The Nightmare Maker

by Gregory Pettit

  I was actually a little bit impressed at the scheme until Mia popped that bubble. “Why does it have to be only a little, Julian? Once Brown starts to pull on the link that he’s created, why would he stop with just a little? He is trying to kill a god, after all.”

  The pit of my stomach dropped at what she was implying. “But you can’t be saying that he’d be able to murder…half a million people?” I put a hand on the railing to steady myself.

  “More like three-quarters of a million,” Mia said, and when I glanced at her, there was mascara leaving thin black streamlets down her cheeks. I felt her hand slip into mine as we continued down the stairs. I didn’t push it away. Shit.

  **********

  “Shit,” I said, staring at the locked vault door while pointedly trying to ignore the bodies of the Redderton agents in their black suits, white shirts, and striped ties, lying to either side of the vault. One was missing his head—it was just gone without a trace, and the other had been melted almost in half; if I had to bet, then I’d have put money on the cause being the Senior Auditor’s slime. I didn’t see Jack here, and that instilled a measure of hope. If he was in the vault, then he’d certainly be trying to slow our enemy down.

  “Can we blow it open?” Mia snapped to one of the men. I guessed that he must be from Gamma Team based on the Γ embroidered on his bulletproof vest. He was shorter than me or Mia, probably no more than five foot seven at most, but he was almost as broad as the two of us put together, and he was carrying a big canvas backpack that he rummaged in for a moment before responding.

  “Not with what I have here. If I had a couple dozen more thermite charges, I might be able to get through, but it would take at least half an hour,” he said with professional detachment in a noticeable South African accent and ran his hand through his crew-cut blond hair. I realized that he was the same man that had spoken on Mia’s behalf this afternoon, and I found I liked his moxie. Never can have too much moxie.

  “Too long…” Mia said and tapped on her teeth with one red-nailed finger. The heavily armed agents all watched her expectantly, ready to snap into action at her order, and I wondered what she’d been through to earn their respect. Then I had a thought—what she’d been through…

  “One does not simply walk into Mordor…” I announced, and everybody looked at me like I’d grown a second head—which was exactly what I wanted them to do. “This is one of the most closely guarded places in the world. We’re not going to be able to get in by any conventional means, but maybe we do have a Cirith Ungol,” I announced now that I had their attention.

  “Your report said you were a nerd…but wow,” Mia said while waving one pale hand in the international symbol for “get on with it, dumbass.”

  “You said that you’re an Opener, and tonight is the mundus, when the gates between the worlds are open. So why don’t you just open a path inside from here?” I asked, basing my plan on one-half knowledge, one-half wild conjecture, and one-half desperation. This was a night when even mathematics needed to give 150 percent if we were going to have a chance of stopping a tragedy—and just maybe saving my wife and daughter in the process.

  “I—I hadn’t thought of that. Normally, we’d need at least a couple of auditor-grade sorcerers and an hour of preparation to have even a chance of breaking through to a near dimension, but…tonight, at this spot…and if you can supply the energy…maybe. But we have to hurry,” Mia said, her cheeks flushing slightly. Then, as if to underscore her imprecation to hurry, there was a bang that carried even through the massively reinforced vault structure, and I tottered as the floor shook.

  “Okay, people, gold. I need all the gold that you have,” the brunette snapped and matched action to words by removing a pair of small studs from her ears. From the half-dozen agents, we only collected one heavy, sporting championship ring and a lucky gold sovereign. I set my fingers on my wedding ring. Come find me. The Senior Auditor had told me it was the key to getting Dana back, and Jack had said he was telling the truth. If I handed it over, I’d be handing over the one sure link I had to my wife. There’d be another mundus in a couple of months…but there were hundreds of thousands of lives at stake tonight, and Olivia was on the other side of the door. I swallowed, slipped the circlet of white gold off of my finger, and placed it in Mia’s outstretched hand.

