The Pages of The Lost: Awaken
By Tazarion Keels
Chapter Two
JANE
—————
MARROW
I wake up with crust in my eye and drool on the side of my mouth. Ugh, great. I sit up and stretch my arms. I look up at the towering trees, see their branches blocking the parts of the sunlight. “Hm, guess it’s morning.” I look to my left to see that the camp fire burned out. And then to the light brown curly haired boy I met yesterday. John’s sleeping on his side, twisting one of his earrings. “Weird thing to do in your sleep,” I mutter to myself. I sigh and stand up, looking around the island's weird forest. “If we are going to find anyone in this place, we at least should have some type of breakfast first.” I’m wondering if I should wake up John and tell him to come with me. But knowing him he’d probably just annoy me the whole time by overly using the name ‘Jane’ again. Nope. I’m good. I walk down a path in the forest, stepping over vines and carnivorous plants, which is kinda hard in this baggy jumpsuit. This is so annoying, because it’s so humid out here. Not only that, I’m getting a better look at some of these trees and they don’t look normal. Each one looks like a different type of oak tree, pine tree, etc. But they still look enormous compared to how each one would normally be. Their branches up top seem to have almost no end to how far they extend. Then there’s the leaves that are the size of my body. Some of the leaves are blue, while others are purple.
And the weirdest thing about them is that underneath the bark it looks like they’re glowing. “Ugh, well at least now I know why the fruit looked weird last night. If the trees are abnormal here, I can imagine what kinda food grows on them.” I’m now wondering how I ever let John talk me into eating it when he came back from the forest with dinner. “Ok, I guess I don't really have a choice.”
I wander through the forest looking up to every tree to see if I can find the same weird fruit. I can hear the different creatures in the forest. Some sound like birds, others maybe wolves and maybe squirrels? Though given our experience yesterday with the flying monkey on the bus and the piranha/fish/girl in the water, these creatures in the forest probably aren’t normal. It figures—nothing seems normal in this place. I’m trying my best to not freak out even more like I did before. Flying buses, mutant creatures, weird trees with weird food and two teenagers who just both happen to have memory loss. Sounds like a modern version of the Wizard of Oz. Hm, that's somewhat comforting.
I look up ahead and I finally find a tree with food on it. A cluster of red giant bananas. Each one is about three feet long. I sigh in relief because it feels like it’s been an hour. I walk over the large tree trunks and reach out for the red bananas. I suddenly hear thunder, causing me to look up. I expect to see clouds or a sign of rain but the sky’s clear. “That’s so…” I shake my head, stopping myself before I say the word ‘weird’ again. I stick my hand out to grab the bananas only to jump back as a squirrel with leather bat wings hisses at me while clinging to the banana. "Oh for the love of- can everything just stop trying to scare me?" I grab a stick and jab it at the mutant squirrel, telling it to shoo. It hisses and flies away. I sigh and look at the giant banana cluster. “Okay, no sign of any more mutant rodents. But… How am I going to carry these?” I look over around the ground and see one of the giant leaves from the trees that must’ve fallen. I lift the giant banana cluster and put them on the leaf. I start dragging them by the stem of the leaf. I grunt and slowly pull them back the way I came. “Jeez… all of this… for some breakfast. That boy better feel grateful when I get back.”
I feel like I’ve been walking longer coming back than when I started venturing into this forest. And this humidity is probably hitting me worse now that I’m not only wearing this hot jumpsuit but also carrying these oversized bananas. Though the jumpsuit raises a clue. John told me last night one of his theories before we fell asleep. That maybe we are criminals and this place is our prison. That our memories were wiped. Or maybe we are in a video game we volunteered for and this is the simulation. I shake my head. I’m finally at the path I was on before when I first started walking. “Okay, I should see John soon.”
I keep walking while dragging the bananas on the ground like a sack of potatoes.
WHERE ARE THEY?
I stop in my tracks in response to the bellowing voice up ahead. My heart’s beating fast. I can’t see who it is but it doesn’t sound friendly. It sounds bone chilling, monstrous, and almost not human. My breathing is hitching and I’m trying to calm down. I’m just a little bit frightened is all. And what’s really frightening is that it sounds like it came from where I left John.
