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.