  “Be true, Unbeliever,” she whispered, and gave me a conspiratorial wink, spinning with one fluid motion to face the rest of her team. “All right, this’ll have to be enough,” she announced, and barked off a series of rapid-fire orders that resulted, less than a minute later, in a large pentagram being laid out on the floor, with the gold in the middle and a soldier on each of the five points.

  I tried to ignore the fact that several of the strands forming the occult symbol were det-cord, but made sure to be very careful not to step on them as I joined Mia and the broad-shouldered South African in the center. “I am Christian.” He extended a hand and introduced himself with a rumble while not seeming to notice the irony of where he was making that pronouncement. I took his hand and nodded, glad that he didn’t play the macho game of seeing who could squeeze harder. I wouldn’t want him to feel bad when he lost.

  Mia finished a quick visual scan of the area, sighed, and rolled her shoulders, stretching her arms behind her back in a way that made me think very inappropriate thoughts. “Here’s what’s going to happen, gentlemen,” she said, addressing everyone in the circle. She was interrupted by a crashing noise, followed by a tremendous boom in the distance, and a roar filtered in—the rioters had breached the main door. They are coming…maybe I’d been thinking of the wrong movie.

  The brunette closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and refocused herself: “Each of you on a point will close your eyes and think of being rich. I mean fabulously, filthy, rotten, immorally, Donald Trump rich. I want you to imagine yourselves surrounded by Jet Skis, beautiful women, big houses, stacks of cash, but most of all, gold. Piles, hills, mountains of the stuff. You need to hold that in your mind without wavering. Christian, grab on to his coat.” She pointed in my direction. “Mr. Adler, I need you to kiss me.”

  “What!” I shouted, a couple octaves higher than usual. I’d removed my wedding ring less than two minutes prior.

  “Have you studied extradimensional mathematics for the four years that it would require to make you proficient in transmission of fifth-order resonances?” she snapped.

  “Umm…I can play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano?” I offered, not understanding a word she’d said; Christian put his big paws on my shoulders, and I glanced back at him. When I turned around, Mia’s hands framed my face, and she pressed her perfect, rouged lips against mine. I tried to pull away, but some outside force locked me in the center of the pentagram. Her mouth tasted of chocolate as she drew closer to me, and I felt her: toned muscle under a layer of feminine softness pressing up against me, making my face flush as the crowd of men stared at us.

  It’d been subjective years since I’d kissed a woman, and I groaned as she pushed her hips against me, darting her tongue into my mouth and running the fingernails of one hand gently down the side of my neck, creating a flush in another, more southerly part of my anatomy. I leaned in, lifting my hands to the small of her back; my concern about the onlookers was the only thing that was rapidly shrinking. She let out a deep-throated purr of pleasure, and I pressed my mouth against hers harder, insistently as my skin began to tingle. Her hand continued down my neck, running across the top of my chest and then, slowly, over my ribs. I wrapped one of my hands in her luxuriant chestnut hair and tried to pull away, intending to plant a row of kisses on the hollow of her throat, but she held my mouth against hers and wrapped one leg behind my thigh, pinning me in place. I felt myself starting to go weak at the knees, and my lips were burning like her kisses were made of fire, and then…

  Now, sometimes people describe a kiss as out of this world, but I had to wonder if this were the first time that it had literally been true. Because th
ere was a flash of golden brilliance; a wave of vertigo hit, making me sink down on top of Mia, and suddenly we were somewhere else.

  I raised my head. Everywhere I looked, the landscape gleamed with aureate light, and a stream that appeared to be made of sapphires tinkled a few feet away.

  “Ahem, Mr. Adler, that would be a more efficient means of energy transmission, but I don’t believe we have the time, and dear Christian here might be terribly scandalized,” Mia said, her voice husky and face inches from mine.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” the broad-shouldered South African drawled laconically, shrugging, his hands still grasping the top of my trench coat. I looked down and saw that my left hand had slid down to firmly squeeze the very pleasantly filled-out back of Mia’s khaki trousers, and the right had found its way inside of her sweater, just brushing the silk of her also very pleasantly filled-out bra. Come find me.

