The Parallel: Chapter 1

Eliott Scott Warren, fifteen, was about the least-average kid imaginable, therefore making him… an average kid. He had very pale, almost sickly-looking skin, protruding, obnoxiously bone-thin limbs, and wavy dark brown hair. But the odd thing about him was his eyes. They were the palest blue possible, not a grey-blue, not a blue-blue, but a white-blue, milky, blurred, and bizarre. Once in a while, people would ask his mother if he was blind, but then his unearthly and intelligent eyes would make contact with theirs, and they would immediately know that he was not. Eliott could see just as well as anyone. In fact, he could see much better than the average person. He noticed everyone and everything around him, as well as some things that weren’t.

Eliott dreamed. He dreamed of things that he had seen and heard before, ordinary dreams, frivolous dreams, dreams he would have long forgotten about by morning. And then there were the other dreams. He would dream of things he knew that his brain just wasn’t capable of thinking up. Amazing things. Devastating things. The weird part was that he had no idea how these dreams got into his head. For Eliott was pretty good at blocking out everything bad in his life, and it was a long list, but these dreams terrified him.

It wasn’t just at night. Sometimes Eliott would witness these strange and alien scenes during the day, usually at a time when he desperately needed to concentrate. (Or so it seemed.) Once, during his Geometry exam, Eliott had wasted a full twenty minutes staring into space as he witnessed a robotic ant eat up the sun. His teacher had scolded him for daydreaming.

It was the fact that the dreams came to him even when he had been previously fully conscious of his surroundings that made Eliott wonder whether they were even dreams at all. He just couldn’t think of anything else they could be.

Eliott lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment with his mother, Cassandra, who worked at the nearby Chinese food restaurant. His room contained the bare basics: bed, dresser, closet, and a tiny desk without a chair. He had a dilapidated art pad with a few stubs of colored pencils, as drawing was what he really liked to do. He never drew things from his dreams because his dreams were often too depressing to think about much. Besides, they weren’t his ideas. They came from somewhere far away, somewhere that was definitely not Hamilton, Pennsylvania, that gloomy little village Eliott called home.

One April evening would change Eliott’s life forever, although he did not know it at the time. It had seemed like a pretty ordinary, or, in other words, eventless, day. Eliott came home from school without having spoken to anyone, as the teachers knew better than to call on him; he never knew anything and appeared not to even pay attention most of the time. He did some of his homework, the parts that vaguely interested him, and then he drew for a while. His mother, tired and grey, with unwashed brown hair up in a lanky bun, came home at 8:30. She brought with her some Chinese food from work. They ate without speaking, besides the fact that Eliott’s mother mumbled some words to herself from time to time. She had always done that. He had learned to ignore it. In fact, she hardly ever spoke directly to him; Eliott supposed that he had learned to talk mostly by picking up mutterings here and there. Eliott went to bed directly after dinner, and he collapsed in a heap as soon as the lights went out. He closed his pale blue eyes slowly, feeling slightly apprehensive.

The world shifted, distorted and gave a mighty lurch, morphing into what Eliott instantly recognized as a dream. This dream wasn’t like most of the others, though; in this dream, there were no people. Eliott was standing on top of a patch of bare ground, without any signs of vegetation. He looked up. The sky was a bloody red, with orange streaks running through it. It was a toxic sky, a deadly sky. Eliott was beginning to wonder when the dream would end when he saw them. Planes.

There were big black planes hurling through the sky at top speed, coming closer and closer, getting louder and louder. As they passed over his head, Eliott turned around and saw just what he had been praying would not be there: buildings, a sure sign of human life.

The planes slowly reached their destination, and Eliott knew what would happen an instant before it did. Something big and cylindrical dropped from one of the planes, and there was a deafening crash, followed by screams even Eliott could hear, though he was miles away. One of the buildings toppled over, collapsing in flames. Then another bomb was dropped. And another. And another.

“No!” Eliott screamed, and he ran towards the city, knowing he would never get there in time. He could hear the screams more clearly now, and crying, and desperate prayers. Explosions racked the inside of his brain. “No! No! No!”

Then, all of a sudden, there was an explosion bigger than any of the rest. It drowned out everything, and Eliott was actually picked up by the force of it and slammed into the ground again.

“Nooo…” he murmured softly, shaking with emotion, his face pressed to the barren ground. The explosions were never-ending, and there was absolutely nothing he could do. Something told him that this was the end of the world. Soon, everything would be gone.

Glassy-eyed, Eliott rolled onto his back, staring bleakly up at the sky. More of the planes were heading towards the city, making horrible, screeching noises as they blasted by. Squinting as he held his ears, Eliott realized with a jerk that there was something written on each of the planes’ bellies:

othin  s   ter   an so ethin

He could only read part of the slogan through the smoke-covered sky. Perhaps it was in Latin or something, because Eliott had no idea what it meant. What was more, he didn’t care very much.

Then, Eliott heard something other than the blasts and explosions of war. He heard a voice, as clear as day, though the outside noise was deafening. “It’s him!” the voice cried, high-pitched and pure, and even a bit… hopeful?

Eliott hesitated for a moment, then got to his feet, running towards the sound. “Wait!” he yelled hoarsely, stumbling around and trying to see ahead of him. “Who are you? Wait for me!” Nothing answered him but the sound of gunfire and cries of agony. He tripped, falling onto a piece of paper that had been blowing around in the wind. Eliott quickly picked it up, then fell back in shock as he looked at the picture of the face that had been stamped on it. It was the face of a woman, a woman with blond hair, black eyes, and a sinister, hateful expression. There was something eerie about that face. It was that she seemed pleased with herself, but it wasn’t a nice kind of pleased. It was as if she knew what was going on, at this very moment, and was fully satisfied with the way her plan was going. Yes, that was it, Eliott reasoned, but one more glance at that face told him that there was something about her that was even more disturbing.

Eliott felt like he had seen her before.

He screamed, a long, drawn out, devastating sound. The orange sky was swirling around him, the black planes mixed in, curling stripes in the pinwheel of death.

Reality lurched into being. Eliott yelped and sat straight up, trembling and trying to get his heart to stop racing. When it slowed down, he took several deep breaths and sank down into his bed. Immediately, his head started pounding again, and he became aware that his entire back was soaked with icy-cold sweat. It took him over an hour before he had calmed down.

“Just a dream,” he whispered to himself, his voice quavering. “Just… dream.”

But it wasn’t. Eliott could no longer pretend that this was normal. He could no longer convince himself that what he saw was anything but… superhuman.

What had this… this vision meant? What was it? Who was that evil woman with the vicious, haunting look on her gaunt face? And what had that person meant when he or she had declared that it was ‘him’? Who was ‘him’?

othin   s   ter   an so ethin

Eliott just could not make out what that was. Or if it even mattered.

Eliott wished he was normal. He wished he had never seen such a terrible event. His only comfort was that it certainly could not be real. It couldn’t be. Nothing like that must ever happen.

Then why had he seen it? Had it been a figment of his imagination after all? But… what if it wasn’t? What would he do then?

“Just a dream,” Eliott consoled himself. He was even beginning to believe it. He closed his eyes once more, flinching slightly, but no dream came. Good. That meant that he could get some sleep. He had a science test that he had not studied for the next day.

Just then, Eliott had a rather disturbing thought. If what he saw was real, then there was only one possibility. This thing had not happened in the past as far as he could tell, and it was not happening now. It could only be… the future.

The future.

Eliott Scott Warren, fifteen, did not sleep a wink.