The War for the Waking World (4 page)

“Follow me. We need to go up high to have a look around,” he told them.

The ground fell away, the trees and the neighborhood next. In the Dream, flight had been absolutely exhausting. There were so many variables to monitor and manipulate: aerodynamics, drag, weight, lift, and thrust. After even a short flight, Archer's mental will could be sapped. Now, after the Rift, things were different. As he flew, Archer could feel the will draining, but it was replenished almost as quickly as it left. The newfound strength and resilience thrilled him. His imagination thrummed with new possibilities. But he'd give it all back in a heartbeat . . . if only the Rift could be repaired.

The Dreamtreaders reached a suitable altitude and cast about. Fortunately, the greenish mushroom cloud had dissipated. From that sky-high vantage, the surrounding territory looked, for the moment, somewhat peaceful. Archer scanned a complete circle—much of the area was suburban neighborhoods with a ton of forest patches—before the first signs began to appear. Bursts of fire flickered in the deep woods to the west, and then a glowing greenish tornado formed several miles to the east.

“Kaylie, Razz, take out those fires,” Archer said. “I'll take the twister, but I might need your help, so meet me when you can.”

“Roger that!” Razz said.

Kaylie nodded. “Let's go!”

“Kaylie?” Archer called.

“Yeah?”

“Anchor first,” he said.

“Anchor deep,” she replied, finishing the Dreamtreader maxim. But the expression she wore was uncertain. “Archer, what are our anchors now?”

Archer saw the fear in her eyes. He felt it too, but conviction overtook it in a heart's beat. “Our anchors are the same as they've always been, Kaylie. Truth doesn't change.”

Kaylie smiled, tentatively at first, but then it became a broad, confident grin. “Operation Fire-Quench, activated!” she hollered as she and Razz streaked away into the night.

Archer lowered his flight goggles and floored it, following the undulating contours of the half-frozen western Maryland foothills. He felt his mental will coursing through every movement of his flight, and he exulted in the experience. He swooped low and swiped at the tops of the pines, sending a spray of powdered snow blasting into the air wherever he went. He curled left and right, keeping the funnel cloud in his sights.

It was an eerie thing to behold, a slim tendril of churning air lit in
the same phosphorescent green as a child's glow-in-the-dark toy. This was no toy, though. Someone, somewhere, had dreamt this storm up, a violent, twisting serpent of carnage, throwing up massive debris clouds and threatening to obliterate anything in its path. Before the Rift, such a nightmarish storm would have been a danger only to Dreamtreaders doing their duty in the Dream Realm.
This
impossible storm was real.

A streak of ice plunged down Archer's back. The tornado was growing and moving faster, approaching a sprawling expanse of farmland where many homes lay. Archer charged ahead, plotting his moves even before he entered the outermost circulating winds of the storm.

The storm seemed more menacing than any tempest in the Dream. The clamor of the wind was a violent combination of sounds, a phasing of a freight train, a lion's roar, and the ever-present thunder. Lightning crackled close overhead. Archer flinched at the sound. He had to adjust his level of mental energy to fight the strengthening crosswinds that threatened to knock him off course. The Dreamtreader banked a hard left against a fist-like gust, and then blasted through to temporarily calmer air.

Man, this storm is moving fast,
Archer thought.
Almost like it's got its own purpose
. The turbulent black mass was getting to the scattered farms. Archer needed to snuff out the storm, and he needed to do it quickly or those homes were history. He summoned up his will and created a bunker buster bomb. It was the sort of thing the military would drop over a terrorist's underground lair, an explosive so powerful it could penetrate concrete and steel.

The oblong device was about as large and aerodynamic as a potato, but Archer clutched it in his will and hurled it into the heart of the storm. He dropped to the ground and willed up a thick shield. Just as he covered his head, Archer decided the shield had not been one of his brighter ideas.

