Dreamfever

by Kit Alloway

  Today was the first time Josh had let him bring any sort of gun into the Dream. He was not actually much good with them, despite having practiced more than most Olympic shooters. She tried to figure out a polite way of taking the .22 away from him and couldn’t come up with one.

  “Love you,” was all she said.

  He grinned, kissed her quickly, and headed into the labyrinth. “Love you back!” he called over his shoulder.

  Josh sank to the ground until she could sit against the labyrinth wall. The heat captured in the adobe felt good against her back and shoulder blades, and she took a few long, deep breaths to settle her heart rate.

  She was already losing interest in the nightmare—what she wanted was to merge with the Dream itself. She felt hungry for its ease and expansive freedom. She had felt it once, felt her mind blown open to contain all the World’s dreams and nightmares at once, and she had been trying to recapture that sense of unity and connection ever since.

  So far, she had been unsuccessful.

  Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

  She closed her eyes and focused on the air moving in and out of her lungs.

  Inhale, exhale. Inhale …

  She stopped thinking, as much as she could. Instead she felt her body’s weight on the sand, the relentless heat of the sun tightening her skin, and the dull ache in her right elbow that never fully went away. She focused completely on her physical self.

  An image flashed in her mind. With a phantom’s eyes, she saw the labyrinth as if from above. The walls were moving on tracks hidden beneath the sand, sliding from side to side, blocking off and opening up routes at random. Staying lost forever in such a maze would be easy.

  Then the flash was over, and she was back in her body.

  The night she and Will and Haley had almost died, she had felt the entirety of the Dream inside her, the whole universe filling her skin. This comparatively meager merger felt like being teased, but it was as close as Josh had been able to come.

  More deep breaths, more focus …

  The next flash showed her Will, jumping out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed between the ends of two walls, and the dreamer, a little old Middle Eastern man in jean cutoffs and a red tank top that hardly covered his pot belly.

  Finally she saw the Minotaur, and she understood for the first time why the Greeks had considered it a terrible monster. It stood taller and overall larger than she had ever expected, so large that its bull’s head looked proportional, and its swarthy body rippled with muscle. It didn’t even have a neck—its jaw just expanded into its shoulders, and its whole upper body twisted when it turned to look at something. Its horns were chiseled to needle points, each pointing forward and slightly out to the side.

  But none of that made the Minotaur anything more than intimidating. What scared Josh was what the monster had done to itself: it was trying to become human, one body part at a time. Swaths of human skin in varying shades of pink and brown had been sewn over its fur. Its cow’s eyes had been torn out and replaced with human eyes, one blue and one green, and they were too small to fully fill the Minotaur’s cavernous eye sockets. Strangest of all, it had pulled out all its teeth and was wearing a pair of human dentures that filled only the front third of its bull’s snout.

  It released a roar, half bull’s bellow and half human shout, and the word it shouted was neither “spheres” nor “deers” but “EARS!”

  Gross, Josh thought.

  Just before the flash ended, she caught a glimpse of someone else: a young woman, her face hidden by a curtain of dark red hair, collapsed at the end of one corridor. She appeared to be fast asleep.

  Who is that? Josh wondered, the surprise jerking her back into her body. And how can she be sleeping?

  From somewhere nearby came the sound of adobe being crushed. It sounded like the Minotaur had gotten tired of searching the maze and started tearing walls down instead.

  Josh tried to settle back into her breathing, but she was distracted by the flash of the young woman sleeping in the sand. She didn’t seem to fit in this nightmare, which meant she was probably a second dreamer.

  More than one dreamer could participate in the same nightmare; sometimes people really did meet in their dreams. But multidreamer nightmares were usually more chaotic than this one thanks to the manifestations of multiple subconsciousnesses appearing simultaneously.

  But a dreamer was what the redhead had to be, and since Will hadn’t found her, that made her Josh’s responsibility.

