R opened his eyes.
The sun was shining. The warmth of it tingled over his skin as he sat on the grey bench at the edge of the park. The trees were swaying in the warm spring breeze, full and green, and the sounds of bird song and laughter carried to him across the wide expanse of lush grass, spotted with yellow dandelions, as he watched a young family playing around an old oak tree.
A black lab sat nearby, his leash tied to a 'No Dogs Allowed' sign, next to an abandoned red bicycle. The dog watched him, panting, occasionally glancing over at the family as a child let loose with wild laughter.
"Hey buddy," R said, smiling. The dog tilted its head to the side and stared back.
R sighed and closed his eyes, leaning back on the bench as he soaked in the glow of the bright midday sun. The golden light sank in deep, thawing the deep chill at the core of his being.
It just felt good to be warm again.
"Hi Rowan," came a quiet voice to his left.
R turned his head. Beside him on the bench sat the young girl with bright brown eyes and curly auburn hair, cascading in a wild mass around her face. The sunlight made her pink jacket glow, as she played with the little brown bear in her hands.
R's heart sank.
"Crap," he muttered and flopped back against the bench. For a few bright moments he'd thought this was real, the sunshine, the happy family, the goofy dog.
But it was just the fucking dream again.
"What are you going to do to me this time?" he snapped. "Bite my head off?" Brow furrowed in irritation, he slouched deeper against the bench.
The girl just laughed, and the sun seemed to flare in brightness and warmth. "No silly. I'm just glad you're here now. I was really worried you wouldn't make it."
R glanced over at her. Her smile was bright and sincere, and he suddenly felt bad for snapping.
"Sorry," he said with a sigh, and turned his face towards the sun again, determine to draw every bit of warmth he could from the dream while it lasted. He had been too cold before. Bitterly cold, and never wanted to feel that way again.
"That's okay. I haven't been very nice." She sighed, glancing down at the bear. "It's not all me doing that to you though. The dark thing makes me do things I don't want to do."
R frowned and looked over at her, "The dark thing?"
She nodded, "It doesn't like you very much."
A cloud drifted across the sun, snatching back the warmth he'd been basking so deliciously in. He straightened on the bench, his stomach twisting.
The dark thing. Was she talking about that creature he'd fought in his dream in the hospital? The thing Julie had said had taken him over? The thing that looked like a boney?
He'd never really been sure what to think about that moment in the hospital. Julie had described it in detail of course, and he remembered wrestling with a boney in his head. But he'd come to see it as a personality he'd manifested for the disease, to better wrap his brain around it. When he'd forced it out of himself, it had been because his body had beaten the infection.
But what if it wasn't just a disease? What if it was an actual entity, something with a mind, with a will, driving this whole thing?
"It's in my brother too," the girl continued. "He used to be nice. But it's been twisting him... changing him. He does very bad things now." As she spoke, her voice became a whisper, and R wrapped his arms around himself as the sunshine grew pale and thin.
Uh oh. This was where things usually went very bad, wasn't it?
Shit.
She suddenly reached out to grasp his arm, her eyes wide and intent. "Rowan, you have to promise me," she pleaded, and he instinctively tried to pull himself away, fearful of what would happen next. "Promise me you'll find some way to save him. After you kill me, find a way to save him."
R blinked, horrified. Kill her? She wanted him to kill her? After all this?
While he hadn't had much of a plan aside from finding her, there'd always been a part of him that thought he could help in some way. To somehow make up for what he'd done, everything he'd done - all of the terrible hurt he'd caused, by helping her.
And she just wanted to die? No way!
"I'm not going to kill you," he snapped, jerking his arm out of her grasp.
"But... you have to Rowan," she answered softly. "That's why you're here."
R shook his head frantically, "No, I'm here to help, not kill you. I'm not killing anyone. I've done too much of that."
Rachel's eyes welled with tears, and R shivered, suddenly terribly cold. Looking out at the park he saw why. Grey clouds had swallowed the sun, draining the color from everything around them.
A terrible dread engulfed him. Jesus, he couldn't feel cold again, he just couldn't. Not like that, the chill that had just eaten him, stripped him of thought and care. Whittled him down to nothing.
Dear god... please don't let me be that cold again.
"Stop making it cold, please," he whispered, still shivering.
The girl took his arm again, gently. "You can't save me Rowan, I know you want to, but you can't. You can save my brother though. Promise me you will."
R stared at her for a moment, then nodded with a sigh. "I'll try, okay? But I'm not killing you."
