Samson Dreams of Monsters

The man-thing didn’t so much crawl out of the subway tunnel, but rather shuffled, hunched over so his chest practically dragged on the ground. He was eating something, black and furry, clutched in his deformed hand – a hand that almost seemed to be put on backwards.  When he heard the pair approach him, he stopped eating and raised up slightly on his knees, eyes wide. His ragged kilt/loincloth barely covered his mangled legs. Was one heel attached to his hamstring? Sam heard a gun click. The man had tossed the meal away and was now posturing at them - a blood-smeared face set defiant. His other arm was a crude, sawed-off shotgun. And it was pointed right at them.

“Ya smell like food,” he said, “Where is it? Give it to me.”

“Or what?” She said, “You’ll shoot me?”

“Damn righ’ ah will,” his gun quavered, “Ya got somethin’ on ya. Meat or fish.” He took a long drag of air through his dirty nostrils. “Or woman,” he said with a lusty gleam in his eye. “Ya’ll give it to me.”

Mara chuckled slightly, “No. I won’t.”

Sam had drawn his own gun, the revolver he could cock with one hand.  He aimed the barrel at the burnout with his left hand, while balancing on his crutch with the right.

Mara didn’t turn to him, but ground through her teeth, “Sam. No.”

“I got this,” Sam responded in a husky whisper from behind her, gun arm over her shoulder, lips pressed close to her ear.

“No. Sam. No.”

“Stop!” The burnout yelled shrilly, “Stop the talking talking. Stop! Too loud!” He screamed. A loud BOOM echoed through the station. The recoil flung the man-thing backwards onto his twisted hand. He cried out.

Time slowed. Mara shoved her hip into Sam as the 10 gauge slug barreled straight into her chest.  Sam’s weight shifted to the right, where his leg was not. His left knee buckled and the crutch tilted with him toward the floor.

He pulled the trigger.

The bullet went low, hitting the burnout in his working leg, which he had stretched out in front of himself to counterbalance his fall.  Sam crashed to the hard tile of the station floor, the gun skittering out of reach. The burnout yowled. Sam grunted.

Mara, on the other hand, had not fully lost her balance and was staggering back into a true standing position. She lunged at the monstrosity, grabbing his shotgun arm.

BOOM.

The gun went off again, this time the slug skimmed Mara’s face, leaving an angry red trail drawn on her cheek.  She wrenched. The thing’s noises turning into an uncontrolled howl of agony as Sam could see his arm twisting back unnaturally. A grinding reverberated through the air, like claws on concrete. Sharp pops resonated through the pit of Sam’s stomach. With one final crunch Mara had ripped off the burnout’s shotgun arm. Sam blinked as the world reset itself.

The howling began to die to a whimpering mewl, as the thing looked at his bare stump.  Blood, the consistency of grape jelly, flowed out of the wound almost languidly. The man, the animal, dug the stump deep into his side as he undulated backwards in fear. Pivoting on his fused knee, he loped and scrambled down the subway tunnel pulling himself along with his free leg and gnarled arm. 

When he was finally out of sight, Mara turned to him and offered a shaking hand. She drew several quivering breaths as Sam stood. A fiery gash on her cheek oozed blood slowly, and Sam stared at it in confusion. This doesn’t seem right, he thought.

Mara gasped and looked down.

Sam’s eyes followed hers and he stared longer, unease and understanding growing in the pit of his stomach. He touched her chest, directly over her heart. His fingers came away crimson (Definitely not right) and his eyes met hers. Mara paled, realization crossing her features.

She drifted backwards, almost too slowly…also too quickly.

“NO!” Sam cried, reaching out for her hand. The red liquid painted streaks on her forarm, palm, and fingertips as she fell.

His fist closed around a coarse blanket. He was sitting bolt upright, blinking in confusion at the blackness in front of his eyes. His mouth worked uselessly, trying to grab a breath that wasn’t there. His heart thumped.

 A groan sounded next to him. “It was just a nightmare, Sam,” Trent’s voice, heavy with sleep, echoed in the darkened room. A hand patted his knee. “Go back to sleep.”

The teenager had been so hungry - Edit - #6

New prologue for my novel: Insignia

-Prologue-

The teenager had been so hungry.

Life on the dirt-smeared streets of the slum city was more difficult than he had anticipated: squatting in abandoned warehouses with other disenfranchised youth and huddling close for warmth during the bitter winter. But not too close. He couldn’t get too close. Teens disappeared off these streets every day.  He wasn’t sure where they went. Maybe they moved on, found something better or maybe…something worse.

A year on the streets had made him lean. Gaunt. Pale. Desperate. Playing in the underground market was always risky. Unreliable. Volatile. Stressful. He had not been nearly as successful as he’d hoped to be.

Hunger.  He never imagined that he could be so hungry.

Learning to dumpster-dive had been a mixed blessing.  He now knew where to find the freshest food, though fresh was a liberal word. The food still stank with the rancid fumes of whatever had been left in the bin the night before.  Some days, he couldn’t stomach it. So he’d learned to beg. Occasionally he’d get treated to a mystery street-meat skewer, but most of the time the fare would be the mildly stale remnants of a stranger’s half-eaten sandwich. It was not much better than the dumpster, but at least it didn’t smell rotten….Then his pride overtook him.

