I dreamt, I dreamt...

I dreamt I was part of a team. There were five of us. Six, if you include the sick woman.

There was the techno-geek, a slim, dark-skinned man. He was quiet, but confident. He knew his technology better than anyone, and had a sort of perpetual smile that was more sad than happy.

There was the brick, a dirty-bonde strong man, who was not too bright, but loyal to the end. I saw him eating a shoe insert once, covered in syrup. He was the Boss' puppy dog, if you will.

There was the driver. She never went in with us. She had a short, irregular pixie cut, dyed a bunch of shades of brown. She had a sleek look about her, like a Greyhound, and chewed gum constantly. She had a bit of a temper, which could be a problem, but she was okay as long as she stayed in the car.

There was the Boss. He had white hair, cut short, former military. I think we called him by a variety of military titles, but there never seemed to be just one. I don't know that he was in the military, but he had that sort of bearing. He was frighteningly organized, passionate, and angry.

There was his mother. Nobody really saw her, except for the Boss. She was very, very sick. She stayed underground with us, always, too ill to go anywhere. We stole to help her, as well as ourselves.

And then there was me. I was the thief. I cracked safes and picked locks. I was slim and tall, with straight brown hair. I didn't work well under pressure, which isn't good when you're a high profile thief, but we managed. I didn't worry about the getting in or the getting out, just the actual stealing.

Together we stole things. Sometimes I didn't even know what it was that we stole. Sometimes I just picked the locks and the Boss would sort through the items and take things.

Sometimes it was jewelry and precious items, but more often it was paper and computer files.

We did skyscrapers and high-rise condos. Hard stuff. High enough up that nobody suspected we could get to it.

We were on a job. It was the middle of the night, but there was so much artificial light, it felt like a blue twilight.

We were in a high-rise office building in a swank area of town. All the walls were glass, and glittered blue, the colour of money and corruption.

We went in from the outside. I don't remember that part. My dream started just as I picked the lock on the inner office.

The Boss went in to find what we were looking for, but my attention was pulled around by our technogeek. He should have been preparing our exit by the window, but he had this look on his face, like a hound after a scent.

Next thing I knew, there was another man in the room. Another thief. He'd been breaking in from the inside.

He was excited to see other people doing the same thing he was. He wanted to join us. The Boss was stressed, being on the job, and told him to go to hell.

And alarm went off.

It shouldn't have gone off. We looked at each other and knew it was the new guy.

"Move!" the Boss shouted, and we all ran for the window, where the technogeek had a primitive elevator set up.

"You can't leave me!" the new guy shouted. He was afraid. I could tell he was pretty green, but cocky at the same time. I felt threatened by him, and wanted to leave him behind.

We jumped on the platform. It was perfectly balanced for our combined weight. We started our rapid descent.

The platform jerked. We looked up and the technogeek hissed. The newbie had grabbed onto the cable and was riding it down with us. We were out of balance. We were going too fast.

"Bend your knees, everybody! Soft knees!" the Boss shouted over the scream of the cable.

The drive was waiting with the car, just below us. The platform his the concrete with a deafening crash and we staggered from the impact.

We jumped in the car, hearts beating, and roared off without checking on the newbie. The alarm clammered overhead, echoing in the empty building. The streets were deserted. It was still dark, but dawn would happen soon.

The park next to the river was deserted when we pulled up. The decorative bushes along the road split and showed a driveway into the ground.

"Should we turn off the light?" the technogeek asked the Boss. There was one streetlamp on. I don't know why the others weren't on.

"Leave it," the Boss said. He was on a high from getting away. There was no pursuit. He was grinning. "We'll kill some bugs tonight." The lamp was swarming with bugs already.

The technogeek didn't respond. He just left it.

We pulled in and everybody went to their rooms to wind down. The driver stayed with the car. She liked that car. The Boss went to check on his mother.

We reconvened in the hallway, quite by accident. It was a military bunker kind of hallway, painted industrial yellow, with rivets along the ceiling. The Boss was grinning, beer in hand. It was one of his home-brews, the only kind he drank.

We were all grinning, except for the technogeek, who was the quiet sort and wasn't really paying attention, and the brick, who was eating a shoe insert.

The Boss passed me his beer and I took a swig. It was a pilsner. I liked it. I could just see him now, filtering the water himself, testing the PH and checking for chemicals, running everything through vigerous testing before be brewed the stuff in a sealed room, farther back in the compound.

The Boss indicated me and the beer in my hand.

"Look at us," he said, grinning. I hadn't seem him so happy in so long. His mother must be doing well. "Look at you! When was the last time you can remember just relaxing and having a beer?"

I grinned. I couldn't remember. I drank more of the beer. It had been a long time since I felt so relaxed, even though we'd just been on a heist go almost wrong.

"The River almost killed us," the Boss said, soberly. "But we won. And we will continue to win." I thought of the Boss' mother, barely conscious, and the chemicals that almost burned out her brain. I thought of the River, teeming with run-off of an over industrialized nation.

The technogeek got that look on his face, the thoughtful, listening look, but he wasn't listening to to Boss. He was looking up the sloping hallway to the door to the outside.

He slipped away while the Boss was still talking. I watched him go, and didn't stop him. He did that from time to time.

This time there was a shout, and the technogeek came back, dragging the newbie. He was stuggling, but not hard. He had a smirk on his face that made me hate him instantly, but even as I felt these things, I knew the real reason I didn't like him was because he could replace me. He was talented, and young, and could improvise under pressure. He broke into that office alone, and we needed a whole team.

Sure, he set off an alarm, but those things could be learned.

"How did you find us?" the Boss asked. He'd forgotten I had his beer. I couldn't see the newbie very well from where I was sitting.

"You left the light on," the newbie said with a smirk. The Boss was furious, I could tell, but he wasn't about to do anything stupid. This kid could be a valuable asset.

And then I woke up with a mild hangover, and an irrational fear of the River.

I shit you not, this is the kind of dreams I have.

A segment of a story. And I can promise you, I will never dream of this or these people again.

Before&After