Dream Chasers (Dystopian Scifi Series Book 1) (6 page)

‘Think it’s time that I show
you the contents, Peter,’ Midori said, pronouncing Peter as
Petaaar
, the
never ending
a
. He cracked the case open, removed a glowing, silky-white
syringe, and laid the case on the floor next to him. He leaned toward Peter,
his eyes locked on the magical liquid inside the syringe. The liquid, a silky white
with hundreds of glittering gray, was like a beautiful woman’s hair, long and
famously soft, times a thousand. But apart from its unique texture, it was the
fact that it glowed a full-moon white that made Peter look in awe.

‘Have you ever seen Dream
Energy?’ Midori asked. No response. ‘Of course you haven’t.’ He leaned back,
taking the moon glow with him. Peter didn’t want the glow to go; he was like a
moth seduced by a pretty light. Midori had the syringe close to his face, eyes
squinting. ‘Thing is,’ he said softly, ‘most people don’t really care.’

‘Is …’ Peter knew it had to be
so. ‘Is that the energy I extracted from the dream?’

The syringe covered Midori’s
left eye, and Midori peered with his right, past the glowing white. ‘Thought
you’d never ask.’ He opened his mouth until two or three or four teeth revealed
themselves, and then he snickered long and maniacally.

Peter’s newest friend, a man
he’d come to know as Spotless, was a slim Asian (most of them were, but he was
extra slim) who wore dark-brown overalls with the letters TOKYO’S FINEST
embroiled at the back in gold. Mr Spotless was a tad different from his comrade.

‘So I told my momma,’ Spotless
said, throwing his weight forward, ‘why you gotta hate my new GF? (Pronounced
Gee-Eff
).
She’s a nice little pretty girl—’ Spotless laid the mop against his hip and
gestured a thin waist with his hands ‘—you know what I’m talkin bout, right?’
There was silence for at least five seconds, Spotless waiting wide-eyed. When
Peter didn’t answer, Spotless grabbed the mop from his hip and dipped it into
the red bucket, which had to be cold by now, because when it came an hour ago,
it had steam swirling around the rims.

Spotless pulled the bucket a
little back, the wheels burping (wheels tired of being pushed around). The mop
went back in, splashing murky droplets. He leaned against the stick. ‘That’s
what I don’t get. Get this, okay. I think it’s cauz my momma big and ugly, no
offence. My new GF ain’t like that. She’s as thin as this cleaning stick.’ The
mop landed on the floor where Noni Makaratzi’s head had once lain. There were
still splotches of blood that needed cleaning. “Not to worry,” Spotless had
said. “All you need is hot water, a good soap, and a mop with hard bristles.
You don’t wipe the blood, you scrape it.”

Peter was getting hungry, and
the smell of hot takeaway wasn’t helping. The basketball players had stopped
shooting hoops and were crowded on the spectator benches, eating rice and meat.

‘What do you think I should
do?’ Spotless asked. He pushed a wave of red water toward the bucket. ‘Should I
tell momma that she’s acting crazy again? I mean, she did say she was gonna cut
her throat with a carrot peeler, and that ain’t no joke, I tell ya.’

Peter carefully looked around
him. He was still on the Dream Infiltrator, tied and upright. ‘Hey,’ Peter
said, trying to get Spotless’s attention. It didn’t work, so he tried again.
‘Hey, why do people call you Spotless again?’ Peter already knew, but he had to
butter his ‘friend’ up.

‘Cause,’ he smiled a big one,
‘when it comes to cleaning up bodies, there ain’t no one better than me. I
clean em away, almost like magic.’ He leaned against his mop and gestured a
silly magician hand gesture. ‘Now you see em, now you don’t.’ Spotless laughed,
mouth wide open.

Peter thought: your teeth are
fucking ugly. Peter laughed with Spotless, hoping that his laughter didn’t
sound too forced. Spotless didn’t seem to mind; in fact, he seemed happy to
have a laughing buddy. But when Peter looked behind, he saw faces looking at
them, and they didn’t seem too happy about the laugher. Fortunately, they went
back to eating whatever they were eating with their chopsticks.

Don’t draw too much attention,
Peter thought, and don’t make Spotless laugh like that, draws too much
attention. Albeit, it’s not really that hard to make the man laugh. Peter
looked around him for any sharp objects. There was no way he was going to be
their little cow for milking purposes. He was getting out of this place.

‘Ha, look at this.’ Spotless
rummaged something from the mop’s bristles, not minding getting his gloveless
hand a little messy. ‘Think this’s bone.’ He brought it over for Peter to see.
‘What do you think?’

