Bum Rush

              In my dream, this morning, I found myself with a bedroll and a small backpack full of various odds and ends. I was without a home, and without a destination as well. I walked up the ramp a little bit outside of the crowd. There was some sort of commotion and then music, pipes and drums. I stepped up onto a tree stump to see over the crowd.
              In the center of the ramp was a white and gold uniformed drill team. They had rifles and flags and white boots, but no bottoms. They began to march up the ramp, the crowd following. I stayed back a bit, and when we reached the flat at the top of the ramp, I took a side ramp further up around the dirt hill on the side of the stadium. Several others had joined me, trying to stay away from the large crowd and also trying to get some altitude to see the whole field from. Behind us was a rusted platform of some sort. A couple of folks jumped aboard and invited the rest of us. Just as I climbed aboard the rusted platform jerked, knocking us all off our feet. I smashed my elbow against a yellow enamel and rust colored loading crane towards the center of the platform, which it was now obvious was a rail car of some sort.
              Before I could get myself back on my feet we were careening down the hill past a station house and along a siding that lead into a car house. We were going far to fast to jump off, which was my greatest desire at the moment.
              “They've got a sixty millimeter!” someone shouted as we were flung forward, the brakes on the car sparking under us as we rolled to a stop in the car house.
              Several of us jumped down off of the car running for the door, which rolled shut before only a couple of us could escape. There was a pair of large windows across from our car. I started across the five sets of tracks when the door was punctured by rapid sixty millimeter cannon fire. I dove back under our crane car. The bullets tore through the dust of the room, leaving visible trails, and tore fist sized chunks out of the the rear wall of the carriage house. After cutting a six foot long line in the door, each shot about two inches from the previous, a second line sprang up, the holes a mere four inches from the previous.
              “It's a trap!”
              “How are we going to get out of here? They're shooting between us and the door.”
              I didn't bother to point out that the door was on the wall they were shooting up, so anyone foolish enough to open that door to leave, even if they could get to it, would be a prime target.
              “You have to get us out of here, what's the plan?” a homeless gentleman, like myself, asked me.
              “Give him time, he's got a plan, I'm sure.” Said a middle aged woman, who was holding her pre-teen daughter tightly to her.
              “How'd I get the the job of planning our escape?”
              “You always figure out how to get out of these situations.” Another woman explained. She sat next to me, gently inspecting my shattered elbow, and then wrapping it in some stips of cloth from her own pack.
              She was heavy, but in a smooth skinned and firm way that was very attractive. I would liked to have stayed cuddled with her longer, but the circumstances required some sort of action.
              I jumped down off of the platform car, and crouched down below the level of the stream of bullets. As I neared the firing zone, a new line started, this one about a foot off of the ground.
              “It's like they could read your mind!”
              “No, like they can see us.” I stepped back to the car, looking up into the corners of the carriage house for cameras or microphones, knowing that it was unlikely that I could spot them. I looked over to the other side of the carriage house, and found some barrels of fuel stored against the wall. There were a couple of hand pumps as well.
              “If they start shooting over here, we're cooked.” but the fuel gave me an idea of how we might actually get out of the place.
              “We've got to get the crane working. Start pumping fuel into its tank, and spray some up on boom to loosen up the rust.”
              I jumped down and rolled a fuel barrel off of its cradle towards the front of our car, hoping that whatever they were using to spy on us couldn't see between the platform car and the wall. It took a couple of us to roll the fuel barrel under the front end of the platform, but we managed, and it just fit between the wheels. It was my intent to ram open the door with the platform car, swinging the crane towards the gun carriage, while the rest of the people escaped by jumping off the back of the platform car and running into the woods next to the rail station. I expected the fuel drum to roll out from under our car after we broke through the door and hoped it would be an effective distraction. We rolled another barrel into the line of fire where they were focused on terrorizing us with the inevitability of our demise at their hands.
              I was hoping the fuel explosion and fire would cover up the sound of the crane engine turning over and driving our car forward by extending the boom against the back wall. I told everyone if the boom broke through the back wall to make a break for it that way.