Exercise 2: Jungle

Exercise 2: Our hero(es) run for the last escape ship off a dying jungle planet.

Unedited.


Jerry felt the strain of competing force vectors on his body and struggled to keep up and running. Michelle had yanked, hard, on his arm to pull his head low even as she stretched her own long legs to bounce over the small scrub that so dogged them. A deer, or something that looked enough like a deer to make Jerry homesick in less strained moments, went whipping by, too fast to have taken notice of the tall man’s extraneous fleshy bits in the way. He was fortunate to have been jerked down.
Michelle struggled for breath. Every muscle in her body bulged and sweat wicked in messy blobs off her skin. Her eyes were thick with wet as well, though Jerry didn’t know if that was the ripping wind and adrenaline or the fact that her sister had just been cut down and left behind. Her mouth was moving. The same simple phrase. The last words her father had turned to her and said, about 20 seconds after the breakfast table had been cleared and an unnaturally warm wind had cut through the forest and melted the frozen fall dew.
Keep running. Keep running. Keep running.
She banked a hard right at the old North Trail marker and sped up, grateful for the relative smooth of the dirt and stone. Jerry struggled to match the speed of her footfall. He tripped more than once, but she only turned to help him the first time. The second time she had just let a hand trail back and clamped her long archer’s fingers down into his curly hair. He was bleeding, but upright and moving, and so had no cause to bitch. Every second still breathing was a blessing with hell on your heals.
“Ship’s just another mile! We’re almost there!”
Jerry looked up and his face sank, or, would have had he the energy reserves to expunge emotion across the pale of his mug. He looked frantically down and reached out for Michelle’s shoulders, driving them both down into the shadow of a small dugout. He heard the soft, moist crack, but Michelle did not cry out. She would be down an arm for the remainder of the run. Off balance. Not good.
The sun, high to the east, reaching down to them with foggy tendrils as various tiny holes opened and shifted in the canopy, disappeared. Blotted out. The threat rolled noisily overhead, a rumbling tip to armageddon’s spear. It did not pass for some moments.
“I don’t think they saw us.” Michelle was openly crying now, but still silent as the salt cut long contrails down her face.
“Look, we’re going to be alright. Like you said, the ship is just another mile, we can make it. We can get off this fucking eden bullshit rock.” She stared at him. He thought she was going to strike and recoiled slightly.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Who cares if we make it? Everyone else is dead, Jerry. Are you getting this? Everyone! We’re it. Even if we make it, no one else is coming home.”
“That’s exactly why we’ve got to make it, Michelle! We’ve got to survives so that someone has!” She festered for a moment.
“Fuck it,” and she was on her feet, “try to keep up, hacker boy.” And she was off. Jerry scrambled to his feet, stumbled, and begged his lungs for just a little bit more oxygen.
He could hear the terror coming up from behind. He was sure trees were falling to its relentless onslaught. The birds and squirrels had long since made their own futile escape. The texture of the forest around them blurred as they ran, greens and browns all beaching out as they both slowly began to succumb to the extremes of exhaustion, first Jerry, soft as his ilk tend to be, and then Michelle, who had fought before she had run, and had little left to give.
The path finally crested atop Porter’s Hill, and the gleaming white cone of the rocket could be seen sticking cartoonishly out the top of a mock grain silo, erected some years ago for the aesthetics of the thing more than for camoflage or defense.
“Oh god, Jerry, we’re almost there.” Michele came close to a smile as the pair began their final downhill run. Smoke filled the sky behind them, and the atmosphere’s normal emerald color had been stained as burning iron. Their knees screamed and threatened to buckle as they let their full weight slam down step after step, but on they raced to the ship, the last survivors of a doomed expedition, bound for home to tell an untold trauma.
“We’re going to make it!” She was gleeful now, crying again, but for hope over despair.
Jerry stopped.
“Fuck… me…”
They had come within 100 meters, run with everything they had, and made it just in time to watch the scaffolding of the silo come crashing down around the spaceship. Steam jets whined and fuel lines automatically popped free of the long white tube. The violence of the fire was shocking. Someone had beaten them to it. Someone had made the same assumptions of loneliness. Someone was stealing their escape rocket.
Michelle cursed, and moments later became just another cloud of ash as the rocket achieved maximum thrust and began to climb from the launch, damping everything around it with fire and heat.
Jerry might have cursed as well, had he not died seconds earlier, the victim of a terrible head wound as a tree, a thirty meter beast of hardwood and leaf, crashed down under the weight of the lumbering violence.
The rocket disappeared with a glinting wink as the world ended.