"Extreme Zone #1: Night Terrors" - Prologue
By M.C. Sumner

ISBN 0-671-00241-4

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PROLOGUE

	He woke up screaming.
	In that first moment, he could still feel the strap around his arms and the cold metal table at his back. He could see blurry figures surrounding him in the darkness, their huge, black eyes set in bloated faces of featureless white.
	But the room was only his own bedroom. The straps around his limbs were only sheets, twisted and tangled. The ghostly faces were only the rows of maps and papers he had taped against the walls. There was no one else in the room.
	For long minutes he sat in the darkness, feeling the cold sweat of fear roll down his face. The same sweat had plastered his T-shirt over the muscles of his chest, making the air icy against his skin. Slowly, his breathing returned to normal.
	Finally, the fear receded, leaving behind images and memories that grew more vague with each passing second. The whole thing was ridiculous. He was being frightened by dreams, nothing more. He ran a hand across he floppy, damp hair, lay down, and closed his eyes.
	The images where still there, waiting for him. White faces. Black eyes. The gleam of a knife, stabbing downward. He tried to think of something--anything--that would clear those visions from his mind. But even after an hour of tossing and turning, sleep would not come. He lay there with the images running through his head, images of darkness and light. And terror.
	"It's only a dream," he whispered. He kept his eyes stubbornly closed. Finally, he fell into a groggy, restless doze.
	While he layed there, thin lines of red light slipped through the venetian blinds on the windows, momentarily filling the room with a ruddy, pulsing light. Outside the house, a ball of bloodred fire, four feet across, hovered in the air beside the bedroom window. It bobbed above the ground like a balloon on an invisible string, swaying slightly in the night wind. Abruptly, it rose to the level of the rooftop and then began to move away, casting its red light over the sleeping neighborhood. In moments, the ball of fire had vanished behind a copse of trees.
	Inside the bedroom, the dreamer pulled the pillow over his head and moaned. 

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