Dreamwalker (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Pete and Rayna made a quick dash from the scene of their teleportation back to the second floor apartment. The mirror issued no round trip tickets.

“So, what's the plan?” Rayna asked.

“I doubt I can get a tunnel into the palace,” Pete said, “otherwise your sister would have created herself a tunnel out. Since there's no way we'd get past the howling madmen circling the gates, we'll go over. From that office rooftop, we'll aim this right into a palace window. We'll be in the building in a flash. Then we find Estella.”

“Cauquemere won't give her up,” she said.

“We'll make sure he isn't home. This is where you come in.”

“Name it.”

“We'll draw Cauquemere out of the palace,” Pete said. “He'll leave if there's a big enough disturbance, like when the men hijacked the gunner Jeep. I can't create something here, but if I brought you food, I can bring back anything. I'll bring back a distraction, say, a bomb. You'll plant it in the city, a few blocks away, then head up to the office.”

“We need to throw a bigger party than just an explosion to get Cauquemere to accept our invitation,” Rayna said. “We can't take the chance he's there when we drop in.”

“Two of us can only make so big a distraction.”

“Then I'll get help,” Rayna said. “Bring me in a dozen assault rifles. I'll recruit some residents. They'll lay low, dispersed around the bomb site. Once the blast goes off, they'll ambush the arriving hunters.”

“Cauquemere can't ignore an organized uprising.”

“And the palace is left empty,” Rayna said.

“Those people firing around the blast area,” Pete said, “they won't have a chance. Against a hundred Jeep-riding zombies and Cauquemere, they'll be cut to pieces.”

“But they'll go down swinging,” Rayna said. “I can find a dozen who'd rather get a quick ticket out of here.”

Pete gave the sack of food a shove with his foot. Cans clinked together. “These can be recruiting inducements, if you need them.”

“I won't,” she said.

“Okay. For now, we need to get that mirror hidden in the office building. Can you get us there?”

“Hey, you're on my turf. We just need to get it there in one piece.”

The heavy mirror was five feet tall and two feet wide.

“We can do it,” Pete said with more confidence than he felt. He yanked the drapes from the window. They came down in a pile, accompanied by the thick metal curtain rod and an explosion of dust. Pete wrapped the drapes around the mirror.

“Ready?”

“You bet,” Rayna said. She whipped her hair into a pony tail and grabbed the top of the mirror. Pete took the base and they lifted it off the ground.

Rayna pulled him out the door and down the stairway. They paused at street level. Rayna stuck her head out the open doorway and scanned the area.

Neon streetlights illuminated the eternally damp streets. Nothing moved.

“Looks clear,” she said. “We're going right, then up the alley behind the house. Ready?”

Rayna didn't wait for his reply. She nearly yanked the mirror out of Pete's hands as she charged out of the house. They dashed through the narrow, littered alley. Their footsteps echoed like rifle shots in the brick canyon, a potential call to arms for a pack of screaming hunters. Pete's heart raced at top speed.

Even with the bulky mirror, Rayna moved like a cheetah on the hunt. At the next street, she paused and dropped to one knee. Pete rested his end on the ground and caught his breath.

This street had been annexed into Twin Moon City for some time. Blasted building faces littered the street with shards of glass and splinters of wood and concrete. Across the street sat a destroyed clothing store. Fifty-caliber rounds had reduced the now nude mannequins to a jumble of limbless, charred torsos.

“We're going for that store,” Rayna said. “Straight through that missing front window.”

“Right behind you,” Pete said.

From the distance, came the dreaded staccato blare of an unmuffled V8, like the scream of a mechanical dinosaur. They bolted for the store.

They hit the far sidewalk at a run and leapt through the display window. The mirror's side scraped on the window frame. They dodged empty clothing racks and wads of stray hangers. A machine gun thunked a block away.

They headed for a hole in the store's rear wall. This wasn't blast damage from the hunters' weapons. The chiseled edges spoke of hours of patient work to yield a slit just wide enough to take a person sideways. A similar slit breached the wall of the adjacent building, the beaten ground between the two scuffed clear of trash.