  For the hundredth time since she’d woken up from her coma in February, she felt overcome by frustration. The power of the True Dream Walker that she had used to save Will, Haley, and herself had abandoned her. She had retained only one ability, and it was a small one.

  It wouldn’t help her now. She was going to have to do this the hard way.

  As she jumped to her feet, gunshots echoed through the labyrinth. Josh counted three, and then she heard the Minotaur’s inhuman roar: “SKIN!”

  Sounds like a hit, she thought.

  As Josh ran into the labyrinth, Will fired again, and the bullet must have hit home, because the Minotaur released a bellow more terrible than any he’d emitted before.

  “EST!”

  She ran toward the Minotaur, whose location was easy to identify because it stood taller than any of the walls around it.

  Sooner than she’d expected, she saw the redhead collapsed at the far end of a corridor. She loped down the corridor while calling, “Come on! Let’s get you out of here!”

  The redhead didn’t stir until Josh shook her. Then she opened bleary gray eyes, examined Josh briefly, and went back to sleep.

  “You’ve got to come with me,” Josh said.

  “Go away please,” the girl said.

  For an instant, Josh considered opening an archway and waking the girl up. But two-dreamer nightmares didn’t always play by the rules; if Josh woke the girl up, the nightmare might end, causing the Dream to shift and tossing Josh and Will into different nightmares. He’d never been in-Dream alone before.

  “You can either run or I can drag you,” Josh told the redhead, and when she got no immediate response, she grabbed the young woman’s ankles.

  “No, no!” the redhead protested. “I can walk. Just help me up.”

  Moments later, Josh began questioning whether or not she should have carried the redhead after all. The young woman could hardly stumble along at a fast walk, never mind run.

  They made it to a clearing where the rubble of shattered walls covered the desert floor. “Stay here,” Josh told the redhead, and helped her sit down behind a partially demolished wall. Two more shots went off.

  From deeper within the labyrinth, the Minotaur bellowed, “UUUMMMS!”

  Gums? Josh wondered, beginning to run again.

  She headed for the bellow, into the passage of fallen walls it had created. She hadn’t gone far when she caught sight of the Minotaur. It crashed through walls, head-butting one and punching through another, and the skin on its hands had been peeled back to reveal raw bone and muscle. Its thumbs were missing.

  Oh, Josh thought, pulling the .32 from the holster at the small of her back. Not “Gums!” It meant “Thumbs!”

  How Will had managed to shoot off both its thumbs was a mystery to her.

  “Will!” she shouted, taking aim, and then she shot the Minotuar twice in the back of the head.

  One bullet stuck in his flesh, but the other actually bounced off his scalp and fell onto the sand. Even before the creature turned and fixed a look of gross hatred on her, Josh was pretty sure that neither shot had penetrated the creature’s skull.

  “Josh?” Will called out incredulously. He peeked around a corner and—seeing that the Minotaur’s back was turned—ducked into the corridor. His expression startled Josh: he looked almost as mad as the Minotaur. “What are you doing?”

  “Come this way!” Josh called. “I’ll cover you!”

  He protested, and she f
ired three shots, this time into the beast’s chest. Its breastbone was covered in a patchwork quilt of pieces of skin, each a different hue, but they all bled the same dark blood where the bullets pierced them.

  “Go back!” Will called. Behind him, the little Middle Eastern dreamer peeked out at the Minotaur, which had dipped a finger in one of its wounds and was now sniffing its own blood.

  “No, come this way. There’s another dreamer.”

  “CHESSST!” it roared, throwing its head back.

  Josh fired again. Will’s expression grew even darker, but he grabbed the dreamer’s hand and dragged him down the corridor toward Josh.

  Clearly, the bullets were doing little to slow the Minotaur down. I should have brought an ax, Josh thought. Axes are always more useful than guns.

  Suddenly she flashed back on the nightmare she’d had the night before. Feodor, and the war, and the strange devices. What would she have given at this moment to have the circlet and vambrace, to be able to reach out and change the Dream, to have whatever she needed to protect Will?

