The Unborn by Brian Herbert

Author:Brian Herbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ReAnimus Press

CHAPTER 26

Sometimes Riggio didn’t like to fall asleep. For months now, he’d been sensing something bad in his dreams, something waiting for him there in the shadows of his consciousness, intending to harm him the moment he fell asleep. Being human, there was no way to entirely avoid sleep; it always came, and too often, the bad things came, too.

Maybe General Neron’s investigation would turn something up, and even if it was bad, at least Riggio would finally know what it was and perhaps feel some relief over that—as long as Meredith didn’t get in trouble over it.

In his hotel room bed on the far-off moon he found himself caught in another dream, a nightmare. Riggio saw a vast army filled with himself in female form—one after another, identical in all respects, wearing red uniforms, dripping with blood, carrying shields and swords. They marched toward him, beating drums, rattling their weapons on the shields, and shouting battle cries. But though they looked like women, they were ferocious, and all sounded like him.

There were so many of these strange soldiers that they were beyond counting, and the voices rose from their mouths like deafening claps of thunder and cannon fire. They increased their marching speed to a trot, and passed right through the dreaming Riggio as he watched.

Turning as they went by, he saw them heading toward a blood-red horizon, a flaming sky. Gradually the female army receded into the distance, until he saw them no more.

Then, from the other direction, a new army marched forward, all women again, shouting and rattling their weapons on shields, and all looking like him. They were identical in all respects to the earlier force, and again they marched right through them, and then off toward a blood-red horizon.

This happened over and over, and when yet another army marched toward Riggio, he cried out above their collective voices and marching sounds, and as he shouted louder and louder, the army vanished, and he awoke.

He sat up in the low light of the hotel room, confused and trying to interpret the nightmare.

In the recent past, when he awoke from other dreams and tried to understand, and remember, he’d summoned to his mind grisly visions of bodies, all dead women, while not always knowing how they had died. The visions of murdered women had seemed so real, as real as the marching armies. And he recalled a whispering female voice, telling him he was a murderer, that he had killed many women, all of them his lovers.

And sometimes he’d found scratches on his arms and face when he awoke, and the wound to his left shoulder that still hurt a little, but was almost healed. All unexplained, making him wonder if he might have gone into the land of dreams and been injured there—and if he had killed people there.

Really killed people.

He had a strong sensation that all of the dreams were linked, but he was not certain how. And it seemed to him that they were more than dreams, more than nightmares flashing across the mind of a sleeping man.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.