Thunder crashes. Lightning flashes. And between the sheets of pounding rain, he can barely hear the screams.
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Landon wakes to a stifling, unbearable heat.
His eyes crack open before they shut again. Light beams from above. And as he runs his tongue over his lips, Landon winces at the rough, cracked texture.
He struggles to sit up. And as the earth -- sand -- shifts beneath his fingers, he brings one arm up to shield his eyes.
“Fuck,” he groans, eyes roving over the vast desert before him. White-brown sand stretches out as far as he can see, and the sun belts down -- a constant reminder of the dry burning heat that bakes his body and tightens the skin on his face and arms. It’s a familiar feeling. Sunburn. And it reminds him of his stepfather, of the days spent out in the open water with the wind at his back.
But those days are long gone. Stuck in the past. Landon sighs. His breath is as hot as the air. Dry, too. He fumbles his phone from his pocket and grimaces when it won’t turn on. “Of course,” he snorts. Twisting his neck and back, popping both, he can’t help but stop and stare at the scene behind him.
The stranded cargo ship makes him blink; the separated aft makes him laugh (because really, it looks like some kid got too handsy with a model boat); and the sharp stab in his stomach makes him double over and grit his teeth through his chortles. The young man runs one hand through sweaty, matted hair, and brings the other away from his gut.
‘That’s a lot of red.’
Landon huffs. What else can he do? So he stands, stumbles, and falls a little closer to the giant tanker that is somehow beached in the middle of the fucking desert, and all he can do is wonder if they’ve got some aloe stashed away for his blistered skin.
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“The Libra?”
The Boat’s name is painted on the back like a shitty tramp stamp. He isn’t surprised; shipping and military vessels always do this type of thing, but it truly becomes annoying with commercial ships and privately owned ego pieces.
He releases a slow breath as he sinks into the sand. The Libra’s long cast shadow had helped take the edge off his blistered skin -- turning the nine intensity into a low six -- but the cooler sand is what really helps him relax a bit. According to his watch, Landon has walked for about an hour just to get this close, and he estimates its going to take another twenty minutes at his slower pace to approach the hole where it’s been torn down the middle.
Breathe in. Count to ten. Exhale.
It doesn’t take him long to rise. He’s cooled down some. Not much. But just enough to where his head isn’t spinning like a top and he no longer feels the need to hurl up lunch he never ate. The ship (or, at least what isn’t stuck in the sand) is massive, and it still takes Landon a fair bit of time to approach the end. Eventually, he comes to a stop, and stares at what lies before him.
The separation of the ship is not clean. He has seen plenty of boats scrape rocks and capsize, he has even seen ships that have buckled and cracked under the weight of water, but this vessel looks to be torn in half. He had not been able to tell from the angle he had approached at, but where the aft was separated, it looked as if something put pressure on the craft --like a frat boy with a beer-can-- before tearing the aft completely off and dropping it in the sand.
He swallows. It’s a sobering thought, one that he hopes has an easy explanation. ‘Actually, screw that,’ he thinks. ‘If anyone has a word for this, I hope it’s so pretentious I can’t pronounce it.’ With that final thought, he comes around the side, and makes his way into the tanker.
He carefully climbs the sand that has blown into the hull, weary of any loose steel or blown apart scrap. Briefly, a grin pulls at his lips, and he can’t help but feel like an action star in a forgettable summer blockbuster. The thought dies as quickly as it came as his eyes adjust to the interior.
The first thing he notices is that the lights are on. It’s still darker inside than the belting, noon-day desert sun, but there’s plenty of overhead lights on this level. The second thing he notices is the cargo. There are several large shipping crates littered on the floor. He assumes they had been stacked on top of each other in neat rows at one point or another, but with whatever fate befell the ship, that was no longer the case.
The third thing he notices are the large, empty cages. “That’s not for livestock,” he whispers. Generally, livestock would be stored above the hull in large open barriers that are designed after stables. More modern vessels would have mostly windowed rooms with steel enforcement so that animals could keep circadian rhythm and have natural light exposure.
These cages looked like they were meant for exotic game.
“Hello?” He calls out, winces at the weak sound of his voice as it echoes. Yet there is no reply. He walks forward, stops at one of the smaller boxes stuck in the sand, and sits down. Leaning back against the other crate it is stacked against, he blows out his nose and listens.
