AWOL: A Character Lost (12 page)

The character heard noises, loons crying in the distance, crickets, owls hooting, felt cool air, sucked in clean oxygen. It was quiet here, wherever here was, probably in the mountains somewhere.

He opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. It was night time, and it was dark – no moonlight. His head was resting on a soft feather pillow. The pillowcase smelled clean, and the sheets and blankets he was lying on and under felt like they had just been washed.

He looked across the room, and he could barely make out the image of a door.

He pushed himself off the bed and stood up.

He found the only light in the room, a small brass lamp with a statue of a monkey attached to it – hanging off the side like King Kong. He turned on the light and realized he was inside a cabin. It had wood floors and wood walls, and from the looks of it, it was hand-built. This room looked familiar to him, the sheets and colors of the bed, and the walls, reflecting a time and place from when he was a child.

He felt a wisp of cool air float into the room, ghost like, as the sounds of the forest seeped in. He looked over at the tiny window, which was partially open and again, it was a familiar image. He knew this window, but how, he wasn’t sure.

His eyes moved from the window to a nightstand beside the single bed. It, like the window, all gave him memory chills as he tried to think back to where he had seen them.

The closet-
Bam!
-that was a big one for him. He walked over, opened the door, and looked into it. There was nothing there, just bare hangers on an empty rod, but the smell was familiar. It was cedar. The tiny closet also reminded him of times gone by. Innocent childhood hide and seek games. After a moment or two, the character turned away, and left the room by way of the door he had seen moments before.

He walked out into a main room and found a couple more brass lamps. He turned them on and noticed that these lamps all had the monkey designs on them just like the one in the bedroom. As he looked around, he noticed that everything was familiar to him, like the room he had just left, from smells to design; it all reminded him of something distant, long ago lost with the passing of years.

He walked over and knelt before a handle sticking out of the floor. He pulled it up just a notch and smelt damp Earth. This was a door to a cellar, and he knew that if he went down there he would find a single light and shelves with tools on them. How did he know this? He wasn’t sure. He just knew.

He let the door fall back into place and scanned the room again. It was pretty sparse, all things considered. If anyone did live here or visit here, they didn’t need much just a couch and a couple of chairs and again, the designs and colors of these reflected a child hood long since gone. In a far corner of this room was a fire place and beside it a pile of wood. The room was cold, so the character decided to make a fire.

*

Outside in the night time sky there was a round silver disc, flying fast, in landing mode. Its destination was Earth, and it wouldn’t be long before it set down somewhere close to the cabin the character was now building a fire in.

*

The fire cracked and popped as the character warmed himself in front of it. He took off his coat and did another glance around the room. The familiarity with everything was just eerie. Had he been here before? Come to think of it, how did he get here? His brain was jumbled. Not only could he not remember this place, which he felt like he should, but he also couldn’t remember where he had come from. How had he come to stand in front of this fireplace enjoying this nice warm fire? He had no idea.

He took a seat on the couch and dropped his head into his hands. He heard a rustling from inside the bathroom (the one to the left of the fireplace), and then he heard a commode flush. He stood up, and looked at the door.

Someone was in there.

The character slipped back into the small kitchen with the humming fridge (which also reflected a decade long since past) and waited.

The door handle started to turn.

*

Deep in the forest the small silver ship landed hard. Dirt, dust, and tree debris went flying as the ship came to a sliding halt.

*

The character watched the bathroom handle for a moment, and then he heard a click. The door was starting to open. He slunk back against the wall, trying to hide, unsure of what was coming out of that door. Would it be the owner of this cabin? How would he approach his intrusion? How would he explain himself? He had no answer for those last two questions, so he just stood there, stood there, and waited.

The door opened and surprise, not fear, raced across the character’s face when he saw who was behind it.

*

Inside the cockpit, instruments slowly went dark as the alien shut off the machine. It unhooked itself from its seat and checked the air quality of this planet called Earth, a place it had never been to before, but had heard plenty about. It found that it could breathe outside without a suit, which was good because the suit limited visibility and mobility.

The alien stood up, and stretched. Long space flights cramped its muscles, but it was an explorer at heart, so journeys like this were necessary because it just had to know, had to know what lay beyond its own orange planet.

The alien stood on two legs like a man, dressed like one as well, with shiny pants, short sleeve shirt, and boots. It also had arms like a human, hands, feet, and a face as well. Its skin was white like its human teeth and its eyes the color of blue. It stood about six feet tall with soft brown hair. It had a forked tongue in its mouth and a long reptile tail, which swished as it stood there.

The alien opened the cockpit door and sucked in fresh air, stepped outside, and looked around. The machine on its arm told the alien what it was looking at, a forest full of trees, soft dirt, water inside the lake, and what animals it could hear and see. Once acclimated, it checked the ship and found no damage, just a rough landing. With the ship’s ability to take off from a levitating position, the journey off this planet would be a lot easier than the landing.

The alien stretched and checked the instrument on its arm again – sent it searching for anything human in the area.

The instrument found two of them, one big, and one small.

This alien was a meat eater; and it had eaten many exotic meats on its travels across the stars, but it had never had human, which was very expensive and very pricey back home. It could have one for dinner and then save the other one for selling once it was back.

The alien checked the cool compartment, which was still working, and the meat inside was fresh, frozen, and cold. That was a good thing because that meat would fetch a fair price, and the alien had worked really hard to acquire it. Zorg meat was second only to human meat when it came to money. However, nothing equaled the price of one human being. It was their feisty, fighting nature that made them so high in price. Many had died trying to acquire this delicacy. Humans didn’t just roll over and let you filet them.

The alien retrieved its weapon, which looked like a shotgun; but this shotgun only shot lasers. The yellow one was for stun, best for catching and maintaining freshness, while the red one was for death.

