5.| Echoes Of The End

Before The Fall

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The same nightmare I've had for the past two years returns. The one where my father is a monster. 

He wheels me on a gurney through a hallway with a dozen dim fluorescent lights flickering on the ceiling above. They cast shadows on his face, hiding his eyes and his mouth. 

I know it's him because he's humming our favorite song. The one we used to belt out in the car on the way to my school. But right now I'm too scared to sing along. 

The notes sound off. His voice is wrong, it's twisted and eerie.

"Where are we going?" I ask him, fear gripping my chest.

"Don't worry. This is for the world, it starts with you, Ian." He says, and I shiver. It doesn't sit right with me.

It's the first time I'm terrified of my father. He's someone else. Someone dangerous.

I struggle against the straps that hold me down,  but I don't know why. I know it's a dream, and yet it feels so real. I lie to myself, saying my father would never hurt me. He loves me just as much as he loves Ivan.

So why am I so afraid?

He takes me to an unfamiliar room, and in my panic I manage to move my head and look around.

The walls are all metal, there's surgical equipment sitting on a table, and my father pushes a light over me that's so blinding it makes my eyes burn and water.

I blink back the tears. I can't breathe, and for a moment I feel as though I might pass out. But I don't, my blurred vision refocuses on him. 

The surgical mask he puts on his face is riddled with holes—eyes pitch black and mouth twisting into a toothy grin filled with rows of glittering sharp teeth. "Don't worry Ian, dad will take care of you." My father tells me and I feel something wet trickle down my pants leg, realizing in my frozen terror I wet myself.

I manage to free one arm and try to push him away, but he's stronger than me. He's always been stronger than me. Even when we used to jokingly tousle on the floor of my bedroom when I came home from school, he'd pin me down and I'd laugh until tears pricked my eyes.

But as he holds me down now, I'm not laughing, I'm shaking. It's almost like he enjoys my pain. He enjoys my suffering as he throws one arm across my chest–stopping me from fighting–and picks up a needle with the other. 

He jabs it into my neck and I gasp.

I try to yell but no sound comes out. He then picks up a scalpel and brings it close to my face. It glints in the light like a knife as I breathe through my nose hard, lips trembling something terrible.

"For the world Ian." He says, and I know what he's going to do next. 

He does it every time I have this dream. 

He cuts open my scalp and peels it back.

I feel every slice, every tear as I'm screaming until my throat is raw.

My body jerks around uncontrollably. My eyes roll in the back of my head, and I'm about to pass out. But before I do, he whispers in my ear.

"Don't come back here Ian. Don't trust them." But the sweet darkness beckoning me—the only thing that'll release me from this pain—makes me forget all about his cryptic words as I plunge into nothingness and everything goes black.

***

A hand shakes me awake from my nightmare. I sit up, panting and shivering. My shirt is drenched in sweat, clinging to my skin. The images of night terror still lingers in my mind hauntingly; the flash of my father's scalpel, the searing pain, the blood, and even his twisted grin.

He was supposed to love me, not hurt me. Why did he do it? Why did he abandon me and Ivan? I always wonder about these questions when I wake up, but I never find any answers. Maybe that's why the nightmares keep coming back.

I turn to look at the person who woke me up and see Rose's worried face. Her brown eyes are filled with concern.

She probably feels bad for interrupting my sleep after I spent most of the night guarding the door. But I need to be alert if I want to follow Zeke's plan. I can't afford to be weak or tired when all our lives are at stake. 

"I'm sorry," She whispers, tucking a curl behind her ear. "You were having a bad dream."

She must have heard me whimper in my sleep and seen the tears on my cheek. I always cry when I dream of him, because it feels so real. 

I try to smile and lie. "It's okay, I don't remember it anyway." I've become good at lying after hiding my feelings from Ivan. He doesn't need to know how much I miss our father, or secretly hate him for leaving us.

"Ian…" She reaches for my shoulder. "You know you can talk to me, right?"

