Spliced

From beneath a pile of rubble a hand shot up. Alex pulled herself free as she coughed the dust from her lungs. She’d managed to crawl up the facility’s other maintenance shaft and into the semi-collapsed garage at the back of the building. Memories of Mark’s limp body being torn apart by monsters haunted the back of her thoughts.

She paused a moment in the hot sun to get a breath. She was just trying to decide what to do when a shadow suddenly fell across her.

She looked up at a man dressed in casual clothes, with a rope bag slung across one shoulder.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Hello, I need some help.” His accent was strange. Where had he come from?

“Help?”

“Yeah, my friend, he vanished, and then all of a sudden he was back again, and then when I grabbed him we were suddenly in this dessert, only then he vanished again and I haven’t seen him since. Do you think you could help me? I just want to get home.”

She cocked her head sideways. Was his friend a teleporter? Why did this man not seem to know what that meant? Had they come through from the old world? Near here though? Surely not the facility? She shook her head. “We can’t take you back, travel to the old world is extremely difficult. But perhaps there’s something else I can do for you if you tell me everything you remember happening.”