The following are excerpts from Book 7 - A.T.X.D. Storm Seeker - where I have been exploring a concept inspired from the Mortal Kombat franchise. My main character Richard has a nightmare of seeing the aftermath of a battle in which all his teammates appear to have killed each other. This nightmare is then revealed to be a grim foreshadowing of actual events occurring in the book, in which some of the characters have been killed and then resurrected as revenants or "anti-operatives" by a particularly horrific villain. When Richard eventually surmises this to his wife Ashley and his former handler Dave, they get the help of another close comrade - extraterrestrial operative Rister Arshian - who believes that Richard's nightmare really is a foreshadowing of a "possible" future. I want to see how this sounds and if it could be made to sound more intriguing and less derisory (ineffectual).
Naturally, the two officers were still a little shaken up from the previous night’s encounter, but that didn’t prevent them from willingly opening up to Dave about the experience.
“Any idea why they attacked you?” Dave asked when his comrades finished telling him the story.
“Well, I noticed their eyes,” Richard replied, which Ashley remembered too but let her husband continue, “They….they were glowing a strange, reddish-orange. Their pupils were also a little narrower than usual. It’s almost like they were under some kind of spell or exposed to a mutagen of some kind.”
“Yeah, and I’ll wager that it’s not just plain induced-rampancy,” Ashley added. “Given the way they were moving, and how coordinated their retreat was the moment Bravo Team showed up, someone or something is controlling them. For what purpose, I’m not quite sure. But it sounded like something personal given what Charlie said before fleeing.”
It was then, however, that Richard started thinking back to his nightmare, as he recalled his assumption that the death and carnage he had witnessed in it was the result of a blood bath amongst his own comrades. At the time, however, he withheld that detail from Ashley, not knowing how his wife would react to hearing such a horrific theory. Then again, how was he to know that their own comrades, bewitched or infected, would try to kill them both the following day? Looking back, he felt that now was as good a time as any to start talking about this part. But even before he felt ready to speak, Dave and Ashley both noticed Richard’s concerned look as he thought about how to put his analysis into words.
“Richard, is everything alright?” Ashley inquired, “You look disturbed.”
Of course he was disturbed, and so was everyone else in the room. Nonetheless, Richard felt it best not to duck away from the inquiries and, slowly, he instead just spit it out.
“Ashley, there’s one thing I didn’t tell you about that dream,” Richard began.
“Dream? What dream?” Dave inquired, shocked by this.
“Richard had some kind of nightmare the night before last,” Ashley hastily replied to fill in the details. “He says he saw many comrades of ours dead, but he didn’t get a good look at what caused it.”
“Actually ma’am, I had a suspicion as to what could’ve happened, but it’s a very scary thought,” Richard warned, then took a moment to collect himself. “I think it was an internal struggle: our own comrades butchered each other.”
Ashley’s eyes opened to that wide, horrified size that always creeped Richard out when she heard this. And Dave, whose eyes never usually widened beyond a raising of the eyebrows, now looked at Richard with a similar look of shock that clearly showed the whites of his eyes for the first time.
“How on earth did you….how do you know?” Dave inquired.
“Ashley, I told you that you were amongst the casualties I saw, right?” Richard replied, looking back at the Commander, who had relaxed her eyes a little bit but hadn’t dismissed the shock from them yet. When Ashley nodded silently to confirm, Richard continued with, “Right across from your body in that nightmare was Laney’s. And I saw a combat knife, your combat knife specifically, stuck in her chest. Also, from what I could see, you...bled out from injuries inflicted by Laney’s knife.”
Once again, Ashley’s eyes widened, and this time she cupped a hand to her mouth as she attempted to process this thought, trying to believe that she wouldn’t be capable of killing the young ex-Marine in cold blood. Then again, Laney was one of the operatives that attacked Richard last night, so was this gorey result in her husband’s dream an act of self-defense? And dare she forget the haunting memories of being a gladiator on Kronosia or her own mindless humanoid under Stilatro’s command, both times killing someone close to her and having to live with that pain and guilt?
“Jesus Christ,” Dave then replied, breaking the shocked silence. “Who else did you see in that nightmare, Richard?”
While he felt unwilling to list every single casualty he’d seen in the dream, Richard went over a few names, including Jack, Dave, Emily and Kellie, though he chose not to describe the details of their supposed deaths as the one he’d just explained was disturbing enough.
