What the...

  Oliver woke to his death.

  Who’s Oliver? My name is Zachary.

  Zach saw his parents as they watched from the crowd. His mother, looking at him with tears in her eyes. But tears did nothing. Her tears didn’t stop the gun from being pointed at him. Didn’t stop his grandmother from pointing the gun at him.

  His father was no different. That face, void of any emotion, had done nothing to stop the death sentence currently being carried out. Effectively exiled from the Camp. Looked at as a monster and forced to join the others.

  Mother? Father? I don’t know these people. I don’t know any of these people. Zach closed his eyes, fighting against the pounding headache sitting in his temples.

  The crowd's murmurs were getting louder. No. No, that wasn’t right. He was simply settling into his surroundings. The wooden platform beneath him. The chains fastened around his wrists, linking him to the platform. The large crowd standing before him, muttering nervously.

  “What’s happening?” Zach asked, still fighting against that headache.

  He tried to stand, but the chains made it impossible to move.

  “What’s going on?” he asked the crowd.

  That seemed to terrify them. Most of them looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. This was most of the Camp standing before him. People that he was supposed to consider family, not in the blood sense of the word, but in the sense that they’d all survived the apocalypse together. They’d all made Camp Twelve a safe haven.

  “Camp Twelve?” he repeated under his breath, feeling the weight of that recollection. “What-what apocalypse? Where the hell am I?”

  The crowd gave no reaction to any of his words. Not even his parents, who were also not his parents. The platform echoed with the Head’s footsteps as she took a step closer to the edge of the platform, her enforcers standing just to her side.

  For what felt like the hundredth time, he strained against the chains. They only rattled, the sound making him even more frantic. This was it. He was going to die. That certainty scared him more than any confusion he felt.

  “Behold!” the Head shouted to the gathered crowd. “The Dreamer of the 7th of November!”

  She turned to face him.

  “Oliver Emery,” she went on, still addressing the crowd more than she did him. “In accordance with our laws, and in fairness for all, we do this to remember your humanity. And in the hopes of saving it.”

  Immediately, memories flooded his mind. His name was Oliver Emery. The Head was his grandmother, Darlene Emery. He was being judged for one simple fact. Oliver was a Dreamer, his mere existence putting the entire Camp at risk.

  His heart raced. His hands went clammy. Before he even knew it, he was crying. Weak as always. Overwhelmed with confusion and panic, and all he could do was cry? Typical.

  Then it got worse.

  Shadows moved overhead. Dark shapes crawling across the sky as though it were the ground, all of them ignoring gravity.

  He had the distinct feeling that they were watching him. Waiting. A quick glance across the gathered crowd showed no one else paid them any attention. He was the only one who could see them!

  “What-what is that?” he asked out loud.

  The crowd gasped, shying away from him. His parents only winced, turning their heads away either in pain or in shame; there was no way of knowing which.

  The enforcers handed the Head a gun. His grandmother turned and approached him, not a shred of sympathy on her face. When she came before him, keeping eye contact all the while, she raised the gun and aimed.

  “No, no, no, no, no, wait!” Zach said, trying to push himself away from her. But the chains rattled in defiance. “Please! I don’t know what’s going on! Please!”

  Bang!

  Without a word, she pulled the trigger.

  Pain stronger than anything he’d ever experienced bloomed in his left hand as every bone there was shattered by that one bullet. The wound bled immediately, but the pain and his screams almost made that a distant thought.

  Overhead, the shadows crawled closer, looking down eagerly. He felt it rather than saw. He turned his gaze to the crowd, begging them for help. Begging strangers for help. They did nothing.

  He fell to his side, pulling his hand as close to his chest as he could. His shirt was drenched in blood, the wood of the platform not much different. It was Oliver’s blood, yes, but it felt like his too. Somehow, it was his too.

  Anger almost as sharp and intense as the pain in his hand rose in him like a wave. An anger so vicious that it made him glare at the crowd and see nothing but death. Their deaths! What they were doing to him now, he would do to them tenfold. A hundredfold.

