by H. T. Night
I had been Catholic all my life, but I had a serious crisis of faith when my parents died. I just couldn’t imagine a God allowing good souls to self-destruct. Father Fitzpatrick got me through it with a lot of solid counseling. Today, my belief system wasn’t exactly what Catholicism taught, but I do have faith. That seems to go a long way with me.
As I reached the end of the street, I decided to cut across the park. It was a little bit of a shortcut, but mainly I did it for the scenic view. Hillcrest Park was built on the side of a mountain and had some amazing trails across the park. I cut through the parking lot and went up some steps that led directly to the heart and soul of the park. The park had three levels, and now I was on the second level, making my way to the very top level to get to my house. I was trying to get to Chapman Street.
The park was dark and the moon was full. I decided to make my way over to a bench and just relax. I’d had a few beers, but I still had my wits. I looked up at the moon and stars. You can’t really see the stars too well in Orange County because we have Los Angeles’ smog creeping over our shoulder.
I just called out into the night, “I’m confused. I feel like I’m at a crossroads. I can’t keep helping people who are so far gone that it doesn’t even matter how much time I invest in them. Their fate is always the same. They either overdose or just return to crime and other means to make a buck. And I lose them to their old habits. I don’t want to do it anymore!” I stood up and walked around. I was sick and tired of trying to do the right thing. In my heart, I had always believed this was what I was called to do, but I was starting to doubt it.
Who was I talking to? God? The creator of the universe? Were they the same? All I knew was that I was talking to someone who wasn’t physically there. If anyone had seen me, they would have thought I had lost my mind. Maybe that was it? I was going crazy.
I took a seat back on the bench and just took a deep breath, a sigh for the ages. Very calmly, I said, “I need a sign if this is what I’m supposed to do!” I began to get a lot more emotional than I anticipated. My work had been everything to me since my family had been destroyed. “Am I on the right track?” I asked out loud. “Or am I supposed to get on another train?” I sat back down and tried to compose myself. “I just need a sign.” I exhaled and got up. I took some stairs to get to the third level. There were a couple of side paths that also led up to the top level once you were done with the stairs. I was now on the second path.
I reached the top of the dark steps, which were barely lit by a dim streetlight, so it wasn’t complete darkness. Something flew into me. It was bird. A big-ass black bird that looked to be a raven of some sort. I looked up ahead, and I saw three more giant black ravens.
What the hell is happening?
The four giant birds seemed to be bullying me. I yelled, “Shoo! Go away!”
Okay, that was not the thing to do.
The three black birds swooped over and nearly knocked me down. They looked like giant bats in the dark.
Then something happened that was beyond my human reasoning. I thought I was seeing things as the three birds reversed themselves in the moonlight and made their way back to me. This time they plummeted into my body. All three of them did. They were fucking attacking me. I saw the fourth bird, the one that originally flew into me. The bird flew away as if it was being chased. I couldn’t see if anything was chasing it as I was dealing with the three present birds attacking me.
What the hell was going on? Am I losing my freaking mind?
I decided to take off running. I got to the field that’s on the third level of the park. I figured if I could get to the street, I could gather my mind. As I ran, I could hear footsteps behind me. Human footsteps. What the fuck was going on?
I turned around, and now I was being chased by three men in trench coats. I must be losing my mind. What the fuck was going on? I looked on and now there were three men standing in front of me.
“What the hell do you guys fucking want?” I yelled.
I now noticed that each of them was wearing a different color trench coat. A blond-haired, blue-eyed man wore a brown trench coat. An African-American man that was short and very skinny wore a white trench coat. The third man was Middle Eastern in appearance and was wearing a black trench coat.
The man in the brown trench coat came at me and swept my leg out from under me. I fell face-first into the dirt.
I looked up and saw the three men standing over me. I was terrified. Nothing like this had ever happened to me in my life. The man in the black trench coat stared down at me and said, “Sorry, buddy, this isn’t your night.”
Was he fucking kidding me? The whites of his eyes cut into me.
“He looks really healthy,” the man in the brown trench coat said to the others. “You want to take him back with us?”
“Nah, guys like him are a dime a dozen out here. We can feed nightly if we want. We have a job to do with this guy, and that’s it.”
What the fuck? What were they planning on doing to me?
I was horrified. My heart began to beat rapidly and I knew I was having an insane adrenalin rush. Something snapped in my head, and I rose to my feet and ran as fast as I could. I had adrenalin running through me that I didn’t know existed. I was almost to the street when one of them tackled me to the ground. I was still on the grass, but the tackle really hurt and I scraped my knees and elbows as I hit the ground.
The next five minutes were a blur. All I knew was that they were taking turns biting me. They bit my neck, my ankle, my wrist. It was horrifying. I saw my life flash before my eyes. They were making me bleed to death. I felt as if I was slipping away. I was quickly losing consciousness.
The last thing I heard before I blacked out was, “Police! Get the fuck off of him!”
Then lights out.