I drop the bananas and run up the path. My body feels easier to move now that I’ve dropped the weight. But I still feel like I’m struggling because of how high up the path is. I hurry as fast as I can and finally reach the top. The first thing I see is animals in a herded position. But they aren’t animals. They are mutant creatures like the others we’ve encountered before. And there has to be at least a 100 or more. From my perspective it looks like I'm staring at the back of the herd of mutants. They aren’t looking at me, which is good. But they look like they are searching for something. And there’s no sign of John. I duck behind trees, vines, and logs on the left side of the path and move forward while keeping my head down. I walk quietly while looking to my right, spying on the mutants.
They all have combinations of different species. No matter if it’s reptilian, feathered, furry, or even an insect. About seven of them are black eyed lionesses with scorpion tails. Eight others are sickly pale giant lizard tailed toads with fruit fly wings twice the sizes of their bodies. Ew. Just… ew. 10 of them are human-sized rats with canine teeth and centipede tails. There are others too, like the three flying monkeys hovering above. Or the ten feet tall half man/half bull things. But the biggest mutant is the one in the front of the herd. It has the body of an oversized moose that looks like it was jacked with multiple types of body enhancements. Scars and blood stains in its fur. Six legs on both sides and three heads instead of one. At the back isn’t a normal tail of a moose. It’s scaly, red, and long. It stretches through the herd's feet; all the way to the back.
WHERE ARE THEY?
There it is again, the monstrous voice I heard before. My eyes are drawn to where it’s coming from as I keep walking forward with my head down. On top of the three-headed moose is a human figure—a man. His wild hair is long, coming down to his upper back. He looks like he’s wearing fur. No, not wearing it, covered in it like he grew it himself. I can tell he’s probably muscular underneath all of it. He snarls in frustration. This is the voice I heard. I look in front of me and see John crouched down on the ground behind a log, looking at the herd. Twigs in his afro and mud on his face.
“Psst!” I whisper to him, trying to get his attention. He looks at me, eyes wide, and gestures to me to come to him. I quickly squat next to him, making sure to stay out of sight.
“Where were you?” he hisses at me.
“I was trying to get food!” I whisper back.
“You could have woken me up!”
I squint at him. “Well maybe I was trying to let you sleep. Can’t believe I was rushing back here to see if you were okay.”
He looks puzzled from the comment, and his face softens a bit. Almost like he’s appreciating the fact I was worried. But he won’t say it. He stops arguing and looks back at the herd.
I sigh. “So what happened?”
He takes a deep breath. “I woke up, you were gone, and then I heard them approaching. Been hiding here since then. But I think he’s the leader.”
He points to the man covered in fur. I nod my head. “Yeah, I figured that.”
He looks at me and then back to the herd. He nods to what’s in front of the three-headed moose’s feet. “See them?”
I look in that direction. There are two mutants scattering around. The mutant leader is barking orders down at them. Both mutants are pale. They have heads, necks, chests, and torsos shaped like human girls. Their backs are in a bridge position while their heads hang back. But their limbs are the arms and legs of arachnids. Their eyes, mouths, and ears are sewn shut. They’re sniffing the ground.
“The only thing not sealed on their faces is their noses,” John says. “I think it's to heighten their sense of smell. Probably the only way they can get around. They’re sniffing where we slept last night.”
I realize what he means. “Great, so they’re looking for us. This place just gets better and better,” I mutter to myself. “Speaking of which, got a new theory on where we are?”
He gives me a side eye. “Maybe. But you first.”
I think for a second. “Well, based on the fact that we’re lost, stranded on a very weird land with abnormal trees and strange creatures like flying monkeys, I want to say we dove into the book of The Wizard of Oz. And that very nice gentleman riding the three-headed moose creature thing is the Wicked Witch, so to speak.”
He nods at the thought. “Huh, I was thinking more in the area of Greek mythology. You know, maybe we died and went to the underworld. The bus driver could be the ferryman, these are the monsters, and that guy—”
He points to the mutant leader in the front.
“—is their leader and their god, Hades.”
My face scrunches up at the thought. “That's a terrible theory.”
John looks at me. “How? There’s even a half man/half bull there like the minotaur in the myths.” He points to one of the mutants I saw earlier.
I look at him. “It's so morbid. Yours involves us already being dead. Mine has the Wizard of Oz which, involves the main character still alive and trying to get home.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine, so let’s say this is the Wizard of Oz and that is the Wicked Witch. What does that make you? Dorothy?”
