I had a dream once. I woke up in a classroom, sitting on a chair while my head rested on the table in front of me. I looked around and saw in front of me a rather plain-looking yet somehow pretty young woman in front of me wearing a familiar uniform. Her back was to the wall, while I had the windows to my back.
Her eyes had a rather empty look inside them. She was blinking and breathing, but she was motionless and silent. I then saw a mirror to my left. I looked at it. I saw my high school self wearing what I presumed was a male version of the girl's uniform. I then looked around one more time to find that the windows displayed a rather surprising image.
We were in space. Wait, space?
And then I remembered everything. The patrol. The initial contact with the Taliban. The shot that put me down. I then went to the door and tried to open it, but it was locked. I tried kicking and beating it open with whatever I could find in the room, but to no avail.
I then tried getting through to the girl who was seated in front of me earlier, but she kept staring forward, her still-blinking eyes remaining completely lifeless.
I then tried breaking the windows, but to no avail. Sometime later, I found a hole in the wall to the right hand side of the room. It was big enough for my head to get through. I looked in to find something distressing.
There was what appeared to be a girl trying desperately to get a response out of a guy who was in the exact same situation as the girl in the room I was in. As I looked and listened to what was happening, I saw that their uniforms were just like the ones me and the motionless girl were wearing. The guy looked somewhat like the girl in my room. The girl trying to get through to him, meanwhile, looked and sounded very familiar.
I then decided to take a chance and call out to her.
She looked around and looked around her room trying to find where my voice came from. After a while, she found my head sticking out of the hole in the wall, and called my name.
The truth then hit me in the face like a bullet. Her auburn hair was tied into a ponytail by a somewhat big ribbon, and I could see the shine of her emerald eyes. The girl was my wife, who looked the way she did when we were in high school. I could only watch as she ran towards the hole, with tears in her eyes. She tried to take my head in her arms, but then decided to press her lips against mine instead.
I just stood there and cried while she told me how much she missed me. She then asked me how our kids were doing, what happened to me, and how did I end up here, but not before telling me her current predicament. When I was almost finished answering her questions, the doors to our rooms suddenly opened and out of them came around ten heavily-armored men in black armed with M4A1 carbines. They wasted no time pulling me away from the hole in the wall, and I could see that the men in her room were also pulling her away, forcing her to get back in her seat. I was also dragged back to the seat I was initially seated in. Then suddenly, I heard a short burst of automatic gunfire and the dying screams of my wife.
Rage overtook me as I knocked down the men in black, stomped one's face in, grabbed his guns and gear, and started to fight back. My mouth didn't say anything but insults, death threats and curses as I shot some more men in black dead until I reached my wife's room.
Her dying words pleaded for me to stay with her as I kept on killing dozens upon dozens of the men in black. Then, one of the dying men in black hit me with an entire magazine of 5.56 before expiring. I crawled towards my dying wife and reached for her hand as I was expiring. My hand reached hers just as six men in black entered the rooms with their rifles pointed at us.
They finished us off with a short burst of fire, but not before I shot each and every one of them with the last of my ammo. I awoke from the dream just as I heard another group of men in black go inside.