War Of The Worlds

I had a horrific dream last night. So much so that I lost my appetite when I woke up. And this is how the message rang.


I can recall going inside a building that looked much like a post office, with brown wood masonry. It was very modern looking. I went to the desk to acquire about joining the library, and she looked at me for a few seconds before passing me to Stall 10 next to her. I don't remember what was said at this stall, but I am hurriedly being sat down at a table with, I realise, two guys I used to know from Blackpool. One from school and the other from college. It is a nice day and the sun is pouring through the windows of the building, and I quickly come to realise that these two people are not here for a nice reason. I've been put beside them in an insane asylum. And they bicker and chatter about how rude the staff can be, and about how useless this asylum is, and we eventually get 'round to discussing why each of us is here in the first place. Guy one mentions something about depression, and I mumble "I've had experience with depression... Mild depression," as so not to sound too self-absorbed.

After a few minutes have passed I am walking down the street with guy number two and we are going to his house. We walk straight towards my house and slip through an alley with a front door on the side which is coincidentally, his house. I say "All this time and I didn't know you lived right next to me." He is unamused, and so we slide through his excruciatingly thin and long front door, and stumble through the short corridors and small roof of his hobbit hole. We are in his room now, and I take a seat on his bed. It's a white bed, and I keep getting my leg caught on the covers because there are so many. The sun is still pouring itself in, making itself at home, and dulling my view. I stand up and move to the window to survey the culprit. What I see when I look outside is instead, much different. The skies are a deep, dark purple, nestled with greys and a horrific, murky yellow. I see bomb shockwaves coming towards me, and open fire, and gunshots, and then just fire. I conclude we must get out as soon as possible.

We make our way towards the front door and I scramble to find my feet and begin bolting in the opposite direction, before being abruptly stopped to find that he isn't following behind me. I run back to him and propose to go his way. By now i'm rather hysterical, and I'm shouting, and bawling and trying to tell him that there's a war and we might get killed. But he doesn't listen. He has headphones in each ear, and is gratiously singing at me the words of an angry song, like someone might do to their parents to piss them off easily and effortlessly. I am still surveying the sky, and the sound of sirens and shotguns is now quite deafening. The most unnerving part must have been the shockwaves produced by the bombs. I saw them spreading North, East, South, West, until you didn't know where they might stop.

We passed a house and two little girls were peeping their heads around the front door, and they had raggy dresses on and dirty hands and faces. They soon went back inside. Still walking, I heard radio announcements, they said they wish that the elderly people who have died in said blaze may rest in peace. And people all around me are mourning their grannies and grandads and elderly neighbours. All this walking had taken us to a particularly settling vista. I was in a place that looked much like Blackpool, with a high winding promenade, that formed its way in circles, around what looked like the spire of a castle. Below the promenade was the sea, and as I looked up, the sky had transpired into a gorgeous velvet blue, tickled with white clouds and general peace.

I was still as unsettled as I had been, and begun to quicken my pace as I reached the first spiral on the hill. I caught glimpse of a shifty looking man walking behind me, in a black suit and tie, and hat. I saw something quickly make its way out of his inside, top pocket and I spun around quickly to walk quicker and harder. I simply had to look back again, and this time saw some sort of metal lazer being produced. There wasn't much time between now and the moment he shot me right in my spine.

I collapsed against the wall of the spire, my legs bent and my back straight. And a screen flashed before me, it said I had two moves to make it out alive before I was dead. By this, it meant two shots to stand up without moving said injury in my back. As I struggled with the coordination of my feet and legs, I watched the numbers slowly creep up, and down, and I'm sure I managed to stand up and walk a few steps, before the number creeped down to zero and everything shut off, turned black, and I collapsed once more into a heap. There was a new screen before my eyes, it simply said "DEAD" in metallic writing, on a murky brown background. There were two things, I found, that had to be filled in before I were actually to be left to die in peace. There was a space to fill in how many moves it had taken me to die, and unfortunately I awoke before I got to read the second question in this insane, sadistic quiz.