Dream Tunnel Part One

He slept in a bunker, a place he had found that offered protection from RPGs and snipers. He was closer to a road than he liked, any of the passing vehicles could hit an IED.

At the same time, he rode in a humvee, on another useless patrol. They rode the same section of highway every day, yet the bombs were never cleared, the danger was never gone.

He had lost contact with his unit. His brothers, for whom he would give everything. He didn’t know where they had gone. He had betrayed them by not being there to take whatever the hajjis dished out.

He rode with his brothers. It was another boring, terrifying patrol. The heat was ever present. He didn’t even sweat, the heat just sucked water and life directly from his body.

He crackled with thought. He could fight if he knew where the enemy was. They were never there, though. The bombs were planted in the darkest hours of the night. Those who planted them were far away by the time the humvees or tanks set them off. The snipers shot from unseen perches. Women and children were bombs, persuaded by others to strap on vests and find a crowd.

He could fight in a way that no one understood. He could make them die. If he knew who the enemy was. If he found his unit he could protect his brothers and turn his weapon on the enemy.

Everyone would die. It would be over.

He slept in the tunnel, with Los Angeles commuters rushing by in their cars. Only a few of them noticed a human form under a filthy blanket. They had other things to think about, jobs to get to, and lives to live. There were thousands like him. The commuters saw them so often that they were invisible.

*****

“Goodness?” Randall Moss asked. “That’s all he said?”

“Yeah,” Marcus Slater said. “Then he just ran away. I seen some weird crap in L.A., but that kid was up there.”

“I’m heading into the third street tunnel,” Randall said. “I’ll lose the signal.”

“OK,” Marcus said. “Catch you later.”

Randall was driving one of the Knighthawk vans. He had spent the night working on the recordings he had made at the dry cleaners in Glendale. He was sure that finding the owner of the hideous voice would lead him to something big. He still couldn’t trace the location, though.

Randall hung up the call by touching a button on his Bluetooth earpiece. He felt a little like Locutus of Borg with that thing attached to his ear, flashing a little red light. He supposed it wouldn’t be long before the same function would be performed by an implant under the skin. Then humanity would be even closer to assimilation.

The third street tunnel was a good quarter of a mile long, with bare cement walls and a sidewalk on each side. It was one way only, towards the west. Randall had driven through it so often that he was usually through it before he even noticed. It was a plunge into darkness, and then a flash into light, with thoughts of his latest software or his new son, or of Sharra, the lady lawyer he had been seeing quite often recently, filling the boring length of the tunnel.

So when the light of the sun came back Randall just thought that he had exited the normal way, where third street would go up the hill and he could turn towards the office building where many of his programmers worked on the latest Mossoft game. They had something exciting planned for the new type of motion sensing game controllers.

But the sun was brighter than he expected, more intense. He was also hit with a wave of heat through the open window of the van.

And there was a car stopped right in front of him.

Randall hit the brakes, and the van slid, tires screaming on the pavement. It slowed down enough to almost avoid hitting the car. Not quite, though. It hit with a solid thunk.

Whiteness obscured Randall’s vision and something hit him in the nose. An explosive whoosh filled his ears.

Air bag. No one had ever told Randall that it would hurt. He sat back as the bag deflated and rubbed his nose.

Then he heard a screech from behind, as another car had to stop suddenly. He waited for the hit, but it didn’t come. The car had stopped in time.

“What the godamned hell!” a woman’s voice shouted. Randall undid his seat belt and opened the van door. He stepped out. Something wasn’t right. it was too hot, and the sun was brighter than he had ever experienced.

“What are you doing!?” the woman screamed at him from her car. She honked loudly.

“Get this piece of crap out of my way!”

Randall walked back towards her. He should have seen the west end of the tunnel as he looked back that way. He should have seen buildings built on top of the hill that the tunnel cut through. He should not have gritty sand under his feet. There was something very wrong.

All he saw was a flat sandy landscape that stretched from horizon to horizon. The road wound its way through, a ribbon of cement in a world of sand. This was not downtown Los Angeles.

“Do you hear me?” the woman shouted. “Move it! I have to get to a meeting!” Then she saw Randall walking towards her. She immediately rolled up her window. The car was a gray Lexus, just a year or two old. The woman had the well groomed looked of the female corporate executive.

As Randall got closer she frantically dialed her cell phone. She looked at him with wide eyes. She had clearly not seen all the things wrong with the landscape. All she saw was a black man from a van moving towards her.

