42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

I’m part of an elite fighting force that battles against an alien invasion. For a while, the fighting has been quiet. The aliens have retreated, and the force is left to play simulated games. A new weapon has been developed and we’re supposed to be practicing with it. It is focused through something that looks like a thin black ribbon bookmark with a piece of stylized metal attached.

I carry mine with me always. I think it is called a quork. Other people are scorning its use, saying the aliens won’t be coming back, and instead play and drink.
But I have some precognition, some vision, that the invasion will be coming back, and I urge my fellow fighters to get their quorks out, to begin figuring out how to use them. But they laugh me off.
There are large arcade type booths that the others are playing in. Unused booths pile up all over. Maybe this means other people have died.
I look down to some nearby water, where a light is shining weakly through.
The presiding council is in a dome, protected underwater. But you can never see a light from it.
I have been down there before. It gives off a cool green light when you are close, but it is hundreds of feet underwater, and we shouldn’t be able to see it from the surface.
As I look, perhaps with further precognition, or something as simple as mechanical enhancement, I see the green dome exposed, and crumbling in the water. It caves in, emitting yet more light in its death throes. I bring it to the attention of my fellow fighters, and we know that the invasion has taken a different direction this time.

In another part, I am travelling, perhaps as a refugee from the alien invasion. I know people are constantly on the move.
I run into some people I used to know, trying to load or unload their SUV. There’s a nearby junkpile; they might’ve taken stuff from it to aid them in their trip of survival.
They ask me to help with the loading/unloading. I’m in a hurry and don’t want to, but I remember them helping me before, so I help with a few things. Their SUV is too shiny, too immaculate, to stay that way long, I think. It’s got a purple custom paint job and shiny rims. I think that in the new world of scavengers and every person for themselves, this soft couple and their family will shortly lose their vehicle, if not more than that. Still, I’m nice, and try to warn them to stay out of the way.

I happen across a beaten down old house, that probably hadn’t seen better days since long before the invasion. There’s old, decaying junk piled in the windows and a sense of desolation.
I start looking around, wondering if this is somewhere I can stop. I peer into the house, through the yellowed, grimy windows. An old woman comes up behind me and scares me.
It turns out she lives there, and has come out because she can see that I need help. Maybe she can tell I’m one of the fighters, though I’m useless now.
She makes the house look like she doesn’t live there, and mostly hides in a small hole dug out next to the basement.
I go in there with her, and it is close quarters crammed with stuff most people would throw away.
I need to go to the bathroom. She shows me out of the hidey-hole, and I’m thinking we’re going to a real, if somewhat dirty bathroom. Instead, she’s got a shed outside, complete with a half-moon.
I smell it, and it is truly awful. I don’t want to insult her, but I think she can tell my revulsion for the outhouse.
I can switch over the storage tanks, she tells me. Tomorrow. I can’t do it today, because it will make a furrow in the grass, and it’ll make us more visible tonight.
I get a tour around the rest of the house. Parts of it are deliberately in poor repair. It doesn’t look like anybody lives here, until you get to the more secreted parts of the house. Everything is old and dingy. Some covered by dust. Old crumbling curtains are floral avacado. A bedspred the same. But she’s kept it neat, a testament to a time when she could still live in the open.
She’s accustomed to people coming by, looking in. But the carefully ordered disarray dissuades them. There’s nothing for anybody here.
But she’s got a small refrigerated cooler with a handful of food items carefully squirreled away by one door. She’s got a few dishes that can be used. I meet her three cats in holes in the walls, all in hiding until I’m introduced.
I’m outside again, and checking my car. I shouldn’t park it here; it only draws attention. I find out that someone has strewn it with toilet paper, and I’m angry. Hopefully the kids will just go away.
But they don’t. It appears while I was outside of the house, the kids found a way to get in, and are busy ransacking it.
I am fearful for the old lady. I hope she has found a place to hide. She’s kept most of her valuables in her separate hole. I worry for the cats though.
It also seems like MacGuyver is in my dream at some point, because I remember looking at him, and thinking he’s closer to my age now, as if he has been frozen in time, instead of Richard Dean Anderson aging into gray hair and starring on Stargate. He’s probably helping me find a way to thwart the delinquents.
I happen upon a couple, and first try to scare them out or reason with them, and tell them that there’s nothing here. That I’ve already been here, and it’s all old junk. They won’t budge, and are militant to me in the way that kids are around their friends. Mostly bravado.
I’m a fighter, but the only kind of weapon I have is one I use to fight aliens. I don’t know what I can do, but try to use my wiles to keep them away from the old woman, wherever she is.
I follow them around, and look in one room, where I can see the old woman’s shape vaguely under a green and white bedspread. If she lies perfectly still, you can’t see her at all. There’s probably a cutout in the bed for her. She is moving to let me know that she is there. I barely whisper to her in acknowledgement and attempt to lead them away.
I think I must get rid of this crew, but then I’m searching the rest of the house to make sure there are no stragglers.
I look in a stairwell to the basement, in a hole where the cats have been known to hide. They rush out and I attempt to comfort them, before standing and realizing there is a young man with a knife standing over me.
He’s part of a second group that has broken into the house, only he plans to go less peacefully. A chase starts through the house. I use the only weapons my have: my cunning and apparently hand-to-hand combat.
But it turns out I’m unnumbered, and another one of the group has found the old lady.
Yet a third group, this one a middle-aged couple in a semi-truck, comes into the house and happens into the fight. At first, I think they can be trusted for help, but instead, they want to pick over the meager findings in this old house.
They have guns, though.
I don’t know what happens next, but several people are dead. They are dragged out and dumped. I think the truck couple are the winners. I still hope that they will leave, and do a quiet search for the old woman.
I find that someone had discovered her, and stabbed her to death. There are red bloodstains where someone had poked through her bedspread, seeing through the deception. Either just out of maliciousness, or perhaps because she had moved.
I then do a frantic search for the cats, and find them alive, if very shaken. They won’t let me pick them up, and now I’m scared. I don’t want to leave them here, but I can’t stay here either. I plot some way to get them to come with me.