The rest of the day I hung around the building. There were small military stations around giving out food and water. The food tasted like garbage but I had to eat something. It was late afternoon now. The rain had passed and I stayed by myself in the small building, reading the Bible most of the time. Psalms was calming and kept me calm and helped ease my mind a little bit. A couple people passed by inside the building. They gave me angry looks as I passed by. Nobody seemed to trust anybody now. I didn't dare try and talk to some of the people. I just wanted to be left alone.

All I could think about for most of the day was trying to figure out what had happened to me. What I missed; one day I was walking into my house on an August day in 2003 and now… this. I left the building that night and started walking down the empty streets. There were gangs scattered throughout street, hanging around near garbage cans they used to light a fire in. I stopped at a torn down school where I found a small couch and that's where I stayed. I slept through the night well.

I woke up the next morning and walked up to the military station for breakfast. There was a small crowd. As I approached, there was some shoving and pushing and soon people were throwing punches at each other trying to get some food. The riot ended abruptly with a gun shot. The crowd stepped back as a strong man standing behind the table with food and water was pointing a gun in the air. The gun letting out smoke from the shot just fired into the air. The man was a giant, standing nearly at seven feet and very muscular. He had a 5 o'clock shadow and brown hair in a short military cut. His face was laced with anger.

He lowered the weapon and glared menacingly at the crowd. "What the hell is this?" he hollered into the crowd, his voice deep and full of authority. "Who started this?" he demanded the small crowd. They kept quiet. The military man walked out from behind the table and took one of the by the shirt collar and pointed the pistol between his eyes. "Was it you?" he asked in his face. The man was scared out of his mind and madly shook his head, unable to utter a word from fear. The military man tossed him to ground hard and he landed with a thud.

The military man looked back into the crowd. "Don't let this happen again," he said quietly and walked back into the tent. The crowd quietly and quickly picked up their breakfast and rushed of into the alleys. I reached the table, got my food and started heading back to the school. I finished the food before I reached the school and then I downed the small plastic cup with water and tossed it. Then I leaned against a pole that was in the back of the school and then it happened again.

The same thing that happened with Reggie happened again here. There was a whoosh and then the wrecked school morphed into a full school. The ground that was littered with boulders and trash was now a playground. The walls and streets were full of life and color. The pole turned into a basketball hoop and then kids started running around playing. Playing basketball and tag and jump rope and having fun. I started looking around confused. Then I saw a kid bouncing a basketball and then stopped and passed the ball straight at me. And as I prepared to catch the ball, it was gone. Just as quickly as it had come, it had fled.

Back were the littered streets and the dull gray atmosphere. The ball disappeared in thin air. The basketball hoop was replaced with the rusted pole and the children were gone. I looked down and saw a broken basketball, broken nearly in half. I picked it up and then it slipped out of my fingers. What happened? Was I seeing ghosts? That must have been it. That must be what I'm seeing. Ghosts. I must be losing my mind.

I decided to walk back into the streets and walk around. See what else I could I could find. What else I could see. I looked around but there was nothing. Nothing I could touch, nothing that was left to touch. Every where I looked there would be some kind of fight of some sort. Robberies, shootings, murder. At one point, I saw someone get shot because he had no money. The boy could not have been more than 20 years old. Everywhere I looked. I laid low and tried not to get in the middle of any of it. I didn't want a piece of it.

That night I fell asleep with an odd feeling. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I lay there on the couch, listening to the sounds of the world around me. They never stopped. Nothing I did could drown out the noise. All I heard were the gun shots, the screaming, all the violence. I wondered how this could be real. What could have possibly ignited this nightmare? How could the world be left in this shape? How could it get this bad? Who caused all this pain and suffering? But I knew was that in this world with no future, there was nobody to answer my questions. This was a world full of questions with nobody left to answer them. No one left to fill in the blanks.

Next to me a fire kept me warm, the flames cracking and dancing in the night air. I tried to focus on the flame. I tried to drown out the world in the flame, melt all the sounds away, all the questions. I seemed to become lost in the flame. It was almost like being lost in the forest. Except that I wasn't scared. I wanted to be lost. I wanted to leave this horrible place and lose myself. Soon I was asleep.

And then… the dreams came…