Lords & Ladies of the M'Verse: An Ooorah Anthology

Day 21 - GlennKoerner's Walking the Multiverse

Walking the Multiverse

by GlennKoerner

A Visitor

Janet Stockton dived over the broken down wall, painfully clipping part of it with the shoulder of her environmental suit. The black material was flexible and impact resistant, but impact still hurt her shoulder. Bricks and loose mortar broke away, creating a small avalanche of debris. Janet ignored both the pain in her shoulder and the deplorable conditions of the outlying city, drawing her disruptor and aiming across the upper edge of the wall and back the way she had come. She couldn't allow insignificant things to distract her focus.

Her breathing was labored, and her pulse was practically out of control. Her gun hand trembled slightly, so she wrapped both hands around the disruptor's grip to keep the aim steady. Janet waited, but there was no sign of her pursuer.

She knew it was foolish to think she'd lost it. Runners were relentless trackers. They followed at a swift pace they could maintain for hours, and more importantly, they anticipated ambushes. Janet spun around in time to see the runner emerge silently from behind a burned out shell of a bus in an attempt to attack her from behind.

Lean to the point of being almost skeletal, runners' muscles resembled twisted vines wrapped tightly in a thin and flexible leather skin. The left arm was long and hung down nearly to the ground while the right was a collection of five tentacles branching out from the shoulder. The legs were angled backwards at the knees for faster sprinting capabilities. The leathery skin extended up from the torso to cover the lowered head of the vaguely humanoid creature as if the skull had melted and become partially absorbed into the main part of the body. The florescent green of its eyes hovered near the collarbones.

Janet fired her disruptor repeatedly, sending pulses of electrical energy toward the monster. She had always been terrified at the speed of runners and the others of its kind. The creature ducked, missing the first two shots cleanly, but the third shot hit, sending an electrical pulse through the body and temporarily disrupting muscular function.

On her way past, Janet shot the runner three more times to be sure it would stay down for the longest amount of time possible. Disruptors only had a limited effectiveness, and it wouldn't be long until the thing recovered and started hunting her again. Hurrying away from the creature, Janet hoped she would have enough time to reach the Citadel before it caught up with her.

Janet's boots kicked up clouds of dust from the barren and desolate streets as she jogged toward home. She kept her speed at a reduced level to avoid running into anything lying in wait. Eyes alert for signs of movement, she skidded to a halt when he heard something to her right. Holding the disruptor out in front, Janet closed in on the sound.

In a crater that had once been a basketball court, only one of the goals was still standing on the edge of the circular depression, an electrical disturbance was growing. Blue-white energy swirled in a tight sphere near the center of the crater. Suddenly, the energy expanded into a circular formation. Although it had the solid appearance of illuminated glass, the energy flowed and swirled like smoke as if it wasn't bound by the any of the laws of physical reality.

Janet stared hard because the area within the vertically standing circle wasn't the crater behind it but a completely different landscape. Trees swayed slowly in a gentle breeze, their movements in tandem with the knee high grass of lush green. Flowers of a multitude of colors and shapes were interspersed among the green foliage. Janet couldn't see the sky through the swirling circle from her position as her line of sight was angled downward from the rim of the crater, but the available light spilling out of the other realm showed it was daytime, another contradiction with Janet's current location as the stars were sparkling in the cloudless sky above.