The Return (Alternate Dimensions Book 5) Page 14

I sat up slowly, rubbing my eyes, confused as to why it felt like I had chowed down on some old cotton balls. After blinking a bit, I realized that I had fallen asleep at my desk while playing the game. That was very unlike me. I was definitely a bed and comfy blanket girl through and through.

  I stretched and was almost immediately hit with a wave of blinding pain. I cradled my head–which seemed to be the source of the discomfort–in my hands and stumbled to the bathroom.

  Practically blind from the throbbing, I routed through our shared medicine cabinet and somehow managed to find some migraine pills.

  I choked them down without any water and stood there for several long minutes, gripping the sink like a life preserver. And it basically was; I wasn’t even sure if I could stand upright without it.

  “Yo, you okay?”

  I looked blearily to the doorway to see one of my roommates standing there, a concerned look on his face. “Fine. Just a headache.”

  “Oh, gross. Do you need me to grab you a glass of water or something?”

  “No. I took some meds. It’ll be fine.”

  “All right. You can always knock on my door if you need anything.”

  I tried to squint a smile at him, but I just wished he would go away. The throbbing in my brain was growing more and more insistent. “Thanks, bud.”

  He turned to go away, but seemed to remember something and turned back. “Oh! By the way, some guy keeps stopping by for you? Big guy, says he has your Christmas present. He your uncle or something?”

  My eyes widened, and I stood ramrod straight. “You didn’t tell him I lived here, did you?”

  “What, d’you think I’m stupid? A strange man shows up asking for a female college roommate? Like hell I’mma tell him who lives here. That’s why I wanted to ask.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate that.”

  “Should I call the cops if he comes around again?”

  “No. Just tell him you’ve never heard of me.”

  “Righto. Get some rest now.”

  He went off to his room, but I kept standing there for several moments until I felt like I wouldn’t upchuck on my first movement. The pain was pulsating now, almost as if it was physically tugging me in a direction.

  I might as well follow it.

  I staggered down the hall and through my door, shutting it behind me. The darkness of my room was a pleasant relief for a moment, until my computer screen suddenly flashed to life, way too brightly to be comfortable.

  I shielded my eyes, groaning at the luminary assault. I felt my way toward my computer, then practically collapsed into my gaming chair as I blindly poked around for the monitor’s power button.

  But the moment my fingers touched the screen, I felt something surge through me. Suddenly, everything was vibrating loosely around me, reality warping and bending in on me like paint colors swirled across a palette. I had never wanted to vomit so badly in my life, but I wasn’t even sure I had a stomach anymore. Or a body. Was I even real?

  The very cells of my being seemed to be scattered across an impossible amount of space, each one being pulled somewhere they shouldn’t be at a speed that shouldn’t have been survivable.

  But then, like a snapping rubber band, I came back together with a pop.

  I couldn’t breathe for a second, but then my body adjusted, and I gulped in a breath as I realized that I was very much not in my room anymore.

  I was in what looked like…some kind of laboratory? But it was far more high-tech than anything I had ever seen. Even more than the cheesy sci-fi films I used to watch. Everything was shiny, holographic…and futuristic.

  “Andi!” Something called my name, and my head snapped in the direction of the sound. My mind almost shut down then and there, when I saw what basically looked like a seirr from the game. A seirr that looked practically like an identical copy of the author.

  I opened my mouth, even though I had no idea what I was going to say, but before I could utter a single word, she was tackled by someone much larger than either of us.

  I moved automatically, feeling strangely protective of the small-framed alien, as if she was someone that I wanted to protect. I got maybe a step or two toward her, when I was physically thrown into a far wall.

  Fire licked at my cheek, and acrid smoke scoured my lungs. Head spinning yet again, I blinked rapidly to try to figure out what was going on.

  Explosion. Something had just gone boom. With me right next to it.

  I’m sure that’s not what they meant with the term ‘warm welcome.’

