Hollow

I was awoken tonight from a disturbing dream by a text message. I should have known better than to leave my ringer on before going to bed but if the alert on my phone hadn't done it, the dream very well might have. Like most of my upsetting dreams, it started out without any particularly disturbing images. I was revisiting old dwelling space, though there were new dwellers in my old space... inevitable and yet saddening. Somehow, I was transport from there to a remote village in Brazil. A woman was telling me how she and a lover had been caught together by a local renegade militia and he had been murdered. Apparently the group of sadistic soldiers had been terrorizing the countryside, murdering for the thrill and thriving off the terror of their victims. They had been growing in number, collecting a brutal army. Finally they attacked the village where I was, and chaos broke loose. No one would be spared if they were caught by the enemy. I did not know who I was, only that I was somehow embodied and was running for my life. I ran past a rape treatment center, and leprosy hospital, and other indications of the miserable lives of the villagers. Though I was an alien in my settings, I was no less at risk. It was like hell's minions were descending upon us all, indiscriminate and blood thirsty. I ran through the village, from one house to the next. Eventually I came upon a man armed with a sword. He appeared to be white, presumably American, and when I encountered him he said something that I took to be a quote from a kung-fu movie. Then he paused and said "All I can think is how hollow those words sound in the face of my own death." Then he told me to follow him and we ran out of the house, nearly running over another armed man, I think he had a semi-automatic rifle. The three of us crouched along the wall of a house across the way, and waited, for what I'm not sure. It might have been to fight our way out of the village alone, it might have been for other armed villagers to band together and challenge the militia. I can't say exactly, because it was just at that moment that my phone roused me from the dream.