  Like someone had poured a bucket of cold water on me, I realized what I was doing and, with my face burning, started to extricate myself from the tangle of limbs. I winced as pain flooded back into my left shoulder, a weight of guilt settled into my stomach, and I tried to jerk myself away.

  Mia grabbed my hand. “Don’t let go of me,” she said, any hint of playfulness or desire already gone from her voice as she braced against me to rise to her feet, although her cheeks were still flushed when she straightened her sweater a moment later. “We’re relying on a very thin, very fragile bubble of our reality to survive at the moment, and if we lose contact, then it will probably pop,” she explained, staring levelly at both me and Christian.

  I knew that I should just shut up, but I couldn’t help myself. “Ahhh…so something else that won’t get popped tonight,” I snarked, and, with a roll of my eyes, threw a long-suffering look in Christian’s direction.

  Mia lowered her eyelids just a fraction, conveying her lack of amusement as completely as a slap in the face, before responding, “If you would like to die screaming, your blood transmuted to molten gold and tears into precious gems, then go right ahead—pop away.” She turned around, surveying the landscape. “Now, we need to find a way out of here…” She trailed off, raising one hand like she was trying to touch something in the air.

  She stood like that for about half a minute. A thought occurred to me, and a few seconds later I spoke. “There’s a portal that I’m pretty sure leads back to the real world about a hundred yards that way.” I pointed across the sapphire stream in the direction of a low hillock.

  “How do you know?” she asked carefully, giving me an appraising look.

  “I’ll explain on the way,” I replied, setting off across the sandy ground, which appeared to be made out of a coarse gold dust. I resisted the urge to bend over and scoop up a handful. Christian glanced at his boss, and she nodded. I gave a quick explanation of the dream senses that I’d been using to scout out my environment since I was a child.

  “We didn’t suspect any ability of that sort. Very interesting,” she said, and I wondered why she’d voiced the information. “I can feel the portal now also, just ahead, but I knew where and what to look for since I was privy to the Mammonite plan. Impressive,” she finished, dragging on my hand in her rush to ascend the small rise.

  “Ummm…what is his plan?” I asked. I’d only been told that most of the team were heading to the bank, while I was to generally guard the Dreamscape.

  “You’ll see,” she said, a mischievous smile on her now-familiar lips as we crested the hillock.

  “Holy shit!” I exclaimed when I spotted the portal—and what was piled up around it.

  “It’s holy, at least to the Mammonites, but I certainly don’t believe that that is ‘shit,’ Mr. Adler,” Mia said. I had to agree with her because it appeared to be the best part of the gold reserves of several wealthy nations stacked up in a neat row parallel to the gateway. As we continued toward our egress, I was surprised to see it shift a few yards to the left, and then another pallet, held by the tines of a blue forklift, was lowered to the ground.

  “As the only one left in the British high priesthood, and with the killer still on the loose, Dennis was worried about what Mammon might do without the clergy’s guidance and moderating influence if something happened to him. The last time that occurred was in fall 2011 when most of the team was away on business and Dennis came down with the flu. You might remember the story about a rogue trader at UBS losing £2 billion? Poor lad. Anyhow, Dennis decided that the old devil, Mammon’s connection to London, needed to be severed, so—in the gold goes.”

  My head swam at the implication of what this would do to the world’s financial markets, not to mention the value of the pound. I looked at the several-hundred-yard-long row of gold bar pallets—I was almost in touching distance of a fifth of the world’s gold reserves. I snapped out of my reverie when I heard the sound of gunfire—a rat-a-tat-tat that I’d wager money on as the output of a 9x19mm parabellum-chambered MP5. My companions heard the sound as well, and Christian surged forward, his instincts calling him to battle.

  “Wait—” Mia commanded. The bulky man stopped, but I could feel him quivering with the suppressed need for action. “When we emerge from this portal, we’ll likely be stepping into a war zone. We’ll have the element of surprise, at least momentarily, because no one expects anything to come out of this portal, but our allies won’t necessarily realize immediately that we’re on their side. So we need to make an unambiguous exit that also maximizes our impact on the battle,” she explained matter-of-factly. Christian and I stared at her expectantly, and her mouth turned up in a wicked grin that emphasized her dimples. “I have a cunning plan.”

