Goats from Lambs

Chapter 5

Rashida returned home after a long, frustrating day and entered her modest third floor apartment. She turned to triple lock the door before making her way to the kitchen, kicking off her boots one-by-one while dropping her jacket and bag, leaving a trail of belongings behind her.

Opening the cupboard to pull out a small rocks glass, Rashida then fetched a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured herself a generous 'double'. She thought about making herself some dinner, but after checking the vapid, yet moldy refrigerator shelves, she figured that another night of a 'liquid dinner' wouldn't hurt.

Slamming back the first glass in one shot, Rashida quietly winced in pain, as her seemingly endless headache finally began to lull itself. Taking a moment to enjoy the fading thrums, Rashida promptly poured herself another glass and moved towards the couch.

It wasn't that Rashida had a drinking problem, quite the opposite in fact. After months of her recurring nightmares, the only way Rashida could clock any sleep anymore, let alone quell her persistent headaches, was to drink herself into a semi-comatose state, but even then, sleep only seemed to come in miniature, restless spurts.

Rashida sat on the couch with the cool glass of cold vodka sweating in her palm. She couldn't stop thinking about what Jerry had said earlier that day, 'No fucking clue what we're dealing with'... what an asshole.

Jerry always had theories. Good theories. Even when they sounded like they were ripped from the pages of a 1950's sci-fi script, the majority of them actually turned out to be correct in the end, but she had never seen him stumped like this.

Was he just getting lazy? Rashida knew that sooner or later, Jerry would fall into the apathetic spiral that plagued most savants that went unchallenged, but this wasn't it. This case excited Jerry, fed his interests in the unknown, but there was something about how perplexed he was that Rashida found deeply unsettling.

Not having the answers felt like an itch that Rashida couldn't scratch. As she sat, stewing, taking giant sips of the cool, yet sharp vodka, she finally opted to drown out the noises of her scattered thoughts by turning on the TV and letting it lull her to sleep with the 'soothing' sounds of nine skillfully-casted strangers yelling at each other about 'immunity'.

As Rashida sat there, listening to the white noise of the worst parts of humanity, she felt her eyelids becoming heavy. She tried to keep them open out of spite towards what she knew was about to come but alas, it was a losing battle.

Slowly, Rahida's eyelids drifted closed as she slumped ever so slightly to the left, the glass of vodka gently lilting to the side, without spilling a drop.

* * *

Rashida suddenly found herself standing at the bottom a dried up lakebed. She was wearing a tattered and faded dress that she assumed had once been white but had been greyed with both age and its surroundings.

Wiggling her toes in what felt like warm Earth, Rashida looked down to see she was standing in a pile of ashes, still warm from whatever fires they came from.

Rashida scanned the landscape to see that the entire area had been scorched beyond reclamation. Everywhere she looked, the ground that had formerly been covered in liquid and algae, was now coated in a thick layer of grey and black ashes.

As Rashida shifted her feet, the ashes beneath her caught the warm, sulfur-filled breeze, dancing upwards towards the reddened sky and revealing a scorched black soil underneath.

The more the ashes cleared away, the more spherical rocks were revealed around Rashida, embedded in the black soil like polished stepping-stones. Approaching one of these rocks, Rashida paused in horror as she came to realize it was not a rock at all, but the face of Christina Bates.