The Booms: Volume 1: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY by J. B

Author:J. B [B, J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2022-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Buzzard's breath caught in the back of his throat as he looked around himself.

Everything about this place was unnatural. There was no red tint to the air, no billows of dust that would lovingly envelop him, comfort him as he walked. There was almost no color at all, in fact. The sky pressed down on him, absolute and black, like a blanket of nothing, both chilling and suffocating.

It was unlike the red sky he knew.

It would have been impossible to see if it weren’t for the pricks of light in the atmosphere. Some were small, like little holes of light in the black. Or perhaps the hole was the everything else, the glints being the soul of the something among the nothing. Others were larger, their lights blotting out the smaller dots around them. Buzzard couldn’t help but think of them as marvelous, dazzling pimples which had spread like a disease across the sky.

Except, when he concentrated, he realized that they had moved. Slowly, but… yes. He followed one speck, drifting near to a larger disc of light. In moments it was consumed. Indistinguishable. He had seen something like it before. Swirling light. A moving sky. A wrong sky. An unnatural place that was not like it should have been.

He pushed those thoughts down, trying to stay in the present.

Buzzard was on the landing. In front of him a narrow pathway, which would have fit no more than four people standing shoulder to shoulder. The path split the difference between the building they stood under, seeming to grow out of the sky behind it, and another just like it on the opposite side. The only ornamentation on either was equally spaced, identical doors and windows.

It bothered Buzzard how… the same everything was. There were almost no landmarks to identify. Just the buildings, the unfathomable sky, doors, and windows. He assumed they would, at least, have garbage and, therefore, garbage cans. But no. Curtains, hid behind the windows, all of the same pattern. The same color red as the foam floors within. Buzzard could have been looking into a mirror, for there was no difference between the building they had left and the one that stood just in front of him.

The space was small too, cramped and claustrophobic. As if everything was smashed together. As if one wall longed to unite with the other, pushing to fill the distance between. Buzzard expected that in the Booms. As the Patchwork sail steadily filled over the years, space began to matter. But here? He couldn’t see over the building in front of him to whatever may have existed beyond it. The wall was too tall, and the path too thin. It was almost like standing at the bottom of a perfectly rectangular, tiny canyon. Or a hole.

Or maybe this was the garbage can.

If Roach didn’t appear so confident, he might have thought they came out the wrong way.

Everything here was uniform, tight, and without waste of any kind, which Buzzard thought was very unlike the shelter, with its haphazard mess of colorful tents, strewn objects, and trash.

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