I'd gotten hit in the head running from the angry crowd I had encountered. I only guessed that as I awoke face down on dawn-lit streets. There was an eerie silence and desolate wreckage all around. Not a person in sight. Some smoke drifted across the street in front of me and caught the early morning sunlight in a strange way.

I reached my hand up and found part of my scalp hanged stickily off the back of my head. I concluded that I had gotten hit by a thrown projectile and left there on the ground. I felt numb.

I walked for a few blocks and still saw nobody anywhere. Or is it somebody nowhere? I needed medical attention, because it turned out I had a concussion. My phone was gone.

It was then that I saw the open doors of a church and some people inside. Decent people had come although there was vandalism and someone had actually broken a stained-glass window. This outraged me more than the random assault I'd suffered. I am not even religious at all. I don't care about superstition and mythology. But really? A stained-glass window? I am sure anyone who isn't a savage would understand why killing someone is less of an atrocity than breaking a stained-glass window on-purpose.

I wasn't sure if I felt that way before I got hit in the head while running for my life and then left for dead on the street. Perhaps it was the brain damage, maybe I went crazy or maybe I became a prophet. I couldn't be sure.

I simultaneously recalled a quote from the Bible and another from Road Warrior. I had read the Bible, but that is another story. I just said them out loud since the people were praying in silence. My voice echoed like a sermon and nobody tried to silence me as I said:

"The Angel led me back and forth among them and I saw them as they are. Their bones littered the ground all around me, and they were very dry bones." I heard myself saying this but had no idea what part of the Bible it was from or even why I said it and then I added: "But we in here are still human beings, with dignity. You're out there with the garbage; just another maggot feeding off the corpse of the old world."

As I said this last part I swung around and faced the open church door for no reason I knew and I pointed at a young man in his uniform. He wore the face of another man on his t-shirt and it was meant to give him license to commit evil and destroy the world. He looked repentant. I raised my arms up and said to him:

"Take off thy blood-soaked garment. Come and rest with thy family."

So he stripped off his t-shirt he had worn proudly the night before and found his aunt and his sister were behind me, praying for him. Evidently their prayers worked. He looked at me strangely, seeing that I was obviously in the wrong place. Maybe he was the one who had injured me. I didn't care.

I genuinely felt joy at seeing his return to his family and his rejection of wrongdoings.

I didn't know what was happening to me. Suddenly I remembered more from the previous night. Without understanding how I could just be observing myself act, I walked to the pulpit. There I saw the deacon laying dead on the floor.

I gasped in horror and felt myself starting to sweat. He had served this community and they had killed him anyway, despite the fact that he had belonged here. At least he had belonged in a sense that I do not. Yet his death had come. Then I remembered that I might already be dead anyway. So I laughed at the sight like some sort of madman.

"Do you all see the wages of sin? Did he not preach that a day had come? It was his day, he was a liar to you all." I said to them. My mind recoiled at my own words and where I stood. I was not a holy man and these people did not see me as one of them. Why were they listening to me? "Beware that you now follow wolves in sheep's clothing. Beware that you have divided yourselves from the truth. Beware that your leaders are false. Beware that you have sold your children to enslavement to a new and terrible master. These are the wages of sin."

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"Death." one woman stood up and said this. They were agreeing with me? I didn't even know why I was saying any of that stuff. But they seemed to. I saw fear and crying. People were shaking. One man got up and walked trembling out into the aisle and began convulsing violently. I waited patiently before I resumed my sermon. Some part of me was screaming in anguish and terror, trying to regain control and flee this insanity.

Instead of taking command over my own body and mouth I walked over to the baptismal font and looked down. I saw it was filled with bleached bones. Then it wasn't.

The decision that I had truly lost my sanity hit my internal terrified self. My willpower was not strong enough to become myself again. I was this other person, this weird loudly preaching guy who quoted the Bible, Eighties movies and who-knows-what. The numb feeling I had earlier was now just a plateau of terror, fear that I was being controlled somehow by someone else. Worse, that I had become someone else, gripped by the madness all around me. Converted into a person I am not.

"My neighbors, my friends." I addressed them directly. "You may reject my words. You might even kill my messenger..."

"What?! issat me? Oh no!"

"But even when you turn your back on me, I will never stop believing in you. That is because I love you. And against my love, hatred cannot prevail." my voice was saying. It had completely lost me at this point and I had no idea what was happening.

Then they all stood up and they began to dance and sing and there were more tears and convulsions. I regained control of myself and all-of-a-sudden it was difficult to stand and my head hurt and I was dizzy. I staggered out of the church, ignored by the jubilant congregation.

My nightmare-fueled moment lingered in my mind. I felt far more afraid of what had just happened than the fear I had felt running for my life last night. I could not understand any of it and I rejected all of it as imagined or perhaps I was temporarily insane. Nothing made sense as I wandered through those broken and empty streets where smoke lingered.

I saw a dog nudging something and it looked up at me and growled. Then it changed its mind when I made eye contact and it whined and retreated. I walked for over an hour before I was finally home. I had no idea where my car was. Maybe it had gotten destroyed.

I went into my home and for the first time I saw the damage I had suffered. Half of my face was a bruise and the mess on the back of my head saw by angling the cabinet mirror in my bathroom against the sink's vanity mirror. The my skull was exposed back there.

Later I got into the E.R. and received some first aid when they cleaned it and put some staples in it. I didn't ask how many. When I got home it was dusk and I saw the dog from earlier in my front yard. It was staring intently at me and it had something in its mouth.

For a moment I realized I might still be seeing things, but it didn't stop the panic and terror from seizing me. I could see the ground littered in skeletons and I screamed and tried to flee to my front door, past the dead. But I fell to my knees while they rose up around me. I was whimpering and I started to pray. For the first time in my life I was praying. It was just "Dear God" over and over like a mantra. But I meant it. The dead formed a procession and left me there. Then the dog stopped over me where I had curled up into a horror-induced fetal position.

Its watery eyes stared deep into mine and I knew this might be the same dog, but it was not at all the same animal. Its mouth opened and blood was dripping to the ground and coming closer. My prayers had descended into sobs and whimpers of fright. Then it nuzzled my hand open under its mouth and it dropped something into my open hand.

Then the dog left me there in the dark. The street lights were on as I gradually collected myself, sniffling and sweating. I uncurled my fingers around what it had given to me:

A small cross made of two thin bones.