Rise Of The Dreamer

• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Epilogue
  

Dennis was woken up by the loud knocking on his front door. He had a resounding headache and he wasn’t in the mood to be disturbed. With sleepy eyes he looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was 1.15 am.
Who in the world could that be?
He thought as he drunkenly and sluggishly made it to his flat door.

Half-afraid he yelled “Who is it?” Immediately he heard a terrified response.

“Please help me.” The female voice cried. “I need your
help,
someone has just kidnapped my baby.” She was sobbing profusely.

Dennis’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t believe what his ears had just heard. He thought maybe he hadn’t woken up yet and all this was a dream. He opened the door and saw a young woman, probably in her late twenties with a bloodied face and what looked like a deep gash at the corner of her left eye with blood dripping out profusely. She had long black hair which was all in disarray which proved that there were obvious signs of a struggle, but she was over powered and beaten terribly. Dennis was too shocked to speak partly because his mind was still trying to process everything that was happening and partly because he was timid at heart, he wasn’t sure whether the kidnappers were still close
by,
he wasn’t the violent type at all.

“Are you okay?”
Stupid question
, he thought to himself. Of course she wasn’t
okay,
her baby had just been kidnapped. He felt like kicking himself. “Please come in,” he managed to say as he cautiously laid his hands on her left shoulder to gently usher her in. He felt her body
shudder,
obviously she was still in shock and understandably very frightened.

“Please help me, my son was just kidnapped.” She could hardly move from where she stood at his door entrance. “Please help me she,” she said again.

“Have you called the police?”

“They stole my phone and destroyed the land line.”

Dennis left her at the entrance, picked his land line to make an emergency call. “Hello, is this the operator? I would like to report a kidnapping and assault.” He made sure he kept his eyes on his neighbour. He never remembered meeting her. In fact he hardly knew any of his neighbours. As he was discussing with the operator on the phone, he noticed a shadow creeping up behind the scared mother standing at his door entrance. His pupils began to widen in fear as he could make out a sharp object in the hand of the shadow as it moved closer. It was a swift swinging movement of the assailant’s arm as his frightened neighbour crashed knee first to the ground and crumbled to the floor.

Dennis shouted out to warn her but it was already too late. He dropped the phone as he stepped back. He could hear the operator saying “Hello, are you still there?” The intruder was completely dressed in black and he wore some sort of black hood over his head, executioner style. The movement by the intruder was swift and accurate. All Dennis could do was gasp in terror.

Dennis screamed awake. He was relieved. It was all a dream, but it seemed so real. He could have sworn in his heart that his dream had really happened. He looked at the time. He was alarmed, the time was 1.15 am, and the coincidence was scary. The night was so
quiet,
you could hear a pin drop. He slipped his hands into his bedside drawer and drew two puffs from his asthma inhaler he picked from the drawer. He didn’t know why, but the nightmare he had gave him the shivers. This wasn’t the first nightmare he had had. But it all seemed different, he just couldn’t understand, it felt lucid. He consoled himself that it was just a nightmare. He was tired already from the previous day’s work and he needed much sleep to be in the right frame of mind for work that day, within a matter of minutes he was fast asleep.

The morning after, he took a quick bath, a bowl of cereal and headed out for his university job as a research professor. He lived in a two storey apartment
building,
his flat was at the top floor. When he got to the first floor he quickly noticed that there was yellow police tape across the door of a flat on that floor. There was a uniformed policeman guarding the entrance and he could see forensic investigators in white hazmat like uniforms through the half open flat door.

“What happened here?” Dennis asked the policeman.

“There was a baby kidnapping and the mother was murdered.”

Dennis walked around like in a trance at the university till late in the afternoon. He couldn’t shake off what had happened. He was a 24 year-old research scientist, a prodigy in his own rights, but he couldn’t understand or explain what had happened to him in the last 14 hours or so. He was just dumb struck or dumb founded. His research colleague Professor Morrison noticed his odd behaviour, but thought nothing of it. He knew that Dennis was a very studious and brilliant scientist and he definitely wasn’t the irresponsible type.

“Are you okay Dennis? You seem a bit off your game today”

Dennis didn’t really see any reason why he should tell Morrison about his recent experience, it wouldn’t make any scientific sense. Morrison was a well-recognised professor of astrophysics at Driscoll University. He certainly wasn’t going to embarrass himself. He didn’t want the professor to think he was taking drugs, or worse still think that Dennis had anything to do with the murder and kidnapping.

