Sick in a Time of Invasion

Sue and Ciarra and Ashley and Mandy are driving me to see the doctor, up Highway D. The space aliens have come. The government and private industry are responding with secret technologies, all caginess and sinister plotting on the table now—technology they’ve been saving for some future they didn’t dare to reveal before. Big robot equipment that plants utility poles and strings electric cables autonomously, erecting power lines along the road almost as fast as we’re driving. Swarms of spider-bots with gun turrets. A small nuclear reactor sprung up in hours about where the Marthasville town dump was in the 60s. Everywhere I look—on the ground, in the sky—some technological wonder is bursting into existence, adding itself to mankind’s defenses, decades ahead of its planned release.

Sue’s daughters laughing and singing as we ride, slow to grasp the gravity of it, although Sue knows. She is driving fast, wanting to get to the safe interior of the medical building before all hell breaks loose—for all of our sakes, but also because my medical condition is urgent. The vague disease of my organs that Mom never told me much about (in previous dreams) is coming true. I might have just weeks or days to live.

Then the hell does break loose. The invaders have been mustering all along, creeping through the hills and fields and being spotted and shot to bits by this fantastic new military-corporate weaponry, but mostly just gathering force, moving into position. The quiet farming valley I’ve known all my life, this five-mile stretch of cozy landscape, is full of hostile extra-planetary beings. Suddenly the war has started. Space aliens are waiting for us with their weapons and robots as we crest a hill. Sue floors it. Charges downhill at full speed, smashing through an alien infantry, barreling off the highway, down a steep pasture, making turns like a dragster, barreling through foliage. It’s all a brain rattling blur. My nieces comprehend it better than me, in my illness and old age. “What happened? What did we do? How did we survive that?” We’ve come to a skidding, sideways halt in an underground parking garage, the car rocking to a standstill. There’s no time for talk, for looking around, for clearing our heads. Sue leads the way and we all all hustle up the stairs, up the elevator. We’re ar from the noise of battle now. The elevator dings. We step out onto carpet.

We look out the high windows, several stories up, and see the melee of fantastic machines all up and down the Road D valley. Big TV screens hanging from the ceiling portray similar scenes across America. War machines unlike any seen before pummel one another, everything brand new and colorfully painted and astonishing. It’s like a civil war in Toyland. We can’t tell who’s us and who’s them. We can barely make out what we’re seeing. But this is without question a war of the worlds. It is finally happening.

But my medical condition is also happening. A nurse prepares me. A doctor arrives to examine me. I’m not well. Not well. There is no uncertainty. This is going to be serious. My body is failing. I’ll have to obey the doctor’s orders diligently. But with some luck, I’ll survive. I could live for years yet. If any of us do.