dreaming

Part twelve of Twelve Stories.

Hakon and Courtney share a glance and silently decide it has become more than appropriate to begin running, as whatever lies ahead is likely to be, if nothing else, better than drowning, and at the silent thought of drowning, Hakon remembers everything – his silent childhood, his missing patient’s delusions of a coming zombifying plague and his investigation into it which brought him to the mediation retreat with Courtney and Maryl and the others on the beach filled with black crabs, how a blood sample he had no knowledge of how to do anything with and retreating to a cave with Courtney was all he managed to accomplish in his attempt to combat this plague his delusional patient had tried to warn him of, how frail he was in the face of the very zombies he felt he alone was prepared to encounter, and how, in the midst of everything, a storm surge or something filled the cave and he saw images of flowers and ceilings, and the sound of his and Courtney’s wet running feet becomes softer and softer and his field of vision dimmer and dimmer and he feels the cold water deep in his lungs and all around as he finds himself still trapped in the very same storm surge with salt water stinging his eyes and Courtney unseen as he drifts into the sides of the cave which don’t even harbor the slightest pocket of air, unable to control his body and the feeling of pressure and cold finally ends and he feels as though he has just awoken from a decades-long dream, no longer a being bound by flesh and gravity to a long-cursed planet, but true freedom on a level he had never known, feeling awake and for the very first time, ready to begin the day.