Hurricane #4: The DMZ (Patreon)

Why can’t you speak back? You don’t have arms and hands. You have four legs, four paws. Why? Were you always like this?

No. No. This is the dream. You’re in the dream, the dream where you’re the coyote in the storm. You recognize the people in this torrential downpour trying to drown you in the creek. The vixen is someone you’ve met. The cat yelling “Just a branch” in your face is someone you know by name. Branch? What does that mean?

You squirm and wiggle and snap, but you can barely hear your snarls over the storm, barely hear the cat’s screaming. The rain has become a torrential squall, the creek a furious whitewater river.

But you know this is a dream. You know it. You should be able to—

They throw you in. Fierce currents rip at you, drag you under.

You’re the coyote. You’re the creek. You’re the storm—

Serrano sat bolt upright, yowling, spluttering, shaking off the water.

Water? Real water?

She stopped and stared down, eyes growing wide. This wasn’t her bed. She sprawled in the shower stall, water pouring off her. As always before, the shower wasn’t running. The water was—the water was—

The water runs out of her. She can feel the weight, the gravity, the storm siphoned from something deep inside, draining away. She is draining away, dissolving, shrinking, flowing helplessly toward the grate in the floor—

Serrano covered her head and screamed. And kept screaming until the feeling of tangled sheets under her fingers reassured her she was in her bed. Not a river. Not a shower stall. She wasn’t wet, wasn’t dripping.

But she could still hear the water flowing, draining away. Real water.

She pulled the pillow over her head and screamed again, now less in fear than frustration. Then she forced herself to her paws, threw on jeans, T-shirt and jacket, grabbed her purse and phone and hurried outside. It took a conscious effort not to look in the bathroom. She knew what she’d see if she did.

Checking the time wasn’t necessary; it was just before four in the morning. The buses wouldn’t start running for another hour. She didn’t know where she was going, and even if she did, nothing would be open but all-night convenience stores.

And all-night coffee shops. Not the chain corporate one she worked at, and not the hipster one that’d opened up in Parkcrest that she should probably be working at instead. But that didn’t matter. She didn’t need good coffee, just caffeinated coffee. And an apple fritter bigger than her face.

Frank’s Donuts was the right place, and it turned out this was the right time, too, the fritters so fresh out of the oven they were nearly too hot to handle. The coffee in the pump pot seemed fresh, too, although that didn’t improve it much.

Sitting down at a window seat, Serrano munched on the fritter and brooded. Was someone working some kind of spell on her, some kind of curse? Before she moved to Mensura a couple of years ago—ended up here, to be more honest—she’d have written that off as tabloid bullshit. Stories about monsters and magic coming into the real world from across the Great Chasm had been around a thousand years, and everyone knew both had existed. But had existed. Past tense. Nothing relevant.

Now, though, she lived maybe five miles from the place wizards and monsters had chosen to come back into the modern world and open a fucking school as a diplomatic mission. Or re-integration process. Or first step in conquering the world, depending on who you asked. The point was, if there was any place in the world where tabloid bullshit regularly came true, it was right here.

She didn’t know anyone at the college besides Professor Light Roast Espresso Latte, though, and she didn’t know his actual name. Some students had probably come through, too, possibly even other professors or staff, but nobody she could ask about curses. They might have a free counseling service. Maybe she could be some student’s final year project. Although they couldn’t have any seniors, did they? Nobody could be farther along than their second year at the school, and all things considered, they couldn’t be taking transfer students.

Another big bite finished off the fritter. After licking the greasy sugar glaze off her fingers and wiping them on a crumpled napkin, she grabbed the coffee and headed back out.

People had already started to treat the DMZ district as just what the name implied. It wasn’t, though. It was only a lower rent, working-class neighborhood where everything felt a little run down and weathered. But as “For Sale” signs sprouted like dandelions around nicer homes—and stayed up, increasingly with desperation-tinged banners like “Price Reduced” and “Motivated Seller”—you knew where it was headed. The grapevine had it that police patrols had been cut back, that they had quietly signaled to the college that if giant students had to blow off steam by kicking over shit, they’d look the other way as long as it was between the college gates and Gordon Avenue. Hard to believe, but she hadn’t seen many cops around lately, and she’d started seeing abandoned homes that looked strangely…crunched. Had they been abandoned before the crunch, or after?

