When Forever Ends (Part 1: A Game of Chess)

XVII

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S e v e n t e e n

A speck appeared on the horizon, along with the dawn of a new day. The nights were getting shorter, the days longer, as we neared the southern pole of Magnus. Very soon, if we continued in the same direction, the sun wouldn't set at all.

I yawned and stretched, excited to see some variation from the flat desert we'd had to look at for the past two days. We had found some food and water on the vehicle, but the supplies were getting dangerously low. Hopefully, the speck would be some place that had food and water.

"Alright, you guys. The time for R&R is over. Now get up!" I gave Will a gentle kick to rouse him. He had been snoring like a nest of bees for the whole night and it had been getting on my nerves.

As my friends sat up and rubbed the sleep from their eyes, I looked back at the speck─no, dot─no, blob─on the horizon. We were getting closer each second. I hadn't realized how fast we were moving until now, with nothing to compare us to, and it scared me to see the speed at which we were hurtling towards the shape.

"What do you think that is?" Sofie asked. She was standing next to me looking out across the desert.

I shrugged. "We'll find out soon enough. It looks as if that blob is to be our destination."

In a couple minutes, the blob had grown into a clump of mountains. At the foot of the first mountain was a military base of some sort.

As the vehicle pulled up and stopped outside the front gate, I wondered why it had brought us here. It must have had some sort of autopilot telling it to come here, but this place looked abandoned.

We climbed out of the Levit and stared at the place we now found ourselves in. Most of the buildings were long and low, with curved roofs made of corrugated metal. Everything was dusted with reddish sand and drifts had built up in every corner over years of soft, but persistent wind. There were no tracks of any kind, from vehicles or people, which may have been due to the wind. The whole place was surrounded by a tall, chain link fence topped with coils of sharp razor wire. At one point, it must have been electrified, but now it was almost harmless.

Maya scrubbed some sand off her glasses with her sleeve, and put them back on. "Helloo!" she shouted. The gate, left wide open, shifted and creaked. A dry, spiky plant tumbled across the sand on the breeze and came to a rest against the fence. There was no reply.

I stepped forward across the threshold and into the compound. Still nothing.

The vehicle we had arrived in suddenly made a whooshing noise and I turned just in time to watch it zoom off into the distance with all our stuff.

"Hey, wait! I want my awesome gloves!" Will half-heartedly tried to chase the Levit. He stopped, though, because he knew, like the rest of us, that it was a lost cause.

"Your awesome gloves?!" Sofie exclaimed incredulously. "What about the food! The water! The way out of here!"

"Calm down, Sofie," I said. "I'm sure there's some food around here somewhere."

"Maybe we should spread out and look around," Will suggested.

"Good idea." I waved my hand, gesturing for everyone to separate.

I walked up to the first building. It was kind of a square, greenish box with a window at the front, right next to the gate. It must have been used as some sort of guardhouse, to control who came and went. I opened the door and looked inside. Nothing but a worn and splintered wooden stool and a broken megaphone. I moved on to another building.