DRAUMRS - Dreamweavers Among Us

2 - Lester

Lester opened his eyes and immediately squeezed them closed again as the bright daylight overwhelmed his too-slow reacting pupils. He was flat on his back. Once he could safely open his eyes beyond a crack, he brought a clear blue sky into focus. Or lack of focus. There was no definition whatsoever. The sky color was squeezed directly from the tube. No mixing of tones, no clouds and no hints of haze; just a consistent blue edge-to-edge. He could only really tell that it was sky by its sole feature: a feathered raptor circling slowly above him. The big bird was a discordant kite against an otherwise continuous phthalo blue sky.

The centerpiece bird was monstrous in size, but apparently far above him. It could be a hundred feet up or a thousand. He had no idea how big this creature actually was. Still, he could make out its nasty details. It was a caricature of a real bird; it had a plate-size unblinking eye and a razor-sharp can-opener beak. It shone iridescent red like a polished June bug, with big brassy claws. It was an impossible combination in nature, but perfectly suited to the impressionist dreamscape.

The bird was watching him intently. Its effortless glide suggested the patience of a skilled hunter; one that was used to ignoring the frenetic scrabbling of its victim. Time was this beast's best friend, time and a parching sun that would do most of the work for it. But for all the heat, the sun was no-where to be seen. Dreams didn't need an actual sun for him to be stretched out in it.

The observation that the monster bird was red gave Lester some small hope. Red birds were parrots, cardinals or hummingbirds, weren't they? None of those were meat-eaters; although he wasn't too sure about parrots. Parrots had those nut-cracker beaks that looked like they could snap a finger right off, so maybe here they had evolved to join the carnivore parade. And he was damn sure that he wasn't looking at an eight-hundred-pound hummingbird.

The presumed predator really was way up in the, really blue, sky yet somehow, he could see the edges of every feather. He suspected that if it squawked, it would have a gruesome bloody red maw that would permanently freeze his muscles. He was outside, in apparent bright daylight, but his arc of peripheral sight presented no horizon and no other shapes; he just had the big ugly bird, with impossibly wide wings, bald head and steely eye glaring back at him.

Sometimes just looking at really scary stuff froze you up like a deer in the headlights. Deer could outrun wolves and jump over small houses, yet when they stared at a set of halogens coming at them, they froze on the spot while waiting to see what the fuck this noisy bright thing was. Raccoons, skunks, groundhogs, all seemed to share the same dumb instinct, and worst of all were those goddamn chipmunks that went back and forth twice and then made the wrong decision about one more shot for the far side just as a ton and a half of metal and rubber arrived to interrupt the game.

This bird was all alone. It probably wasn't a vulture because then there would be lots of them, going round and round, seemingly never actually flapping their wings. He'd heard that in the desert, vultures circled over injured or failing animals, knowing that a few hours of waiting would deliver a nice warm, ready-to-eat, corpse. Whatever the species, this one was good at waiting.

OK. So, we've eliminated hummingbirds and vultures, with parrots still on the possibilities list. He was running through an ornithological checklist in his head.

Good for me, though, he thought. At least I'm a live meal prospect, not already a stinking corpse with all the best parts eaten by the early arrivers.

He was worried about concentrating on the bird too long. Like with the ridiculous huge marshmallow man in Ghost Busters, he feared his thoughts would determine what the bird actually was. He briefly tried to think of a pigeon or sparrow, but realized that any bird this big would be a nasty specimen, even if it was a chickadee.