Chapter 11 - Dreams

Jude’s next day was uneventful. He headed in the direction in which the sun sets, the opposite direction from which the island on which he was born was. He no longer thought of it as the City, for it was obvious that the City extended beyond the island.

Jude thought more of the aurora-script and the map, but could make no sense of it. He ate a single meal, a can of peanuts he had found in a house some miles back. The day itself was cool and rainy, and the flowers were blooming and leaves were returning to the trees.

Jude slept that night on a sofa - a rare occurrence, as most sofas were destroyed by soldiers, mobs, and bombs. With the most comfortable thing he had slept on in years under him, Jude fell into the deepest sleep he had had in the longest time.



Colors swirled around him. A faint voice was on the air, but it was not clear who it was nor what it was saying - or even the language in which it spoke. Music played and drums sounded, but no tune in particular was playing.

The colors took the form of an aurora, and the swirled around Jude’s body as it projected itself into the world of dreams. And then all motion stopped.

Jude found himself in a city, still built, populated entirely by humans. He recognized where he stood as the Square of Time. Cars drove along the street, people laughed and talked, and an feeling of friendliness was in the air.

Jude noticed a nearby newspaper's headline, in a surprisingly large and bold-faced font. "Contact with Extraterrestrials Made".

The sky began to darken with surprising quickness. Clouds enveloped the sun, and people screamed and ran for cover. Jude stood alone in the Square. He heard a low-pitched noise, sounding like a combination of a buzz and a hum. Looking to the sky, he saw the source.

A massive spaceship, resembling an enormous wasp, pulled in from the sunward direction. The wings of the ship opened, revealing large compartments on either end. Unearthly light flowed from the compartments, and from them came countless smaller ships - fighters.

The fighters swarmed the city, unleashing their deadly laser beams upon the skyscrapers. People screamed and ran for cover, but to no avail, for the destruction was everywhere. A massive doomsday laser shot from the torso of the mothership, incinerating dozens of people in each shot.

Jude himself was not affected, simply watching it as though it was a replay of a historic event and not a dream.

Time sped up, and the sun moved slowly across the sky, illuminating only sections of the city due to the cloud cover. The fighters returned to the mothership, which in turn sped off into the distance. The city was left in rubble, few people left to mourn the dead.

Colors swirled around Jude again, and the music replayed but the voices died. A sickening spinning motion in the clouds and colors began, and a single voice eminated from the void. It was Survivor's.

"Jude," it said, in a tone filled with infinite majesty and calm. "These are what you seek."

A book apeared before Jude. It was leather-bound with old parchment paper, and closely resembled Survivor's book. One word was printed on the cover in gold. Kryonomicon. And beneath the word, aurora-script was clearly visible.

The book flashed open to the middle page, and there was a simple pencil illustration there.

It was a massive tower, standing high above the rubble of whatever city it was in. It was a massive cylinder reaching high into the sky, supported by three large metal supports that went down from the middle of the cylinder to the ground below, following a hyperbolic curve.

The book slammed, shut and the music in the background grew dark and angry. The colors swirled harder, and turned darker and more rapid. Wind began blowing in Jude's face, and rain began coming down in torrents. Jude awoke with a start.



It was raining quite heavily, and Jude found himself soaking wet from the sheets of rain that were falling. He ran for cover into a non-bombed out building.

The building itself was empty, likely looted in the years just following the war. Jude sat down on the floor, and contemplated his dream.

It was so real, unlike any dream he had had before in his life. Could this have been an actual account of the occurrences when the City was bombed by the kryons? How could it have been implanted into his mind like it was?

And another question manifested itself within Jude's conciousness. Judging by the newspaper headlines, contact with the kryons had been very recent. Why did the war start so early?