Home sick today. Was sent home sick yesterday after maybe an hour and a half. Yes, folks, I finally came down with the Creeping Crud. Dammit. However, that's not the only reason I feel like I've been hit by a truck.
I had one of
THOSE dreams last night.
Yeah, THAT kind -- the kind that is so real, it convinces my mind that it happened, and all injuries therein leave actual pain behind that only fades to phantom pain after a few hours awake. I haven't been awake that long yet, so this is some slooooow typing.
Worse, I know exactly why I had it. It was a cross between watching Dave play
Kill Zone all afternoon yesterday and watching
Return of the King Sunday evening. I just
knew that big spider was gonna come back and haunt me, and damn if it did. *shakes head*
Lemme lay it out for you.
I was trapped in a B movie. Giant spiders that make the one from ROTK look like infants. BUILDING-SIZE spiders, man. And intelligent -- not quite human intelligence, but good enough for government work. I and my group were military/militia types in a stronghold just outside a major city. I stood my post in a sniper tower, as I am a damn good shot.
And the spiders were coming.
Now, we'd been fighting these beasts long enough to know that it took a good 8 shots to the head, even with sniper bullets, to put one down. However, if you could put each shot in the eye, you could usually get away with 4 shots, as they went directly to the brain.
At any rate, one of the beasts accidentally stepped on one of the infantry men -- a friend of mine, actually. He screamed, and the beast picked up it's leg and shook him a few times, like my friend was nothing more than some dog shit it had stepped in. He screamed again, bleeding out entirely too fast to be saved, so I took aim and fired, severing the leg at one of the joints.
Now the
beast screamed -- so loud and piercing that my ears bled -- and flailed around, trompling a few more infantry men but basically just making an icor-y mess.
The other sniper in the tower jerked back all of a sudden -- God only knows why -- slamming into my back and sending me over the railing. Now, you couldn't have pried my sniper rifle from my cold dead fingers, but I did manage to grab onto one of the skeleton supports, though the sudden stop after probably 50 feet of free-fall nearly jerked my arm out of the socket. Probably did, actually.
And then the lumbering, still-screaming beast slammed into the tower, sending it over and me with it. I let go so the tower didn't fall on me, rolled when I hit the ground to absorb some of the impact, and ended up flat on my back, shoulder shrieking and head throbbing from a good solid
thunk on the ground.
The beast saw me. Remember when I said they were intelligent? It
knew I was the one who had injured it, and it was ANGRY. So, it lunged forward on its seven legs and buried its mandibles into my lower ribs, impaling me and the ground as I stared up in shock.
Dead. I'm dead.
Someone hollered for a medic, but I already knew that was pointless and too dangerous to risk.
So, I raised the rifle, put the barrel in the beast's multifaceted eye, and pulled the trigger over and over again, thanking God for whatever invention allowed continual shots without having to manually chamber another round, as I can't lift my left arm. The first shot took its eye. The second blew out the back of its head. The third reared it back, the retreating mandibles scraping against broken bone and doing even more soft tissue and organ damage on the way out. The fourth was pretty much an extraneous shot up through it's squat neck-segment.
The beast fell dead.
And I woke up with a scream in my throat, my abdomen on fire, and my shoulder and head shrieking. Dammit. I could feel myself bleeding out, folks. Not pretty at whatever the hell time in the morning. I just kept repeating, "Just a dream...just a dream...just a dream..." but it didn't feel like a dream. It felt like I'd been stapled to the ground. I felt like I had caught myself halfway through a 100-foot fall with one hand. I felt like....
Well, I was already sick. I really didn't need the added phantom shit to make it worse.
I lay awake for at least an hour before dozing back off, but any time I tried to roll to one side or the other, agony flared and I'd wake up again. No sleep for you. The worst of it faded by the time my alarm went off, but there was no way I could go to work with both Charlie Foxtrots in my system, so I called in sick from the chest congestion, headache, and achiness, but really stayed home because it still hurt to move.
Needless to say, this has taken a good hour and a half to type. My left arm doesn't want to work terribly well, and the fingers are numb and tingly. Typos galore.
I hurt. I
still hurt. A sudden shift makes my ribs grind funny, and I haven't eaten yet because my whole abdomen just ACHES. God. No dream should feel that real, folks. It...sucks.