Unprepared Castaway Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Greg marched through a blue, eerily silent field, following the mat of vines. Following the obvious trail meant that he was no longer worried about getting back, the fear of not being able to find his small patch of Earth being superseded by a fear of what would happen to it once the vines reached it. He had the option of trying to sever them, but how much time would that buy him? Given the speed with which they grew, trying to keep them away could turn into a full-time job. Besides, even without them, his camp would still be on top of a big pile of meat. Presumably at some point, it would go rotten, or attract the local equivalent of maggots. It was a pity, really; given its size, it could have provided him with food almost indefinitely.

Assuming the massive creature was even made of meat to begin with.

The grass, despite being completely the wrong colour, had the 'correct' texture underfoot. The air continued to be breathable. The landscape was scenic, in its alien way. If only there was a doorway back home, it would have been an interesting place to visit for a picnic. Instead, Greg was still worrying about being the picnic. There was no rustling. Nothing darting under the ankle-height grass, nor larger creatures grazing on it. But just because he couldn't see or hear anything was no reason to believe nothing was there. He'd seen that eye, after all. He knew full well massive creatures were around somewhere.

The other benefit of following the vines was that he had a decent chance of finding something without needing to travel too far. Yes, they grew fast, but only compared to Earth plant-life. It was still far slower than his walking pace, and he hadn't been in this world for long. Probably not even twenty-four hours. If they'd started growing from somewhere as soon as the creature died, then it must be somewhere close by.

Yes, there were still a couple of big assumptions there, but he still felt it had a better chance than picking a direction randomly.

As luck would have it—albeit it remained to be seen whether that luck was good or bad—his conjecture was proven correct. He'd been walking for a mere half hour when a small tower loomed out of the twilight in front of him. A green tree, of sorts. A single vine, a metre in diameter, poked straight upwards, bifurcating a few times, but there were no twigs or leaves. The resulting structure was a few metres in height, with root-like vines snaking out of its base and travelling in a dozen directions.

More important was that a noise that sounded very much like bubbling water was coming from its vicinity.

Greg circled at a distance, being suitably nervous of a plant that ate creatures the size of hills, but there were no rivers or any other signs of water. He did, however, note that while the matter he could see being pumped towards the tree through the vines that led to the creature, more was being pumped away through some of the other, thicker vines. This was obviously just one part of something larger.

"I don't suppose you'll give me some water?" he called at it, to no response. "It's probably just the noise of it pumping liquidised hill around, anyway..." he added in a pessimistic mumble.

Still, it needed to be checked out, so Greg cautiously approached, picking a direction that let him get as close as possible without treading on any vines. He uneventfully reached within a couple of metres, and then several events happened at once.

First was a glimpse of bubbling blue water through the mat of vines; the thing seemed to be growing on top of some sort of spring! Second was the odd tingling in his extremities growing noticeable even when breathing shallowly. Lastly, but probably most importantly, was a quiet phut and a sudden pain in his shoulder.

Alarmed, Greg leapt backward, looking around wildly, but seeing nothing moving. The tingling died down immediately, but the pain in his shoulder remained. Questing fingers found a small needle pierced through his t-shirt and skin beneath, and on plucking it out, a bead of a viscous green liquid formed at the tip.

Greg said a rude word, being prepared to bet half of his food stores that it was poison. Luckily, the green needle hadn't penetrated deeply, but at least some of the stuff must have ended up inside him.

"Will squeezing it make it worse or better?" he wondered. "I think I'm supposed to suck it out, but my head doesn't bend in that direction!"

In lieu of any better options, he fled back towards his base. Running—getting his heart pumping and spreading the poison—may not have been the best idea, but the shock and fear meant his heart had already been racing. Best to get back somewhere secure.

He made it there without issue, not feeling any effect from the projectile beyond a mild stinging, which could probably be attributed to it breaking his skin rather than poison.

"I suppose, if it's evolved to take down the local wildlife, there's a decent chance it won't do anything to me," he sighed. "Maybe the tingling is the same; some sort of airborne poison that doesn't work properly on humans? Still, I'd be a fool to risk it. Maybe I simply didn't get a big enough dose of either poison. It could be delayed, but that would make it rather pointless as a defensive measure; I could have torn the plant to bits by now. Also, I've only been here a day, and I'm already talking to myself. Is that a bad sign?"