Early in the morning, though, nothing felt dangerous. Dark and empty, sure. But no one was up at this hour looking for trouble. They were up because they had to be for their job. Or maybe because magical fucking nightmares kept them awake.

By the time she reached the campus gates, a faint tinge of pre-dawn yellow stained the horizon behind her. She stopped just outside the giant archway, trying to figure out what she was looking at. A road, a sidewalk, and another road that looked like a sidewalk but was sunk a half-story below ground level?

“A giant sidewalk,” she said aloud after a few seconds, running a hand through her hair. She stared down at it, then shook her head and started along the “small” walkway. As far as she could tell, she was completely alone here: no traffic, no pedestrians at any scale, nothing ahead of her but seemingly endless concrete cutting through the woods. The trees to either side of the entrance road were big, probably forty feet high. What would it be like for those to be waist-high to her?

After a good fifteen minutes of unchanging scenery, a car passed by on the same side of the road, and a minute later a bus came the other direction. They had on-campus bus service? She wished she’d seen the stop.

Then the pounding started.

She looked around, ears pricking up, until she saw someone jogging toward her. Someone big, coming down the giant sidewalk.

It took nearly another minute for him to pass by. An athletic, buff tiger in short shorts and a fur-tight t-shirt, at least twice the height of the trees. If he noticed her gaping up, muzzle open stupidly, he didn’t give any sign.

A couple more cars passed during the next fifteen minutes, but she didn’t start seeing more people—more giants—for more than twenty. Another one out jogging, a giant squirrel woman, who nodded down to Serrano but didn’t break stride. Then a crisply dressed, middle-aged mouse, likely a staff member or a professor, walking briskly toward the campus rather than away from it.

“Hey!” Serrano yelled, waving both arms.

The woman stopped, looking down at the coyote, readjusting round gold-rimmed glasses. “Yes?”

Serrano swallowed. Having a giant’s full attention was fucking scary. “Hi. I. Uh.”

“Are you a new student?” The mouse looked back and forth along the sidewalk. “If you’re heading toward the admission offices, you have quite a walk ahead of you, although they’re not going to be open for another…” She looked at her wristwatch. “Eighty minutes.”

“No, no. I’m, uh, a townie, I guess? It’s just…” She took a deep breath. “This might sound weird, but I want someone who can tell if somebody’s been using magic on me.”

Despite the low light and how far away the mouse’s immense face was, her skepticism came through with ice-clear clarity.

“Look, I know how that sounds. I know. But I’m having nightmares that, like, carry through to the real world. I dream about drowning and I wake up and there’s really water there.” She rubbed her face and looked down at the woman’s car-sized shoes. “I met a bartender the other day talking about sympathetic magic and the first once since then, the dream tonight, got a lot weirder. A few days before that, a professor at your school here asked me if I was a ‘student of magic’ and I’m wondering if he…saw…something.”

“A professor here.”

“Yeah, a snow leopard. Black hair, soft-spoken, looks like he could be a mysterious wizard from a children’s book series.”

The mouse lifted her brows, then looked away, letting out her breath through pursed lips. “If you come back to my desk, I can run a cursory test, but I don’t know what I can do beyond that other than refer you to the Magical Arts program.”

“That sounds, uh, confusing, frankly. But good. Uh, I’m Serrano Layotl.”

“I’m Ms. Webb.” She crouched and held out her hand, palm up. “Hop on.”

The coyote stared stupidly, eyes growing wide. “You, uh, want to carry me?”

“Frankly, no, Ms. Layotl. But it’s a forty-minute walk to the building from here for you, and less than ten minutes for me.”

“Oh. Uh. Right.” She swallowed again, and gingerly crawled onto the woman’s palm. “Thank youuuyip!” She wrapped both arms around the closest giant finger as the hand started to lift.