I shrug and smile at the thought. “I suppose so. You could be my cowardly lion.”
“I am not—”
We hear a crack and realize our feet just broke a twig. Crap. Something wraps around our bodies, pinning us together until only our heads are uncovered. At the end of what is holding us is the head of a snake with no eyes. We are yanked off the ground, flying up, screaming. We both close our eyes as we feel the snake pulling us down. It stops just as we are about to hit the ground. We open our eyes to see we are hanging upside down in front of the mutant leader's face. I look at the long body of the snake to see it’s attached to the end of the three headed moose. The scaly tail I saw earlier was this. A long snake with no eyes. The three-headed moose creature is keeping its snake tail wrapped around us tightly. And holding us in front of the leader of these mutant creatures.
YOU ARE THE MAKERS.
“Makers? No!” John says, frantically shaking his head. “We didn’t make anything. Right, Jane? tell him.”
I nod my head. “We made nothing.”
“Nope. Not a thing.” John nods quickly.
The mutant leader snarls underneath the brown fur on his face. I can’t see his eyes, nose, or mouth. His fur covers his whole face. He walks forward on the back of the neck of the middle moose head to get closer to us.
I AM MARROW. LEADER OF THIS ISLAND AND PROTECTOR OF MY KIND. YOU LOOK LIKE MAKERS. THE ONES WHO MADE US. TORE US APART AGAIN AND AGAIN.
“Well that sounds painful,” John says nervously.
Marrow turns his head towards John.
THEY USED US. MADE US SLAVES TO THEIR CAUSES. WEAPONS FOR EACH OTHER’S HATRED. AND THEN WE HATED THEM. My stomach burns from each word he speaks. His voice never changes even though we’re now inches away from his face. He continues to talk.
WE TURNED ON THEM. AS THEY TURNED ON US. TRIED TO DESTROY WHAT THEY CREATED. ARE YOU LIKE THEM?
“No!” I shout. “We promise, okay? We’re just trying to get home. We’re stranded and we don’t even remember who we are. Right, John?”
John nods, trying to sound convincing. “Yeah, we’re telling the truth. We just want to go home.”
Marrow tilts his head at us. I swear I can see the bones of his rib cage rearranging in his chest underneath all that fur.
WE DON'T TRUST MAKERS. OR MAKER LOOKALIKES. THE ONLY WAY TO TRUST WHAT YOU SAY IS TO HANG YOU BY YOUR HANDS AND PUT A FIRE UNDER THE SOLES OF YOUR FEET. ONLY THEN WE WILL SEE IF YOU ARE TRUTHFUL.
The other mutants behind him snarl in agreement. I can only think of two options. The first one is that we fight these mutants and try to get the upper hand. I look at John and back to Marrow. Nope. That idea sucks. So plan B. “Well,” I say to Marrow. “As nice as that sounds…” I throw my head back and sink my teeth into the snake until it draws blood. The snake hisses in pain and drops John and I both. The three-headed moose that it’s attached to stumbles back, causing Marrow to fall off. We get to our feet and run. Marrow screams behind us.
KILL THEEEEEM.
We both duck through the woods, running and dodging tree branches as we hear the mutants running behind us. The spider girls are the first to catch up to us. They’re closing in on our heels. I remember what John said about their noses being their only way to get around. I quickly turn for a moment and kick the dirt on the ground to mess with their sense of smell. They stop in their tracks and shake their hanging heads in frustration. We keep running. A flying monkey dives towards us. We dodge as it misses our heads.
“See?” I say to John. “Flying monkeys! Wizard of Oz!”
We keep running and hear a roar above us. We look up at the giant pine tree to our left to see a bulky half man/half bull squatting on a branch.
“See?” John says. “Minotaur! Greek mythology!”
The mutant bull man jumps down and comes at us from the left, causing us to start running to the right. We keep running and running. We are starting to get tired and starting to slow down. But we can’t; if we do, we'll get taken or killed. We look back to see the mutant bull man charging while his head tilting down, pointing its horns towards us. I look back in front to see an oak tree. I look at John and see he’s thinking the same thing. We keep running to the oak tree. One. We’re almost there. Two. We’re at the foot of the tree now. Three. We both jump to the side as the bull man rams himself into the tree. We try to catch our breath but hear noises in the distance. We get to our feet and run away from the oak tree, going even deeper into the forest, jumping over small bumps and vines on the ground. We manage to put enough distance between us and the mutants. We get behind a boulder covered in moss and lay our backs against it. Hopefully we can hide here while catching our breath a little more. I pop my head over the boulder and look back to see that we aren’t that far from where the bull man is stuck. But hopefully it’s enough. “I think we’re safe here. As safe as we can be at least.”