Dennis stared at him directly to look as convincing as possible. “I’m just a bit shaken by the kidnapping and murder that took place in my apartment building. I can’t seem to take my mind off of it. It seems so creepy that it took place so close to me.”

“Oh, I heard about that, did you know the woman in question?” asked the professor.

Dennis felt very unsettled by that question. From his perspective, he didn’t see why the professor should ask such a question. “No, how could I?” He replied defensively.

Morrison didn’t understand. “You did say she lived in your apartment building, did you not?”

Dennis sighed inwardly. He knew he wasn’t thinking straight. It was logical, he lived in the same building, and it wouldn’t be farfetched that he might have run into her once in a while. But in actual fact, Dennis never remembered running into
her,
in fact, he had never seen her before. “I haven’t seen her before
professor,
you know this job keeps me too busy, I hardly know any of my neighbours.”

“Very true, speaking of which, you should try socializing a bit. I haven’t seen you with anybody, you should take some time off you know. Everything isn’t about astrophysics. I can still get a whole lot of things done while you’re away.”

Dennis thought briefly, time off would mean he would be at home a lot of the time, and currently his apartment was giving him the creeps. “I’ll think about it.”

An hour later, during his lunch break, Dennis was at his office desk. He still had twenty minutes left from his break so he decided to recline back on his chair and stretch his legs. He dozed off and in just under a minute he was fast asleep.

Dennis saw himself standing by the road side in an unfamiliar location. He could see across the road a shopping mall named Shop World with a large parking lot where several vehicles were parked. Then his attention was brought to a large school bus coming up the road. He didn’t know how, but he just knew that there were thirty-two children on the bus coming back from a field trip. He looked at the time on his wristwatch, it was just 2.30 pm. He noticed someone that stood out from the pedestrians on the busy
roadside,
he just seemed different and unusually familiar. He was wearing a black suit and a pair of black sun shades standing on the side of the road.

The man in black suddenly stretched forth his arm with his black gloved hand open palmed as if he could control the cars on the road by merely gesturing with his hands. Almost immediately the school bus started swerving from right to left as if it were out of the driver’s control. He could in fact see that the driver had fallen asleep. Dennis was right away alarmed and distressed at the same time. He didn’t know what to do, he tried to warn people, but it was too late. In just a split second, everything happened. The bus rammed itself into an oncoming truck, and behind the truck was a commercial passenger bus. The results were ghastly and catastrophic. The bus full of school children was on its side and it was on fire, the front of the truck was completely smashed in, while the commercial bus behind the truck now lay upside down.

There were screams of terror, blood everywhere, dead bodies of children and adults and human body parts seen in some parts of the accident scene. To cap it all up, the truck exploded. Dennis woke up in terror and he was hardly breathing. As he fumbled for his asthma inhaler, he had a bad headache and felt very nauseous. Dennis had the shivers.

“It’s just a dream,” he whispered to himself. He didn’t feel too
good,
he decided he would have to take the rest of the day off. He hurriedly cleared his desk and half-way through the door he gripped his chest as he found it more and more difficult to breathe. His knees buckled while he used his left hand to hold onto the door lintel as support. “Somebody
help
,” he rasped. The last thing he saw was the floor getting closer and closer.

He woke up two and half hours later in a hospital bed in intensive care. Oxygen was being passed to him in a bid to clear his airways, due to the strain on his lungs. He remembered it was months since he had had a serious asthma crisis, but this was the most severe he had in years since his child hood. He had been able to effectively avoid the asthma triggers, but he couldn’t he really see what could have triggered his asthma this time around. He worked in a relatively clean environment, almost dust free as a matter of fact.

As he ruminated over the recent events, he could see about a dozen other patients, some having different kinds of medical machines plugged into them. There were nurses moving briskly about their business of care with just a handful of doctors checking on patients and scribbling down notes periodically. Within a few seconds a nurse in her mid-thirties noticed he was awake and came to his bedside immediately.

“How are you feeling now?” she asked with a beaming smile.

Dennis wondered internally if her smile was sincere or it was simply out of professional courtesy or bed side manners. But what did he care, he would be only there for a few hours and be out of there very soon. “A bit of tightness in my chest but I’ll get over it,” he responded.

“That sounds good to hear, you had quite a nasty asthma attack there, a doctor will be over to see you shortly,” said the nurse as she adjusted his bed covers upwards a bit. “Is there anything you would like me to get you?”