Mike was out on a date with a girl he knew from Hardees. He gave Brandon and me specific instructions NOT to go out in public that night, fearing we might screw up his date. I, however, had gotten a new job as a decoy secret agent, and I was ordered to make several appearances around town that night. Since I was a decoy secret agent, I was dressed all spiffy-like in a black suit and little red tie and such, and I figured that everything'd be okay because Mike probably wouldn't recognise me in that kind of outfit. Plus, since I didn't know where he was taking his date, there was a very good chance that I wouldn't run into him anyway.

Well we weren't so lucky, and as I was making my scheduled appearance at the downtown bingo hall, I saw Mike and his date (some blonde girl who probably doesn't exist in real life, but if she does, way to go Mike!) sitting at one of the tables. I tried to hide, but before I could get out of sight, I heard Mike say "Well speaking of Neal, there he is." I kept on moving away from the table because I didn't want to cause any more of a disturbance than I already had.

Before I could get out of the front doors (which were just a series of open garage doors on the front of the building), a group of terrorists, all Christian-fundamentalist Auburn High Schoolers, blocked off the exits and had everyone in the room handcuffed. We were all lined up about 3 feet from the back wall with our backs to the centre of the room. Between us and the wall, a terrorist would stand and jab each one of us in the stomach with a dart one at a time. I was about halfway down the line, and as the stabbing terrorist made her way closer and closer, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to fool my organisation's enemies into thinking that I really was a secret agent. When she got to me, before she could jab me, I lunged out and bit off the end of her nose. Then I jerked my head back quickly and broke the nose of the fundamental fiend holding me in place behind me. I shouted loudly "I am Secret Agent of the Lord Africanus Domino!!" They (the terrorists) all gasped and cried "S.A.L.A.D.!!" (they didn't shout the periods but I knew they were supposed to be there) All of the conscious terrorists ran out of the building. We got the handcuff keys off of the two unconscious terrorists and set everyone else free.

I knew that with those terrorists around that there would be more signs of their deeds elsewhere. I remembered my mom telling me that fundamental Christians murder dogs because they see dogs as symbols of Catholicism and Judaism, so I thought the first thing to do would be to search for dogcrimes. I found a long cylindrical tunnel branching off of one of the main corridors in the back of the bingo hall. It had fluorescent lights running the full length. I slowly crawled inside and found baby dogs lying on the floor of the cylinder approximately one every three feet. They were all about an inch and a half long and 1/4 inch wide. They actually looked more like worms, but I knew they were dogs because of their heads and feet. I also knew that at such a young age, even the most delicate human touch could crush them. The only way to rescue them was to hold a glass jar beside them and hope they had enough energy to crawl in.

I ran into the kitchen area of the bingo hall and grabbed a half-pint glass. Back at the glowing cylinder, most of the baby dogs had enough energy to crawl into the cup. Some didn't respond at all, and with those, I took the chance and picked them up as gently as I could and placed them in the glass. There were a few, though, that had been cut in half by the terrorists. I left those behind. I turned to someone who was passing through the cylinder from the other end and said "Remember what these dogs gave for you." When I said that, she told me why the Fundamentalist Terrorists hated dogs so much -- they saw dogs not explicitly as symbols of Catholicism and Judaism, but as symbols of the devil. Since DOG is GOD backwards, they saw dogs as being the opposite of God, and therefore all evil.

Regardless of their reasoning, and even despite the fact that I don't usually like dogs, I still carried out the surviving dogworms and placed them in a dog incubator that I found back in the kitchen. I went back out into the main room of the bingo hall and found it completely empty with the front garage doors open. Outside it was raining. I walked up to the doors, and just outside at the bus stop I saw a group of American students that I remembered from Lancaster. They told me to hurry up and get my bags because the bus would be coming any minute to take us back to the USA. I told them I wanted to stay, but then this girl Cathy (who was actually English, so I don't know why she was in the group) told me that I couldn't stay because I had family and other responsibilities back home. I knew she was right, so I turned around to grab my bags. There on the floor of the bingo hall were my Transformers and some other toys. I put them in a box, taped it up, and went out into the rain with the rest of them.

We climbed onto the bus, which was an old yellow American school bus and NOT a British bus or coach, and drove off into the rain. It was really quiet, and all I could hear was the rain, the engine of the bus, and the clicking of the strobe light on the top. No-one was saying a word. They were all just staring out the windows or at each other. On the monitors, the trailer for the new Halloween movie was playing on repeat. It kept showing the blonde girl from Dawson Creek getting her head split with an axe. It looked really fake though, because there was no actual contact between the head and the axe.

Our bus stopped in a residential neighbourhood of some town, which looked a lot like the 23rd and N intersection of Auburn. Apparently the driver felt ill, so he stopped to go into the church at that intersection, hoping he would get better. The church that was there was in the same place as St Joseph's Catholic Church at the 23rd and N intersection in Auburn, but in this neighbourhood it was a huge gothic church (possibly a cathedral--I didn't see inside). With the stormy weather, the beaten up bus, and the darkness of the houses around us, it made for a downright spooky situation.

Someone figured out that we were only 3 blocks from the train station, and that the train was also only 3 minutes away, so we all decided to run those last 3 blocks so that we could catch our train. Upon opening the bus doors, though, we saw that the streets were flooded. We were going to have to crawl out of the back door of the bus and onto the roof of a nearby house. From there, we would have to just jump from roof to roof, hoping that they would allow us to get to the train station. Since it was England, it wasn't hard to go from one roof to the next since basically every building was connected. However, we got to where the train station should have been, only to find that the whole rest of the town from that street south had all washed away. It was just a sea of angry water for as far as we could see. From behind me, I heard a man say "A Worther's original and three tic-tacs for four Worther's originals."

Return to the Dreams page