Fear can do lots of things. It can make someone freeze, make others flee mindlessly. It can be a motivator, or a hindrance. In those ten seconds, it was the driving force that kept both me, and Red, alive.

As the first of the taloned hands reached through the grating, I slammed my heel down with all the force I could muster. With an audible snap the hand jerked back, and something that sounded like a scream of pain came from below. From a zombie. A zombie with cybernetic eyes and muscles that looked like they had been replaced with synthetic equivalents, but still a zombie.

"I am not going to die in a damn zombie dream." I gasped and staggered into a lurching run, pulling Red with me. She gasped in surprise, but stayed with me and we barrelled past the grating. Behind us, I heard the grating fall away and 'things' surge up from the depths.

I used to run track, and cross country, and I considered myself in fair shape. However, there is a distinct difference between running, and running while concussed, because going in a straight line at full tilt turned out to be way harder than it should have been. Red's breath came in gasps as we ran. My own breathing tightened, and after only a few steps I realized that the fear that settled in my chest had begun to constrict in a familiar way

We shot into the next room even as howls out of nightmare began to sound behind us, screeches that sent my heart hammering in my chest in panic, . Her steps were longer, and more than once I found her pulling at me rather than the other way around as we ran for the next door. The exertion and rising fear made it harder and harder to breathe, but air wouldn't matter if the things behind us caught us. My imagination treated me to a horrific scene of being pulled apart in a haze of dismemberment and blood. Behind us I could hear the scrabbling charge of the freaky tech-zombies.

Don't judge me. What else would you call them? Rogue cybernetic life forms? No. Tech-Zombie. Much easier.

The next door led us to a curved tunnel that slopped up, and my breath came with sharps spikes of pain

We made it through the next pair of double doors at the top, and into the next hall as it leveled out. Behind us, I could hear our screaming pursuers, their cries announcing their continued presence in a way that sent my hindbrain gibbering in panic. I could feel my chest tightening more and more, the weight settling there, constricting and choking.

Training and conditioning can only do so much, when it comes to asthma. Eventually, the disease has its say. I can sprint, or I can run at a reasonable pace for miles. I can't do both simultaneously, and we had been running for a couple of minutes now. My batteries were going to go dead, and soon. Sweat trickled down my face from the exertion, and I looked over at Red. Our eyes met for a panicked half second.

And then I tripped.

The impact was jarring and painful, starting with my arm and elbow as I hit the rock of the floor, going up through my shoulder as the momentum carried me on in a tumble. I rolled, but then everything went white for a moment as the back of my head bounced, just once. I blinked the white away and tried to remember what on Earth I had been running from. What had been the hurry? Why not just lie here and let whatever just take me? That wouldn't hurt as much, right?

I dimly heard Red shouting something that didn't make sense, the words echoing but the meaning stolen.

The world came back into focus and I froze as I gazed up into the mismatched eyes of the damned grim reaper ... or at least, a man who could fill that role. His face was scarred and disfigured and battered, and he looked like he survived just so he could go one more round, get one more scar. Scarred armor covered him, and he had what looked like a pressure bandage wrapped around one thigh. And he held a rifle big enough to be a threat to small aircraft and armored vehicles.

Grim Reaper stepped past me, giving me a single glance that seemed to weigh my worth in a single moment and found me completely beneath his notice. He raised his weapon and took aim down the way we had just come, muttering under his breath the whole way, just low enough I couldn't hear. Red reached me, said something to Grim Reaper. He growled something back but the words just weren't clicking anymore.

Lips moved, but everything echoed, hollow, garbling the meaning . My brain rebooted slowly, and I remembered just what we had been running from.

Oh. Right. Zombies.

Red helped to haul me up, but the world spun again, and I had to lean on her heavily to keep from falling over. My chest hurt and the world had gone from the white agony of pain, to greying around the edges of my vision instead. Thunder sounded behind as Grim Reaper fired and we looked back a moment, and got a good look as the first zombies chest and head exploded, sending its arms bouncing in the corridor and the rest of the torso flopping back like a land bound fish.

