Brown eyes stared bitingly out at me, framed by wavy, blonde hair that fell above a pair of unfortunately broad shoulders. Thin lips and a straight nose twisted into a scoff as I bent down to pull my Vans on. Looking at my reflection was a surefire way to ruin the confidence I’d managed to build up between my room and the front door, but short of covering the old vanity with a sheet it was pretty much unavoidable.

Coffee made my hands shake, and I wobbled back and forth while I struggled with my laces, my computer bag sliding down to hang around my neck. All the graceful athleticism I’d enjoyed practicing gymnastics after school had dried up after a year of poor sleep and no exercise. University was meant to be a time of growth and learning but my Bachelor of Business Management wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, and I was no closer to fixing any of my problems than I’d been six years ago. The excitement I’d felt after finishing high school had quickly faded and left me with the feeling that I was doing something wrong. Of course, I didn’t have even an inkling of what I was doing wrong, but I seemed to feel worse with every passing month.

I clunked my way downstairs, slipping my key away after I double-checked that the front door was locked. The sun shone low and weak over the city’s vast suburban sprawl, dancing across hundreds of damp tin rooves before it settled timidly across my back as I traipsed up the road.

The bus stop nearest my house was empty when I arrived. I sat down, then immediately decided standing was a better idea.

The bench, and by extension, my ass, were somehow damp in defiance of the arched roof that topped the graffiti covered bus stop. I huffed out a defeated breath and pulled out my phone to check the time.

Several minutes later, long after I’d gotten sick of watching cars zip by, the four-two-five arrived. It pulled sharply to the curb and wheezed out a breath of air as it sunk down to my level. Double doors opened with a squeak and another pungent exhalated buffeted me as I stepped into the bus.

The ride was long, and I wasn’t sure if the humid warmth inside was a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, it beat the chill outside, on the other it likely came from the mouths of the thirty other people crammed inside with me. Deciding it was better not to think about it, I tapped away at my phone one handed while I hung from an overhead bar with the other. The quiet chatter that passed between the other early morning commuters faded in and out over the drone of the engine and outside the sun slowly rose until it hid behind a layer of dreary cloud cover. After stopping and starting across what felt like half the city, the bus pulled alongside the curb once again and expelled a wave of students, who flooded out onto the university bus stop as one chattering, laughing mass.

Campus was more busy than usual. Market day tended to bring the students without classes in to browse the stalls and catch up with this or that club. Cutting through the crowds as quickly as I could, I beelined for the coffee shop that took up a small corner of the university’s main courtyard.

Slipping through the sliding glass doors, I found a seat in the corner and scanned the QR code on the table to order. It beat waiting in the line that stretched across the shop floor, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone just yet. There was time before my first lecture to enjoy the relative warmth of the café while I scrolled through my socials. It was a place I tended to end up on cooler days, or when I had time before classes. Watching friend groups and couples chatting and laughing was nice, even if it sometimes made me hate myself more for not joining in.

My drink arrived within a few minutes and the guy who brought it returned my smile which was nice. I’d ordered a hot chocolate. After all, two coffees in one morning, especially when I was already jittery was just masochistic.

After a half hour or so I left the café, glancing at a few of the stalls and signs as I passed. There wasn’t a lot I was interested in there, but it was always fun to watch the political clubs handing out their flyers and newsletters. Forced to set up next to one another the tension between the opposite ends of the spectrum was always palpable.

I slipped into my lecture hall and quickly crossed the floor to my usual spot in the front-left of the theatre-style hall. I’d found that the best place to be if you planned on working quietly and without interruption was as far from the main bloc of students as you could get, and well out of the lecturer’s sightline. I pulled out my things and settled into the conversations of the other early arrivals.

Hours later I held the door for a few of my classmates before I followed them out of our lecture hall. I got a smile from one and it felt half worth it until I had to squeeze past another group of students who had managed to block the entire hallway.

The Business, Economics and Law building retreated behind me. It was an imposing thing, five stories tall and built from heavy blocks of weathered sandstone that made it look like a beachside fortress. The interiors were modernised of course, and its glass walled, abstractly carpeted tutorial rooms gave me the feeling of sitting inside a fishbowl. A fishbowl filled unfortunately with people I just couldn’t bring myself to like. They were fine, in a general sense, but the grating of aggressive personalities against one another was painful during groupwork, and a quiet, razor thin tension during lectures. The competitiveness of it all was stifling.

