Fate

What I recall in this dream is me waking up in some sort of institutional-type building. However, the setup is very strange to me. The floor beneath me is ceramic tiling, and the walls behind me and to my front and right are solid white. However, to my left the wall seems to actually be made from link fence material, so that I can see through it. Getting up and peering through the 'wall', I notice that the building appears almost like a spiral staircase so that I can see the levels both below me and above me, and I also see that on the other side of my current level is a door, presumably leading to the stairwell. I run over and exit where I'm at through this door.

I'm shocked, however, when I enter to smell something rancid and to see a half-decomposed body resting on the stairwell leading up to the upper level. Upon hearing the noise of the door clambering shut behind me, the corpse actually rouses and groans before attempting to crawl in my direction. I immediately recognize it to be a zombie and sprint down the stairs. I try exiting through a lower door about three or four levels down, but this floor is slam packed full of zombies and I barely manage to bring the door back to a close before they can stick a limb through the opening. It has to be pulled for the door to open, so I appear to be relatively safe.

Still, I can hear moans all throughout the stairwell, so I know I have to get out. Suddenly a pole seems to be directly in the center of the also spiraling staircase (much like a firefighter's pole) so I hop the stair railing and take the metal pole all the way down to the bottom. I pass many zombies along the way, but seem to come out lucky as there aren't any on the bottom floor when I reach it. Now there is actually another door set off to the left that doesn't appear to re-enter the building and I go through it.

Where I appear next seems like the food court setup of a mall, though nothing is running and no people are there. It's also devoid of any tables, chairs, or things of that nature, and is mostly an empty expanse of concrete flooring other than the long-empty food vendors. On the far side I notice a still-running escalator leading down to a bottom floor and I get on it. It takes me to another door, but before I go through I look to my right to see a long, vertical window to the actual outside. It seems the building I've been in is located in a desert-area, as there are many sand dunes and cacti throughout the orange land. There seem to be zombie sparsely located, but not enough to concern me at that moment. So I ignore them and finally go through the door.

When I enter the feel to me to seemed to be set up much like a GameStop (or your typical more high-end gaming store). Instead of having a ton of games on sell, however, they had a bunch of older arcade games set up along the middle of the store, and the edges were actually stands of comics, manga, and other video game or television related items. On my right wall are four highly tinted doors leading to the outside. This time there are actually people inhabiting the store. There are some my age, but mostly some older than me. I actually recognize one of the people my age as my friend, Chris, and we're very happy to see each other. He explains that no one had known where I'd gone when everything went down, but that he and the people there had been living off food from the food court up until that point. However, he said everyone knew they were getting low on resources, so they actually had a plan on the roof of the part of the building they were in (apparently the door was out located near the food court to this machine) so that they could go search for more food.

About that time, everything begins to go even more downhill. Somehow zombies have managed to venture their way into the area I'm in from the outside, and the scene quickly becomes bloody and gruesome. People are being shred apart by the monsters as Chris grabs my hand and takes me back through the door and up the escalators to the food court.

[On a side note here, my dream randomly jumps to these two teenage boys running through a hospital room being chased by zombies. One of them has a sword and stops to start attacking their chasers and ultimately ends up sacrificing himself for the younger boy. Just as he's being overwhelmed, however, he gets to see the other boy open the door leading out and still be consumed by zombies residing just outside. Neither of them live through it.]

Chris and I make it to the building's roof, where it turns out the machine is actually a helicopter, not a plane. Neither of us have driven it before, but Chris designates me to try driving it. We hastily hop inside and I start pressing buttons in an attempt to make it work. Somehow I actually get the thing started and us lifted off, but just as we're leaving the building and screams behind us in exchange for hundreds of sand dunes, a problem quickly surfaces. The helicopter has actually been low on gas and the console urgently starts beeping at me. In my dream it almost immediately shuts down, sending us crashing back down to the ground. It all goes a bit blurry from here as I black out, and the next time I wake up is to Chris screaming. In our landing I managed to rip off the door from his side and crashed so that we were laying sideways with my side at the bottom and his at the top, and zombies are clawing inside and attacking Chris, though not quite able to drag him out. However, I know that they are still tearing at him and dread fills me at the oncoming change of my friend, but this is the point at which I wake up.