Fire. Light. The deafening explosion sent a shock wave hurtling outward, buffeting Archer's shelter. He tried to hang on, but the force
spun him sideways. The blast wave bellowed into his shield like a burst of wind filling a sail. Archer used his mental will, strengthening his grip to keep the shield from being torn out of his grasp. The shock wave yanked the shield, and then propelled it and Archer to the west like a cannon shot. Archer tumbled along the ground. Jarring concussive bounces left Archer disoriented and dizzy even before he hit the trees.

The shield and Archer collided with a thick trunk. He ricocheted with a grunt and then careened off a sturdy white oak. Like a human pinball, Archer bounced from trunk to trunk until finally running out of blast-driven momentum. He collapsed in a heap at the base of a prickly blue spruce. Rolling on the carpet of needles, Archer groaned and coughed. Finally, he blinked back to reason and consciousness.

“Why am I not dead?” he whispered. There were sharp pains and throbs as he stumbled back to his feet, but nothing too serious. He brushed the muddy slush, dead leaves, pine needles, and other branches off of his jacket and fatigues.

Then, at last, he dropped the shield. In fact, he hurled it, and that's when he figured it out. If he had tried to toss the shield prior to the Rift, using just human power, he might have managed to launch it a few feet, maybe a couple of yards. But as Archer watched the shield spin away over the treetops, he realized his post-Rift will had infused his physiology with new strength—and durability.
Bouncing off tree trunks should have pulverized me,
he thought. But it hadn't. He'd survived with nothing more than scrapes and bruises, and even those felt like they were healing.

Archer took to the air, dodging branches until he was clear of the forest. By then it was nearly too late. The tornado had ripped up and scattered the fields surrounding the farms and was currently tossing farm equipment into the air like toys. The storm bore down on the farmhouses, and Archer had no idea what he could do to save them. He poured a new infusion of will into his speed and rocketed toward
the storm. In moments, he entered the storm's debris field. Timber and sheet metal came careening at him. Something struck him in the knee, but he didn't see what it was. There'd surely be a welt left behind, but at the moment it was a tiny concern.

“How do I stop a force of nature?” he growled, tearing free once more from the storm's grasp. As he hovered in the turbulent air between the approaching storm and the nearest farmhouse, the truth became very clear. This was no force of nature. It was worse, a supernatural amplification of someone's greatest fears that had been given life by the collision of worlds in the Rift.

A piercing cry from below and behind forced Archer to spin around to face the farmhouse. He saw a man racing across the farm's front porch. He was carrying two little blond children, one in each arm, clinging to his neck and shrieking. A woman and a girl of maybe seven or eight crouched low and followed an erratic path behind him. They clambered off the front porch and fought the wind to get around the backside of their farmhouse, where a pair of large metal doors lay recessed into the ground.

Storm doors
, Archer thought,
and just in time
. Glowing tendrils of cyclonic wind churned closer as the man handed off the toddlers to his wife and struggled to open the way down to the cellar.

“No,” Archer whispered.

The farmer bent over the doors, straining and pulling, but they didn't budge. But the tornado had shifted its track, lurching forward, cutting Archer off from the farm and eating up the ground. Rows of crops were stripped and shredded, sucked up into the glowing storm. A scarecrow vanished, then a hundred yards of fences.

The storm was upon the farmer and his family, and there was no way Archer could fly to them in time.

FIVE

A
GAINST THE
W
IND

A
RCHER DID NOT HOVER THERE, STUCK LIKE A DEER IN
the headlights. The misbegotten monster tornado would not have this family. Archer would see to that. There was no time to fight the winds and cover that distance, but he didn't need to. His will traveled at the speed of thought.

First, Archer thought up a stone barrier. He built the forty-foot wall much like the blast vault and placed it between the oncoming windstorm and the farmer's home. But this tornado was infused with something supernatural. It tore into the wall, its invisible fingers prying open the smallest seams in the wall. The wall began to fall apart, and that would turn each lifesaving chunk of the barrier into a deadly, bludgeoning projectile.

Archer wrenched the strength of his concentration to unmake the wall. “C'mon, Archer!” he berated himself. “You can do better than that! Think!”

