Free To Make Death Love Us by Sovereign Falconer

promise.
    The second was the
reality that awaited them all. Pepino felt the truck shake, shudder, the lurch sicken-ingly
outward and down. A great thunderous roaring tore at his ears and his chest. The truck plummeted
down­ward.
    Bones broke through
his skin, shattering against each other inside his body. The truck spun end over end.
    There his hand was
crushed, there his legs broken, and finally at the bottom, a great bursting and sundering which
eviscerated him. He lay in a pool of his own blood, his chest torn open, his insides threatening
to fall out.
    That was only a
part of the horror she made him see.
    For as Pepino lay
there, she made him feel, yes, hungry.
    Ravenous.
    And the dream
promised it for an eternity after death.
    Pepino stirred, the
dream of only a few seconds' dura­tion, gleaming like summer lightning in his mind.
    Gone was the
paralysis, the terror that had overcome mind and muscles.
    In the same way,
with different dreams and promises, she touched Paulette and Colonel John. In Colonel John she
found the leader, the one they must obey if they were to escape.
    Her dream washed
across the midget's mind, a tidal surge that moved deep inside his mind. Colonel John stiff­ened
suddenly in the dark, as if electric currents had passed through his body. He felt great things
suddenly astir in the night, things that swam in the flow of his own blood up the dark creeks of
his brain. He seemed to travel elsewhere, to a land beneath a star-pricked sky. He put his head out into that night and
looked up at the sickle moon only to find two instead of one.
    Comets of
iridescent red and blue flashed in the sky above him. Earthquakes rocked the ground gently
be­neath his feet in a strange, almost tribal, surration.
    White rime spun a
delicate mist over the grass and, turning his head, he saw the great forest from which it seemed
he had just come. It was an enchanted land of silvers and golds and rich greens and towering
growths of crystal like great frozen fires.
    And then ahead of
him, some great and wondrous beast moved and he turned to see it move past him in full flight.
And his eyes went wide in astonishment, in unabashed wonder, for it was a beast of fable, a night
legend, a uni­corn of silver and gray and beautiful in its being.
    And as it passed
by, its silver mane brushed against him and burned his face, a delicious witch-cool heat. And the
legs that had been too short, grew.
    The arms that were
like toy appendages stretched out. Like Alice, he grew and grew, each part of him advancing with
perfect symmetry, until he stood, a handsome, whole man in the glare of the two moons above his
head.
    It was a wonder so
big his heart seemed fit to burst from his chest. And so he reached out, trying to move his body
to the rhythm of the dream. His body coursed with a new energy, a confidence regained. For him
the dream never withered, never died and in so doing left him changed, the leader, the decider of
their fate.
    For Serena had
dreamed Colonel John into a giant and he now felt himself to be one.
    Paulette was the
hardest to reach and the easiest to console. Serena smiled at her in the dark; her hands
trem­bled, her sightless eyes blinked with tears. The smile was replaced by a sudden look of
pain. The strain of the effort Serena
was making was beginning to tell on her fragile little misshapen body.
    Paulette gasped as
she sensed Serena's dream thrusting into her consciousness. The shock of it almost pushed her
into hysteria. It was so sudden, so overwhelming, she felt as if she was going mad.
    But Serena, ever
soothing, ever gentle, with pleasing fragments of the dream, reached deep within Paulette and won
her over with a dream bigger even than Paulette herself.
    Serena pushed and
pulled and delicately scissored at the dream until it most kindly reached Paulette's secret self.
Paulette was appeased and settled back into the beauty of the offered dream. It was a dream so