Dreamscape, Part 348

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I really dream well at the farm. It must be the fresh air, the exercise and the deep silence of the night here. I was going to get up and write about Paris, since I love that town, and the 1989 visit to the City of Lights was well-nuanced and spectacular. It had everything, literally.

Instead, the events of the days cascaded into a dream so real that the faces of the participants are with me still with the first cup of coffee. I can analyze the sources of at least some of the imagery and context of the dreamscape. ISIS had beheaded another American, this one an idealistic former Army Ranger who had returned to the area of conflict not to fight, but to assist those dislocated by the Syrian civil war.

The story evolved during my drive to the farm in the real world, and intelligence sources confirmed the actual imagery displayed on the propaganda video of the murder. The second case of Ebola in America was not going well. Dr. Martin Salia’s condition was worsening as the epidemic continues to rage in West Africa.

Hostage Peter Kassig is just the latest martyr to religious fanaticism. I tried to put that out of my mind through the day, and the epidemic, but it all came back in the second sleep of the night in the quiet of the farmhouse.

It had been a productive day. Driving down was a breeze, since I left before I-66 ground to a halt outside the Beltway. I got settled in to the house, worried about cast iron skillets, before stopping at Mattski and Natasha’s place next door to see if they needed anything from my afternoon trip to town. They were sitting in chairs drawn up to a glowing fire. Jack the German Shepherd puppy was sprawled on the floor. His fur was soft as down, and his needle milk-teeth teased at my skin and sweater. Not to be outdone, Biscuit the Wonder Spaniel attempted to crawl into my lap and lubricate my face with kisses.

Natasha was knitting a complex pattern sweater for Mattski.

It was so domestic and so seasonal against the gray chill outside that I decided to build my own fire and hunker down once I completed a trip to Croftburn Farms to discuss a requirement with Andrew, the proprietor. Filled up the Panzer at the Martin’s supermarket complex, and procured some dry and wet supplies.

I made a light dinner and built a big fire and the Deadskins and the Eagles were humiliated on the flat screen. I dozed off after the games were done, got up at midnight and went to bed. Sometime in the larger small hours, I turned in the bed and realized I was someplace sunlight and real.

I was unhappy in my job. Pal Holly V was running a small woman-owned business, in partnership with a dynamic father-son entrepreneur team, very prep in apprearance. They looked like Agency people. I agreed to try to support a contract overseas with Holly’s company and deployed to Liberia. Boko Haram was the ISIS stand-in during the next series of vivid events, and Ebola was abroad in the land.

The father-son team running the contract and there were tensions flaring under the stress. My old pal Sunny was with me in the headlong passage across the stricken capital. Columns of government troops were flowing through the streets, we stayed on the side streets to minimize our visibility, since Westerners were being waylaid and killed.

Boko was said to be massing outside the city. Ten days, some said, until the militant Islamists will sweep over the city, killing and pillaging as they came.

My bag and my pistol disappeared as I was waiting for further transportation. I sighed at that, thinking about the implications of the loss of the weapon and my passport. Desperation began to rise. There was a boat slip with two berths where a few hardy yachts provided a shuttle service down the coast to what the Navy had established a Fleet Landing. I missed one, then another as I talked to someone about my bag. I wanted my gun.

I scratched at a carbuncle on my leg, and was alarmed when a green jelly-like substance oozed out. Was I infected? I had to get out. I had to get away from the twin threats of marauding religious zealots and deadly infection. Two of the Four Horsemen were bearing down on the city, and in fact, one of them was already there.

Would the boats return? Was there a schedule, however haphazard? If I could make the Landing, I hoped my status as a retiree might be able to get a lift out to Carl Vinson, who people said was orbiting off the coast. Would they take a possibly infected American away with them, or hoist the plague flag from the mainmast?

I was dropped by the boat near the Fleet Landing along with a woman whose face has now faded with the slowly rising light. A thin angry man engaged me, poking me with his index finger, haranguing me like the real world Haitian attaché who accosted me on a similar pier in a real land that was also dreamlike. People with red brassards indicting their infected states stood mutely by a fountain.

I had to get out, and I did by opening my eyes in the darkness, breath racing. The images of the troops falling back against an implacable cruel foe stayed with me, and the sense that something was spreading and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

My pulse came back to normal. It was safe at the farm. I did not hear about the Doctor’s death until I got to the computer.

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Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

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