Archer threw his arms forward and created giant hands of blue light, much like the ones Kaylie had created to deal with the wolf beast. But Archer used his to lift the farmer and his family up from the ground. “No!” Archer cried out. The flaw in this attempt became painfully clear. The farmer, his wife, and children . . . they were terrified. They'd never seen giant, magical hands. To them, they were sinister things . . . ghostly even. They fled from the palms faster than Archer was able to scoop them up. It was maddening, and the tornado closed in.

Finally, Archer let them down and removed the hands. The farmer huddled his family at the storm doors and once more tried in vain to yank them open. “Stupid!” Archer yelled, but he wasn't referring to the farmer and his family. He was thinking of himself. He'd panicked and, once again, his solution had been too complicated. This time, he'd keep it simple.

The Dreamtreader willed a crowbar to appear in the man's hands. The farmer stood very still for a moment, looked skyward, and then went to work. With Archer applying a little will to assist, the man got the doors open. He hustled his family down below, and then slammed the doors shut. Archer added a few layers of reinforcing steel before turning back to the approaching nightmare.

Ducking debris and shielding his eyes, Archer rose well above the farmhouse and faced the twister. Thunder sent deep, vibrating shock waves rolling over Archer. He steadied himself and fought down the panic rising within. He had a hundred storm-stopping ideas careening through his mind—putting up a massive shield, building a box around the storm, or creating some gargantuan vacuum cleaner—but none of them made any sense. They were all stupid, panic-driven absurdities like the bunker buster. The storm was so close now it cast an eerie pale green aura on the entire farm. Intensifying crosswinds threatened to yank Archer from the air, but each time he readjusted some facet of flight to hold . . .

His . . .

Position . . .

An idea burst into Archer's mind. He went into a power dive. For the plan to work, he needed his feet firmly on the ground. He had no idea if he could stay conscious, much less maintain flight, with the amount of mental will he was about to attempt. He had his limits, even with the Rift supercharging them.

The roar of the storm seemed to become a physical thing. The glowing funnel itself grew right before Archer's wide eyes. It became a
massive wedge of churning debris, blotting out the horizon on either side and even the sky overhead. The roar intensified to a constant thunderous explosion. The winds tore the fence line and its concrete footings out of the ground. So powerful and voracious was the wind that it began to gouge out huge strips of earth, carving hundred-yard trenches with each advance. It might have been an F5 storm before. Now, no F-scale could measure its wind speed. Archer's ears popped as the air pressure dropped. Phantom gusts raked at his coat, relentlessly trying to pull him into the churning vortex.

“I don't know if I can pull this off!” he yelled. “But . . . I need to!” Archer narrowed his thoughts and thrust both arms forward. Slowly, deliberately, he began crafting his own tornado.

It was small at first, just a ropey thing, but it was growing, and, more importantly, it was rotating in the opposite direction of the nightmare twister. As if his mental energy were sand in an hourglass, Archer could feel it draining quickly as he willed his tornado to grow. His funnel spun faster and faster, sucking up more soil and debris. The wind speed of his anti-nado picked up. F2 then F3—the thing was getting harder and harder to control. He had to keep it churning, keep it spinning in the right direction, so he filtered in a little blue light. Now he couldn't just feel the wind's movement; he could see it. Yet the nightmare twister was still so much bigger, so much stronger. It was like a ghostly silhouette looming behind Archer's baby storm.

But Archer was far from finished. His roar joined the thunder-train sound of the other two storms, and he spent a chunk of his will all at once. It was so large he swayed where he stood and almost toppled. His storm tripled in size. Still not quite there, it was more like a light-heavyweight boxer against a heavyweight, but at least now, it was a fight.

It wasn't a moment too soon. The nightmare twister lurched forward, and the two storms collided. In that moment, there was a flash
of green light and the sound of a thousand high-speed car crashes. The funnels of the two storms became enmeshed. Clockwise blue strove against counterclockwise green. The strain took its toll on Archer, depleting his mental will at an alarming rate.

But he fought. He fought with everything he had. That nightmare tornado could not win. Archer's storm grew again. Now it was close to equaling the rival twister.