It was for me, at least.

A short walk towards the river and then down into the science block brought me to my usual study spot. It was hidden away behind one of the Physics labs, down a set of stairs and a short, unlit cement corridor lined with exposed pipes that put most people off. Someone must have forgotten the area after throwing a table in there, but it was pretty much perfect for me. Unlike the libraries, it was quiet and open and somehow still had good internet despite being tucked away between two cement buildings. Best of all, there weren’t a hundred eyes roaming around, evaluating every move I made.

I opened my bag and pulled out my laptop, only for my pen to fall out alongside it.

Shit.

I bent down, gritting my teeth when my head banged painfully against the stainless tabletop.

Hisssssssssssssss.

A breeze blew against my face as a foreign suction pulled against my lower back. The staticky crack-pop of a broken power socket crackled in the air behind me as my hand closed around my pen. I swallowed with a suddenly dry throat as the ground grew further away. Like I’d been hooked onto a winch the pull against my back intensified and a feeling of wrongness turned my stomach. I couldn’t move my head, because I was still bent double, but my hand seemed to be getting further and further away, still holding onto my pen beneath the table.

Suddenly, too fast to fully comprehend what was happening, the suction pulled hard, I shot backwards, far enough to see my legs still bent around the bench-seat-

-and my arms reaching impossibly far beneath the table-

-and my torso stretched across the horrifically distorted space in-between-

I screamed, as my head stretched further away from my limbs. I watched as they began to warp and waver like overcooked spaghetti noodles, trailing after me as I floated into the air.

A deluge of electric shocks passed over my back, then up my neck and across my scalp and in a flash, I found myself hurtling through the freshly torn asshole of the world, screaming while electric-blue sparks tasted my skin and the air outside. Like a rat in a water pipe, I was shot backwards faster than I could fully comprehend, a tube of writhing, screaming infinity kneading me like dough in a plastic bag.

Squeezing my eyes closed to escape the torturous kaleidoscope all around didn’t block out the scrape of my own toenail against my cheek, or the prickle of my leg across my back. My fingers were bent and wiggled and played with, rubbing against my wrists as they were stretched backwards. Everything was wrong, dislocated and stretched like rubber in a mill. I was trapped inside my body more now than I ever had been before, too much space separating my brain from my lungs to even scream.

The feeling seemed to last forever, and for hardly a moment all at once. A brief nightmare that my mind made quick work of, boxing it up and pushing it to the side as my ass slammed down against cold, damp ground.

My eyes snapped open, and I scrambled to my feet. My pulse pounded between my ears and quick, panicked breaths scraped my throat.

What the fuck, What the fuck, What the fuck…

I wheeled around on the spot, my Vans squelching in a thin layer of mud.

As far as I could see, long, blue-grey grass swayed on a breeze I couldn’t feel. Eventually it met a sky filled with a seemingly infinite number of strange, dotted stars at an indistinct horizon obscured by hazy, grey mist. My fingers waved through the grass as I turned, and it parted like cigarette smoke, thin stalks trailing streams of blueish vapour before it slowly began to reform before my panicked eyes.

Between the stars, the sky was a deep black, so colourless it almost hurt to look at. The stars themselves were uncanny, round with two tapered points and a black centre, like the iris of an… eye.

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I swallowed thickly, flinching as another tear opened in the distance with a static Hiss. Great arcs of blueish energy jumped from its writhing edges like plasma, crackling through the ghostly grass below and illuminating the plains with vivid flashes of light. Fear turned my stomach as I scanned the plain and watched as hundreds of tears open and close with every passing moment. They floated in the air above dream-like grass until they expired and burst into nothing. I refused to look up again, some animal part of me terrified that the stars, those eyes, would turn their attention to me.

Around me, any trace of the tear that had dumped me here was gone, and I stood alone in the waste high not-grass, wondering what the fuck had just happened to me.

I couldn’t see a way back, and waving a shaking hand through the air above my head didn’t reveal any hidden portals… or a greenscreen, or a psychedelically-patterned-shawl-wearing-hippy hiding behind me with a needle full of whatever the fuck I’d been spiked with. Shivering, I rubbed my arms, trying to sooth the goosebumps that lined them.

I felt around through the grass for any way out, there had to be something. But all I found was my pen, so I slipped it into my pocket and slowly stood back up.