Rayna slipped through with ease, the mirror's tip balanced on her trailing hand. Pete saw the problem too late.

“Rayna!”

He stopped and the mirror slid past him. He grabbed the base just as the frame's wide feet jammed in the narrow slot, inches too wide for passage.

Outside the building, an engine roared.

Pete stepped back and kicked the center of the base. The feet shattered. The mirror dropped. He caught it with one hand, inches from the floor.

“Pete?”

Rayna's voice sounded miles away from the other side of the wall. Brakes screeched out front.

“Got it! Go!”

He slid through after the mirror. The tight alley flashed by and he passed though the next wall. His knuckles scraped against the concrete's sharp edge.

Whatever this building had been, it was empty now, looted and stripped or maybe just a gap in some victim's hijacked memory. Rayna angled across the open space to windows that faced the next street. Bullets rattled around inside the store behind them.

The mirror bounced and weaved in Pete's hands, as if intent on deserting from its important mission. Pete was out of step with Rayna, her up was his down. He skipped and shifted the weight of the mirror in his arms. He fell into the rhythm of her a long-distance runner's lope. Now the mirror seemed to glide on air.

Three more streets. Pause. Pant. Run. Each neighborhood was more ravaged than the last as they moved into older sections of the city. They dashed into a burned out bookstore and scared up two residents like a pair of quail. They passed through another engineered gap in the wall and into another empty set of offices.

“Almost there,” Rayna said.

She aimed them through the front door, straight across the street and through the missing front window of a pizzeria. The sign on the door beside it said
CLOSED
. Someone had scratched the word
ALWAYS
above it.

She made a beeline for the metal rear door and hit the center bar at a run. The door stopped halfway open with a heavy thud. Metal clattered on asphalt.

Between the buildings, a hunter lay face down on the ground. He wore the remains of a fast food worker's uniform. His machine gun had landed a few feet down the alley. Black, greasy hair hung down to his collar. His head turned a slow 180. Mummified flesh covered its face. It looked up with dead, glassy eyes. Its mouth dropped open and out came a high-pitched, cackling laugh.

Pete dropped the mirror. He charged the hunter and kicked its head like a soccer ball. The head tore from its neck with a mushy rip and hit the pavement a few feet away. The decapitated body dropped back to the ground.

A gunner Jeep barreled past the far end of the alley. Brakes wailed and the engine revved as the driver threw it into reverse.

“It's coming back,” Rayna said.

Pete scooped up his end of the mirror. She led him through one more building and to the rear door of a second. The sign on the door read EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. Pete wondered what didn't qualify as an emergency in Twin Moon City. Rayna heaved the door open. They pulled the mirror inside.

It was the blasted cubicle hell near the palace.

Pete stripped the protective drapes from the frame. He rocked it toward the filtered outside light.

Not a scratch.

“Let's stash this in the base of the stairwell, behind the door,” he said. “We'll move it up to the roof at the last minute.”

He rewrapped the mirror and they secreted it in the pitch-black stairwell.

“We'd better split up,” Rayna said. “There's a pack of hunters two blocks over at the palace and we attract more attention together.”

Pete's mouth opened in protest, but he gave a resigned nod.

“I'll start recruiting some volunteer warriors,” she said.

“I'll backtrack to my tunnel home. It's got to be easier without carrying home furnishings.”

“Be careful,” Rayna said.

She grabbed him and gave him a desperate, passionate kiss. Pete went numb with pleasure. The world of Twin Moon City disappeared and it was just the two of them in a soft blanket of white. He wrapped his arms around her, relished the warm touch of her lips. When they parted, she buried her face in his neck.

“You come back to me,” she whispered.

“Every time,” Pete said. It took all his strength to release her. “You still have the key?”

Rayna patted a lump in the back pocket of her jeans. “My prized possession.”

“You may need that before all this is over. Don't lose it.” He passed out into Twin Moon City.

He re-traced their route back to the apartment, without a thought about the VPD that hobbled him in the tactile world. He stopped at every doorway, double checked every crossing. Every creak made him pause, every stirring on the street sent him for cover. The sound of gunner Jeeps, no matter how far away, made his hair stand on end. Only one patrol passed before he made it to the apartment building where this dream began.

