“Ow,” cried Carrie as the top of her head struck a hard surface. “I’ve got to stop doing this.” Sitting up, the first thing she noticed was that she wasn’t in the ceramic building where she had encountered the insect alien. The second thing she noticed was the sound of whimpering.
The hard object her head had struck was a massive boulder, and the whimpering was coming from Dave, who was crouched next to it. He was curled in a fetal position, his arms over his head.
“C—C—Carrie, what’s happening? Where are we?”
Surrounding the boulder was an empty, dusty plain. To their left, in the distance, was what looked like a forest of single, massive, red leaves, stiffly arched. Behind them, a pale yellow sea lapped sluggishly at the shore. The boulder, which was the same off-grey colour as the plain, rose twenty feet high, and above it a light mauve sky softly glowed.
“Err...to be honest, I don’t actually know.”
“I remember looking at some tools that were on your kitchen table, when the cupboard door under your sink opened. There was this green light and I—I...”
“Got sucked in? Yes, weird, isn’t it? It happened to me yesterday.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“No, I went somewhere else before. It was a job interview.”
Dave straightened and sat up. He wrapped his arms round his knees and swivelled his head, blinking and squinting at the alien landscape. “A job interview?”
“Yeah.” Carrie looked around. They seemed to be alone, and their entry point had, predictably, disappeared.
“What job were you interviewing for?”
How on Earth will we get back? Carrie thought.
“Carrie.”
“What?”
“What job were you interviewing for?”
“Oh...” She waved her hand in a vague gesture. “Space detective, I think it was.”
Dave shook his head. “Space detective? This is insane. I must be dreaming.”
Carrie grimaced. “Yeah, I thought that, too. But, no, it’s real. Sorry.”
His head in his hands, Dave began to moan and rock. “This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening.” He lifted his head and stared at Carrie, his face white. “How do we get back? We have to go back. Now. We have to.” His eyes widened and he pointed a shaking finger at her. “That’s where you got all the stuff on your kitchen table.”
She nodded.
“I thought it looked strange. So those were, like, made by aliens?”
Carrie shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“What do you do with them? I mean, what are they for?”
“To help me do the job.”
“But...”
“They’re back there, and we’re here. Yep, that had already occurred to me.” Carrie wondered if one of the tools was to open a passage back to her kitchen. She thought it wiser not to mention the possibility.
Dave began to moan and rock again.
“Okay, okay, calm down.” Carrie tried to look calm and confident. Inside, her chest was tight and her stomach churned. She stood. “Well, first we can—”
She was thrown to the ground as a massive boom filled the air and the boulder shuddered. She yelled and grabbed Dave as he grabbed her.
“What was th—” he said as another boom came. This time it was from the sea, and a towering plume of pale yellow, gloopy liquid rose into the air.
“I don’t kn—” The boulder shuddered again, and a crack appeared, running from the top to the base.
“Are those b—b—bombs?” Dave asked. “Carrie, are we in a war zone?”
Carrie wrung her hands, trying to remember what the insect had said. She was sure it had been talking about...something. She pressed her hands to her head. Two huge explosions created a spray of the liquid that rained down on them.
“Carrie!” The next explosion widened the crack in the boulder. “Quick, let’s go there.” Dave indicated the forest of huge, single leaves. “Whoever’s attacking, they don’t seem to be attacking that.”
The two of them sped over the plain towards the leaves. A memory flashed into Carrie’s mind. Something about the orange jumpsuit. Yes, that was it. The colour was so she would stand out in...her heart sank. In conflict zones. Conflict zones like the one they were in right now. And the jumpsuit was back on Earth.
The forest drew nearer. Behind them the deafening sounds of explosions continued, the ground vibrating at each one. Dave was ahead, but Carrie was gaining on him. When she drew abreast, he was red-faced and gasping.
“Come on,” she called. “Not much farther.” She silently thanked her Bagua Zhang instructor for pushing her to train outside of class time. The first leaves of the forest were only a couple of hundred feet away. As she reached the first leaf, Carrie stopped and turned. A second later Dave caught up and sank, gasping, to his knees.
“Oh, it wasn’t that far,” Carrie said.
Dave feebly waved his hand by way of reply as he drew in large lungfuls of air. “Haven’t...” pant “run like...” pant “that since I was...” pant “at school.”
In a few minutes Dave’s breathing eased, and they set off through the leaf trees. Each was nearly identical to the next. Wide, with a central rib and radiating veins, they looked like beech leaves, except several thousand times larger and a deep, unsettling red. All were facing the same way, irregularly spaced and casting a maroon shadow.
As they drew farther from the explosions, the ground vibrated less. Carrie squinted up at the cloudless sky where a small, intensely bright sun shone. A sun quite unlike the one Earth orbited. Though the temperature was balmy, Carrie shivered.
She glanced at Dave. His face had regained its colour after their run, but it was still rigid and his eyes were wide.
“Carrie,” he said, after they had walked a little farther, “what are we doing? Where are we going?”
“We’re getting away from those bombs or whatever they are.”
“But we’re far away now. We aren’t in any immediate danger. I was wondering if you’re taking us somewhere we can get back to Earth.”
“Er, I’m not sure.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I haven’t been here before.”
“You said you’d been for a job interview. To become a space detective.”
“Yes...but they didn’t say anything about this place.” At least, she didn’t remember anything, though she hadn’t been paying much attention at the time. Who pays attention in a dream? She decided against telling Dave about her giant bug interviewer with the razor-sharp, dripping fangs.
“So you have absolutely no idea where we are, or where we’re going.”
“Ermm...” Carrie disliked the implications of what she was about to say, but couldn’t think of a way to avoid saying it. “No.”
“Carrie.” Dave grabbed her shoulders and spun her round. His hair, which had been perfectly, stylishly groomed only an hour or so previously was now a tussled mess. Though quite attractively tussled, Carrie thought. His skin shone with sweat. “Carrie. What are we going to do? How are we going to get back? We can’t wander through this forest forever. We don’t have anything to eat, or drink, or, or...what’s wrong?”
She hadn’t noticed it at first, distracted as she was by Dave’s dishevelled good looks, but even she couldn’t fail to see the giant metallic object that was behind him. How it had got there she didn’t know. Maybe it had been following them silently, or it had appeared out of nowhere. But there it undeniably was. A huge, grey length of metallic tubing that was folded—overlapping at the beginning and end—into a rectangle with curved corners. Through the hollow centre Carrie could see the giant leaves that led back the way they had come.
Reading Carrie’s expression, Dave slowly turned around and looked behind him. He grabbed her arm and leaned in close to her ear.
“Does that look like what I think it looks like?” he whispered.
Carrie nodded. “A gigantic paperclip.”