The Key for Nightmares

I ate my dinner at 10 that day. I felt too sleepy after 20 hours of

hacking. But the MI6 didn’t care heck about who died for them and who worked how many hours for them. They just wanted their work done. 

I wolfed down all of the Italian noodles and threw the plastic bowl down the veranda railing. I walked to the schedule my sister had made for me. She died 2 years ago in a car crash. She was driving on an accident-prone road when a truck coming from another side hit her car. The car was completely smashed and she was deeply hurt. As she tried to escape the car for help, the driver shot her dead.  Thankfully I had recruited an agent to look after her. He instantly shot the truck’s tyre, so the driver wouldn’t manage to escape. The driver was killed by my own hands in the interrogation room. We searched for the real criminal mastermind for 1 year. He was a chinese man named Yangun Chai Shifuri. But let us not talk about it. You do not want to know about how much blood the major lost and how much the criminal lost.

I went to bed almost after 11:45. I couldn’t believe I spent that much time reading the schedule.

That night when I was asleep I had a dream. More of a nightmare. It went like this. 

I was standing in a playground. Not me, maybe. It was a kid. There was someone with me. An adult, perhaps. It was nighttime. The moon was peeking from behind a tree.

The strange thing was that the moon was purple. The craters were very visible. My mom used to tell me that the craters were created by the rabbits who found a way to reach the moon and took a bite from it. It slipped out of my mouth at work once. An officer had called my name and told me to land a satellite for Russian terrorists on the craters, I had replied “Nah, they’re full of germs.” The officer was not really amused.

                                 …………………………………

The adult and I started to walk. He had a nameplate on his shirt…

                                            ARISTROLE  KOREN  SWIFT

                                                OCCUPATION                                        

                                                 Army Officer

                                                 Post

                                                 Colonel

                                                  Age

                                                 35 years

                   Nameplate provided by TRONS TERM SAFETY    

                                                               CONFIRMATION

                                 All rights reserved.®

We stopped again. I looked around. All ashes and dust.

“You done looking?” Aristotle suddenly asked. I nodded.”Then let’s go.”

I was put in a car. The door slam shut. From the blurred sight of the car window, I saw Aristrole take out something. After that everything started to explode. I realized it was a gun. I couldn’t wait to see what he was shooting at. I put my legs on the chair, stood up, turned back, and knelt. What I saw was beyond my imagination. But I knew what it was called. It was in the research yesterday that the scientists did. That meant…I was on another planet. Were there humans on the planet?

Then I realized that the shooting had stopped. I looked towards the window. Aristotle was holding a stone and looking violently at me. I figured he was going to throw it at the window to grab my attention.

Then he signaled at something in the door pocket. It was not very visible. Only the barrel. I took it out. It was a rifle.

 I tried to open the door. It was locked from the outside. I showed the gun at the window. Then he pointed at me. I realized he was asking me to shoot.

I adjusted the gun on the trunk of the car, then wrapped my finger around the trigger. Then, without me controlling it, the bullet got loose. The creature was just in time to taste some of his own blood. And then-

                       ………………………………………

My eyes opened. I was glad that I was awake. I didn’t want to see any more of the horrors of that nightmare. I got out of bed and dressed up.

Wrinkles were present in larger quantities on the coat than usual. But it was no problem. It happened when I put it in a moist place.

It took me half an hour to iron the coat. The iron once even got over my hand. It took me ten more minutes to soothe the extreme pain that I felt in my fingers. I washed it with cold water and put an ice pack over my hand. Finally, the ironing finished and the coat was as good as new.

Before going to work, my mind was very eager to breathe in some fresh air.

But the creator of the universe had something else planned for me. What I saw in my dream was reality. Just not with the boy and the soldier. But with an extra package. As cold as ice and as sharp as ever. Bigger than the tallest buildings. The monster we were fighting.

The Arctic Ranger.

My mind was panicking. I didn’t know what to do. That stupid mind had to stop working at that time only. Then I remembered the major telling me that if you shot at his eye his body would stop functioning. He would stop at one place. But I didn’t have a gun. For the first time, I hoped it would work.

I ran in the whole house looking for it. I never thought something like this would happen. It was my only invention so, maybe, it was in the garage. I  ran to the room, which was located on the left side of the house. I opened the door and looked for the stairs. The Arctic Ranger had now started to run towards my house. I had to hurry. There it was, lying at the edge of the shelf. The mechanical crossbow was extremely dusty. 

I quickly wore the arrow set over my shoulders and held the crossbow in a hand. If someone saw me they’d mistake me for a professional archer, but only I knew how terrible an archer I was. For the first time in my life, I had prayed to god.

I ran to my roof. In my hurry I stumbled over the steps. I balanced the bow on the wall and loaded the arrow. When the monster was only a meter away from my house, I let it go. It was just like in my dream. Except that it wasn’t a gun and it really touched him this time.

Then the bow touched an invisible wall and fell on my stomach. Even though only the string touched me, I felt a sudden sharp wave of pain in my body. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, what I saw was the real world. Then,  I looked towards my stomach. Stuck to my body, was a real… knife. A bottle of poison lay on the table.

And that was the last thing I saw.

                                      …………………………….

The major was waiting for his hacker at the headquarters. He checked his watch. After his sister’s death, the hacker had never been late.

Suddenly, the door of his room opened. He looked up to see the coroner standing at his door with a packet in his hands.

“I’ve got some really bad news. Your hacker was found dead in his house. And these are his reports. We found he was hallucinating. The detectives found this note next to his body” The coroner handed him a piece of paper. The major was horrified with what he saw.

 It’s coming for us. The Arctic Ranger

As everything the hacker thought or saw came true, this was on his way to come true too. He had dreamt about his sister’s death a few weeks before she died. He dreamt that a monster would be found, researchers found the wreck created by him on nearby planets. He dreamt that he would die due to an hallucination, he died the same way. And now this. He bet his life it was coming.