Call of the Void by J Z Foster & Justin M Woodward

Author:J Z Foster & Justin M Woodward [Foster, J Z & Woodward, Justin M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Winter Gate Publishing
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ever since Tommy was a small boy, he’d gazed at the stars. It was a dream of his to go into space and look back down at the Earth, to see it as God does.

But dreams have a habit of dying as you get older.

He’d joined the Air Force because it had looked like the best route through college. It wasn’t long before he’d become the hamster on a wheel that runs but doesn’t get anywhere.

Running fast just to stay in one place. But that was life, wasn’t it?

Marrying his college sweetheart was the first step down that path. She was beautiful, smart, and funny. And she wanted to go on living right there in the same town she’d grown up in.

That was fine.

They’d been good to each other, and Tommy would have told anyone that he loved his wife. They liked watching movies together. Though that was the only hobby they’d shared.

When he’d been transferred to Iraq, he kissed her goodbye, and they knew they’d see each other in a few months.

That was fine.

Those long stints became longer than originally expected, and that was fine. And everything else that had happened after that fateful phone call where she told him she’d moved on?

Also fine.

That had been Tommy’s life from the moment he stopped looking up at the stars.

Fine. Just fine.

He hadn’t known who he really was until the divorce. It was as if that dissolution was a wake-up call to make him understand how hollow he really was. He’d been lying to himself. He hadn’t cared about anything in years.

But now, as he loaded a fresh mag into his XTU and heard the click as he drummed back the slide, he knew he wasn’t hollow anymore.

And he knew what he cared about.

Wading through the water, Tommy moved right past an open shutter. He saw the orange landscape, the dusty, desolate terrain of this foreign planet. That was when it finally hit him. He was on Mars. The place he’d wanted to go for so long, the place he’d looked at when he stared up into the stars.

He’d made it.

And that was just fine.

But he wasn’t hollow now. He had a purpose, and he had people who depended on him.

And he wasn’t going to let them down.

Shuffling through the water, he saw the blinking lights of a small provisions store. It was a go-between that had been placed between two hallways to drum up business from the busy occupants of Felicity walking though several times a day. He headed through its crescent archway and saw it was run down and water-soaked, but still lined with rows and rows of junk food.

Something chirped. An alien, wheezing sound.

Tommy’s blood froze cold, and he tightened up against a shelf, bending his knees and easing down toward the water. There were small gaps in the shelving, and as he leaned down, he got a view of what was making the noise.

A man, or rather, something that had once been a man, was shuffling through the water.

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