A Recent Dream

RECENT DREAM

She felt weakened and confused as to how she arrived at the store. A government commissary? Her mind began to flutter in between reality and the milky white haze of lost consciousness.... and it was then that she became aware that she was pushing an empty grocery cart. She was floating. Foggy. Had she been drugged? She gazed down sleepily at her tombstone colored arms and felt the cold metal of the cart stinging her grasp like an erosive lime. In her compromised mental state, she hardly even cared that she was wearing a tattered old hospital gown. Her bare feet shuffled slowly, one step at a time, down the endless aisles of canned goods. She felt herself begin to awaken and focus on the blurred watercolor images around her. There were others like her, vacuously shuffling behind their carts like some crazed b-rated zombie movie.
A man screamed.
She slowly turned towards the sound. There were men shouting and guardsmen in uniform swarming like insects around the man who was violently thrashing to break from their iron grips. They were beating him.
She knew she had to escape, but she was finding it difficult to quicken her steps. It was like walking through a vat of molasses. Somehow, she managed to drudge herself to the entrance of the huge facility, completely un-noticed. The sliding glass door electronically whisked open and she stepped catatonically out onto the pavement of the cool outdoors. She gulped in the life giving air around her and stopped. Did they see her?
Suddenly, a red jeep screeched it's tires to a halt. A man's face appeared out of it's window. He was shouting something with a strained urgency, "GET IN!!!!"
That face. It was her ex-husband. Odd.
"GET IN, NOW!!!"
She remembered getting in, but quickly faded into a dream.
She regained consciousness a few moments later, and noticed herself sitting in the back of the red jeep. It clumsily rumbled down a rocky dirt road, caroming her body around like an old forgotten rag doll. Frantically fumbling to find something to hold onto, she grabbed the moist flesh of someone sitting beside her. She recoiled in shock. It was a man wearing the same kind of sheer gown as she and he was grinning with a wide toothy grin.
"W-where are...we...goinggg?", she slurred.
No answer.
Did she actually speak it outloud?
She looked down at herself. My God how thin she was. So pale.
She braced herself with alarm as the jeep lurched around, lumbering over a small craggy hill. She put her hands up on the driver's seat in front of her to protect her face from smashing into the side panel.
The jeep, with strangulated whirring, came to a sudden stop in front of a house. She looked. It was That new- age , modern 80's type of archecture, with the entire facade of the house covered in huge paned windows. She smiled with the bliss of a memory.
Her ex-husband impaled her reverie with his shouts. "GET OUT!! GET OUT!!!!" His eyes were bulging with a searing panic. The door swung open and she was thrust out onto the lawn. The jeep then sped off in a cloud of dirt and rock debris, the gears grinded their metallic screaming protest as it peeled away. She looked to assess her bleeding knee and scrapes.
The hospital gown man had already entered the house, so she followed in. The home must have been lovely once. There was a Large family room with a spacious adjoining kitchen , separated only by the white granite kitchen island. She stepped carefully through the thick debris of dirt, old abandoned wires and moldy, stained moving boxes. The white marbled floor was shrouded with years of accumulated rust colored dust and she tried to stifle her racking coughs for fear of vomiting. God, She felt so ill.
She leaned up against the cold, unforgiving granite counter top to steady herself.
Thinking.
Forcing a clarity in her mind was like focusing a lens in a broken camera ...but it was then that she saw the clear, plastic wrist cuffs on her arms. In a sudden epinephric frenzy she began savagely ripping and tearing at the cuffs on her wrists in attempt to break them off. A trail of crimson colored Blood began to trickle down her pale arm and the Pain shot up through her like a bolt of lightning . Her forehead pounded like the sounds of drums beating at some savage cannibalistic ritual.
The clear cuffs were embedded into her skin and were attached to her wristbone by a single shiny metal bar. Terrified, she began opening and slamming shut the many cabinet doors in search of something...anything to release her from the plasticine shackles. The cabinet beneath the sink revealed nothing by dank old sheets of Aluminum foil that were sequestered in a bed of old woven cobwebs and a suffocating amount of old dust. She seized them and slammed them down on the granite in front of her. Staring...thinking. Her breathing was ebbing in and out with stuttering, sticcato wheezing and then...
