But even that wasn’t true. It went back further than her. It all started with the nightmares.
A few days before the incident at the bar, Ryan lay in his bed, fighting sleep. It was a losing battle.
When they first started, Ryan had told himself that the dreams would go away. That once he was home long enough, the familiar would kick in. He would be reminded of who he was. Not Lance Corporal Ryan Dixson. No. He was Ryan from Carbondale. Starting linebacker on his high school football team. Son of David and Joy. Regular guy with a regular life. But the dreams wouldn’t let him forget. So he lay there, waiting. It hadn’t gotten better. In fact, it had gotten worse.
At first, when he landed in the States, they had come once every couple weeks. But with every few days that passed, he saw them more. The last night he had slept through without having the dream was Saturday. Now it was Wednesday, and he didn’t know if he could handle another one.
He wasn’t sure that he should call them dreams. They were more like memories in dream form. Night terrors of an actual event. No embellishment needed, for it took no dark conjuring to turn Ryan’s dreams into soul-rending flights of horror. No, the dirty work had been done in the real world. The only conjuring needed was the fumbling hands of a tribal rebel.
He was probably still alive, out there somewhere. That singular day was no doubt burned into his mind as well. Perhaps, on long nights in the Afghan waste, he and his fellows would sit round a low fire. In the sparking embers, as the others waited silently, ready to hang on his every word, he would weave the scene.
It was a convoy, seven Humvees deep. The Afghan raiders sat on a low hill a mile from the dusty, desert road on which the soldiers traveled. They were members of a local tribe. Not Taliban, but angry enough at the world and the invader to accept their generosity in the form of crude explosives.
Their methods were simple. Bury the device along the side of the road. Wait. When the target was over the area, trigger the bomb with a remote. Run.
The last part meant they were never really sure whether they succeeded. Sometimes the bomb went off too late or too early. Sometimes it just disabled the vehicle or caused minor damage. Most times it was more of a nuisance than anything else. But every now and then, it all fell into place. And that was the story the Pashtun man would tell his brothers in the dark watches of the night. Of the time that he killed an American.
Of course, Ryan never saw it that way, figuratively or literally. The dream was always the same. He was in the middle Humvee, the one that, by all rights, was the safest. He was sitting in the center of it, protected by the vehicle’s most heavily armored section. His back was to the windshield, facing Philip O’Connor. Philip was grinning. It seemed like Philip always was.
That smile was the last happy memory Ryan ever had.
It happened in an instant, as these things always do. One moment Philip was smiling. Then, somewhere on that distant hill, a man Ryan didn’t know and would never meet pressed a button. It took a split second for the signal to travel from the hill to the road. Long enough for a heartbeat. Long enough for the Humvee to roll the few extra feet it needed to for fate to have its due. But as thunder follows lightning, so too did the roar of the explosion follow the pressing of that button. On that roar rode death.
He only really heard it for a singular instant. After the pressure wave burst his eardrums, everything that followed was more of a low, echoing murmur, like he was sitting at the bottom of a well. Somehow that made everything all the worse.
He felt his stomach drop as the whole vehicle lifted into the air. But it wasn’t the feeling of weightlessness or the bursting of his ears that filled his nights with horror. It was what he saw.
Philip was sitting across from him, smiling. Then he was ripped apart. Even as it happened, even as parts of his body were twisted and torn off, he still wore that smile.
They said he died instantly, and Ryan believed it. He often wondered what exactly it meant to die instantly, though. It was true — the smile never left his face. But that only meant that his brain didn’t have enough time to register what was happening and send a signal to his muscles to better reflect it. Even if the control of every fiber was cut in that instant, even if that smile remained frozen in place, Ryan still wondered what the brain knew. If Philip’s last thoughts were simply the echo of soundless screaming, confined within the walls of his own mind.
Then Ryan wasn’t just thinking about it — he was living it. In that instant of reflected terror, he watched it happen again through his own eyes but with no power to stop it, a passenger in the flights of his own subconscious. As much a prisoner as one bound by chains.
He awoke from the dream as the sound of thunder ripped through the cabin of the vehicle and the body of his friend.
That night, the transition was a quiet one, his eyes simply fluttering open to the darkness that seemed eternal but in fact ended in the ceiling above. It had not always been that way. At first it was a shock. He would jerk himself from the dream, sitting bolt upright in his bed, drenched in sweat. At least, with time, he had overcome that part. Now that the dreams came more frequently, he had plenty of chances to practice self-control.
Not that it made it any easier to fall back asleep. No, in the hours that followed, he was as awake as he would ever be, even as he knew he would pay for it in the coming morning. There was no point in lying there and fighting it. If anything, that would probably make it worse, prolong the agony. He sighed as he pushed down the covers and pulled himself out of bed.
He wandered down the steps in the dark, not bothering with the lights. As if there was anyone else but him there, someone he might disturb, someone he might awaken. But he was alone, and he felt it.
He tripped on the final step, almost falling as he stumbled into his living room. He let himself collapse down into the recliner that sat in front of his television and turned it on. Then he reached over and opened the small refrigerator that he kept permanently stocked with beer. As he opened one, he couldn’t help but think that he was drinking more of it these days.
Bottle in one hand and remote in the other, he pressed a button and the electronic firelight of the television outshone the meager glow of the moon that had, until that point, provided the room’s only illumination. Ryan flipped through the channels, pausing briefly on an infomercial that made him smile for the first time in what seemed like ages. But it was a horror film that struck his fancy, one of those bad sci-fi flicks they only play at three o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t long before his eyelids began to grow heavy. They had almost closed completely when the movie faded out and the commercial began.
If it hadn’t been that particular commercial, Ryan wouldn’t have remembered it. If it had been anything else, he simply would have slipped away into sleep, never recalling the televised message he’d seen before dreams took him. Maybe then things would have been different. Maybe then, everything would have changed.
But it wasn’t just any commercial. It was something much different. Ryan watched through barely opened eyes, and later he would tell himself it had been a dream brought on by too much beer and not enough sleep. It started as a flash that filled the screen in blinding white before fading to an equally empty black. There was a pause then, the image emanating from the television now giving no light, and darkness held sway. But then from that black void, letters started to form, silhouetted in a dirty red. But it was the voice that broke through the dream-like haze that gripped Ryan.