He was better than this. He was smart.

So he taught himself to steal. He always had a knack with data:  computer navigation was second nature to him, even though he never loved it. The dingy cyber cafés had become his new haven.  Long days crouched over an ancient typepad, hunched in cheap fiberglass chairs with eyes straining at a dimly lit LED yielded him a fake credit account to which he stored real money.

He traveled through security networks of big CORPs, the underground tunnels of their cybernet space. Worming his way into firewalls and secure shields like a cockroach made of bytes, he scrounged for scraps of cred. Then he invested that cred in the virtual market. Win. Lose. Win.

He snagged only bits at a time. A little here. A little there. Not too much. Can’t get caught. Take just enough. Can’t ever get caught. Data heists were among the most severely punished crimes. In this world of capitalist greed where consumerism was rewarded, credit theft was punishable by death. 

The money though…it wasn’t for food. It wasn’t for clothing or shoes or mech mods. It wasn’t for him. It was for Charley. Someday, he hoped to have enough for two train tickets out of the hate-filled shitthole. To a real city. East, west, north – he didn’t care. All of them had promises, potential. A real job. A real school. A life. For both of them.

Then this strange man with a handlebar moustache and a plush burgundy waistcoat approached him in the café. Looking for him.

Why me? An offer. A good offer. Money. Money for food. He had been so very, very, hungry. And then this offer…

“What do you want me to do?” He asked the strange man.

The man took a drag of a long, mud-colored cigarette and handed him a small chip. “I need you to hack a shopping mall’s security system and pull the locked files.”

“Hack a system?” The teen asked incredulously, “That’s it?”

“It’s not as easy as you might think, kid,” the man explained, “It’s an AI security system. Makes what you’ve been crawling through look like a toddler’s game. It takes Skill.”

“Oh, I got skills,” he responded arrogantly.

The man barely smirked and cocked his head. Nonetheless, he tapped a metal plate on the chip. There was one line of text:

JR. Avenue 5. Independence Plaza.

 “This is where you can find me,” he said cryptically and left, nodding.

*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

Skills indeed, the teenager thought angrily, this bastard’s convoluted as shit.

Maybe he was in over his head. The man had warned him that several who tried before had failed. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his t-shirt was becoming damp under his arms.

“Failed how?”

The man didn’t say. It didn’t matter.  The money was too good. Enough to get him and Charley out of the slums. To get to freedom.

*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

The lines of code taunted him. Flashing their glaring green deep into his strained retinas. His stomach growled. It’s just a shopping mall! He railed to himself silently. What could be on here?

*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

An AI system.  What was an AI system?  It couldn’t be a new software because he knew all security systems. He’d never heard the term before. Maybe it was an old word? An antiquated security system? Maybe that’s why it was so hard to crack?

*tap* *tap* *ta—

He was in, he stared wide-eyed. The files suddenly were zipping themselves onto the storage device.  Bits flashed by in a whirr: zeroes and ones. Replicating with the precision of high-speed data, submitting to his hand, no longer taunting him but almost screaming.

Screaming... Red lights flashing. Something had triggered an alarm. How, though? He had been so careful!

Shooting to his feet, he yanked the chip out of the mainframe just as a boring-looking man strode casually into the server room.  The man’s eyes, however, were not boring. They were dark, and angry. And they were looking straight at him.

Fuck! He ran like hell. 

Zombie Dream 1 - The Stakeout

In this dream I'm living at my parents house, and I think Luna was there.  However, this house is in a land crawling with zombies.  In the first part of the dream, Luna and I were on the deck and I can't seem to get over the fear that she's going to jump off the deck and into zombie country.

Then it's night time and I am wandering around the downstairs area of the house.  I get into the room that is now the office, but what was the "rec room" when I was growing up.  It used to have some bookshelves/file cabinets, a wood stove and a dumpy fold-out couch.  That is how it looked in my dream, except for the fact that the whole north wall was gone and in its place was a canvas sheet.  I remember thinking, "Wow, that doesn't seem very secure against the zombies."

I start watching some other people, possibly young college or high school students.  They have a bunch of candles lit and are talking about apocalypse theory.  They ask me if I've read Delillo (Dondelillo maybe?) and his fortification strategies for a post-apocalyptic world. One strategy is to pit one predator against another.  So apparently my house had big cats roaming the perimeter and apparently they weren't affected by the zombie disease.  Another thing one guy was proposing was to dig a moat around the house and fill it with piranhas.

(At one point I saw a cheetah in the kitchen and was afraid of it, but then realize that it was there to kill the zombies so it was friendly to humans and I pet it).

Look at this handsome guy!

Then these guys decide to start messing with this one guy who looked kinda like the fat kid from Lost.  The sheet was pulled back and in the field beyond appeared a figure. He was holding up a hankie and communicating a message of help trying to entreat us (or more like them b/c I was pretty much an observer here) to take him in.  He was talking about all of his skills.