The air was thick with tension, and it wrapped around me like a fist around a throat. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking under the indistinct glares of a million stars. I took a small step forward.

And waited.

…

…

…

I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but my instincts were screaming at me for the first time in my life. The pressure made it impossible to move, but standing still was worse. There was something coming for me, I could feel it and standing still wasn’t going to save me. It never had.

I took another careful step, breath hissing from between my teeth as the tension lessened ever so slightly. It was impossible to tell whether the feeling was physical or something I had created inside my own head, but it faded faster as I took another few steps.

The ground beneath my feet was soggy and uneven, with hard rocks buried just below the surface. They dug into the rubber soles of my shoes and tested my ankles with every step. The not-grass dispersed in small puffs as I passed through, curling languidly through the air but never thinning enough to reveal the ground between its stalks.

There was nowhere to go really, but something about the stars overhead and the infinite horizon egged me on. Told me to move and keep moving until I found its edge and what lay beyond if I didn’t want to be found myself. I’d never felt this way before, hunted like an animal.

This is insane… I was at uni… I am at uni, this cannot be real.

Tears appeared again and again as I walked, and the air felt charged, crackling against my skin. Some opened a few metres from me, while others were barely visible on the distant horizon. All of them though, led to the same impossibly twisting tube that had sucked me up like wet spaghetti.

I shivered.

I hope this is a dream… Although fuck, there’s something wrong with me if this is the shit I dream about.

Hundreds of metres disappeared behind me as I trudged over the muck and through the grass. The plain never changed, more and more of the gently swaying grass appearing at the edge of my perception with each step, while more still faded behind me.

Despite the fear driving me, walking slowly calmed my nerves, and my heart returned to a steady thud-thud in my chest. I didn’t run, didn’t sprint, or lunge or move too fast. There was something there, something at the edge of what I could understand that told me to do anything else would be a mistake.

Even if this was a dream. I didn’t want it to be any worse than it already was.

-=:=+=:=-

Hissssssssssss

Another tear ripped through the air to my right, sparking and pulsing angrily. I was too tired to give the ugly hole more than a glance when a million of its brethren had already been born and promptly died around me in the hours I’d been walking.

Unexpectedly, something connected with the soggy ground over my shoulder, squelching in the mud before something or someone else landed atop it with a quiet wheeze. Heart jumping in my chest, I spun and came face to face with the sculpted rictus of a grinning skull.

Intricately shaped metal formed a skeletal faceplate, with wide glass lenses set deep in its eye sockets and thick, steel-ringed tubing extending from beneath its upper jaw. The rest of the person’s head was covered by a World War two style helmet whose brim reached barely above my shoulders.

With the rest of their body wrapped in a baggy leather jumpsuit, hung with all manner of knives and boxy tools, the new arrival cut a striking figure. Adding to the strangeness of the scene, they stood atop the back of an unmasked, mostly unclothed man who had fallen face-down in the mud. In the few seconds that the two of us stood staring at one another in surprise. Two more leather clad, skull masked soldiers dribbled through the tear, flowing like water into ready positions at their partner’s back until their flesh became solid once again and they wobbled unsteadily.

After a few moments of tense silence, where the flanking newcomers unholstered and pointed long-barrelled pistols in my direction, I opened my mouth to speak.

The lead soldier lunged forward in a flash and a leather-gloved hand clamped over my jaw. I was cut off with a barely audible grunt and in an instant, the shorter man had both of my wrists crushed in his grip. Another thirty seconds and my hands were tied firmly behind me back while the soldier’s sour, leather glove covering my mouth was replaced by a thick gag that dug painfully into my cheeks.

It all happened so fast that I could hardly understand what had gone on. I’d never been manhandled like that before and the few fights I’d been in had ended before anyone resorted to violence. Still shocked and now completely helpless to do anything to defend myself, I was prodded into walking alongside the stripped man in silence. The soldiers walked behind us, their gleaming masks hiding any of their thoughts behind a frankly gruesome visage.

The leader, who I noticed carried a sword sheathed at his side like some kind of fifteenth century cosplayer, pulled out a strange, blocky device and moved infront of me. He led our group of five through the ghostly grass while the other two followed behind.