There’s nothing. He is alone. Only the metal, wind, and sand keep him company now.
Landon breathes in. Counts to ten. Exhales.
He waits fifteen minutes before he moves again. It takes all he has to stand, and he finds himself leaning on the containers like a cane to keep himself up at times. “My head hurts,” he grumbles, “my legs hurt, my side hurts--” he puts his first knuckles to his nose and shotguns out a clump of snot, crust, and blood.
“Everything fuckin’ hurts.”
It takes a while, but eventually, he comes to a set of stairs that lead to the upper level. That’s a bit of a problem. But it’s also a blessing. Off to the side of the stairs sits a mud sink: something that (based on the smell) the workers had used to wash piss and shit off themselves from the cargo -- yet it fills him with an eerie hope that he’d all but abandoned. His heart hammers and his arms shake and his legs tremble when he braces against the sink, leans forward, and turns the nozzle.
With a hiss, the water starts.
He runs his tongue over his teeth in a slow, practiced motion before his lips twitch up into a half-grin. “Oh, thank god,” he laughs, and with quivering hands, he reaches out to cup the water between his palms.
It’s warm. Tepid, but not hot. It builds up in his hands, runs through his fingers and down his arms. After a bit, he begins to clean off the dirt that had caked up everywhere above his elbows, pulls back his hair, and leans down far enough to drink from the spigot.
As far as water goes, the taste is dreadful. It’s sour. At least one part lemon juice. But he’s thirsty. So he drinks and drinks and drinks some more until his stomach hurts and he almost hurls.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He does, after a while. Almost half the water that he’d slammed back like a freshman with a kegger ends up in a puddle beside him when he crouches down against the wall. It doesn’t stop the laugh that tears from his lips as he slides further down; until his butt touches the floor, and his knees are brought up under his chin.
It doesn’t stop the stabbing in his side either. It’s sudden, fast, and hits harder than his step-dad after the one time he’d stolen a fifth of whisky from his liquor cabinet. Landon locks his jaw before he twists and leans back against the metal wall. With shaking hands, he starts to unbutton his shirt.
The wound in his side looks worse than it feels.
It’s hard to tell with his undershirt on (and honestly, there’s no way in hell he’s going to try and peel that off right now) but he can see the gross, gnarly hole that is his wound. Stuffed with the fabric of both shirts, sealed with blood and dirt and grime. “Shit,” he whispers out between clenched teeth. “Shit!” He repeats, frantic. It looks bad. It looks really, really bad. It doesn’t look infected, yet, but on a scale from one to ten, it sits comfortably in the nine to nine-and-a-half ‘I’m literally about to fuckin’ die’ range.
Landon breathes in. Counts to ten. Exhales.
He repeats himself several times. ‘It’s okay’ he thinks. ‘It isn’t bleeding.’ He starts another count.
‘One. Two. Three…’
He stops at seven and stands. His vision blurs and his legs shake, but he refuses to fall. Moving carefully, stepping over the pool of vomit he left on the floor -- no way in hell does he want to slip on that right now -- he makes his way to the stairs.
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Something is wrong. Incredibly wrong. Different: strange, like traveling to another country where no one speaks English, and everyone stares at the out of place tourist.
There’s truth there. Landon is out of place. It shows when it takes him almost two hours to make his way across the deck, into accommodations, and to find the med bay. No heart or cross marks the door. Instead, a pink egg smiles back at him from above the frame. He had missed it on two prior passes through the hallway, and only when he opened the door (once he stopped to look for a bite to eat) did he realize that he had stumbled into the doctor’s office.
On the inside it looks like any other bay. One of the strange, blue beds covered in white paper sheets rests in the corner. Plenty of posters adorn the wall, most about workplace safety or vision or something else that he has historically ignored. What attracts his attention are the slew of cabinets containing various medications that he starts to pick through.
The similarities end there.
None of the labels are familiar. He pulls one out, glances at it, and places it down on the counter below. The bottles do not even look the same. ‘For dizziness, issues with depth perception--’ he stops reading and again, moves it down below. There are no orange prescription pop tops here. No white, over-the-counters he is familiar with, and instead, he has thirty or forty pastel bottles with cartoon animal shapes. Landon grabs one that looks like a small bear, snorts as he reads the multivitamin label, and places it with the others.
