Nightmare

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

I woke, eyes half-lidded and bleary, to the familiar, intrusive whine of the front door opening. Nothing important. I rolled over, closing my eyes and sinking into the lulling drift of my half-asleep mind gradually spiralling to blissful emptiness. Like a lake stilling to a smooth calm after being disturbed by a pebble, before violently erupting as a metaphorical boulder crashed through it.

—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

Awareness came to me with an involuntary gasp and sweat-soaked PJs clinging to my body. Something was wrong. It blared through my ears like a looming predator, muffled by distance but unrelenting in pursuit. Why wasn’t it stopping?

I swallowed, ignoring the uncomfortably damp sheets, as I rolled to the edge to grab my phone. A bright glow of the screen later only worsened the trepidation clawing its way towards my heart. She never comes back this late.

I swallowed again, now noticing my parched throat and dry lips. It had never done that before, but I knew what it meant. It meant the bad guys had come back. They can’t be here, bad things happen when they come.

I was well and truly panicking now.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. She’d said so. ‘No one would dare rob with the increased security. The alarm was warning for them, not us,’ she’d said. I felt a hint of hope as I remembered her words. Maybe no one had a chance to reset it yet.

I considered doing it myself but shouting from old Ben decided the matter for me.

My heart raced, throbbing with an ever growing sense of dread slowly consuming me as I honed in on the low, masculine timbre of another's voice that decidedly wasn’t Jacob's or Eian's. Then the struggle started.

Decidedly wooden thuds and angry clangs preceding a piercing bang that squashed all thoughts of aid. A sound so foreign yet so intimately familiar that it inspired only one thought: run. Yet I cowered still, with legs like lead. Heavy and mostly unresponsive to my urges, only managing a pitiful tremble no matter how desperate I tried.

Can I do anything? I thought as I scrambled through the recesses of my mind for anything. Yet silence prevailed with only the unrelenting beep persisting.

Darkness set in abruptly the dim glow of my smart phone went out, a solution presenting itself like divine intervention. Trying to calm my unsteady hands, my mind continued to whirl as I stared at the mobile, the small device suddenly unwieldy and estranged in my hands.

I tried gathering the shattered vestiges of resolve that lay scattered and submerged, but each attempt was reset by a quaking bang after 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 suppressing the very environment around it. The lake bowed away from it, forming a spherical depression, and, with it, my fear. I was ready, until I wasn't. A shriek blasted through the ball, shattering it like a meteor through a golf ball before impacting the body below. Water whipped into a frenzy as waves formed and clashed chaotically, the larger ones consuming the smaller before collapsing and beginning a new.

The boy 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.

I am Mikael and my mother died 3 years ago.