Dream XLI

My older brother and I were on a trip to find my younger brother. He was staying at a cabin by a lake. It was important that we get to him, because mass zombie uprisings were happening all over the area. I had to ride a bicycle behind my older brother; we rode along the sidewalk, through stacked up piles of old wood and other junk. My jacket frequently got caught on bits of board and pipe that were projecting from the piles.

Somehow, we got separated. He ran on ahead, while I stopped to get oriented in the area. And the zombies got him, somehow. I wasn’t there but I knew how it happened. They’d pretended to need help, and when he stopped to help them, they attacked.

I went on toward the camp with the lake cabins. When going through the gate, I was joined by a number of other non-zombie people, all on the run from the attacks. We got to the main camp outer building, a combination store/assembly hall.

One of the women with us wanted to go inside the building, for no real reason, and I warned her that there were probably zombies inside. I pointed at what looked like the tops of heads, hidden behind chairs. She noted that it looked like they were asleep, and she went in anyway. A handful of others followed.

Well, this woke up the zombies. I quickly pulled all the normal people out. Some people insisted that there was no danger and wanted to stay inside; since I knew time was of the essence, I didn’t try to persuade any of them.

The front of the building was two doors and a large window between them. I quickly closed, bolted and locked one door, but when I went to the next, I saw to my horror that the door was missing. I quickly piled up whatever I could find in front of the door, but I knew it wouldn’t be effective at all, so I ran into the woods.

Eventually, I got to the cabin area and found my younger brother asleep in one. I woke him up and explained that we had to leave. He wanted to turn on some lights but I told him that would attract the zombies. We packed some essentials and prepared to leave.

In the living room near the lakeside view was a small hole cut in the floor. This was for accessing the surface of the lake, and there was a boat down below. Suddenly a zombie rose out of this hole. I recognized him as someone I trusted, but I knew as a zombie he couldn’t be trusted now, so I told my little brother to get in the boat and I tried to kill the zombie by pushing an old stick into his temple. But the stick broke, and he just laughed.

Some other people came by and doused the zombie with a flammable liquid, shouting at me to light the zombie on fire. The twig was now lit, somehow, so I thrust it into the zombie and he burst into flames. I then got into the boat, and my brother and I sailed into the lake.

We passed several boats on our way back home (fortunately the river went all the way back to our house). Some of these boats were occupied by zombies, but there were people on the shore who had home-made catapults and they were launching small burning objects at the zombie boats, and when they hit, the zombies would go up in flames.

The people on the shore would use flashlights to see if the boat occupants were normal or zombies; one zombie guy they highlighted had half of his face flattened into a large plate shape. “I have a huge headache,” he quipped. The catapults began launching against him in earnest.

On the shore, another set of brothers had a stop-motion diorama showing a man mowing his lawn, while here and there on his property were large, spherical bipedal creatures that wandered around. This seemed significant to me—it was a representation of the movie “Dead Alive,” which was now being ripped-off (by Uwe Boll) to make our reality.

I didn’t think this was fair, but I didn’t say anything to my brother.