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Michael has experienced enough visions to recognize them from the beginning. There are two types—visions in which his future self is present and those where he is not. Both start like waking from deep sleep, his sight blurry as it adjusts to light, his other senses dull from lack of use. Time accelerates faster than an airplane, his sight coming into focus with it at an almost heightened state. But in the visions where his future self is not physically present, so, too, does Michael lack the sense of touch—a ghostly watcher of wicked deeds, trapped in an ethereal plane others can neither see nor hear, unable to impact the events fate or God or his own subconscious deems necessary to show him.
Those visions are actually less terrifying. In the other, he is an unwilling participant. While he can move as if in possession of his own, albeit somewhat older, body. He can feel everything, do anything, be responsible and harbor guilt, or hurt and be hurt. Which is why he momentarily confuses the latter with the former.
Michael can’t move. He thinks he might be paralyzed. The thought sends a chill up his spine, raising all the hairs on his neck. Panic threatens to whip his thoughts into scrambled eggs. His appendages are useless. He can’t even wiggle a toe, never mind lift his head off the dewy grass. His eyes move in their sockets, but on his side, he can’t see a damn thing out of his left eye beyond spears of thin green grass and the water droplets clinging to them. The scent of damp earth fills his nostrils, not unpleasant, fresh like a field after a summer rain. The only sound belongs to cicadas chirping out their nightly mating song.
What good can I do with this if I can’t see anything? But his right eye can see more. He focuses on learning what he can about his environment, and his pulse ticks down half a beat. Unfamiliar bleachers, painted white and wooden, with those dangerous gaps between each row that Michael didn’t think existed anymore; a starless night sky lit up by stadium lights too bright to stare into; a scoreboard standing to the right of the bleachers, Go Sabres or something similar written on it. Much closer, a line of chalk runs at a diagonal out of sight.
A thump and a groan silences the night critters. A slap follows, then bodies crashing only a foot from Michael’s face. Two people, both with short white hair, each with hands around the other’s neck, strangle each other. The bigger man on top has better leverage and position. He digs his thumbs into the other’s neck, likely crushing the Adam’s apple and windpipe.
The slender figure below him wheezes, head turning toward Michael. He gasps, seeing no man at all but Sam. Her hair is cut short and styled up in an unfamiliar rounded coif. And the color is as silver as a coin, making her look older than her years. Her face, too, shows signs of aging, with wrinkles where she never had them before. Whether they are due to exertion or the passage of time, Michael cannot tell.
He tries to reach out for her, tries to scream for help, but he can do neither. Sam rakes at the man’s eyes then throws punches into his jaw, but for all her efforts, she cannot break his hold. Michael can only watch as Sam fights on, much longer than he thinks possible, dragging out the inevitable with every last bit of fight she can muster.
He cries as her hands fall by her sides. Her face tilts toward him, lips parted as if to let her soul escape, eyes open and filled with the knowledge of what is to come—for her and for Michael.
The man grunts and rises to his knees. His face is not immediately recognizable, yet as he glowers down at Michael, it is somehow familiar. Sweat drips from his temples. He wipes his hands on his pants and shuffles toward Michael. Resting on his forearms and breathing heavily, he plops down inches from Michael’s face. So close that, for all the differences and only meeting the man once before, Michael knows who he has to be—the man with the needle, the man who must have touched him. The man with a city burning in his eyes, a vision he yearns to make reality.
But on recognizing the killer in a vision in which he himself is present, Michael’s fears actually begin to retreat. Although disabled, he knows he cannot be dead, and he couldn’t have been killed any time between his capture and this moment, whenever the events are supposed to occur. This realization comes with a bittersweet sense of hope—he will survive whatever is happening to him at Brentworth, if only for a little while.
His teeth chatter, and he bites into his cheek. A pain in his shoulder rises with a sob in his throat.
The needle man smiles. “Oh, don’t worry, my little shit stain of a friend. I won’t do you nearly as quickly.”