After Fate Fell

37 • ELLA

1 year, 3 months, and 16 days after it all
•ELLA•

The storm subsides, leaving us alone in an empty desert, no river or ocean in sight. Sand, as far as the eye can see stretches out before us, rippling along the barren landscape. The mountains that existed before are now replaced by just more sand, more nothing.

The storm slowed for a few minutes before, and we thought it was all over, but then it ramped up intensity, becoming even stronger than it had been before the brief break in the chaos, almost picking the car up off the ground and flipping it over. There were so many moments when I thought that just that would happen, that the car would become flipped over and it would become buried in the sand along with us, drowning in the little pieces of sediment that are more dry than bone, but somehow, Five was able to keep us afloat, to keep us from drowning.

Now we sit in a car that may be above the surface, but the wheels aren't. In the last blast of the storm, we may have been able to keep from flipping over or from being completely buried in the sand, but the wheels are stuck. We've tried multiple different ways to get the car out, but they've all proved useless. We're alive, but we may not last long.

Five pushes his foot all the way down on the gas, but the car goes nowhere.

"Shit!" he yells, slamming his fist on the wheel. "Fucking storm," he hisses.

"Five, give it up," I tell him. "We aren't getting it out of this."

I reach out with my telepathy, although somehow I know that it's already gone, along with my connection to Legacy.

Nine? Six? Sam? Adam? Can any of you hear me?

My mind just feels blank, and I know that I simply just spoke these words in my mind, there's nobody listening except myself. My telepathy is useless.

"I can't reach them," I tell the others.

John holds the walkie-talkie in his hand, trying to reach the other car again and again.

"Nine? Six? Guys can you hear me? We need your help. Please respond. We're all going to die out here if you don't," he says, the fear and the anger strong in his voice.

"You don't have to be so dramatic with that last part," Marina tells him, frowning. "We're gonna be fine guys." And I'm just glad to hear that at least one of us has hope. I keep trying to get my mind to move in a more hopeful direction, I want to believe that we'll be fine. But I can't. My attempts are just like our wheels in the sand, they keep trying to move without getting any traction.

Marina opens her car door. We all look up at her, confused.

"What?" she asks, and she sounds offended. "Our car is stuck, the walkie-talkies are too far apart from each other, we can't just sit here! We actually will die if that's all we do," she says as the sand blows in through her open door.

"You're right Marina. But night is falling," John says. "The temperature is already dropping and it won't stop anytime soon. Plus, navigating in the desert is impossible enough in the light of day, imagine trying to get anywhere in the dark."

"So you're saying we should what, spend a night here?" she asks, and I can tell she understands, but she's just frustrated. I know she's trying to keep her hopeful outlook, but the more we wait, the more potential it has to deteriorate.

"I agree," Five says. "We can't afford to be out there at night. We can leave in the morning."

//

We decide to pack up what we absolutely need to survive into backpacks and makeshift bags, shoving all the water, food, and a few supplies into every little inch of our bags. We try not to make them weigh too much, but we need a lot of water, especially since we'll be out there in the heat of day, and for who knows how long we'll be out there, wandering, looking for the others, the ocean, the river, anything other than the sand.

I'm sure the others are alive, because the storm couldn't have killed them, unless somethibng extreme and unprecedented happened, like my fear of the car flipping and the sand covering the windows and doors too quickly, trapping them inside. I doubt that happened though. It was just a fear I had in the storm, in the moment. I know they made it through, they had to of.

Sleeping in the car will be tough, since this is the car that only has two rows of seats, so Marina and I will have to share the backseat, and she's much too tall for it to even look comfortable...even I'm a little too tall to lay comfortably. We've all taken naps during the trip, but we need a real good-night's sleep. We have a long day ahead of us.

The darkness is completely upon us, and we've all gone silent, settling in for the night, the sound of the wind howling outside the car our lullaby to lull us to sleep. If it were anybody else sleeping in the back seat--except Six and Sam--they would have slept head to toe, but Marina and I are basically soulmates, in a different sense than love. We have been through nearly every step of this journey on Earth together, or at least it feels like it. We have to hold each other close, in hopes that everything will be okay, we'll kill this thing, we'll make it home.

Five is the first one to fall asleep. I can hear his breaths slow into a rhythmic cycle. Marina is next, her body stills, her hold on me becomes weak, and her breaths slow. John is hard to tell. In the absence of my telepathy, his mind is as dead as night, at least to me.

And all I can think of is Legacy's words over and over again in my head, except they aren't really there, because she isn't really there.

There is a way to rid yourself of the nightmares, the visions, the endless death scenes. And the only way would be to let me die. To let Lorien fall. If Lorien falls, so do the nightmares.