Miss Marvel's Nightmare

Part 1

I was asleep that morning when I heard the screams in my head.

I didn't know where they were coming from. And for some reason, I was the only one not affected by the phenomenon.

I saw images of the different screams coming from everywhere. In California, there was a tiny little girl with a rose headband in her hair, and she was clutching her favorite bunny, while walking downstairs in her parents' house. The bunny kind of looked sick and twisted, a moving vampire like mouth and angry looking eyes. And when she squeezed it, it chuckled and said in a post nasal voice, "You're my bestest friend!" Kids these days, I guess they are attracted to ugly things now, like the Bratz dolls, only this little girl liked ugly stuffed animals.

She went to her parents, a blond woman doing the dishes, and a darker man who looked like police, when he said, "Honey, I just got a text from headquarters, we've got to move."

The mom said, "What is it, dear?"

"Stepdad?" the little girl said.

The stepdad said, "There are hundreds of people missing, turning into dust, then causing accidents. I may have to work late. But I need to get both you and Cassie to a safe place right now."

"Did you try Scott?" the mom said. "Do you know how to get a hold of Dr. Pym or any of them?"

"I tried calling them, they won't answer. Voicemail. They may have been affected as well. Or they're busy."

Then the little girl pointed and gave a chilling scream.

The mom stopped what she was doing and dropped a wet glass that shattered on the floor. Her hands flew to her mouth. The stepdad had just dropped his phone because his hand was missing. Then pieces of his body started turning into dust and floating away into nothing.

"Cassie, Maggie, get out of here, now!" the stepdad shouted.

"Pax! No!" the mom screamed, running to him. But by the time she got to him, he fell to his knees, for his feet were missing, and the rest of his body melted away forever.

His gun fell on the floor and fired a shot into the mother's stomach. The little girl screamed even harder, "MOMMY!"

The mom looked down at her stomach and saw the complete hole in her belly, for her body was fading into dust as well. She fell to the ground and reached out to her daughter.

"Cassie, run!" she shouted. "RUN!"

And the mom melted away. Forever.

The little girl, Cassie, dropped her favorite bunny, and ran to her parents' emergency cell phone. She dialed for a man named Scott Lang. It rang.

It went straight through to voicemail. So in a panic, Cassie said, "Daddy, it's me. We have an emergency. Mommy and stepdad disappeared. This is a code Anton. We need Ant Man right now! Please, dad! Pick up the phone! 911! Come home right now!"

Her voice trailed off when she automatically saw something happen to one of her hands. She was losing grip on the phone because her fingers were slowly disappearing as well. She immediately hung up the phone. Her hands were completely gone. Then she lifted her arms and saw her arms were fading away. She gave the loudest shriek that stung my ears while she disappeared.

"DADDY!"

Miles away, a family trio of scientists were conducting an experiment on the roof. It looked like they were sending someone to the quantum realm through a tiny brown van.

The old man in the glasses said over the mic, "Ok, Scott, we will be pulling you back in five, four, three..."

And boom, he vanished. The old woman next to him put her arm out and shouted, "Hank!"

"Dad!" the younger woman shouted. She looked at her mother and said, "Mom, what happened to dad?"

She knelt down and saw nothing. "I don't know. I've never seen this before."

She gasped and looked at her daughter. She screamed, "Hope! Your hands!"

Hope's fingers were missing too. And both the mother and daughter were fading away.

"MOM, NO!" was all Hope said before her mom faded away. But for a brief second, she saw her mother shed a tear and put both hands on her daughter's face. And they were both gone.

Over the radio mic, a man was saying something to check in. It was the little girl's daddy, Scott. "Ok, very funny, Dr. Pym. You can pull me back now."

But no one answered.

"Guys?"

Nothing.

"Guys?" with a little more concern in his voice.

Still nothing.

Now Scott was panicking. "GUYS!"

He had just realized he was trapped in the quantum realm forever.

Then on another orange planet like Mars, a young teenage boy in a spider suit was feeling sick. He was feeling the same phenomenon happen to him too.

"I don't wanna go, Mr. Stark!" he cried.

The man with the dark hair and the goatee I recognized immediately as Iron Man, Tony Stark of Stark Industries, and the leader of the Avengers, post Sokovia Accords. He held on to the kid for dear life as the kid began to fade away.

"I don't feel so good," the kid said.

"You'll be fine, Mr. Parker, hang in there," Tony said.

And without another moment to lose, the kid turned into dust. In a panic, Tony Stark turned to a man in a beaten up red cape and a battered Buddhist type uniform from East Asia. And the wise man in the red cape was fading away too.

"I tried to tell you, Tony," he said. "This was exactly how the one way out of 14 million futures this was going to go. I'm sorry I gave Thanos the Time Stone. But it was the only option. It was the only way I could save us."

Tony stared at him in fear. "Doctor, I..."

"It's all right, Mr. Stark," he said. "Goodbye."

And he faded away as he closed his eyes one last time.

But now Tony was on that dead rock of a planet all by himself. He looked at his cell phone and saw he had no signal, even when he tried to call the love of his life, Pepper Potts. There was no way he'd be getting back to Earth.

There was so much screaming in my ears. A poor young woman clutching the body of her beloved, Scarlet Witch holding her Vision. And she faded away to gray dust, crying as she went, then waking up screaming, as if the place she was trapped in now was hell, and her body was burning. Captain America running through the woods of the Wakanda jungle when he found that his friend Falcon had also disappeared. He turned to his best friend Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, who too, turned into nothing but ashes.

And I was reminded of the poem, "Ashes to ashes... dust to dust..."

And the death poem echoed in my head as well:

"Do not go gentle into that goodnight... Rage, rage against the dying of the light..."

I heard all of their screams all at once. And then I heard silence. The entire world was silenced. And it was like half of the world had died. People in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, New York, San Diego, Sao Paolo... One teenage girl was screaming and crying for her dead brother in Wakanda as the guards came and said, "The Black Panther, the King T'Challa, is dead. Long live the Queen."

It was like a plague. The plague of every firstborn. And all the Jewish and Egyptian people who lived, we were them. But this was different. They were fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends, spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends... Everyone. They were all dead.

I wanted to wake up from this terrible dream. I wanted the nightmare to be over at last.