“Let me out! Please!” I yelled at the door. “Someone, please! My card isn’t working! My card isn’t—”
My terrified plea for help was the last thing I was able to get out of my chest before my world went dark, before my throat felt like it’d closed up for good, before my legs seemed like they’d disappeared from the rest of my body.
Chapter Two
Rachel
I woke up underwater. I woke up screaming and gasping for air, my body feeling the weight of the waves crushing down against my shoulders. The first thing I tried to do was swim for the surface, my frame moving instinctively, trying to carry myself to safety, trying to keep myself alive.
But as I broke the surface and gasped for air, I couldn’t help but notice the water’s odd tone and hue.
The water is purple.
Where in the world is there purple water?
I knew that there was always a scientific explanation, that more than likely it was either a trick of light or the result of moss or sea life that’d turned the water purple over time, overtaking its typical nature. And even though I wanted to ask a billion questions about the purple shade of it all, I knew that if I didn’t make my way to shore, I wouldn’t be alive much longer to ask anyone a question about anything.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Why was swimming so fucking heavy? Why did it feel like for every small motion I made, I was exerting twice as much energy as it took?
How the hell did I end up in this purple ocean, anyway?
My mind raced back to the wrong door at NASA, the heaviness I’d felt in the room swirling around me, the lack of any sign of life. Had I stumbled into an experiment room? What kind of experiments had they been running?
Just then, a pulse of fear swam through my veins.
Were there other people in that room before me? Had they been disappeared to their own version of purple lakes, too?
At the same time as the thought crossed my mind, I found that I’d reached the shore. I then pulled myself up on the banks of the river, my fingers twisting into impossibly green sand, just as impossible as the purple water.
“What the fuck is happening to me?” I muttered, briefly wondering if I hadn’t been transported anywhere at all. For all I knew this was just a massive hallucination, and instead of being in the middle of a purple river, I was actually lying in a hospital bed and fighting for my life.
For all I knew, I’d been poisoned as soon as I’d walked into the wrong sector.
As I caught my breath on the banks, I reached down for my messenger purse, happy to feel that it was somehow still at my side. And as I rested my back along the green sand, looking up at a sky filled with constellations I didn’t recognize, filled with several moons of various sizes instead of the usual one, I pulled my phone out of purse, soon bringing it up to my ear.
This is a dream. Or I am dying.
I knew either of those options had to be the truth. Even so, I still dialed the secretary’s desk at NASA, hoping to hear the older woman’s annoyed voice, hoping that my brain would be able to come up with a conversation that’d at least calm me down before I woke up in the hospital. I’d also been more thankful than ever to have recently splurged on my first big purchase, a waterproof phone that’d been all the rage in the news that everyone seemed to want to get their hands on, too.
Because even though I hadn’t actually just swam through a purple river, at least my brain wouldn’t fight the logic of a phone call going through in a dream world, not with a waterproof phone.
I waited a few moments for the call to complete, my gaze still staring up at the impossible sky.
But the call never went through and when I glanced down to the screen I noticed no bars of service.
“Huh.” It was all I said as I calmly placed my phone back into the folds of my purse. I closed my eyes, then, as I waited for something, anything, to change, as I waited to get a glimpse into the afterlife or wake up surrounded by nurses and doctors.
And a few seconds later, something had changed.
Because now, there was someone standing over me.
I was able to feel the person’s presence before I saw them, my eyes slowly blinking open so that I’d be able to take them in. A part of me wondered if they were all my imagination, too, maybe my brain dreaming up someone to guide me into the Land of the Dead, if I wasn’t there already.
But the person standing over me wasn’t much of a person, at all.
My mouth fell open into a scream as I scrambled away from their frame, my eyes still taking them in even as I put distance between us. They were huge, standing at least eight feet tall, with purple skin that matched the same hue of the waves.
Their skin.
It looked more like armor than anything else, hard, uninviting and scarred, jagged welts of deep blue marks that seemed to take over their entire chest. I then looked up into the stranger’s eyes, fear still running through every part of me, soon bleeding right into confusion as I finally got a glimpse of their face.
While their eyes were human enough, the rest of their face was not. Their features reminded me of a sea creature’s, like a fish with a hard, square nose and a pair of lips that were just as scarred as their chest. It was as if a deep-sea diver’s helmet had melded into their head too, creating a bulbous shape that was only vaguely recognizable, creating something that was so clearly not human—
Alien.
“Fuck!” I screamed at the realization, still trying my best to scramble away from the creature.
And my screaming seemed to have activated something within the alien, because as soon as the sound left my mouth, I watched as they reached for something that looked a lot like a goddamn sword, pulling it out and bringing it up toward their chest.
And then they were coming at me with the weapon, stabbing wildly at the air around me as I continued to scream, continued to move away from the stranger.
“Stop! Please! Don’t!” I screamed again, still running away from the violent creature, my heart beating so fast inside my chest that I feared the worst, that I feared that all of this might’ve been oh so very real.
I wasn’t in a hospital bed. I wasn’t in purgatory.
I was on a fucking alien planet, and I was about to fucking die.
Just then, the alien seemed to have lost their edge over me as I watched the sword come down a few inches away from my bare foot. He took a moment to try and pull the sword out of the thick sand, and as he struggled with the weapon, I had an idea blaze fast and quick across my brain.
I reached down into my purse again, this time pulling out a small can of mace that I’d been carrying with me ever since high school. Growing up on the wrong side of town had prepared me for the kind of asshole who might follow a girl while she walked home alone, or the kind of asshole who might come across a girl on an alien beach and try to stab her to death without any warning.
And then, just as the alien managed to slide the sword free of the sand below, I aimed my mace right at his stupid, alien face, letting the spray fly free as I hoped against all hope that he someone wasn’t resistant to its burning effects. A second or two later, I realized that he was just as susceptible to the effects of the mace as any creep would’ve been on Earth, his purple hands moving up toward his eyes, trying to rub the mace away.
But as yet another moment passed, as the alien soon moved his hands away from his eyes, I let out another horrified scream, the sound ripping right through my chest.