Before us...

Chapter Four

A darkness surrounded him. Gripped him so tightly he could not move a single muscle in his body. It was, he imagined, what drowning felt like. The increased weight of the world on his shoulders, responsibility sitting on his chest as if waiting for him to be brave enough to fight back so it could just grab at him and throw him under the water again. As if it was waiting for him to give up so it could swoop in and put him out of his misery; end his pain.

Milo's mind was often a dark place when he slept, especially when exhaustion had become so unbearable that he was forced into a sleep so deep he was incapable of controlling any aspect of his mind. His mind often subjected him to many vindictive and torturous twists of his memories that lay in wait, innocently hiding from their grabby hands to avoid the pain and hurt they would cause Milo whilst he lay unaware of their power to seep into his mind whilst he slept.

Tonight, they start slow, as if dolling out the seconds as slowly as possible to lull Milo into a sense of false security before throwing him down and hounding him with everything at once. Images flash behind his eyes of Fort Drum; the training, the inadequacy he felt every time a superior so much as glanced at him knowing for a fact that they were waiting for him to mess everything up. They had a look in their eye that he was too familiar with, a look of pure disappointment, that he was weak. It was something that his father bore so well.

These men and women trained him to be controlled and strong in the face of the enemy; to hold his own. How disappointed they would be if they saw him now, broken and beaten by his own mind. A cruel snarl could be heard, echoing around his head trying to pound their truth into him.

Flashes of learning to shoot and taking longer than everyone else played at the front of his mind, reminding him of the late hours he was forced to put in to better his aim despite knowing that he had hit the target just as much as everyone else. The movie plays on as he watches himself crawl through the sopping mud, scraping his shoulders against the heavy and sharp wire that hug so low above him as he digs his elbows into the wet ground so he could slip to freedom faster and help his fellow soldiers complete the intense training course they were struggling through. The corners of his mind were hazy as his dreams unfolded before him.

Milo is twisting in his sleep now, tangled in blankets as memories of field exercises and the fear he felt when he, after forty-four weeks, was shipped off to Iraq, where he fought for the best part of the last seven years.

He could hear the ominous splatter of the dark sand as it pattered around him, covering him, drenching him in its essence as he took cover behind the harsh wall of a semi-demolished hut that once housed an innocent family. The dark clouds swarmed him, then and now, and installed a fear within him that would never leave. The smell of smoke and metal bombarded his nose and watered his eyes, as tears slipped out of his closed lids where he lay in bed, as he sprung out from his place of safety and unloaded his weapon in quick succession, he continued through the eerily tunnel-like divisions that separate him from his target.

Sprinting now, and twitching where he lay, he continues to follow the only target his team had left to take down, rushing after him solo. Had he been solo? His mind played tricks as his eyes continued to dampen as he ran through the shadows of decay that hung in the air.

Explosions erupted alongside him as he ran, never hitting him, as the gun fire rained on behind him. Now nearing his target, he raises his weapon ready to yell and scream and make his way back to his team who were probably waiting for him. The man had stopped. He stood ahead, unmoving and hunched as if in pain before cracking his head to one side, twisting his broken body towards Milo who stood uncertain behind him.

The man did not look human. His face held a sinister smirk almost masked by the deep black eyes that shrunk into the hollowed eye sockets set deep into his skull. Milo could not move, his mind had twisted figures so many times in his dreams, to make him hurt. Thus, this was not the first time he had seen the face of his best friend buried under a monstrous mutation of the man whom he had shot moments before being shot himself.