Amber by Dan-Dwayne Spencer (e book reader .TXT) 📕

unfolded from the interior of the van, stretching and shaking our limbs. I gave them the best rendition of the dream I could. I didn’t leave out anything, even down to the smallest detail I could remember. No one said a word. They all sat and stared at me; I felt like a genuine carnival freak. I might as well have been born a four-armed boy.

“Did you recognize any of the dead people in the dream?” Flower asked.

“No. They were pretty generic, no outstanding marks or scars I can remember. One looked like a morbid business executive, and the next one had on my swimsuit; the third wore jeans and one of Jimmy’s western shirts, but the last one was a girl wearing a nightgown.”

Jimmy asked, “Did it have sexy lace? Was it black? I bet it was low cut, too.”

I shot him a disgusted look.

In a defensive tone, Jimmy replied, “I want to know if it’s black. That’s all.” He seemed genuinely offended by my scolding.

I pretended he said nothing. I’ve talked guy talk about girls and what they wore lots of times—when it was just us guys—but sexually inquisitive guy talk didn’t feel right for this conversation. After all, we were talking about a dead person. Where had Jimmy’s mind wandered off to?

“Let me see if I have this.” Roger was working overtime trying to make the dream mean something. “One dead body came from a cushion under you. The next came from beside you, by your elbow, and the third came from in front of you.”

“Right, but to find the fourth one I had to go outside the van. I found it in a gully.”

“Right,” Jimmy muttered. “What if they are me, you, Roger, and Rose? You said one dead guy wore one of my shirts and another wore your swimsuit.”

“But I don’t wear business clothes and you’ll never catch me in a tie—ever,” Roger flatly said.

Rose spoke up, “Well, there are those four horsemen the angel mentioned.”

“Arland didn’t say anything about no horses,” Jimmy blurted.

“No. Rose is right,” Flower interjected. “Phoenix mentioned pestilence, death, famine, and war in his prophecy. Those are the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

“Apoc…Apocalypse, like the end of the world kind of thing?” Roger asked.

Flower quietly replied, “Yeah. That kind of thing.”

Jimmy laughed and said, “There could be something different going on. You don’t know.”

I added, “You’re right, we don’t know.” I paused and thought about the dream. “When it began, I dreamed I was sitting here in the van watching the sunset off to my right. The first one came up from underneath, but the second one came from inside the wall and the third…I just don’t know what it means.”

Roger’s expression seemed strained. “Yeah, I don’t see how it helps.”

“I don’t know.” I kicked the driver’s seat with my new sandals and shook my head. “I’m grasping at straws now.”

My kick startled Flower because she jumped and gave me a harsh look in her mirror.

“Me too,” Rose said. “I think the most perplexing thing about the vision was the star. Nothing, and I mean nothing, explains the star.”

“Does the sexy nighty being black have a meaning?” Jimmy Dugan asked. “What kind of nighty was it? Did it have matching panties?”

We all shook our heads at Jimmy as we piled out of the van and headed toward the Roundhouse. He couldn’t get past the image of the dead girl in the nighty. We tried to ignore him as he went on and on.

Chapter Fifteen

Calypso’s Puppet

In a joint decision, everyone headed to the Roundhouse and subsequently to the kitchen—everyone but me. It had been almost four hours since we had the Sonic burgers and they wanted to see if they could get something else to eat, even though it was late and the cook wasn’t coming back. I said I wanted to go somewhere to think. So, I broke away from my friends and set off toward the deck and the beautiful river.

Behind me, Jimmy yelled, “Loveless, wait up.”

I slowed down to wait on him, I said, “There’s not much to see except the deck after dark unless you want to swim.”

“What were you planning on doing? It was your idea to go there.”

“Yeah, I just wanted to sit on the deck and think awhile.” I sighed. The images of the dead bodies were still so real. And too, I felt responsible for Mr. Carter’s entrapment. I needed a little time alone; it would help me sort through my thoughts and feeling. The problem was how to tell Jimmy not to come with me? As it turned out, I couldn’t. He was determined to tag along. “Maybe if I just hang out down there in the quiet, I can put order to the chaos in my visions.”

“Great, then that’s what I’ll do too.”

“So, you’re going to the river to sit, just because—”

Jimmy slapped me on the back of the head, and said, “Yep, exactly.” He smiled and gave me an odd cock-eyed grin. “What are best friends for, anyway?”

I nodded, and we walked in silence. Since when did Dugan ever slap at anyone. He might haul off and slug the crap out of somebody, but slapping wasn’t his way; also, exactly where and when did we become best friends? Only last night he was saying I couldn’t be his friend at all, and if I didn’t abandon the spooky stuff, he would leave me at the commune.

Since visiting the carnival, nothing supernatural bothered him anymore. He talked sexy guy talk about dead bodies and in front of girls—no less. Hell, he even wanted to know what color the dead girl’s panties were. Which totally creeped me out. But I admired his effort to reconcile because for the one day we had