Dandelion

1

A great snap echoed through the small office.

Vibrations shivered up the wheeled center post of his chair.

Blond hair stood up and trembled on the back of his neck.

Spider webs split the taupe office wall.

The rumbling roared with a tyrannosaur’s imagined strength.

In a breath, the floor gave way.

He screamed on the way down.

Sulfur and dust filled his senses.

The sun blazed beyond his closed eyes.

Darkness took him.2

Sulfur and dust still clogged Ezekiel’s nose when the oily darkness retreated from his consciousness. Dirt was hot against his face and scrubs and bare forearms, almost to the point of blistering his skin. The air was scorching, an oven, lungs trying to seize as he panted into the gritty earth under his cheek. He cracked his eyelids open and got a peek of reddish dirt.

There was ringing in his ears, punctuated by metal singing against more metal. Where the fuck was this? Seattle didn’t have this kind of…anything. The office he shared with his fellow nurses didn’t either.

A grunt broke through the scrambled thoughts in his head. The crack of skin against bone followed. Something hit the ground close to him, the dirt spray hitting the backs of Zeke’s hands in sharp pings. Zeke itched to move, but his whole body screamed in protest as he thought about it. A fight was happening a handful of feet from his legs. His arms trembled as he tried to crawl out of the way. They wouldn’t take his weight and he collapsed back onto the dirt.

Sounds tumbled around him like an oboe was played to mimic words close by. That didn’t make any damned sense. Another strident staccato of noise, rocks smashing against rocks, came from closer still. The air stirred. A hard screech of a car trying to stop before an inevitable collision overwhelmed everything, grated painfully through Zeke’s mind and ears.

Absolute stillness followed; a complete void of any sound at all. Deep, buried instinct forced Zeke to stay put. The whole world held its breath.

The oboe started up again, low and soothing instead of harsh bleats from a minute ago. Scorched air blew over him in waves. Cool skin touched his wrist. Zeke lurched away and rolled to his left side, a flash of green blinding his eyes. More notes poured into the air, but the touch didn’t return. It felt like someone hovered close to him.

Zeke blinked away the afterimage of the green streak from his vision. The sky above wasn’t the cerulean blue he knew so well, it was a murky slate, stony. The clouds were missing too. He remembered that much. It was supposed to be a little cloudy today, white fluffy balls of cotton dotting the great blue. And cool. Where was he?

Dirt shifted behind his back, where the green was. The unnatural quiet broke open with growled words Zeke couldn’t understand. He winced and tried to cover his ears from the sound. It didn’t help. The words sounded human enough, but there was a sharp edge to them, cutting against his awareness. Zeke gasped and sucked up some of the red earth under his face.

“Stop,” he choked on the syllables and sputtered out a cough. More of the grit flew up, sticking against the sweat starting to bead on his skin under the heat.

Another cool touch lighted on the nape of his neck, right above the collar of his cartoon-cat-covered green scrubs. The dusty feeling in his throat faded away. Words flowed through the air and made sense this time, though the instrumental quality hadn’t gone from the voice.

“Enough, human.” It was eerie, the voice. Broad, full, deep with something he had never heard echoing underneath each word. Like the person was talking with a diaphragm the size of the ocean.

Zeke craned his head up at last and took a good look around him, the desolate waste spread to the limit he could see. This wasn’t home. This wasn’t anything close to it. The sweat on his skin turned clammy and cold as panic ate at his insides. Maybe he’d woken up in the aftermath of a bombing. Wouldn’t there be more craters? Ruins?

Air moved and Zeke twisted to his front, pushed up until he knelt in the reddish dirt. The slight breeze felt good on his sticky skin. He looked to the west, off on his left, and his mouth popped open. The moon hung heavy, perched right on the edge of the horizon like a giant globe of marble shot through with rills of silver. It was perfect and impossible for the moon to look like that. He easily made out Mare Imbrium and the Copernicus crater, traced the details with his eyes as though it were a picture on the wall.