Green blood ran down the length of the spear, pooling on the cage floor as Dustin knelt beside the alien creature. He closed his eyes, offering a small prayer for its passing before he stood up. His legs trembled as the horrific scene around him returned.
An arm shot up to stabilise him as he tilted to the side, catching him under the armpit. A cold sweat ran down Dustin’s back, but he nodded, using the bars of the cage to keep himself up. Ben released him and looked at the other cages.
The goblins had arranged the imprisoned bodies in various states of undress with clear signs of torture. Dried blood covered the cavern floor and Ben refused to glance at the opposite side where they had desecrated the other deceased. His knuckles whitened around the baseball bat, his breathing erratic.
“What do we do now?” Ben asked through clenched teeth, his eyes drawn to the only recognisable body. Dustin rubbed his leg muscles to stop the trembling and left the cage, abandoning the goblin’s spear to the side. Two strikes had blunted it, giving it a poor chance at penetrating anything else.
Dustin spat on the floor, a foul taste spreading throughout his mouth. The urge to vomit pushed at the back of his throat, but he fought against it. The dying remnants of the campfire gave little light to the cavern as Dustin dragged the goblin corpses to the pile of bodies opposite him.
He didn’t want any other goblins wandering in to find their brethren at a quick glance and alert the others of intruders. Blood stains and a dying campfire were all that remained in the open.
Dustin glanced at Ben, who was staring at the woman’s body, her form mangled as it lay cold and unmoving.
“Are we just going to leave her here?” Ben whispered. Dustin noticed his bloodshot eyes and shook his head, crouching down to inspect the woman.
She looked to be in her late twenties, with long black hair and formal attire. She was pale, her eyes glassy, staring up at the ceiling. Blood drenched her clothes, pooling out into the cage and even dripping off the sides. Dustin had no choice but to step in it as he entered the cage.
Her right hand was bent backwards at a ninety-degree angle, resting on her abdomen. Dustin felt her left wrist instead and waited for an entire minute noticing nothing but frigid skin. No pulse. A quick glance told him she had passed, but he had to check, if only for that inkling of hope he clung to.
She died on an alien planet, far away from the world she called home, perhaps the first victim among many to come. Dustin confirmed she had not entered through the same entrance, each student he travelled with accounted for.
Whether she had come alone, or with others, was unknown, as was the location she entered through. Either she had found the goblins, or the goblins had found her. He searched for pockets and found none. The only saving grace was a lanyard he thought was a choker, pulling tight against her neck as the bottom of it dipped into the blood behind her.
He pulled it around to the front, wiping the blood off of the laminated plastic to see the paper within.
“Grace Morossey,” Dustin read, looking at Ben. Both of them shook their heads, an unfamiliar name.
Dustin brushed aside her unbuttoned shirt, revealing her chest. A goblin had raked its hand below her bra, leaving four long scratches, and a nasty laceration ran down her right side. He tugged the shirt close and placed one hand under her knee with the other under her back.
Her limbs were stiff in his hands, cold and heavy, but he lifted her up, ignoring the blood that stained his clothes.
“Let’s go.” Dustin nodded at Ben and led them out of the cave, his eyes adjusting as light filtered in.
When he emerged from the cave entrance, a gentle breeze glided over him. The woman’s hair fluttered in the wind, trailing behind him.
“May you rest. The horror is over.” Dustin whispered when Ben could not hear him. A familiar phrase that the survivors who fled Earth often said to send the dead off. After living a life of hell to survive, they considered death a painless way out.
Although many would not admit it, they craved the day they could join the rest of humanity in eternal sleep, even if it meant losing everything.
Ben and Dustin retraced their steps past the goblin traps until the clearing ended, returning to lush green and humid air. Ben held both of the baseball bats as he bashed the plants aside, releasing the steam inside of him.
Dustin crept behind him, his blow slung over his shoulder, quiver resting at his side, and the woman’s body in his arms. They continued in silence for the next twenty minutes, nearing close to the hills where they had appeared.
They halted before an enormous tree and Ben turned to Dustin.
“Where are we Dustin?”
Dustin cocked his head to the side, using the arm under the woman’s legs to point forward.
“Not far now, they’re up ahead.”
Ben shook his head, pointing one of the baseball bats at him.