“And after what happened last night,” Richard continued, “I wonder if these two things are connected. That maybe something or someone is prompting our own teammates to hunt down and kill us.”
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After a while, Rister finally replied, “I think I have a rough idea what you’ve experienced Richard, but I can’t say for certain.”
All eyes turned to Rister before the Vipros warrior replied, “I believe the Sergeant Major experienced what my tribe at least calls a Halarach: it’s a mental vision with a warning of future events in the form of a nightmare. It’s not especially common, but my people use it as a means of taking precautions to ensure a dangerous threat is minimized.”
“So like a prediction of the future from one of your own,” Ashley tried to clarify. “But how do you know if it is credible?”
“In my culture, Commander,” Rister advised, “we take the clarity and mental states of all our people seriously. We don’t doubt or criticize them because we think they’re mad or, as I once heard a human say on a mission, on steroids. It’s doubts and ridiculing like that which results in tragedy caused quite simply by ignorance. However, you’re also right that we don’t just act on impulse with visions like this. We take our time to investigate them and determine just how tangible a threat there is.”
“So how do you investigate without, if you pardon my saying, making premature actions that cause problems rather than solve them?” Richard inquired.
“Halarachs are not a foreshadowing of the future, Sergeant Major,” Rister replied. “They only provide clues to something that is likely to happen, but they cannot display exact outcomes. Because the future is a variable, unseen dimension that is easily affected by events in the present, we must look for clues in the vision. Once we have ascertained those variables, we can make a moderately accurate prediction of what will trigger the foreseen event, so that we can intercept and change it right when it occurs.”
“Wait hold on, hold on,” Dave interrupted. “You’re basically suggesting that we need to wait and then strike at one very specific point in time? A point we don’t have any knowledge of at this moment?”
“Exactly,” Rister replied, “I know it is a risky and arduous task.”
“It’s almost like trying to strike a sniper’s bullet with your own bullet at a very specific, almost perpendicular angle,” Richard surmised.
With some intrigue, Rister responded to this with, “Now that’s the best metaphorical way I’ve heard it described. To address your concern, Dave, that’s why we gather evidence with the time we have to get a good understanding of what pivotal moment in the near future it is we need to be looking for and when we need to intercept it. If we just let things run their course without intercepting them, then the event foreshadowed in the Sergeant Major’s nightmare is very likely to occur very similarly to what was depicted in his dream.”
“But if I’m understanding Rister’s view correctly,” Leilak replied, “by disrupting the chain of events in even the slightest way, we could reshape the outcome, for better or worse. And preferably, the more of this evidence Rister says we gather, the more likely it is we can turn the tables in our favor and prevent, or at least reduce, the potential for disaster.”
“Well, if we’re going to get started,” Dave replied, briefly touching his head as he tried to avoid giving himself a headache over the paradoxes they’d just talked of, “then we’d better begin with what we have right here. I’ll see if Dawson can give us a full copy of that report, in case there’s anything in there that we may have overlooked which could be useful.”
“In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get General Reach to send us to Siberia,” Ashley replied, and Richard briefly jolted with surprise.
“We’re going to the exposure site?” he asked for clarification.
“The report may be valuable,” Ashley replied, “but if there’s even the slightest trace of physical evidence left behind by the contact scenario from three days ago, then we’ll need to gather or analyze it quickly.”
“And what if the source of the manipulations is still there?” Richard questioned.
“Then we’ll have to fight it the best we can,” Dave replied, clutching his fist in his other hand, “And if it comes down to a fight for our lives, then we work together to bury this sonuvabitch, and hopefully bring our comrades home intact.”
“I’ll see what the data in the mission logs from the Siberia Response have to say, maybe even track down LFC Armstrong in the process,” Leilak then volunteered. “And I’ll work with Rister to try and help piece together what we have before and after your next mission to the Siberia site, assuming we’re successful in getting the operation approved by Command.”
“Right, so let’s get to work,” Ashley insisted with a clap of her hands, taking command of what was now unofficially a mission at hand. “There’s no way we can stop this phenomenon from occurring by just standing here and talking. So let’s get going.”
With a circling of the Commander’s hand to dismiss the group, everyone quickly broke up to perform their assigned tasks.