Transmissions from Mars: Alive(ish)

Ground zero: were the Silio used to be on Golding's pig farm 3:22AM

I couldn't hear.

I couldn't see.

The dust and debris were not only blinding me, but making it impossible to breathe. The impact had thrown me against the wall.

The fall in the field.

The battle with the fake Round Trip Jones.

The explosion.

I wasn't getting up anytime soon. Every inch of me hurt. I felt old 20 minutes ago, and now I felt ancient. I felt like I was on the wrong side of dead. But for better or for worse I was alive.

I even managed to grab the thing by the ankles and with future strength worthy of a summer blockbuster, I tossed it out of the hole into the other end of the silo.

Someone grabbed my knee and then someone grabbed my shoulder. Standard protocol when senses are impaired is to establish physical contact.

2 hands + my lump body = we were all alive.

The good news was we weren't going to be ripped apart to pieces or crushed under debris.

The bad news was the bad guy was still on the loose and we had no idea where the real Round Trip Jones was or if he was even alive.

After what seemed like forever but not nearly enough time, we all struggled back to our feet. A few minutes more we were struggling to climb out of the trap door in what used to be the silo.

The explosion had blown the the roof and the walls completely to pieces. The construct we had previously been in was gone - as if it had never existed. The area a few yards outside of where the silo was looked more like a meteor impact than a pig farm.

This answered the question we were all thinking but nobody had said.

"How the fuck had we survived that?"

I wasn’t looking to get lucky, but not only did I toss the exploding clone outside of the trap door but outside of the silo entirely.

"Good shot," Tiny coughed.

"Fuck yeah!" barked Ethan, which somehow actually did sound like “thank you.”

We walked through the blast zone, into the tall grass, and almost like we planned it, we all collapsed.

The dust had settled so I could see the stars. I thought I could hear sirens in the distance. I also heard something that sounded like a whine and some other explosions but my ears and head were ringing too much to decipher what that could possibly mean.

We all laid there. Discouraged, disappointed. It hurt to breathe as if for the first time in my life, a mile away from where I live, I was going to stay forever.

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