Unprepared Castaway Chapter 4 (Patreon)

Greg wore a grin that, had anyone seen it, would have had them quietly backing away and bolting their doors. Fortunately for him, no-one did, partially because of his motorcycle helmet hiding his face, but mostly because he was in a different universe from anyone who knew what a 'grin' was.

Then the grin was joined by the chainsaw, and things got a whole lot worse.

"Right," declared Greg, suitably armed for his task. "I need water. The freaky poison tree has water. Time to teach it to share."

Helmeted and clad in thick leather, wearing a backpack stuffed with every suitable empty container he could find, he stalked back down the hill. Unused to the stiff clothes and carrying the heavy weight of the chainsaw, he once again fell over at the bottom of the hill, where it was at its steepest, but managed to avoid rolling. That was quite fortunate, given the chainsaw, which was rather spiky even while turned off.

"Perhaps I didn't completely think this through..." he muttered, sliding down the rest of the hill on his bum instead of trying to walk it. "Also, it's hot! I'm sweating like a pig wearing this. How can it be this warm without a sun? And I bet when I get at it, the water's just going to be poisoned anyway."

Despite his complaints, he marched back to the alien plant, drawing closer until it launched another dart at him. Once again, it stabbed into his torso, but this time, it didn't reach his skin through the thick leather. Reassured of his protection, albeit having no idea where the dart had actually been fired from, the grin made another veiled appearance.

"Got you now!" he exclaimed, pulling the starter cord on his stolen chainsaw. The thing stuttered and belched out a cloud of smoke before roaring into life.

As he stepped closer, holding his breath, a new dart thudded into his makeshift armour. When he didn't back away, it was followed by half a dozen more. Then chainsaw met trunk.

A low-pitched creaking came from the plant, its vines writhing slowly, but Greg failed to hear it. Chainsaws weren't generally the quietest tools around, and its engine drowned out everything else. He felt rather than heard a few more darts bounce off his helmet, before more started stabbing everywhere. A few pinged off the metal of the chainsaw. Some stabbed into his shoes, but none managed to reach skin.

With a final creak, the plant toppled over.

Greg immediately jumped back, throwing the chainsaw to the ground and drinking in great gulps of air, despite the tingling it caused. The thing hadn't been tough, and had turned out to be mostly hollow, taking less than a minute to cut through, but that was still a substantial amount of time to hold his breath while exerting himself.

"Sheesh. I look like a pincushion," he muttered once he had his breath back, looking down and counting at least three dozen darts sticking out of him. "Let's hope it was worth it."

Despite being sliced off near the base, it wasn't as if the plant had vanished. The ground was still snaked with vines, joined in a big tangle above the spring, although none of them seemed to dip down into it. Blue water bubbled beneath the hollow centre of the plant.

And it really was blue. Not in the sense that it was reflecting the sky, which certainly wasn't blue, but the liquid was coloured. Worse, it was slightly luminescent. Nor did it rise out of the hole, indicating the plant had grown over something more like a natural well than a spring; the water appeared stagnant.

"Damn," swore Greg. "Is that even water? Even if it is, can't say I want to drink it..."

Mindful of the vines, Greg crept closer, again holding his breath, and filled an empty bottle from the spring, glad of his thick gloves. The liquid continued to glow within the transparent plastic.

"No way is this safe to drink... I was worried about poisons and bacteria, but what in the heck is in it to make it glow? I suppose some bacteria are luminescent... Or is it radioactive? Boiling it before drinking is a given, but suddenly that seems rather insufficient..."

He took an experimental sniff.

Then he dropped the bottle, staggering backwards as his nose and throat caught fire. His vision darkened as he struggled to breathe, the tingling that had thus far only affected his extremities now flooding his entire body.

And, as he exhaled, he could have sworn there was a dull blue tint to his breath.

He swore again—this time rather more colourfully, both metaphorically and literally—as the burning sensations died down and his vision returned to normal. The symptoms only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough for him to consider the water very unsafe. He hadn't even tasted it! "Yup, no way is boiling going to fix that."

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There was a clearing in an alien jungle, perfectly circular. If the shape didn't give away that it was unnatural, the contents certainly would. Perfect cubes of silver floated in the air, drifting slowly but mostly arranged into concentric tiers.

About half of them were occupied. In the dull lighting, human eyes would find it difficult to say what they were occupied with, but there were certainly silhouettes moving around up there.

One of the silhouettes—a broad, squat shape, with a pair of obvious antenna at one end—clicked in a way that conveyed agitation. Another—looking for all the world like a simple pile of stones—groaned unnaturally in response. A hovering sphere, floating above one of the cubes, flickered with blues and reds as it emitted a static crackle. Inflected hissing came from the space above a cube that had no visible silhouette at all. Another apparently empty cube creaked angrily, but in that case, the noise seemed to come from the cube itself.

The watching human eyes would have been able to deduce it was a meeting, of sorts, but listening human ears would discern no meaning from it; whatever communication was going on bore little resemblance to any human language. Regardless of comprehension, any human present would be able to take a reasonable guess at the topic, simply based on timing and the fact that they were where a human really shouldn't be. After all, the anomaly hadn't been confined to Earth; it had two ends.

Every impact point on Earth had a corresponding site elsewhere. Landscape had been decimated and lives lost on both sides.

And also, on both sides, things had arrived. And some of those things were alive.

Upon a fifth cube, a lathe shape ending in a point shifted in silence, extending something that was obviously a limb. The end unfurled and twisted, revealing another shape, which ended up hanging by a tail, thrashing around in the air as it dangled from the alien limb.

This one the watching human would have been able to identify fairly easily. It was quite obviously the silhouette of a rat. A living rat.

At that display, almost every shape upon the cubes started making noises all at once, Crepusculum Concilio subject to more activity than it had experienced in a hundred pulses.

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Greg sighed back at his home base. He'd followed the other vines a little, but since he'd filled his pack up with empty containers, he hadn't had much usable food and water on him. Besides, his stolen thick leather was still uncomfortably hot.

It remained an open question how the air was pleasantly warm given the lack of sun, but it was a question that wasn't high up on Greg's list of priorities. Topmost was locating a safe source of drinking water, because the first attempt was obviously a failure.

He'd filled up a few bottles anyway, for experimentation purposes, but had been stymied at the first hurdle: boiling things required heat. While he'd found matches and timber, the timber was proving surprisingly flame resistant. It was an unfortunate fact for him that people generally didn't want their houses to burn down, and flammable building materials were therefore often treated to make them a little less flammable. A match wasn't sufficient to set it alight. It wasn't a problem he'd considered back when he'd done his first bit of scavenging, hence the sigh.

"I'm really not cut out for this... I'm pretty sure I saw some newspaper somewhere," he mumbled to himself. "That would certainly catch alight, but how much would I need to get a proper fire going? Maybe those vines would burn? But even if I did get a fire started, simply boiling this stuff probably isn't going to help. It needs... I dunno... distillation? No way can I build a still."

He stared at the liquid that may or may not have been water, then blinked in confusion.

"Huh?" he commented, picking up a bottle, which was no longer glowing. Nervously, he removed the lid and sniffed, suffering only a very mild tingle for his efforts.

"Maybe it really is radioactive, and it's burned itself out already? But where would something with such a short half-life be coming from? Besides, if it was radioactive enough to glow, it should have boiled itself without me needing to worry about starting fires. Urk... Please don't tell me that's why the air is warm. If it really is, I've probably had a lethal dose already."

And then he dropped the bottle, his grip failing as his hand twitched. "Huh?" he commented poking it. "Ouch!" he added at the resulting stinging sensation. A panicked use of his torch showed his skin was covered in small, red blisters.

"Oh, joy. Burns? Guess that confirms the radioactivity theory."

He paused as he considered that the blisters were on the back of his hands, rather than his palms. In fact, weren't they clustered around where the vine had stabbed him the first time he fell down the hill?

"Or not... Time delayed poison, allergic reaction, or infection? Probably infection. Drat; why didn't I scavenge some disinfectant when it first stabbed me? There was bound to be some. Well, whatever. At least I tried. No helping making mistakes. It's not like I've had any training for this."

Even more pessimistic about his survival chances than usual, he risked a small sip of the water, giving up on the idea of boiling it. Worrying about what was in the water seemed rather superfluous, given his infected wound and how long he'd been breathing the air. It burned a little, but not anywhere nearly as bad as when he'd breathed its fumes earlier.

"Suppose I should note down its behaviour..." he muttered, fetching his diary to write in the approximate time of collection and when he'd noticed the glow fade, adding in his observations of the behaviour of the vines, his hand, and what the moons were up to. A green one had appeared in the sky at some point, well camouflaged against the nebula. The five moons he'd seen so far seemed to be orbiting in the same plane, so his plans to use them for timekeeping seemed possible. "Wonder why they're different colours? Another question that, on the whole, is rather less important than how long my hand is going to take to necrotise and fall off."

Stewing in his pessimism, Greg headed to the food stash to construct a sandwich, being a little more luxurious than perhaps was prudent, given that he didn't expect to last long enough to exhaust the food supplies.

By the time he was done, the blisters had spread completely over his hand. On the bright side, it no longer stung. On the downside, it no longer anything. He had no feeling at all, nor could he move it.

"Suppose that answers the 'how long' question," he morosely grumbled to himself. "Now what? It's not like I have much in the way of options."

He glanced at the bottle of formerly glowing water.

"Suppose I could try fighting fire with fire... Sterilisation by radiation is a thing people do to preserve food, isn't it? Not that I have a clue what sort of radiation is involved, which is fine, because I don't know what sort of radiation, if any, the water is giving off either."

Another trip down the hill, this time travelling light, followed by a brisk walk to the unidentified pool of glowing blueness, was enough time for the blisters to spread halfway up his arm.

The local plant life hadn't been idle. The vines above the spring had grown and tangled together, pushing upwards. Another bulge had formed a little away from the pool, too. None of that stopped Greg reaching the pool, nor had whatever part of the structure that had been launching the darts regrown. Once there, neither did it stop his desperate act of plunging his infected arm into the pool.

Greg screamed as his arm burnt, despite the previous numbness, but he held on for a full ten seconds before pulling out and lurching backwards, panting for a minute before he recovered sufficiently to look at the results.

"Not sure what I was expecting, but why not?" he sighed, peering at his glowing blue veins, which ran a little further up his arm than the depth he'd plunged it. His flesh had taken on a blue tint, too, but at least had the common decency to not be luminescent.

"Screw this. I'm going to bed."