I woke up hooked up to an IV bag in a hospital bed with every single atom in my body aching. I could barely breathe, but I was awake, and I was alive.

There wasn’t a single other soul in the room, just the lonely periodic beep of some machinery, my pain and a little bit of light which came from the hallway through the open door.

I survived. Mandy did not. I would find out later that day that she bled to death in that yard in front of what was left of the church while I was passed out.

There was no one to help me pick up the pieces of what happened, but I was able to figure it out mostly on my own. The terrifying incident that Mandy and I kept having play out in the night that Barbara caught on camera was us seeing the future of the tornado incident where Mandy would die and I would almost die. The monsters we would see were each other, covered in blood, ripped to shreds, 20 years older and not looking anything like people we would recognize when we were kids.

Grandma was right, her feeling that she needed to warn us was true. The visions had tried to prepare us to survive the most-dangerous moment of our lives, but we weren’t able to harness it because we weren’t trained.

My grandma would be the only person who would come visit me in the hospital the week I was there. She accepted my apologies and understood why I dismissed her at first.

We never really talked about the visions or seeing into the future in the hospital. We mostly just bonded and it felt wonderful. She even brought by some of the amazing salted chocolate chip cookies she used to give to me as a kid on my last night in the hospital. We ate them and made plans for me to come back to her office and start working on properly handling my powers after I went back to Houston to get back into work for about a month.

My usual work routine and life helped put me back at ease and heal for the first couple of weeks back in Houston, but it would not last. After about two weeks, the night visions from my childhood started to come back. At first they were mostly just feelings or sounds or a sense that someone was watching me, but things came to a stomach-turning head last night.