Mythical

  *****

  Maddie was dreaming of killers in white jumpsuits with automatic weapons. If her body would have been able to, she would have been tossing and turning, as it was, she was frozen in place. She drifted in and out of strange dream-lands, when a fish in her dream started biting her hand. It wasn't biting hard, not chewing into her, just grabbing and pulling, but it started to hurt in the cold water. Upon closer inspection, it looked like a tropical eel of some sort with big eyes and a wide mouth, and a snake-like body tapering off after about two feet, but the water was really cold.

  The fish was suddenly gone and she was on the ice, painfully cold, so cold that it hurt to think, breathe or open her eyes. She missed the fish that was then an eel, it was much more pleasant than the bear that was looking her in the eye right now. Although, even in her less than focused state, she could not help but notice this bear was really scrawny. It had matted hair all around its face and was painfully skinny for a bear. She knew it had to be starving, literally.

  Sorry buddy, her inner voice said, I'm not dinner yet. She tried to raise her gun, but it was so heavy. Then she noticed the bear was trying to take the gun out of her hand. Smart bear... she thought. It appeared that this bear had a gun of its own, a really big gun, not so much long as it was fat, and it was pointing the gun at her. Maddie mentally reconciled this by concluding that bears have big hands and, therefore, need big guns.

  She was proud of her on the spot hypothesis and was about to ask the bear what he thought of the whole thing, but her brain once again abruptly shut the system down, shutting off all but the tiniest amounts of blood circulating to the outer extremities and the brain itself, conserving what heat it could within the core of her body.