“I’m calling the police!” she shouted.

Randall just turned and went back to the van. Let her figure this out for herself, he thought. Besides, he wanted to make a call of his own. He opened the van door and picked up his own cell phone.

It had no bars. A message said, “No service.” If he was out of the tunnel, he should have bars.

The Lexus pulled around the van and sprayed sand over Randall as the wheels spun in the soft earth just off the road. It had trouble moving forward, but it got past the van and then the car that Randall had run into.

Randall looked back at his phone. He shook it a little, knowing that wouldn’t help at all, but hoping for some magic to make it work.

His brain didn’t know how to process the sound that came from the road. It was too loud. He didn’t experience it as an explosion at first because the explosions he knew from movies and TV were only as loud as the volume being played. This was a sound louder than he had ever heard before.

He didn’t expect the hot wind that washed over him, filled with sand, either. Sand got into his eyes and he dropped to his knees. Sand was in his mouth also. He spit but it was still there. His eyes burned. He fought the urge to rub his eyes with his hands. He knew that could make things worse.

The road that his knees touched was very hot.

What was this? Where was he?

No answer came. After blinking rapidly, feeling tears on his cheeks as his eyes tried to wash themselves clean. Randall could see a little better. He got to his feet. He turned to see what had happened.

Something was on fire just ahead of the car in front of the van. Randall slowly moved in that direction.

The car his van had run into was a Toyota Prius. Randall couldn’t see anyone inside.

The front half of the Lexus was burning. Randall looked for the woman. She was still sitting in the driver’s seat. Or rather, a human shaped thing, blackened and cracked, was there. Flames crawled over it.

Randall just barely managed to keep his breakfast down. He leaned over and a rope of drool fell to the sand, but with an effort he didn’t throw up.

What was going on? How did he get here?

Whatever was going on, the woman in the Lexus proved that this was a dangerous situation. He needed to get out of here.

Which way was out? He could walk back the way he had come, but all he saw there was open road. If there were bombs in the road, would walking be any safer than driving? Also, he would die of thirst out there, in this heat. The same for going forward.

Whatever was going on, this place could kill. He would be safer if he wore, say, a suit of armor.

The Knighthawk suit was under an equipment console in the black van. Someone could enter the van and never know it was there. Randall had been driving one of the vans almost every day, instead of one of his many other cars. It was unlikely that he would run into a situation that required him to wear it, but he had designed it with his childhood love of comic books in mind. The hero was always ready to spring into action.

Marcus was using the other suit fairly often these days, but Randall had never completely retired from the hero game. He tried to be really careful, he had a son and a woman in his life and he had to be responsible to them.

He had also discovered that a billionaire could do a lot more heroing with his money than he could as an individual crime fighter. Kids who had a community center to go to, a neighborhood jobs program, and could get small loans for legitimate businesses were less likely to become criminals.

What was going on here required the suit, Randall thought. Not that it would have protected him in the kind of explosion that killed the Lexus woman, but it might help with any other dangers.

Normally it took a while to get the suit on and check all the systems. He figured he could do some of the checking as he went along. He got the basic systems running in about fifteen minutes.

Knighthawk stepped out of the van into the heat and searing sun. Hmm, Randall thought. The suit is normally hot, I may be in trouble in this kind of heat. If it’s too bad I will take the helmet off for a while.

A whining sound came at him from his left. Something clanged on his helmet.

“Get down! Get down!” someone shouted. Two men crouched as they ran past him. The sound of gunfire was all around him. Randall tried to crouch and run like they did, but the Knighthawk suit wasn’t really meant for that. He followed the men, soldiers, around a corner in a wall.

Wall? He was in a different place than before. Instead of the open landscape and ribbon of road he was in a city, with buildings made of light colored brick.

“Where is he?” another soldier shouted. Gunfire, now so rapid it must be a machine gun, filled the air.

“Take him out! Take him out!” somebody shouted.

“I don’t know where he is!” another shouted.

The soldier closest to Randall threw a grenade in the general direction of the machine gun fire. The stuttering clatter of the machine gun disappeared into the explosion.

Then it started again.

The soldier who threw the grenade swore. He turned to Randall, “Jerry,” he said. “You OK?”

Randall didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know if he should respond. Wasn’t accepting the reality of a hallucination a further step into madness?