The roar of a gunner Jeep sent him ducking for cover in the apartment hallway. It zoomed by. The rear position carried neither hunter nor machine gun. The Jeep disappeared around a corner and Pete ran up the stairway two steps at a time. He entered the apartment and skidded to a stop.

A hunter stood between the bedroom and living room, its back to Pete. The back of its T-shirt carried the faded logo of Sunny Times Tanning Salon in West Memphis. The edges of the shirtsleeves had come unraveled and one of the rear pockets was gone from its jeans. A gaping red hole replaced the creature's right ear, and strips of ragged flesh hung from its arms. In its left hand it held the improbably heavy machine gun, dismounted from the gunner Jeep. The barrel rested against the floor. In the hunter's right hand, it held Rayna's can of ravioli, raised for inspection. It stared inside with one glazed, confused eye, as if the sight raised a memory the creature never knew it had.

Pete spied the curtain rod he'd yanked from the wall. He pulled it off the floor. It was solid metal, as thick around as his wrist, with pointed ends. He tucked it under his arm like a jousting knight and charged.

The makeshift lance caught the hunter in the spine. It roared in surprise. Pete pushed it across the floor like the head of a mop. Its machine gun fired and a stream of bullets cut a path through the floor. The hunter hit the wall face first. The curtain rod ran it through and sank into the sheetrock. The gun went silent and fell to the floor. The ravioli can rolled out of its hand. The zombie looked like a pinned insect.

Pete released the rod and took a step back. The hunter raised its head.

“Heh, heh, heh,” the creature chuckled in a guttural tone.

It raised its arms to the wall in slow motion. Inch by inch it pushed itself away. Its chest slurped around the rod as it worked itself free.

“Oh, hell no.”

Pete ran to the bedroom, yanked open the trapdoor, and scrambled down the ladder. He slammed the door shut behind him and made a circle around the edge with his finger. The seam disappeared and the door turned to earth.

He sat back against the wall, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. Sitting in the dirt never felt so good. He was going to have to wake up to get some rest.

As soon as Pete left the office, Rayna collapsed against the wall.

That was amazing.

She'd tried to put any romantic thoughts about Pete out of her mind, but he thought to bring her food and he was so devoted to helping rescue Estella. Then when they passed through that mirror, she felt like they were
joined
, sharing something she never thought was possible, never even knew existed. She was kissing him before she knew she'd decided to do it.

She'd told herself a hundred times that it couldn't work between them. No matter what happened here, she and Pete existed in two worlds that only a demon could cross between.

But now she believed. She believed their plan would get them into the tower. She believed they would rescue Estella. And when it was done, there'd be a way that somewhere between her world and his, she and Pete would be together.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Pete's muscles ached as he climbed the stairs into the mansion. He was tired, though he was never tired in his dreams. Even his most taxing adventure dream left him exhilarated, but never exhausted. Whatever subconscious recharge a human being logged during sleep, he wasn't getting his recommended daily allotment.

He needed to prep his part of the plan before he woke up to the tactile world. There was hardware to conjure for his next trip to the land of the living dead. The weapons were too important to trust to his subconscious.

He wished he could master this conjuring trick in Twin Moon City. Estella's rescue would be a lot easier with a helicopter, or better yet, a Star Trek
transporter
.
But Twin Moon City seemed to impose its own limits. Perhaps the rush of life force he felt flowing into the palace included enough of his that he wasn't as strong as he was in the mansion. Maybe Cauquemere exerted some dampening force within that reality. Whatever it was, the only time Pete felt powerful on the other side was when he held Rayna's hand and went through the mirror. Even when he left the reflection, Rayna had been nearby.

Creating Rayna's key had just been a matter of will. He thought about it, and where it would be, and it was there. The weapons of war he needed shouldn't be any different.

He needed assault rifles. A dozen of them. With ammunition. And of course, a bomb. He'd leave the technical details to his subconscious. All these things would be stored in…an armory. One of those places with weapons racks and shelves full of other implements of destruction. He summoned that room at the end of the main hall.

