Chapter Text
Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.
There’s little else but the greenish gray of the sea and the near-blinding sunlight from a clear, bright sky, reflected off the sand. Most of what happened in the previous hours (was it hours? Or days even,) was but a blur. The only things I could recall with clarity was a storm and the dropship that was supposed to take me back to Babylonia falling into the ocean with as much grace as a rock.
And by some miracle, I washed ashore. Alone. The rest of the crew at this point are likely at the bottom of the sea with the dropship and half of my gear including my rifle and the all-important (especially at this point) flares and smoke grenades.
No point beating myself up. It’s not like doing so would bring back any of those from the bottom of the sea. At least I can take some comfort in the fact that I still have water, my knife and my handgun.
But would it even have any use? To clean it out is one thing but the bullets most likely won’t fire. There’s no telling how long they’ve been soaked, which leaves the knife as the only form of defense I have if somehow any Corrupted would spring from the sea or from the scrubland flanking the beach, where the sands slope uphill.
I can remember the storm but there’s no clouds anywhere. There’s silence on the comms where radio static should be - No doubt that my comms gear has been shorted out by the salt water. Even my wrist terminal doesn’t turn on. If the water hadn’t shorted it out too like it had my comms gear, the salt would corrode it from within, especially in this heat.
A quick rummaging through the remnants of my webbing tells me that there’s some serum left, but not much – less than two days’ worth. No point in trying to ration it either. The dosages if strictly rationed would have little to no effect against Punishing Virus infection.
Ah if only the eggheads under the Science Council made inver-devices for flesh and blood humans like me too.
There’s sand everywhere. Crunching under my boots and trickling in through the cracks and tears in my suit, sticking to wherever the seawater had soaked into. All over my gloves and the visor of my helmet, cracked in a near-dizzying array of spiderweb-like patterns.
It’s not the worst thing I have had to endure though, compared to the thirst that doesn’t go away, even after a swig from the hydration pack.
Shelter would have to come first. The sun’s already baking everything in sight and who knows how much time I have left until dusk and only the gods know what would crawl out of the woodwork once night falls.
Yet there’s nothing in sight, not even a dip in the sand or a cluster of trees. Just miles and miles of sea, scrub and sand.
There’s little other choice but to walk. And walk.
Alone on the shoreline... I can’t help but think that perhaps in a form of cosmic black comedy, I might actually be dead, plucked from the dropship at the bottom of the sea by some deity with a twisted sense of humor and revived in the world and role of a certain gunslinger from a certain novel that Bianca from the Purifying Force had lent me a while back.
Unfortunately, (or perhaps, in these circumstances, fortunately,) I am not Roland Deschain and this is not the Western Sea of his world, Mid-World. Besides the fact I look nothing like him and lack his near-inhuman quickdraw speed, there’s no magic doors dotting the landscape that I can open and stroll on through into Babylonia. Though there’s also none of those lobster-like abominations from that world either. The thought of losing the fingers on my shooting hand to those things the same way Roland Deschain did, makes my stomach churn.
Hopefully there’d be nothing like those on this stretch of beach.
And speaking of Babylonia, surely by now someone has to have realized by now that Gray Raven Squad’s Commandant is long overdue from his solo mission on the surface right? Even then, it’d be ages before they’d send out another dropship.
I brush the thoughts aside. There’d be time to ruminate later once I find some form of cover.
The day passes, quicker than expected with the sun now setting, bathing everything in a blood red glow. Night will follow just as quickly and there’s still no sign of shelter though the heat’s already dissipating. But then there’d be the chill of night to worry about.
I can’t tell how long I’ve been walking. Maybe a mile, or maybe a hundred yards. Or maybe even in a circle. All sense of time seems to have stopped, with the movements of the sun being the only proper indicator I can use.
All I know is that I need to keep moving.
There’s a pile of rocks just yards away behind a bush that had up and dried out some time ago. It’s virtually useless against the elements but at least it’d provide some sort of concealment.
I take another drink of water, being careful to sip this time. It does little to ease the parched feeling in my mouth and throat, as if I had swallowed a wad of sandpaper. But necessity outweighs amenity and I fight back the compulsion to chug the entire hydration pack in one go.
No, I need to distract myself.
I start with my handgun, going through the motions of disassembling it, wiping it down with the remnants of the cape attached to the back of my suit, having made sure that it was free from as much sand as possible.