Chapter Five
4:00 a.m. Tuesday Morning
I woke up, and I was in the hospital. I had no idea how long I was out. I looked up and Steve was sitting next to me in the hospital room.
“How did I get here?” I asked.
“By ambulance. Are you okay?” Steve looked at me with concern.
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“You were attacked, Hunter. It looks to be by animals. You have bite marks all over your body.”
“It wasn’t animals,” I said. “It was human beings. Three guys attacked me in the park for no reason.”
“When the police found you there was no one there. You were bleeding to death.”
I tried to remember the last thing that happened. I was being attacked and I heard a police officer identify himself. He or the other cops had to have seen them. I paused and stared at Steve. “They said I was lying alone?”
“Yeah they did.” Steve seemed as surprised as I was.
“That doesn’t make any sense. The last thing I remember was a male policeman stopping them by calling out that he was indeed a cop.”
“Don’t try to worry about that right now. Get some rest. I was worried about you, man. I thought we were going to lose you. You lost an outrageous amount of blood. I feel like shit letting you walk home.”
“Letting me? I know you might feel bad, but I have walked through that park a hundred times over the years. Most of the time at night. Those fuckers were eating me. They were biting my body everywhere. It made no sense why anyone would do that?”
Steve looked over at me. He seemed to have a lot on his mind. “Listen, Hunter, we’re going to catch these assholes that did this to you. I won’t rest until we do. Right now, you need to rest. I’ll come back and see you later in the morning.
“What time is it?”
“Four in the morning.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“Munson came to the scene and he called me. He recognized you as they put you in the ambulance. He called me immediately.”
“He always seems to be there at the right time, doesn’t he?” I said to Steve.
“He’s the best cop on
the force.” Steve got up out of his chair and walked over to me. “I’ll come by tomorrow. I’ll probably bring Munson.”
Steve left the room. I was surprised that Steve was the first person I saw when I woke up. Not a doctor, not a nurse, and not a policeman to take down my report. I looked outside and recognized what hospital I was in. I was in the same hospital that I had been in hours earlier signing ‘end of days’ papers for Dave.
I had no business making that type of serious decision for him. Was this my karma?
I closed my eyes. I was real sore and real tired. I had an IV in my arm that must have been dripping painkillers into me. It was making me terribly drowsy, too. Before I knew it, I was out.
I was in and out of sleep all night, which meant sleep paralysis would be making an appearance. My condition was always worse when my sleep was disrupted.
I was having a jumbled dream that was a mixture of three ideas like most dreams are, but then something happened; something very specific. First and foremost, I fell into one of my dream seizures. I could feel my panic level rising and my heart rate was beeping off the chart. I could open my eyes and see the room, but yet I was still dreaming. I could see my heart monitor. I was in my seizure, watching my heart rate rise well above 175.
I tried to will myself awake. I can do that sometimes if I’m real focused, and I will snap out of my seizure in the beginning. But not this time.
This time, everything was different. It wasn’t this chaotic mess where goons and ghouls pop out and scare me as if I was in my own demented haunted house. Instead, my dream was very real. Nothing chaotic, as if the dream unscrambled and I saw the dream world perfectly clear. That was all fine and dandy, but I was dealing with the unknown fear that happens to me when I fall into this condition. Usually, I do all I can to jolt myself awake or I eventually just go back to sleep.
Not this time. I endured the panic attack. I endured the misfiring of neurons that sent a chilling fear down my spine. I tried to look past all of that so I could concentrate on the dream.
It was as if my dream became perfectly clear and my consciousness was watching it, as if I was in a theater watching a horror movie. I say horror movie because what I was witnessing was a nightmare. But it wasn’t a nightmare about me. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t in the dream. I was an outsider. I was watching from afar as if I was peeking through the window.
I could see a young a man. He looked to be in his early twenties. He was really skinny, with long, black hair. His skin was pale and he seemed malnourished. He was wearing a blue windbreaker with blue sweats. He was snooping around someone’s apartment. He was going through drawers and looking in closets. I saw an older man come home, and the long-haired guy was hiding behind the door. The old man knew someone was in his apartment. He crept around and made his way into the bathroom where the man was hiding in the shower.
The old man yelled out, “Who’s there? I know you’re in there. I can hear you breathing.” The old man now seemed to be a little bit of a bad ass. This wasn’t his first rodeo or break-in.
The man hiding in the shower didn’t answer. The old man grabbed a baseball bat that was at the side of his bed. He must have kept it in his room for this very reason. He yelled out one more time. He knew the man was in the bathroom. “I’m calling the cops. I know you’re in there!”
Suddenly, the long-haired man jumped out of the shower and tried to run to the hallway.
Then the old man did something foolish. He should have let the guy run out. He hit the young kid in the back as he ran by with the metal bat. The long-haired kid fell to the floor and the old man jumped on top of him. The young guy was far too strong; he chucked the old man’s body off of him. The old man got up and put his body in the doorway.
“Fucking move. You fucked me. I didn’t fuck you!” the younger man yelled out.
The old man didn’t budge. The young man grabbed the bat that the old man had dropped by the door.
