Young Writers Society

Avery jolted awake, his nose dripping with tea. Bleary-eyed, he squinted down the harsh sunbeam pouring through the window before him. He felt very odd. Attempting to recollect what he'd last consciously experienced, but coming up short for answers, he moved on to trying to understand his surroundings. He was seated at a small round table, in the center of a small square kitchen, half a cold mug of tea sitting before him.

Avery blinked, confused. His throat began to itch at the familiar scene, recalling the cold he'd had a day ago, or two, or however long it had been since that fateful sneeze he'd loosed upon the world. He was back in his kitchen; back home.

“What?” he murmured, looking around cautiously. Outside he heard a familiar barking sound and, approaching the window, saw his neighbor's little black terrier bounding up the street — its usual, familiar pastime. In the other direction, another neighbor was trimming the hedges alongside his house, and further down the block was an elderly woman checking her mail. It was all so familiar, and it made Avery increasingly anxious.

He checked the clock above the fridge, wondering the time, but couldn't focus on the object. His eyes grew blurrier and blurrier until he turned away. Then, noticing a voice float to his ears from the adjacent room, he went to investigate.

Stepping through the narrow doorway between the kitchen and the living room very quickly solved the mystery, as Avery found that he'd left the television on, a re-run of an old sci-fi show flickering across the screen.

“Hm,” he sounded, stepping over to shut it off after watching a Dalek scream at people onscreen for a moment.

Taking another step, this time backwards, Avery scratched his head and stared at the empty black tv screen. Why was he home? What had happened to Jason and the ship? Who would save Jasmine? He thought the third question more quietly than the other two, as if someone could read his mind and judge him. He then began a small argument with himself, trying to reorganize his thoughts and saying how anyone who would judge someone for wanting to save someone else was probably a mildly unkind person. Unless, of course, he began to add, the judging person was originally waiting to be saved when their savior suddenly wandered off to save somebody else instead. He nodded to himself. That would be a good reason to judge someone for a rescue.

Before he could think on the matter anymore and fall deeper into his self-bickering, there was a rough, frantic scratching at the front door. Looking up at it, Avery caught sight of the mail-drop door swinging shut on a very invasive, shiny black nose. The neighbor's dog had come to visit, it seemed.

As with the last time he'd seen the dog, Avery wasn't a big fan of canines, and his time away hadn't changed that in the slightest. He hadn't even thought about it, though, to be fair. He'd been more distracted with running from laser blasts and staring out a spiraling spaceship's window for most of it. Actually, thinking about it now, he couldn't quite recall what his mind had been focused on during the window-staring bits.

So, due to the microscopic size of his fan-ship of dogs — though he quickly clarified in his mind that puppies were sort of alright — Avery decided to wait for the dog to leave, rather than answer its call at the door. This soon proved potentially impossible. The dog wasn't leaving.

With a loud groan, tilting his head to the ceiling in annoyance, Avery reluctantly answered the door, and sure as the sun in the sky, if it were sure of anything, the neighbor's little black terrier sat there staring up at him.

“What do you want?” Avery asked, working to spare the mutt of any annoyed tone.

“An Avery?” it replied. Avery's eyes grew wide and his mouth grew wider. “A Mr. Trent, perhaps?” the dog pressed.

“Er...” Avery said.

“Are you Mr. Avery Trent, sir?” the dog asked, tilting its head and wagging its tail.

“P-perhaps...?” Avery replied cautiously, furrowing his brow as his brain raced to understand what was happening, exactly.

“Well, either way, I suppose you must be, since no one else is straying from their occupations,” the dog stated, glancing up the street. Avery leaned out the doorway and did the same, seeing that the hedge-trimming neighbor was still trimming his hedges, and the elderly woman at the mailbox didn't seem to have gotten all her mail yet.

“Er, sorry,” Avery straightened his posture again. “What is this?”

“Oh, don't worry about it. Most people don't figure it out 'til they're up,” the dog said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

“Nothing, don't worry, look, I've got a message for y--” the dog suddenly went rigid, its mouth stuck open, and a familiar voice stumbled out.

“Avery! Avery, come on already,” it was saying. There was what sounded like someone being smacked and the side of Avery's face tingled.

“Avery, wake up!” Water began to pour out of the dog's mouth, then, following after the sound of, well, spilling water. Glancing down thanks to some sort of instinct, Avery found his shirt drenched.

“What in the--?”

Avery's eyes flew open just in time to catch Jason's palm flying towards his face. Too late, unfortunately, to stop it, though. Smack!

“Ahhh!” Avery screamed, clutching his face and rolling away.

“Well it's about time!” Jason screamed back, standing over Avery, an empty bucket hanging at his side.

“What happened?” Avery asked, sitting up in a puddle of water. Jason toppled back into a chair and slid the bucket towards a wall.

“Uhh, let's see, we were eating. Then Deadpan wouldn't shut up, then you wouldn't shut up, then Roman showed up. We ran, he chased, we fell. You hit your head pretty hard--”

“Okay, wait, slow down,” Avery replied, holding his head and pulling himself into his own chair. “Who is Roman?”