  Oh shit.

  Chapter 31 2300–2359, Monday, October 5, 2015

  “‘Money, Money, Money’ by Abba!” I bellowed to Christian over the music pumping from the PA attached to the Rolls-Royce Phantom as we hurtled out of the gate between worlds like a golden comet. “How have you never heard of this?” The South African shrugged his shoulders, and Mia narrowed her eyes in a disapproving glance and jinked the car hard left to avoid the back end of a forklift. We skidded on the concrete floor, and Mia slammed the brakes. There was a thump, and the music died as we came to rest against one of about a dozen remaining pallets of gold.

  Our grand entrance was followed by a moment of shock as both sides tried to understand what the hell had just happened. I glanced around. As expected, Dennis was positioned near the portal along with a dozen well dressed, middle-aged men and women. I also spotted Jack, in a bright-red suit and lugging a chain gun that must have weighed as much as I did, and five absurdly heavily armed men aiming outward from the shrinking half circle of pallets. If these were what Jack had described as “rent-a-cops,” then I didn’t want to see what a serious force was in his opinion. Facing off against them, the Senior Auditor was twenty yards away, crouched behind a red half-dome of energy that trailed sparks where it met the ground. I couldn’t overlook the dozen or so mangled corpses littering the ground behind him. I still wish I could.

  The moment ended, and I grinned maniacally as Christian opened up with the fifty-caliber machine gun that had been mounted to the roof of the enormous luxury sedan. The huge rounds hammered on Brown’s mystical shield like a battalion of tiny drunken blacksmiths and physically drove him back, snarling, across the floor. The forklift lurched into motion, grabbing another pallet, and I closed my eyes to concentrate as I felt weariness settle back into my limbs. When Mia had explained her plan to me, I hadn’t thought it would work, but everything seemed to be going well so far.

  Five minutes earlier…

  “I want a car,” Mia said to me matter-of-factly and with no expectation of difficulties, as though she had walked into an upscale restaurant and ordered the eggs Benedict with a side of salmon on toast.

  “Ummm…” I said, making the internationally recognized “what the fuck” face and gesturing around at the golden ground, sapphire stream, and emerald trees.

  She rolled her eyes and el
aborated patiently, like she was speaking to the slow kid in class (which I felt like I was most of the time, lately). “I know that you can create things when you dream, so I want you to summon up a car. Something big. Something expensive.”

  “It should have a big gun too,” Christian added in his bass rumble. Mia glanced in his direction and acknowledged the validity of his contribution with a slight nod.

  “I’ve never summoned anything like that before outside of the Dreamscape. In fact, I’ve already passed out once today after using my powers, and that was just from accidentally making some glasses explode,” I said, throwing my arms up in the air. I pointedly didn’t mention the frightening loss of control that I’d suffered earlier in the evening when I’d almost killed Toscan.

  “Ahh…but how do you feel now, Mr. Adler?” Mia questioned; actually, I did feel pretty good. In fact, considering everything I’d done today, I felt great—my shoulder even seemed to be almost healed already.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but she could see the answer in my eyes already. “You physically passed through the ‘Dreamscape’ as you call it. I believe that will have, at least temporarily, enhanced your ability to affect the real world. You may also note that this is not exactly the real world either, and my presence won’t hurt your attempt. So could I ask you again”—she batted her eyelashes prettily—“please may I have a big, flashy car?”

  “With a big gun,” Christian added again.

  The music was my idea.

  **********

  My reverie was interrupted by the Rolls rocking under a heavy impact, and I felt a spike of pain in my forehead, right between the eyes, that made me gasp and lean forward, bracing my hands against the dash. Brown had hurled one of the corpses at the car—a dead black man festooned with knives and pistols, who slowly slid down the windshield. With my concentration interrupted, the car started to fade.