My Trip to Mars

I was picked to be in the first group of colonists sent to Mars.

Our assignment was a brief one. We would be on Mars for about six months to establish shelters and to study the soil, atmosphere, and air quality. Or so they told us.

We bounced towards our Martian construction site on a school-bus-sized buggy. Here were the sweeping plains, the high distant mountains, the lonely hills over whose photos I had pored from a whole planet away! It was so beautiful I began to cry.

That’s when I saw the maintenance shack.

Maintenance shack?! Who put that there? Who's maintaining it? The whole bus of colonists was in tumult.

We crested a tall hill and fell silent at the sight of the metropolis. The whole world had already come here?

We were briefed. The general public hadn’t been told for security reasons. “Imagine the chaos,” a stuffy general shuddered.

Our mission was not to collect soil samples at all, it was to help fine-tune a device that would make intra-planetary teleportation possible. Or so they told us.

After receiving my tool box and my repair assignment, I stood in an antiseptic chamber with the device. It looked a lot like a walk-in tanning bed. As I inspected it, I noticed a keypad that no one had mentioned.

Exactly what kind of travel was this for?

And then the dream ended.

How Alinea Was Sacked by Zombies

Brother and I were headed to Alinea for a meal so innovative and delicious it would surely change our lives.

When we got there, the host seated us at a table that was way too big for two, so a sous chef who had the night off shared our table. I relayed that we were here because I’d read the head Chef Grant Achatz’s book, Life, On the Line. As the first course came out (some kind of foie gras), she said the chef would be excited to hear that and summoned Grant from the kitchen. He emerged, wreathed in steam and unknowable aromas, and shook my hand. I was really worried there was food in my teeth.

I said, “I’ve never had foie gras before, and it’s delicious!”

“There’s a little bit of a Coca-Cola-like taste to it, isn’t there?” he said.

Then there was a plane - with all its fuselage doors open - coming in for a landing right next to the restaurant. The plane’s interior appeared curiously empty except for a single dead old man. I left the table to investigate. When the plane landed, zombies came out!

They started devouring people left and right! I couldn’t find my brother, so I sprinted back to the kitchen for a knife so I could search for him.

The kitchen staff only barely let me in; they made an exception to their survival barricade because I’d been eating with one of their chefs and I was clearly a friend of the culinary class. Then I blatantly stole their biggest cleaver.

I spied out of the doors’ portholes to make sure there was no one around before busting back out.

Brother wasn’t in the dining room, so I turned a corner and got lost in a dim funhouse maze exploding with panicked people and zombies. As I tried to save my hide from dead people and their keening quarry, I stumbled across a large room in which people were sighing in ecstasy as the zombies gnawed at their necks. I turned to get the EFF out of there before they ate me, too, but when I spun around I was face to face with a Furby-resembling zombie. I darted into a room to hide. At first he didn’t see me, but when he spied me clutching my cleaver, I launched at him. As he fell onto the rug, torrents of blood cascaded from my victorious hands.

I clawed my way out of the maze and into the lobby, where Brother was holding a handgun like he meant it, a pile of permanently dead zombies at his feet. We clasped hands (mine were very slimy) and ran out of the restaurant. The zombies hadn’t gotten out to the street yet, so I tried to go with it and contribute something positive.

Oh yeah. We were going to kick some ass.

We found a loaded rifle lying in the street, but then a zombie lurched out from behind some bushes and Brother shot him between the eyes with the handgun. Brother switched to the rifle and I shoved the gun in the back of my pants like a real badass. We hurtled towards my apartment, some two miles distant, to regroup and make our next move.