nodding off

I’m running down a hallway, from an enemy I haven’t had a clear look at. I see a black man with a leather coat at the end of the hallway and he starts running with me upon noticing my assailant.

We flee down a concrete stairwell and jump into a truck with its engine running. The smoke from the smoldering rubble of demolished buildings blends into the overcast sky and now our pursuers are in the sky, trailing the truck. The shots send up plumes of fire to the left and right of us.
Something pops a tire and we swerve off the road and fly into a ditch.
 

I wake up sweating and nervous, another bad dream.

At the office, I make seventy copies of my TPS forms instead of seven and trip over paperclips. It takes thirteen styrofoam coffee cups to make it through the day.

I’m in my bed this time, and the tiny figure looks like a huge mosquito standing on my chest. If only I could move, I could punch him to death with heavy blows, but I can’t move.  His fingertips spin like drills and he punctures my chest, blood splashing onto my sheets.

His expression never changes, frozen like he’s wearing a mask. His pointer finger draws nearer and nearer to my eyeball and I’d give anything to scream. My body must’ve been disconnected from my brain, because all I can do is watch.  I’d go into convulsions from the pain, but even my involuntary reflexes are busted.

I thought you couldn’t feel pain in dreams.

Tina, my secretary, has bags under her eyes and she keeps dropping pens. I tried to catch a catnap at my desk, but every time I start to drift I see that creature boring into my eye.  Coffee’s been replaced by energy drinks and I can see the lines as the computer screen refreshes itself, like when seeing a computer screen on television.

The woods are thick with fog and the scent of rotting leaves. I’m running again, but this time I know where I have to go. There’s a cave on the edge of the forest where the others are meeting to talk strategy, it seems someone’s devised a means of fighting back.

But I’m always three steps too slow and their buggies are gaining on me. No lasers, just giant scythe-like sickles they use to slice off heads and legs and arms.

They’re wearing suits that looks like the hazmat outfits they use when hosing down a naked redneck arrested with a meth lab in his trunk.

I never thought it would be like this. I always assumed anything traveling light years to get here either wouldn’t kill me or would have more ingenious methods than lasers and blades.

Low branches cut me and flip into my face. My foot’s caught in a snarled root and I drop to my knees. I hear the swoosh, the hiss of the blade and feel the mud in my ears. I look up at the rest of my body and for that last second of life I can see the daemon hovering over me, already looking about for another victim.

I wake up in a puddle…I haven’t wet the bed since I was ten years old.

My boss’ head drops in mid-sentence, but snaps back up in less than a second. He looks worse than I do, and his lecture about clumsiness and lost productivity seems hypocritical. On my way here I passed four wrecks, even the cops swaying and unsteady while talking to the shaken drivers.

Six people called off sick today, but I haven’t heard anything about an epidemic. On the news, there was a story about an elementary school in Duluth where half the kids didn’t show up.

The sky is red, and fighter jets keep exploding up above, vaporized by some unseen force. It’s like a bad sci-fi movie with no happy ending. I’m not running, I’m shackled. We’re chained together, in a line so long I can’t even see any captors prodding and poking someone on the end like in those films about Roman times.

A huge beast with green skin and yard-long teeth bursts from the earth, grabbing a prisoner from the line of people next to me. As they’re all chained together at the necks, the whole string of people is whipped into the air, shrieking and gurgling, a big whip of metal links and human bodies.

But nobody in my line stops. We just keep marching, blank stares and prayers that the creature will gorge itself on the chain of human sausage links it’s already munching on.

But other creatures pop out of the ground, tossing sod like water geysers and wrapping their appendages around the nearest bundle of dirt-smeared flesh. A slimy green arm coils around me and I’m crushed, unable to split my focus between my shattered bones and the tension on my neck from a hundred people shackled to me.

I think I’m fine when I wake up, as none of my bones are broken, but I cough up a mouthful of blood and throw up another half quart after rushing to the toilet.

I skipped work today. I tried to call off, but nobody answered any of the numbers I called. On the news, planes are dropping from the skies for reasons nobody can determine. A jetliner in Reno, a private jet in Poughkeepsie. Tragic, but not the leading story. Insomnia seems to be sweeping the nation. Kids with nightmares, adults vegetating in front of infomercials instead of sleeping, even the animals are twitchy and restless.

A scientist proposes that the cause is some as-yet-undetected virus that renders the infectees incapable of sleep, but the Reverend they interview next seems to know better: he says it’s fear.
 

(c) j baugher 2006