Alive Again: Awakening (Book 1)

Prologue

Shades of red and orange danced on the wall as the blaze grew around me. Smoke blanketed the ceiling; the heat was smothering, like a vice grip slowly tightening. The smell of ash in my nose came from my skin. I was covered in it.

I looked around the room. Children laid in the bunks around mine, but I couldn't see their faces. Their bodies were blackened and still. Urgency ruptured inside me, as I realized they were dead. Fear unlocked my limbs. I leapt from my bed. I called out a name. I don't know whose name it was, but when I looked, I saw him huddled beneath a dresser.

I screamed at him over the crackling flames to come to me. He inched out from under the bed frame, reaching up for my hand. I yanked him onto my back. He held onto me, more scared than I was. I ran for the door, slipping through before the fire snaked across the room, erecting a wall between us and the charred remains of our siblings. 

Where they'd fallen asleep the night before would be their graves.

I ran down a long hallway, the hardwood floor warming beneath my feet. Someone nearby was screaming. I recognized the shrill sound as my mother's voice. The sound cut off abruptly and I realized that she too had died. The little boy wrapped around my body was crying now. I couldn't distinguish the tears from the sweat dripping down my face.

I couldn't die in this fire, and I couldn't let this small boy die either.

An image of a tunnel and trap door came to mind. The image was unfamiliar to my mind, but my body seemed to understand. I waded into a living room space, just as a  beam collapsed in front of us, blocking our path. The flames licking up the beam began to eat at the carpet below it. With haste, I snatched up an untouched corner of the rug and flipped it over the beam. I pulled open the trap door, wincing at the heat of the handle, and lowered us inside.

The boy detached himself from me and began crawling. The light from the fire cast an orange glow in the tunnel, illuminating our path. The sounds of cracking wood, and furniture falling over, ceased as we got farther and farther away.

In minutes, we crawled out into the crisp midnight air, panic and urgency fading from our movements. The fresh air was almost icy to the warmth of our skin. We could see our home in the distance, a distorted funeral pyre, as smoke and flames rose up into the clear violet sky, clouding the stars from view.

The last imagines of what I presumed to be our family flashed through my mind. They were all dead, caught in the flames. Even at that young age, I knew we were alone.

Sirens pierced the night in the distance.

I didn't wait. I grabbed his hand and we ran further into the woods. Somewhere behind us, twigs crunched. Someone was following us. The panic returned. I tried to run faster, the little boy tripped. I turned to help him and saw a broad man standing there, intent to harm us.

The man reached for the boy. I threw my small frame against his chest in protest. He swiped me off of him. I could hear the child's small voice screaming and screaming, as my head hit something hard and I jolted upright in my bed.

Another vivid nightmare. Sweat covered my face, my hands were trembling. My heart galloped in my chest. Why did I feel like I hadn't been breathing? Even after my heart rate slowed, my muscles were still coiled tight with tension, as though danger still lurked nearby.

The dream resonated like a memory, except I didn't have any siblings, and my parents were safe and soundly sleeping two doors down the hall.  I touched a hand to my face and realized I was crying again. The tears were still pouring minutes later, as I laid back down to sleep.

By then, I'd accepted the strange dream and my physical reactions. It wasn't the first of its kind, nor would it be the last, I suspected.  At the time, I had no way of knowing what those dreams meant or how many people would soon suffer because of them. I only knew the small agony of waiting, with shaken breath and damp eyes, for sleep to return.