He walked down the hallway and the last door had changed. The solid oak was now solid steel, with a wheel in the middle like the water-tight doors on a submarine. His subconscious apparently had a sense of humor.

He pushed open the heavy door. A gray industrial epoxy coated the floor. The steel-sheathed walls and ceiling looked like a bank vault. Two racks of jet-black M-16 rifles stood at attention in the center of the room, an even dozen. Twelve bandoliers of ammunition sat in neat rows on a shelf behind them, packed and ready for transport.

He stepped forward and plucked a rifle off the rack. He had never held an M-16 before, never even seen one. The plastic hand grips made it feel like a toy. It felt surprisingly light. Down to all the details, it looked just like ones from the movies. Of course as a product his imagination, what else would they look like?

In two trips, he transferred the weapons to a spot next to the trapdoor in the hall. The ammunition took two more journeys. He considered moving it all into the tunnel, but he wasn't sure what would happen when the shaft shifted to a new location. He was positioning all of this to minimize, not maximize, the risk.

He still needed the bomb. He returned to the armory. On a back wall shelf sat a cylindrical device about five inches across and not as deep. It was made of silver metal and hard black plastic. On the face were five red LED numbers all set at zero. Three small switches sat under the red numbers.

Pete burst out laughing. It was the detonator Louis Jordan used in the James Bond film
Octopussy.
As a big Bond fan, he'd seen how to set this explosive a dozen times. He added it to the pile of munitions in the hallway.

His part of the plan was ready. The easy part. Now Rayna had to deliver on her promise, to find a dozen people in Twin Moon City who were both sane enough to trust and still suicidal, who were willing to end their existence to help a stranger. He found it hard to imagine a great deal of altruism floating around in Twin Moon City.

A vibration made the floor tremble. Then a low, far away rumble filtered in from the front of the mansion. Its pitch and volume rose. The boards in the floor began to flex. The thought that somehow Cauquemere had found the mansion made Pete's blood run cold.

Pete yanked open the door and stood on the porch. Brilliant summer sunshine burst from between robust green trees, the antithesis of Twin Moon City's gritty grays. The rumble came from the right, where the ground sloped away from the mansion. The din rose. The porch swing danced on its chains.

A pounding, saddle-colored mass crested the hill. The rolling thunder it created washed past the house. Pointed white shafts flashed within the approaching, undulating sea of brown.

It was a herd of antelope. Thousands of them.

The herd charged and sideswiped the porch, missing by inches. As the antelope flew by, a varying symphony of snorts and thudding hooves filled Pete's ears like a passing freight train. The earthy smell of the animals and a dusky cloud of dirt filled the air.

The last of the herd pounded past, leaving the billowing dust storm in its wake. The cloud didn't settle uniformly to the ground. Instead, it swirled and pulsed, selectively defying the gravity that pulled it back to its birthplace. Within the cloud, an outline became progressively clearer.

It was a narrow brick building on a street corner. The second and third story had a tall window on the left and octagonal rooms that jutted out over the sidewalk on the right. The lower floor had a large window to the right of the entrance door. The writing on the window was too fuzzy to read, but the ornate scrollwork around the window was clear. It looked like olive branches, with a lion crouched in the center.

Just as he identified the building's features, they dissipated and fell to the ground in a waterfall of brown dust. The grains filtered between the blades of grass in the lawn. The lawn was still perfect, bright green and unmarred by a single hoof print.

Pete had never seen the house before, but the design perfectly fit into his neighborhood. He had a feeling that all he had to do was take a walk through town and he'd find it.

But why? He might have summoned the NRA dream-come-true in the armory, but the antelope weren't his. The invitation to the house of dust came from someone else.

Something else to investigate when he woke up. Right after he got out of Tyrone's house so he didn't bring down any heat on the boy and his sister.

With that thought, he closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face and was tempted for a second to spend a little more time in this safe, comforting place between the worlds. Instead, he took a deep breath and swam upward into the unstable, uncertain, waking world.