A little Halloween treat, enjoy!
“I will share with you those last moments and then I will never speak of it again. The screams of her…” Leland went silent, holding back the moments that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
After a few moments he continued; “August twenty-fourth in our advanced year. Sherra and I were on an excavation. It was a simple scrape of a few items of interest and then we would depart. The portal had gone through some odd warping, and at first, a brief disconnection of some sort. The crew was against moving forward unsure of how that would affect the time stamp, but commander Raik insisted it was fine, so we followed through.”
Leland took up a glass of water; his shaking hand brought it to his mouth where he could hardly get a drink.
Again, he continued; “Everything looked as it had looked before, we had been to this place many times. It was in constant moisture and the light of its sun was muffled, which exposed many different shades and colors across the lush landscape. Our procedure was the same, to get a few rock and water samples where we had unknowingly also gathered some micro-organisms that the science department wanted to explore in further detail. It was a simple mission, and everything seemed perfectly normal, until…”
Leland covered his mouth and trembled for a brief moment.
“As we were moving through some trees is when we spotted it. At first, we thought our eyes were playing tricks with the fog and lighting, but no… It was there. It was extraordinary at first, and we ducked down into the bushes to get some photographs. We had never seen anything like this in all the times that we had been there, at least fourteen times previous.”
Looking at the small council that was across from him, ten men and women all writing as he spoke. Evaluating his story and mental state. Leland swallowed as he watched each of them for a moment before once again continuing with his experience.
“Sherra lost her footing and leaned back to catch herself on a large rock. As she set her hand upon the rock… Something, unreal… It moved.”
Now the man’s eyes began to look wild as if he was there again in the presence of what had transpired.
“I was standing right next to her and moved to catch her and keep us as quiet as we could… But the rock… The rock… It moved, it was not rock at all, it was some kind of living flesh, and it folded into her hand and held her. She stifled her scream with her hand, but…”
Leland started coughing and leaned forward into the palms of his hands; “It happened so fast, that… Thing we saw, that stick, creature. It moved swiftly taking ahold of Sherra, it held her across the chest and the legs with its stick like grippers and began to eat her. No hesitation!”
Now he fell forward onto his knees weeping, “Her screams! She screamed and it was eating her right through the suit to her flesh! And her face, I could see her face through her helmet, the horror… Terror!”
At this point Leland was lost in the memory and incoherent of his surroundings. Two large male nurses came in quickly and subdued him, they sat him back into the chair and gave him a shot of tranquilizer which calmed him almost immediately. As he began to fade off, he just yelled out;
“Damn you. Raik! The glitch altered the destination; we were off course by one fraction of a second! She’s gone! Raik! She’s gone! She was pregnant with our baby, Raik!!!
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