Speeding in Reverse, Pt. VIII

[ehowton]

Dreamed my brother and I were in a Pinto, or a Gremlin, or a Pacer - some sort of 4-cylinder rear-wheel drive car; Kevin was driving down 75 Central Expressway way too fast - dangerously fast. He would make these erratic hard turns at the last minute, missing the guardrails and I was absolutely on edge.

At one point, the car in front us tried the same thing but actually bounced off the guardrail after hitting it. This caused the car in front of us to turn up on two wheels, then down and up on the opposite two wheels as it quickly lost its balance and turned over in front of us. As we were going too fast, we hit the wreck, which propelled our car several hundred feet into the air. My brother fell out of the car at its apex and I watched his body fall to the rocks in the median between the roadway. His hair was long and he was completely naked. I was trying to see if he was still moving, or if the fall had killed him. I couldn't tell if he was moving or not - he body lay completely prone on the jagged rocks below.

I thought I had a chance of surviving the fall if I remained in the car, so spent all my effort on securing myself, but suddenly the car was gone and I was falling toward the Earth, trying to aim for the soft, wet grass adjacent the rocks to avoid the same fate as my brother. All the way down I was watching to see if he was moving or not.

I awoke with my body tingling with the hot fire of adrenaline.

When I fell back asleep I was in a white limo with a black interior. It was owned by the Bible Camp, and had rows of seats like a school bus. The limo was trying to navigate down a tree-lined gravel road, but the kids kept opening the suicide doors and trying to catch them on the trees to force them off the car while it was moving. Fortunately the driver would stop the car when he saw the doors open in his side-view mirror, thwarting the kids' plan. When one kid closed his door so the car could continue, another kid opened the adjacent door in hopes to trick the driver - it worked, getting caught on the trunk of a tree, but did not snap off, rather bent it backward and prevented the car from continuing forward.

Seeing the dilemma from the cabin, the driver put the car into reverse to dislodge the car, backing down the gravel path. Then he started accelerating. We were now speeding backward toward a busy highway and the driver showed no intention of stopping. This maneuver seemed quite foolish and I was getting nervous. Sure enough, without slowing, we reached the end of the driveway, crossed the highway without being hit, and continued down into the steep culvert on the other side before coming to a stop. The driver announced from the intercom that this was going to get bumpy for those of us in the back of the limo, and floored it, hoping to jump the highway, and land at the Bible Camp cabin in hopes of bypassing the tree-lined path so the kids couldn't interfere with the journey.

Not only did I find his idea ridiculous, I couldn't imagine the limo had the power required to perform such a feat.

Then the limo was suddenly a train, somewhere overseas; probably Korea. I was standing in the aisle at the back, looking for a place to sit. I walked forward and found an empty seat just behind the adjoining articulation and sat. The girl behind me, my daughter's friend Erin, was dressed in military fatigues - we all were. She leaned forward and said, "I don't know why you chose to sit by me, I'm just a small-town girl from Kansas." It was like she didn't know who I was.

We arrived and disembarked at the Bible Camp. Behind the Great Room was the common area, a dark, sunken lounge done all in black. It had a projection television (a couple were watching cartoons), a wet bar, disco lights, and a smoke machine. I started fiddling with the dials filling the room with smoke and music and lights, much to the chagrin of the couple trying to watch cartoons. I explained that when I first started coming to Bible Camp, the older kids were the ones who controlled the environment, and now that I was the older kid, it was my turn. But the place was a mess with trash and leftover foodstuffs everywhere, so I organized a clean-up crew and we got started cleaning the everything up. The only arguments which broke out were which things were, and were not allowed to go into the sink's garbage disposal.