Hunted Read Online Free Page A

help
because they were still so odd.
    Mostly
it was just a collage of images involving people I knew—Richard
Parsons, Janessa, even a couple of my teachers, which luckily wasn't
as gross as it otherwise could have been. Tonight was different
though. I wasn't at school or anywhere else I knew, and I wasn't
dreaming about anyone familiar.
    I
was standing in the top of a partially-constructed skyscraper. The
steel skeleton had been assembled and most of the floor and exterior
wall had been finished for the floor I was on, but if I looked up I
could see open sky above me in some parts.
    There
was movement a little ways ahead of me. Part of me said that I should
just steer clear, that dreams in abandoned buildings never end well,
but I crept forward anyway. There was a small man sitting on the very
edge of the floor I was on. His legs dangled out into thin air, but
he didn't seem worried that he might fall.
    He
was obviously intent on watching something below us, so I took a
couple of steps forward until I could see over the edge of the
building too. What I saw was odd, even for a dream. We were somehow
both really high up and only a few feet from the ground all at once.
When I looked straight ahead at the buildings around us, we were even
with the very tops of most of them, and they were all dozens if not
hundreds of stories tall, but when I looked down at the ground it
seemed like it was close enough that I could just hop down from the
building without any risk of injury.
    I
shook my head and closed my eyes, but when I opened them back up
everything was still the same. Down below, on the street, someone
walked into view and I suddenly realized what else was wrong about
the scene. There was only one person visible down there. We weren't
in some kind of ghost town—the buildings all looked
well-maintained, the streets were still in working order—but
there wasn't anyone else down there. I'd never been to New York or
Tokyo, but it just didn't look right to have a city as big as this be
completely deserted.
    The
man looked up at us and my heart skipped a beat. He looked familiar
somehow, not like I knew him, but like he was related to someone
important to me. Only he didn't actually look like anyone I knew.
    It
would have just been one of those things that you dismiss as a weird
coincidence, but my heart was still going a mile a minute. It was
like it was trying to tell me that whoever this guy looked like was
the reason that I'd never been particularly interested in any of the
guys my own age. It wasn't that I was gay or asexual, I'd just been
saving my emotions and attention for this one person whom I still
didn't know, but whom I finally had the tiniest of links to.
    I
came within a second of throwing myself off of the building so that I
could stop the man below us and ask him where I knew him from, but
something stopped me at the last moment. I'd heard people say that if
you hit the ground in a dream that you'd die without waking up. I'd
never believed it before now, but there was something about this
dream, weird though it was, that made it feel as real as anything I'd
ever experienced with my eyes open.
    Instead
of jumping, I turned to the man a few feet away from me and asked
what I thought was a non-threatening question.
    "Who
is that and is there a way for me to get down there in time to talk
to him before he disappears?"
    The
man practically jumped out of his own skin. It was like he'd been on
a hair trigger, but he'd been expecting the threat to arrive from a
different quarter.
    He
went from sitting to standing without ever actually having seemed to
move, but that was the least alarming of the changes. Between one
second and the next his face changed. He went from looking like a
non-threatening, elderly Native American to something out of a
nightmare. His teeth lengthened and got sharper at the same time that
his face got broader and sprouted fur.
    The
change happened so fast that I blinked and missed most of it,