She frowned and shook her head, "You won't have a choice. I'm not like this anymore. I'm just an echo watching from somewhere very dark and very far away. I don't even know how this happened," she gestured to the space around them. "There was just a little bit of light, so I followed it, and found you. I got in your head, tried to talk to you, but got trapped in your memories. I'm somewhere I don't understand and I'm tired. I don't want to hurt people anymore. I hear them screaming and I can't stop."
A tear trailed down her cheek as her skin turned ashen. Dark shadows swallowed her eyes as they turned wolfish and alien, and the hand on his arm grew cold.
" ... please stop me..." she whispered, in a voice as dry as bone.
"Jesus!" he yelled, and frantically tried to release the girl's icy grip on his arm. Fear thundered in his chest as the world around them grew darker, colder and dead. The family disappeared, their laughter lost as a sigh in the wind. The dog was snarling at the sky, its exposed insides raw and glistening.
Fuck, wake up! Now!
But he couldn't. The world pressed in on him, too real and immediate, too bitingly cold to ignore.
The girl's head tilted suddenly and she shuddered, her wolfish eyes widening in terror.
"... oh god... it's here... I can't..."
She screamed then, a sound that rose to an inhuman screech as her head jerked back and her mouth opened impossibly wide.
The dead skin of her face split violently as something black and withered pushed through, its jagged teeth gnashing the air as it clawed its way out of the girl's now shredded corpse.
R jerked back, a wild scream escaping his throat, and found himself trapped in the thing's grip as it rose from the bench to tower over him.
It was a nightmare, a thing of twisted bone and blackened flesh stretched over something that had only the faintest resemblance to a human skeleton. Jagged, jutting angles of bone protruded from every limb. Its eyeless skull swiveled towards him as it straightened, pulling R to his feet as he tried to wrest his arm free.
The air around R grew colder and rank with the stench of decay as it slowly drew him in, the thing's impossibly long, thin hand burning like ice against his skin, siphoning the heat from his body.
A voice of grinding stone emerged from the dark maw of the creature, through jagged teeth wrapped in shriveled flesh.
"...hello again..."
The air snapped with frost as it spoke, and R's panicked breaths drifted like lost ghosts before his face. The terrible chill at his core was growing as the creature held him fast, and he closed his eyes, trying desperately to ignore the pain of the thing's touch, trying to reject the reality his senses were drenched with.
WAKE THE FUCK UP!
"...no... I think not..."
R yelled, his eyes popping open, as the creature's grasp tightened like a trap around his forearm and it drew him closer still. He cringed back from the thing's face as it leered down towards his own, his heart thudding desperately in his frozen chest. The black pits of its eye sockets yawned before him like hungry mouths.
"...you stole... so many from me..." it snarled, lips pulling back from jagged teeth, "...you will not... take these two..."
"...they are MINE..."
The creature's other arm shot out, moving so swiftly R had no time to react, and its skeletal hand closed about his throat, the brittle fingers like daggers of ice against his flesh.
R choked, and desperately tried to pry himself free as the thing lifted him from the ground. The creature's fingers were frozen around his throat, and he shivered violently as it leeched the last remnants of warmth from his body.
"...as you... once were..."
The cold was inescapable. It claimed him, as it had so many years ago when the infection took hold, numbing his body, slowing his heart. He gasped desperately as his eyes rolled to the sky, trying to hold on to life, his mind knowing this was a dream, but his body screaming that he was dying!
Help!
Eyes wide, R shuddered as his heart trembled and stopped. All thought, all fear and feeling left him as his body sagged in the creature's cold grasp and hung there for a time that had no meaning.
Then his head rose in small jerks and he met the eyeless gaze of his maker, his own eyes pale and empty.
"...that's... better..." the thing purred, drawing a boney talon along R's grey cheek. Where it touched, ugly black veins rose, spidering across his dead skin before vanishing again.
"...no pain... no sorrow... no guilt..."
Slowly, it lowered R to his feet, and he stood, his body quiet, his head hanging heavily.
"...better not to feel..."
R stared at nothing, feeling nothing, as the creature drew a boney finger across his forehead, silencing the faint stirring of anguish in the depths of his mind.
Better...
"...better without her..."
Without...
Julie?
R's head rose.
"...no..." he sighed through a dead throat.
The creature reached out and wrapped long twig-thin fingers around his jaw, and leaned in until they were inches apart.
"...you fight... you struggle... for her... always for her..."
