I dreamed I was a high level executive in an important business meeting that had run late into the night. My colleagues and I were gathered around a glass table in the hotel suite of the competitor CEO who had called the meeting. I had just set down the heavy glass tumbler that held the iced water I was drinking when some sort of strange cataclysm happened.
There was no thunderous noise, no flash of light, but suddenly every glass surface filmed over with a strange white scum. Every tumbler, even the ones on a tray by the minibar that we hadn’t used, suddenly held a pulsing little blob of translucent white gel, like a jellyfish condensed to the size of a large marble.
The CEO ran a finger over the filmed glass of the table, trying to find out what the stuff was. He rubbed his fingers together, then raised them toward his face to smell them. Slowly he slumped back into his chair, and his face went slack and still. His eyes glazed, and he spoke the right words to continue the meeting as though nothing had happened, but his voice had gone as flat and expressionless as his face.
We couldn’t see out the windows because they were filmed over, but we began to here skidding, crashing cars and panicked screams floating up from the streets, and the little jelly lumps pulsed and wiggled in our glasses. From a corner of the windows, a band of what looked like rusted metal began to spread over the walls of the room, leaving a coarse, brown residue over every surface, not just the glass. At that point, I bolted out of the room.
I ran and ran, out of the city, until I was up into high meadows where no glass windows or metal beams caught the soft light of the rising sun. There was just soft, green grass, rippling in the breeze, and I slumped down on a hilltop to rest. My heart rate and breathing slowed, the sun rose higher above the hills, and the only sound was the gentle swoosh of the long grasses in the wind.
Theeeeen it occurred to me that it was odd that there was no birdsong, no butterflies or grasshoppers, that I was literally the only creature stirring as far as I could see. And as I looked back the way I had come, the green horizon began to dull, going dead and dark and brown like the edges of a fallen leaf. The blue sky was filming over with a white scum that wasn’t mist or cloud, and a strange, faint rattle could be heard from the base of my hill. It got louder and louder, but at first I couldn’t make out what it was in the haze.
Then I saw them. Thousands of dried up skeletons were running up the hill toward me. I leapt to my feet and began to run again, but there was no way I was going to escape. Then I woke up.
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