Sleepstory 2019.12.12

Sleepstory 2019.12.12
On request, though today's dream has a neat section that fits the prompt.
I'll skip most of the fluff and get to the good stuff.

I was in the backseat of a car driving through the pines in the backroads in a hilly area, the kinda pines where there's basically zero undergrowth, and if you look between the trees, you see nothing but more trees until you can't see any more trees. It was some time in the afternoon: in an hour, maybe, it would be dusk.

In the driver's seat, in front of me, was a fellow I'd met on the road a while back from a group of open-carry advocates, though that story is from all the dream preceding this which I'm not describing in this text. They shared a name with an individual I met a few years ago, but we'll call them Aldi, because the name I remember them by would probably dox me. They were an American from beyond the suburbs. An AR sat pointing up beside their seat.

Aldi was a strange fellow. They had a habit of going out of their way to drive as close as they possibly could to pedestrians (especially children) without actually hitting them. This sometimes resulted in a bumpy ride when it involved leaving the road for a brief moment. It was their car, though. Aldi was the kinda person who almost definitely visited /x/ (specifically, /x/ in its golden days), and sorta took for granted the stories of people in the countryside being harassed by aliens. Never preached about it, but sometimes, scarcely, it would slip through kinda matter-of-factly in conversation with them.

In the front passenger seat was my mother, and in the backseat beside me was my father. As is very unusual for me, in this dream, my family members actually reflected my family members in the waking world, though my parents seemed twenty years younger, here. Nothing much more of mention that comes into any degree of relevancy in this story.

As we were driving, every once in a while I'd notice a vehicle driving off the road, in between the pines. It would flicker into and out of existence like somebody with awful latency. I, being a person who is quick to distrust their own eyes, didn't think very much of it, and definitely didn't mention it, but I watched carefully whenever I saw one of these vehicles appear. They'd flicker in, catch my eye with their not-pine colors, move around like somebody on dial-up, and then vanish.

You know who doesn't distrust their own eyes? Dumb animals. At some point, some canine started barking and chasing after these phantom vehicles, and just kinda following us otherwise. The terrain was filled with hills, cliffs, and turns, so it wasn't too difficult (who decided to build a road through this area?).

Eventually, one of the phantom vehicles stopped, and the canine caught up with it (that, or the canine caught up with it, and the vehicle stopped). Aldi pulled off the curving road and down a hill to where the encounter was taking place. The dog was yapping at a police car, which was parked facing the dog, on our left. Behind the dog was an amber SUV, on our right.

A horrible, hard-edged and blocky caterpillar-esque creature got out from the police vehicle's driver seat and started moving towards the dog. It looked like it had pieces of police gear on it, but all in the wrong number and places (there was no proper place on this beast for most of it). It looked like what the Deep Dream AI would imagine a policeman looked like. Something else awful got out of the SUV, but I didn't have proper line of sight on it.

Aldi jumped out of the car with his rifle and started shooting at whatever nightmare had exited the SUV. I followed, hopping out on my side, drawing my two handguns, and shooting the police-thing. One of my handguns either jammed or never had a round in the chamber to begin with. The police thing didn't really react to us at all, more focused on the dog than anything else. Aldi put rounds into both targets. It was over in a few seconds, and they didn't fight back. I don't remember what happened to their corpses, but I definitely remember them not being there anymore after a while.

After the event, I gave one of my two handguns to my father. He was mostly blind, but he knew his way around a firearm better than my mother ever did. This time, I ensured a round was in the chamber.

The dog had gotten hurt. Something happened to its eye. Aldi ripped it out, and told me that I needed to put my medical skills to use and cauterize the wound to prevent infection. I think the infection he was talking about was something worse than an untreated wound. I was dazed and under-equipped for such a task, with no medical supplies. I ended up trying to look up on my phone (since when do I have a stylus?) what sort of common household items I could use to chemically cauterize a wound, praying that I could find something of the sort in the car. The last option that had come to mind was to spark gunpowder on the wound, but I didn't know if I could reliably cauterize a missing eyeball with such a method. Truthfully, I'm not so familiar at all with the anatomy of an eye socket with no eye, and was afraid that cauterizing with heat would probably make things a lot worse than they already were. A chemical cauterization I could afford to be careless with, but I had nothing to work with.

The sun kept going down as I searched for an answer. Dusk crept in as the sun slowly slid between the pines. I called it off; we had to leave, we were running out of light. Kill the dog.

We were one head shorter as we went to the car. I called out for my mother, but there was no reply. Darkness had settled in; it was too late to go looking for her. She could be on the ground thirty feet away and we would never find her.

I woke up.