But then there’s the bullets in the magazines – and there’s only five mags with twenty 5.7mm armor-piercing rounds per mag. I turn to the bullets after reassembling the handgun, painstakingly extracting every single one from the magazines, propping them into a pile of black-tipped brass on a flat facet of the rock. Even in the dim light, I can already tell which ones are suspect.
And as I load the mags, I notice something else on the rock, that had inadvertently fallen out of one of my pouches while I was fumbling about with the handgun and the bullets earlier.
It’s a pressed iris flower, its desiccated petals like violet washi paper. A memento I hung on to for the longest time. It came to me one night, attached to a hastily-written letter on the night I was supposed to attend some gala with the writer of it, a girl who was supposed to turn up with an iris in her hair, as befitting the pen-name she used in our correspondences - Iris.
She didn’t show that night, even as I waited until the end of the ball, even as dawn fast approached. I returned to my bunk then, dejection giving way to anxiety as I found her letter along with the iris she was supposed to wear in her hair, neatly pressed.
That letter had been a heartfelt apology. Something had come up – an emergency mission to what remained of the International Space Station.
A mission she’d not returned from, even to this day.
And I had waited for an eternity after for any sign of her, which was ultimately fruitless. And then my own mission to the ISS had taken place. I was finally given a chance to find her, or at least what was left of her, but that chance had been brutally crushed as there was no trace of her, save for the glimpse of a lifeless construct’s remains from under the cloak of a certain Ascendant.
By coincidence, a construct from the WGAA, Ayla, if I remember correctly, had also joined the mission to find a friend of hers named Selena.
Perhaps that construct that the Ascendant had snatched from us was Selena. I’m sure that had to be her. If it was… Perhaps Iris and Selena were one and the same?
If so… then we were too late.
I’ll never know for sure if it was indeed her and for the longest time, the uncertainty of her fate ate away at me. Yet deep down, some part of me held out some hope that somehow we’ll cross paths again.
I held on to that pressed iris, tucked it away in one of my suit’s pouches, nearly forgetting about it until today. Just the sight of it alone is enough to uncork the proverbial bottle. Thoughts, feelings, memories, things I kept bottled up, spill forth.
Besides my own survival, I can only really think of her again at this point and how dearly I want to see her again, even if she’s a lifeless frame out there in the world, and bring her home with me.
But with me being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, perhaps in actual Purgatory even, with no indication that anyone would be coming for me, whatever hope I had gained was fading fast.
I turn back to my bullets as the more rational half of me virtually screams at me to focus, that there’s more important things right now than a girl I was (and admittedly still am) enamored with but never met once in my life.
Out of a hundred rounds, there’s fifty-seven that I hope are still good. Even then, the rounds I presume to be dry, could still turn out to be duds. There could be only twenty, nineteen, ten, five. Or one. Or none at all.
I load the magazines back up. The ones loaded with the potential duds are marked with an ‘x’, scratched into the metal with the tip of my knife. Loading an unmarked mag back into my handgun, I feel a sense of perverse curiosity upon hearing the clicking of the slide racking itself back, a strange compulsion to pull the trigger, to hear the satisfying barking of the handgun’s report, or even the dreaded snap of a misfire.
But a click would be entirely meaningless, and if there was a report, that’d drop one, from twenty to nineteen…or ten… or five. Or zero in the worst case.
Nightfall comes, even faster than twilight.
There’s no point trying to navigate in the dark. Another voice in my head speaks, compelling me to rest here for the night.
Yet sleep doesn’t come easily. In the hours before I drift off, somehow all I can think of, is her and only her.
It takes an eternity before darkness overcomes me.
The next day, with night rapidly transitioning into broad daylight confirms I’m not dead and I’m neither in Purgatory nor Mid-World. But with the way things are going, I might as well end up in the former if rescue does not come soon.
The adrenaline had worn off in the night and already, I can feel the various little aches from being tossed around in the crash starting to creep up on me. My head is starting to pound but I still walk on. A couple of painkiller tablets from my salt-crusted medikit does little to ease the increasing waves of pain that are slowly threatening to overcome me.
I’ve licked my wounds and patched my battered self up as best I can as soon as I had awakened. Acting on sheer instinct, I keep moving, heading westwards in the direction of the sunset
The chill of the dawn had long given way to the wet heat of the midday sun. The medication proves itself to be useless as the pounding in my head only seems to intensify even more as the day drags on.