  He turned his attention back to the Head, his grandmother, who still stood there, aiming the gun straight at his chest. She, too, was waiting. They all were. Just waiting for him to lose his mind, to say the words those shadows craved, too.

  What words?

  Suddenly, he felt himself losing consciousness, his eyes getting heavier and heavier. The blood. I’m losing a lot of blood. Aren’t they going to do something about that?

  As rational as those thoughts were, they were being pushed away by the sheer force of pain pulsing out in waves from his ruined hand. How easy it would be, inviting those shadow creatures into his soul.

  Those demons, he realized with a start.

  Then the words came to him as well, like a worm pushing its way out of Oliver’s muddy memories. Two words he couldn’t say. No matter what.

  Come in.

  He could tell the creatures craved it. Somehow, he could tell.

  “Oh, God!” he grunted out through the tears, through the pain.

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  Someone pulled his shoulders. He blinked through the blurry world, feeling the sticky mess of his blood-soaked shirt. It was the enforcers. They were picking him up. They’d already removed the chains.

  When’d they do that?

  The crowd was still there, looking at him with nothing but sympathy. Sympathy! Any one of them could’ve stopped it at any time, but now they look at him with sympathy? The nerve of it fanned his rage.

  Above, he could swear the creatures reacted with something like fear.

  When he looked up at the sky, he blinked in shock. There were hundreds of them, if not thousands. Each of them looking like black smoke given form and substance. All clinging to the sky like flies to a ceiling, all of various sizes.

  Most of them crawled away from him; others stayed where they were, as if challenging him.

  His heart was racing again, the pain torturously pushing him toward unconsciousness, then pulling him back every time he just touched it.

  “He sees them,” one of the enforcers whispered fearfully, pulling away from him.

  Zach felt his mind go distant again. His hand was still bleeding. Throbbing with the kind of pain none of them would ever understand. Not unless I have something to say about that.

  The thought was so full of menace, so alien to his mind, that the shock finally sent him into that waiting darkness.

  When he woke, he found himself sitting on a green couch. Zach Smith and Oliver Emery still warred away in his mind. It was too dim to make out the room around him.

  He blinked, the crushing presence of the pain in his hand beating against every nerve in his body. How was it possible you could feel hand pain in your feet?

  He realized that someone was working on his hand. They were trying to be gentle, but it still hurt. Worse, when he tried to pull away, he couldn’t move. Couldn’t squirm away from that pain.

  His body wouldn’t listen to a word his mind said to it. He blinked... and was terrified to find that he couldn’t blink. His mind had simply been registering past movement.

  “Okay,” the person said in a familiar voice. “At least it’s stopped bleeding. Somewhat. We have to go over it again.”

  A foreign memory told him that was Ava’s voice. His mother’s closest friend, but more importantly, a member of the Medical Function. Camp Twelve had many different Functions, and everyone belonged to one.

  These aren’t my memories...

  Still, thinking about the Camp brought back the gruesome thoughts he’d had on the platform—the execution platform, his mind corrected.

  He remembered the violence that had shaped each thought. Even now, they made him recoil. Well, he felt himself recoil, even though he couldn’t move a muscle.

  Not now! He couldn’t unpack those thoughts now. He couldn’t wonder why he wanted to grab this woman by her neck. He first had to figure out what was happening to him.

  “This might hurt, Oli,” she said softly.

  Don’t call me that! That’s not my name! It seemed his mouth wouldn’t listen to him either.

  She pulled a knife from somewhere close to the floor, most likely from a bag.

  “Your mother wanted you to know she loves you,” she whispered, glancing somewhere else in the dim room.

  No, she doesn’t, he responded instinctively. But of course, she meant Oliver’s mother. Oliver’s mother loved Oliver.

  A warm orange glow revealed itself at the bottom of his eyeline. A flame. She was running the blade of the knife through a flame.

  He wanted to object. Wanted to scream until his lungs were raw. But nothing came out. Nothing but small tracks of tears that rolled down his cheeks. Pathetically, he was crying again!

  A deep shame overwhelmed him. All he could do was stare straight ahead, at the part of the wall he could see, where there were shadows. Shadows he could make out clearly, despite the dim light and the fuzzy view the tears in his eyes gave him.

