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On The Run
A man stood looking, a faraway look in his eyes as he searched over the plains of a uncharted world under a nameless sun. The sun was about to go nova, to die, but the light from its approaching death would not wash across Terra’s shores for five thousand years. He was searching for the flaw, his one way out, his one escape from them and (as an afterthought) the threatening nova. He found it and ran towards it; even as he watched them close in out of nowhere and everywhere he knew what he had to do. Running, not looking back…didn’t dare in truth but they were there anyway, watching, waiting, and following. His sole advantage being that they couldn’t see flaw’s, unless he passed through it.
He ran knowing that this single chance was only a slim one, a forlorn hope that even if it succeeded he wouldn’t be better off…not that he cared…much, but anything was better then facing them. He ran and ran, unable to stop even if he had wanted or dared to and finally he arrived. The man stepped into the flaw, twisting in space and time, and as he stepped out he found nothing, then again nothing was one of the chances he had taken when he had entered. He looked around just in case, but it was a perfect nothing, they were not visible.
A few sounds shattered the cloak of silence for a moment, it came from the man and if you knew the long dead, or newly born, language it worked out to, "I can really learn to hate this place."
The nothing mutated slowly as they tried to enter, the darkness that replaced it wasn’t really darkness, in the human sense. It was another order of darkness, above and beyond, not quite real, twisting, and tugging, itching at the senses. The silence wrapped itself harder and harder, choking the man as they tried to enter.
They found a path and the silence shattered into a thousand pieces as they arrived but nothing could touch him here but the rightful owner, not even the things pursuing him.
The voices whispered around him, trying to tempt him but he had long experience in facing them and he ignored it. He was waiting for the owner of this place to banish them, and him – hopefully to different places. The silence merged back together as the owner arrived, whispers caught and held in endless shadows. One by one he felt them leave banished from the silence to everywhere and nowhere…from whence they came. It would take them some time to get back together to find him again, unless he ended up next to one of them. Then it was turn; he screamed wordlessly and silently as he was torn out and thrust back into the human universe.
The brightness of a sun was shocking after the endless dark and he screamed again, his voice loud and clear, as he covered his eyes with a thin, scrawny hand. After a minute or three, time was never his strong point, his eyes adjusted and he looked around. He was on an open plain, a few trees swaying gently in the wind; trees that were blue shaded instead of the Earthly green. He got up slowly, using his withered muscles again for the first time in a long time, or a very short time depending on your perspective. Relativity’s a bitch. The sun was a blue-white color that was reasonably common to the people who had spread from Terra.
He looked down at his body; his clothes were tattered, falling apart, which revealed an intricate series of scars, tracing strange patterns down the length of his body like a demented artist with no consideration for the painting. It had once been in perfect shape, the best and latest technologies incorporated, now it was a hollow shell of it’s former self. He spent only a few seconds staring at his body before he sighed, and began.
Walking, he winced at the familiar pain of walking barefoot, the barbed, blue tinted grass was not familiar but the pain was.
Days later he was still trudging along, a hunk of bloody meat slung over his back. He had been lucky, the remnants of his implants sufficing to allow him to digest the food on this planet.
If you had been observing him from far above, as someone might be, you would see a long trail of dead and withered grass and a few skeletons. Zooming in you make out the details, the skeletons with their unfamiliar bone structure, lattices of bone replacing layers of ribs that were more familiar to humans, the grass withering and dying soon after his foot touched it, animals beginning to avoid him.
The planet rejected him; humans could not survive for any length of time on its surface.
He hoped he would have been across the plain by now but he wasn’t, mountains loomed far away, hazy in the distance. He looked around, he had encountered only one oasis on the way and while he could go on for some time he would need water within two or three days before his performance was impaired.
He glanced up at the sky, the sun hang low in the sky, the fact that it took forever to set mocking him. He paused for a moment, shook his head at the fates then continued to walk.
The trail of dead things was spreading before him now but he trusted in the fact that he would be out of here before it mattered. At least if they skipped the relativity bit and went wormhole.
He was right.
The ship descended from the clear sky like the angel of death, fire streaming from its engines, the rumble rippling out before it.
He smiled a melancholy smile and walked to meet it.