Dark Dream

9. A Sea of Change

Charley awoke from the Devourer of Souls. He was in hospital. Paul Weeks, a loving father of four, had broken his back. He'd been described in the tabloids as a workaholic family man, with no previous convictions. What happened to him could have happened to anyone. Tough shit, in other words.

Charley lay in the darkness, the soothing sounds of the hospital ward helping to ease the panic he felt. His mind was often drugged and hazy of late. The painkillers left him groggy and filled his nights with dark and terrible dreams.

The dreams he was having now were different to the dreams he'd had as a child. Back then, he'd seen uninterrupted views of the Earth from space. To his young mind, the Earth had looked like a blue and white marble or a big sticky sweet, wet from the mouth.

As he'd grown, his dreams had evolved to include his monsters. At first he'd begun to see them as a distant plague of locusts. He'd watch, mesmerised, as their numbers grew. Finally, even the sun would vanish as day turned to night.

When he hit his teens, religion and science came together with a bang. In his dreams he saw monsters swarming over the surface of the Earth. The ones that couldn't fly - the ones that were more human than monster - covered the sprawling land, filling up the rivers, lakes, and shallow seas. The ones that could fly soared up into the air as more of their kind poured out of vast craters in the Earth's crust. The majestic view would be gone, calloused over and hidden beneath a darkening shroud.

The silence would draw out for an eternity and just as he thought nothing more was going to happen, he saw lines of white vapour trails converge on sections of the Earth. It was like watching a fleet of aeroplanes all heading for the same sunny destination. Before hitting the ground, each one broke up into pale fingers of destruction. Finally, explosions ripped through the seething mass, scattering their numbers in waves. Plumes of ash crept up to the heavens as huge mushroom clouds broke through to the upper atmosphere, solidly punching through reality and changing the world forever. The oceans seethed and bubbled. The long delayed aftershock finally reached him. Dull booming noises echoed around the world until he felt as if his ears would explode. 

He had this dream many times. Each time it would be like watching a slow-motion film. Pockets of emptiness dotted the Earth's crust; no clouds or monsters existed where the cluster bombs had fallen. From his vantage point, he could see forests, buildings and pylons; all toppled like dominoes. Growing halos of steam and smoke would always crown these explosions. They reminded him of his brother's neat smoke-tricks.

Before waking up, he'd see an army of machines pour from holes in the blast zones. He wasn't sure how he knew them to be machines. It was something he just instinctively knew. Whatever the case, he could see that these machines seemed deft at mimicking the monsters. They used the sky and the land to their best advantage, their numbers being of equal match. This army of darkness ran alongside and even over these larger but slower machines, machines that looked huge by comparison.

Night would fall and the fires of their battles would rage on. This would be the last he saw before awakening. His mind, feeling the sorrow of seeing the Earth reduced to a burning ember in Hell would always be glad to awaken.  The world outside his bedroom was still there, undamaged and unconsumed by war.

He'd preferred it that way. Better the banality of life than the horrors that plagued his mind, their deformed legions mindlessly tearing at the fabric of a flimsy reality. Their bodies would be made immortal by these creatures. Their greatest desire would be their most dreaded enemy; a broken cycle of life and death, with no release.

Recently, his dreams had become more personal and now included the rest of humanity. They no longer hid under his bed. In his dreams, they were out in the world and growing in number, the bodies of the fallen beneath their feet.