Nightmare

Mikael awoke bleary-eyed to a strange, incessant noise downstairs. Naturally, his first instinct was to roll over and return back to the comfort of sleep, letting the drowsiness overtake him before it faded away entirely. It came to him with familiar ease, used to his single mother’s late night escapades as he was, the lulling drift of his half-asleep mind gradually spiralling to complete emptiness. Like the half-hearted roiling at the surface of a lake stilling to a smooth calm, before violently erupting as he was jolted alert by an incorrigible sense of wrongness. It blared, not beeped.

It was supposed to beep whenever the door opened, not blare. It had never done that before. Ever. He rolled to his side and a bright glow of a screen later only worsened the trepidation clawing its way towards his heart. It was all wrong.

He swallowed, now noticing his parched mouth and dry lips. Was it a false alarm? No one had dared rob them since they increased security, the anti-theft alarm was more a warning to uninformed invaders than it was for them. Should I go check? Shouting from old Ben decided the matter for him.

His heart raced, throbbing with the ever growing sense of dread slowly consuming him as he honed in on the low, masculine timbre of another's voice that decidedly wasn’t Jacob's or Eian's. Then the struggle started. Wooden thuds and angry clangs preceding a piercing bang that squashed all thoughts of aide. A sound so foreign yet so intimately familiar that it inspired only one thought: run. Still, his legs felt like lead, heavy and mostly unresponsive to his desperate urges, only managing a pitiful tremble.

Can I do anything? He thought as he scrambled through his mind. Darkness set in abruptly as the dim glow of his smart phone went out, a solution presenting itself like divine intervention. Trying to calm his unsteady hands, his mind continued to whirl as he stared at his mobile, the small device suddenly unwieldy and estranged in his hands. He tried to gather the vestiges of resolve scattered and submerged, but each attempt was offset by bang after inordinate bang. Again and again they resurfaced and assembled, only to be violently flung away and drowned. But it wasn't without hope, each attempt brought them closer than the last before they finally reunited into one coherent whole.

It floated imperiously above the lake like a ball of fiery rage supressing the very environment around it. The lake bowed away from it, forming a spherical depression, and, with it, his fear. He was ready, until he wasn't. A shriek blasted through ball, shattering it like a meteor through a golf ball before impacting the body below. Water was whipped into a frenzy as waves formed and clashed chaotically, the larger ones consuming the smaller before collapsing and beginning a new.

He remained like that for a time, not noticing the deafening sirens climaxing before giving way to the flashing of red and blue light piercing the dark of his room. Nor did he notice the rush of footsteps meticulously checking each room of the large, three-story house. If anything, when an officer entered the room, gun briefly pointed at the teary-eyed, sweat-soaked, trembling teenager, he felt more muddled than anything else. Each second pounded on his mind like hundreds of other seconds merging into one continuous beating that prevented any stray thoughts. Then, with a pop like a bursting bubble, everything came rushing back once again.

He was Mikael and his mother died 3 years ago.