Freaking Rumpy and her freaking writing and her freaking BRAIN.

I'm mad because I'm envious, leave me alone.

Lookit this stupid thing she wrote instead.

*DISCLAIMER* RV makes no claim to own Tremors or its characters. They are the property of S.S. Wilson and Stampede Entertainment. No profit is made from this writing.

Most people aren't aware that the memories of that first graboid attack just don't... Disappear. Sure, they fade. They become less painful. They show themselves less frequently. But they are still there. They lay there, in waiting, to rear their ugly monster-shaped heads on the survivors, often during their nightmares.

It's a bit different for each one. Sometimes they wake in the dead of night in a cold sweat, or scream in their sleep, or just stare at the ceiling for long hours until the sun peaks over the mountains in the east.

Sometimes Val and his wife wake near-simultaneously, holding onto each other as life-lines until the visions stop. That is the only thing they can do so that they don't fall back into the nightmares of twisting tongues and foul stenches and barbed wire.

Sometimes Kate has to shake Earl awake from a restless sleep, leaving him to tell her there is nothing wrong while images of severed heads and buried station wagons dance behind his eyes.

Sometimes Nancy wakes herself sobbing, maternal worry for a daughter assaulting her mind. It takes her time to remember that the pogo-hopping girl is well out of harm's way.

Once, Mindy woke shrieking. The house was shaking and if it fell out from under her, the monster would get her! But, no, it was eleven years later and her friends had to remind her, you aren't on a roof. You are safe. You are on a gently rocking boat. Not a roof.

Sometimes Melvin can't even fall asleep. He paces his room for hours, alone, back and forth, unable to close his eyes for fear of the death he knows with inhabit his dreams. He can't tell anyone, get any help, because he is as alone now as he was when those creatures killed his best friend.

Sometimes Burt Gummer wakes from a dark, dark nightmare that left him tossing and turning. He can't shake the giant head breaching his basement, the intelligence he faces and traps he must anticipate. His house exploding in a funnel of fire, leaving him a refugee with nowhere to go, because he cannot be prepared for everything. But most of all, he can't shake the dark. The suffocating, near hopeless, dark of being eaten alive. So he lays still, staring up above him, planning to prevent any of this from ever happening again, until the sun rises. Until the darkness fades.

The memories never disappear.