There’s more salt than sand covering everything. Half of my suit is coated in thin, translucent layers of powdery white crystals. It’s all over my gloves, inside my suit and it’s a miracle none of it makes it into my helmet, or I’d be even more screwed than I already am.
What’s left of my electronic gear – comms, terminal, is little more than glorified bricks by now, corroding from within thanks to the salt.
There’s no other sound I can hear besides the wind and the constant breaking of waves against the shore. There’s none of that rather distinctive howling roar of a dropship’s ion engines in the distance.
Odd.
Someone up there in orbit has to have have realized that it’s been close to 48 hours since I failed to report back. Had they even picked up the emergency beacon of the sunken dropship?
My head at this point feels as if someone is taking a sledgehammer to its internals, exacerbated even further with the aching strain I’m feeling in the muscles of my neck. Despite the fact that my throat is feeling every bit as dry as the sand under my feet, half a mouthful of water is all I can spare myself to wash down the last of the painkillers, which are every bit as useless as the first dose. The pain is dulled, but not by much, not even as the hours pass by like grains of beach sand through my fingers.
The silence in between the caesuras of the waves and wind is more than unsettling. There’s no other sounds of boots crunching on sand besides my own, no shots in the distance, no garbled screeching of Corrupted that just found something human to kill. There’s nothing. Nothing lying in wait in the scrub, nothing hunting me from behind or above. I’m all alone, and solitude alone has been known to drive many a survivor to madness.
Driven by sheer compulsion, I keep walking. Following the direction of the sunset has taken me off the beach and into the scrubland. Hours pass by like minutes and within the blink of an eye, night falls yet again. The hydration pack is unsettlingly lighter… at some point I realized that my thirst is slowly overcoming my rationality and I’ve been unconsciously drinking more than I’ve allotted myself.
The next day passes by in a flash along with the next one and the one after. Days turn to hours. Hours turn to minutes with my only companions being the chill of night and the searing heat of day.
I’ve been out here for the better half of a week and there’s barely enough drinking water for another day. Even the ration pack is empty by now. A tiny voice in the back of my head is starting to berate me for my lack of foresight but the other voice, the rational side of me drowns it out. The mission was supposed to have been quick after all – Go to the surface, escort a supply drop then piss off back to space. In and out within the span of a couple hours.
Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink and there’s still no sign of any rescue ships coming.
I had trekked through the scrublands where the bush had given way to reeds, the sand given way to mire and perhaps the lack of trees should have been a dead giveaway. Yet I still pressed on, convinced that there would be a creek of some sort hidden amongst the reeds, to refill my now-empty pack.
Oh how wrong I was.
I had ended up in a salt marsh, of all places. If the salt in the water doesn’t kill me, the stuff that’s in the drab-colored brine definitely will.
There’s little else I can do but walk on.
It takes four days for one to die from dehydration and in my case, even less, with the way the sun’s baking me in my suit and the fact that I have no fresh water left. I can feel my lips cracking each time I part them. Each breath I take feels like I’m breathing in air heated by a furnace.
I can taste nothing else but blood from my cracked lips and salt from every breath I take. I can feel myself burning up inside and out, touched afire by the unyielding sun. My veins feel like there’s molten lead running through them instead of blood while the pounding in my head is now at a near-maddening level of intensity.
Between the sameness of the sky and the land, my thoughts wander even further from wanting to just get home and hopping straight into an ice-cold shower to… her.
Her.
Iris.
Selena.
Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps she is indeed dead and gone. And if rescue doesn’t come for me any sooner, I might end up sharing the same fate as her. Pitiful, isn’t it? To have fought the worst that the Punishing Virus and the Ascendants have thrown at me, to come all this way only to die alone on some no-name shore from the ravages of Mother Nature.
So this what the Last Gunslinger from that book felt, when he was lying there alone on the edge of the Western Sea, hovering between life and death, sickened from the bite of a monster.
At least unlike him, someone eventually will find me and bring me back. But what about Iris? She’d still be out there, alone and unsung.
At least I did try to find her. I’m acting on pure instinct at this point. I don’t know where else to go but forward.
I have to keep going.
And going.
And going.
My steps falter.
It may have been three hours or three minutes. Have I walked three miles or three yards?
I need to push on.
No. Not yet. Not here, not now, I tell myself. But my body is already caving despite my best efforts.
Is this it? Is this the end of the line for me? Looks like I’ll never get to meet you after all, Iris…