“Um, Jane?” John says.
I turn my head back to John to see he’s looking at something. He’s facing forward with a stunned expression. I look at what's in front of us and feel the blood drain from my face. There are skeletons laying on the ground. Some are wearing lab coats and others military uniforms with rifles. But the uniforms look old, like World War II old. There are maybe fifty bodies. Further down behind them are demolished tanks.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anyone who can help us here,” John says with a shaky breath.
We both hear noises behind us and we look back over the boulder to see what’s happening. Marrow and the other creatures found the bull man stuck to the tree. They all screech and growl in frustration. I can see that Marrow has his back to the direction we’re hiding while the others crowd the bull man, trying to free him.
I sigh and whisper, “Okay, good, they don’t see us.”
“Yes, but what are we going to do?” John whispers back. “The plan was to find someone who could help us, and it turns out there isn’t anyone.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. We just can’t let them find us.”
John steadies his breath. “Okay, let’s just slowly stand up and back up away from them.”
I nod and stand up. John does the same. We both face the direction that the mutants are in, backing up and slowly stepping over the bodies. My body is shaking with fear. We are almost in the clear when John trips over a fragment of a tank. He makes a loud thud by falling back on the metal. My body shudders. I look back in the direction of the mutants and see that they all have stopped moving. I catch my breath. Marrow’s back is still facing our direction. But I swear I can see from here the bones in his neck rearranging like I saw before with his rib cage, allowing his neck to make a full 180 like an owl. “Oh god, that’s disgusting.” More importantly, he can now see where we are.
GET THEM.
They all run toward our direction.
“I really don’t want to run again,” John says.
I look behind us to see a tall tree about 15 feet further beyond the World War II military corpses.
“How about climbing?” I suggest.
He looks at me like he’s wondering if I’m being serious. “Climbing?”
“Yeah, it’s totally better.”
“How's climbing better than running?”
“Just move!”
We turn around and run, hopping over the corpses and bumps on the ground, avoiding the leftover shards of the tanks. We make our way to the tree. The branches are extremely long. We look back to see the mutants are getting closer to the place we were just hiding. We turn back to the tree.
“Go!” I shout as I start climbing. John climbs beside me. We quickly grab enormous branches and pull ourselves up to get the next ones, avoiding insects and trying to make sure we don’t slip. I look back down to see the mutants have reached the tree.
Marrow is at the front. The bones in his arms, from the upper ones to the forearms to the wrist, rearrange themselves, until it looks like a big lump just stuck in the socket in each of his arms. The lumps slide down to his hands, creating gaping holes in the middle of the palms. What comes out of the holes are big white hatchets. It’s as if he has melded all the bones in each arm to create his own large axe. He starts using them to climb. We turn our heads up and keep climbing the tree. We can hear the mutants behind us, trying to catch up. The flying mutants, like the flying monkeys and the giant flying toad flies, are swooping toward our direction. I curse in frustration. I look to the left of a branch and pluck fruit from some of the small branches and start throwing the fruit at them. John does the same. John misses a lot of them, but I make three good headshots. I have extra fruit left underneath my arm and look back down at Marrow making his way up the tree. I throw it at his head. It connects with his head, breaking his neck and making his head go limp. I sigh in relief. Not a fan of killing, but if it’s a psychotic mutant it’s not off the table for me. The bones in Marrow’s neck rearrange and bring his head back in place. He growls.
“Great,” John yells. “Now he’s even angrier.”
“I can see that!” I snap back. We keep climbing, but they’re starting to catch up to us again. I look over to the other side of the tree we’re climbing and see a long branch extending to another tree. I look at John and yell, “Hey! We can leap to other trees.”
He nods in agreement. We grip the branch, hoisting ourselves up so we can stand on top of it. We run down the long branch and then hop on another tree’s branch. I almost stumble, but John catches me. We run down this branch and leap onto the next tree. The mutants see what we’re doing and start doing the same. Marrow is in the lead, his bone hatchets to his side. We keep leaping. But so do they. Some aren’t even leaping; they're just flying. We hop to another branch again, and this time I miss the branch. John lands on it but I fall screaming.
