Read Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) Online
Authors: Aileen Harkwood
Chapter 27
Concealed by brush on a ridge a quarter mile from Jack’s cabin, Rafe shifted his weight and stretched cautiously after a long night of surveillance. He handed off the good set of binocs to Poppy, his partner for this assignment, who shimmied into position on her belly and took up the task of watching for hostiles who might approach the unauthorized safe house. They’d fought boredom and fatigue, and battled swarms of bugs. After ten hours of it non-stop, Rafe swore the raucous chorus of tree frogs in the forest around them had already caused permanent hearing damage.
“How long do we have to stay here, do you suppose?” Poppy asked.
“Until Gavin says we don’t, would be my guess.”
“We ran out of coffee two hours ago.”
“Something to remember for your next stake out,” Rafe said. “Note to self, bring a 55-gallon drum of coffee. For someone who’s a health nut, you really like your caffeine.”
“Drug of choice,” Poppy said.
Rafe thought about it.
“Could be worse.”
The satellite phone in his jacket vibrated. He answered with a single word, “Here.”
A moment later, all humor drained from his face. Like a flipped switch, his habitual laconic demeanor vanished, replaced with that of a focused warrior. He was on his feet, grabbing up two heavy packs of gear in one movement, the fluidity of which was second nature.
“We’re on our way,” he said.
Poppy didn’t need to be told they were moving out. She’d shouldered her gear before Rafe’s expression had even changed.
All desire for stealth was abandoned. They raced flat out down the ridge where they’d spent the night, crashed through a stream too wide to jump at the bottom of the hollow, and charged up the next ridge to Jack’s place.
Where they met his security system in the form of a front door with no lock, handle, or knob.
“It’s rough planking over steel,” Rafe said after studying it briefly. It took him only a few seconds longer to locate the hidden panel at knee level, behind an old crock. “Tricky, Jack.” He jumped off the wooden porch to the ground, a good 30 inches below, and shoved the crock out of the way. He lifted the piece of wood hiding the panel and almost had an eye to sensor view of the–
“Biometric lock,” he said. “The only one who can get through that door the usual way is Jack.”
They went for the windows next, Poppy to the one left of the door, Rafe to the window on the right. Each used their hands to block out the sun, and put their faces close to the glass.
“Mirrored film is too strong,” Poppy said. “I can’t see a thing inside.”
“Me either.”
“Shoot it out?”
“Not mine. It’s bullet resistant.”
“I don’t know what bullet resistant glass looks like.”
Rafe stepped back from the building and glanced at Poppy’s window.
“Yours, too.”
“What now? Blow the door? What if he’s just on the other side and was trying to get out?”
“Gavin said it’s bad,” Rafe said.
“How bad?”
“He didn’t think he’d made it.”
“Let’s go. Blow the fucker.”
Poppy had been Jack’s first Lost One. Or, at least, his first successful find of a Lost One. She might appear as diminutive and fragile as her name suggested, but she’d survived a locked down psychiatric hospital that had given Rafe nightmares once she’d told him about it. She’d had a rough life, and it showed in her vocabulary during moments of stress.
Rafe hopped up on the porch, opened his pack and took out the necessary materials and tools. Though the door had no visible hinges, he opted to place the charges best guess where he thought they might be.
“Back,” he ordered and retreated from the stoop.
They took shelter behind the rusted carcass of a 1940s Dodge truck, which listed in the mud a few yards away, no doubt left there by Jack to make the place look even more derelict than it already did.
With a muffled
whomp
, the cabin’s door blew inward, releasing a swirl of dust, but thankfully, not landing on a prone Jack. In fact, they didn’t find him anywhere inside the sparsely finished one room structure.
“Okay, where is he?” Poppy said.
“Over here.” Rafe rushed to the pantry door, flung it open, saw the stairs leading down to another steel door, this one open, and gestured for Poppy to follow. Their search of the underground living area, kitchenette, bathroom and first bedroom turned up nothing. Rafe reached the threshold to the second bedroom, started inside, and then pulled up short, stopping in the doorway.
Jack lay on the floor. The pool of blood spreading outward from under his still form was too large to belong to any other than a dead man.
“We’re too late.”
