Daniel drove for another few minutes. He made sure we were a safe distance from the outpost before he stopped the car so we could have a look back at the aftermath.

“Was it nuclear?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Daniel answered. “Would’ve been bigger.”

We argued for a while about what to do. Do we keep driving? Or do we go back and try and figure out what happened?

Daniel wanted to keep going. Get as far away from here as possible. But in the end, Maria and I forced him to go back and look for Kenji and the others.

We drove through the smoldering ruins of the outpost. There was no point in stopping. Nothing remained. Daniel suggested we make our way to the entry of the rabbit hole. If Kenji and the others had escaped, that is where they would be.

He maneuvered the Humvee into the dried up river bed. But when we got to the entry point, we could see that the rabbit hole was caved in. Blackened scorch marks stained the ground near the entrance to the tunnel. This meant the explosion had raced through there, burning everything in its path.

“Where did they go?” I asked out loud to no one in particular. “What the hell happened!?”

There were so many questions racing through my head. Did Ben get them out in time? What about Tariq? Did they untie him?

“I don’t trust him,” I said.

“Who?” Maria asked.

“It was him,” I said. “Tariq. He was behind it. He…”

“He what?” Maria asked. “He was nothing but helpful.”

Daniel was shaking his head. He was at a loss. He couldn’t explain it.

Something wasn’t right.

Kenji was gone.

Ben was gone.

My head began to throb, the orange desert sky began to spin. My vision narrowed. I don’t know if it was because everything was starting to hit me, or maybe it was the cut to my head, but I suddenly felt light headed.

“You don’t look so good,” Maria said.

And as soon as she said it, I doubled over and threw up.

Daniel checked my head. “This is pretty deep. You could have a concussion.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have time for this. We need to find Kenji.”

“It’s going to need stitches,” Daniel said. “Maria, I need you to keep pressure on this.”

I stood up, moving away from Maria. I didn’t have time for a goddamn concussion. I needed to find Kenji. I needed to know that he was all right, that he was alive.

But there was no sign of them. No sign of anyone.

It was at that moment I completely and utterly freaked out.

I knew we had to go. We needed to keep moving. It was too dangerous here.

We had to leave without the others.

No Ben.

No Tariq.

No Kenji.

Everything turned blurry after this. I didn’t know it at the time, but my head injury was worse than I thought. And I’d lost a hell of a lot of blood.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Daniel held me, tried to pick me up and put me in the back of the Humvee. I wrestled out of his grip and fell to my knees at the mouth of the cave.

I started digging, clawing at the rubble and the rocks.

I wasn’t going anywhere, I thought. Not without Kenji. I was determined to stay. To keep searching. For as long as it took.

The thing is; I must’ve passed out.

I don’t really remember.

Maria has told me that I was crying. That I was hysterical. I was calling out for Kenji at first. And then I was calling out for my mother. Even my father. I did not know why I was in Australia. I couldn’t remember that I had moved out here. I thought New York was my home.

It was a full on concussion.

The next thing I remembered, we were back in the Humvee, heading for Daniel’s camp. Maria and Jack were comforting me. Telling me that I was going to be all right. Telling me that everything was going to be all right.

And for some reason, I believed them.

I guess it was just easier to believe them.

My memory is still hazy from the concussion. I only remember bits and pieces. I remember getting back to the camp. I remember the machine gun sentinels, deactivated and lifeless. Piles of bullet casings surrounded them. The electric fence had collapsed. The hypersonic jet was covered in red dust. Two Humvees were parked next to the storage container. The whole camp, including the domed shaped tent was covered under a blackish green camouflage net. This cammo net was actually an invisibility cloak. But it had long since run out of power.

The other thing I clearly remember was Jack smiling. He was so happy and so relieved that we had finally made it, that Maria would finally be rescued.

I kept passing in and out of consciousness. I woke up inside the tent, lying on a mattress on the ground. My vision was hazy and blurry. Completely unfocused.

I woke to the sound of someone throwing up. It was Daniel. He was sick. Apparently he had been throwing up black goo every hour.

“Why?” Maria asked. “Why are you throwing up?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, obviously in pain. “It must be the nano-swarm. Maybe it’s a kind of poisoning, like food poisoning or alcohol poisoning. My body is trying to get it out of my system.”

Whatever was making Daniel sick, it meant that he couldn’t fly us out of here. Not yet. Not until he was better.

At some point I managed to get up off the mattress and check the foot locker where I had stowed my things. It felt like such a long time ago I was here, preparing myself to fly back into Sydney. I fished around in the footlocker and found Kenji’s letter. I grabbed it and held it tight.

According to Maria, after I’d found Kenji’s letter, I had become even more hysterical. She tried to calm me down, but couldn’t. In the end, Daniel had to give me a sedative.

Through the night, Daniel continued to throw up. He was indeed sick. Poisoned. He was starting to scare Jack and Maria.

The next day, Daniel left the tent to check on the X-wing. He came back, angry. Swearing. I can’t remember his exact words. Only his tone. Apparently the X-wing wasn’t working. The electronics were all screwed.

Daniel sat down in front of the computers and attempted to make contact with the ‘Dark Crystal’. His command ship. He spoke into a radio headset. He rattled off a whole string of code words. I couldn’t make any sense of it in my concussed state. I just remember that after he had finished speaking, he took off the headset and threw it across the room.

“Twenty-four hours,” Daniel said.

I had no idea if he meant we would be rescued in twenty-four hours, or if it meant they would get back to him in twenty-four hours. Either way, there was nothing we could do except wait. So that’s what we did.

We waited.

I remember Maria changing my head bandage more than once. Each time she removed the old bandaged you could see the blood stain.

During the night, someone patted me on the shoulder. They told me everything was going to be fine. And again, I believed them. The voice told me to take care of Maria. I opened my eyes. I could see a shadow. Initially I thought it was Kenji. But I was wrong.

The next morning, Jack was gone.

Again, it’s difficult to remember what happened or what was said. I only remember the tone of their voices.

Maria was hysterical and upset.

Daniel sounded more and more like a defeated and broken man.

Jack had left a note for Maria that said he was going to find his sister. He had left in the middle of the night. He had taken one of the Humvees.

“We have to go and get him!” Maria said.

Daniel shook his head. “No. You are staying here.”

“Because he’s expendable, right? He doesn’t matter?”

Like I said before, everything at this point was hazy and blurry. Like a room filled with smoke. I remember everything as a kind of patch work quilt, a mosaic of pictures that were all out of sequence.

I remember sounds. Tone.

The tone of Maria’s voice. Anger.

Daniel. Scared. Terrified. Unsure of himself.

He tried to contact the command ship one more time. There was no response.

Maria was standing behind Daniel with her hands on her hips. “So what now?”

“We wait. They’ll be here.”

“How do you know that? You don’t know that! They’ve left us for dead.”

Or they’re dead, I thought to myself. Or they’re cut off. Or the Oz virus or the nano-swarms have gotten to them. “Something has taken them out,” I whispered. “Something got them. It’s too late.”

No one heard me.

“No,” Daniel said. “They’ll be here. Trust me.”

All the shouting and yelling was making my headache worse. I started to black out again as I listened to Daniel’s pleading voice.

He was asking for help over the radio.

Requesting an immediate extraction.

Maria paced back and forth from one end of the tent to the other.

Daniel looked over his shoulder back at me.

I blacked out to the sound of Maria crying.