“ARRGH!”
Someone is grabbing me. Holding me. Someone is killing me.
I fight. I toss my head and I try to kick and punch, but it’s hard beneath the bedding.
“Shh. Stop. It’s okay. It’s me. It’s me. You’re safe.”
It’s him. It’s Rex. I’m safe.
I’ve never been safe before. I’ve never been comforted. Maybe not never. Maybe just not as long as I can remember. It feels good. I lunge into his arms, my heart thundering in my chest. He holds me as though he can make everything better, and I let myself believe he can.
He’s an alien. He’s an almost complete stranger, but he is the strongest and most loving entity I have ever connected with as an adult. I grab onto him and I hold him so tight I’m certain I’ll never let go.
“What was wrong? You were fast asleep and then suddenly you were screaming and…”
“I was having a bad dream.”
“They come here sometimes,” he says, as if they’re not something our minds generate, as if they’re dark forces which sneak in through your ear and do things to you. Maybe they are. I was always taught they’re just your brain trying to process the events of the day, and they can get really fucking wild if your day has been wild. But this dream was different. This was something my entire being has been trying to forget.
“What did you dream about?”
“I really don’t…” I shake my head. I don’t want to tell him what happened, or what was happening before I came here. I don’t really exactly remember how I got here. There’s a blank spot in between the bank and the dinosaur.
He gives me a long, searching look, as if he knows more than I think he does, though I know he doesn’t know anything about me at all. I’d quite like to keep it that way.
“What do you dream about here?”
“War,” he says simply. “I dream about the battle I lost. I dream about it from every angle, and in every way, but it always ends the same. I wake up here, and there is no…” He sighs. “There is no way back.”
“But you brought the chest with you? The exposition chest?”
“I don’t know how that came here either. It’s not mine. It was here when I got here. So it is mine, but it is not from my world.”
“Wow. I thought you said…” It doesn’t matter, I guess. Who cares where the chest came from. “But how do you know it’s dangerous?”
“It explains things.”
“Don’t we want explanations? Maybe if we listen to it, we can find a way…” I was going to say back, but I don’t know that I actually want to go back to Earth. I wasn’t exactly doing well there.
“The chest is not our friend. I would have destroyed it, but I think doing that would cause more chaos. Don’t worry about the chest. Don’t worry about anything. We are safe.”
Are we though?
I am safe with him. But this world we find ourselves in is not safe. We are surrounded by massive predators on all sides. We are two very small creatures living in a world clearly not made for us, and we don’t know how we got here.
Except. Maybe I do. Maybe we do.
I was robbing a bank. He was in battle.
“The battle you were fighting. Was it going well? Did you…”
“What are you trying to ask, Kristine?”
I can’t bring myself to ask the question in case it makes everything real.
“We’re here, and we don't know how we got here. But it’s a world neither of us have ever been in. And we were both doing things that…”
“What?”
“Did we die? Like, where we came from? Do we not really exist anymore? Is this some kind of dinosaur-ridden afterlife?”
“I feel alive, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
He strokes my sweat soaked hair back from my forehead. “It’s possible, actually, definite, that we no longer exist in the worlds we came from. I suppose you could call that a death of one kind or another. I don’t think it makes a difference.”
How can he be so calm? Maybe he already thought about this and got over it. I’m not ready to be over it. I’m at the freaking-the-fucking-hell-out stage of my feelings when it comes to the whole situation.
“You’re not dead, whatever you are,” he says. “You’re displaced. So am I. We’ll find our way back, together.”
That’s such a sweet thing to say. It’s almost as though he’s forgotten we don’t come from the same place. There is no way back together. There’s only a way apart.
I resolve to keep the exposition chest firmly closed.
My heart rate has slowed. I am starting to feel sleepy again. I bury myself in his chest and I sync my breath to his. He’s everything I have in this world, quite literally. I reach for his arm and I hold onto him, and I feel myself becoming anchored to this new reality.