Thursday, December 2, 2010

Now I have the Cranberries stuck in my head.

So, i haven't posted in a while, which should be obvious. Oh well.
This semester has been kind of crazy, but through it I managed to keep up with Psych, Big Bang Theory, and How I Met Your Mother (not to mention starting and getting through more than half of Battle Star Galactica).

I obviously have my priorities straight.

Most of my recent dreams have been about my now-ex boyfriend being a jerk. Which isn't totally surprising. I mean, he did break up with me. And I've never had a dream about him where he's not a jerk. He really isn't in real life, though. Well, except for breaking up with me.
This is not an emo blog, though. So moving on. (I haven't. Three weeks later and I still think about little else. Ug.)

Zombies.
One night I had a collection of dreams all about zombies. It was pretty much a series of short stories, but in video.
Some of them were kind of terrifying.

General background:
There are zombies. They kill people, kind of gruesomely. In this particular city/town (larger than the town I grew up in, smaller than NYC or Boston), there are small groups of people, say three to six people, who have so far successfully survived. One group of four or five people has fortified a house mainly by not leading zombies to it.

Summaries of some of the stories, in somewhat chronological order:

A young girl (actually a sexless child- characters are sometimes like that in my dreams, but it's easier to pick a gender) wakes up to find a zombie in her room. She hears it grumabaumble (no, that's not a typo). She's terrified, but realizes that it's lit by the candle her mother left by her bedside. She grabs the candle, bludgeons the zombie, watches it fall, and falls back asleep with the mild suspicion that it was all just a dream.
The girl wakes up, finds her brother with hot wax burns on his face, dead at the side of her bed. (Yes, I know, wax doesn't really burn /that/ hotly, but oh well. Maybe she got in a particularly good whack to his head when she was flailing at him).

A group of four or five people are living in a two-story house. A grubby stranger comes to the door. They are suspicious, but take him into the house with them. He proves useful at finding things.

A group of three people are running through the town. They are being chased, but by something faster than zombies. Probably dogs. There are a lot of pets around because the zombies are only interested in human brains. Or they can't catch the animals. Maybe some of both.

Three women, one red haired, one short and dark (the point of view), and another are in the back yard of a nice enough house, next to a partly rotting, painted brown, wooden privacy fence. There is a zombie coming towards them, around the corner of a barn. There is a struggle. PoV feels useless because she is too afraid of the zombie to be useful in a fight. The 'another' and red have gotten the zombie pinned, but it's struggling and they are having difficulty holding it down. They tell PoV to hit it. "With what?" She's terrified. How can she kill something, even if it's not truly alive? How does she know? Red has an arm and is holding its head down by the hair. Another is pinning the legs and the other arm. PoV doesn't know what to do. Red yells at her to grab a piece of the fence and just hit it. She tries. The wooden beam is heavy. Red shifts, to bare the throat, and encourages her. PoV brings the wood up, her arms hurt. She tries to bring it down, but it seems to bounce off the thing. She has to try again. She brings it down harder. Nothing. She tries again. Harder. It seems to have an effect. Again and again and again she brings it down. (This one wins for most distressing, though not particularly gruesome).

PoV (different person) is running through the house the group of four or five was in before. She might be one of that group. She is being chased by a rather well put together zombie which is barely leaving any pieces behind. It could have been a mountaineer once. Or that male gym teacher who always skeeved you out a little. It is apparent that it was once is good shape. At one point she is hiding on the top bunk of a double-decker bed. She gets up the stairs, climbs onto the roof of the porch, hides. She can hear it moving around inside. Somehow, it thinks of the roof as well. It finds her. She screams, scrambles, falls off the roof. (This was probably the second most distressing)

The group of four to five has met up with another group. They are trying to think of ways to get rid of the zombies, at least in their area. They realize that fire seems to work.

A man (PoV) is in the backyard of a house, by a swing set near a garage. He is digging in the mulch around the building, looking for something he knows was there before. He hears something, pauses. He watches a zombie approach. He doesn't move. Maybe it won't see him. As it comes closer, he looks around for a weapon. He sees an old canister of fuel. It nears, is obviously after him now. He picks up the canister, feels it's heft: there's liquid in it. He pours the liquid over the zombie. It's water.

"Love me to Death" (yeah, sometimes there are titles)
A girl is on the second story porch of a house, looking over a wooded area with a barn. She watches a zombie of a boy she knew before. It is slouching towards the barn. It pauses. She ducks and hides. It looks up at the door to the house, continues into the barn. She remembers what it was to her, when it was him. She wonders what she would do if it ever came up the stairs.

The larger group is organizing something. The people have split up. One man, the useful one who once was scruffy, has a mega phone or a microphone. He is running around a rather densly zombie-occupied space, yelling about his luscious brains ("I rarely used them, after all! Sure to be tender!"). Zombies are gathering, surrounding him. He runs into a convinent abandoned warehouse (ah, now, that was their plan all along).
A boy and another person are throwing meat around, hoping it will help lead the zombies in. The bodies they have seen, after all, have more than just the brains missing. They are on a second story.
There are all kinds of zombies. (My favorite was the girl with spiked purple hair.) Pan over, to take in the diversity.
The boy from before is getting out fuel canisters. He and some others start throwing it over the collected zombies. Some of the zombies have humorous (to me) expressions. The boy lights a match, throws it onto a soaked zombie. The flame goes out. He tries again, nothing happens. He tries again, it catches, the zombie starts flailing, burning unexpectedly well. It catches others on fire, but many are catching on and moving out. The boy douses himself in kerosene, lights himself on fire, and dives in.
The place in on fire. The one with the microphone is dead. The boy is dead. Some others have perished. Three people look onto the burning warehouse from a roof several streets over. A job well done.
They go back to the house.

I wish I could take credit for the world building of my subconscious. Some of the worlds are really pretty.

In news of today? I tried signing up for a YouTube account. It almost let me, but now refuses to acknowledge my usename as one in existence, but also refuses to let me sign up with that name since it already exists. There is no e-mail contact for YouTube that I can find (which makes sense. I shudder to think of the many trolling e-mails they would probably receive) and I have little inclination to send them a written complain through "snail mail".

Oh, I also have a DeviantArt account. I may link to it later, but not today. Stalk away, if you think you can find it. (I'm actually toying with the idea of starting a second one to watch groups, so I only watch individuals with the main account, and to post written work. We'll see if I ever actually do that, though.)

No comments: