By Samuel Gachon
She couldn't even remember her own name. All she could remember was an explosion. Nothing else.
She lay there. She had no idea where she was. She tried to remember. Nada. Void. She stayed immobile for what seemed to be an eternity.
Eventually, she recovered some strength and stood. She looked around. What she saw frightened her. Everything — destroyed. Corpses lay scattered on the ground, but there was no sign of violence. They were like...frozen.
She could see outside through shattered walls, all of it dark and lifeless.
The ruins of a city. What had happened ? If only she could remember...
She wandered the ruins for hours, seeing only destruction and frozen corpses.
She sat against a wall.
Something moved beside her. What was that?
She looked around, but saw nothing. “Who's there?” she called. No answer.
She fell back into her quest for memory, and the movement — closer this time — came again.
There it was. A small creature. She had never seen anything like it before. Like a lizard, but with white skin and glowing blue lines all over its body.
It looked at her, wide-eyed, probably as surprised as she was.
“What are you?” she asked. She was not expecting an answer. Stupid to try and speak with it.
But the creature did answer. “I am here to set you free,” it said, its voice warm and welcoming, curiously lacking any lip or mouth movement.
“Your world is no more,” the creature continued. If you stay here, the Great Shadow will take you and force you to suffer for eternity. Follow me and I will take you to my realm where you will know Eternal Sunshine. Everyone else is already there. They are waiting for you.”
She shook her head. “I know what you want,” she said. “I’ve seen what you did to the others. And you want me to be next. Why?”
“I only want to save you. What you see are their former prisons. I took them to a place where they don't need them. Follow me as well, and you will understand.”
Was that supposed to comfort her? “What will I understand?” she asked, “Who are you?”
“I am what you would call an angel. I was sent here to save you from evil. You do not belong here anymore. You do not deserve the horrible fate that awaits you here. Your home is with us now.”
She was still afraid, but it seemed she had no choice. She let the creature come to her. At the instant of physical contact with the lizard, her pain vanished.
She floated away from the ground, away from her body frozen below like the others.
She closed her eyes, and finally learned the truth. There was no Great Shadow. These invaders had bombed her city, and sent this messenger to collect survivors.
She was still alive down there. The creature was draining her energy for its masters to use as fuel.
Nevertheless, she was happy. In fact, she had never felt so good in her life.
At least they allowed her to die happy.
And then nothing.
About the Author
Samuel Gachon
Samuel Gachon is a student in creative writing at QUT, with a minor in media and entertainment.
He lives in Brisbane, and has published a few stories on Wattpad and Deviantart.
Links:WordPress: <https://wordpress.com/pages/samuelgachon.wordpress.com>.
Wattpad: <https://www.wattpad.com/user/SamuelGachon>.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Nick works as a freelance writer out of Perth, Western Australia, where he likes to read unsettling fiction and complain about the sun.
Callan J. Mulligan was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988.
Louis Evans is a sci-fi writer living in Brooklyn with his partner and two cats named after fictional European detectives, Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Kaoru Sakasaki lives with his family in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
Neil A. Hogan has been writing space fiction on and off since the '80s.
João Ventura writes short fiction, which has appeared in several websites (AntipodeanSF and Bewildering Stories among them), and also in printed form: Somnium, in Brazil; Dragão Quântico, Hyperdrivezine, Phantastes (Portuguese fanzines); Universe Pathways (in both the English and the Greek versions).
An emerging writer, James Patrik enjoys exploring the existential themes.
Steven Fritz graduated from the University of Maryland, became a Naval Aviator and flew helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft in the US Navy.
Brian has published over sixty short stories in the United States as well as internationally.
Pretty much a life-long fan of speculative fiction, Edwina Harvey is a writer, editor, silk painter and ceramic artist.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.