She looks over her shoulder. Her face, a chapped jag slanted under two pills, pulls life from the dying world around her. The air saturates her lungs and dements her spirit. Leaves drift in purposeless circles to the ground around her. One lands before her foot, makes a scratchy noise against the cool asphalt.
She turns her head forward, walks toward the white building. Brittle leaves crackle under her shoes as she makes her way up the curb, across patches of brown grass and to the side of the stacked white cinder blocks in black trim. She peers through wooden window frames, the panes within laced with mesh metal. The opposite side is raised level upon a hill that descends into a shallow valley clear of these trees. She looks to the side of the building. A barricaded ladder leads to a further walled well of stairs. She begins to scramble-- scrapes her stretched triceps. She makes it, bleeding and teary eyed, to the top of what now seems like a complex. The roof is black, the sky is grey.
Over the field her eyes see nothing but colorful streaks of salt water. The desolation of the empty field breaks her heart and she begins sobbing. "My husband," she babbles. "My husband, oh!" she wails. "This building," she shrieks. She shrinks into a bouncing mound of hysterical nonsense. She falls asleep and dreams of her husband-- a lab tech. involved with the whole mess. His bifocals behind beakers drift in and out of her sleeping head.
This building's flesh decays, its roof rotting. It squishes underneath weight. A breathless still settles. A distant hum approaches. Closer and closer, the fluttering of a motorized heart. I stand, rifle in hand. I walk to the sleeping woman and nudge her with my foot. This does not work. I kneel and cup her jaw with my hand, gently rapping with my fingers. Lids roll back and reveal an empty stage.
"Ride's here," I say. She staggers and looks to the street. From this angle, the small car looks like it will crash into the corner of the roof. It disappears instead so we walk to the edge of the building.
We carefully descend. Our backs to the white, we see a dark woman with nappy hair standing frozen in front of the vehicle. The woman retreats, her gaze locked to us, and bumps into her car. A pale young man opens the passenger door. He is clearly mentally retarded.
"My husband!" cries the woman to my side. I turn. The alleged husband stands hunched in a doorway, a now open entrance to the building.
"Get away!" yells the dark woman. The pale young man rushes toward us.
"My husband-- we need to get him out of here!"
The husband steps through the doorway. From black, grey illuminates his lurid face. His jaw slacks to one side. Aphotic circles drag away from sunken eyes.
"You're alive! I can't believe your alive." The beady eyed woman swells. She moves to him. Before she can reach him, the pale young man has her by the waist. He drags her, kicking and screaming, away. I level my rifle and blast the retarded kid in the shoulder. Bits of shattered bone explode outward. Blood rains down in giant globules, painting a wide area. The kid falls back with the woman on top of him.
The dark woman begins yelling at me. "What the fuck! You shot him!"
I return the barrel to the husband. I tell the dark woman the kid should not have grabbed my companion.
The husband shambles toward me, vines of viscera swaying from his gut. I squint as the ghoulish pendulum makes his way.
"Don't, no, don't shoot!"
"Shoot him!"
"No!"
"If you can shoot a kid, shoot this. Now!"
I shoot him in the chest. Cracking ribs echo the rifle. I shoot him again in the knee. He drops to the ground and begins crawling. I pull the trigger once more. A head shot. This evaporates the right side of his face. His eye oozes out of his head and teeth begin pinging off the asphalt. His rotting flesh slides into a gaping hole in his head. This does not stop him. I pull again, nothing happens. I am out of ammo. I am frozen. Closer and closer, the faceless gore inches. I drop the gun and stare into its vacant eye.
The bleeding young man escorts a now even lower-functioning life form, the wife, to the car. They get in.
The corpse grabs my ankle and looks directly past me. Its head rears and lunges. Before contact, the butt of my rifle smacks him in the jaw. Still, I watch the dark woman roll the corpse over with her foot and circle round me. She grips the barrel and lands a crushing blow to the skull of the corpse. It twitches, releases my ankle. The skull caves in and she takes one final blow which spews goo, grey on everything.
She drags her breath out, cracks her neck and frowns at me. "We need to go," she whispers.
Notes: This dream takes place in a park by my grandfather's house in South Boston.
I ended up using a lot of alliterations after seeing a few good ones in a poem the other day.
I would never actually shoot a handicapped person. Unless they were a zombie.
I wrote most of this down in one of those black and white composition books as soon as I woke from it.
In an effort to turn this dream into something serious on paper, I removed the fact that the husband was actually William Petersen , pretty much as he is in CSI.
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