Rose pries. She wants to know more about my dream, but I don't want to share it with anyone. It's too personal, too painful. I've learned to depend on myself and be strong and independent. 

"Stop," I shrug off her hand. "This is why I stopped talking to you in the first place."

She does what Jack does; tries to make me talk about my father. It won't help though. They act like I'm a puzzle they want to solve. But they don't get it. There's something that hurts every time I say his name out loud. 

I can think about him all I want. How he left me and Ivan alone, how he betrayed us. In my head. I fill the void with anger; telling myself we're all just a means to an end in this world.

Rose glares at me with hurt in her brown eyes. "You can't stay like this forever. You don't think I know it's hard?" She snaps at me and narrows her eyes.

"You don't understand…" I shake my head. "Every time someone brings him up, it's like I'm that fifteen year old boy again who just lost the most valuable thing in the world to them. I'm not a troubled teen because I'm heartless. I'm a troubled teen because I miss them."

The words sound foreign to me. I've never admitted how I felt about it before. I always acted like I was fine, like I didn't care what people thought of me. Like I wasn't afraid of becoming my mother. Maybe that's why I pushed everyone away and shut down my emotions.

But in the end, it doesn't matter. They still see me the same. A fragile boy ready to break just like his mother. 

Rose looks shocked at my admittance, hell, I am too. I can tell she's trying to hide it by nodding to give herself more time on how to respond. "So what are we going to do?" She plays it safe and settles on changing the subject. 

I scan the classroom. Everyone else is asleep, snuggled under desks or snoring in their chairs. 

The windows are black from the night, but the moonlight illuminates the snow swirling outside. It seems peaceful, but I know it's going to be hard when we get out there. The weather in the beginning of December is awful. I can't imagine escaping in the snow from hungry people who want to eat us alive. 

"I'm still thinking about it." I finally say, glancing over to her once more. I don't think I can bring myself to tell her about having to pick and choose who comes with us…or how it means I'm also choosing who lives and who dies.

She looks down at her phone for so long I think she didn't hear me.

"My mother texted me," Rose awkwardly says after a moment. "You remember Bobby?"

I do. He was Rose's father. A drunk and a jerk. Around the time when I still hung out with Rose and Zeke, we'd sometimes go to her house and play video games in her room.  Other times we'd stay up all night and head bang to rock music or play Just Dance until our legs gave out. 

That's how we all became friends in the first place, arguing about whether or not a girl could be good at gaming. But she proved us wrong by kicking our asses in Mortal Kombat three times in a row. 

I remember I was so pissed I threw my controller at the wall and broke it. Though in the end, we laughed it off and crowned her queen of Mortal Kombat. 

It was also the day me and Zeke realized how bad Rose's home life really was. We heard her father stumble in the house, her mother asking him where he'd been all night. 

He'd call her all kinds of bitches, say how useless she was and how it was never any of her business because he could do what he wanted. 

Rose always turned up the T.V to drown out the noise. But it didn't work for me. I had good hearing and my chair was always next to the door.

I'd hear it when things got ugly when her mother tried to stand up for herself, only to get hit and slapped around. After the fourth time, I started telling Rose and Zeke we should hang at my place instead. She didn't need to deal with that crap. None of us kids should.

"What happened? Did he hit her again?" I ask, worried.

Rose shakes her head. "No. No. Nothing like that." She's lying to herself and shaking too much to fool me. 

She never could handle the truth about Bobby's abuse. I know it's how she copes, but it's not healthy. I'm only seventeen, but I've seen too much to be naive. 

"Then what's going on?" 

Rose looks up from her phone and locks the screen. "She's in the hospital. She said she slipped and fell."

We both know that's a lie. She didn't slip and fall. She was probably pushed or beaten.

Tears fill her eyes, and I reach out to comfort her. But before I can, everyone's phone in the classroom rings. The same sound that happens when there's a statewide emergency text.

She wipes her eyes and we stare at each other for a moment, then run to the T.V.