “Very soon,” Miss Ena said. “Everything will be over soon.”

  The prophetic words lingered in the cab long after the sound waves had died, dissipated into nothingness. Everything would be over soon.

  The only question, then, was how it would all play out.

  43 | To Arms

  Devin had been at the compound for nine or ten days.

  It had already felt like a lifetime—that his previous twenty years on the planet had been a dream, a mere mirage.

  When he walked in the fields at dawn, the workers tending to the plants in almost endless shifts, a great silent wave would wash over the Reverend’s people. They would still work—the work, the cultivation, that was paramount, the main commandment, as far as Devin could tell—but their demeanor, their attention, usually so invested in plants, was all directed towards him.

  He would say nothing or he would mumble pleasantries as he passed them by. It made no difference; they were rapt, in awe of him. Believed that he was the Prophet, some sort of oracle as the Reverend had claimed.

  The response was enough that Devin, somewhere deep within his subconscious, was believing that he indeed possessed world-changing powers.

  And his dreams—the things he had done—were getting crazier than they’d ever been.

  Devin thought of all this as he wound his way through the tall plants, brushing away the itchy, hairy buds that tickled his face as he passed. The Reverend didn’t require his presence in the fields; he and the Reverend, in fact, were the only two members of the Lionhearted exempt from any field work.

  Still, he’d come down here every day for one reason.

  “Hi,” he said. His arms outstretched, and he gave Sarah a quick, brief hug. Workers had to work. And Sarah was a worker, even if she had the ear of the Prophet.

  No special treatment.

  She smiled, returned his embrace, and picked up a can of water, sprinkling it into the deep, rich soil. Without make-up, she was still pretty, and despite the elements and hard work, a certain luminosity now permeated her character that Devin had never noticed before.

  He doubted it was a belief in the cause.

  “How you been?”

  “Same as yesterday.” She massaged one of the worm-eaten leaves and shook her head. “Someone messed up.” A pair of clippers came up, and she snipped it.

  “You take this seriously,” he said.

  “I don’t believe in the cause, Devin,” she said, and she dropped her voice when she uttered the heretical words, “but I believe in doing a good job.”

  “Funny, I never got that impression,” Devin said. He rubbed one of the marijuana buds between his fingers and squeezed it, sticky resin oozing on to his fingers. Sarah slapped his hand away and shot him a sharp look.

  This was what someone was like when they’d found their purpose. Passion and insanity balanced on a razor’s edge. Devin hoped that Sarah was staying on the correct side of the line.

  “Don’t do that,” Sarah said. “It ruins the final product.”

  “You’ve been here for a week,” Devin said. “Have you even seen any final product?”

  “Listen and you will learn,” Sarah said. She sprayed some water on the injured bud and inspected it with a close eye. Satisfied, she moved down a plant, and Devin followed her.

  “You quoting Bible verses now or something?”

  “You tell me, Great One.”

  “That’s not fair,” Devin said. “I want to be here about as much as you do.”

  “You should see the look on your face when you walk down the row and come towards me.”

  “What’s it like,” Devin said, unsure that he wanted the answer, but curious nonetheless.

  “You know what I said about belief?”

  Sarah dropped the clippers for a moment, turned her attention away from the row of plants so that she facing Devin, her gaze dead set on his face. Even with the strides he’d made over the past few months, having a pretty girl—her blue eyes blazing in the pink and orange dawn, a thin line of sweat and dirt dripping down the center of her forehead—cut right through him, like she knew all his secrets, made him sway in the faint breeze.

  Still, Devin said, “I remember.”

  She brushed her hair back and said, “So it’s like this. You were lame as shit when you used to work at the shipping factory. You think I didn’t notice, but I did. Kind of. Enough. You were like one of those leaves on the ground at the end of fall. Brittle, weak, just waiting for someone to step on you.”

  “Nice plant metaphor,” Devin said.

  She socked him in the arm and kept going. “But now, you stand up straight. Walk like you belong.”

  “That’s what happens when people call you God,” Devin said. Megalomania.

  “And you eat that shit up,” Sarah said. “You enjoy it. Look at you today.”

  “What do you see?”

  “You got that, what does Samuel call it? A Gathering?”

  “Yeah,” Devin said. “A Gathering.”

  “And what’s your sermon gonna be?”

