1 Dream

The dark chapped lips of an inanimate body quivered. Cold air was sucked in through her mouth the next second. And seconds afterwards, she coughed due to the abrupt intake of air. Her eyes opened wide, red and bloodshot, while her body violently jolted out, chest heaving heavily. She was struggling to breath...

After what seemed like a torturous half an hour, she regained her normal breathing. Her insides still hurt every time she breathed in. Like the time when she had a high fever, it had been just like this but the pain this time was more agonizing than ever. The girl slowly closed her eyes, relaxing the muscle tension all over her body, and breathed out.

Her eyes opened again, the red veins on her ball of eyes retreated greatly, the constrained and dried feelings had receded.

But the colours on the wall facing her were brown and orange. The orange was dancing. Black soothes waltzed later with grey ashes. Just then the smell of burnt wood wafted in through the cracks of the window near her. That was not the smell of a cooking in a pot that was burnt in the kitchen!

Getting up in an abrupt manner made her fall to the floor next to her bed. She spent no longer than 10 seconds to lift her butt up and hustled to the door leading outside. When she opened the door, what greeted her was a rain of arrows bursting down.

"Arghhh!"

Few people who were running in front of her caught the arrows, impaling them to their legs, chests and eyes. They became human porcupines - bloodied.

Her eyes got bigger at the shocking scene, but soon retained a weird calmness. As some unfortunate people got a critical hit and stumbled to death on the spot, some others just continued to grit their pain and scampered off.

Looking at the stream of people running off to one direction, she swam right in and joined the flow.

She had thought that all this while, it had been such a long dream. It wasn't unusual for her to be in a scene just like a movie if she were dreaming. Soon afterwards, she would just wake up with a headache.

But the pain on her shoulder just reject her initial hypothesis. Usually if she were punched in the abdomen while in a boxing ring, the pain would come and swiftly go. Don't ask why would she dream of a UFC, battling against another boxer with a burly body. The thing is she had just taken a close look at her shoulder to discover that it was cut deeply. The raining arrows from before had not left her unarmed!

'The cut hurts? It still hurts?!'

She definitely felt a pang of pain when an incoming arrow shot through her before.

Fortunately, the arrow had only grazed her shoulder a bit but actually leaving an open wound where she could see her flesh. The situation in her environment was in a dire state as she followed other people scrambling off to save dear lives. The fire on every house raged on.

Wails and agonized screams filled the background. At times like this, she couldn't register the scripts of the people yelling around her. In a such chaotic situation, she wouldn't have time to address the wound, nor even have a look at it.

One habit she honed in her dreams, run, run away from dangerous things!