For some reason, the blood on
the floor – now mostly foam and red bubbles – didn’t affect his hunger.
Earlier, when the blood was still thick in redness, he’d wondered about this,
thinking that the sight of gore should’ve removed his hunger, but it didn’t. But
this all changed when Spotless had decided it’d be a good idea to show Mr Peter
the remainder of a deceased Mr Noni Makaratzi’s skull.

The contents in Peter’s
stomach, which were very little, mostly sticky liquid and clumps of
half-digested mussels, whirled around and then shot into his throat. His throat
was a ball of acid that wanted to come out. Peter mustered enough willpower to
swallow the acid back into his stomach, but it didn’t work. The string of hot
liquid made its way back up his chest, past his throat, and into his mouth. Now
he knew exactly what he had for breakfast and what he had last night – a
combination of milk, seafood, and bread. He was going to throw up, he thought,
any second. The hot liquid wanted out.

‘Shit, you okay?’ Spotless
asked. He threw the piece of skull away like a Frisbee. He didn’t pat Peter’s
back, he pounded as if Peter were his only family member alive and choking on
food.

Milky-green vomit spilled from
Peter’s lips. It was hot and a lot. When Spotless saw that he was wrong about
the whole Peter-choking thing, he backed away and screamed something in
Japanese. Peter wasn’t too sure if the man was laughing or crying, maybe both.
But what he was sure of were footsteps running toward him.

Peter lifted his dripping-vomit
chin and saw guns out; they were waving them in the air like a group of
lunatics, screaming in English and Japanese. One of them had his eyes wide
open, screaming at the top of his lungs, knocking the bucket of blood water
over. They stepped over the red wave and swung their guns at Peter as if they
were casting spells.

‘He’s not dead. Not dead!’ the
wide-eyed Asian screamed.

‘Check pulse,’ another said.

‘What happened?’ one of them asked,
looking at the bucket of spilled blood water.

A voice squeaked from behind,
Spotless’s voice: ‘Think I know what’s going on.’

‘What’s going on?’ the Asian
with the big eyes asked. ‘Tell me!’

Spotless laughed, which was a
mistake.

Wide-Open-Eyes Man looked at
Spotless with a terrible hate on his expression. Peter, who felt like gurgling
another wave of vomit, watched in horror as the man pointed his gun at
Spotless, and thought he was going to shoot him, but he didn’t. The gun,
however, did go off. Thunder clapped as bullets sprayed on the roof, making
dust rain. Spotless wasn’t laughing anymore. The men in black coats were
looking at each other, some of them still trying to understand what was going
on.

The man checking Peter’s pulse
had rice stuck on his lips. His breath smelled of chicken and a lot of soya
sauce. When Chicken Breath was satisfied, after checking Peter’s pulse for the
fourth time, he turned around at the waving machine guns and told them – with preaching
arms in the air – that everything was okay.

The only person not okay was
Peter, who still had warm acid stuck in his throat. It’s a good thing Midori
wasn’t sitting in front of him when he had fired from his mouth. Thinking about
that made Peter want to laugh, and then he felt like crying. Everything that’d
happened – Ohko shot in the head, the thoughts of his mother waiting and
wondering about him, Noni shot in the head, the pool of blood on the floor, the
scent of takeaways while being locked as a prisoner – it was all too much, and
the stress had come out as vomit.

Evil worked full-time, holidays
included. The time was somewhere around 2 a.m., and the outside moon was
covered in a few strips of cloud. Puddles of last night’s rainfall were
scattered everywhere, some of them reflecting flickering streetlamps, a dim orange
that made shadows jump away as they flicked on.

As Peter was escorted from the
gymnasium door, he thought: there are a lot more cars than when I arrived. Four
yellow Subaru cars were lined up behind a green one, kissing each other’s
bumper. The engines scratched softly at the night. Unknown shadows, shielded by
tinted windows, appeared and disappeared, trying to have a look at their latest
prize.

‘Where are you taking me?’
There was no response. They were ignoring him as if he was nothing, just a
walking no one. Lucky for him, he had gotten a total of thirty minutes’ sleep
before they came in and dragged him away, without telling him where he was
going. They were also kind enough to give him a bottle of water when he’d puked
all over the floor, thanks to Spotless who’d showed him a piece of skull that
looked like dripping-red candy. ‘I want to know where I’m going,’ Peter tried
again. A hand pushed his back, urging him to walk a little faster.

