I dreamed I was part of a military intelligence operation tracking shipments down into Houston by various rivers. The Frio River ran almost due north/south, and we had detected a lot of clandestine activity coming from a northern port city called Ebsilos. We thought we might be onto something big, and we were keeping our discovery very hush hush.
So when my commander came in one afternoon waving a newspaper, we thought we'd been blown and were about to be in enormous trouble. It turned out, though, that only I was in trouble. I'd done some work that had brought to light a thriving black market in human flesh for human consumption, and Houston was a hotspot for that trade. I hadn't spoken to the paper, but somehow I was named as a person involved at the highest levels, and one of the bosses was after me.
His name, as far as I could tell, was something like Alfred Canata, and he looked like a Colombian Mario, with a red Make America Great Again cap instead of a plumbers hat. So the boss told me to go up to New York City and try to track this Ebsilos thing and stay out of Alfred's sight.
So I went up to New York and I met my friend Summer there. She had booked us a room in a reasonably priced and inconspicuous hostel on the edge of Central Park. We settled in, and I gave my cover name. We went out for dinner in Chinatown, and when we came back, the desk clerk said a friend had come by looking for me.
We asked some nervous questions and found that, sure enough, it was Alfred Canata, king of the cannibals. The clerk gave a very clear description, and said he'd left me something in my room box. I knew that meant he'd watched the clerk put it in the cubby, so he'd know what room we were in. He had left me a warm, juicy cheeseburger, and it didn't smell quite like beef. I was absolutely sure it was ground human flesh.
We called the cops, and they took the burger away for testing. They looked at some security footage, and were able to identify Alfred as someone they'd had under surveillance, and knew just where to pick up. They swore they'd apprehend him, and the desk clerk put us in a suite of rooms that was the most secluded thing they had on the property.
We had to go up to the fourth floor of the main building to get to the only staircase that led down into a brick courtyard. That courtyard was covered over with a tin roof, and no one could observe as we entered a small square of lodges with windows only facing into their own private court. We were in the back two rooms on the ground floor, that had hidden stairs leading to a suite in the basement.
We had gotten settled in, and it was decided that I was sleeping in the basement rooms, of course, though I hated to be down there away from the light and air. Just then, the front door opened, in spite of all the locks they'd locked, and a guy I knew from New Orleans came in. It turns out, they'd given us his rooms by accident, and he had the key, of course.
We locked everything up and explained to him what was going on, and we all agreed it would just be easiest to share, and that he could even add a layer of obfuscation if anyone came looking for me. Then Summer's cell phone rang, and she had to go to the first floor rooms to answer it, since she didn't get reception in the basement.
I heard her start to yell and curse, and I ran upstairs. It turned out that the police had detained Alfred, but he'd made it clear that nothing he did was illegal, and he meant me no harm. He just wanted to get to know me better, and couldn't understand why I'd made such a fuss over a perfectly normal cheeseburger. The lab hadn't had a chance to test anything yet, so they just sort of took him at his word and let him go. Some of his friends had come to pick him up.
By "friends" I knew he had meant his minions or followers, because the black market human flesh trade was pretty much a cult. They claimed they never killed anyone, but bought bodies from people who had been donated to science, and that anyone who was a member of course donated themselves as needed. I that was a load of crap, because we'd turned up ample evidence that a number of missing persons and murder cases could be traced to the black market. Maybe he did want to kidnap and convert me, not kill me, but I still had no intention of going along with his program.
Summer finished reaming the NYPD up and down and out, then the hostel desk clerk called and blithely informed us that she was sending our "friends" over, so Summer started in on her. My friend from New Orleans pulled a shotgun and a pistol out of his suitcase, and we got them loaded.
We turned off all the lights, and I laid down along the base of the door and front window, so that I was invisible from the outside. Everyone else hid similarly, and we hoped they'd just decide we were out and go away. Then the locks began to turn above my head, because the desk clerk had given them a key.
I couldn't decide at that point if they were going to recruit us or grind us up into mincemeat, but I knew we'd shot a few deadbolts and bar locks they couldn't open with a key. This had the benefit of definitely keeping them out, but also would be a dead give-away that we were somewhere inside. Then they began breaking the glass on the door and window, and we couldn't really pretend any more.
Something about the mullions kept them from just coming in, and they couldn't reach the locks, but they had guns, too. Alfred said several times that he just wanted my friendship, not my flesh, at least, he joked, not in THAT way, but he wanted me to marry him and be his queen. His minion Christopher had orders not to hurt me, but the rest of my friends were fair game.
Christopher began shooting into the room at everyone else, and they were shooting back at him, but no one seemed to be able to hit anyone. I had the shotgun, and I was only feet from the door, so I knew I couldn't miss. I pumped the gun, pointed, and pulled the trigger. Something clicked, but nothing else happened. I scrambled to check that it was loaded, and it was, but every time, I cleared it out, loaded the cartridges, pumped, and tried to fire, and absolutely nothing was happening.
I wasn't sure how long we all could last, and there seemed to be absolutely nothing I could do. Alfred Canata just stood there, on the edge of the ring of light from the front porch lamp, smiling, smiling, smiling, and Christoper fired over and over just around me and above me at my friends in the room behind me, his eyes absolutely dead and void of any light and feeling. Because that's what you became when you'd eaten as much people meat as he had.
Then I woke up.
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