Dream Chasers (Dystopian Scifi Series Book 1) by Logan Stark Read Free Book Online

thick needle at the
end, the size of a finger. For a second Peter thought the needle was going to
go into him, but the tip of the needle turned into a bright, sea-blue beam, a
barcode with letters.
    ‘I’m marking you. As I said,
you might want to bite your teeth – not your tongue,’ he snickered. Peter had
anticipated pain, but he didn’t expect it to hurt this much. The blue beam ran
across his forearm, marking red letters on his skin that disappeared a second
later, fading into the color of his flesh. It was beautiful to watch shiny red fade
into blue and then into skin, but there was nothing beautiful about the pain.
Peter screamed – tried to scream – the pain away. Someone covered his mouth
with cloth as he screamed.
    ‘Bring in the host,’ Midori, a
patient observer, said, standing a few feet away from the table. He waved his
fingers at the door. There was commotion. The first thing Peter saw were legs
kicking, then a body of a man. It was the homeless guy from earlier, the one
Ohko had given cocaine to.  
    ‘What’s this?’ Homeless
protested. ‘I got no trouble with you authority!’ He was carried in by three
men. When Homeless saw Peter, his eyes widened. ‘You,’ he said, spit dripping
from his lips. ‘You tricked – you tricked me!’
    ‘No I didn’t,’ Peter said.
Before he could tell the man to calm down, Midori head-butted Homeless with his
gun, knocking the man dizzy.
    ‘I … wha-I, I.’ Blood snaked
down Homeless’s nose. They sat him in a chair next to Peter, where he lay
slumped with his head back.
    ‘We don’t need him fully conscious,’
Midori said. ‘Just half awake.’ He slid his gun into his waist and turned to
Peter. ‘Now listen to me carefully.’ He stepped closer with his finger raised.
‘You are going to infiltrate his dreams, and I want you to do whatever is
necessary to harvest the dream.’
    The pain in his forearm was only
a nibble now. He watched them scan the man’s neck with the blue laser, marking
him as the host. ‘I don’t know how.’ Peter shook his head and bit down on his
lips. ‘For fuck’s sake, I’ve never done this before! How do you expect me to
harvest his dream without training?’
    Midori waved Peter’s outburst
away. ‘All you need is a strong imagination, something Ohko said you had. If
that’s the case, you should be fine.’ He rested his one hand on the gun, using
his other hand to emphasize his words by waving it around. ‘Let me remind you,
if you don’t succeed in our little interview, you are going to end up dead,
bleeding, lost and prone in a trash bag. Is that understood?’
    Fuck you! Peter screamed in his
head.
    ‘Was’s going on?’ Homeless
asked, reaching for his bloody nose. They strapped him with cuffs. His eyelids
fluttered open, trying to fathom, trying to remember, but he went back to
painful sleep.
    ‘If you fail, this man is going
to die as well.’ Midori pointed at Homeless. ‘So you better—’ he twirled his
hand in a graceful bow ‘—learn on the job, as they say.’ The machine next to
him lit up in wonderful rainbow colors. A man appeared with a laptop. The
machine made a smooching sound. Peter could feel heat coming from somewhere,
maybe from within.
    ‘Vitals steady,’ the man said,
tapping the keyboard. ‘He should be under in one minute.’
    Another man appeared from
behind, reading on a tablet. ‘Did you give him the procaine?’
    ‘What’s that for?’ the man
asked, looking up from the laptop.
    ‘They give Dream Chasers
procaine tablets to numb their mouth, something about numbing the lips,
otherwise they run the risk of biting their tongue off.’ Laptop guy was the
first one to laugh, and then everyone chuckled. Midori approached the bed.
    ‘You are going to be fine,’ he
said, putting his hand on Peter’s forehead. ‘You’re getting really hot, son.
You okay?’ With his hand still on Peter’s forehead, he looked at the guy with
the laptop. ‘How far?’
    Suddenly,