Something had stirred in R, the faintest flicker of life as he'd thought of Julie's name, and saw her smiling face in his mind. He'd started to come back to himself, but the thing's touch had stolen his thoughts again, leaving only silence.
Stillness.
The creature's mouth twisted into something akin to a grin.
"...I will take her... and you... will stop fighting..."
Under the thought smothering grasp of the skeleton, something sparked within R's heart at its words. The spark flared quickly and grew, and R found himself thinking again... feeling again.
Pale eyes rising under brows curled in anger, he reached up, grasping the creature's talons with his own grey hands.
"...you... WON'T!" he roared, his voice suddenly stronger as he ripped the creature's hand from his jaw, breaking the brittle bones of its fingers as he wrenched it away from himself.
The thing jerked back with a screech, and R felt a momentary rush of triumph.
Then it laughed, and the horrible face lowered towards him as the grating echoes of its mirth faded.
"... you amuse me..." it growled, and its other hand swung forward and rammed into R's chest.
R felt a tremendous impact, and found himself suddenly landing hard, his limbs flying as he rolled, thirty feet from where he'd been standing. Something had snapped when he'd hit the ground, and he looked down to see his left arm hanging crookedly.
But there was no pain, because he was still dead.
As the black thing stalked forward, R rose to his feet, his arm hanging oddly at his side.
"...it is a pity," it rasped, "I cannot truly claim you... through the dream. Not... like last time..."
It neared, and R stood his ground, feeling the invulnerability of death, anger roaring inside.
"... this is, after all..." The creature stared down at him, its shriveled face twisting in a wicked smirk, "...just an illusion..."
R gasped. His heart had suddenly started thundering within him, drowning his senses in the pulses of life, of hot blood and trembling breath.
And pain.
"Fuck," he groaned, crumpling over as his chest and arm flared in sharp agony, his nerves reignited. He fell to his knees, gasping against a ribcage that felt crushed as he cradled his broken arm.
Jesus, this had to stop. This thing was going to keep torturing him in this dream unless he woke himself up, but he had no idea how to do that. How could he pull himself from a world that felt so fucking real?
Could he change the world instead?
As the creature's boney hand closed over his throat again, R focused his mind, through the haze of pain and its frigid grasp, on a weapon. A gun, in his hand, imagining the cold metal against his palm, its heavy weight.
The problem was he'd never handled a gun in his life. The thoughts would not coalesce, and he found it hard to concentrate as his body shuddered, the chill settling in deep once again.
The thing lifted him from the ground, and R went still, his mind desperately focused on materializing a knife, long and sharp instead. The cold wrapped around his core, snatching his breath, and scrambling his thoughts.
"...will we do this again?... you seem to fear the cold..."
R looked up, his eyes glazed with pain, the thoughts in his head slipping, but still trying to feel the blade in his hand.
It was cold... he couldn't breathe. Why couldn't he breathe?
Where was Julie?
Too cold.
"...when you wake... I will be waiting..."
As his eyes drooped shut, R suddenly started, jerking in the creature's arms. No, he couldn't fucking die like this again! With a strangled moan, his good hand clenched into a fist, and his eyes widened as he felt his fingers close around something in his palm. Something that hadn't been there a moment ago.
Without questioning it, he swung his arm up, the movement sloppy and frantic, and embedded the impossible blade in the side of the creature's skull.
The thing's hands jerked opened reflexively, dropping R to the ground, where he landed hard. Moaning, he pulled himself away as the creature fell with a strangely soft sigh, crashing to the pavement where it lay still.
R coughed as he lay against the hard road, his body trembling in pain, still feeling the frigid chill from the thing's touch.
He could see it from where his head rested against the rough pavement. The knife he'd somehow conjured up was sticking out of the thing's jagged skull, coated now in thick black blood that dribbled from the wound.
Was it dead? It had to be... it hadn't moved at all.
Slowly, grunting against the pain, R got to his knees and stood, cradling his broken arm.
The thing did not stir.
Why hadn't he woken up?
R slowly shuffled over to the skeletal nightmare and looked down at the dark pits the creature had for eyes. Black blood pooled in a dark halo around its head.
"Fuck you," he whispered as he stood there, listing slightly. "I'll never let you take her."
The withered skin around its bottomless eye sockets twisted inwards as its blackened lips pulled back.
And it laughed.
"...too late..."
With ferocious speed the creature struck, its jaws closing over R's face. He had a trembling moment to register the stench of rot and spilled blood, the pain of a multitude of teeth scissoring into his skin and muscle, and pressure beyond anything he'd ever experienced.
Before the thing shattered his skull.