Grayspace

A Discovery

I don't think they were looking for me. They seemed surprised to find me. The sky was gray and the sun was white. Actually everything was gray. Took my eyes a minute to adjust. Last I knew, I had passed out with a bottle of something strong and amber-colored in my hand. Then these guys were excavating me out of a sarcophagus. I think it was summer. Maybe. There weren't any trees. There wasn't any grass. The sun was too hot, too bright, but I think everything was sand. 

They wore full-body haz-mat suits with thick black capes and shoulder pads. Like the CDC made a contract with Hot Topic for some limited edition outfits. 

They wore masks with large, heavy beaks and opaque eyes like the plague physicians of old. I had to laugh when I say "of old." I really didn't know how much time had passed since I passed out. The landscape outside my window before I fell asleep was skyscrapers and jets and taxis. Then it was dunes of sand with sporadic dark teeth of broken masonry. 

They yanked me from my eternal resting place and threw me onto the sand. One of them ran a wand over the stone where I was laying looking for radiation. Another had a glorified pair of tweezers digging pebbles from random depressions. They were more interested in gravel and grit that held zero clues, than in me who could speak full English and could answer any questions.

I was drinking away a few bad memories caused by people I was trying to forget. But the landscape, the dress of the few human beings I saw, told me that the people that caused me to pick up my chemical crutch had died a very, very long time ago. And me, as a product of my of the ghosts of my experiences, was less than nothing as their elbow-length, 6mm gloves hoisted me up and rolled me down the steep dune.  I was left to crumble into a mass of sand without an hourglass to lend me the most elementary of purpose, under a sun like an unblinking eye. The very things that made me, ruined me, weren't worthy of the Smithsonian. Mostly because such an institution had ceased to exist millennia ago. 

I spat out the granules of gravel and stood. Dull thuds of shovels behind me trying to establish a rhythm in the sand. I laughed. I wiped away dust that was meant to be tears. I began wandering a wide open, unfamiliar world looking for another place to pass out.