Poppy pushed him aside to hurry into the room, but Rafe grabbed her and pulled her back in his arms.
“Poppy. Forget it.”
She stood motionless for several seconds. Her body went tense with concentration. Rafe swore he could feel something, a presence reach out from her to Jack. An invisible hand stirred the hair at Jack’s neck, and two circular depressions in the shape of fingertips appeared in the skin over his jugular.
Rafe had seen her do something like this before. Freaky. He couldn’t decide whether it awed him, or creeped him out.
The presence retracted toward her, brushing past the barrier his embrace had created, and lifting the fine hairs on his arms in the process.
“No.” She shrugged off his hold, irritated. “He’s still with us.”
“What? He can’t be.”
“Just barely, but he’s there.”
She dragged a chair from near the bedroom’s dressing area to a spot just beyond the pool of blood and sat down. A moment later, Rafe was forgotten as she went deep inside herself to work.
Rafe knew he couldn’t help, not with what she was doing, and immediately retreated, heading upstairs. Provided Poppy could keep him alive long enough, they needed a way to transport Jack down to the road and get him more traditional medical help ASAP. But how to do that when faced with the impassible road to the cabin, and solid, near-old-growth forest covering the rest of the slope between?
“You do what you have to do,” he said to himself, dropped every bit of gear on him except for his keys, side arm and satellite phone, and took off at a run.
He fully expected Jack to be dead, for real this time, when he returned twenty minutes later. Loping into the cabin and taking the steps underground three at a time, he came upon a terrifying scene in the bedroom where he’d left the two of them.
Poppy was grey. Not just pale or ashen with blue lips, but grey as one of the suits their enemies wore. She didn’t move and her skin felt like cooling meat when he dared touch her. Jack appeared no better. His blood, what was left of it in his body, seemed to be settling with gravity, and his eyes, closed when he’d departed, now stared off into space. They had the hazy look people’s eyes started to take on shortly after death.
“Oh, God.”
He never should have left her alone. She’d just killed herself in a useless effort to save Jack.
“Don’t start blubbering yet,” Poppy spoke, startling him. Her voice was like wind whispering between dry bones. “We’re both still here.”
“Okay.”
Not wasting any time on the improbability of it, Rafe kicked himself into action. Poppy wouldn’t be able to walk on her own, not like this, which meant carrying them both out. He would have loved to be able to pick up the two and carry them at the same time, but Jack weighed more than he did, and it was an easy guess he’d have trouble fitting himself and two others into the passage upstairs at the same time. He had to make a decision.
“Taking Jack first okay?”
Poppy looked up at him with shadowed and sunken eyes, only just managing a nod.
“Okay. You’ve done your bit,” he told her. “Rest now. I’ll be right back.”
He turned Jack over, grabbed him under the armpits, and lifted him into a sitting position. Jack didn’t feel like dead weight, not exactly. His limbs didn’t flop like one of the deceased, which was a good sign. Rafe hefted his friend over his shoulder, the blood soaked clothing smearing his own, and hurried out of the room.
Thankfully, Poppy looked a little less grey when he got back. She heard him coming and tried to stagger up out of the chair, failing miserably.
“Nope. None of that. Upsy-daisy.” He threw her over his shoulder and up they went out of the ground into the sunlight.
Their SUV waited, parked in front of the cabin’s steps, passenger door open. Rafe had lowered the seats in the back to create a large area where he could lay Jack flat. Three blankets covered the injured dreamrunner and a cushion from one of the cabin’s kitchen chairs was pillowed under his head.
Rafe stood Poppy on her feet next to the open passenger door. Her eyes went wide when she noticed the vehicle.
“How?” she said in amazement. “That’s not possible. How did you get this up here?”
“I don’t ask you how you do what you do, so don’t question how I do what I do.”
“Never again,” she said, as he helped her slide into her seat.
He reached over for her seat belt.
“Let’s get you buckled up. You’re not going to like this ride.”
He climbed in behind the wheel, glancing back over the seat at Jack.
“How long does he have?” he asked.
She sighed deeply. “Not long. I’m not sure he’ll last the drive to The House.”
