Passing through a convince store, and out the other side into the night air.

I'm walking, or trying to along the side-walk with a co-worker I had years ago. She and I are joking around, intentionally bumping into each other, flirting. It's a nice re-channelling of memories I had, but they're gone. The night air remains.

I'm with two current friends outside - a guy and a girl. We're all thirsty, and start trying to find some house that will give us water. No ones around - the houses sit empty and dark.
We go though various houses, and I stop to look at book cases and books that have never existed. As I walk though the empty aparments and houses, I see the detritus of other peoples lives. There's a set of cups floating in a bucket, but no drinkable water.

The guy hears TV noise in a far room, and I'm nervous. He enters, and quickly re-emerges to explain that we need to leave. We descend the ladder leading to this loft area, and rush toward the front door. We're not suppose to be here.

An older Korean woman is walking up the front lawn, emotionless. She grabs me  as I leave (her) house, and won't let go. I struggle to break free, and realize if I do, I can continue to dream. She squeezes me, and I awake.

There's a threatening presence outside, across the street, and I'm in the parlour room of an old home. There's a shallow grave dug though the floorboards, straight down with a woman laying in it. 

She was alive recently, but became infected or posessed by something. There's a crowd of people in the room, mostly scared farmers or rural middle-aged looking people.

To prevent the body from getting up, someone fires a nailgun though the woman's head. However, it starts verbalizing.

Someone calmly explains it's rediscovering basic vocal structures found in all vertebrates. I realize there's something in this woman that's colonizing her body. It moves on to making ape-like noises, but no real words yet. The limbs are twitching.

The presence outside wants this thing destroyed, but the people inside are fearfully protecting it. I realize the man who spoke with me earlier wasn't himself - he was some kind of colonized body puppeting a person. He has an unfocused look in his eyes.

The woman rises, nail still though her head and starts frosting the glass windows. If the presence outside can't see in, I'm told, it will delay it's attack.

The parlour room is attached to my grandparent's house. I walk past the side door, and trigger something's attack. Sheer terror as the house shakes with wind, screams, and rapid gunfire. I hide beside the doorway, and then crawl toward my old room, seeking a place to hide.

It's daytime, and people from earlier in the dream are gone. Someone whose my grandmother, but not my grandmother is cooking breakfast in the kitchen. I'm sitting in the carpeted hallway, trying to attach a hexagonal lid to a jar of chocolate peanut butter. 

There's still a grave dug through the living room floor though.

Dancing a waltz with ex-girlfriend. She doesn't look very well.

 At first, I'm confused: and I haven't seen her in many years, and there's no music playing. I have one arm around her upper shoulder, and cupping the back of her neck, under her red hair. This is how I realize she's actually dead - the scalp feels like it's separating from the back of her skull. 

I'm filled with terror, and fear that if I stop dancing with the resurrected corpse, she'll kill me. 

 Our soundless waltz continues as dusty floorboards of the house creak.

I'm standing outside a red brick building on a cloudy day, photographing the sky. Something isn't right.

I alternate between using my camera and my phone, because I can't make sense of what I'm seeing in the photographs: The clouds seem to drift from the horizon, then curl back at a higher altitude like a wave. There are things on the underside of the clouds. Squares, of some kind.

I enlarge the images on my phone, and see that they're tents - canvas squares anchored down. Others are beds, upside down, and high above me - anchored to the clouds.

A rising panic swells inside me. I can't make sense of this. I rush inside to a computer, and open up a memory card on screen. Something is wrong - something or someone doesn't want these images viewed or spread: the icons and filenames of each photograph begin of dissolve into multicolored static. I try to disconnect the drive from the computer, but the drive has smoke pouring out of it already.

Something is living in the clouds, and doesn't want to be found.

It’s night, and I am outside. Surrounding me are the ruins of old stone buildings with their skeletal timbers jutting upward toward a dark sky. The landscape feels like the property of my old house, before it was renovated. There’s a chill in the air, despite the torchlight that illuminates a few points in the distance.

There’s a group of frightened people waiting to the left of a cellar doorway. I step over the shambles of a wooden farm fence, and find that they’re arming themselves with makeshift weapons. Pipes with large bolts, kitchen blades, Molotov cocktails, and other less intimidating things. 

A man rushes over, and presses a grenade into my hand. “They’re coming!” The crazed look in his eyes frightens me more than his dire prediction. “He shouts to no one in particular, “Get ready!”. People gather on the lawn, facing this cellar door. The doors are missing, revealing concrete stairs that descend down into a dark hallway beneath the ruins of a large house. I recognize this as the ruins of my old home.

Undead emerge from the cellar steps into the torchlight. I’ve released the grenade, and tossed it down the stairwell. The explosion sends shards of concrete everywhere, and as I fall down I lose my glasses. Scrambling to retrieve them, the world devolves into blurs of movement, and torchlight.

People sound like they’re panicking, and attempting to run while other attack the undead. I see struggling forms falling to the ground, and back away while still laying on the ground.  In the darkness, I retreat away from the cellar door, toward the road. Still without my glasses, I find a heavy steel pipe weapon nearby. Up the stairs and toward me move a woman and child, both dead. A man takes down the woman, and with startling speed, the child bares its small teeth as it rushes toward me.