  Creatures as black as night, their eyes scattered across their bodies and appearing as thin slits wide enough only to admit a single pupil, a funny symbol sitting right in the center.

  “Your father, as well,” Ava added. “They’re thinking about you, Oli. I promise.”

  Shut up!

  Just before he felt the peak of that strange anger, the hot blade was pressed against the edges of his wounds. The sensation reminded him that it had already happened before. While he’d been unconscious.

  He screamed inwardly and fell back into something deeper than sleep, but not much more healing.

  The next few days passed by in a blur.

  He remained trapped in this strange body, seeing life pass through eyes he couldn’t move. Though there wasn’t much of a life to see. They’d left him right there on the couch, with nothing but that wall for a view.

  In the corner of his vision, he could just make out the wooden boards that had been nailed across the windows. But in that pain-filled, monotonous sequence of events, more memories came to him.

  These people were seven years into an apocalypse. This building—the Dreamhold—had been a constant reminder of the destruction that lay beyond the Camp’s walls. Everyone feared it. Everyone. Or, maybe it was better to say people feared the Dreamers who lived within it.

  Dreamers like him, apparently.

  Ava continued to come in and out of his eye line, checking on his hand, which continued to throb and torment him every single moment of every single day.

  She’d remove the wraps she’d put on the day before, mention that it was free of infection and how good that was, just before she passed on whatever words Oliver’s parents had sent with her that day.

  “Your mother’s constantly asking about you.”

  “They’re praying for you.”

  “Your father really misses you.”

  “They want you to get better.”

  The words continued on the same path every single time. And each time, he wanted nothing more than to tell her to shut up. To make her shut up. He had to fight against the impulse to bash her head in, a thought that scared him every time.

  But try as he might, he couldn’t stop the anger her words brought.

  “Oli, can you hear me?” Ava whispered now.

  He tried to focus on her, but his eyes still refused to move. Something as simple as moving your eyes, and he couldn’t even do that!

  The shadow creatures on the opposite wall seemed to sense that insecurity. They moved closer, the demons crawling on the wall, the floor, the ceiling, all of them just waiting to claim his soul.

  A part of him considered letting them in. Maybe that was how he brought an end to this nightmare. But they looked viscous, ravenous, even. Moreover, they looked wrong. And it seemed fear was a great deterrent.

  What a dream, he lamented. Could dreams even be this vivid? A lucid dream, maybe. That made the most sense. Okay, then. It’s time to wake up!

  The creatures came closer, vibrating with an alien sound that shook him. NO! he shouted. Get away from me!

  Amazingly, they did as they were told. They crawled away from him, predators waiting for their prey to keel over and die. That vibration made his skin feel like it was on fire. Like all of his flesh was being ripped off at once.

  That’s what it would be to give in to them. His choices boiled down to two options. Live in this current torment, or be flayed alive? Unfortunately, the choice was easy. He had to live. A coward’s choice, perhaps, but that flaying... that must be what hell felt like.

  Oh God... Am I in hell?

  True panic set in then. He grunted from the effort of trying to move.

  “You can hear me,” Ava went on, her voice a moment away from a full-on emotional breakdown. He’d almost forgotten she was there.

  “Oliver, I need you to fight. Please. Your mom’s driving herself crazy,” Ava went on. “I… I need you to try and eat. Alright? Please eat.”

  I can’t eat! I can’t move my body!

  “I made the oatmeal softer than usual,” she added hurriedly. “I can’t feed you myself; the Head won’t allow it. But try. Please, Oliver... For your parents, just try.”

  For some reason, the pain in her voice brought even more tears to his eyes. That was sheer pleading. There was nothing else she could do.

  Oliver might’ve been used to this emotion, this level of affection shown to him, but Zach wasn’t.

  Even through the pain, he was thankful he couldn’t speak or see her properly.

  The Dreamhold a chance.

  Follow, Favorite, or Rating. It helps to spread new stories like this one more than you know. Chapters 2 and 3 are coming in just a minute or two (daily drops for the first week, then Tues/Thurs/Sat schedule). Looking forward to this journey!