  Vision still mildly doubled, I looked to see the seirr/author/whomever she was being hauled off over someone’s shoulder. I tried to pick myself up, but my leg was pinned between two crumpled…well, I didn’t know what the hell they were, but they were big and metal, and they were crushing my foot.

  Dread filled me as I watched her disappear behind thick, metal doors that slid down from the ceiling, and I couldn’t help but feel like something very bad had happened.

  ‘Grab it. Grab the datapad, you idiot.’

  I started, jolted by the voice of the author right by my ear. I didn’t know what the hell a datapad was, but I frantically searched around for something that looked like it needed taking. Tossing aside the rubble that was trying to bury me into the raging fires around the room, I found a small square about the size of my palm that looked like the flattest phone that I had ever seen. I wasn’t quite sure if this was a ‘datapad,’ but it looked right enough to me, and I quickly shoved it into my bra.

  Once it was safely hidden in my underclothes, all the smoke and trauma started to get to me. I felt my eyelids grow heavy, and my lungs squeeze painfully from too many carcinogens and not enough air. I kept fighting to pull the lower part of my leg free, but every tug grew weaker and weaker as the debris around me became hotter and hotter.

  The world began to wobble again, but try as I might, I wasn’t able to hold on. I slipped down, down, down into darkness and away from wherever I was.

  One thing was for sure, though; it certainly wasn’t Kansas.

  Chapter 3

  My head hurt.

  My leg hurt.

  I hurt.

  I groaned and opened my eyes against much bodily protest. Taking a deep breath, I realized that just a few minutes ago, I wasn’t able to really breathe at all.

  Except–I was guessing–it wasn’t just a few moments ago.

  Sitting up took concentrated effort from several of my muscle groups, but a few minutes later, I managed to pull myself off the floor. I was in, what looked like a cell–of the high-tech variety, of course–but a very small cell. More closet than an actual room, and as far as I could tell, there was no way to relieve myself.

  “Well, that’s just peachy.”

  It probably wasn’t the time for snappy dialogue with myself, but I was tired, cranky, and more than a little overwhelmed. Fish out of water didn’t quite capture the scale of the past few moments. Fish out of solar system seemed a bit more apt.

  Slowly and with a bit of a limp, I walked to the brightly lit opening of my little holding area. If I didn’t know better, I’d call it a force field. But force fields weren’t real and neither was any of this. I was just having the biggest dissociative episode I had ever heard of. I just had to wait for it to end, then go to a therapist, psychologist, or whoever ASAP to get some help.

  But as I reached the electric-blue barrier and reached out, my fingers were hit with a buzzing shock, and I yanked my hand back in surprise.

  “Okay, so maybe a force field.”

  I peered beyond the slightly glowing blue to where I saw another row of cells across from me, a small pathway between us that maybe three people could fit across at max. Although I had utterly no idea where or when I was, I was pretty sure that this was a prison.

  “Great, less than five minutes here, and I’ve already got a record.”

  I hobbled back to the corner of the room and curled into a corner. The floor was metal, just like the walls an
d the ceiling, and none too giving. I tossed and turned for a moment, trying to get comfortable, but I figured out pretty quickly that absolutely everything about my accommodations were designed to be on the opposite end of the spectrum from comfortable.

  Sighing, I sat up and finally pulled out the electronic thingy from where I had shoved it in my bra. I turned it over in my hands for several moments and tried to figure out how to turn it on, but pretty much came up empty.

  Tears of frustration started to prick at my eyes, as much as I tried to hold them at bay. Too much had happened much too quickly, and the implications of what had occurred were just settling into my mind.

  Someway, somehow, I had ended up in the world of the game I had just been playing. Either I was completely off my rocker and experiencing the most hyper-realistic hallucination known to man, or this was all real, and I was somehow now existing in a digital world.

  Or, a third option that seemed even more ludicrous than the first two, maybe the game had just been some sort of portal or mirror of a real place, and I was now in some sort of alternate dimension that really did exist just as much as mine. An alternate dimension, where I didn’t even know how to work even the simplest of things.