‘We no talk now,’ the Yaramati
gang member said. ‘You walk, we talk,
later
.’ His broken English carried
on: ‘You walk like sister, faster!’ He pushed Peter’s back with his machine gun.

The lack of clouds made tonight
a cold one, and something just made the air colder. At first Peter didn’t want
to believe, thought it was his tired eyes and acidy throat that clouded his
mind, but as he approached the green Subaru car – the engine hissing – he saw
his mother’s face behind the windshield.

The car doors opened in a
synchronized wave, first the ones behind and then the green Subaru. Midori climbed
from the green machine.

‘There, there he is!’ Midori
said. He had different clothes on, again, this time a black, long-sleeved
shirt, high boots, and a belt with a large skull in the middle. He clapped his
hands together and continued grinning as if he knew something Peter didn’t,
something big – big, big news. ‘I heard what’d happened, Peter.’ He waved his
hand in the air, a two-finger twirl, and walked over. ‘How you feeling now?’

When Peter saw his mother climb
from the car, his heart squeezed into a flat line. Sweat broke across his
forehead. He felt dizzy all over again. Why? he thought, why oh why oh why?
This night couldn’t get any worse. Peter looked at his mother and saw what he’d
anticipated. Horror and confusion.

His mother had lost weight. As
she approached the streetlight, her body swimming from darkness and into
urine-yellow light, Peter saw that he was wrong; she hadn’t lost weight – she’d
lost almost
all
her weight. For a few seconds her face looked like a
skull in some horror movie, a face rejuvenating its skin back as time went on.

Felicity Steel, his mother, was
the only family Peter had left. She was a hardworking individual and still
pretty for her age, fifty-four. But, Peter thought, how come she lost so much
weight? Was she sick? Or did all this mess make her sick?

‘Oh, my child.’ Felicity
tiptoed toward her son, almost tripping over her shaky knees. ‘What’ve you
gotten yourself—’ Peter thought his mother was going to slap him across the
face, but she crashed into his body, both her hands sliding down his cheeks
‘—what’s going on? I’m so, so—’

Tears welled in Peter’s eyes.
He hugged his mother the hardest he could, but there was no escaping the horror
they were in. ‘It’s okay, mother. It’s fine, really is.’ While his mother
sobbed in his arms, the Yaramati looked at them as if this was some kind of
reality TV show. They were enjoying this, he could tell. Even that fucking
cleaner – Spotless – was standing not far away with his cleaning utensils, his
one knee on the red bucket. He grinned at them, and the grin said
A Happy
Family Reunion.

Felicity pushed herself away,
but not too far away. ‘They told me you Dream Chased.’ Before Peter could utter
a word, she continued: ‘And they said something about you having a unique gift
for it.’ She used her shirt’s collar to pat tears away. ‘What’re they talking
about, Peter? I’m so scared.’

‘Mother, everything is—’ Midori
slapped his hand on Peter’s shoulder, making him jolt in fright.

‘That’s right, Ms Felicity. You
ought to be real proud of your son here.’ Peter had no idea what was going on,
and he didn’t like the way Midori squeezed his shoulder. ‘He’s got quite the
remarkable gift.’

‘What are you talking about?’
Peter asked.

‘I never told you, did I?’

‘Told me what?’

‘You were the first one in
history to extract Nightmare Energy straight from a dream.’ Midori’s face had
opportunity written all over it, his eyes narrowed, lips thin. ‘You should be
real proud.’

‘That’s impossible.’ For a
moment Peter forgot about his mother. There had only been rumors, countless
debates, and scientific studies about the possibility of Nightmare Energy.
People said it couldn’t be done, that such a thing didn’t exist. Dream Chasers
have always harvested from positive dreams, never bad ones, and it was said
that it was just the way of the dreams, the infrastructure of Dream Chasing.

‘But it wasn’t really a
nightmare,’ Peter said. ‘I was in—’

‘Well, I tell you what,’ Midori
said. ‘Don’t really care what you did. All I care about is you replicating what
you did over and over again.’

Peter told himself: I’m going
to have to play this smart.

‘I want my mother out of this,’
Peter said. A trembling hand fell into his and squeezed it so hard that he had
to look. What he saw would scar him for life. There was a goodbye on her lips.

‘Baby, they, they told me that
I only had—’ It all happened so fast. One second she was there, the other
second she was on the floor, begging for her life all over again, telling
Midori that she only wanted a few minutes more with her only—

Clap! Clap!
the pistol fired. It was the same gun that killed Noni Makaratzi. There was a
hazy pause between shots, Peter Steel trying to understand what was happening,
and then again:
Clap! Clap!