It was hot outside, and I was thirsty. I was walking on a street I recognized, though I wasn’t sure where I could get something to drink – I noticed an auto shop with a couple of garages was nearby, I could see a middle-aged man inside working on something, so I dropped in to ask him where I could find a soda. He pointed me in a couple of directions, asked his two adult sons who were working nearby, and the consensus was there was nothing close.

I thanked them and turned to leave, but rather than exiting through the open garage door, I wandered off through an adjacent doorway, and found myself in another garage, this one dark and closed up – I heard them closing up shop behind me, and I started looking quickly for another way out, afraid of them suspecting that I was snooping around where I wasn’t supposed to be.

Then the first man, the father, came in, and told me not to worry about it – I could go out through the back way. He lead me back into a dirty concrete room with one door open to the street, and another odd half-height opening that came up to my waist. Curious, I poked my head out, and saw an enclosed alleyway, walled in with the backsides of buildings, roofed by the overcast sky.

“Can I leave this way?” I asked, curios about the strange configuration and the bulky tarp-draped vehicles at one end.

“No, you don’t want to go out that way,” he counseled me.

I got a bit of a chill, and prompted, “Why not?”

He looked at me, and said coldly, “it’s pretty fucked up.”

Well okay. I turned back, and the two sons offered to show me out – but for some reason, we weren’t leaving the building, we were going back in, then down through a trap door, through a service tunnel, and into what appeared to be an abandoned subway terminal. After running down a cramped stairwell, taking several stairs at a time, one rounded the last corner and hurled himself feet-first over the turnstile. The second mimicked the move, while I walked through normally after them.

“Know why we always do that?” One son asked me.

“For fun?”

The other shook his head humorlessly. “Not for fun. See that escalator behind us?”

I glanced back, and saw the last leg of the stairwell had actually been an escalator – albeit one that was currently unpowered and therefore stationary.

“We had a sister, you know, a while back – she was coming down here, just like we were,” the guy explained, “and some asshole was running through the wrong way, pushed her back into the escalator, then ran off – and she got caught in the bottom.”

“- so now,” the other one continued, “we always kick right through the place where someone’s head would be if they were coming through the wrong way, you know?”

“Uh, wow, yeah, I can see why you’d do that,” I admitted.

Leading me further on into the subway station, we ended up in a secret underground bunker sort of structure – and they led me to a back room, walls of cold concrete, with an ornate wooden frame, a high mattress, and white bedclothes. Lying there were what I immediately recognized as the remains of their sister: cold and bloodless, horrifically mangled, missing limbs and random chunks of flesh, stripes of torn skin running the length of what was left of her body in several places. The missing bits and pieces had been filled in with oddly cropped photographs that looked like animal parts – fur, claws, and a tail were all in evidence. Looking at what’s left of her face, she bears a striking resemblance to Star Wars-era Carrie Fischer.

I’m hit with the sudden realization of the path this story is taking… I envision a lightning bolt striking the body, magically melding its components, both grisly and photographic, into a shambling chimera of a zombie, wielding an unsettling array of  mismatched limbs… NOPE.JPG, says my brain, and I wake up before the dream turns into a full-blown nightmare.