"When the Moon Comes Out"
05/09/2019
I was with my best friend, T, in a school gymnasium. Apparently, we were being sent on some mission, where we would be transported through time and space, for a major battle. This would be a time-dilated experience, so, even if we took days to get the job done, only seconds would have passed, to everyone around us, by the time we got back home. A crowd watched, while we walked up into the bleachers, donning armored suits and taking our choice of weaponry from a scattered pile near the top. I remember assembling and disassembling various gun parts, in order to customize my loadout, and we both walked back down to the floor, carrying beefy, dual rifles, with all kinds of accessories on them. I don't remember much of the actual trip through space/time, but I recall that it had to do with some sort of ritual that had to be performed by the people who were sending us on the journey.
The next thing I knew, I was "waking up," in an all-white bedroom - either in a crouched position, or sitting in a chair. I don't remember which, but I got the feeling of "coming to," in a position of rest. Looking around this unfamiliar setting - unarmed, as it seems my armor and weapons had disappeared - I tried to get my bearings and remembered having been sent on this other-worldly mission. A strange sensation of "not-quite-lucid" washed over me, as I felt a very surreal nature to this place. It felt very cerebral, almost dream-like, in sense that I felt any anxiety I might feel may actually manifest into a bad situation, here. Despite the fact that I was surrounded by pearl-white decor, with daylight beaming in through the windows, there was an unsettling stillness about this house. Trying to push the tension out of my mind, I began exploring my way through the deathly-silent house, eventually making it to a back door.
Outside, it was a completely different scene. There were plenty of people, milling around. Children ran about the yard, as if there was some family get-together going on. After some walking, I was approached by three, burly, Latino men who, for some reason, decided to start shit with me. I don't remember many details of the fight which ensued, but I know that it still had that 'almost-lucid' feel to it. I had them supernaturally outclassed, leaving two of them writhing around in the grass, in paint, with the other one backing away from me and asking for mercy. He actually asked if I would stick with them and help be their "bodyguard," so to speak, whenever they ran into trouble. Lol. I simply declined.
Shortly afterward, I could see that people were beginning to disperse from the area, in a fashion that immediately implied that they were seeking shelter. The doors and windows of neighboring houses were being closed and shuttered. I noticed that the atmosphere was growing increasingly overcast, and a very distinctly ominous wind was beginning to swell. Even the tough guys I'd encountered were scrambling away, and I could hear them mentioning something about "what happens when the moon comes out." Suddenly, the revelation hit me that I may not know what was going on, but I should probably seek some kind of shelter, myself.
I ran to the nearest building, which, I believe, started out as just another house. Once inside, though, it morphed into a run-down slum of an apartment building. The hallways were dark and cluttered, with peeling walls and holes in every other surface. People were still shutting and shuttering their doors, so I decided to just keep searching until I could find a suitable place for myself, rather than attempting to deal with any of these strangers. Before long, I was stopped by a woman who stepped out from the shadows of a doorway - a white woman, a few years older than me, with somewhat frizzled hair and a hardened look to her. She seemed familiar, and I soon recognized her as who I believed to be one of the faces in the crowd, back in the gymnasium I had been in before making the jump through space/time.
Hurriedly, she told me to follow her and started leading me up one of the winding stairwells of this apartment building, explaining to me about the "monsters," that flood this town, after dark. As we traversed to the higher levels of the building, I could see that the weather was quickly deteriorating, outside. The wind was now howling loudly, and night was falling ridiculously fast. I remember asking more questions about these monster attacks, and - though I don't recall what one, specific question was - I recall her answering me, very dismissively, with: "Well, it doesn't really matter, because nobody else here is likely to survive the night, but us."
At one point, she motioned for me to crouch and be quiet. I immediately complied, and she pointed up to a huge hole in the wall, rounding off the next flight of stairs. Through the hole, I could see the lights of a helicopter, ascending just outside of the building. It had a cargo palette suspended beneath it and, as the palette rose into view, I could see a large, bulky object resting upon it - definitely some kind of monster. It was either sleeping or sedated, with a body about the size of a rhino, and a face like a cephalopod (squid-like), with tentacles hanging from its snout. It was clear that there was a human faction releasing or aiding these monsters, and this woman knew all about it.
