Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
She had looked at her husband, pleading with him to understand—to believe her. But Chuck just sat there staring at her like she’d grown a second head.
“Look, I know it sounds crazy.” Torri took a deep breath, trying to calm herself, trying to speak rationally. “But it’s a gift that runs in my family on my Mom’s side. Nana, my grandmother had it. She called it ‘The Truth’ or sometimes, ‘Seeing Dreams.’”
Chuck gave her a blank stare.
“So I’m supposed to believe you when you say aliens are headed for Earth because your grandmother used to have funny dreams, too?”
“Not just funny dreams—Seeing Dreams,” Torri emphasized. “She said they came to her often—sometimes about little things, like where she put a piece of jewelry she misplaced. And sometimes about big things. Do you know she stopped my Uncle Timmy from getting into a car accident once by giving him a flat tire?”
“What?” Chuck demanded flatly. “No, I’ve never heard that story.”
Probably because she only told it to me, Torri thought. Because I was the only one she trusted.
But now she had no choice, she had to trust her husband—so she tried to explain.
“Look, Uncle Timmy was visiting her from college when he was younger and he was determined to go back a day early to get ready for some exam or something. Nana had a Seeing Dream about it and she begged him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Torri spoke rapidly, the words spilling out in a hasty flood as she willed her husband to understand—to believe.
“In desperation, Nana went and stuck a knife in his tire while he was eating breakfast that morning,” she told Chuck. “He never knew what she did, but the delay of getting that tire fixed saved his life. A semi truck jack-knifed on the highway he was going to take to get back to college. There was a seventeen-car pileup and he would have been right in the middle of it if Nana hadn’t knifed his car tire.”
Chuck had remained unconvinced.
“So you think I ought to believe there are aliens on the way because your grandma had a bad feeling one time about your uncle?” he demanded. “Get real, Torri! Just because your Nana was an old gypsy and believed in all that mystical bullshit doesn’t mean you have to, too! You need to snap out of this now and keep your crazy to yourself—I can’t deal with you going nuts on top of all the pressure I have at work.”
Torri had shut up and shut down after that. She’d tried to “keep her crazy to herself” as Chuck had demanded—but it kept spilling over into everyday life. The fugue states during the day got longer. She began blanking out in the middle of conversations with coworkers and even clients at the bank. People began to whisper about her behind her back, asking each other what was wrong with her.
Then the night terrors started getting worse. She woke Chuck up screaming and the neighbors too. Twice the police were called to their house in the middle of the night and had to be sent away, after inspecting everything to make sure there was no domestic violence going on.
Her husband was getting more and more impatient with her and Torri could see the questions in his eyes when he looked at her. She was ruining their perfect life with her sudden and extremely inconvenient mental illness—why couldn’t she control herself? What was wrong with her?
But the worst thing of all—worse than the way she was losing respect at work and waking herself and half the neighborhood up with her screaming at night—was the fact that Torri knew the dreams were real.
She knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt—the same way her Nana had known she had to stick a knife in Uncle Timmy’s tire to keep him home and keep him safe from the impending accident. But now the entire Earth was about to have an accident—the small blue and green planet humankind called home was headed for a collision with a hostile alien race and only Torri knew about it.
Along with that certainty, came a horrible guilt. She ought to be telling people—she ought to be shouting it from the rooftops, going on TV, posting it on the Internet. Torri knew she ought to be getting out the message that the Earth was about to be in big, big trouble.
But the fear of being called crazy had stopped her. The fear that she would lose everything if she started telling people what was going on—what was about to happen—that the sleek black ship called “The Fathership,” which was almost as big as a city—was headed towards Earth with extremely bad intentions.
“And in the end, they called me crazy anyway and slapped me in here,” Torri muttered to her blurred reflection. Now it was too late to tell anyone—she was in the psych ward, for God’s sake. Nobody was going to believe her. Chuck certainly hadn’t. The more she’d tried to describe the AllFather and his alien hordes, the more he had looked at her like she wasn’t playing with a full deck.