Alien Safari

Chapter 1

Well, at least he'd lived through the explosion.

Travis came to. It was dark, at first, but his vision gradually came back.

Dark and light greens with specks of darker, less bright colors filled the world for a while until he was could see well enough to distinguish everything again. His hearing was muddled, and it was like he was trying to listen to music underwater. Nothing came through quite right. He tried to stumble to his feet and fell back on his ass instead.

Not going to bother with that for a minute, then, he thought.

Someone was there, to his right. Talking? No, shouting. He could barely hear them.

There was too much ringing in his ears. He swept the tips of his fingers against the side of his head. No blood, good. Travis blinked and shook his head once or twice. It took a bit longer, but his hearing started coming back.

"-alright? Are you alright? Can you hear me?" The man's voice was shrill and nasally in the most irritating, annoying way. There was a slight stutter and hiccup to his voice.

I'd rather hear that voice forever than not be able to hear. Travis pushed off the ground.

Travis stretched and stood up. His balance was uneven, but he was steady enough to keep standing. He looked over. A man in a lab coat. There were other men that were awake, too-- sitting on the other side of the clearing in the dense, dark jungle they were inside of.

There was stuff strewn all over the grass in the clearing. Blood was splattered like a painter had been particularly generous with his reds.

"Where--" Travis croaked and his voice cracked. He bent over, coughs racking his whole body. Every breath was suddenly difficult, and he decided to sit back down right away. He felt thick, long blades of grass against his ankles and shins as he tried to get comfortable.

"Take your time. I'm surprised you lived at all," the man closest to him said. He looked like he wore glasses, based on the dark spot on the bridge of his nose, but they were missing. "There's only five of us in total. We're probably not going to live for long, though," the man added on, like the final statement was only an afterthought.

"Why?" Travis' response was instant and desperate, almost demanding.

"What do you remember?" he asked. The man looked along the clearing. Travis followed his gaze and gasped. His stomach turned at the sight, guts twisting up as he cringed.

Blood, everywhere. He'd already seen that. He hadn't looked close enough to recognize that the stuff was body parts. He didn't see any intact heads-- the pieces were too small for that. He saw eyes, he saw ears. He saw fingers ripped so horribly he could look and see into the bone without even moving from where he was sitting. There were toes not five feet from him.

Travis was sitting in it. To his credit, he didn't vomit.

"Is there another boy my age here? Blonde hair? Kind of lanky, five foot seven?"

He swallowed and looked behind him, the only direction he hadn't investigated with his eyes yet. He winced, but then relaxed, his posture losing the tension it'd gained a few seconds earlier. He sighed. Travis turned back around to the man.

"What happened?" he asked the man closest to him. The other two men wearing lab coats were on the other side of the clearing, talking amongst themselves.

"Forgive me, I haven't introduced myself," the man closest to him said. There was a slight tremble in his voice. It cracked like a boy's. "I'm Larry. Larry Thompson. I'm a scientist. The fact that you don't know what happened only proves how bad it is," Larry said. "Even worse than we thought, actually. See, there was an explosion," he said.