“Doesn’t have to,” Rafe said. “They’ve got a helicopter transporting the Lost One there right now. He just has to make it off this mountain and then another three miles down the road to an area open enough for the chopper to land. Once it’s dropped off the Lost One, it’ll circle back and fetch him.”
Poppy quietly contemplated Jack’s immobile features.
“Pray,” she said.
“Not the religious type.”
“Me neither,” she said.
He nodded. “Will do.”
Chapter 28
Home
, as Gavin put it, was apparently an ER, a very tiny one. When they rolled her in, she found herself in a room more appropriate in size to a private doctor’s surgical suite. It had just two emergency beds and no windows. She didn’t remember the helicopter landing, or the route they’d taken to push her stretcher here.
“One, two, three,” a man’s voice said, and several sets of hands lifted her, transferring her to one of the beds.
Scissors cut away her clothes, and snipped away the dirty, bloody bandages around her injured hand, while she moaned incoherently and thrashed half-heartedly. People asked her questions, but she wasn’t certain if she answered. Vial after vial of her blood was drawn, the vials capped with a variety of happily colored tops. Individual faces among the many working over her disappeared and came back, everything done in a flurry of activity. Contrasted with her dulled, slowed senses, she felt like she was an immobile object in a sped up time-lapse video.
Through all of this, one thought stuck in her mind and wouldn’t come dislodged.
Jack
.
She knew something was wrong with him. Catastrophically wrong. She didn’t know how she knew he was in grave trouble, yet the feeling persisted. Like another needle, this one to the chest, the knowledge knifed its way into her heart and stayed there, with no one to pull it out. Its icy panic festered and grew until, in her disoriented state, she began crying uncontrollably.
“I’m sorry, honey,” a nurse said to her. “I know it hurts, but we’re going to make it better soon.”
“No,” Lara said. “That’s not why I’m crying.”
If someone asked her why she cried, she wasn’t aware of answering.
Minutes later, she picked up and latched onto another snippet of conversation she knew was important.
“You’re AB neg, aren’t you?” Someone, a doctor, Lara thought, asked a woman who stood by her bed with a clipboard.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Forget the intake form,” the man told her. “We aren’t going to get anything sensible from her now. They need all the AB neg they can get on the other side. He crashed twice on the way here.”
“Jack,” Lara said. “Jack’s in trouble. Someone help him.”
“We know, Lara,” the doctor said. “We are. He’s got our best team with him on the hospital’s other side. Let’s concentrate on you. Okay?”
Lara wouldn’t say,
okay
. A part of her, she could only describe it as sheer will, had hold of something critical and precious. She could feel it in her grasp, insubstantial yet glowing with brilliant golden light and stretched to the point of breaking. So thin and fragile was it, she knew the slightest wrong move could destroy it. She was the only one who saw it, the only one who could keep it from breaking. If she did as the doctor asked and relaxed, she’d have to let go.
Letting go, would be letting go forever.
“You’re going to feel sleepy now, Lara,” the doctor said. “Don’t fight it. We’re going to take good care of you.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t do it. Please, don’t.”
Lara woke. Her eyelids flickered and then closed….
She woke again, annoyed by an extremely noisy bird outside somewhere. Her eyes closed again….
She woke a third time, now able to focus her eyes and register her surroundings. She occupied a hospital bed with crisp, surprisingly soft and comfortable sheets, in a small, but private room. Unlike the typical hospital room, this one had personality. It wasn’t her personality. The furnishings weren’t ones she would have chosen, since she wasn’t overly fond of yellow, but it was at least a thousand percent better than the typical institutional setting. The bird that had interrupted her sleep, continued to chatter on the other side of a set of French doors. She watched it hop from branch to branch in a small potted tree that sat in the corner of the balcony beyond the doors.
Lara squinted at the view, trying to figure out what was off about it, and then she understood. A masonry wall that rose a good ten feet high enclosed her balcony and completely blocked the view of whatever might lie beyond it. Light was allowed down into the well, since the sun was currently directly overhead, but even if she’d managed to use the nearby furniture to construct steps to the top of her balcony’s enclosure, thick wire mesh covered the hole the mesh so tight, she wouldn’t be able to fit a pinky through the gaps.