  Just when I was going to fall into some pretty serious despair, my thumb found the mildest depression toward the bottom of the screen. Resting the pad of my forefinger over it, the screen flashed to life.

  Giddiness rushed through me, but that quickly waned when I realized that I couldn’t read a single thing on it. I could tell that the strange symbols meant something, but hell if I knew what that was. But what did I expect, English? That would be even less believable than this whole situation.

  Then again, I remember learning that you can’t read in your dreams. That was a bit troubling. Was this a dream? It wasn’t a very nice one.

  That frustration began to turn into outright anger, and I flicked my finger different ways across the thing, navigating blindly like a child going through a picture book. There was a butt-ton of schematics, and then what I guessed were chemical compositions. At least science held the same basic meanings in this strange universe.

  However, I hardly knew science in my own home, so it wasn’t like I was going to unravel any great mysteries here. I navigated to the back button, then a circle that had ‘home’ glowing slightly above it.

  I froze.

  Did I just read a couple words?

  I looked back to the pad, and there was just the strange symbols again. Not back, or home, or anything.

  Freaked out yet again in a very short period of time, I hit the little sphere and sure enough, I was brought to what basically looked like the start screen of a phone. Instead of folders, there were different, large symbols, but the intent was pretty clear.

  I clicked on a random one, and a series of pictures came up. I clicked at the one at the top of the list and was treated to a shot of the alien/author girl standing in front of an empty lab, smiling brightly. She looked so happy with a dazzling smile and her dark hair pulled up into a messy bun.

  I slid on to the next picture, which was basically a selfie with what I guessed was a krelach. I couldn’t help but let out a short, wry laugh. It seemed that some things were truly universal in the technological age.

  I kept going from photo to photo until I reached the end. There were only a handful – she most likely had them backed up to whatever this world’s version of the cloud was – but I could feel myself taking a liking to the girl. All of her pics had science stuff in the background, so I imagined she was wicked smart. And she always looked like she was thinking about some intense calculation or mathematical theorem.

  A buzz sounded throughout my little square holding pen, and I quickly shoved the thing back into my bra. Once I was sure that it was safely submerged in my cleavage, I stood up and limped back to the transparent field.

  Three aliens were marching toward us in outfits that screamed law enforcement. There was a human, a nesr-roona, and a mooreerie but no kodadt. That was odd. I would have thought the muscled, peaceful wildcats would have been excellent guards for a prison.

  The trio stopped in front of my little slice of paradise, and I just noticed one was carrying some brightly colored supplies. “Prisoner LL-69852, walk to the back of your containment unit and place your hands on the wall.”

  “Wow, so you speak English? That’s a little weird.” I stared stupidly for a moment. “Oh, you guys are probably talking to me. Sorry, I’ve never been a prisoner before.” I headed to the back wall and complied with the orders, craning my neck, so I could watch what they did.

  “Eyes forward!”

  I snapped my head back to face the wall. I bristled at the tone, but I had to realize that I couldn’t exactly pick any fights when I was in a strange prison, on a strange planet, in a strange reality.

  One of the officers approached, the others flanking him. “You may turn, inmate,” he commanded.

  I did, and I was pretty pleased that I towered over all of them except the human, who was my height. It was harder for people to intimidate those taller than them. Not impossible, mind you. Just a wee bit more difficult.

  “This is your uniform.”

  I looked at the pale-gray bodysuit in one of the nesr-roona’s hands. It was futuristic-looking and was tight enough to be a second skin.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” I said, picking it up and holding it to me.

  “Change.”

  “Fine. Where’s the bathroom?”

  “You are not allowed facilities to change, inmate. Put on your uniform now, then you will be taken to the scanner.”

  “Wait, are you serious? You guys let male guards do this?”

  “Officers Klavic and Moq are female. Change!”

  We had an intense stare down for several moments, but I eventually relented. I wasn’t about to win a fight between three aliens while I had a bum leg, so I might as well get over the embarrassment.

