Storms of Future Past Books One through Four

Chapter 6-2

This time Anne woke with tears running down her cheeks and her pillow soaking wet. On one or two other nights, she was sure she’d screamed in her sleep, so this could be called an improvement.

The clock showed three hours before the sun would even come up. Waking up so early on a Saturday made her want to cry even harder.

She was so, so tired. Every part of her ached with exhaustion. Good nights were getting so rare that they seemed like a distant memory, like some kind of good dream she’d had years ago. She staggered into the bathroom and turned on the light.

She thought she looked nearly as old as her Gemaw now, like she’d skipped over turning twelve and gone straight on to sixty. Her green eyes were puffy and red, and she couldn’t pretend the dark circles under them didn’t show anymore.

Too many people had asked her about that.

Evan had noticed before anyone else did, even before her own mother.

Anne wondered sometimes if Evan liked her, not like a friend but like a girlfriend. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him or anyone else to like her that way. It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to the adults she knew.

And if she was losing her mind just like her grandmother, no one would want to put up with that, anyway,

She washed her face and went back into her bedroom. She didn’t think she’d be able to get back to sleep, but maybe she could figure it all out if she tried yet again. Anne sat down at her desk and got out her notebook, her special private notebook. It looked like a regular spiral notebook, and that was exactly what made it safe.

She was old enough to know writing Private! and Keep Out! and Do Not Touch! would only draw her parents to it like a beacon. This way, no one had any idea what was inside.

She turned to the last page with writing on it, nearly halfway through. She hadn’t done anything special before falling asleep, and that never seemed to make any difference anyway. The dream seemed to be random, even though she was getting less and less of a break from it.

Nothing seemed to cause it, and nothing seemed to keep it away.

That didn’t make her feel better.

Anne drew a line under the last entry and started writing. She didn’t note what had happened on the screen. She was still too afraid to do that, though she was running out of other ideas. She couldn’t stand to try to remember it more clearly. Flashes of the dying and dead in her mind all day long were bad enough already.

She wrote down what she’d done in the dream, like she had the last several times. The one thing she hadn’t done to try to change the pattern, the one thing she could think of to try, was just what she’d done tonight. Getting that original book down off the shelf hadn’t improved anything.

All she’d learned was she was supposed to do something about it, and that even the survivors weren’t going to last long. She put then pen down and rubbed her burning eyes, laughing under her breath.

“What am I supposed to do about a bad dream?”

As it turned out, she already had made the difference, at least for a little while.

The dreams stopped, but before a week had passed Anne would have welcomed them back. Now she was having visions, and not just at night.

She was having visions of the end of the world all day long. And the visions weren't just scenes like a movie, as awful that was.

Now Anne lived in the visions, she was part of scene. She heard the screams, smelled the blood and the fear. She felt the heat of the burning pits of human bodies.

More than Evan or her parents or her teachers were noticing something was wrong with her now. She knew she seemed to zone out and stare into space when she saw the visions. Evan had told her that, but she couldn’t figure out how to stop them. At least with the dreams, she knew she’d be alone when they happened.

Now she never knew when a vision would hit her.

People on the street seemed to stare at her even when she wasn’t having one, but before long Anne couldn’t be sure about that.

Not once she stopped seeing the faces of people around her.

The first time it happened, Anne ducked into the girls’ bathroom before anyone could notice. Her gym teacher, one of the few who took the time to make sure Anne participated in classes anymore, played the victim. Ms. Denton no longer had short curly blonde hair and a ready smile, or at least Anne hadn’t seen that.

Most of Ms. Denton’s head was missing, and part of her legs were, too.

Anne somehow knew a plane crash tore the woman out of life just as it tore her body.

She didn’t have to fake throwing up that day, and for once she didn’t hide the reaction. Her mother picked her up from school. Anne wasn’t sure if staying in her room the rest of the afternoon kept her from seeing more.

Not until she left the house the next day and saw the faces of the dead everywhere.

Instead of a man walking into a store, she saw a soldier dying with blood gushing out of his belly. Instead of a little boy running across the playground, she saw a starving shadow of a human being, his head huge and his belly distended.

And worst of all, instead of a little girl walking into the kindergarten room she and Evan walked by on the way to their classes, she saw a skeletal, ill version of the girl, clutching and clawing at her throat as the water poisoned her.

Almost every person Anne saw turned into a death mask, some version of how they would eventually perish. She didn’t know when it would happen, or even if it would happen, and she didn’t care. She couldn’t stand to see any more.

She kept her eyes down and hurried from class to class, then she rushed home and went upstairs to her room. Even her parents, even their faces were dead and cold and lifeless to Anne. She could hear them talking, but they looked like cold, badly made wax figures instead of people. She was grateful she couldn’t see how they were going to die, but seeing them dead was bad enough.

The only person she could stand to be around was Evan. She could actually see his face, hear his voice, look into his beautiful pale blue eyes. He could talk to her, or at least talk at her, even though Anne could hardly ever manage to say anything back to him.

She was so glad he kept talking.

She felt bad for ignoring him, but she couldn’t stand to be away from him or around anyone else. She wondered why she couldn’t see his death or even her own in the mirror, but she was afraid to wonder too hard.

The last thing she could stand would be seeing his face disappear behind his particular version of the end.

After a month of the visions, she knew she had to talk to Evan about them. No one seemed to notice she never spent time with anyone else when she could possibly avoid it. But even with him walking beside her every morning and every afternoon, cheerfully talking nonstop the whole time, Anne was starting to get terribly lonely.

She hadn’t really talked to anyone in so long, not since the nightmares first started months ago. And she’d realized that was the one thing she hadn’t done to try to stop the dreams or the visions.

She hadn’t told a living soul about them.

Maybe if she did that, maybe if she talked to her best friend in the whole world, the only friend who’d stayed by her side, the visions and the dreams would go away. Maybe if she brought it all out into the light, it wouldn’t be able to torment her any longer.

She was so afraid he would start to look at her the same way other people had, at least back when she could see other peoples’ faces.

She didn’t know what she’d do if Evan stopped spending time with her, or if she started seeing his face disappear.

But she was too scared and lonely to keep it all to herself any more.