by A.R. Rivera
Eighty-Eight Miles Per Hour
Another forest. Not so dense, though. The grass is golf course short. Manicured.
The sun beats down, bright and powerful from mid-sky. I raise a hand to shade my eyes, but the glare dissipates too quickly for the move to make a difference. Streaks zip across the horizon.
In the time it takes me to put the stones away, the sun has dimmed. Not obscured by clouds, but actually set.
Sunset in less than a minute?
The moon has appeared. It darts across the sky. Stars wheel overhead.
And... daybreak?
There’s a city in the distance. Tall, round buildings casting long shadows that shrink until they disappear in what looks like high noon, and then reappear on the other side. Pale colors wash them out as they disappear in a brief night.
I can hear Eli’s nagging voice in my head, Mark the time differential.
I set my pack on the ground to dig out my notebook and describe the fast-paced world, with days that abruptly end and begin. During the next sunrise, I begin a count that makes it all the way to seventy-three before the sun sets again and then write it all down for him—which takes a few days because the spans of light are so brief. It would be sinful not to mention how I have also just leapt from a world that felt unbearably slow when I first arrived, and must somehow throw off my count, but even so, the days are fast.
When I bend to set my notes in the bag, it’s covered in green vines. I yank my bag up, breaking the strands of greenery, and stamp my feet, which are also wrapped in sudden overgrowth.
After securing my pack, I take out my stones and start walking towards the distant city. I need to keep away from it, but at the same time, I’ve got to get power.
Wait, G.
Day. Night.
You’re forgetting what you came for.
Day and night come and go.
I turn back and run toward the spot where the cave was in the last world. The trees are different—there’s hardly any. No grassy steppe, either. Only rolling hills covered in uniform stalks of dull blades of grass that move choppily in the intermittent breeze.
I keep my steps quick and high. Green leaves fade to orange and brown, then thrust to the ground. At the hilltop, the place near where that chief was dancing around a fire in the rain, the tell-tale rings are barely visible.
I pause my hunt, waiting, once again, for the sun to rise. When it does, I see the round markings and charge forward.
A loud sound like a whip cracking, it’s quick and high-pitched, booms through the open field. I look up and spot more streaks. There’s a line of some type of craft flying in formation—the blur of them carry a constant shape and they’re too big to be birds— and they’re heading south.
Quick, successive pops ring out like firecrackers, but I don’t pay attention, making for the faded rings in the dirt.
It’s pretty quick work, only five or six days of digging until the next set of stones float up from a crumbled rubber bag setting on top of an old stone plate under three feet of loose sand. I don’t see the sets of stones dancing like the other set did, they’re just absorbed by mine and I still don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing. I mean, the stones seem so powerful, they must know what they’re doing, right?
I set them back into the mesh bag at my waistband and head back towards the city down in the valley that is now flickering with fire. The tall, cylindrical buildings I saw only a moment ago are gone. The distant skyline is shrouded in black and yellow smoke.
Round shapes zip through the land below. I think they’re vehicles, forming lines set side by side. Rows of what look like armed forces readying for invasion. More streaks fill the sky, but this time, I hear them loud and clear. Popping sounds go off again and the thick walls of the distant city puff out smoke like an old man’s pipe.
Suddenly a blinding light cancels the sky. I feel myself scream, clutching the stones to my chest as I’m tossed by a wall of great heated wind.