Something moved .
She fixed her gaze upon the counter. A thin, clear line of a watery mucous cascaded slowly down and splashed in bubbled mounds upon the foil sheet. She whipped her body around and noticed the hospital gown man leaning over her with a wide , unnatural toothy grin. The saliva still dangling from his lips. His eyes were ablaze with insanity and With a broad smile he began cackling at her showing all his teeth. He was...laughing hysterically.
She KNEW that face, that matted curly blonde hair, those faded denim colored eyes. She tried hard to place his face , but her mind was still so hazy and jumbled.
He thrust a bony arm forward and greedily seized one of the tarnished foil sheets for himself and staggered away aimlessly.
Spencer Pratt.
He looked like Spencer from that ridiculous reality show. What was it? Heidi was his wife. She strained to remember. She felt as if she was swimming through fog .

Grabbing the remaining tin foil, she carefully attempted to mold it around the plastic cuffs, in hopes it would somehow shield their signal, if any.
She cautiously looked up. "Spencer" had found himself an old liquor bottle and was guzzling it with one hand and playfully rolling around the tinfoil with other.
Laughing. He was Laughing? Haaaaaa. HAAAA!!! "HAAAAAAA!!" It gave her chills like ice cubes running down the base of her spine.
She cautiously and quietly backed away from the kitchen to the enormous glass window at the front of the house. The sun was in such a position that she could only guess upon the hour. 2pm? 3pm?
The shrill, piercing sound of glass breaking on the marbled floor caused her to stiffen with a heightened sense of alertness. Just then, "Spencer" bounded Clumsily towards her ,with that evil full toothed maniacal smile. "C'meeeeer pretty girlllll".
His strength, thankfully, was now exhausted by the contents of the entire liquor bottle he had just swigged down. She easily shoved him to the ground when he began pulling, groping and tearing at her hospital gown. He fell backwards and hit his head on the floor with a sickening sound like a fish being slapped down at a fisherman's loading dock.
He didn't stir. He just laid there motionless with his mouth open, still clutching the broken bottle in his bloody, grey colored hand.
She quickly advanced into the back room of the house searching for a place to hide, still reeling from her induced state of being previously drugged. She held on to the walls as she stepped down the hallway. There, before her, was a very large oak storage box against the wall in the back bedroom. No other furniture, just this disgarded wooden chest. Without a thought, She crawled inside and lowered the lid. The air inside the box was so stale, and musky and so stifling that she struggled once again to supress coughing. She began gagging and wretching uncontrollably but, She didnt care. She was safe for the time being. She curled up inside the wooden chest, despite her waves of nausea and laid on her side . Her body gave in to the clutches of a deep , dreamless sleep and she silently drifted into it's billowy depths.
She awoke with a violent startle to find she was encased in a wooden sepulcher. Her memory began to seep and cascade in to gently remind her that she was safe within its walls and she softened and tried desperately to recount the course of events of the day. Remembering nothing but the jeep ride , she decided to slowly lifted the creaking oak lid to view her surroundings . Her intentions were To get out...to think. To BREATHE.
To her amazement darkness had fallen.
It was night.
"THINK!!!!!" ,She screamed in her mind.
In catlike fashion, she cautiously stepped toe-heel from the bedroom.....listening, feeling, like a Ninja in the inky cold blackness of the house's structures.
She heard the frantic muffled beating of her Own heart pulsing in her forehead, like some viscous cannibalistic dance. The expectation of danger and fear caused her to gain an acute clarity. Cautiously she peered around the corner, into the livingroom.
It was so dark, that she could barely make out the abandoned moving boxes on the floor. No sound, just Silence. A grave silence.
On her way to the back door of the house, the moonlight cast a glistening hue on the floor. It was the tinfoil Spencer had taken. She immediately retrieved it and began clumsily molding it over the left cuff while softly making her way to open the back sliding glass door. She carefully slid it open, an inch at a time.
The back yard was enormous. At least the size of a footall field. The moon cast it's eery glow upon the massive lawn and she noticed in the far distance that there was an illuminated figure of a man. Was that A hospital gown? It was Spencer. He was talking to 3 men in dark clothes. She could see him flailing his arms while he talked and staggering around while he explained something to the men. Their words were completely inaudible and she strained to listen.