The alien pushed in the yellow button on the handle and turned its attention towards the cabin-
six clangs by his count, twelve miles to you and me-
which sat all alone in the woods.

Goal:
Stun the meat first, keep the biggest, and eat the smallest.

Its stomach growled, as it made its way into the forest with the gun humming, cocked and loaded.

It was hunting time.

*

“Johnny?”

“Dad?”

The two of them stood there, unmoving, frozen, a living room gap between them, separated for so long by stories and pages, together at last.

The character found his legs first and moved across the living room as his son moved towards him. They met in the middle, embraced, and hugged for what seemed like forever.

“I’ve missed you so much,” the character replied, holding his son tight, and his son, even though he was twelve years old, allowed it.

“Where have you been, dad? I was so lost and scared. I kept finding myself in all of these strange places, but now I can’t remember a single one of them. It’s like a long dream. You know you were in it when you wake up, but you can’t remember anything about it.”

“I know what you mean. I’ve been feeling the same way.” They stood there a moment longer before the character broke their embrace. “Take a seat by the fire. You look cold.”

Johnny did as his dad asked. While he sat there, he looked around the room. “This place looks so familiar. It’s like I’ve been here before, but the colors and designs are all wrong.”

“I know,” the character replied.

“What happens if the owner of this place comes back?”

“I have a feeling the owner won’t be coming back.” The character hoped he was right about that, but a stocked fireplace and a clean cabin meant someone had been here recently. “Are you hungry?”

“Starved,” Johnny replied, eyes on the fire.

“Yeah, what growing boy isn’t, right?”

The character made his way into the kitchen and began to forage for some food. The refrigerator was well stocked and so were the cabinets, dark rich oak cabinets with round gold handles. The character stood there a moment and let a memory wave wash over him. This was all so real to him. He let the thoughts drift away and then made a couple of sandwiches – ham and cheese, his son’s favorite. Once he was done with that, he threw the sandwiches on a plate, grabbed a bag of chips, a couple of sodas, and back to the couch he went.

“Plenty of food,” Johnny asked, eyeing the plate.

“Enough to make me uncomfortable,” the character replied, sitting down beside his son.

The two of them ate in silence for a moment.

“Better?” The character asked, as he stared at his son.

“I could use another.”

The character looked at his son’s plate, and he saw the sandwich was gone. The character still had about a half left. He gave it to his son who quickly gobbled it down. Still hungry, the two of them worked on the bag of chips, and drank their sodas.

“The crazy thing about this place is that it reminds me of my grandfather’s cabin. I have been denying it to myself, but I honestly can’t deny it anymore. This has to be the place,” the character replied.

“That’s what seemed so familiar.” The light finally went off behind his son’s eyes, and he saw it too. Crunch, crunch, crunch went the chips as he talked through them. “When . . .”

“Chew your food first and then talk,” the character replied.

His son swallowed, slurped, and then went back to his thought. “What I was saying was that when I arrived here. I tried to figure out what was so familiar about everything. It was the colors and designs that misled me. I hadn’t seen them before.”

“That’s because, they’re from my past, before it was modernized. This is what it looked like when I was a kid.”

“So, I have been here before?”

“Recently, after it was renovated. Don’t ask me how I know all that, but I just know.” He paused, glanced around the room. “It’s like the brain is cloudy and occasionally you pick out things from the murk. Those things keep telling me where I am, but I just don’t want to believe them.”

The character got up and poked the wood in the fireplace; the fire roared its happiness.

“Does that mean we are close to home?” Johnny asked.

The character looked down at his son, still munching chips and slurping his soda. He had no idea how to answer that question.

*

Outside in the woods, the alien moved through the trees, to the edge of the clearing that held the cabin. It peered through the bushes and looked at the small structure. From where it was standing, it was looking directly at the front of the cabin, which had two large windows with open shutters on either side of them. A large door sat in between these two windows underneath a porch that went from one end of the cabin to the other. There were four small steps leading up to this porch, a swing in one corner, and a table with two chairs underneath it.

There was no sign of movement, no sign of armed protection anywhere around the outside of the facility, just the dark forest creeping up to the edges of the wooden cabin walls.

“Easy in and easy out,” the alien thought, with an empty stomach grumbling.

With the surveillance done, the alien gripped his gun tight and made his way across the clearing.

Snow had started to fall.

*

The character pulled himself away from his thoughts, unsure how to answer the question; so he directed the conversation another way. “Do you remember home?”

“I sort of do, sort of don’t.” He burped, finished his soda, and looked back at the kitchen then back to his dad. “Can I get another one?” Johnny held up the can for his dad to see.

“Sure,” the character replied. He didn’t like his kids to have too much soda, but he thought under the circumstances that it was okay. How did he know he didn’t give his kids too much soda? He really didn’t know, and it was starting to irritate him, like a really bad rash.

He grabbed a soda from the fridge and started to make his way back to where his son was sitting, watching the red fire crack and pop.

*

The alien had decided half-way across the clearing that it should approach this in just one way – full impact. Bust the portal to the house open and go in with the gun firing. Stories of those who had caught and captured humans always had one thing in common. Humans were slow to react in situations that they were quickly tossed into, so if you startled them you were likely to get less of a fight, and an easier chance of catching them.

The alien trotted up to the porch, and crept up to the door. It could hear rustling and talking coming from inside, but that was it. These humans seemed to be in a peaceful situation. This really could be a very easy job for a tremendous amount of pay.

The alien smiled, left the porch, and walked half way across the clearing, leaving tracks in the fresh snow. It steadied its nerves, and thought of home, thought of all the riches it would have from this score. This gave it desire, gave it hunger, strength and power, motivation.