Kingdom Keepers: The Syndrome Read Free Page A

she wouldn’t go. She claimed it wasn’t real, that I was making it all up.
    I was so angry with her for that. Every morning I reminded her about the bunny. Every morning she’d claim she didn’t know what I was talking about. That made me even angrier. My
mother, faking confusion to avoid buying me another gift? Why?
    I didn’t realize that the event at the gas station hadn’t happened…
yet
.
    A few days later, we broke down on a road we’d never taken. It was all new to my mom, but from my car seat, I told her exactly what would happen next. The more it did happen, the more
freaked out she got. When we reached the gas station, she saw the pink bunny, the one I hadn’t been able to stop talking about. That was the last straw. My mom ran out of the gas
station’s mini market, pulling me along behind her. I saw fear in her eyes when she looked at me. She wanted to know how I could possibly have known three days ago what would happen today.
But she was afraid to ask.
    In that brief exchange, I gained this weird sense of importance. And of guilt, for making my mom afraid. Of excitement. We rode in the tow truck in silence. I couldn’t understand how
I’d scared her; I only knew that I had. To me, my dreams just seemed to repeat themselves sometimes. I didn’t know then how familiar it would become to see fear in people’s
eyes.
    My powers got stronger as I got older; the dreams became more vivid. As I neared the end of elementary school, I woke up screaming every night. It was often the same dream: my parents being
dragged off by bad guys while on a trip, me being sent to foster care. The doctors called them night terrors and told my parents they were common in kids my age.
    When my parents left on a trip to South America, I begged them not to go. I told them I’d dreamed a hundred times about something awful that was going to happen. Even with my
mother’s obvious desire to believe me and stay, my father told me I’d be fine for two weeks, and off they went.
    Two days after they left, the nightmare stopped abruptly. Hushed phone calls and pitying looks from my sitter followed. When child protective services showed up at the door to take me away, I
was waiting for them. I’d seen them coming. I even knew their names.
    Every kid thinks they’re “different” or “special,” but this was the first time I
knew
. I had dreams like everyone else; the difference was that mine had a
tendency to come true. I didn’t tell people about them, but eventually they found out and a few years later, I was sent to a place in Baltimore.
    The dreams grew more and more powerful. Sometimes I’d get a break for a few days, a week, even a month. I’d start wondering if they were gone for good—but
then they’d come back stronger than ever.
    Eight years later, Amanda and I were rooming together in Burbank and working our first internship with Disney. One summer night, I had a dream so forceful it made my head throb. I found it hard
to hear myself think through the barrage of images in my head. It wasn’t a movie of the future playing out in my mind. It was more like a bunch of snapshots being thrown at me and me trying
to catch them before they were gone—without getting hit by them.
    Habit guided my hand to the journal, pen, and book light tucked between my mattress and the bed frame. Before I even had the light on, before I was fully awake, I had the pen on paper, racing to
get the image in my mind down before it disappeared.
    I sketched quick, feathery strokes. A thin rectangle became a door opposite a small window with lace curtains. Framed in the window was an antique lamp. I added the vague outline of a twin bed
with a train set on the shelf above it, a couch like something out of a grandmother’s house in a movie, and dark, thick lines that became the outlines of three men, menacing in their stance,
blocking the main door. Their clothing was identical, standard army fatigues, except for the number