Chapter 4

Only a little searching produced the BFG, and on the shelf with it was a belt of ammunition. But this ammunition was different: each bullet point was painted red. Oh, dear God, I hoped that meant that the bullets were explosive. If they were, that would make life a whole lot simpler.

Yep, as before, as soon as I picked up the BFG, I was fully dressed in the standard battle dress that I had been wearing the last time. That certainly was a relief, and I felt like my chances of surviving this adventure had taken a long jump up.

I went through the usual procedure of checking out the BFG and loading it with one end of the ammunition belt. As before, I was now loaded for bear, or maybe that was rhinoceros. Anyway, I was now ready to hunt monsters. I went back to the hall and decided not to retrace my steps this time. Don’t ask me why, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t have to go far to find my first monster.

Dammit, this was one of those two-headed, six-legged saber-toothed cats. Yeah, I had looked them up on Wikipedia. The cat was trotting toward me as if it expected me to turn and run, and it was planning to have some fun when it chased me.

I never gave the bastard the chance! I lined up the BFG and pulled the trigger. The aiming point I had chosen was its chest where I had pumped bullets the last time to no avail. This time the first bullet to hit exploded, and so did the rest of them in the burst that I unloaded on the cat. The damned thing actually looked surprised as the bullets hit and tore up its bone shield. The creature did not live more than a few seconds after the first bullet hit, and that made me very happy. Dammit, now I had the kind of gun I had been looking for.

I assumed that these explosive bullets would have the same effect on anything they hit, so I was prepared to waltz through this dream. Dammit, I needed somebody to pinch me and to say, “Wake up, Judy. Don’t be so damned cocky. You are acting like a boy who is too full of testosterone.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have a guardian angel to do that, so I almost became a statistic.

The next monster I met was a wolf/bear, and I made a fundamental mistake. Actually, it was two mistakes. I waited too long to shoot, and I aimed at its gut and not at its chest. By waiting too long, the bullets did not have time to arm themselves before they hit the monster. By aiming at the beast’s gut, I did not have hard bone for the bullets to hit; therefore, they would not have exploded.

At the moment, I did not know why the bullets did not explode, but I kept pouring bullets into the creature’s gut as if I were using the earlier, non-explosive ammunition. That was enough to chop the beast into two parts and put it out of my misery. It was after the creature was dead that I realized what I had been doing wrong. I tried an experiment and backed off a few feet before I fired one bullet into its chest. Dammit, I found that I had to have about 15 feet for the bullet to travel before it would explode. That was simply unacceptable. If the bullet had to travel more than five feet, I could be killed if I had to fight inside one of the small office cubicles.

Further thought told me why the bullet was currently set to travel 15 feet before it exploded. That would put it far enough away so that I would not be hurt by the bullet’s explosion. The problem was, the designer of the bullet had not considered that I would sometimes have to fight at much closer range. I was willing to take a chance on being too close to an exploding bullet in order to be sure that the damned thing was going to explode when it hit one of these creatures.

Oh, shit! I had been wool-gathering and a monster had sneaked up behind me. It had slapped me on the back with its claws, and it was my body armor that saved me from being killed by the blow. This was an ape-like creature that had the hands of a wolf/bear with four-inch claws. Its face was shaped like a typical primate, but its jaw was full of pointed teeth like that to be found on a carnivore.

I was not injured by the blow, but I was really shook up. I hit the floor and started shooting as soon as I could get the BFG pointed in the right direction. Naturally, I was too close to the ape for the bullets to explode, but the ape was confused by being hit by all of those bullets. Thank God, the ape backed off in confusion, and the bullets started exploding. It only took about four hits with the exploding bullets for the ape to die, but I was scared out of my wits. I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall while I got myself back together. I looked both ways in the hall every few seconds. I hoped nothing else ever sneaked up on me while I was in one of these dreams.

Well, whatever was controlling the dream must have decided that it was time for me to get some rest. The next thing I knew, I was lying in bed. I opened my eyes and saw Sally sitting beside the bed with considerable concern on her face. She brightened up when she saw that I was awake. “Dammit, Judy, I didn’t know what to do. You were jumping around in the bed, and I didn’t know what was wrong. I was afraid to wake you; yet, I was afraid not to. You must have been having one hell of a dream. Was it one of your nightmares?”

“Oh, my God, Sally, this was a real gem if you like that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I don’t!” I told her about the first part of my dream with the stampeding cattle and how I escaped. She laughed at that and congratulated me on doing something that she would never have thought of.

I lay in the bed while we talked, and suddenly I wondered if I really was awake or if this was just a continuation of the dream. Dammit, there was no way that I could tell. Oh, well, I decided to go with the flow, and we continued to talk about various things. One of the things we talked about was when we could have another session of sex. Just talking about it turned us both on.

OH, SHIT! This must have been a continuation of the dream because I was back in the hall with my battle dress and my BFG. The trouble was that Sally was with me, and she was dressed in her normal clothes. Furthermore, she did not have a weapon.

“Sally, you are in great danger! Come with me!” She looked like she was in shock at the sudden change in location and my outfit, and she just froze in position. At that moment, two of those wolf/bears showed up down the hall. They were about a hundred feet away, so I was able to open up on them with my BFG and expect the bullets to explode. I was aiming for their chests, and I was right about the bullets exploding.

Sally started to cry, and I turned to her, only to see a saber-toothed cat about to pounce on her. The beast was closer than 15 feet, but I had no choice. I fired into its face, hoping to send a bullet down its throat, even if it did not explode. Thank God, the needed change had been made in the bullets, and one exploded when it hit some bone in the roof of the cat’s mouth. That blew its head off, and killed it.

Dammit, Sally and I were sprayed with blood, bone, and brains, but we were still alive, so I figured that for a win. I couldn’t tell if Sally saw it that way, because she was crying even harder. Hopefully, she was just crying from relief.

I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me toward where I had found the storeroom. I have no idea how far we went down various corridors, but we never did find the room where I could equip Sally. I was just going to have to defend us both.

Uh-oh, we came upon several of those apes, and these creatures were monsters. They were so large that it was impossible for two of them to fit side by side within the confines of the hall. Sally was behind me, so I did not have to worry about her being in the way as I started shooting. I was aiming high to hit the apes in the chest where that bone shield was. I wanted to be sure that the bullets exploded when they hit.