Sighing again, he poked around in the ruins of a bungalow that had the front half of a motorcycle lying outside, and luck was on his side. He found thick, protective gear under the rubble, scratched and covered in brick dust, but unbroken. It was ill-fitting, and he couldn't get the boots on at all, but the helmet fitted, and he was fairly sure the flimsy little needles wouldn't get through it. Anything in the air still would, and his salvage didn't contain anything as handy as a gas mask, but he always had the option of holding his breath. The tingling had died down very quickly with distance, after all.

A half-collapsed shed held a diesel chainsaw. The fuel wouldn't last long, but it didn't really need to.

"Time to do some gardening," declared Greg, grinning in a slightly maniacal way.

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Ruth was standing at the edge of a large cordoned off area, a heavy police presence keeping watch over its border. One of the policeman was holding up a tablet in front of her, upon which was playing a recorded video from a truck's dash cam.

Ruth had tried to hold it herself, but her hands were shaking so badly she hadn't been able to clearly make out the face.

"Yes, that's him. That's Greg..." she admitted, doing her best not to let her voice crack.

Behind the policeman, a white tent had been erected in the middle of the street. Strange noises and lights were coming from it, but Ruth really couldn't care less what was going on. Compared to family, it wasn't important.

"My condolences," responded the policeman. "It really was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Is... Is he..." started Ruth, thinking back to the news reports over the previous day. Not that she needed them. She could see the ruins of the street with her own eyes, parts of it simply gone. Not a single home was standing. It wasn't hard to imagine what that would do to a person. Newscasters reading out counts of the missing and confirmed dead did nothing but add punctuation to what was already obvious.

A few more exclamation marks were added by the way this impact site had been just one out of tens of thousands, as the anomaly washed over the entire planet in under a minute. Thankfully, only a small percentage hit urban areas, but the death toll was still significant.

"I'm sorry, but so far we haven't found him."

"Then... then he might be alive?"

The policeman blinked in surprise, wondering how she could think that after watching the video. It showed a young man gawking blankly at the sky as the truck veered off the road towards him. Just before impact, he'd spun around, eyes having just enough time to fill with fear before the truck hit.

And then he'd vanished, along with a decent portion of the wall behind him. The truck had kept going, straight into what remained of the wall, at which point the video cut out.

Admittedly, they didn't know how much of him had vanished; the truck was close enough that only his head and shoulders were in shot of the camera. But the vanished portion included his head. Decapitation was generally not survivable, not to mention the complications a missing head caused for identifying the body. The house the truck had crashed into contained quite a few, so it would be some time until the fingerprinting and DNA testing was done and the remaining body parts could be definitively matched to the names of the missing.

Even then, there was the chance the teleportation had been total, in which case there would be no remains to hand back to the poor girl. There certainly hadn't been any blood visible on the front of the truck, although that could easily have been hidden by the subsequent crash. Again, the investigators would check more thoroughly, but given the sudden workload, it would be a while before any answers were available. Not that it made much difference, in the end.

"I'm sorry," he said, shaking his head.

"But he could have been teleported away completely! He was always talking about those weird conspiracy theories about that other world, and that certainly wasn't our sky in those videos. Maybe he's there?"

Ruth's speech grew progressively faster as she clung to hope, refusing to give into despair despite the evidence before her.

The policeman, giving a wry smile at the mention of conspiracy theories, glanced back towards the tent, thinking about what they'd found so far in the pit they'd been digging. The incident had cut off water to the entire neighbourhood. Assuming a section of pipe had been teleported away, they'd dug a pit to get it replaced. It turned out not to have been teleported away. Rather, something had been teleported in, causing a blockage. And once they'd cut it out...

Well, if anyone had been teleported somewhere things like that lived, even if unharmed at the time, he doubted they'd remain that way for long.

There were rumours about even weirder things found at the other sites, too, but given his position near the bottom of the public-service order, he hadn't been read into too many secrets. The most he could say was that those who were missing probably weren't going to mysteriously reappear.

"For now, he'll officially be classified as 'missing'," said the policeman, refraining from comments on other worlds that may or may not exist. "If we don't find any remains, his official status will remain that way for some time. If it brings you comfort to think he might still be alive somewhere else, don't let me deny you."

What he thought, but tactfully remained from saying, was that such a line of thinking wasn't much different from those who took solace in their loved ones being taken to a paradisical afterlife. There was nothing quite like a non-falsifiable theory for beating back despair after losing a loved one.

"It doesn't, but I'll take whatever I can get..."