There are plenty of stylized graphics. They are bright, vibrant, and impossible to miss.
He recognizes none of them.
“Topical ointment,” he scoffs, because of course the ointment is in the shape of a fruit. He can’t wait to screw off the top and slather his bullet wound with some apple spread. “Apply to burns or shallow lacerations.” He glances through more of the medical jargon on the label before coming to a stop. “Helps with infections.”
He drums his fingers against the counter. After a second, instead of putting it with the rest he had gone through so far, he separates this one out and places it by itself. Even if he can’t use the apple butter Neosporin now, it does more for him than discount Dramamine and the Flintstones he had put to the side.
“Pure Blissy,” he picks up the next one and rolls it around in his hand. Marked similarly as the med bay door, a smiling egg stares back at him from the front of the pink label. “Helps with…” he pauses, rereading the words.
“Helps with pain, and stimulates rapid recovery.”
‘What does that even mean?’ Landon rolls his jaw, palms the supposed miracle drug, and pops the top. He expects horse pills. Something so cartoonishly large that no human can swallow them. Instead he pulls a handful of colorful vitamin gummies.
“No way,” he says, snorting. Without thinking about it, he grabs a couple of them, and tosses them into his mouth. In hindsight, maybe not his best idea, but given the craziness of the situation at hand, he cares little. Worst case, he goes on a ride, and whatever drug induced coma he will suddenly go into can snap him out of the insane reality that he currently lives in.
‘At least they got the piss water taste out of my mouth.’
He coughs. Despite the water he’d chugged, somehow, his throat is sandpaper: coarse, rough, and dryer than the dusty air outside. He clears it before pulling another bottle off the rack. ‘Use in case of light fever--’ Landon quits reading, puts the bottle in the pile, and continues with the next.
Decongest. Goes in the pile. He picks up what looks like a candy shaker next. The garish purple color and the large red ‘X’ striking through a… ‘Is that a skull and crossbone?’ He pauses, curiosity momentarily overpowering his confusion until he realizes it’s just cough medicine. He tosses that, too.
Landon picks through the rest of them one at a time, only stopping to place a potential anti-inflammatory next to the snake oil gummies and the ointment. His hand comes up and he scratches against the back of his head.
As he stares down at all these funny shapes, some of them catch his attention again, and he suddenly feels a strong sense of nostalgia. A frown pulls at his lips. “Wait a second,” he crouches down to eye level, picks up, and looks -- really stops and stares -- at the multivitamin bear that he had checked first. It’s cute, with a head just as big as its body.
But what catches his attention is the large crescent moon on the forehead.
‘That’s a teddiursa.’
The realization takes a second to settle. His focus snaps back to the bottles he had separated out. The generic pain medicine shaped like a star was the first he flipped around. The name of it stared back at him in an overly cursive, italicized font.
“Wish,” he says, voice strained. His mind runs on overdrive. The smiling, pink egg from the Pure Blissy label smiles back at him, and he reaches out to pick it up and do something he has never done: read the ingredient list on a pill bottle. All things considered, the list is fairly short. Most things listed seemed like generic filler, but towards the very end of the list, there was a single phrase that he caught, only adding to the absurdity.
“Preserved Soft-Boiled.”
‘Is that even possible?’ he thinks, focusing on something --anything-- else. ‘Can you preserve moves in a fashion to be used later? Is it the actual egg, or is it some fake pseudo-science?’
‘I fucking ate three of them,’ sits in the back of his mind the entire time.
Landon falls to the ground.
It isn’t dramatics. His legs do not give out on him because of some weak feeling of helplessness. Instead, he gets hit by a sudden wave of exhaustion, one that seeps deep into his muscles and bones, forcing him to his hands and knees to catch himself.
He passes out. It’s just for a fraction of a second, but his vision fades from dark to black and back again. He cannot breathe. Landon tries -- struggles for air in fast, needy gasps -- but the little he’d been able to hold rushes out of his lunges as his head hits the floor. He finds himself flat against cold tile.
Rolling onto his back, with his last moment of clarity, he stares down his open shirt and watches his bullet wound stitch itself back together in equal parts amazement and horror.
‘Damn,’ he thinks, jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth. ‘I can’t believe those gummies were laced with fent.’
Everything fades.