Lifeline

Running. Just running. My entire being was concentrating on just that. Just running. My breath rasped into my lungs and screamed back out again. I couldn’t get away fast enough. How could she say that? About me? She’d lied to me for 16 years. My own mother. About my father. He wasn’t some randomer she’d fucked when she had been a whore. He was rich. He was famous. He was a rockstar. He was Jacoby Shaddix.

My legs collapsed. I tried to stand, to get further away from her, but I failed. My legs refused to take my weight for any longer. I had no energy left in me. My breathing was laboured; it was all I could do to just get air past my chapped lips and sore throat, and into my lungs, giving momentary relief. I fell back and curled up into a foetal position. I reached up a blue shaking hand to brush away the falling tears, creating tracks and racing each other down my face and then finally dropping off onto the snow laden ground.

Wait! Snow?! I sat up abruptly and an avalanche of snow cascaded of me. I looked around, scanning my surrounding for some form of shelter. I struggled. My breathing was still laboured and my vision was filled little black spots. I realised that I must have blacked out, because it had been midday when I had collapsed, and now the sun was setting. I shivered and spotted a sheer rock face beyond some trees. I stood and cursed when pain shot up my left leg. But that wasn’t the big issue right now. The big issue was getting some warmth into me before I blacked out again.

The rock face towered above me, and gave me sense of vertigo. I shuddered realising that it was likely that this would be the last sight I would see, and curled up. I screwed my eyes shut, and sleep quickly smuggled me away to the land of dreams.

I was surrounded by whiteness. Soft downy whiteness, as far as I could see. I felt safe, warm, comforted. And absolutely terrified. I had this dream every night. However, this time, I was going to see the end of it. I just knew it. Something bad was gonna happen. I could feel it in my bones.

I glanced around, but the now familiar landscape hadn’t changed. I settled back and snuggled into the featheriness of the ground.

A sudden keening startled me. It rocketed in through my ear, rattled around my head, and shot out the other ear. I sat up, quickly enough to get head rush. I looked and to my left the white was turning to red. A deep, blood red. And the red was turning to jet black. And the black was slowly turning to a scene.

The scene was slowly filling itself in, as if an invisible hand was painting the scene in incredible detail, with me in the middle of the canvas. It was of a car crash. At least eight cars had been in it, there might have been a couple of motor bikes. The scene zoomed in on a car, leaving me badly disorientated. I noticed the car and my eyes widened with shock and recognition. The car was my mother’s.

There was someone in the passenger seat. A gust of wind whirled around, carrying a scent of perfume to my nostrils. My mother’s perfume. I gasped.

“No! No! No!” I screamed and scrambled round to yank the drivers door open, sobbing as I did so. “Please Mum, please. Please be alive. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean anything of what I said earlier. Please!”

My hand closed around the door and passed straight through it. My mouth opened into a perfect little “o”. My mind, working a gazillion times the speed of light, figured something out for me.

It wasn’t real.

But it had to be. The quality was too realistic, too lifelike for it to be a dream. Then I saw myself running, screaming and sobbing down the road. But I was standing right here.

So either this is like a weird premonition, or I’ve now got a doppelganger as well as a famous father.

An ambulance arrived, screeching to a halt, and entourage of fire engines, police cars, and more ambulances following it. They reached my car first, and police officer grabbed the other me, and hauled her back a couple of metres, while the paramedics attended to my mum.

“Can you find a pulse?” one of them asked.

“ Nope. She’s long gone”

At that, the other me wrenched herself out the police officer’s arms and ran other to my mum, sinking to her knees when she got there. I found that I was imitating her, only my vision was fading back to white.

But I didn’t feel warm. I was trembling, and absolutely freezing. I opened my, and saw a rock face towering above. It had stopped snowing. I huddled my body into a tighter ball, and against my will, found myself drifting back to sleep.