Storms of Future Past Books One through Four

Chapter 5-1

Chapter 5

A huge, echoing boom kicked off the dream next time.

Anne stood with her back against the door to the library, and she knew without trying that the door wouldn’t open for her, not yet. She didn’t want to be here, not here. The same library with the awful moving book was the last thing she wanted to see.

Anne took a few steps forward, determined to control something before bad things started to happen. Everything was so much larger than before, so big that her mind cried at trying to understand. The rows still went on as far as she could see in every direction, and the shelves again stretched so tall she couldn’t make out the top of them against an invisible ceiling. The building still felt bigger, somehow.

Maybe this library was as big as the whole wide world.

If that was true, what if she got lost and couldn’t find the door again?

The same stinky sweat covered her body, and Anne felt drops running down her scalp under her hair. She knew she’d wake up from the dream. She always had, even from the worst nightmare.

Still, this had the disturbing hint of reality, like she could open her eyes a thousand times and never be able to leave this place.

Well, she’d just have to stay within sight of the door and find something else to read. Eventually the door would have to open. Anne turned the opposite way from where she’d gone the first time, when she’d had to climb over a thousand chairs and tables to get away from the huge reference books that now looked much taller than she was.

She spotted a shelf full of picture books only a few steps away from the door. These were all small enough to hold in her hands, books for children. Several tiny, brand new tables and chairs sat on a rug covered with blocks of vivid colors, and a fake hot air balloon in the same colors hung overhead.

Anne was her full size and age of eleven even in the dream, a little too old for such things. But she felt safe looking at them.

Most of all, and no matter how old she was, she needed something happy to look at. A clammy, dark feeling that something awful was going to happen kept rising up from under her bare feet, creeping slimy and cold up her ankles.

Anne needed something good to make her smile, to make her feel warm and silly. Not more terrible movies from the book about the future.

She took one more step away from the door, deciding losing sight of it just for a second would be worth the risk. Stepping under the balloon and onto the warm carpet dulled the echoes of the vast space around her, like she’d walked into a safe little tent. She pulled a bright book out from the low shelf that didn’t even come up to her waist, one she remembered checking out herself just a few years ago. It was one about the moon.

She’d driven her parents crazy asking them to read it and renew it until they’d bought her a copy. She moved around the knee-high tables until she could see the door, then sat in the much too small chair. Her knees felt like they were as high as her shoulders. Anne laughed, the sound echoing too much for inside her sheltered tent.

The noise escaped into the unseen roof and bounced around, getting louder for several seconds before fading away. She was afraid a thousand little girls were laughing, just out of sight where she couldn’t see them.

Anne squeezed her eyes closed tight, knowing the doorway out of the dream still wouldn’t work yet. She vowed to keep quiet, opened her eyes, and started to read.

The words didn’t quite make sense, but the soft, pastel drawings of flowers and castles and sweet animals were just what she needed to see. She gradually forgot the door, the awful book on the other side of the library, and the gigantic space all around her.

Her feet again felt like they were sinking into cold, sticky mud, right through the cheerful carpet, but she managed to ignore that for a while.

A loud click from behind her made Anne jump. She turned and blinked at a gigantic old wooden television on a metal cart she hadn’t noticed before. Her teachers sometimes rolled a TV into the classroom for them to watch, like when the space shuttle launched, but this one was way too big.

Anne recognized her Gemaw’s old set, the one in a cabinet that was big enough to sit on the floor and still be waist-high on a grownup. That couldn’t possibly balance on top of the thin metal cart, but in a room bigger than the whole world, anything could happen.

Anne could hear the wood creaking and shifting as the huge TV warmed up.

Remembering the way the book had turned itself on, the bad book, she tried to get up and leave. Once again, she was held tight, unable to move.

“No,” Anne whispered, trying to force her gaze away from the screen. “I don’t want to see any more.”

The black screen exploded into shapes and colors, and Anne couldn’t stop herself from letting out a small scream at the swarms of bees. Her voice echoed again, getting louder and louder until she clapped her hands over her ears to block it out. All she could hear then was her own racing heartbeat, and sweat ran down her back despite the cool room.

Everything on the screen was the same, at least until the people with the guns showed up.

The people suddenly didn’t look like drawings anymore. They looked like real people.

This time when the bad people shot, the groups of the dead didn’t just turn into dust.

This time they were covered in blood that sprayed everywhere, and they were all screaming.

Anne squeezed her hands tighter over her ears, but she could still hear them. The same thing happened to mobs of people by the big round lakes, the only thing Anne knew more about now. She’d looked in her encyclopedias, too afraid to go to a real library. The first things the giant airplane had poisoned were for cities to clean their water, to make it safe for everyone to drink.

This time when the little girl drank the green water, the real little girl, she didn’t just turn into dust. She turned green herself, then her body started to swell and look rotten.

Like in the first nightmare, the camera drew back until Anne saw hundreds of children beside the metal lakes, all drinking and falling and dying.

Even in a dream, Anne knew she couldn’t possibly be smelling those tiny rotting bodies, but the thick stench coating her nose, mouth, and throat told her otherwise.

Finally the c*****e on the screen stopped, with the cool, blue words floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The dots on all of the continents looked the same, and the words floated to the surface.

Remaining Human Population.

“How many are left?” she whispered.

The blue words in the middle of the ocean shifted and rearranged themselves.

Less than one million.

Anne covered her mouth, trying to keep breathing now that the stink of death was clearing. She knew a world with over four and a half billion people, and now there were less than one million?

She needed to get out of here before she saw more, and before the chairs completely blocked her path. She managed to raise one shaking hand and did the simplest thing she could think of. She pulled the plug.

When the TV went dark, Anne started to cry.