“I’m not talking about that,” Ben lowered the bat and turned around, pointing the other at the two suns peering through the canopy, “Where are we?”
“I don-”
“Don’t give me that shit Dustin. Don’t think, even for a minute, that I can’t see what’s going on.” Ben spat, leaning forward with his bat planted into the ground.
“A year ago you were happy to study your life away. Then one day you show up, don’t pay attention to anything, and disappear for a week. After that, you return as a stranger. You showed no interest in joining clubs prior to this year, and now you’re in the archery and martial arts clubs. I haven’t seen you in a single lecture either.”
Dustin froze, chewing his lower lip. Ben was fuming, even angrier than he had been in the cave.
“Jennifer, Taro, Mark, they might not have noticed the change since they weren’t friends with you before, but I know you better than that. You’re not the same person I met, and it worries me that something like this happened after you became better.”
Ben waved a bat around at the surrounding flora, knocking a few fern leaves aside.
“Whatever happened in that week changed you. Hell, I would have kept believing this was because of a girl if we weren’t standing in this shit with a dead body!” Ben shouted, his voice carrying far.
“Now I’m scared Dustin, scared you knew this was coming and said nothing. You carry a corpse and act like this is all natural.”
“Ben…”
“Don’t you Ben me, Dustin. Is this a game to you? Did you know this woman would die? Like you somehow knew about all this?”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“So please Dustin, please tell me you have some kind of reason for all this. Because I just cannot fathom why you would put yourself and us at risk by keeping quiet. Something could have attacked the others, or what if one goblin injured us in the cave?”
Dustin looked down at the woman in his hands, her body weighing heavy in his hands and on his conscience.
“I died, Ben.” Dustin muttered, meeting Ben’s eyes with a lump in his throat.
“You died.” Ben repeated, keeping the bat level with Dustin.
“I died. You died. Jennifer, Mark, Taro, they all died. My mother died. My sister died. Ben… everyone I knew died.”
Ben could hear Dustin’s voice breaking, and his breathing stopped for a second.
“I couldn’t stop it, nobody could. Everyone died, one by one, and we could only run,” Dustin took a breath, “They were strong, tougher and deadlier than anything I’d ever seen, and I had seen a lot.”
“When?” Ben whispered, his weapon in hand sinking to the ground.
“Fourteen years. On a burning shit-hole surrounded by monsters.”
Ben looked down and to the side, biting the inside of his bottom lip. It was a lot to take in, his own impending death and the bleak future that awaited the rest of humanity.
“And you’re sure this wasn’t a dream…” Ben’s last word drew on.
“I didn’t just imagine this Ben, I lived it. Every minute of every waking hour. We fought, hid, and starved just to keep going. I… loved, if only for a short while, but it was real. It all seemed like a dream too until recently, but now that we’re here I cannot deny that I saw this coming.”
“I hoped, for that entire year, that it was all in my head. That having these memories was a mental illness and not a roadmap to the end of humanity.”
Ben fell silent and glanced towards the hill that the rest of the students were on, his friends included.
“And you didn’t tell anyone because they would think you were insane.” Ben muttered, tapping one foot on the ground. He took Dustin’s silence as acceptance and sighed.
“Well. Isn’t this just fucked?”
Dustin wanted to smile, to show his friend that there was some hope. His knowledge of future events was one thing, but stopping them was a different beast. He could see the blood draining from Ben’s face and took a step forward.
“If you help me Ben, we don’t have to follow the same path.”
The ground beneath him shifted as a large worm wiggled its way from underneath Dustin’s encroaching foot, squirming away. Its body was the width of a soda can but shorter. Ben cracked a smile at the sight, looking away when a woman’s pale and broken hand swung into view as Dustin stopped a footstep away.
“There will be many more people dying Ben, and I can’t stop it on my own. I brought you and the others in here with me thinking I could train you up to fight off the coming horde, and I can,” Dustin took a deep breath, “but I don’t want to force you.”
“Maybe it’s better if I kept you in the dark, but I didn’t do this for fun. I did it out of necessity. I can pave a thousand paths and plan a million scenarios, but I can’t force you to go through any of them unless you help me.”
“Ben?”
