Page 16 of Shared Omega

Taking up my knife of chipped obsidian, I stab into the cooking fish to turn it. Something else, however, catches my attention, causing me to drop my half-cooked dinner back into the coals.

A sound, faint and distant.

At first it is a low, rhythmic throbbing. As I listen, however, the sound changes, becomes a prolonged, hawk-like screech, but much, much louder.

I rise, focusing my eyes in the direction of the sound. It only takes me a moment to find it—a dark speck moving across the starry sky, angling downward toward the earth.

By the Source.

An aircraft—An Outsider aircraft!

I have seen them once or twice before, soaring overhead like giant birds. But I’ve never seen one this close to the center of the Zone.

I squint, focusing in even more. With my highly acute vision, I can just make out the shape of the distant craft. As I watch, something emerges from the back of the ship and begins drifting slowly downward like a floating seed pod.

Another seed pod emerges, immediately followed by a third.

Not long after that, the falling craft disappears from sight behind the tops of the trees. A sudden orange glow flares on the horizon, and several seconds later, delayed by the vast distance, comes the rumble of an explosion.

I drop my stone knife into the fur sheath at my hip, and kick some riverbed dirt over my fire, extinguishing the embers and ruining my dinner. I say a quick apology to the fish for wasting his flesh like that, but there are more important matters to attend to right now.

Bigger fish, as the saying goes.

A moment later, my bare feet are racing over the earth, eating up the distance between me and the crash.

If I hurry, I can reach it by first light.

CHAPTER 6: SLOANE

The world comes back to me in bits and pieces.

First there is a sensation of something warm and wet trickling down the middle of my face, creeping along the side of my nose. Next I notice a strange, musical droning sound unlike anything I’ve heard before.

And weirdest of all, the pleasant, nostalgic sensation of swaying gently back and forth.

In my half-consciousness, an image comes to my mind of being small again, riding the swings at the dirty little playground in the cramped courtyard of the orphanage.

The trickle reaches my lips. Instinctively, I lick it, tasting the warm, coppery flavor of blood.

A sudden pulse of adrenaline surges through me, and my eyes flutter open with a gasp.

I am strapped into my jump harness, suspended from a treetop by dozens of nylon cords attached to the camo parachute caught in the limbs overhead. Other trees surround me, an entire dark forest. The gnarled branches bobbing in the cool night wind seem like hundreds of deformed hands reaching for me.

I look down.

It takes my eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness, but when they do, my mind reels with a sudden sense of vertigo.

A good thirty feet below in the darkness lies the forest floor, littered with pine needles and dappled with pale moonlight poking through the upper canopy.

Now it’s all coming back to me.

Something happened to the pilot and copilot. Then the other marines all started changing too. We lost control of the ship and we began to crash. With Dog’s help, I jumped out at the last second.

After that, things get a little fuzzy.

My last memory is the violent jerk of the harness rig between my legs and under my arms as the chute deployed and inflated. I came down straight into a dense forest. I must have hit my head against the trunk of this tree and lost consciousness.

Shit. How long have I been out?