Trapped

The pounding was unbearable, the sound seeming to rattle his very bones as it continued like a war drum sounding the call to battle. Rocked inside out by the rumbling beat, the young man grabbed his head in pain, trying to clamp his ears closed, a desperate attempt to end the agony which the booming noise continued to bring him. He opened his mouth to scream, to cry out for help before he could be driven to the brink of madness, but nothing came from his parted lips despite his greatest efforts. He could feel his skull beginning to crack under the assault of the pounding noise, hoping beyond hope that death would come swiftly to release him from this torment.
Jerking upright, a cold sweat coated his face and palms, his breathing ragged as if he’d been running for his very life. Taking a deep breath, the young man ran shaky fingers through his matted hair, trying to calm his unsteady nerves. The dream, while strange and unexplainable, was beyond terrifying, the realism of the pain far beyond that which he’d ever felt in real life.
Looking around his bedroom, the familiar scene helped to relieve him, comforting him after the horrendous nightmare as it settled him back into reality. Glancing towards his door though, he heard a voice, his mother’s, but it was too muffled for him to understand from the other room. Slipping out of bed, he moved to the door and passed into the hall, moving down it towards the voice. As he did though, his gaze settled uneasily on the photographs hanging upon the walls. Tilted, washed out, slashed up and shredded, nothing recognizable in the pictures except his own face. Hurrying down the hall, driven by the tension he felt at this surreal sight, he continued onward, calling out to his mother as he checked room by room.
When his hand settled on a door knob though, it was locked. Confused, he passed to the next door and again found it locked tight. Knocking, he found no response from inside and moved on. One door after another, he passed down the long hallway, every room inaccessible, leaving him stumbling down the hall, unsure what was going on but feeling a cold chill settle over him as he came to the final door. Reaching to the knob, he grasped it, taking a deep breath before twisting it, hearing the click as it opened and he shoved his way through quickly, the confines of the corridor suddenly too much to bear.
As he stumbled forward, the young man found himself outside, but all around him the world seemed to a literal wasteland, barren of all apparent life. Color itself seemed to have perished in this land, dull grays tinting everything around him. There was no grass, no trees, no flowers, not a bird flying overhead, nor a squirrel scampering along the ground. The land was simply devoid of existence, as if something had wiped everything off the face of the planet but his own home. As the confusion and terror started to wash over him, turning in circles and looking for something, anything that looked normal, that looked right, he again heard noises, this time multiple voices, a garbled conversation taking place all around him.
Desperately he ran, circling his house, bloodshot eyes glancing in every direction across the flat plains but seeing no one and nothing. The voices continued though, and now he could even make out part of what they said. His name… the disembodied voices were calling his name, the echoes surrounding him on all sides as he lifted his eyes to the pure black sky overhead. No sun, no clouds, no moon or stars, nothing but deep dark emptiness above him though the voices seemed to fall from the sky like rain. He called out, his voice cracking with the fright which turned his blood to ice within his veins. Again and again he screamed for someone to answer him, to show themselves, for all of this to end, this nightmare in which he seemed imprisoned. And then he heard it once again… the drums, those ever beating drums from his dream… the beating was growing louder and louder as if it were coming straight towards him, the pace quickening as the volume grew unbearable once more, just as it had in his dream, just as tormenting as he’d felt it before. Dropping to his knees, he again cried out to the voices which echoed his name in the darkness, but no response came from them as he collapsed to the ground in surrender to the grief which overwhelmed him.
“Jessie… Jessie, can you hear me…? Jessie, it’s mom… oh Jessie…” The woman dabbed at her eyes with a tissue as she held onto the young man’s hand, squeezing it lightly and praying beyond hope that she would feel a squeeze in return. Around her shoulders rested the arm of her husband, leaning over his son a bit as he comforted his wife. “Son…? Jessie… Jessie, please wake up… please Jessie…” With them were other close relatives, all of them crowded into the small hospital room, surrounding the bed where the young man was lying, the only sign that he still lived being the steady beeping of the heart monitor, the faint rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Standing behind the mother and father, the doctor set his hands on their shoulders to try and reassure them. “He may still be unresponsive, but continue trying to talk to him… though he’s in essence trapped within his own mind, a patient in a coma can still hear your voices…”