Red paled, and I felt sick, and we turned and hurried along as fast as we could, but at this point it felt like my legs were made of lead and each step took a costly expenditure of willpower to keep going.

The tunnel ended in a door that didn't match the surroundings and as we passed through a second doorway, dozens of other voices assaulted us. The tightness in my chest made it hard to focus on anything but the stark difference from rough rock and strange metals to what reminded me of the inside of a submarine or naval ship, with glowing controls.

A short blonde woman bobbed into view, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, a long scrape along her jaw. "Kelly! Where have you…." She trailed off as she looked at me.

Red….no, Kelly, her name was Kelly, gasped. "Jenny, little help."

"Rolston, get over here!" The blonde shouted as she ducked under my other arm. "What's wrong with him….god, his lips are turning blue!"

Shadows continued to eat away at my vision till there was nothing left. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move and it was getting just so hard to be scared of a dream. I just wanted to stop. As the two women lowered me onto something soft and warm, the only thing I could think was that I would finally stop running and rest.

And then someone jabbed me in the shoulder with a needle. I tried to flinch out of reflex, but it was just too much effort. But the pain didn't stop with the needle. Suddenly my entire arm, my neck and my chest burned just under the skin as whatever I had been injected with went to work.

I shrank in on myself, curling up and unable to stop from coughing as I gasped in huge lungsful of air. The burning sensation started to fade after a moment, the fire ants scurrying off to torture someone else.

I blinked several times as my vision started to slowly come back into focus. Kelly stood next to the bed on one side, while on the other side, a maternal woman stared at a display just above my head, her gray hair in disarray and tucked hastily back from her face.

"Heart rate is returning to normal, and his lungs seem to be clearing. I will need to run some tests later, but he should be fine for now," the other woman said, looking over at Kelly. "What happened?"

"I don't know. We were the last ones to get back. I didn't realize he was having problems until he tripped."

"Alright, well, he's stable for now. Keep an eye on him. I suspect he'll have some questions. Did any other colonists make it?"

Kelly's voice dropped to a whisper. "I don't think so. We were the last ones on board. "

The doctor didn't answer after that, just looked down at me then back at Kelly and turned away. I heard a clunk as she busied herself with something on a tray a few feet away. Kelly seemed to deflate a bit as she leaned against the wall, her eyes closing.

I pushed myself carefully up to a sitting position.

It hurt some more, but nothing like right after the injection. My lungs had skipped the normal post-asthma attack recovery time, and I could breath completely normally.

"So, your name is Kelly?" I finally ventured, turning to face her.

Her eyes snapped open, looked a little unfocused for a moment before settling on me. She paused like she needed to gather her thoughts before she finally answered and extended her hand towards me. "Yeoman Kelly Chambers. Its nice to meet you, Mister…"

I felt my face screw up in disgust at the title. "My name is Micah. Mr. Moore would be my father, not me."

A genuine smile cracked her professional exterior a moment. "Alright, it's nice to meet you, Micah. How are you feeling?"

I considered that a moment, letting my bruised excuse for grey matter take it's time cataloging the damage. "Headache, enough bruises for two people, and whatever I got injected with is still burning like hell, but I can breathe so there is that. " I shrugged, and the pain in my shoulder forced me to stop the motion halfway, "And I did something to my shoulder. You?"

"Glad to be alive. Tired, but besides that, I think I'm intact, at least on the outside."

I mentally filed her response away. She wasn't okay, but I didn't want to push. Instead I looked around. "Where are we?" I raised one hand to stop the obvious answer, "I mean, yes, we are in Medical, but where is Medical located?"

"The SSV Normandy, " she said, but didn't elaborate. "I'm not sure how they got it here, but we were on a mission to stop the Collectors. The ones that stuck us in those pods. The ship was attacked, and some of us..." She stopped, shaking her head. "They didn't get the commander, and he must have taken the ship back. I don't know much else."

"Well, does the commander have a name?"

That earned me a classic "are you stupid" look. Or maybe she was trying to decide just how many hits to my head I had taken. "Commander Shepard," she said carefully.

That meant nothing to me, but clearly it was supposed to. "Oh, okay."

