28 days later
[Todd]
I sit up in my bed and wake up again from the nightmare. It's hot and I'm sweating hard so I take off my soaked shirt, which leaves me in my boxers. I look over to the bed across from me. I sigh in relief. Good. Vi's still asleep. I've been keeping the dream a secret from Ben and her for a couple weeks now. Ben always keeps to himself downstairs, and I usually fall asleep after Vi, so it's not particularly hard. I lie down and feel the dampness of the mattress on my shoulder blades and arch my back. Gross, I think, but my shirt is worse, so I ease up and I think, the only thing that seems to calm me down after having the nightmare.
Sometimes I can go back to sleep again, but sometimes I lay awake until the morning. And sometimes the nightmare comes back.
Anyway, I shake the thought. I think about how life is going. Bradley, the new President, (did I mention earlier?) announced me waking up the day we moved, about five days after I actually did, the same time he announced the tragedy of the exploration party. I think about how now I have people wanting to meet me all the time, and whenever I go into town, people and their noise sort of freezes and locks on to me, the undeserved titles War hero and occasionally even Savior floating around everybody's heads. Which is all annoying. Then I think about Vi, how She's adjusting to normal life, and how much I'm getting used to it again after a long time. Things that a year ago were basic needs and as recently as six or seven months ago seemed like luxuries are starting to feel normal to me again. I think about how Haven is being rebuilt, slowly but surely. I think about how I'm making friends with Lee, who visits pretty much every morning, how we have more in common than we expected. I think about my birthday tomorrow. I think about how beautiful Vi's gotten, how much she's grown, how I've taken to calling her Vi most of the time, not Viola; and how she kind of likes it.
And then I think about the nightmare again. And before I can stop and catch myself, I can't, because it's too late. Like it's been teetering on the edge of my mind all along and I've been keeping it out and I finally let it go. Like now it's fallen off a cliff into my head and can't be stopped, just falling, waiting for the half second before impact. It engulfs every inch of my noise, every memory, every happy thought. And it copies itself, like a virus. And before I know it, I'm dreaming it even though I'm not asleep, paralyzed in my bed.
It's different every time even though it's always the same. It feeds on every positive thing about me, and then destroys it all. It chants COWARD and BOY and WORTHLESS over and over like Aaron used to but worse, if that's even possible. I'm breathing heavy and sweating as much as my skin will dare. After it gets rid of every last bit of self worth I've ever had, it starts attacking those around me. It shows me on the run a year ago, Hearing explosions and gunshots coming from my old house. It shows me memories of Cillian and of Ben. Cillian, dying, exactly how I imagined it, then images that Davy used to show me, the ones about him killing Ben, then an extra memories that haven't really happened, ones of Ben dying in various ways, all of them painful, all of them slow, and I'm forced to watch. Then it goes after Viola.
It's the one almost-happy part of the dream. It's the one part of the dream where I think it's the end, where it instills false hope, like the hope Vi and I felt being shattered when we first got to Haven, and she was shot. AND YOU ALWAYS FALL FOR IT TOO, LIKE THE LITTLE BOY YOU ARE, says the dream. It puts me and Vi in a sunny field, sharing a meal, and then suddenly a black cloud wraps around her and lifts her upward. I run after her, she's screaming and kicking and squirming as hard as she can. I try to always to keep my eyes on her, but doing that forces me to look up at the sun, and it blinds me a bit. I look away to recover, just for a second, but when I look back up, she's gone, blue sky and sun replaced by a dark cloud and behind it two sinister red eyes. The cloud forms a hand, tracing something blurry that I can't quite read in big fiery letters on the ground in front of me. And then it's gone.
My mattress is about as wet and sticky as my shirt now, so I opt to take my blanket and put it down on the floor. I creep downstairs to get a small fan. I hear Ben's sleeping noise, dreamless at the moment, as I go by. I get the fan and head back to my room, plugging it into the socket next to my blanket and put it on a low setting, so it doesn't make too much noise. I lie down on my side on top of the blanket, and wrap some of it from the edge around my back and my shoulder. Finally, I get some sleep.