  Besides, I doubt the orange and beige aliens cared if I was naked or not. To them, I was absurdly pale and squishy with weird lumps.

  Slapping on my best deadpan, I set my new uniform on the ground, then slowly unbuttoned my flannel shirt. Thankfully, I was wearing a tank top under that, and I tentatively left it on. From there, I pulled down my sweatpants.

  To their credit, none of the officers leered, and the human kept his eyes trained to the side wall, while only the aliens watched to make sure I didn’t try to pull anything sly.

  I bent back down to pick the jumpsuit up, then stepped into it. It took a fair amount of wiggling, but the fabric seemed to stretch with my body heat until it was up to my chest. Before I put my arms in the sleeves, I zipped it up a bit, then pulled my tank top over my head without flashing my bra too much.

  Thankfully, they didn’t ask me to remove my bra or notice the rectangular object held within my body’s ‘natural pocket’ as I liked to call it. Straightening myself and finishing zipping up, I tried my best to square my shoulders and not look like I was totally terrified out of my mind.

  “Hands forward.”

  I obeyed, holding my hands in front of me for what I assumed were going to be some high-tech handcuffs.

  Sure enough, the officer slid two circles of metal over my wrist. I waited patiently, knowing that they couldn’t just be some chunky bracelets. A couple seconds later, they flashed a bright blue and then slammed together, pinning my chest uncomfortably between my arms as they shrunk to perfectly fit my wrists.

  “Follow us,” was the terse order.

  It took all of my strength not to roll my eyes. No, I thought I’d go on a merry stroll by my lonesome self, I snarked to myself. I had spent years learning to carefully choose my words; I wasn’t going to ruin that now by getting mouthy after a few years of freedom.

  They led me out of the cell and down the hall. I surveyed the area as much as I could without spinning a full three-sixty, and my prison theory was basically one-hundred percent confirmed. I saw some of ever
y species in every cell we passed in various stages of aggression. It seemed that prisoners weren’t separated by sexes or gender either, which was pretty interesting. I wondered if that helped or hurt compared to Earth penitentiaries.

  Eventually, after what seemed like ten minutes of walking down row after row of cells, they reached a door that basically looked like it had walked off a starship. I saw the three officers scan something in their bracers, then place their thumbprint on a pad in the wall, then finally scan an eyeball. Welp, looked like I wasn’t going to be picking locks anytime soon.

  Not that I knew how to pick locks, but that was beside the point.

  Down more nondescript, chrome halls–although these were far dirtier and more battered than the lab I had first arrived in. Before the explosion, of course. But we passed door after door until, finally, the guards stopped and ushered me inside of another small room.

  It was a bit bigger than my cell, with a chair in the center that could have possibly starred in either a horror movie or a space opera–coin toss on which–and a whole lot of equipment arranged around it. Two seirr in white jumpsuits stood ready with bigger versions of the techno-square that was currently in my brassier.

  “Sit.”

  I sat.

  I had to admit, it was pretty uncomfortable just being still and polite as they strapped me down across my chest, waist, wrist, and ankles. I could see how someone might get a little…agitated being so confined. It made me feel small. I hadn’t felt small in a long time.

  I didn’t like it.

  The guards took a step back once I was arranged, and the two seirr came forward, speaking amongst themselves.

  “Prisoner LL-69852, presenting with leg lacerations and compression fracture. Mild smoke inhalation and dehydration. What do you recommend?”

  “Rehydration, followed by mild sedative for debridement of the wound. Once sterile injury site is confirmed, rebuilder nanites for the compression fracture and a skin graft for the necessary areas of skin.”

  “Very good. Go ahead and start with your course of treatment.”

  I could tell the taller seirr was nervous as they approached me. It was clear this was some sort of intern or resident, and I was part of their learning experience. Great. If there was one thing I loved more than being a prisoner in an alien universe, it was being a med student’s guinea pig.