I – when I was a child and even now – possessed the annoying tendency of having nightmares. My nightmares sometimes involved my parents; my mother’s carelessness and my father’s many sins. I sometimes had nightmares about myself destroying things – toys, cars, and shops – anything I could find. I could always see myself doing it and I was so afraid of myself – my eyes. I was like an entirely different person. I was a monster. Of course, when I was awake I suspected that I was a monster, but I wasn’t that kind of monster. I was the kind that played with its food. When I turned fifteen, I used to have nightmares all the time about Amelia; it was nothing symbolic or anything like that – I just saw her running and then bang. I learned to live with my terrors because no matter how hard I tried I knew that I couldn’t run away from the things in my head.
I was always perfectly astounded by how real nightmares seemed to be. Dreams were quite alright and never so vivid, and that is because they missed out on one crucial element of reality – fear. Nightmares appeared real because they scared the hell out of me, however there was always some kind of hope that was hidden deep down inside that told me not to cry – that I would wake up and the pain would be gone. In this particular nightmare, I was afraid to say that something was definitely different.
I knew, as soon as it occurred, that I was having a nightmare, but that wasn’t the problem. What worried me was that I wouldn’t wake up – that’s what scared me. When my nightmare began, I was naked and alone, left to walk for ages on end upon a darkened desert road. The desert wind swept over me with a fierce and prickling chill, and the specks of sand that it carried bit into my bare skin like thousands of tiny ants. I was completely vulnerable. The wind and the sand covered everything and I had no shelter to hide behind, and no clothes with which to protect myself. Never before had I felt so abandoned like.
I raised my hands to cover my eyes in the hopes that I might be able to see ahead, and what I found in the distance was a house. The very first thing that appeared in my mind when I saw this house was just how thirsty I was. My mouth was completely dry – as dry as this damn desert. I needed water, and so I quickened my pace.
As I closed the distance between myself and this house, I began to see the damage that the desert had inflicted upon it. I could imagine that this would have been a wonderful house, in better days when the desert had no sand. Part of a fine estate, with two levels, richly painted timber, and a garden unlike anything I had ever seen. Now, the wood had been worn thin and the paint crackled, and all the beautiful plants with their vibrant shapes and pretty colours were now dead and decaying, and such a sad thing, too.
Although it was indeed sad that the house had been left in such a condition, there was a limit to which my parched throat would allow me to care. All I wanted was water, no – all I needed was water. And so, I stumbled on across the desert road, with sore feet from the gravel, sore skin from the sand, and sore eyes from the wind. I pressed on.
My greatest fear when I was finally at the front of the house was that the door would be locked. I considered knocking at first but then I remembered that I was completely alone, and so I pushed the door open and went inside. The inside of the house was completely stripped, surrounded by an eerie silence and a murky air. Upon the floor in the centre of the room was a dish of water, and without a second thought I ran over and drank, crying as the water trickled hastily down my chin. I had closed my eyes, and when the water was all gone I set down the dish and sighed. When I opened my eyes again, the dish was gone, and I was sitting over the blood-spattered corpse of Mr Brakewater, with a blade in my hand.
I screamed and hurled the knife away but it was too late to change anything. He just stared up at me with his cold expressionless eyes. I was covered in blood – my arms, my legs, my chest – and no matter what I did I couldn’t get it to go away. I stood up and ran for the door. When I stepped outside I was struck with a thick and deathly aroma. The desert was littered with skeletons, hundreds of them everywhere, their bones as dry and brittle as firewood. It could not be explained, but I knew that I was responsible for their deaths.
I awoke. I didn’t scream or anything like that, I just opened my eyes and took a very deep breath. I was lying in an incredibly comfortable bed, everything was clean, I heard a machine at work, and the air around me took on a certain chemical aroma. I sat up in my bed and the smell of the chemicals made my tummy rumble. I remember thinking: My god I’m hungry. I don’t think I care where I am right now so long as they have food… Hmm… food… that’d be nice… I felt like some sugary, like a doughnut. The more I thought of it the worse the craving became. If I don’t stop thinking about doughnuts I might just starve myself to death.
I suspected that I was in a hospital, or in some special room back at resistance headquarters. Outside the room, I could hear two voices, one belonging to Aizel and the other to Benson himself. They were talking, most likely about me.
“Now that the code is in our possession we have our chance to end this war.” That was definitely Benson. “We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”
“With all due respect, sir,” that was Aizel’s voice, “that code is still inside Jeannette’s head, and given everything that she’s been through, simply asking her won’t be enough.”
“Well if you had done your job properly and gotten the code from her when you were supposed to then we could have avoided all this.” Benson’s voice was hard and scolding. “Time to make it right. Get the doctors to wake her up if you need to but for god’s sake, get me that damn code!”
There was a long silence from Aizel, and then a solemn “Yes, sir.”
After that I heard Bernard’s footsteps slowly fade away, and then a new voice entered the conversation, one that was had an intelligent tone.
Aizel was the first to speak. “Doctor,” he said, “how is she?”
“Mrs Abigail should be waking up at any moment now,” replied the doctor. “Surprisingly they had dealt very little physical damage to her – uh, there is a cut across her bottom lip where she seems to have bitten herself, her right cheek is bruised and her blood pressure is through the roof, but other than that she’ll be recovered in no time…”
“Can I see her?” Aizel asked forwardly.
“Well,” said the doctor, “that’s just the thing. I said that she was okay physically, but psychologically she, well she must be traumatised by what they did to her in there. When she wakes up, I don’t know what her mental condition will be like…”
“What do you think will happen?” Aizel pushed.
“She… she may be untrusting at first, there may be signs of anxiety, perhaps depression, memory loss…”
Aizel stopped the doctor there, and I understood why. He was afraid that my trauma might have caused me to forget the code. I smiled. 6573-4532-7710-2169-3490. It was all still there.
“What do you mean memory loss?” Aizel was saying. I smiled behind the door.
The doctor was stuttering. “It’s just that,” he explained. “She might forget some things and she might not, the extent of which I cannot say.”
There was another very long pause – so long in fact that I thought one of them might have left. But then Aizel continued to talk. “Can I see her now?”
“Most certainly.” And then I heard the doctor’s footsteps fade away as the door to my room creaked open.
ns 172.70.126.21da2