Bermuda

Holy fucking Dinosaurs!

Complete darkness followed by flashing lights.

Falling. No gravity.

So much screaming - where were we getting the oxygen to scream?

Light seeping through the cracks in the ship.

Sizzling, greasy and acrid.

Breaking apart. Disintegrating.

Trees, an ocean…

Oblivion.

*

My head pounded. As a matter of fact, my entire body felt as though I’d been trampled by a herd of stampeding elephants. I was laying down, but whatever I was laying on didn’t feel like the metal of the ship. It was warm, gritty and slightly damp.

I wanted to move. At the very least I wanted to open my eyes, but I was scared. The ship was crashing - I could remember fleeting, fragmented images, but not the crash itself. If we had crashed, how the hell was I alive? No one survives crash-landing a spaceship, so by default I must be dead.

If I could face the possibility of being dead, then surely I should be capable of opening my eyes. They felt crusty; as if I’d been asleep for hours. I forced my eyelids apart and looked up at the most incredible cerulean-coloured sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, only birds majestically riding the thermals.

“Ace! Jesus Christ! Oh shit, don’t be dead…not you too…”

But Megs, I am dead.

“Me too?” I croaked and began to cough, my throat as dry as sandpaper. My stomach muscles ached - I couldn’t even summon the energy to curl into a ball.

Megs’ eyes glistened with unshed tears when her face appeared above mine.

“Esa’s dead, Ky’s dead. Hadi and Teff are missing and I thought you were dead too and I was all alone!” The words tumbled from her lips without a pause for breath.

“I’m not dead?” I stared at her in confusion, “but we crashed, I don’t understand.”

She helped me sit up. Other than some incredibly stiff and sore muscles, I appeared to be in one piece and so did Megs.

“I don’t really understand it either,” she admitted. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but the only theory I have is that whatever the wormhole did, it didn’t crash us. It put us down - the ship’s all broken up, but it’s not scattered like you’d get with an impact.”

It made no sense whatsoever. “How did...Esa and Ky…” I couldn’t bring myself to say dead. Ky would have loved this, being part of the UESAA team who discovered a wormhole. We’d even talked about starting over together.

“When the view pane went, you got knocked out and Esa started screaming. She couldn’t let go of the wires - Ky tried to help her but…” she trailed off. She didn’t need to say it out loud.

We sat in silence on the pearlescent sand, listening to the gently lapping waves as they ebbed and flowed while we mourned the loss of our friends.

*

I had no idea how much time had passed, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to stay here under the darkening sky until the tide swept me away.

I felt numb. Lost. I’d been so excited about the geological discoveries I could have made on the planet we were meant to go to, but this wasn’t it. There wasn’t a single constellation amongst the twinkling stars that I recognised.