Tuesday, November 29, 2005

of a falling out and of falling

The second dream last night was much more of a standard nightmare for me.

I was the third partner in a law firm. It became apparent very quickly that things in the firm had been going badly for some time. There were allegations of wrong-doing and we had just received word that day that we were being investigated.

The other two partners seemed to blame each other. At first, their frustrations vented as simple shouts across the hall from one office to the next. But shouting alone didn't seem to settle the matter.

It wasn't long before I found myself quite literally caught in the middle as I was attempting to pull the other two men off of each other as the first few punches flew. There were shouts about clients, about accounting discrepancies - not much of it made sense to me. What made immediate sense was the fury in each other's eyes.

As with all dreams, there are holes in my recollection. After the hole in this dream, I found that the not-guilty partner and I were located in an abandoned upper floor office in an attempt to barricade the door. Somewhere off in the distance was the guilty partner. We knew he was armed with at least a knife.

As I peaked out through a crack in the door, I discovered that I had sadly underestimated the threat he posed, as he now had a handgun and an axe. All sanity seemed to have left his eyes. There was only murder and bloodlust in them now.

Our barred door didn't hold up long and it's only moments before the axe-wielding partner entered. There was a scuffle by the window. I was apparently armed as well because I locked the knife I was holding with the axe being swung at me. My arm took a pretty deep gash, but I wasn't cleaved in two so I consider it a victory.

I could feel my knife sliding deeper and deeper into his wrist. I know that one of us is going to die but I can't figure out who it's going to be. With a kick, we broke apart from our bloody tangle. I'm not sure who kicked who.

Next thing I knew, I stumbled out in the hallway again, scrambling for the handgun he had dropped before entering the room. He turned around and began stalking me with the axe, its head already stained with my blood.

I raised the pistol, aimed directly at his heart, and told him to "stop." My hands were shaking so badly I hardly knew if I'd be able to coordinate the thoughts necessary to pull the trigger. He didn't stop and I could feel myself tumble off of a moral precipice somewhere in my head as I pulled the trigger for the first time.

Click.

The chamber was empty. He smiled and came closer.

Click. Still empty. He started to laugh. My hands were shaking horribly. I could see my own blood clotting on the axe head.

Click.

I was doing my best to stay focused and not contemplate my own death. I pulled the trigger again.

There was an explosion. A bullet flew out of the chamber while the kickback kicked me back a few feet. I watched in horror as the bullet traveled the short distance between us and then seemed to hover just outside of his body.

At first, I though it was going to simply fall to the ground. Slowly, though, the bullet pushed its way into his skin. It looked painful - more painful than a regular gun shot - but he didn't seem to be phased by it so I fired again. Three or four more shots all left the gun. Each one slowly pushed their way into his skin.

Something was wrong with him, he was doing his best to walk forward but might have been in the midst of dying at the same time. Whatever it was that was distracting him, it was enough that I could grab his arm and toss him behind me. Without any resistance, he flew forward, smashed through a glass window, and plummeted.

I ran to the window and looked down just in time to see him fall the remaining few feet to the ground, smash through the rear window of his own limousine, and saw his body come to rest in a bloody mess of dress clothes and tinted splinters of glass.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home