“Jane!” John calls to me as I fall.
I have to think quickly. Come on, come on. I grab another branch further down from where I was before. I get to my feet and stand on the branch. I look up to see Marrow looking down at me. He jumps off the branch that was closest to where John is and lands on mine. Several mutants follow him.
“Go!” John yells at me. “I can see a clearing at the edge of this forest. I’ll meet you there!” He runs forward, hopping to the next tree as half the other mutants continue to chase him.
I look back at Marrow. His bone hatchets have gone back into his arms and he starts to chase me again along with the other half of the mutants behind him. I turn and run forward like John told me to. I’ve got to focus. Even if we’re on different tree branches, as long as we’re moving in the same direction we’ll be able to meet up. I hop and run down the next tree branch. The mutants keep following me. Suddenly, something flies right past my right past my ear, hitting the tree in front of me. It looks like a rib bone stuck in the bark. As I run, I look back and see Marrow has a small hole on the left side of his chest. The right side of his chest opens up, forming another small hole as he reaches in to pull out another rib to throw. I leap to the next tree branch, hoisting myself up. I’ve got to keep moving. I dodge the next rib he throws at my head. I continue leaping from branch to branch as he keeps hurling his ribs at me and I try my best to avoid them.
AFTER WE ROAST YOU ALIVE, WE WILL HANG YOUR SKINS FROM THE TREETOPS! I’LL THEN RIP OUT YOUR SKELETONS AND ADD THEM TO MY BODY’S COLLECTION.
My whole body turns cold as I look back at Marrow and see him leap in midair while reaching deep in his back and pulling out a 24-foot-long spine, swinging it like a whip. I manage to dodge it as it sweeps past my head. I keep running as Marrow chases me with it.
I leap to the last branch and run down to the edge to see the clearing John mentioned. But it’s not a clearing. It’s a river, flowing rapidly in the middle of the forest. I am now at the ledge of the branch with nowhere to go. “Oh god, oh no no no…” I turn around to see Marrow leaping to my branch, walking slowly toward me. He’s savoring the moment.
“Jane!” I hear John's voice calling out to me from above. He’s reached his last branch too. And now the mutants who were chasing after him also have him cornered. I don’t know what to do.
John faces towards me and bends his knees. I widen my eyes.
“What are you doing?” I yell at him. The mutants on his branch lunge at him but they miss as he leaps off. He grabs a vine, and it pulls him forward and he is now heading in my direction. Marrow yells in fury and runs down my branch toward me as well. John catches up to me right before Marrow can touch me. We both scream as the vine takes us away from the trees and over the river.
“Brace yourself!” John yells.
“Wait!” But it’s too late; he lets go of the vine. We fall screaming, holding hands. I shut my eyes like John told me to. We plunge into the river as its current carries us all the way downstream. We hang on to each other as much as we can and try our best to avoid any giant logs. I try to see through my wet hair. The current keeps pushing us into the rocks, but we keep finding ways to maneuver ourselves away. My eyes are stinging from the water as my head keeps going under. We see up ahead that the water is stopping. No, not stopping—falling. My eyes are widening as I realize we are about to head off a waterfall. We reach the edge and scream as we crash into the river below. We still hold hands as we go under the water. I come up for air and so does John. I look at him and he notices it too: the water isn’t pushing us like it was before the waterfall. We swim to shore, coughing up the water in our lungs. We get to our knees. My eyes are stinging from the water. I wring out my hair, trying to dry it.
“You okay?” John asks me.
I look at him with irritation. “You mean after you took it upon yourself to push us into a river? Oh yeah, I’m great. Totally. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“You’re really going to complain about how I just saved us?” he asks. “They had us on the edge! What was I supposed to do?”
“You said it was a clearing!” I yell back. “That was a river! With a very steep waterfall!”
He rolls his eyes and looks away. He looks at the waterfall. “Think they’re following us?”
I look at the waterfall too. “Probably. Maybe we should hide.”
John looks around and spots a cave. “We can try there.”
I nod and start walking behind him. We enter the cave. It’s dark, so we walk slowly, feeling the walls and watching our step. We are silent for a bit, partially because we probably feel like yelling at each other while we are still clearing the water out of our lungs.
