Well, yesterday was pretty tiring. We allowed a salesman from Britannica (his surname, get this, was Himmelreich) to sell us the whole set. We may have to sell our flat-mate into slavery to pay for this one. What with that and the rolling blinds falling down in our bedroom - we replaced them with a doona cover held up by nipple-clamps - I was pretty shot by about four a.m. When we retired I had a screaming headache, so my wife gave me two Mersyndol and I flaked out.
I dreamed about X-Day.
It was strange (well, shit yeah, OBVIOUSLY) - I mean, the sky wasn't full of saucers - they'd arrived years ago and were hiding under the desert just north of Mexico. The aliens had assimilated themselves into our society a long time ago; X-Day was merely when they'd decided to throw off their disguises and run the earth their way. One-world government, uh-huh, six official religions, all of them violent, designed to keep its adherents fighting with the followers of the other five. The streets were full of crowds, something half way between parades and riot-mobs, all carrying banners and icons, running down streets, and when two groups intersected they beat the shit out of each other until the military police came and dragged them apart.
I was the only one unaffected by this organised mass hysteria. They could tell, too; I could walk maybe ten blocks before someone noticed how I wasn't with any of the six religions, and they'd start chasing me. I'd lose them somehow, and then it would start with another group. Pretty soon, they were all organised, and I just had to keep running.
I came to an alleyway, where a group of men were carrying dark brown wooden tent-poles with that peculiar cross that the Temple Ov Psychic Youth use at one end:
Their leader stepped forward, poked me in the ribs with the end of his stick and laughed nastily; then they surged forward with the express intent of beating me senseless, so I ran down to the docks, threw myself into the water and started swimming for the abandoned slaughter-yards down river. The water was cold, soothing to the heated bruises that I'd been dealt that day, and the upwind stench of the slaughter-yards was like having your head stuck in a bag that had once held nitrogenous fertiliser.
I was swimming past the yards, turning over to float on my back for a while, looking up through the grey clouds at the distant, wan disk of the sun. I sank into the water until my nose was the only thing above the surface, thinking if they come looking for me with their copters, they may not see me.
I turned over again, with the notion that I should start swimming in earnest if I wanted to put some distance between me and what the civilised world had become, when I spotted the submarine. It wasn't yellow, but hell, I wasn't going to be picky. I swam toward the section of the conning tower which stuck out of the water.
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