“Look, it didn’t have to go like this. You gave me no choice.”
“I cut you off. That was all I did.”
“Then you owe me.” The young man took a swing at the old man and yelled at him to get out of the doorway.
“Fuck you, Felix, you’re a lying, cheating scumbag!” the old man yelled.
Then Felix snapped. He hit the old man over the head with the metal bat. The old man tried to protect himself, but the force of the bat was too much. He collapsed on the ground and the young did the unthinkable; he smashed the old man’s skull in with one good swing. Felix looked on in horror. Blood was all over his face and clothes. Felix ran out of the old man’s house.
Then the dream ended, and it was just in time. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It was the longest seizure I had ever allowed myself to endure. I saw every horrifying detail. I was sweating from head to toe. I crawled out of my bed and made my way to the doorway. My arm was still stuck to my IV. I was dragging the darn thing behind me. A nurse saw me at the doorway and told me to get back in bed.
“May I have a pen and paper?” I asked her.
“Sure, get yourself back in your bed, sir. I will bring it to you.”
I got to my bed and the first thing I noticed was that it was still dark. I had only been asleep for maybe an hour since Steve left.
The nurse brought me a pen and paper and I wrote down every detail of the dream I just had. I was strongly drawn to do so. I wrote out the dream and by the end of it, I had fallen asleep again.
This time I woke up in sheer pain. My very own face felt like it was on fire. I woke up instantly and the morning sunlight was coming through the window. For whatever reason, it was stinging my face and arms in a way I had never experienced. I yelled out, “Nurse! Doctor! Help me! Someone help me! Anyone!” I covered my face and arms with my hospital bedspread, but it was doing very to little help.
The nurse came running and asked, “What’s the matter, Mr. Simon?” I recognized her voice. It wasn’t the nurse. It was Dr. Gomez, the doctor I had spoken to the day before about Dave living or dying.
“Please do something about the sunlight. It’s burning my skin!” I said, sounding like a madman.
She ran over to the window and put the blinds down. “How’s that?”
My skin still felt like it was in a pan of grease on an open fire. “Please get me out of this room. Put me in a room where there is no sunlight.”
“The only place there is no sunlight is the hallway.”
“Then fucking wheel me out there!” I said, pleading.
Then a couple of men came in the room.
“Please help me move Mr. Simon to the hallway. The sun is hurting his skin.”
The two men wheeled me to the hallway, and the second I was out of the sunlight, my skin felt normal again. I was still under the covers. I peeked my head out and could see Dr. Gomez and the two men staring at me. The men were hospital orderlies. Everyone was looking at me like I was fucking crazy. All I knew was that my skin felt like it was on the surface of the sun.
“Thanks,” I said.
The doctor looked me over to try to get a read on me. She had the most amazing eyes. They pierced right through me as she tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with me.
I smiled at her and let out a deep breath. “Thanks everyone. I have never felt pain like that in my life.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Simon. You have been under a lot of pressure these past couple days. I think you might have just had anxiety attack. We’ll try to find you a room where there isn’t any outside light coming in. For now, please go back to sleep.” She gave me a warm, soothing smile and my eyes were still heavy. The drugs were definitely working. I quickly fell back to sleep.
Chapter Six
2:00 p.m. Tuesday Afternoon
I was in a much deeper sleep this time. I only woke up once and saw that I hadn’t been moved from the hallway. As I fell asleep again, my scattered dreams were swept to the side and I was having a very specific dream, as I did earl
ier in the morning.
Then I was struck with another one of my sleep paralysis seizures. Fear bolted throughout my body as if I was being struck by lightning. I could hardly handle the anxiety.
In my dream, I could see a coffee shop. It was a cold night. It was Grind Away, a coffee shop in the city of Buena Park. Again, I wasn’t in the dream. It was as if I was floating above the scene and had a perfect view of my main character. Once again, the star of my dream was the long-haired young man that had killed the old man in the previous dream.
Felix was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. He was walking out of the coffee shop. He had a large cup of coffee in his hand. He walked across the street to a light brown apartment building. The outside of it read Casa Vista. It appeared to be where he lived, because he scanned a card that got him through the outside gate. I saw Felix walk up a stairway to the second floor. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He walked in and now I was seeing inside his apartment. He walked to the back of the apartment to his bedroom. He took his jeans and black T-shirt off and just threw on a pair of blue sweats and decided to remain shirtless. He had a pretty good build.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Felix went to his only window and looked out of it. He seemed to recognize who it was, because he opened the door.
It was a white guy. He was real tall and real skinny. He was wearing the same color blue jeans as Felix, but he was wearing a black leather jacket.
“You got the shit, Felix?” the guy asked.
“You got the money, Tyler?” Felix fired back.
“Of course.” Tyler reached in his pocket and flashed a bundle of cash. Felix smiled and turned around to go to his bedroom. As he did so, Tyler quickly reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. He held the gun behind his back and slowly followed Felix into his bedroom. Felix had no idea he was about to get ambushed with a gun.