The soldier looked so earnest, Randall had to nod. The soldier was in desert camo, and loaded down with equipment of all kinds. He had goggles strapped around his helmet, ready to pull down when needed. Under all that, his face was so young.

Randall had carefully designed all his weaponry to be non-lethal. There wasn’t much he could do to help these soldiers. Besides, he was in downtown L.A. He was in the third street tunnel. There was no war going on in the third street tunnel.

Bullets from the machine gun pummeled the wall around the corner, inches from Randall’s head. The Knighthawk suit was designed for street fighting, not war. He wouldn’t survive machine gun fire for long.

Why was this hallucination happening to him? Marcus was the one who had actually been in wars.

*****

The entrance to the tunnel was sealed off by the cops by the time Marcus got there. Two patrol cars blocked it and wooden barriers had been put across it.

Traffic was backed up back to Alameda. He had left his BMW in the stalled traffic and walked towards the tunnel.

There was some seriously wrong crap going on here. Randall told Marcus he was going into the tunnel and in just a few minutes a news report on the radio said that there was a big accident blocking the tunnel. Frantic calls to Randall’s cell phone were diverted to voice mail.

“Move back, sir,” a beefy cop said. He eyed Marcus suspiciously. Cops always eyed Marcus suspiciously, even the African American ones. Something about him read “perp” to them.

“I think my friend is in there,” Marcus said.

“We’re handling it,” the cop said.

“He’s my boss, I should help if he’s hurt.”

“Move back, sir. No one allowed in the tunnel.”

Marcus moved away. There was no arguing with the cop. Maybe he would get a chance to sneak into the tunnel.

As he stood there, angry and impatient, a large, swarthy man got out of a small bus and started swearing at the cop for not letting his bus through. It wasn’t enough of a diversion, though. There were five other cops manning the barriers.

Marcus tried the cell phone again. It rang, then gave him voice mail.

*****

“You’re mom’s going to freak,” the blond kid said. “You didn’t even graduate yet.”

Randall was spinning through realities. He had been on a patrol in a humvee, in a tent eating one of those military meals in a bag, and now he wasn’t in the war at all. He was back in Southern California, some suburb in the desert, sitting at an outdoor table at a hot dog franchise.

In each place, he watched, but he was also part of the scene. The soldiers called him Jerry. He was still in the Knighthawk suit, but no one reacted to that, they treated him like another soldier. He couldn’t speak as himself, tell them he wasn’t who they thought he was.

“I thought they didn’t take supers.” Two teenagers sat at the table with him in this suburban scene. This one was shorter than the blond and a little pudgy.

Jerry was angry. Randall could feel that. I ain’t no super, he thought Jerry said.

“The second teenager leaned closer and said, “OK, but when you told me about making out with Linda? Man, I was there. I could feel it, see it. That’s some kind of power.”

Jerry wanted to strike out. He knew he could do it. He had never asked to be different. He had to be careful or people would see and feel what he talked about. He knew he could reach into them too and hurt them. He held it in. He was no super. He didn’t want to hurt his friends.

He made damn sure not to tell the recruiter anything about his powers, if they were powers.

“When do you have to go?”

Two days, Jerry thought. Two days and I am so out of here. How am I going to tell mom?

*****

Jerry slept in the only home he had left, the only shelter he could find. His mind cascaded through his tours, his visits home, and his months in the hospital. It was all mixed up, but the one thing he held on to was that he had to find his brothers. He had to protect them, as they protected him. When he found them, he would strike out at the hajjis. He would kill them all.

*****

Randall was back near his van and the burning Lexus. He didn’t feel or hear Jerry in his mind any more.

There had to be some explanation for all this. If Randall could learn who Jerry was, he might be able to figure out what was going on. He needed to get out of this illusion or at least communicate with the real world.

A streak of light entered this strange reality. It came over his van and the Prius, then circled around and came back towards him.

Landing next to him, the light turned into a man, in a stark white costume with a sunburst on the chest. Sun Man, Randall thought, that young hero who has been on TV a lot recently.

“Whatever you are doing in here, villain,” Sun Man said in a melodramatic voice, “it stops now.”

“Whoa, kid, I’m not...” Randall said, then stopped as the white-clad hero fell to the ground. Randall kneeled next to him. “You all right?” he asked. He touched the hero’s arm and felt that the young man was shivering.

“So cold...” Sun Man said.

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