  Devin shielded his eyes as he turned away to face the rising sun. He shook his head, but didn’t speak. A sermon. Was she right—was it a sermon? Most things in life just came down to semantics, it seemed.

  Stanton, Samuel, they were the same. This place, it was the same as the last. He was a prisoner, but a somewhat willing one. His entire life, as Sarah had said, he’d been weak. Trampled upon. Invisible. And now he was something.

  He just wasn’t sure what.

  So whatever his words would be that night, Devin knew one thing: they’d be taken as the gospel, just as whatever bullshit the Reverend had preached had gotten everyone to make him rich while they lived in wood houses.

  “Hello? Hello?” Sarah waved her hand in front of Devin’s eyes. He caught it, his touch light, and brought it down, rubbing the dirt from her knuckles. He turned around, slow, but didn’t give her back her hand. “Devin?”

  He brought his face closer and kissed her.

  And she kissed him back, before they tumbled to the ground, under the cover of God’s green earth. Damned if his disciples could see them.

  But no one seemed to notice, even if everyone did.

  44 | Gatherings, Interrupted

  Devin combed his hair, rubbed the wax between his fingertips. Ran the tacky substance through the strands, getting it right where he wanted it. No second guessing. Prophet slick, not businessman slick. He tamped down the sides and went into the tight room, almost hitting the Reverend with the door.

  “Sorry,” he said, and for a moment it dashed his confidence. But he soon regained it, brought his chest up high, and looked the Reverend in the eye. “Didn’t see you there. No X-ray vision.”

  The Reverend smirked at the joke, that Devin couldn’t see everything, and then waved it off. Fixed his own bed, then Devin’s. Perhaps a nervous affliction, given this particular Gathering’s importance—the introduction of the Dreamer to the congregation—or perhaps an obsessive tic learned long before. It was difficult for Devin to tell.

  Given the clockwork organization of the compound, he reckoned it was the latter. The Reverend didn’t rattle easy, and tonight seemed like another cog in his master plan. Wherever that was headed.

  “You’re prepared,” the Reverend said, once he finished with the bedspreads, “for tonight’s speech.”

  Devin was thankful he didn’t call it a sermon. He said, “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  “These people, they believe in you, son,” the Reverend said. He stared out the single window, at the throng beginning to fill the simple wooden benches that had been brought out from storage in the silo earlier. A doz
en of them, heavy oak, each fashioned from a single tree, requiring ten men each to hoist them into the small, tight expanse that lay between the Reverend’s quarters and the congregation’s.

  The Reverend could see his disciples rub the great wood with wonder and reverence. “The elegance of simple things,” he said. “A man needs not much but strength and the truth.”

  “The truth.” The word no longer felt right on Devin’s mouth. It felt like a paradox, something impossible to ever resolve into a semblance of clarity.

  “You’ve been quiet, son. Is it to do with the girl?”

  “The girl?” For a moment, Devin’s heart hammered, but it soon subsided. Whatever he did, the Reverend needed him. Thus far, he seemed above reprimand.

  “Our newest arrival,” the Reverend said. “Sarah.”

  “She’s well.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” The Reverend turned from the window and clasped a great hand on Devin’s back. “Don’t worry, I’m only devoted to the Bible’s message. The letter of it is hazy when it comes to the life of man.”

  “Okay,” Devin said, and understood this devotion. Based on the Reverend’s tactics, the lengths he had gone to track down his precious Prophet had been pretty extreme.

  There was a loud, frantic knock on the door to their chambers. The incessant pounding of knuckles. From the sound of it, whoever was on the other side wouldn’t stop until their hand was bloodied and useless.

  The Reverend stepped over and opened the door.

  “Sorry, Samuel,” Boyd said, his words short, his breaths even shorter. Devin tried to catch a glimpse of the man from around the Reverend’s body. From what little he could see, Boyd had been running through the fields and was covered in leaves and dirt.

  “You’re dirty, son,” the Reverend said, as if he didn’t appreciate his plants being destroyed.

  “They’re coming.”

  “Who is? Be clear, boy. I’ve told you that before.”

  “Goddamn Chimera. Our spotter saw them about thirty miles up, on the old Riverwalk Road.”

  “Give me that,” the Reverend said, and grabbed the radio from Boyd’s hand. He clicked the button, and the line crackled open. “Spotter network, this is the Reverend. Do you read?”