  She would have given almost anything.

  But she didn’t have the circlet and vambrace, or even an ax, so she tried something new. Instead of aiming for vital organs, Josh shot at the Minotaur’s knees. One shot went between its legs, but the other two hit their mark and blew the creature’s kneecaps off like corks exploding from wine bottles full of blood and bone fragments.

  Unfortunately, the shot that had gone wild had hit the dreamer’s foot as he and Will tried to scramble past the Minotaur. “I’m hit! I’m hit!” the little old man cried out. Then, rather comically, he added, “Good-bye, cruel world!”

  Josh and Will both rolled their eyes. Will dragged the dreamer toward Josh, who shot the Minotaur a few more times to distract it as they passed by. Then she slung one of the dreamer’s arms around her neck, and she and Will carried him at a run back to the clearing.

  Behind the partially demolished wall, she found the redhead asleep on the sand. Stunned, Josh stood with her mouth hanging open for a moment. Dreamers could dream that they were sleeping, but when they did, they inevitably began dreaming that they were having another dream.

  “Wake up,” Josh said, kneeling down. She shook the girl’s shoulder through her windbreaker. “Come on, you have to wake up.”

  “Just leave me,” the redhead murmured without opening her eyes.

  “Nope, you’re coming with me.”

  As Josh helped/forced her to her feet, the Minotaur emerged from the labyrinth. It appeared to have torn its lower legs off completely and was now walking on the ends of its thighbones. The method proved surprisingly speedy.

  Josh didn’t have time to open an archway to the World in the traditional fashion, by reflecting light into a doorway, so she closed her eyes and imagined an archway right in front of them, standing in the open air with no need for a doorframe to hold it up. With that image in mind, she opened her eyes and thrust her left arm out. A burst of dense air flew from her palm, shot ten feet forward, and then expanded with a ripple into a freestanding archway. Its surface glittered like a gossamer fabric, but when Josh and Will shoved the redhead through, no material held her back. Josh cast one more glance at the Minotaur—now only a dozen paces away—and she grabbed the other dreamer’s hand and jumped.

  Creating archways was the only True Dream Walker power Josh had retained. If not for that, she would have questioned her destiny entirely.

  The burst of air conditioning that greeted her in the sterile white archroom was both soothing and refreshing. She inhaled, feeling satisfied, until she saw Will glaring at her.

  “What the hell were you thinking back there?” he demanded.

  His anger caught her off guard. “What?” she asked, more out of surprise than defiance.

  “I could have dealt with that by myself. But what did you do? You—you, who was perfectly safe—decided to jump into the middle of danger for no reason at all!”

  “I had to get the girl out,” Josh protested, finding her voice again.

  “No, you didn’t! Who cares about the girl? She was just one dreamer!” And he must have known what Josh was thinking, because he added, “She sure as hell wasn’t your responsibility!”

  “And I’m not your responsibility!”

  Josh didn’t like the tone she was using. She knew it meant she had already lost her temper and all she could hope for now was that she wouldn’t kick anybody or say anything she couldn’t take back.

  Will must have recognized her tone, too. He got that condescending look in his eye that meant he was retreating into psychoanalyst mode. Josh hated that look.

  Both her tone and his look had become all too familiar recently.

  “I told you that I don’t want you to be reckless anymore, remember?” he said hotly. “I told you after that Titanic nightmare that it freaks me out when you take stupid risks.”

  “And you get to decide which risks are stupid? I’m supposed to check in with you before I do anything? You’re the apprentice, Will, remem—”

  A whimper interrupted Josh’s rant. She and Will looked in the direction from which the sound had come.

  The redheaded girl was huddled against the far wall of the archroom, her blue-green windbreaker sparkling with fairy dust.

  Josh saw movement out of the corner of her eye and realized Will was pointing his gun at the girl’s head.

  “Will!” she cried, and at the same moment, the girl fainted.

  Two

  Shoot her.

