Page 83 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

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I dreamed of a house—ample, outfitted with a sort of
expensive, faux rusticism. I was looking out a window,
watching a bird take its meal from a tray feeder. A sound
spread across the sky. It wasn’t so much loud as it was
alien, and it was becoming everything. The bird vanished.
In the span of a thought, the world changed. I ran through
the streets wearing only the skin on my feet. All around
me, the world was breaking apart, giving birth. The sound
was as big as the world, and I felt incredibly small, caught
underfoot, without place or purpose. Finding a hole in the
earth, I plunged into darkness. There were other things in
there like me, abandoned by the world, by nature.
The dream changed sharply. While I remained the same,
I was also different—better. The time had changed, but my
place underground had not. I was moving at a brisk but
decidedly measured pace, despite the utter lack of light.
There were other things surrounding me in the darkness.
Whatever they were, they belonged to me, body and soul.
Up into the moonlight we went, all clicking claws and
licking lips. Looking upon the moon, I beheld weird shapes
stretched dark and massive across its face. The intervening
sky was alive somehow, alien, but not hurtful to look upon.
I’d long made peace with the new world. I was right with it,
prepared—designed for it.
My pack and I made our way through corpse-piled gutters
and lanes carved clean and straight by rivers of gushing
gore. We moved upon roads paved by living tars, crept the
thickets of rambling, rusted, barbed wires. We ignored the
pleading, ensnared shapes—prey to unseen things haunting
the webs of bloody, serrated steel.
Finally, we came upon our destination—a gigantic
factory. I lifted my gaze to leer at a massive smokestack
throwing black plumes at the sky. We entered by way of a

86 | Mark Anzalone