Space Cadet #5 - First Clues

Anotace: #5 - First Clues

As the night fell upon the vicinity, the climate gradually became more acceptable. I didn’t feel my sweat rolling down my forehead or body no more. Thanks to these conditions, I managed to convince myself to continue with my exploration. However I tried to stick to this surrounding only, nothing too far from the den which is my temporary refuge. It didn’t take too long before odd things were set in motion, as I’ve exited the den I have already registered some movement outside in the jungle. This time I was pretty damn sure, that it wasn’t another optical trick performed by the headache. Not even wind could move those weed like that, because there was actually no wind at all. Still slung over my shoulder, was the rifle that I found earlier during the day on the beach. Suddenly I heard an inhuman murmuring coming from the distance. In fact I felt that the voice wasn’t either from an animal. Unfortunately I was hoping to find an animal out here to expand my food supply, due to the fact that I can hardly survive with the coconuts at disposal…. And well the food packs that I had earlier during the day were long gone after I woke up.

My curiosity for this distant murmur has dragged me away from my “lair”. Moment later I realized that I might actually be its prey; I took a step back and stopped. Meanwhile the darkness was pouring over every corner of the horizon, my suit started to shine in black-and-white light. It seems that the suit was trying to merge me with the surrounding and irradiate me at the same time.

All of a sudden, the creature leaped towards to me, from the shadows. It possessed a humanlike body, but I’ve distanced myself from the idea that it was actually a human being, due to the grey skin reminding the skin tone of a dead person, torned clothes and the red glowing eyes… - of course those eyes. Just like the ones I’ve seen from my dream! Before I managed to pull the trigger and launch a barrage of bullets that would have torn it apart, a few memories flashed through my mind.

I recalled taking a task on the spaceship. A very intense mission with my team, we were supposed to delve into something completely unknown… and then I’ve seen those red eyes again. The most intriguing part of those memory flashes was the unknown girl, who I’ve met earlier in my dream as well. She was part of my team. Together we boarded the ship and started to work for the Starfleet.

When I came back to reality again, there were two more of those pesky creatures. But they didn’t look identical to one another, since one of them missed the lower jawbone with the tongue hanging out like some loose meat and the other one had a blade growing out of its arms. This was seriously some sinister mutation; at first I thought that it was just some undead apocalypse… But no, I was wrong, it’s much worse. Without any hesitation I pulled the trigger and launched several shots at the bladed mutant who attempted to approach me, the gun suddenly jammed. Panic and fear strucked me. I didn’t know what to do, while my fate was about to be sealed. Through the panic I was still able to be aware of the fact that I still had my sword and two laser blasters, which gave me a moment of relief. The creature with the missing jaw suddenly leaped towards me. Despite my fear, I managed to unsheathe the sword from behind. As I was about to diagonally swing my sword to separate the creature’s head from its body; a bullet shot whistled right next to my head and consecutively it hit the attacker. A spray of purple blood came out as the bullet gouged a hole right in between its eyes. Due to the fact that I was quite close to the creature, some of the blood managed to get on my clothes. My eyes were wide open and I was frightened by what’s happening in front of me. The sword slipped down from my hand as I turned towards the direction the gunshot came from. I tried to utter a word to the man with the gun. Ask him to stop shooting; I wasn’t able to make a sound though. With the gun that seemed to be pointing at me, he pulled the trigger. Was this the end of my story? The shot whistled right next to my head like earlier and it hit the last creature that was approaching to attack me from behind. After that he fired no more shoots and instead stood in front of me with the smoking gun barrel. Fortunately it seems that this man was in fact trying to save me rather than killing me, even though he just blew away the smoke from the barrel and still kept on pointing it at me. I think that it might have been thanks to my uniform that he managed to recognize me as someone alive.

I looked at the man with short black hair – and a face covered by a light beard growth. Even in the darkness of the night I was able to recognize his grey-blue uniform with illuminating blue stripes. Although it was a totally different uniform, since it had a button up white zipper, but there was a symbol on it – which was the same as the one I had on my uniform. A simple large symbol, it looked like the letter – “A”, engraved on the left side of the uniform where our heart was situated as well. The man approached me slowly, still holding the gun in his hands and ready to fire when needed. As he stood closer to me now, I realized that he knew me.

“Bloody ‘ell! Is that really you, mate?!” he suddenly said.