Alpha Australias a fantasy fiction novel

Untitled Part 2

 ALPHA  AUSTRALIAS. 01

                                                     

                                                                                                                               

                                                                                   Mick Low   

 

 

         

                                                                      

CHAPTER 1

Trip to Saucer Mountain

                 

If this wasn't so serious it would be funny, Bill Jones thought. Then, as if putting it into words would in some way help he said out loud, “Strange things pass through a man's mind when he is in real trouble, and trouble doesn't get anymore real than this—or anymore strange for that matter.” His face contorted with pain as he searched for some form of escape.

He was on a rectangular steel frame two metres long and a bit over one and half metres wide. Through the centre of the frame, lengthwise, was a steel beam, mounted at one end of this centre beam there was a winch, the sort of winch that was usually used for pulling small boats up on to their trailers. It was on a pole about a metre high from the base of the contraption.

The frame was flat and level as it had been when it was on the ground but now it was rocketing straight up and at great speed. Bill Jones hung over the winch pole with the handle of the winch buried painfully deep into his left shoulder. His legs dangled helplessly through the bottom of the frame. His right hand, streaked with blood groped at the winch handle as he tried desperately to lift some of his weight, his left arm hung useless and numb. He couldn’t reach any part of this strange apparatus with his good hand.

Crying out with anguish he stretched out his right leg searching for something solid to take his weight but no part of the structure was immediately below him and to push on the part nearest to him, which was to his right, caused him to twist his body and bury the handle even deeper into his flesh making the pain unbearable.

            He thought, if I don't find some way of stopping this thing I have only seconds to live. Looking down through the frame past his dangling legs he was unable to distinguish the exact spot he had left from only seconds ago. Even in his present predicament – even with the pain that seared through his whole being he froze for a moment agape at the immensity of it all.

 Far below, the ground was like a distant patchwork quilt made up of the reds and browns of the Australian outback mottled with the greens of the thinly veiled treetops. Looking to the edge of the fantastic scene, he could see the curvature of the earth like a section of a giant round balloon floating in a vast black ocean.

The speck of colour that was the roofs of his family homestead buildings had disappeared into the mosaic pattern. He knew that there was the place he had begun this unbelievable journey and there was the place where his family stood at this moment. If only I had realized the power of these stones sooner, he thought.