A voice echoed from behind Ben, scaring a nearby bird into taking flight. The vibrant colour of its feathers drew Dustin’s attention to the tree canopy, where eyes gazed down at him. A long spindly leg he had mistaken as a twig withdrew from the light, and the eyes disappeared as whatever creature it belonged to retreated into the thick mass of leaves and forking branches.
“We’ll have some explaining to do… talk about this later?” Dustin asked, hefting the woman’s body to make it easier to carry. Ben looked torn, leaning forward with a slow nod.
Jennifer was creeping towards them through the thick trunks, her bow held down by her waist with an arrow nestled into the arrow rest. She scanned the treeline for any signs of movement, spotting the duo standing out of place among the green backdrop.
“You’re back! How did it g- huh?” She started jogging over but halted as she saw the woman’s unmoving body in Dustin’s arms.
Ben turned to look at her, his shoulders hunched forward, “we found her like this.”
----------------------------------------
Back where the forest met the hills, the students were sitting around exploring the forest floor, skirting around bushes to see the unknown flora that populated this strange alien world.
Mark kept a sharp eye on the surroundings, worried about Jennifer who had run off in search of Ben and Dustin. She had sworn she’d heard them talking and went to investigate, leaving Mark to keep watch. Kantaro stood guard on the other side of the group, watching the hills for any signs of movement after the previous attack. The boar’s carcass still sat up on the hill, a trail of sun-dried blood leading up to its resting place.
Sam, the teacher whisked away with them, was meditating on a fallen log, doing her best to calm down and form a plan to get the students out. One or two other students were sitting near her, breathing in rhythm with eyes closed.
Movement caught Mark’s attention as he saw a pale Jennifer pushing through enormous ferns that stroked the floor from several metres up. Her hand clasping her bow trembled as she approached. With a quick glance at Mark, she trudged over to Sam, kneeling down in front of her to draw the teacher’s attention.
While Sam was asking the students meditating with her to move away for now, Mark crept closer to eavesdrop.
He could only catch parts of the conversation, but from her disposition and the words body and monster, he could feel his stomach churning. Sam put a shaky hand over her mouth and nodded, standing up with help from Jennifer.
Mark signalled Kantaro to come over and walked towards the two women. Jennifer glanced at Mark approaching and swallowed the lump in her throat, keeping a hand under Sam’s armpit to keep her steady.
Mark stood a foot away and waited for Kantaro to huddle in before opening his mouth, “What happened?”
Jennifer saw Sam staring at her as they turned to face Mark and Kantaro. The two men noticed her trembling lip and hair stuck to her forehead and felt a cold sweat run down their backs.
“Dustin and Ben found a woman’s body.” She whispered, feeling Sam’s grip on her tighten.
Despite the grave news, Mark felt a slight moment of reprieve at the notion that Dustin and Ben were unharmed, accompanied by the threat of bile rising in his throat.
He wanted to ask if she was a native or if she had been teleported too but Jennifer answered the question as she slipped a hand into her pant pocket, pulling out the bloody lanyard Dustin had given her to show them. Sam shuddered and tilted her head to look at the woman’s name and photo.
“I don’t recognise the face or name.” She whispered, turning to look away with a cringe. Mark and Kantaro both shook their heads, unfamiliar with the woman either.
“Do we leave it here?” Jennifer asked, nibbling the inside of her bottom lip. The group stood in silence, staring at the bloodied lanyard without an answer.
Mark piped up first, “If we’re walking out of here, who will carry the body?”
Taro stiffened at the question and looked at the ground, “Not to mention the other students will panic if they see it…”
Sam cleared her throat and reached for the lanyard, recoiling from the dried flakes of blood but pushing through to take it from Jennifer’s hand.
“We’ll take her with us. I’ll carry her. Everyone is an adult here capable of controlling their emotions, we’ll cover her as best we can but I’m not leaving someone to rot here.”
Jennifer leant forward and placed her hand on Sam’s shoulder, whispering her name. Placing her hand atop Jennifer’s, Sam looked to the rest of the group.
“I know you all think it’s weird I want to take her out of here... but I know the pain of not being able to say goodbye to a family member. As painful as it is, I’m glad I could see my sister one last time before she passed, and I don’t want to rob the same opportunity from someone else.”