“So,” John says after a while. "What was that thing he was swinging around at you?”
I blink for a second, wondering who he’s talking about. “You mean Marrow? I think it was his spine.”
“What?” he asks in amazement. “How can a spine be that long for a guy who’s like six feet.”
“He said he wanted to add our spines to his collection. I think it’s a chain of the spines of all his victims.”
“Man, that’s—”
“Don’t say weird!” I snap. “I’ve been saying that word all morning and just hearing it makes me feel like I’m going crazy.”
John shrugs. “I was just going to say insane.”
I glare at him in the dark. “That’s not better.”
He chuckles a little.
We keep moving down the cave wall. I bite my lip and think for a second. “You know when he said how he and his kind hated the people who made them? I could feel it. Like in my gut. It was a burning feeling for a sec.”
“I know what you mean,” he says. “I could feel it, not just from him but from this place. Just a little. Everything here is just so w—” He stops and looks back at me. “You know what I mean.”
I nod.
John stops moving.
“Why’d you stop?” I ask.
“Because I feel something,” he responds.
He knocks on something in front of him and I hear a loud CLANG. Like metal.
“Take my hand,” he says.
I feel for it and take it. He slowly takes me away from the wall and we step through something too dark to see. Suddenly a light flickers on. We look around to see what we’ve stepped through. It looks like a big metal plate was wedged into the corners of the cave. But there was a big rectangular piece missing from it. It’s if someone or something had burned out a chunk of it.
“Is this supposed to be a metal door?” John asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “But it looks like there’s a piece missing from it.”
We turn back to what was beyond this metal door and see that there are stairs leading down with lights on the side of the cave.
“Ladies first,” John says to me, acting gentlemanly.
I roll my eyes and make my way down the stairs as he follows. We get to the last step and see a corpse.
“Great,” John says. “More dead people.”
I shake my head. “Look at what they’re wearing.”
The skeleton is wearing a lab coat. We look around to see desks, chairs, books, and lamps. There are weapons like tasers, guns, and missile launchers.
“Is this a bunker?” John asks.
“It looks like it,” I say to him. “And probably a lab too.”
We step over the dead bodies and look around. I look at the papers on the floor. There was probably writing on them at some point, but they’re too smudged for me to read anything.
“Hey Jane, look at this,” John calls over to me.
I’m walking over to him. He’s hovering over one of the desks, looking at something. There are blueprints for something.
“These are drawings of all the monsters we ran into,” he says. “Look.” He points to a drawing of a creature that looks like a monkey with wings. “There’s your flying monkey.”
I look at another blueprint and see a drawing of a bull walking on two legs like a man. “There’s your minotaur,” I say back to him.
We look at another blueprint and it has a drawing that looks identical to Marrow. Each one is a blueprint of a mutant we saw. Drawings of their anatomy.
“Remember what Marrow said?” John asks. “He said we looked like makers.”
I look at the corpse of the doctor on the floor. “He meant people.”
John nods. “And look at these dates on the blueprints. April 2nd, 1940. February 22nd, 1941. June 1st, 1943. These are dates from the—.”
“War World II period,” I say. “But this makes no sense.” My hand accidentally knocks something over on the desk. I look on the floor to see it's a small pink journal.
“What's that?” John asks.
“It looks like a diary,” I say. Next to it is a white origami paper. It looks like a swan.
“Does it belong to one of the doctors?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. It looks different from the other books here.”
I open it, flipping to the last few pages. I read out loud. “Dear my love, it’s now been 365 days. Officially one year since I’ve come here. Hasn’t really been a paradise. More like a fight for my life really. Mutant squirrel bats, lions with scorpion tails, and don’t even get me started on the one with bones. The whole experience has been insane. But what should I expect from falling into a dimension whose Earth is so different from the one I come from?”
I pause in shock and look at John. His expression is as stunned as mine.
“Different dimension?” he asks in disbelief.
I start reading out loud again.