The guy being messed with was going to go out into the dark to help this other guy.  "Don't go out there!" I yell at the dude, but it's too late.  He's already in the field and has discovered that the "guy" was actually just a computer screen and he's turning around to come back inside.  Then I see bright eyes appear behind him (zombies) and I scream, "Watch out!" But the guy doesn't hear me.  Luckily,  these two werewolves jump out of the darkness and start fighting with the zombies so the guy gets back inside.

The Google Maps view of my parents' old house. The semi with the sheet metal would probably've been parked in the red rocks area. 

Then it's daytime and I have decided that since no one else seemed concerned about fixing the gaping hole in our fortifications, I had to do it.  So I walk into this semi that somehow backs right into the house (so we don't have to go out into zombie country to get supplies) and grab some sheet metal.

At this point, The Office woke me up, so I have no idea how the house fared with fortifications after I left.

Dream about Lions

I had this crazy multi-part dream last night with one of my reoccurring dream themes - lions & other predatory animals (including tigers, bears, wolves, hyenas, velociraptors, zombies etc.).

Part 1 - Lions

There I was, shopping in a store trying to buy enough stuff so that I could get a free tote bag (classic Lyndsie). When I finished shopping, I left the building and saw a couple lionesses in the parking lot so I immediately turned around to go back into the store. However, another lioness poked her head out of the door I just left, which meant that I couldn't go back that way. I began circling the building to find a back way in, at which point I realize that I had Shermie with me. I was looking through the windows trying to find a room with a closed door so that when I put Shermie in, he wouldn't take off into this house (apparently the store is in a house) infested with lionesses. 

I eventually found a basement room with those top-open windows so I dropped Shermie in and climbed in after. I did make sure to shut the windows tight before assessing the situation. Somehow I managed to leash Shermie up to keep him from escaping and I opened the door to look into the house. There was an older woman in the hallway and when she saw me, she started talking to me about how she's going to be leaving on vacation soon. I encouraged her to do so, thinking:  "I don't want to see you get eaten by lions."

After the woman left, my Mom and some dude came to the room and started chatting with me. I looked past them down the hall, and saw two lionesses in my Mom's bedroom. "Mom, there are lions in your bedroom, hurry up and get in here." I said with urgency. And they did. So me, Shermie, my Mom and this guy were just sitting in some bedroom without any way to get out and lions all around us. Smart, huh?

It's hard to find a pic where they don't look cute. 

Part 2 - Bears 
Then the scenery changed and I was driving in a car or running down a road with some guy, presumably just having gone to get supplies, being chased by a couple of bears and some other non-predatory animals like deer and horses. Up ahead there was a parked fuel tanker semi thing so we decided to climb on top. The guy gets onto the hood of the vehicle while I climbed up the ladder to sit on top of the tanker.  Left abandoned on top of the tanker were two saws and a couple of Santa hats.

It was a good thing too, because the bears that were chasing us had started climbing up toward me (leaving the guy alone completely).  I took the saw and kept smacking the bears on the nose with the flat of the blade, trying to scare them away. (It did occur to me that I was holding a sharp saw and could do some serious damage to the bears, but I never actually tried it).  Then I started whacking them with the Santa hats but when that seemed to do little good, I went back to the saw. Eventually, it seemed that I had scared them enough to leave me alone so we could get into the cab of the semi and drive away. Shermie was with me again at this point.

These were the bears. They're dancing bears from India,
I actually read an article about them yesterday which is maybe why they appeared in my dream.

Part 3: More Lions
The semi turned into two Jeeps and we're racing across dried up pastoral land (like the kind you see along US36 in Colorado) until we run into this old dude on a horse who's trying to fence in a group of sheep or cows.  Unfortunately, there were also lions wandering around so I told the guy that he needed to hurry and rope his sheep in because the lions would get them if he didn't.  So I and whomever I was with start stalking the lions.  I am trying to shoot at them but all I am doing is hitting trees.

Eventually we get to part 4.

Part 4: Tigers and Lions Oh MY!


Now I am in this house with a bunch of other people that backs up to a lake or bay or something, but is also in mountain-scenery.  There are lions and tigers stalking the area around the house but it's fenced in and protected so they can't get in.  I am sitting on an upstairs balcony watching a tiger lying in the shade.  It seemed that I was under the impression that the predators were eating all the pray and eventually they would die off if we didn't keep feeding them. Then I see this beige-colored chow-type dog running up to the house with a bundle in its mouth.

Look - So majestic!

"Oh my god! Oh my god!" I'm saying as I'm racing down the stairs to open the gate up for the dog so the lions/tiger won't get him.  Unfortunately, the tiger grabs a hold of the dog and starts shaking him and I'm screaming at the tiger from inside the front door (which resembles a batting cage): "Let him go!"

Eventually the dog gets released and comes up to the gate, but now he's a human.  I let him inside and I'm standing there staring at the tiger.  It comes right up to the fence and I'm yelling at it.  Then it lunges at the fence and turns into a human and says, "You think you can beat us, but you can't."

Then I wake up.


The weirdest thing about this dream is that I'm not really afraid of predatory animals.  Tigers are my favorite animal and I find all big cats cute and fascinating.