“This is a joke right?” said Colin, exasperated. “What do you mean open a wormhole? I’m going mad, aren’t I? This is all some crazy hallucination!”
He collapsed on the spot, his whole body seemed to deflate.
"I mean," he began. "A wormhole? Come on!"
Rachel looked deadly serious and folded her arms.
Colin tried again.
"But... but it's impossible! How the hell do you "open"," he outlined the word "open" with "hand speech marks". "… a wormhole? It's impossible! Even if you did, wouldn't it... like... suck up the planet?"
"You're getting two things wrong. Number one: it's a black hole that would suck up the planet and Number two: it is very possible to open a wormhole."
"Well, fine then!" he said, almost patronising Rachel. A wormhole, he had never heard anything so stupid. He removed his bag, placed it on the damp floor, and sat on it. "You open up a wormhole, and I'll sit here, in the rain that's likely to come in a few minutes and slowly go mad." And he folded his arms.
Rachel tutted and said nothing. Colin was always so stubborn. As he watched, she pulled an intriguing device from her large, purple rucksack. She knew anyone would be amazed and terrified of the contents if they ever discovered it, but she had to take it with her. Just in case. This beauty here, though, was a necessity. It was long, sleek and pitch black, like a new television remote, but in place of buttons, a shiny touch screen. Rachel sighed when she saw the amount of fingerprints it was adorned with, but preceded anyway.
She wiped her finger across it, and it turned on, a blue screen with a digital number pad. Colin raised one eyebrow as she tapped it a few times, like a keyboard. It looked so ridiculously new, he half expected it to have a white logo of a half-eaten apple on the back of it.
And then the wormhole was opened with Rachael jabbing the air with it like a Wii-mote.
Colin stood straight up. Too quickly. His knees betrayed him and he sank awkwardly to the ground.
The words, "Oh my God," escaped from his mouth.
A wormhole, it appeared, was a bending in space, a hole that shouldn't exist, a window that led to an insane, maddening vortex of colour and light. It was no bigger than a large television screen, and yet it seemed to engulf Colin.
"Oh my God," Colin said again. The world seemed to have bended to make way for this thing, the air seemed distorted as it moved towards it.
"Rachel," Colin said. "I'm really sorry for whatever I've done, but this is too far."
"I'm scared," he added. "If this is a joke, then please, just stop it." Rachel could see the fear in his eyes and sympathy shrouded her. This was going to be hard. All her life she had waited for something like this- but from Colin?
“Listen to me Colin,” her voice was anxious, fast and edgy. The rippling hole in space was distorting the air and wind and gravity around her, causing her hair to be drawn towards it, drifting up, floating and waving. “I can take you to a place- a planet called Gaia- where they’ll be people there who can help you. Help you a lot.”
“A different planet?” Colin almost laughed. “Well- that’s absolutely fucking marvellous isn’t it! Are you hell-bent on driving me bloody insane?”
“You have a power Colin,” Rachel said, ignoring him as best as she could. Jesus, this was going to be hard. “But- it’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Most people like you- they can control an Element. Earth, fire, air or water. Seeing as you just, most likely, killed Rick with lightning, we can rule out Elemental powers. But these people, good people; they can train you, help you control yourself. Please- you don’t want to live your life as an outcast with a strange power. God knows what you’d become.”
God knows what I’m already becoming, thought Colin, but he nodded. He wiped some blood that he had neglected from his nose, but felt a stab of pain when his hand brushed it. Broken for sure.
“I’m bloody coming with you.”
“Well, well, well.” A Texan voice rang out through the alleyway as rain started to fall from the sky in heavy drips.
The scaled creature with the robotic hand from Colin’s dream emerged at the alley’s entrance. He wore a blood stained outfit consisting of a dark trench coat and trousers, a filthy white shirt and a purple waistcoat that wasn’t buttoned. He clearly used to have four eyes; two yellow, sinister slits on each side, but the two on the right were covered with an eye patch. Dirty black hair fell to his shoulders and his grinning mouth was adorned with fangs.
Colin’s mind exploded with fear. He tried to let out a gasp but all that he could muster was a slow, ragged breath. He gulped and licked his lips that were now bloody and sweaty.
“Oh, Christ.”
“Claw, you bastard.” Rachel spat at the creature with an inconceivable amount of fearlessness. “How the-
“Zacharias, if y’all please m’lady. M’sugar,” Claw said striding up to Rachel. He placed the metal hand on the back of her head and tilted it upwards, leaning towards her ear. “My honey.”
“Die in a hole.” Rachel growled.
Zacharias Claw was in hysterics.
“Y’all thinks you can threaten me!” He danced towards Colin and gripped his neck with his good hand- rough and scaly as his face and with just three fingers and a thumb that all ended with yellowing talons. The near suffocation caused Colin to shut his gaping mouth.
“Y’all gonna swallow a fly, boy.”
“You keep your hands-“
Zacharias whipped out a gun from the black trench coat he was wearing that was out of this world. Silver and sleek, adorned with purple spikes and a skull-shaped key-ring.
“I’m gonna kindly request that you step into the car that’s parked just outside this alleyway nice and quite like or I will blow out your god damn brains with m’wife here.”
“I know you killed your wife you sick son of a-“
“Get in the fucking car!”
Rachel was on the verge of tears as she walked towards Colin.
“Colin I- I’m sorry,” she whimpered; Colin was whimpering with her all the same. “We- we should do what he says. He’ll kill us if we don’t. I’m not powerful enough”
The lizard in the trench coat pointed their gun at them as they proceeded out the alleyway and said, “You bet your pretty little boots you’re not. And put your hands behind your heads- make it seem all proper like.”
Zacharias examined the wormhole before him for just a second before asking, “Be more exciting to leave it open, huh?”
He giggled and licked his lips with that monstrous forked tongue as he led them with his gun to a sleek black car that was splattered with several bullet holes and smelled of decay.
With a sudden gesture Zacharias reached into his trench coat and stabbed both Colin and Rachel’s necks with what looked like, in the flash of visuals Colin saw before he blacked out and darkness consumed them both, metal syringes filled with a yellowish liquid.
“Nothing personal, sugar,” whispered Zacharias close to Colin’s ear through the fog.
“Or is it? Yeah- guess it is.”
Giggles interrupted the ever-persisting recurring dream as Colin slept.