From what I can tell, this Earth’s history with World War II is so different than my Earth. In my world, neighboring countries at war with each other just used weapons like guns and tanks. But this war was different. I learned from the doctor’s notes that in the 1940s the Nazis weren't just using heavy machinery but working on ways to create weapons. Took apart one species and then fused them with another one. Creating mutants, new predators, monsters. Using them to fight. The US got word and created their own. And so did other countries. They cultivated them, experimented on them, and used them for war. Eventually the mutants became smarter and grew tired of being used. Especially ones like Marrow. So they became at war with the humans who made them. This island is the place the US used to create its own army of mutants. During the mutant rebellion, the scientists then took shelter in this cave. Trying to find ways that could kill the mutants. They even tried to affect plants. Making their products poisonous to the mutants but not to humans. But even that didn’t have much of an effect on them, because they grew an immunity.The mutants in the end are the ones who won World War II. After they ended the war, they didn’t trust any other humans. So they hunted them.”
“Well that explains the monsters we keep running into,” I say to John with a lump forming in the back of throat.
He shakes his head. “Keep reading.”
I take a deep breath and continue reading the diary.
“I’ve been squatting in this cave all this time and taking food from the trees. I’ve finally gathered enough energy from this dimension using the quantum energy panels. Thank god it’s portable, otherwise I would’ve never been able to fit it in my bag before I fell into this place. I used a blowtorch from this bunker to sever off enough metal from the metal door and forged it into an arch. Made a few adjustments to it, turning it into a gateway machine that’ll create a rift in reality to get to the next dimension. Similar to the prototype we made back home. I plugged all the energy gathered from quantum energy panels into the machine's core. It seems it does have enough for two rift jumps. I’m using the first one. My love, I know you. You’re going to try to come after me. But we also know the journey back to our dimension isn’t easy. So I leave you with this information for what danger will come next: always have a compass, take a flashlight, and beware the shadows. When you get to the next dimension, try to find me. If you can’t, I’ve created another gateway machine to get to the next dimension. The compass will help you find me. Sincerely, Evelyn. Remember: beware the shadows.”
I stop reading and look to my left, expecting to see John. But he’s not here. I look further down the room to see him standing in front of a big metal arch. My eyes widen as I walk toward him and the object. It’s covered in tech, buttons, and a mechanical tube attached to it. It has yellow electricity in it.
“A gateway through another dimension,” John says, his eyes never leaving the arch. “Is this real?”
“The metal arch or the story?” I ask, still in shock.
“Both.” He turns to me. “I mean jumping to other dimensions. There’s no way this is real. Do you think it is?”
I put my hand on my forehead, trying to keep myself from falling. “Well I may not remember who I am, I do remember what normal looks like. Monkeys don’t fly, bulls don’t walk on two legs and bones are supposed to stay inside of you. What if this is the reason why nothing here has made any sense?”
“Because it’s an alternate dimension,” he says.
I nod.
“Okay, but what about our memory loss? What does that have to do with this?”
I shake my head and shrug. “I don’t know, but at least we actually have a way to get out of here.”
John sighs and looks back at the gateway. “Okay, well let’s turn it on and go through.” He starts messing around with different buttons on the machine.
My eyes go wide as I remember something. “Wait!”
He looks back to me, startled. “What?”
I look back at the diary in my hand. “She says she was leaving enough energy stored for just one more jump. For someone she thought would come find her. If we use it then that person won’t be able to come through.”
John slumps his shoulders. “That’s true but… what else are we supposed to do? We can’t stay here. And what if we get to the next dimension and Evelyn’s there with a way to help us get home?”
“Yeah I know, but…” I fall silent.
John walks in my direction and stops right in front of me. “What do you want to do?”
I think back to our original plan we made yesterday: find someone who can help us. Every other human here is dead. And the only person who can help left us left a way to follow her. “We need to get home.”
He nods.
I sigh. “But we also need to follow her instructions.” I look on the counter where I had found the journal and see a compass and a flashlight, just like Evelyn wrote in her diary. She must’ve left them for her lover. I put them in one of the scientist's satchels, along with Evelyn’s diary. Behind them there’s a flashlight. I turn around to see John standing in front of the gateway. In the middle of the gateway machine’s arch, there are what look like unstable energies folding and unfolding on each other. Like a rift.
“I got it to work,” John says. I look at him and nod. We both stand in front of it, trying to prepare for what may come next. As we take each other’s hands, I remember the emphasized words in Evelyn’s diary. Beware the shadows. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the next dimension, but it is true that we’re in this together.
“Ready?” John asks.
I nod. “Yeah.”
We step through the rift.
