Sweet Dreams by Aaron Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

and seemed to slow to a dead stop. He felt as if he was frozen, trying to move, but every limb felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His hands were cramped to the steering wheel. His heart stopped. Was this what death was like? The absolute helplessness and the sense that your body was being ripped from time and space. Then the sound overtook him as it shot through his body like a bolt of lightning. He could feel the rush of air go by him as it threw him forward in his seat. This was the one time he wished he had listened to K and worn his seatbelt. His body slammed into the steering wheel, and the car filled with a blinding light and a heat that began to melt the headliner and the plastic molding on the interior of the car. The rear window burst under the pressure of the blast, and glass went flying into the front seat, shattering into a thousand pieces as his head hit the front windshield making a dull thud.
    Mark couldn't feel the glass digging into his back, but he could taste the iron warm blood in his mouth. He couldn't feel anything and his mind was temporally frozen in fear or just shock he didn't know.
    He heard the sound again and this time he could put it into words in his mind. "KABOOM!" Mark escaped his nightmare and regained the use of his limbs and hopefully his wits. He reacted with lightning fast reflexes and ducked down with his face smashed into the leather seat as the rest of the windows exploded into a million daggers of death. The car lifted off the ground like a rocket that just hit the blastoff part of the countdown. The silver Honda flipped end over end followed by a fireball that pushed over fifty other cars in what looked like a huge wave on the sea but not made of salt water but rather metal and molten fire. Mark covered his head with his arms, and jammed his legs into the floorboard wedging himself against the seat and the door, trying not to get thrown from the car.
    The force was like a merry-go-round pulling everything away from the center of the vehicle as it tumbled through the air. Mark pushed with everything in him, trying desperately to keep from being thrown from the vehicle. The car landed on its roof, slamming Mark from his hiding place, and slid to a halt, crashing into a light pole about one hundred yards away from where he had started.
    Blood ran from Marks arms and back but he didn't notice, all he could hear was a high ringing in his ears. A small fire was beginning to burn into the leather and fabric of the caved in cab where Mark was lying when he seemed to notice that this was not the best place to be at the moment.
SWEET
    DREAMS
    49
    Slowly, Mark crawled out of the broken window, dragged his legs through, and rolled onto his back. The sky was blue with a few scattered clouds floating lazily across the open expanse as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on in the world.
    Mark gulped in a deep breath not knowing that he was holding his breath. His confused brain was sparking and sputtering as if trying to re-boot. His lungs burned as he took another deep breath and blood oozed from his side. He did an inventory check of damaged parts and could tell that he had a few broken ribs and from the pain in his back he guessed that he was a dartboard for glass shards. His head was spinning, and he tried to focus his eyes.
    He scrambled to his feet and turned to face the supermarket where his family had been. "Where was the store?" His mind raced. He tried to take a step toward where he thought the store should be when his legs gave away, and he fell on his elbow onto the crushed glass and concrete splitting his forearm open and sending a flash of hot pain up his arm. Flames and thick black smoke filled the air. It was raining bits of metal and fire all around him, and all of the cars within a one-hundred-yard radius had been thrown away from the front of the store like a tidal wave. Cars were on fire, and one let out an explosion as the gas tank caught fire and the fumes ignited.