Terrestrial Alien ✔

[Part IV] Chapter 56: Through the Desert

Seth

Buzzing rattles against my skull and against my cheekbone, all but prying inky unconsciousness from me. Before, I was out cold, but now awareness is trickling back to me in slow fits and starts.

It's like wading through my own mind, but it's some bog that keeps shifting, sloughing from side to side. An intoxicating, thick blackness clings to me stickily, and it's hard to think.

The buzzing against my skull continues, and it increases in intensity until my head is throbbing with it. The blackness is pierced through by sharp stabs of light—sunlight—that burns my face and my eyelids.

"How could you do that?" A voice snaps beside me, slicing through tendrils of darkness. "That's amoral."

Disgust ripples through the voice, somehow familiar, though I can't grasp how I know it. I can't really grasp anything at all.

"Oh, please. Relax, kid, it's just lying. Not even pernicious lying at that. I'm sure you've done far worse yourself, in your days."

This other voice bubbles up from somewhere in front of me, slimy and unappealing in my half-aware state.

"They trusted you!" The voice beside me snaps.

A sigh sifts through the blackness in front of me.

"You say that like you care about them, Gonzalo. Last I checked, you hated them as much as you do us."

Gonzalo. The name slips away from me.

"Last I checked, you didn't resort to lying and kidnapping to get your way, and yet here we are. Townsend and Hernandez aren't the only ones who will be expecting us. You can't do this."

"And yet we are. Imagine that."

A third, sharper voice bites from somewhere else. The buzzing in my head continues.

"Don't forget, you two are missing anyway, champ. It's not like anyone will notice if you're gone a lil' longer."

"Or a lot longer," the third voice adds.

Even through my haze, I feel the way the owner of the voice beside me trembles—with fear or rage, I cannot tell. It pulls me closer to the surface; I pull in a shuddering breath. I can feel my eyelids now, and my fingertips, and vibrating glass against my temple.

"A friend saw us today before we left. We're not completely unknown. People will notice," insists the Owner of the Voice beside me.

I don't catch a response, if there is one. I can't be so sure; I'm slipping under again, trying to stay focused on being able to feel my body instead. I feel so disoriented, disconnected, and the blackness doesn't want to let me go, keeping me away from the sunlight.

What's going on? Where am I..?

"Where are you even taking us anyway?"

That voice comes again, quieter now, smaller. It's like a light, or—no. A warmth, pulling at me, familiar somehow.

I become aware of the warmth of the glass against my face, and I blink my eyes open, blearily battling rays of sunlight. It outright hurts my eyes, opening them.

The first thing I'm aware of is sand. Lots of it, rolling by just beyond my nose.

A sea of red and beige dust glares back at me from beyond a burning black road, which stretches for miles on end in either direction. My head spins. In the distance, layered, rosy hoodoos dance across my vision, right alongside flat, crumbling mesas and tough sprouts of wilting shrubbery.