Do not Stop

This is a dream: This can’t be really happening

Thoughts whirled frantically in Reagan’s mind as he tried to take in his surroundings. Some of his squadmates had been mauled so badly he could barely make out anything human in the mounds of flesh. Others, despite his pleas and cries to them, hardly responded despite no visible injury being present. He wasn’t much better off: Something had gotten to him, and attempted to tear him to shreds…but in the heat of the moment, his mind was blocking out what that thing looked like. He had already tried radioing in some backup as well as paramedics, but fear gripped his soul as this beast his mind refused to acknowledge approached.

How long did they say it would be, before paramedics would arrive? Minutes? Hours? Seconds? All he feared would be far too late for him. But, should he stay, certainly he would meet a similar fate those around him had met. He couldn’t stay: He was bleeding, badly, and while he was far past the point of an initial cry of pain, he could barely hold back the whimpers that came with that lingering. Was it a sense of doom he was feeling, or some innate fear that something would hear him, and finish him off?

And yet, the lumbering beast cared not about what was racing through the sole survivor’s mind. It cared only that he was here, somewhere, and that he was wounded, reduced to a coward by pain and adrenaline. Reagan dared not draw its attention to him as it walked past, trying to spot the last man who had entered its territory. He had a suspicion that it didn’t have the best sense of smell or sight, since it had missed where he was a few times even when he was out in the open. But Officer Barnes did not wish to test how good its other senses were: Others fell trying that. So, he simply waited for the beast to pass. It growled, stood tall and proud, and looked around hoping to find something it may have missed. But when it found nothing, the monster left, continuing its search in another place…and this was the moment Reagan made a break for it.

His steps were anything but lightweight: Each board shrieked at how harshly he stomped upon them, but they were agile. And agile was all Reagan needed at the moment, as he was certain the beast would hear him and start booking it to his location any moment now. Relying solely on the rush of adrenaline and the desperation to live, Reagan pushed the Entrance door open, hardly pausing to look back at what was certainly after him. He didn’t stop running until he had made it the police cars of his former squadmates. Here he remained, leaning against one of the cars until he heard the wailing of sirens. He tried to stand, to signal to the others where he was…but the loss of blood had made him too weary, and instead he slid from behind the car and lost consciousness, the last sounds he heard were the sirens…normally a bad sign, but for him, it was a sound of victory.

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He hadn’t been sure how long he was out for. Could’ve been a few hours…could’ve been a few days. But as surely his condition started to stable, he started…seeing that thing. The very thing he refused to look at, for the sheer fear of having it burned into his mind, still found a way to get in. And just like before, he dared not acknowledge it: he had a feeling it wasn’t real, that his mind was making things up as it had teetered on the brink of death. But the monster made from his mind was not like the monster he had encountered: This one could always find him, always knew his movements…and always stalked him, no matter where he went. It tormented him with the cries of those it had killed previously, it toyed with him by swiping at him, intentionally missing at first only to hit him in the heart on the second try.

At some point, complications came up, and his heart stopped beating. CPR was used in a desperate bid to resuscitate him. It took almost half an hour, but eventually his heart was beating…and with that consciousness was regained. Still somewhat delirious, He grabbed the nurse’s arm, who had been keeping him alive with CPR.

“Don’t stop,” He whispered initially, “Please, do not stop…Lord help me…”

“Sir,” The nurse said, somewhat worried, “I don’t plan on letting you die, but if you could kindly let me go-“ His grip tightened, stopping her sentence halfway.

“Just Please!” He begged, “I don’t Want to go back there, please don’t let me go back there, I beg you!” The nurse got a better look at him by now: His pupils were dilated, he was sweating bullets…His heartrate was skyrocketing. Seeing everything going wrong for him, she called for another nurse, requesting something to calm him down, before turning to him.

“Back where?” She asked, “What do you mean by ‘back there’?” He didn’t say much of anything to her in response: He was struggling to breathe, everything was swirling at once in his head, and he couldn’t control what he was thinking…and it was scaring him.

“Sir…” The nurse sighed, “You’re okay, you’re okay…You’re going to make it through this, just, stay with me” The other nurse returned, and helped connect some IVs, hoping that refilling his fluids would better stabilize him. Finally, Reagan could feel himself breathing again: but with such a high adrenaline output for God knows how long, there inevitably would have been a crash, and Reagan was not above that fact either.

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Unlike the previous time he lost consciousness…there was nothing there in the dark. No monster, no voices…nothing. No dreams danced in Reagan’s mind, but no nightmares dared to haunt him, either. He at the very least was resting well now… and when he finally woke up for real, He could better look at his surroundings. But little did he realize, as well as many of the medical staff…his mind had scrubbed itself of that night. Both the monster encounter and his delirious speech had found themselves absent in his timeline of events. So, when he was asked about what he meant by “back there”, he was without a slightest clue what that was supposed to mean, either. He could recall most of the day, thankfully, but the night? Nowhere in his memory.

Not that Reagan was too bothered by it: He had learned from others that the rest of his crew had died, and that somehow, he was the last one left alive. The officer mourned for those who didn’t make it out alive like he did, although he bore scars that he had no recollection of how he could’ve gotten them. He always told himself that maybe it was for the best that he didn’t remember: Perhaps, it would be so traumatic that to acknowledge those memories would fundamentally change him for the worse. To be safe however, he swore to himself to never deal with anything supernatural again, if he could help it: if those scars were from a monster, clearly things didn’t go well between him and a supernatural.

Eventually, he found himself a new squad: While some of them were still weird in their own rights (namely Zane, the ghost of a cop who was killed, but not given a proper burial), they were at the very least tolerable, and he could see none of them were a threat…but somewhere deep down, that memory of the past exists. Even if he can’t recall it at will, it does influence his actions when met with some odd entity: He does still panic, although he’s gotten better at hiding the fact that he’s panicking for no clear reason other than “that’s not something I know from the real world”.

It does bother him occasionally, that he has this reaction with no clear explanation to it…but, is he willing to pry deeper and possibly open his Pandora’s box, for the sake of understanding why supernaturals bother him so much?