Dream #5 - Undead Homecoming

We rode into my hometown but it wasn't my real hometown. Rather, it looked like a 1970's Bruce Springsteen song if Bruce Springsteen had written songs in the 70s, a little dirty and downtrodden, a lot of iron railings, telephone wires and a homeless person with a shopping cart loaded with crumpled newspapers and rotten rags. In short, like New Jersey. Except the sun was shining. My female companion, a blonde with a grungy Seattle style looked bemused.

 

She and the car and the suburban drought disappeared. Deb and I were walking down a street of nondescript brick houses that much more resembled my hometown though were still not my hometown. I knocked on the door of a house and asked the woman who answered for the forty dollars she owed me. She rudely told me she didn't have it and slammed the door in my face. I was distraught for I really needed that forty dollars. I walked on, feeling helpless, down the street, down a hill lined by lilac bushes and fresh mown lawns in front of larger houses a ways back from the road. I heard Deb behind me. Always Deb; a blunt and colourful individual whom life had taught that there was no point in stupidity or in wallowing in the bad things. "Fuck her! Measure twice and bleed for six!" I didn't know what the hell that meant but I got the gist of it.

 

At the bottom of the hill I came to a bridge with thick concrete parapets that I climbed up on. I looked out over the river which grew quite wide ahead of me, surrounded on all sides by dark green trees on which a pink sun was setting. I sat brooding for awhile, my knees hugged by my arms to my chest. Deb continued to prattle behind me.

 

I continued across the bridge and found myself in the grey light of New Jersey again, gritty and littered with everything under the sun. My female companion had rejoined me. We came into an alley with a yellow brick wall on the right, a rusty chain-link fence on the left guarding an empty lot of brown, dry grass, a rusty wheelbarrow, some rusty sporting equipment and some zombies. Down the alley, a squat shack in the same yellow brick hugged its rusty iron door shut. Beyond it the alley turned and a few naked and blackened shamblers came tottering around the corner. One laid upon my companion but I pulled my nine and took care of him, splattering blood on my woman. (Why do zombies have blood?). I dispensed in short order the other zombies but for one. On the other side of the fence one lay upon the ground. This one must have eaten a lot of brains because he was the most clever. He was immobile but for his hand and the eyes that followed me. In his hand he had a small loaded crossbow. With a zombie's deft adroitness, he slowly aimed the bolt at my head. Thinking fast, despite a diet low in brains, I grabbed a shovel leaning against the face and placed it between the crossbow's trajectory and myself. The zombie shifted his aim to an exposed part of myself and I moved my makeshift buckler accordingly. We performed this dance a half dozen times as I hopped the fence and got closer to him. When I could, I crushed the tiny crossbow which seemed to be made of popsicle sticks under my foot and used the blade of the shovel to part the zombie from his skullcap. My companion and I continued down the alley and turned beyond the shack into oblivion.

 

That's the first and last time I go to New Jersey.