[ closed ] teeth of mangled little listeners

[gramarye]

Who: Benji and Wolfgang
What: This dream is contaminated.
Where: Dreamscape
When: Nighttime, sometime late Ceidary
Warnings: Severe body horror, violence directed at children, will be edited as needed

The desert at night is comfortably cool. This far from any major city, it is also not as dark as it feels like it should be, because the moon and the stars are out in such bright clarity that they light up the whole landscape. Of course, it's hard to tell exactly whether there is any major city anywhere at all — there's nothing around as far as the eye can see but more desert. This could be anytime at all.

It's the convoy of trucks rolling in that telegraph the time period — they all look roughly circa the 1940's. They're all black with black-tinted windows except for the single silver Cadillac with them. The glare from their headlights is visible a long way off in the distance and for an indeterminate amount of time, that's all there is — headlights coming closer, illuminating small patches of desert before them. Why they stop where they do is anyone's guess, but they do stop and the doors of all those cars open, people spilling out — white men and women in suits that are at least weather-appropriate; it's about 15°C. What they're saying, in spite of the distance, is more or less audible. They're mostly British.

"Are you sure this is where she is?"

"Absolutely certain; the readings are off the charts."

They're carrying weird gadgets, almost comically so, like something out of a 40's pulp science fiction comic, almost as if they were scavenged out of materials found in someone's garage, all buttons and dials and long antennae. The cartoonish deedly-boop noises they make are enough at odds with the general tone of the rest of this scene to edge it towards surreality, but the deadly economy in the faces of the men and women wielding them swing everything back around to menacing.

This could be a child's reimagining of technology they do not understand.

They're spreading out in grid-like patterns, combing the area for something, obviously searching. A woman stops to open the trunk of the silver Cadillac and remove a case, inside of which is something that is not at all cartoonish or funny — a modern assault rifle, like the LSAT assault rifle. She's loading it when one of her colleagues glances over and scoffs.

"You're really going to use a gun?" he asks.

"Shut up, you idiot. It's Primium." She locks the magazine into the weapon and wields it like it weighs nothing at all.

"Christ. Is this really necessary? It's just a kid."

Above them, the stars shine on indifferently, but something is wrong with the constellations. None of them are recognisable, and they should be here, because this is Earth. None of the men and women searching the desert pay that any mind; they have something more important to do than pay attention to the exact configuration of stars.

Behind a dune thirteen meters away, something moves. Something that sounds human.

Comments

[cestrumnocturnum]

She smiles more freely, this time slightly abashed. She knows she is older than Wolfgang, by some years, and she only need look at him to know; and yet, sometimes she just doesn't feel that way at all. "Well, good," she allows, scratching long white fingers through her hair as she tips a look back down to her tea, before bringing it up to sip from, although not before adding; "Next time I'll set out wine instead of tea."