  That was the only thought in Will’s mind. The girl had come out of the Dream, just like two others once had, and if somebody had been around to shoot them the moment they arrived, a lot of people wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

  Shoot her in the head.

  His finger twitched against the trigger. Only the sound of Josh shouting his name stopped him from firing.

  Josh rushed forward in a valiant effort to catch the young woman as she fainted. She failed, but the stranger collapsed in a rather neat pile, with her head resting on one forearm. Will kept his sights on her as she fell, like a hunter following the flight of a bird.

  “Crap,” Josh said. She got down on her knees next to the girl’s inert form, then glanced at Will. “Could you not point the gun at me?” she demanded.

  Her words broke through the dark tunnel in which Will’s mind was caught; still, he lowered the gun with reluctance. “I’m out of bullets,” he said, realizing the truth of the statement as he spoke.

  “Do I care?” Josh asked. “What was the first thing I taught you about guns?”

  It had been Never point a gun at a person unless you’re going to kill them.

  But I was going to kill her, Will protested silently. I think that maybe I still should.

  He aimed the gun at the floor with one hand and rubbed the back of his neck with the other. He had to stop thinking that way.

  Feodor was dead. He hadn’t sent the girl.

  “Go get me some smelling salts, would you?” Josh asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Will heard how hollow his voice sounded.

  “And Will? Don’t bring the gun when you come back.”

  “Sure,” he said again.

  He exited the archroom into the basement, a long, concrete room with small windows near the ceiling. In the center of the room sat the training mats and equipment: heavy bag, kettlebells, cardio machines, a rack of weights. At the far end of the room, where storage bins of holiday décor were piled to the ceiling and out-of-style furniture kept house for ghosts, Will had set up a research center with his files organized in the drawers of a gray metal desk and a timeline of Feodor Kajażkołski’s life strung across mismatched corkboards.

  Will’s friend Whim Avish called the timeline Will’s “stalker wall.”

  Ostensibly, Will was investigating Feodor in hopes of learning something that would help Whim’s sister, Winsor, who had remained comatose since one of Feodor’s goons had attacked her. But Will was self-aware eno
ugh to know that his real motivation was more personal and less reasonable: Will was afraid of the man. And he was irrationally afraid that Feodor was coming back.

  Pulling his eyes away from the stalker wall, he locked the .22 back in the gun safe. Then he opened the giant emergency first-aid kit and found a few packages of smelling salts. Plastic tubes in hand, he typed in the code to open the vault door to the archroom.

  The arch to which the room’s name referred stood in the center of curved white walls. Two pillars of gray stone rose out of the ground beneath and up through the floor to create an archway overhead. Nearby, a slab of frosted red glass the size of a textbook stood suspended at waist height on top of a metal pole. At the moment, the archway appeared empty, but Will knew that if he pressed his hand to the red stone—the looking stone—the archway would become a portal leading to the Dream universe.

  Josh was sitting on the floor with the redhead’s feet in her lap.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Will said. “With the gun.”

  “It’s all right,” Josh replied. “Her coming out of the Dream like that was … well, unexpected.”

  Josh didn’t say, Freakishly similar to last time, when my grandmother got killed and my best friend got her soul sucked out and my stepmother got beaten into the ICU and almost lost a baby she didn’t even know she was carrying.

  Josh didn’t say that, because she didn’t talk about Feodor. Not ever.

  As Will broke open a plastic tube of salts and held them close to the girl’s nose, he got his first good look at her face. He had never seen a beauty quite like hers. Delicate, feminine features were laid over a heavy—almost masculine—bone structure, and the combination made her appear both winsome and strong. Her dark red hair hung all the way to her waist, even tangled into early-stage dreadlocks as it was.

  She was beautiful in spite of her current state, which included shadows beneath her eyes so dark and deep that they looked like Halloween makeup, a scratched and swollen chin, dirt lines discoloring her broken nails, and chapped white lips.

  Almost immediately, the girl woke with a grimace and began trying to rise.