Terrestrial Alien ✔

Chapter 26: A Grey Sky

Seth

  The sky is a fuzzy reflection of the asphalt beneath my bare feet. Grey. It's like a softer version of the heat that had burned the color black into the soles of my feet for the past few miles, and thunder rolls across it like a deep, rumbling growl.

  My legs are wobbly when I finally collapse in a heavy heap onto the stoop of the nearest house, and I can't tell which stings more, my feet or my throat. In the latter a tightness has been building, and I think of Joshua. I think of him outside the hospital, his face wrought with grief and his cheeks stained with tears. The weather now melds with the weather then in my mind, and it is grey all the way around.

  Grey, grey, grey.

  My throat tightens further, and I struggle to hold back the burning behind my eyes. The wooden step to the stranger's home creaks under my bum, and my legs splay out awkwardly in front of me. They're too long. Knobby and gangly, I don't know when they'd become like this.

  Maybe it was on the highway, while I'd been running. A frantic, mad dash, I hardly remember half of it. I just kept thinking that if I'd run faster, maybe I'd catch up to a car that looked like Joshua's. Maybe I'd catch Joshua.

   I'd just wanted to be faster, and now I feel longer, strung out and worn bare. The weariness and the confusion are simply overwhelming, and I don't know how to understand the changes of my own body. Even to myself, I am a stranger.

   What am I even doing here? Why do I even exist?

   The thoughts swarm in my mind, and they're closing in on me, swirling around me.

   I desperately want something to make myself feel more stable, something to give me purpose, explanation, reason. I think of Joshua. I think of him helping me out of the burning desert.

   I think of him crying at me outside of the hospital.

  The swirling darkness crashes in on me all at once, shattering everything all over again, and I can't take it anymore.

  I curl up on myself, hugging my stranger's body as a sob wrenches its way from deep in my chest. I can't stop it. Fat tears roll down my cheeks as I sob, and I'm lost. Utterly lost.

  I might have screamed. I probably did.

  The rain starts falling then, bursting from the clouds as though it sympathises and agrees with my anguish. Quickly I grow soaked, and it isn't until the rain has been falling for a while in a steady patterpatterpatterpatter... that the girl steps out from the doorway of her house.

  I'm the intruder, and yet she peers out over me and asks, "What's wrong?"

   I sniffle sharply, my eyes snapping open wide.

  "Seth? Seth!"

   The fresh, electric air of a rainstorm zaps out, sharply replaced by the pungent, acrid smell of smoke.

   My lungs choke on it, and suddenly I'm heaving as I scramble about.

   Grey, grey, grey.

   I see smoke, all around me. Breathing is a struggle, and every part of my body feels like it's been seared under the sun. My skin burns with every movement, and yet my muscles ache to move, to get out of here.

   "Seth!" The voice cries again, and it isn't Rebecca.

   Painfully, I turn my head towards the voice, my heart beating an anxious staccato in my chest. Help?