Wexxon the Great Alien Warrior - Juno Wells Page 0,3
the remnants of a bagel and coffee breakfast.
“…Hello?” I asked the empty room as I looked for a place to set down the file folder. “I was just…”
My words trailed off, but before I was able to gather my thoughts, the door to the room loudly slid shut behind me. And as my eyes met with the back of the door, I felt a surge of fear course through my veins, my gaze quickly reading a sign on the wall..
SECTOR D.
I was in the wrong room. Sector C and Sector D had been so close together on the map, though, that I was sure Marsha was going to laugh off my mistake once I got back to the conference room. I took a moment to laugh at my mistake, too, knowing that I’d only gotten the sectors mixed up because I’d been so preoccupied with the future of my career, basking in the potential brightness that laid ahead of me.
Because for the first time in a long time, things felt like they weren’t going to be so fucked up.
I brought my access card back up toward the door, waiting for the scanner to recognize it, waiting for the door to slide back open and let me back out into the hall.
But there was no response from the scanner.
I tried it a few more times, growing more frantic with each attempt, something about the air in the room beginning to feel too thick and too wrong. And when the scanner continued to ignore my access card, I started to bang against the heavy, silver door, a desperation creeping into my veins that hadn’t been there before.
“Let me out! Please!” I yelled at the door. “Someone, please! My card isn’t working! My card isn’t—”
My terrified plea for help was the last thing I was able to get out of my chest before my world went dark, before my throat felt like it’d closed up for good, before my legs seemed like they’d disappeared from the rest of my body.
Chapter Two
Rachel
I woke up underwater. I woke up screaming and gasping for air, my body feeling the weight of the waves crushing down against my shoulders. The first thing I tried to do was swim for the surface, my frame moving instinctively, trying to carry myself to safety, trying to keep myself alive.
But as I broke the surface and gasped for air, I couldn’t help but notice the water’s odd tone and hue.
The water is purple.
Where in the world is there purple water?
I knew that there was always a scientific explanation, that more than likely it was either a trick of light or the result of moss or sea life that’d turned the water purple over time, overtaking its typical nature. And even though I wanted to ask a billion questions about the purple shade of it all, I knew that if I didn’t make my way to shore, I wouldn’t be alive much longer to ask anyone a question about anything.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Why was swimming so fucking heavy? Why did it feel like for every small motion I made, I was exerting twice as much energy as it took?
How the hell did I end up in this purple ocean, anyway?
My mind raced back to the wrong door at NASA, the heaviness I’d felt in the room swirling around me, the lack of any sign of life. Had I stumbled into an experiment room? What kind of experiments had they been running?
Just then, a pulse of fear swam through my veins.
Were there other people in that room before me? Had they been disappeared to their own version of purple lakes, too?
At the same time as the thought crossed my mind, I found that I’d reached the shore. I then pulled myself up on the banks of the river, my fingers twisting into impossibly green sand, just as impossible as the purple water.
“What the fuck is happening to me?” I muttered, briefly wondering if I hadn’t been transported anywhere at all. For all I knew this was just a massive hallucination, and instead of being in the middle of a purple river, I was actually lying in a hospital bed and fighting for my life.
For all I knew, I’d been poisoned as soon as I’d walked into the wrong sector.
As I caught my breath on the banks, I reached down for my messenger purse, happy to feel that it was somehow still at my side. And as I rested my back along the green sand,