THEN

I’M FALLING THROUGH the air.

There are over a hundred people marching in the street below. Their boots kick up dust on the dirt road. They’re all wearing military uniforms, but they don’t move like the military. They’re wobbly and erratic, only loosely in sync. It’s as if the whole crowd is drunk. The crackling popping sound of teeth echoes up to me.

I realize I’m not falling toward the crowd, but toward a building on the side of the street. And I’m not falling alone. The man in the tinfoil suit, the brilliant man, is falling alongside me. The gleaming suit buzzes as we fall, and the buzzing makes words. If you don’t mind this part of the base being annihilated in the process, sure.

I’m not sure what the bright man is talking about. The dream has dumped me in the middle of a conversation. I can’t remember how it started, so I’m not sure how to respond.

The flat roof rushes up at us and only slows just before my boots hit. They never touch, or if they do it’s so gentle I can’t feel it. My arms shift and a third person enters the dream. I’m carrying an older man, with messy hair and an overgrown beard. He doesn’t seem to weigh anything. He looks like a professor who hasn’t slept in days. He’s familiar, both to dream me and to real me, watching the dream from some other vantage point.

I set the man down on the roof and a voice speaks. My voice. It takes me a moment to recognize it, and by the time I do the few words have passed and been lost. The old professor looks at me and nods. “I understand. I’ll be fine.”

And then I’m falling again. Some of the parrots—the monsters—see me coming and raise their arms. Up close I can see their uniforms are incomplete. Some have digital-patterned jackets, others T-shirts, and a few just wear sand-colored tanks. A few have belts. One or two have caps. I drop into the center of the crowd and they turn on me.

I grab a monster by its outstretched arm and swing it like a medieval flail. The corpse batters down a dozen of the dead soldiers. I swing my improvised weapon back the other way and clear a path to a large, hangar-like building. It’s a tomb. I know this in the way people know things in dreams.

My weapon twists at the end of the swing and the dead body comes apart at the shoulder with a wet sound. I’m holding an arm and most of the shoulder. A yellowed knob of bone glistens at the end of the limb.

Another monster lumbers out through the entrance into the building. I put my hand on its chest and push it back inside. It stumbles away from my hand and knocks other corpses down behind it.

I grab the huge door—it’s half the front of the building—with one hand and pull. It squeals on metal wheels and shrinks the opening. Dead things gnaw and claw at my hands, but I know they can’t hurt me.

Something hisses behind me and the shadows jump and vanish. The tinfoil man hangs in the air with his arms stretched out to push at something. Clouds of black ash in front of him hold the shape of soldiers for a moment, then drift apart. Near the edge of the clouds are three or four other charred monsters that break apart as I watch.

The man isn’t tinfoil. He’s hot. White-hot.

My knuckles punch through a dead soldier’s skull. The punch becomes a backhand that crushes another head. I grab a body with each hand and throw them like dolls.

I speak to the white-hot man and he talks back. I say something else, but the words are lost in the muddle of the dream. We have a whole conversation that I can’t hear.

No. That I can’t remember. That’s important, part of me knows. I’m not not-hearing this. I’m not-remembering it.

The monsters are all dead. I’ve thrown them all into a pile and the white-hot man has incinerated them all. It makes him get pale.

I look up at the old professor on the roof and jump up to him. Like my other dreams, I’m carried up by invisible wires that make my back itch. I hold on to the older man and we fall down to street level together.

Not fall. This is something else important. These aren’t falling dreams. They’re—

The ground shakes and disrupts my thoughts. It’s a heavy, steady thumping—the sound of construction sites and dinosaurs. Reflections tremble in the windows of nearby buildings.

A few buildings down, something smashes through the doors of another hangar. The long slats fold like cardboard. Rivets pop and scatter like bullets. Without thinking, I pull the old man back and step in front of him. Shards of metal patter against my body. I feel them, but they don’t hurt.

For just an instant, the huge robot stands in front of the hole it’s made. Then it turns and runs down the street away from us. The trembling ground goes with it and—