Traveler trilogy Book 2.
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, however, when Francis S...
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Arthur woke in the night, paralyzed with fear.
This had been happening to him a lot lately, just like it had before he'd switched to the medication he was currently taking for his PTSD. The nightmares weren't as vivid as they used to be back then and to his knowledge they were not accompanied by screaming, but he still felt horrible every time he woke from them.
It had to be this time that was causing them, he reasoned to himself as he lay in bed, gasping for breath. With the cooler air and the leaves beginning to drop from the trees all around Roanoke Ridge, he knew it must be almost time for him to die.
Well, not die exactly, but the first time he'd experienced this season of his life, he hadn't known any different. The other him had begun the series of events that led to his PTSD in the first place, and with each gasped breath and lungful of blood coughed into his hands, he'd come closer and closer to what he thought was his end. It had been terrifying to live through even without all the things that had happened between him and Dutch and John and Micah, and if he was honest, he wasn't surprised his medication wasn't working as well as he'd hoped it would.
Sighing and sweating, Arthur knew he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. He kissed a sleeping Tori's forehead gently, and then slid out of bed. If he couldn't sleep, at least he could maybe take Cheyenne out for a ride in the forest.
Roanoke Ridge was beautifully spooky at this time of night, and even though one ran the risk of running into the Murfree Brood (an incestuous, bloodthirsty group of inbred monsters who roamed the hills around here), Arthur knew he could take them in a fight. A little gunsmoke might even make him feel better, he reasoned. And killing Murfrees was like killing rabid animals - It was better and safer to put them out of their misery.
Jackson, unsurprisingly, was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper as Arthur left his and Tori's room. "Couldn't sleep?" he mused quietly without looking up from his paper.
"Had a nightmare," Arthur admitted with a grunt.
"Me too," Jackson admitted in an equally short voice.
"What was yours about?" Arthur questioned.
Still not looking up from his paper, Jackson said, "I keep having these dreams of a big, black hole swallowing up the whole Earth. I see it rip trees from the ground by their roots and shred horses to atoms right in front of me. You?"
"It was a dream like the ones I had before I married your sister," said Arthur. "A horrible, distorted memory of one of the thousand bad things that's happened to me in my life."
"You should tell Francis," Jackson quipped, finally looking up at him. "Maybe he can help you?"
Arthur chuckled and crossed his arms, leaning on the kitchen counter. "Naw, he can't help. Not here, anyway. What's he gonna do? Up the dosage of my medication? It ain't like we got a real pharmacy to fill the prescription here in 1899. They'd probably just prescribe me cocaine instead."
