The Citizen Soldier (DNF)

32) Rainy Day

*Clay POV*

I screamed as I bolted awake. Shaking, I looked at my hands, putting myself in a sitting position and then trying to put myself in my familiar ball of emotional comfort. When I felt the slight tug on my arm from an unknown source, I looked down at it to identify the problem. There I found George, sleeping peacefully. I started to calm down, rubbing the back of his hand to calm myself.

As I started to calm down, I started to think through what had just happened. Starting with the basics, I worked my way up. I spoke out loud softly while I went through my dream.

"Okay Clay. You were on a train. This train was headed to your dad's concert. There were many people with you on the train, including mom and Christina. You went through a tunnel, and everything went silent other than the clattering of the train wheels. You couldn't see anything, and you couldn't speak or yell, no matter how hard you tried. The loud was way too much, and the air smelled stale and dead.

"You got out of the tunnel and everything resumed as normal, all of the passengers including your family not thinking anything of the phenomenon. You closed your eyes and calmed yourself. About thirty minutes later, you went through another one, but this time when you got out there was only your family. Christina was the only one who seemed to take notice.

"You were confused and you wanted to ask Christina a question about what she may have known or seen, but you couldn't speak. You could only think frantic thoughts. So you simply took a seat and waited for the next tunnel. The next tunnel came up, and the same happened, except you and Christina were somewhere else. In a back room of sorts.

"There were the familiar etchings in the walls of Dream, then a new one saying Run. Christina immediately took up the invitation and grabbed your hand, running through some sort of bleached white maze, one that never seemed to end. Occasionally you could see some sort of shadow moving out of the corner of your eyes.

"You ran for hours until Christina got tired, and then you carried her in an attempt to not get separated because you didn't think that you could handle either of the two of you being all alone in this strange place. Somehow Christina weighed you down more than possible, and the running became a slow and desperate jog.

"There was something following both of you though Clay. You couldn't save either of you. You and Christina died in here, and your mother may not have even known it, or that you existed." After talking through the nightmare, I looked to my wall, which had the Dream etching on it. It made me shiver to see it, but there was nothing that I could do about it.

There was one thing I was pretty sure of at this point though, and that thing was that I was being haunted by something, and it must refer to itself as Dream. It also might have been a demon. That was just the most wonderful revelation that I'd ever had in my entire life, though now I was wondering about Christina.

I pulled out my phone and texted the contact that I hadn't touched in months, feeling a bit guilty about not being the first to reach out to her. I knew that she could get ornery sometimes and that few things could change that and her mood until someone apologized to her. It made my intestines feel like they were being twirled like spaghetti to think about how I almost left her all alone without any real explanation as to why other than that things were too hard and I was being a crybaby about it.

Then again, I was sitting in a mental hospital at the moment. I hovered my thumb over the send button, trying to decide whether or not to press it, biting my cheek subconsciously as I did so until I tasted the iron. I stopped chewing and instead taped my heel against the ground as I sat on the edge of the bed.

I looked out the window at the dawning day, finding the sky to be cloudy and grey. I smiled, I loved rainy days in the fall. Looking back down at my phone to take a picture, I remembered just what I was doing a moment ago. I made a face and then decided to delete everything that was in the message bubble and opted for a captioned picture of the sky.