“Oh, y'know, 'Dorothy',” Jason said. “His name's Roman.”

Avery nodded. “And you know this how?”

“Uh...” Jason stared blankly, as if searching for an answer. Avery had a feeling it wouldn't be an honest one, if any.

“Uhh... Uhhh...”

“Okay, never mind, then...?” Avery suggested.

“Yes.”

“Alright... So I hit my head?”

“Ah, yeah, you passed out,” Jason said. “This all happened, like, one, one and a half days ago?”

“Wait, what?” Avery asked, astonished.

“Yeah,” Jason replied. “Yeah, you've been, uh, asleep since then?”

“Jason, I could have a concussion!” Avery exclaimed, holding his head. Now would be a good time to explain that Avery has an incredibly fear of head injuries, for no reason such as having had one before, or nearly had one, or anything like that. He's just really scared of them.

“Um,” Jason sounded. “Uh, a what?”

Avery blinked. “Just... Are there hospitals out here, anywhere?” he asked, glancing out the window.

“I dunno. I mean, I could check,” Jason offered. Avery nodded and Jason rolled his seat back to the control panel, clacking away at some keys and controls.

Avery leaned back in his seat, cold from the water and worried about his little coma. Jason looked back at him a couple of times, seeming nervous about something he wanted to say.

“These concussion things,” he finally asked. “They're not contagious, are they?”

Avery restrained a comment about them being “contagious” if someone were to keep asking stupid questions about them and got a boot to the head. Instead he just glared softly, which more closely resembling a confused squint.

“I just-- Gotta keep these guns healthy, y'know,” Jason added, pulling his sleeve up and flexing a mushy arm.

* * *

The hospital was an enormous box. It was more rectangular than the average box that might come to mind, but “a box” was a much simpler way to describe the place. It had its details, of course, such as large, light blue, smiling skulls painted in random places, paired with various numbers and letters. Jason had mumbled a guess about them being doors, but not the doors they'd been looking for.

Eventually, they did find their target doors, and calmly entered — on Jason's part, at least; Avery had busied himself with hyperventilating and spinning around wildly, making Jason a bit more worried about the concussion thing and any chance of them being contagious. He just kept some distance for now.

“Welcome to Dr. Fratalian Belgium, M.D.'s Medical Health Station For The Fatally Ill, do you have an appointment?”

“Hi, yeah, uh, no,” Jason replied to the short, literally bug-eyed lady behind the counter.

“'M sorry, sir?” she said, staring widely.

“Sorry, no, we don't have an appointment.” Jason glanced at Avery nervously. “But my buddy here has a little problem, says he needs a doctor.”

“I see,” the lady spoke, turning her head on Avery, who was watching the glowing whiteness of the room with awe. He was particularly interested in the ceiling, despite its complete lack of anything.

“Well, 'm sorry, sir,” the lady told Jason,” but appointments are backed up at least a decade. Not even a chance we could squeeze you in anywhere.”

Jason blinked, then squinted, then furrowed his eyebrows. “Who the Mars dust schedules an appointment for a decade in the future?”

“Eh, richies who expect or plan to be hurt around a certain time in ten years, psychopaths. One guy claimed to be a time traveler a while back, but we connected him to Dr. Pollux Gemini, Ph.D's Nervous And Reluctant Home For The Mentally Disconnected (Please Don't Hurt Us).”

Jason nodded at the obvious offense of that title.

“Well, uh, can you help my friend here, or...?”

“Nope. Sorry, again, sir, but no can do. Dr. Fratalian won't have anything to do with anyone unless they've got an appointment, and the soonest I can get you in is--” She paused and tapped her computer screen a few times. “Ah, well, we just got a load of new appointments scheduled, so the soonest I can get you in now is thirty years.”

Jason's eye twitched. For once, he genuinely felt like the smartest person in the room, or at least the most logical. There was a ding and the lady tapped her screen again.

“Forty years, now. I'd hurry up if I were you boys.”

“Uh, no thanks?” Jason replied, grabbing Avery by the shoulders and steering him back out the doors. There was a vast spaceship parking garage just outside, concealed and air-tight for safety reasons, and so you didn't lose all your bandages or a cast or maybe even your life to the vacuum of space after a trip to the hospital. Jason began pushing Avery towards their ship, his beautiful silver can, when suddenly a massive hole took the place of the garage's back wall.

Ships and litter and a few people outside were all flung across the garage, sucked out into space. Jason clung to a steel support beam, his grip tight around Avery's elbow and his mind frantic.

“What the hell was that?!” he tried to cry into the vacuum, but his words were sucked up by it as well. Pulling a very dazed Avery behind the steel beam as well, he felt some very recent déjà vu. 

Throwing a look over his shoulder and the edge of the beam, he felt a pang in his stomach as he watched the scene with horror; as he watched his beautiful silver can plummeting away into the darkness. A scream ripped at his lungs, mute against the vacuum, as a set of titanic teeth smashed down on the ship.