SUbmitted as Times of India – Write India Entry
The firestorm killed the lights and knocked the ship deep into space. Somehow, the instruments were still alive, but there was no crew to read them. Far below a red crescent shone, the edge of the burning planet silhouetted by the curve of a wing. It would be a lonely trip. She gazed through the porthole at the wavering stars.
Humanity had brought its own end upon themselves and foreseen it; the place they once called home turned into hell; the planet green and blue; now a blazing red engulfing it as a whole. The alarm had blared in the silence of the night for half of the world and for the other half it was just the beginning of their day. In the next few hours, there arose a strange phenomenon ripping through continents, a strange combination of a hurricane and fire. It was like the natural storm’s mitochondria was petroleum and it was bigger than any living organism had ever seen, heard or thought about.
A team from NASA was immediately arranged to go to space when the threat was first detected – the urgent response was powered by the curiosity and the sheer fear on the faces of the researchers that had been observing it. The sudden urgency surfaced questions that were unanswerable yet valid, hence a spacecraft had to be sent to explore and decipher the odd spectacle that (unknown to their knowledge) would lead to the extinction of their entire species. Within the span of an hour the group had launched off unbeknownst to them that the universe would not allow them to survive – their fate was locked.
The universe had a cruel way to punish the beings that it had created when it decided it had enough of the species that the planet was ruled by; this was clear to her at this point. Her mission now was to survive, it didn’t matter where, but only mattered how. She had set out here and there was literally no point of return for her as her world was set ablaze and destroyed, burnt to a crisp. She was lost, hoping to find one of the crew members unconscious on the floor but to no avail; the ship was desolate… or so she had thought.
Her ray of hope came from the control panel from where the big blue button was calling to her, hypnotising her to press it – and she did; this, she realized made the ship surge forward in an animal-like motion and made it move on its own; the destination unknown. This made it much easier for her to explore the rest of the ship while it was automated. From the corner of her eye she could make out a gargantuan cabinet right at the front of the space craft; curious, she stepped over the equipment and swept up the crowbar she was using to pry open the doors and quickly made her way to the cabinet. With sweaty hands and a heaving breath, she finally managed to pry open the doors and… she screamed. Out fell the co-pilot of the ship! In shock, she jumped back and stumbled over her own feet and fell to the ground with a loud thud. She stared in disbelief and wonder, that how on the entirety of the ship, only the co-pilot would remain, unconscious but not a scratch upon him! Out of curiosity, she made her way over to him again, slowly and carefully, vacillating through the mess she had made; approaching him, she raised his arm and dragged him onto the surface of the ship (this was possible due to the spacecraft hovering in the Earth’s orbit). Turning him over onto his stomach she noticed that the back of his shirt was torn open from the side and a visible green scar had been engraved onto his torso and dried crimson blood was surrounding it. “Green scar? That’s unusual… “she thought, trying to process the image she was seeing before her. Just to check, she raised his wrist and put two fingers on his veins and put her head against his chest, but silence was the only thing she experienced meaning, he was dead. This hit her like a ton of bricks for some reason… she could most likely be the only human remaining in the galaxy at this point.
Her body slumped against the control panel and she burst in to tears, hysterical; she got up in such haste that she knocked over all the sonar equipment and whilst still crying started banging open all doors, cabinets and rummaged through all the boxes she could find. She herself didn’t know what she was looking for, maybe a ray of hope? In this time of disbelief and depression suddenly, a peculiar scent hit her, it was slightly alkaline yet sweet. Calming down slightly and wiping off her tears, she made her way over to the hatch of the spacecraft, only to find a glowing blue orb sending off those fumes. She reached her hand out to feel and hold it, but alas it zipped past her, stopped, came back aiming straight for her face like it had a mind of its own. She ducked right on time fooling the orb and opening the porthole slightly to let it out. All of a sudden, her head felt woozy and her legs started shaking, making her panic, but only for a split second as she dropped like a slaughtered beast headless onto the ground.
She woke up in the exact same place, but this time she had company…they were her crew members! But not? They looked exactly like them, but their behaviour, voice and language did not match them, hitting her with the sudden realization that they were dead, and these foreign creatures were using their form to bamboozle her, this is why she pretended to remain comatose until the creatures surrounding her decide to slap her awake. Offended, she quietly picked the crowbar lying next to her and threw it across one of the duplicates faces, managing to majorly injure two of them and making them crumple to the ground concurrently. The other three turned their head around simultaneously alarming her, hence she dashed just in time, out of the way and into the changing room from the blast that was supposed to hit her. Her heart was pounding in her chest, blood rushing through her ears, drumming and accentuating every single sound, yet from the outside not even a single tinkle could be heard. She could not believe her luck; it was like the universe was seeking out all the revenge for every single sin she had ever committed in the past 24 years. She never would’ve thought something this dreadful could ever happen to her let alone her experiencing it. Although the next thing that happened was way beyond worse – the creatures carved a hole through the thick metal door and burst inside, this time in their true horrifying form.
The only way they could be described was as, ginormous squid-like creatures with tongues of every living organism that had existed previously on her former planet, attached to their heads which was surrounded by bat and snake fangs in a locus. She backed against the wall of the room, yet the creatures kept inching closer and closer, every second. These seconds seemed like a decade each as she tried to form an impulsive plan spontaneously. Unfortunately, it was too late… pressed against the wall the beam they projected from their mouths hit her square in the chest, making her tumble and slide under a table. Yet for the first time, she had luck. She was barely conscious, but she managed to pull the guns that they had dropped (from their former alias) with her foot, carefully enough for them to not notice. Still curled under the desk in a ball, she quickly checked the ammo and thought of how to execute her plan this time, whilst the creatures celebrated their ‘victory’.
The next few minutes were chaotic and dangerous – she pushed herself out from under the table and jumped up to spin a whole 360 degrees and before her toes could hit the floor, she sprinted out from the room and made her way straight to the hatch. She was hoping that the ghastly creatures would follow her and while chasing her, she would suddenly stand back, open the hatch and let them fall into the chasm, death devouring them. And if the plan went even slightly wrong, she always had the gun with her the whole time. Luckily at first, she got what she wanted, they were chasing after her! “Perfect!” she cheered. Impulsively, even though it did not seem necessary, she shot one of them in the chest, which pierced it and black tar-like fluid gushed out of it. This made them angrier and chase after her at a much higher speed than before, but just in a nanosecond she stopped and stepped to the side- nevertheless fatefully for her, their reaction time was faster than hers, so they stopped right in front of her immediately and each lashed out a tongue at her face burning and giving her searing scars. She screamed and backed up against the wall accidently pressing against the button to open the hatch and the creatures sought this out as a perfect opportunity to grab her, however she was using all her power to resist it; she then became aware of the gun she still had and she managed to shoot three bullets in her captors body and the remaining two into the one standing behind it. She bothered not to shoot at the third one as it was already losing a lot of its fluid and was practically dead. Even with her best efforts, the creature threw her out of the hatch of the ship and closed it.
She latched onto side of the spacecraft; her fingers already numb against the cold metal of the ship. She knew there was no point of her holding onto her doomsday transport, but she wanted to just take a few moments of peace alive, to remember everything that had led up and escalated to this moment – the climactic catastrophe, the firestorm, the creatures, everything. She wanted to feel numb and forget all of this before her eventual sweet release of death. And when that was done, she let go… letting the deafening deadness and the darkness engulf every inch of her, thinking and feeling the stricken cinders from the remains of the Earth still roaring and she let herself plunge into the Abyss.
Kashvi Kathuria 