Suddenly, the loud whipping sounds of helicopter blades erupted the sanctuary of the night and a brilliant bright beam of light shone down directly on Spencer. As the ray of light shined down , a shot pierced the night air and echoed off in the distance. He collapsed to the ground.
"OH my GOD! "In a panic, she darted around like a caged lioness. She couldn't hide in the house, they would easily find her.The bushes? Ridiculous. My god..my GOD, she looked back to the scene where Spencer was and saw that his hospital gown was now saturated in a tide of red blood .
She bolted.
She made her path in the direction of the nearby wooded area. Running, running, her bare feet being skewered by pine needles and branches along the path. She began climbing with every ounce of strength she could muster, up a branchy pine tree. The bark acted as razors, cutting into her hands and fingers and toes. She climbed higher and higher until there were no more lower branches to climb. She huddled with her knees to her chest on a large branch with her back against the enormous trunk and succumbed to her fate. She was going to die. No question.
Brackish, briney sweat cascaded down into her eyes and it stung like insect bites. She whinced.
It was there , on that branch that she reached the end of herself, both physically and mentally. She gave in to the explosion of heaving sobs that she had held captive for so long. Her teeth began to chatter uncontrollably and she hugged herself tightly with a fright she had never known nor experienced before in her life. It physically gripped her heart . It was The kind of terror that causes your dry tongue to stick to the roof of your mouth. She held herself like a little orphaned child and continued to cry out.
"PLEASE MY GOD HELP MEEEEE", She rocked back and forth , with sobbing heaves. Eventually ,she quieted and wiped her tears with her raw and bleeding fingertips and looked out through the branches. She could see that Spencer and the men were gone and the house was now illuminated with lights. She tried her best to calm down the laboring of her breathing, praying all the while. She fixed her gaze ahead in the distance and noticed with a startle, that there were men lined up on the far adjacent roof of a nearby building . Their black military gear was in stark contrast to the white building, which made them more than obvious in the moonlight hue. They were looking through enormous...binoculars? Night vision goggles?
She squinted her eyes shut .....so tightly That it caused a fire of pain to shoot into her ears like an injection of lit gasoline. She Rocked to console herself, back and forth, quaking and repeating the same words over and over "savemesavemesavemeeeeee". A hazy memory as opaque as a cataract suddenly surfaced in her mind. She saw the sterile facility in which they injected her daily like some kind of useless lab rat. There were others, as well and they were crowded with her in a long white hallway. A nurse had abandoned a rolling medical table and raced to subdue a thrashing young boy about 12 feet down the hallway. She grabbed a handful of syringes and quickly hid them behind her back with intentions of stabbing the nurse and escaping. "You are the______, ______of the Vindicator Order", they told her over and over again. She recalled the countless Hours of training within a dimly lit glass enclosure of computers, but she just couldn't remember the rest, just the blue glow of the monitors.
Just then, she began to feel a trickle down her forehead. She wiped at it. It had girth and felt FURRY and spindly. Suddenly, hundreds of furry sensations of bulbous hairy bodies began to stream down upon her head , scurrying down the entire length of her body. TARANTULAS!!! "NONONONO...OMG..NOOO". She thrashed around madly trying to rid herself of these fanged demons , trying also to stay on the branch without falling. Just then she heard The Voice.
A calming, loving yet powerful voice within the confines of her very soul. Almost like a radio transmittion to her brain:
." I sent the tarantulas to cover you. It will barracade your body heat from their night vision".
She forceably stilled herself by covering her tear stained face with her trembling hands and allowed the scurrying 8 legged arachnid bodies to blanket her face and entire body. She was cocooned by the 1000's of them, now obscuring her presence. What voice was that inside her? Such a familiar tone.She worried that perhaps she had gone mad and was nearing the throes of insanity. Just when she thought her mind was going to fragment into little shards , the spiders began to slowly scatter off. One by one, climbing slowly back up the tree. She could hear the clicking noises as the scurried up the tree back to their nest.
She was finally free.
Free from "them", free from Spencer, free from danger ...but, for how long?
Her left wrist cuff crackled and buzzed electronically and immediately emitted a purple glow.