6. Dreams
Chapter six
Dreams
S lowly Brad’s eyes parted. His vision swam and he tried to hold his head steady to combat the dizziness, but he couldn’t move. He felt no straps, yet his body was immobilized. Fear boiled up from his toes to his head until his face was hot from worry. He was in an empty gray room shaped almost like the inside of an egg complete with silky membrane, laying on a raised cold hard slab.
He tried to shout but even his mouth was frozen shut. All he could move were his eyes. They danced back and forth inside his skull trying desperately to see anything around him. An inescapable feeling of disconsolate emptiness overcame him. A tear slid down each side of his face.
Nausea rolled around Brad’s stomach, as though the giant gray egg were rotating with him inside it. He squeezed his eyes shut as if that could shut out his disorientation. He tried to count the seconds, but even that was futile as every time he tried the numbers didn’t make sense, as if time had no meaning here.
He didn’t know how long this went on for, Brad only knew that he’d do anything to make it stop.
Stop.
A figure emerged as if it were able to glide through the shell, spindly and towering. As the figure reached for him, Brad could see its two large black glistening eyes peeping at him from an elongated head. Its skin appeared gel-like, not a solid, yet not a liquid either, the same gray color as the egg walls.
When it reached for him, its skin slowly turned dark green and solid, reptilian. Its’ one, long, pointed finger inserted itself into Brads ear. He wished he could scream. Something white like a spiders’ web began to lift from Brads feet, and suddenly it was as if his skin were made of thousands of tiny fingernails, and each was being pulled from his flesh.
As the painful web was slowly ripped from his body, Brad began to lose focus; until his consciousness was taken from his body and transferred entirely into the web. Brad, in his web form, floated over his body. The dark green figure with its one long pointed finger was attached to his web, like Brad was some kind of sick balloon.
They left Brad's unconscious body and went through the egg shell, but they did not appear into a hallway, they reappeared in another room, this one black with the sounds of dripping water, like a rotten cave. Hundreds of humanoid sleeping bodies were encased in cylinders of water, air bubbles escaped from their bodies.
They stopped in front of the body of a female. Her dark brown hair, shoulder length and twisted into thick locs, floated in the water around her naked ebony skin, her eyes closed. As they waited there, Brad could see the water inside her cylinder seemed to be dispersing, or perhaps it was the cylinder squeezing in on her as her body absorbed the placenta like tube until only the body was left. Suddenly its eyes and mouth opened wide in noiseless fear, gaping, confused, and terrified.
Brad’s web instantly got sucked into the body of the female with even more pain upon reentry then he could have ever imagined. He had no control, and as he realized his mind was leaving him with each inch the body absorbed, he became desperate to escape. To not lose himself.
But his fight was futile, and with one last slurp, Brad was gone.