"Fallout Children" - 02/22/2009

"Fallout Children"
02/22/2009

Dream #2

I was walking in a field with maybe two other friends of mine, and I believe we were teenagers. We were all staring at this old factory/plant that was off limits to trespassers, while we passed by it. Apparently, there were a lot of old stories and rumors about the plant, and we were all really curious as to what really went on there. We saw a man coming our way, walking toward the plant, and he had a box. When we crossed paths, he said that he was making a delivery to the plant, so he had permission to go in. Of course, we couldn't resist asking if we could go with him. he agreed, and allowed us to walk along side him.

We approached the old, run-down building, and noticed that there was a smaller building attached to the front of it. This one looked more like a house than an industrial building. The place appeared completely abandoned, but the closer we got, the more we could hear what sounded like machinery whirring and whining from the set of buildings. Before going inside, we went around the front side of the 'house', trying to see inside the dark windows for any signs of life. The closer we got to the building, though, the louder this whining, wailing noise got - and the more distinct. It sounded almost...human. More fantastically, it sounded like the wailing of ghosts. Lots of ghosts. The idea seemed absurd, though, but thinking about the sound with that in mind made it one of the eeriest, most unnerving sounds I'd ever heard.. Still, secure in the assumption that ghosts didn't exist, I approached the others and we walked inside.

We found ourselves in an old kitchen. It looked outdated, but didn't exactly look as abandoned as I'd half-expected. The wailing sound had gotten louder, though, and it seemed to be coming from a cellar door near the hallway. I was such a ghastly noise, but with everything else seeming so untended, curiosity was getting the better of us. A couple of us went over to the door and pulled it open, peering down into the blackness. We almost toppled all over each other, when a mass of tiny heads and arms suddenly lunged out at us, reaching frantically for us like zombies closing in on a meal, wailing away in that terrible chorus we'd heard from outside. In the second it took us to react, I could see that they were children - dozens of them. Their faces and bodies were horribly disfigured to the point where it was hard to even recognize them as humans. Just the same, though, we slammed the door shut, screaming, and braced ourselves against it to keep the horde inside.

Just then, a man and woman appeared in the hallway, having heard the sounds and come to investigate. They were totally aware of the children in the cellar, and after we began to calm down, they told us a story about the plant and how there used to be all kinds of fucked up experiments going on in there - one of which caused some sort of radioactive contamination that burned all of the children that were being experimented all, disfiguring them the way that they are. They took the box from the delivery guy and opened it, revealing the contents to be canned goods - food for the children. Still uneasy about the atmosphere, we stuck around long enough to hear more about the tale, as the man and woman fed the children. They let a couple of them run around in the kitchen area while being fed and, aside from the horrific disfigurements, they seemed like ordinary children - though they couldn't talk and did not much more than make moaning noises. The wailing from earlier had been their cries for food.

Though there didn't seem to be any danger in the situation, it was all just too uncomfortable to hang around in. We'd figured that we'd been there long enough, hurriedly said our goodbyes, and left the building. For some reason, we were all suddenly, overwhelmingly hungry, and we could see that there was a Subway at the end of the field opposite the side we'd come in on. Instead of walking around the entire perimeter, we just went and climbed over the chain-link fence, crossing some railroad tracks and heading toward the Subway to eat.