Code 3

I woke up in the blackness of the wee hours of morning to the sound of heavy pounding, a dispatch radio and an Police officer saying something about Code three outside my window… I groggily pulled my body to the window and peered out through sleep blurry eyes. Several police cars were parked directly outside my apartment. Along with a fire truck and ambulance.   

I pulled myself out of bed to go to the front room, still groggy, but remembering to slip a skirt onto my naked hips. Half asleep I peered out of my front door peep hole to a whole slew of officers on the stairs leading to the apartment above me. Pounding... pounding. Yelling at the occupant to open up as if it weren't 2 am, but a busy downtown street in the middle of rush hour. They were greeted with the silence of a summer night and maybe a cricket in the distance.   

I popped my head out of the door still half asleep and they apologized for waking me... then asked me if I knew the guy who lived there. Yeah, I told them. What's his name, they asked... I stammered still half delirious and not quite remembering his name... T... T.... "Tylor?" they asked. Yeah, that's it. Have you seen him? Yeah, he was moving things today into a moving truck... said he was going to Vancouver.

I had talked to him earlier in the day, a little sad to see him and his 3-year-old son packing up their little garage into the u-haul. He had been a good neighbor, even catching the neighborhood peeping tom red-handed. He had told me if I need anything, anything at all, not to hesitate to ask. I liked him.

Have you heard anything, the police were asking. I hadn't, I had been asleep. They thanked me and resumed pounding, not offering an explanation. I didn't ask, but took my cue to quietly slip back into my apartment. It had been a swelteringly hot day and my back door was wide open to welcome in the cool night air. A shiver of fear ran up my spine. My neighborly and quite good looking friend upstairs had just taken on the air of a probable bad guy, and my mind was sparing me no wild and outlandish thought. Had someone come through my second story window somehow? I made a quick run through the rooms checking for intruders not sure what I would have done had I found someone!   

A bit too worked up to go back to sleep, I got on my computer and tried to let myself calm down. But my mind kept running over the situation. The police had eventually given up and left. But why would they have come out here on an emergency code 3? Fire and ambulance and all? If it had just been a domestic violence call wouldn't they have just sent an officer out to check out the situation?

After about an hour my mind had calmed down and I was ready to go back to bed when I heard footsteps upstairs. Like little tiptoe steps, purposely soft to keep me from hearing. He WAS there!! I had thought he had skipped town or something, but no. He was still there! What was he hiding? My heart started pounding again. It took me a whole hour more to feel sleepy enough to crawl up in bed again, skirt and all... and drift off into a fitful slumber. Reality and dream morphed into one, indistinguishable from each other... where one stopped and the other began I couldn't tell.    

Through the haze of sleep I heard a truck pull up outside, and I remember peering through my window again. It was his u-haul. He was making his getaway. In my sleepy delirium, I decided to follow him. I left the girls sleeping in the blackness, and pulled off in a little car, staying far enough behind him so as not to be suspicious. He turned the u-haul out toward the countryside intersection, and then took a left. I passed the intersection and turned around to come from the other direction, just in case he had been watching me, and saw him pull his trailer back first into a driveway.

Next thing I know, I'm out of my car, and I see him walking back toward the apartment complex. Fear grips me and I start running back too, but I realize that I won't make it, so I hide in the bushes of a house and watch him pass. Again, in the early twilight, I follow him. I suspected he forgot something and was going back to get it. Only, he cut through the complex, and to avoid being seen, I took the long way around.

As I came closer to my unit I saw that the police were there again, tearing through apartments, all the contents out on the front lawn. And I see bodies. Some lying side by side, arranged on the grass by police... others lying over couches that had been gutted from apartments. They were all girls. They were all dead. Quite dead.

As I get closer to my house, I see that my couches are outside too, and my front window is shattered. My heart seizes in my chest. My first thought is that the twins had fallen out the window. There is something that looks like blood stain on my couch and I rush inside, open the door with a gasp and....   

 
wake up, sitting straight up in bed. Thankfully the girls were still next to me, their little chests rising and falling in a soft, syncopated rhythm. I deflate into the realization that following him and the rest of what I saw had been a dream. At least, I think it was... Strange how the continuum of Psyche works, how waking reality can so easily melt into dream reality while the unconscious works it's way into symbols and stories.

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