Kelly stared me with an intensity that normally reserved for studying complex math or science problems. I looked away.

"So, what happened back there? When we got you down here, you had almost completely stopped breathing."

"I have asthma." I said. I started to shrug out of habit, but halted the motion before it became painful. . "Exercise induced, as well as a few other things. I haven't had a attack that bad in years though. "

That thought, now that I had spoken it aloud, nagged at me. This didn't feel like a dream. This felt way too real. I didn't have time to continue that line of thought though, as a tingling pressure of someone's attention on me drew my attention back to the doctor and Kelly. Kelly's eyes were asking questions that she didn't seem sure how to word. Chakwas, on the other hand, had turned around to face me, her arms crossed and her eyes narrowed.

"...what?" I looked between them, "I mean, what did I say?"

"There hasn't been a documented case of asthma in an adult in eighty years," Chakwas said flatly. "Even in the colonies."

"Um, what?" I asked, feeling stupid. "I mean, I don't need an inhaler now, whatever you injected me with worked wonders, but I have asthma. I've always had it."

"Dr. Chakwas, I think he's telling the truth. Or at least what he believes to be the truth," Kelly said carefully. Her tone annoyed me, and I opened my mouth to say something else, but the doctor cut me off.

"Tightness in your chest, lips turning blue, couldn't catch your breath, no matter how fast you were breathing," she rattled off.

I shut my mouth and nodded.

She scowled at at me. "There are several other conditions that mimic asthma symptoms. I gave you a targeted muscle relaxant and bronchodilator, which would relieve a great many of them. But you can not have asthma. It's impossible."

"I've had it since I was, like, four," I said, starting to feel my temper rising as I swung my legs off the side of the bed to face her. "I'm not lying, and the implications that I am are a bit insulting."

I started to say something else, but everything around us shook, and I had to catch myself by grabbing the bedframe and wall to keep from falling. Kelly snaked her arm around something that resembled a construction arm to keep standing, and Dr. Chakwas caught herself on the end of the other bed.

I looked at them both as my pulse jumped. "And that would be..."

A second thump rattled through the ship and this time I sprawled as my grip slipped. The other two didn't fare much better, or so I gathered from the sound coming from where Kelly had been standing. My head throbbed as I pulled myself back up. "Okay, really, what the hell was that?"

On the far side of the room, a panel on the desk lit up and a man's voice spilled out of it. "Doctor Chakwas, we have wounded from the ground team coming in."

Doctor Chakwas pulled herself back to her feet. "Thank you, Joker. How many? "

"Not sure. Thane sounded a bit distracted and I didn't want to play twenty questions when people were shooting at him."

"Alright, thank you." Doctor Chakwas picked up a small medical kit and handed it to Kelly. "Go meet them at the airlock, give this to Mordin if he's not injured himself. I'll stay here and get ready for anything more serious."

She turned to me. "You, just stay out of the way please. We'll talk about your medical history later."

I finished standing and glowered back at her. "Fine."

I am arguing with a freaking figment of my imagination. This is a freaky real feeling dream, that's all. Just stop it, Micah.

I had started to study the medical equipment around me—deciding I had no idea what any of it was for— when the door to medical hissed open. I turned to look and met the gaze of another alien, the second since the start of this madness.

He was thin, but not weak, like he was made of whipcord and sinew. His green skin looked more like a snake's to me, rough and dry, and his eyes were very large dark things that tracked every movement. He moved with a dancer's grace, light on his feet.

"Doctor Chakwas, Kasumi needs immediate care," he said, his voice humming with a strange harmonic, like a buzzing sound with each word. And then I saw his burden.

She had been burned. Her arm and leg looked red and blistered, her clothing and armor in charred tatters on that side of her body. The wounds oozed and she let out a pathetic whimpering cry as the green skinned alien set her down on the first available bed.

I ducked past him and out of medical, stopping and sliding down the wall not far from the elevator, my breath coming sharp and fast and panicked.

Horribly burned girl.
Freaking Aliens.
Tech Zombies.
No recorded cases of asthma.

Where the hell am I?