Whiplash

The bullet moved in slow motion, inching toward the man’s uncovered forehead. He clenched tightly his eyes and relaxed his shoulders. It was inevitable. The Final Problem. The Reichenbach Falls. It was time. He heard the howling of wind in his ears and the man with the gun let loose a wild cry. Everything went black.

Ω

The night before, the man had a dream. As his body began to relax, he fell into a deep slumber, and opened his eyes to a great snowy landscape. He was surrounded by vast and jagged mountains in every direction, covered by feet of snow. The man’s breath plumed in front of him, warming his face in the bitter cold.

The man knew this dream. Ever since he was a boy, the man had a recurring nightmare that became a harbinger of death and destruction. When he was eight years old, the towering peaks first arose the night before a horrific accident that killed both of his grandparents. When he was 10, his house was burned down by a fire. When he was thirteen, his parents’ lives were claimed in a mass shooting. The man had lost everyone but his brother. The dream hadn’t occurred in forty years.

But, it plagued him that night.

Every time, the man was lucid, but out of control. He walked, or stumbled, or crawled, or slogged his way to a crevasse about 20 yards to his left. The wind howled, and snow fell wetly and heavily on the man’s tired shoulders. His scraggly beard was caked with snow and ice. When he clawed his way to the slit in the mountain’s ledge, he peered over the soft, undulating mounds of snow into the unfathomably deep and dark opening before him. Every time, the man heard a voice, weeping.

“Please don’t take me away,” it said. “Come with me; don’t leave me behind….”

It was always the voice of a woman – sorrowful and sweet, like the sirens’ song.

Every time, the man, despite his strength, was sucked into the crevasse by a sudden vortex of wind that left him breathless and sweating in his bed. He always awoke with the feeling that he was falling.

This dream began no differently. When he opened his eyes to a torrent of snowflakes, he knew what was to happen, but not to whom. He was pulled upward to his feet, and trudged yet again to the hole. This time, however, it was not a female voice that greeted him, but that of a man. It said nothing but let loose a guttural cry that stirred the winds and lifted the man up, up, up through the air, face to face with the summits of the mountains. A focused blast of wind hit the man squarely in the forehead and his head snapped back. He woke up sweating, again, but this time with whiplash.

When the man heard shouting and banging outside his house that morning, he wasn’t alarmed. He had known this was coming. His brother, the captain, was safe at his home in no threat of danger.

He readjusted himself on his sofa, and left his book open on the table. It wouldn’t take them long; the locks on his doors were very weak and the man had no means of protecting himself.

By the man’s calculations, it would take whomever was in his house eight seconds to reach his room; that was, if they knew where to look. He assumed they did.

As the man gazed out the window at a striking sunset, the colors triggered within him some of the most buried memories, deep in the man’s subconscious. It looked like fire – beautiful, yet harsh and unforgiving.

Time seemed to slow. It had been only two seconds, but it felt like an eternity. He heard the feet of a man pound up three stairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. The man’s heart pounded to the beat of the heavy boots, nearly halfway to the top of his stair case. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud thud thud thud thud. A man burst through the door, holding a gun.

Ω

Tick-tock.

Tick-tock.

The clock sounded every painful second.

The captain sat at his desk, radio in hand, gazing out his window at a similar sunset. The sun met the sea in the most vivid array of bright hues that bathed all who watched in a golden light. He didn’t, however, have the luxury of gazing from the sandy shores of the beach below. He couldn’t enjoy himself - yet. The wait was too excruciating.

The captain’s radio crackled with static before a voice came over it, and the man bit his lip. The voice on the radio confirmed what the man had ordered, just hours earlier in the dead of night.

“Target eliminated, sir.”

“Good work, Braxton.”

The crackling overcame the radio once again and faded out altogether.

The captain leaned back into his sparsely-cushioned chair and sighed with relief. It was a bittersweet victory.

Outside his window, framed by the orange sun, snowflakes began to fall, and the captain, oddly enough, felt the sensation of whiplash.

A