The Spatial Blight

Chapter 2: Awakening

When I awake from a dreamless sleep, I'm engulfed in darkness. I can't breathe. I try to move, but the darkness presses in against me.

My heart races in fear. I struggle against the oppressing dark, aware that I'm running out of air. Suddenly I feel my fingertips break out of the darkness as fresh air hits them. I thrash upward with all my strength, and poke my nose out of what feels like sand. I breathe in deeply, then burst out of the ground.

I lay on the black sand and just breathe. I almost died.

As my memory comes back, worry floods my mind. Where am I? What happened to my friends? What happened to Delta Corps? I remember a creature coming out of an asteroid, absorbing me, and getting hurled out of it, but I have no idea how long I've been unconscious. I look down at my hands, expecting to see them scarred and bloody, but there are no injuries. I look up, then back down at my hands. Something seems off about them.

Then I notice it: my veins are black instead of blue and red. Horror sweeps over me, but as I watch, the black slowly fades back to its regular color, leaving me wondering if I really saw it or if it was just some sort of hallucination.

I look around. Shapeless black dunes of sand rise around me, blocking my line of sight in all directions. I begin to climb one of the dunes, but it takes far more energy than it should and I collapse when I'm ten feet from the top. I slide back down to the bottom of the hill. It takes me half an hour to climb a thirty-foot tall hill, and I'm exhausted when I reach the top. I sit down and put my head in my hands, taking deep breaths. When I'm ready, I stand and look out over the strange planet's environment.

To the west and north, there are flat plains of black sand spotted with liquid-looking patches. The east is a forest of black, leafless trees with branches like claws stretching toward the sky. To the south, rolling hills stretching off to the horizon.

As I survey the landscape, something moves in the corner of my eye. I turn and see, off in the distance, a monster just like the one that knocked me out of the asteroid creature. It has a black, shiny body, saurian and almost graceful. Its head twists into three points, with round eyes and a fanged smile stretched tight. Its arms are impossibly twisted, but its hands are human.

For a moment, we stare at each other. Then its head swivels away from me and it starts climbing up a dune, slowly, carefully. Suddenly a human leaps over the dune, holding a metal stick. I gasp. Another human, I think. I'm not alone in this strange world.

A thought occurs to me. I saw the asteroid alien begin to infect the ground around it with black sand. Is this place still Earth after all?

Sudden loud sounds draw my attention back to the creature. The human's stick has extended into a black crystal sword and the strange creature's right hand has become a thin blade. They trade blows almost too fast for my eyes to follow, and then something shifts. The human slices off the creature's blade as it starts to turn toward me.

Some sort of instinct flashes through me and I drop to the ground, hoping the human didn't see me. Then my logic reasserts itself. I stand and watch as the human walks away from the prone form of the creature.

I run down the sand dune, stopping to grab the fallen blade from the alien's body, then follow the human's trail. I peek over the top of the dune and see the human pull something out of his backpack and press a button. A keypad on a metal pole rises out of the sand. The human taps on the keypad and a hole slides open in the ground by the base of the keypad. The human climbs into the hole, and it shuts behind them.