*  *  *

The rest is a blur. By the time I can hear anything beyond a high pitch whistle in my ears, I realize that I am covered in blood, and slumped on my knees next to an oak tree. I feel like I'm in shock, and have a deep sense of vertigo. Gradually, I regain my composure. 

To the right of the house is another ruin, but one that has a door and first floor but no roof. Side stepping the corpses the litter the ground, I walk over to the house and sort through the garbage can next to the doorway. I hope to find something useful. Inside, I find a box-cutter, an empty DVD case, and a bubble envelope. An old man stops me as I back away from the can, and explains that he “put them there for a reason”, then returns the objects to the garbage. 

I walk through the door, and up a short flight of stairs. I am standing in a kitchen that has a window facing the road. I turn on the kitchen faucet, but realize it’s too short; a stubby bathroom design. The water doesn't reach the sink. Instead, it pools all over the dusty counter top. 

My father is standing nearby, reading pages from a binder. It looks like he’s seen battle, and his pants and shirt are tons and frayed at the knees and elbows. “I need to get out of here”, I tell him. He explains that he’s going ahead to Quebec to locate a safe zone for the family to move to, but he needs me to stay here to watch out for the family while he’s gone.

I can’t do this though. It’s his responsibility to look after the family, not mine. The dream reasoning blends with reality as I realize that I am moving overseas for work, and I can’t stay behind. The sounds of the undead echo off in the distance as my father remarks “Do what you need to do.” He turns back to studying his binder of papers.

I don't want to abandon my parents to the threats outside, but I know that my presence here can't stop what's coming. I walk outside into the night, but there’s no longer any torches lit. Looking out over the ruins of the house, and the featureless sky above, I feel a deep sense of dread.

I walk through a deserted matrix of shops and store fronts while the skyline of a dark metropolis looms in the distance. The city is familiar, and I know that I've visit it before in a dream long past.

The cobblestone paved roads are grey, and faded neon signs blink nearby. The streets feels like an area of Japan, or perhaps Hong Kong; having an aged quality about them, but lacking the grime and gum-stained sideways of most western cities. A small number of Asian shoppers wander about in the distance, too far away to make out. I meet an elderly version of an 80's/90's action movie star as he waits on the side walk. We walk quietly through an open air mall area build into the side of a building. The squared hallways are deserted, with many of the shops closed. The old man's knees hurt, so we stop for a time and sit on a bench. The air is cool, like an air conditioner; lacking any hint of moisture. The old man coughs, and tells me anecdotes of his life. I listen, but can't remember any details of what he says. Focusing so intently on what is said, I forget what came before.

As we exit the empty shopping alleyways, I see a large black freight truck parked beside the curb which we both get inside. As we both get in, I'm still uncertain of why he's walking around with me, or why we're now flying in a helicopter.

We ascend, leave the grey streets below. There are hills between this small shopping district and the sky scrapers that line the western horizon. No one is flying the helicopter, as both the old man and myself sit as passengers. Together, we watch the horizon.

I'm in a car driving down a heavily wooded highway. Cars are abandoned by the roadside every so often, and there are people with backpacks walking in both directions ahead. 

We exit into a clearing next to the forest to avoid the scattered wrecks of abandoned cars that clog the road . My driver is a woman who speaks very little. She gestures that I get out of the car with my belongings in front of an old wooden house. There are two others, but she gestures to this one in particular. 

I exit the vehicle, and she pulls away. I go inside, and other people notice this. A man starts running across the lightly gravelled front yard toward me. I run inside, and down a small set of stairs. At the midway point on the stairs is a sealed hatch-door. I get inside, and press it closed. The man throws his whole weight against the door, while another behind him hit it with a sledgehammer. They're desperate to get in. 

I tumble backwards down the remaining set of stairs as other people flood in. Men, woman, children. There's a few infants too, carried by their mothers. As the last of them enter, the door is hastily sealed with the inside valve. It reminds me of doors on a submarine, or fallout shelter. I look around, and realize it's the latter: a single long room, stretching back 300 meters is lined with tables and lockers. Canned and preserved food lines the shelves. To the right is a small hallway with two public wash-rooms. There's an argument among some of the people - I was going to let them die by sealing that door early. I didn't know what was going on. The room shakes, and light flicker. I know what's going on now. 

I open my small carry on suitcase to see a few dress shirts and pants and an old notebook. Inside the notebook are torn pieces of pink and beige silk laid between blank pages. The people around me busy themselves settling in while creating a feast from the provisions available. Soon, everyone is sitting around a long fold out table eating mashed potatoes, meat, and apple pie. I sit beside an attractive brown haired girl as she chats about where she grew up. My grandmother sits in a comfortable chair knitting as Stan Lee sits at the end of the table, serving himself more potatoes. "Aren't you glad you let other people in?" he comments. "It would be a terrible thing to be locked down here alone". 

*   *   *

The scene snaps in an instant. I'm alone in this bunker, standing in my underwear, wearing a plastic Halloween mask. There's no overhead electric light, but through the dimness of the emergency light bulb, I see a table mockingly set for 12 people. From the time I entered the wooden building, I experienced a hallucination powered by the madness of being sealed in a bunker alone during the apocalypse. 
I stand at the table, and gaze back into the room's receding darkness; listening to the silence above.