Beside me, their other prisoner stared blankly ahead, deep bags hanging beneath his eyes and signs of abuse marring his otherwise pale skin. I swallowed nervously, saliva dribbling from my lips around the gag. I couldn’t tell for sure, but these people seemed… Bad. Not like anybody I’d met before. They seemed harder, with a unnerving readiness to their movements, as though they could explode into violent action at a moment’s notice. Of course, everybody has their reasons, but the reason would have to be fucking good to justify beating a captive and kidnapping a stranger they found wondering around alone. Even if this was a dream.

Wondering whether the two behind were watching the both of us behind their black lenses, I pulled tentatively at my bonds. They didn’t so much as budge and something sharp pressed against my back through my shirt.

Note to self: They do not Fuck around. At all.

We walked like that, gagged, and bound for some time, following the winding path of the lead soldier as he read off the small, grainy screen held out infront of him. The field remained unchanged, stretching on infinitely as tears opened above its surface. The soldiers were supremely unbothered by the gaping holes in space, sometime skirting around them like they were potholes in a road. Fear still bubbled away in my stomach, but it was muted behind a layer of pragmatism for once. These people, no matter how awful or violent, knew what they were doing and maybe sticking with them would be for the best.

The idea that I had a choice was laughable, but it kept the shaking in my hands from spreading to the rest of my body.

The silence that had hung over our small group was suddenly pierced by a pained scream, only partially muffled by the leather gag.

I flinched, whirling to find my fellow prisoner bent double, wheezing and drooling. He seemed unharmed, until I caught a glimpse his foot. The broken end of a bloodied bone protruded from his milky skin, trails of blood already pouring from the wound.

I stood frozen as an intense sense of pressure slamming down on my shoulders. Overhead, a million eyes snapped in our direction, one turning after another in a cascade across the deep, black sky.

The soldiers were not as affected. With shockingly precise movements, they stepped forward and cut the bonds holding our arms behind out backs, exchanging lightning-fast hand gestures with their leader before they motions us to continue following.

When their other captive failed to move, simply moaning in pain as he stared down at his ruined foot, they abandoned him.

Still in shock, I was shoved from behind, and fell into a stumbling jog behind the lead soldier. Struggling to breath I clawed off the gag, gasping for air as we began to pick up speed. The pressure never abated, only growing stronger. Behind me, a bloodcurdling scream cut through the air like a knife, and I glanced over my shoulder while I ran.

In an expanding circle centred on the unfortunate captive, the ghostly grass had dissipated, revealing the gruesome muck beneath. What I had thought were rocks buried amongst the mud were bones protruding from a sea of rotting flesh. In places the meat and skin was so fetid it melded together into a gory slush. Worse, the sea of corpses was beginning to stir. Already an emaciated torso protruded from the ground at the captive’s waist, its rotting fingers clawing at the man’s abdomen while its teeth gnashed at his flailing hands. Others were rising, clawing their way free of their tangled brethren.

One of the following soldiers shoved me again, and I snapped my head forward. I could hardly breath past the lump forming in my throat, and my lungs felt too small as I ran.

The captive’s screams grew louder and more pained, and I pumped my legs as fast and hard as I could.

Not me. It won’t be me.

If that wave caught us, we were dead. I didn’t see the strange, blocky sidearms the soldier’s carried doing anything against the thousands of bodies I had already seen twitching and struggling to stand. Unlike in the movies, with the state some of them were in, I doubted a shot to the head would change much at all.

Suddenly, the lead soldier stopped, calmly clipping his navigator back onto his belt. With a series of hand signals, the other two soldiers drew their weapons and stood facing the distant wave of gnashing, clawing undead. They were finished with the captive, whose suffering had likely saved us a handful of seconds at most. The horde were moving quickly in our direction, spreading like fungus as more grass dissipated and more dripping hands rose from the ground. I refused to look down myself.

I knew what I would find now when the grass dissipated but I couldn’t do anything about that. I would have to take my chances when the soldiers finished whatever they were working on now. They had to have a way out of here.

I turned back to the leader, and watched as he crushed a fragile-looking crystal in his fist. Powder trickled from his glove, and where it passed the air rippled. With his other hand, he drew out a thick-handled knife whose blade glowed faintly. With a quick slash, the knife passed through the rippling air and with a flash, and a static crackle of electricity, a tear opened.

With all the soldier’s backs to me, and the horde drawing closer by the second, my brain did something with my body I never would’ve expected it to.

I launched myself into a dead sprint, shoulder checking the much shorter leader out of the way. Ignoring the stumbling solider, I dived forward, passing between the torn folds of space and—

…