"Didn't I die fighting a monster?" John rolled out of his bed frantically, his hand clenched onto his chest, feeling his healthy and rapid heartbeat. He felt his shirt sticking to his chest, drenched by cold sweat.
Sliding open the curtains and windows to let fresh air enter, John quickly calmed his heavy breathing.
He looked towards the bed he rolled off from. Blue sheets, grey pillow and that heavenly mattress. And let's not forget about the World War Z poster hanging on the wall.
Yup, this was his room. Nothing out of the ordinary.
"Was that a dream?" John recalled a monster jabbing its claw into his heart, stopping his beating heart. That's when his life officially ended.
"What am I thinking? There's no way I died to a monster. I'm just an ordinary John from…" John's thoughts were cut halfway by familiar yet odd words.
"From Planet Terra?"
John lowered his eyebrows. His head was throbbing. It felt so chaotic and jumbled within his skull, as if someone had just punched him in the brain, rearranging its components.
"From Planet Earth?"
Words and memories collide and clash. Some being replaced; some remained the same; some new…
What is going on?
John thought he was hearing double. He focused on his brain, trying to remember anything about his dream, but he couldn't.
It was all so vague, no details.
John squeezed his cheeks to double check whether this was actually reality.
"Ouch." Feeling a burning pain, John rubbed his cheeks. He picked up his phone by his desk to observe the red punch mark on his cheeks. It was 9:33.
"I must have had a bad sleep."
John shook his head, preparing to go back to bed.
Just then, a roar of pain travelled into John's ears. "Ow!"
After experiencing death in his dream, John was hypersensitive to the sound of pain, especially when the sound came from his father!
Alarms of worry blared in John's mind as he bursted out of his room to run towards his father's room.
"Dad! Are you okay?" Without knocking, John burst into the room, only to see a man rubbing his cheeks and arm simultaneously while a woman laughs at his goofy look.
"Mom! Dad! You scared me!" John rolled his eyes, patting his chest to settle down his nervousness. It was a false alarm.
The man with two red marks on his cheek and arm is John's father, James, while the laughing woman and clearly the culprit of James' shriek, is John's mother, Maria.
James and Maria, another two very common names.
When they were dating, John's dad found out that both of their names were on the "top 100 most common names" list.
He decided made a joke about picking their children's name from the list. He didn't expect John's mom to take it literally.
James and Maria were in their mid 40s. Unlike like many others their age, they do not seem to have signs of graying hair.
Staring at his parents, John's lips quivered for some reason, and his throat tightened.
Nostalgia. It was nostalgia that triggered his reaction.
All of a sudden, his mother's face began to flicker, glitching in and out between the two faces. His mother's kind face juxtaposed with another face of similar features.
Despite having similar features, the other face was barely recognizable. Its sclera, pupil and iris…. The normal colors of an eye were entirely absent.
They were grey, myopic, and dead.
But finally, the visibility of the face decreased, eventually vanishing. There was no longer a face with a dead look in its eyes, it was just his mother, still smiling cheerfully.
"I'm definitely hallucinating. But… but why am I so… relieved?" As if set free from an invisible cage, John experienced an immensely peculiar feeling.
He was confident. He was ready to face the world. An urge to redeem himself.
Covering the sudden wave of bittersweet emotion when a soft grin, John turned his attention back to the two pinches on his dad. He remembered about the pinch that he gave himself too minutes ago..
This made his eyes widen with shock as his heart dropped slightly. He needed some answers. Whatever he dreamt about was too real to be a dream.
"Did you guys happen to have a strange dream too?" John peeked at his parents to find a reaction.
Exchanging a glance, James and Maria bore a surprised look on their faces. The family immediately sat down on the bed and they started to share their respective dreams.
"Oh no." John murmured. After a brief discussion, it was revealed that they all had different dreams. But there was one thing in common.
They all met the same demise — perishing in the hands of a zombie-like monster.
Him alone having a strange dream cannot prove anything. But with a second and even a third confirmation, John knew something odd was going on.
He started noticing the honk of cars in a distance away.
"That's weird. Why were we asleep?" John's father took a glance at his phone, scratching his head. "It's only 9:34pm?"
Falling silent, John's dad abruptly stood up as he swiped a denim jacket hanging on the backrest of a chair. "Honey, John, you hear that?" His face visibly bore traces of anxiety and puzzlement.
"Yeah I do." John nodded, bearing the same perplexed look.
They all heard a whisper.
"Earthling."
Emerging out of nowhere, the voice was a light breeze. Standing in this quiet room, a bystander would have barely detected the whispered word.
However, that same whisper boomed in John's head like the ringing of a giant bell, reverberating violently.
Creating a momentary chain reaction, images and thoughts erected sequentially in John's mind. He saw his 'dream' again from various viewpoints.
Brief explanations of his unanswered questions, as well as, additional foreign information formed within John's consciousness.
The voice delivered into his head wasn't a hallucination.
It was a hint and a reminder.
A hint of our past.
A reminder to embrace for the incoming apocalypse.