Vilainous Assault on Time, pt 2!
Tuesday, 4/14/09
I dreamt…
By now, other children had come out of nearby rooms to see what was happening. they were scared and alone. What kind of place was I in, anyway? Knowing that the building might collapse, and also where the stairs were (at least in nearby time lines) I told the children to follow me outside. They may not have liked being bossed around by a little girl, but leaving sounded like a great idea to them.
We descended the staircase, and were leaving the stairwell when a door was kicked in ahead of us. We pressed against the wall, at my instruction, and a man stepped into the hallway beyond the stairwell. At first I thought he looked a lot like bert from sesame street, but I was quickly distracted by the enormous gun he carried. Fortunately he didn’t seem to see us and kept walking straight ahead, quickly moving out of sight. We used his point of entry to escape the building.
Outside we made it for the back yard, as the front was a parking lot. There were other children there, but no adults, which I found strange. We were starting to get settled and figure out what we were going to do, when a man walked up.
He looked like the joker, only with a palate swap, and he carried what at first I thought was a fire hose, but I quickly realized was tipped with rotating gun barrels, like a gatling gun. He said something he thought was amusing and laughed to himself as he set up his weapon on the roof of a nearby car.
Knowing we were in trouble, I dashed for the car, along with two other kids. We ducked down on the side of the car opposite him, out of his line of fire. One of the kids tried to hide under the car, but I suspected he’d be found and killed. The man opened fire, and there were loud shots, manic laughter, and the screams of dying children. They were being cut down, and I didn’t have a plan. It was then that I found a small bundle of dynamite.
I don’t know where it came from or how it got there. I didn’t care that it was soggy, either. I only needed a way to light it. The kid next to me provided that, in the form of a handful of small slender sticks. He rubbed them together until they started to smolder. I wondered what they were, because I’d never seen orange wood before. The gunfire stopped, and I got one of the small soggy sticks lit just as the man was coming around the back of the car.
I ran to the front of the car and tossed the stick at the man. It landed beside him on the trunk of the car, and he stared at it for a moment, realizing what it was. I ran, telling the others to do so as well, as the man seemed to accept his fate and said a melodramatic goodbye…
The dynamite fizzled. I ran. Into the woods nearby, as I heard his laughter resume, then his weapon. I ran. What could I do? I had a six year old’s body, and I was stuck in time.