barren dawn

I sit up in a flash, choking out mouthfuls of water. The ceiling is sideways. I'm slumped in the corner of the ship, bruised and blackened. There's a tear through one side of the ship that's leaking in a bright ambient light, but it's mostly covered by crates hanging from the ground, which is the ceiling and the bodies scattered all over the area. I hold my hand up to block the light, and the outside becomes more apparent. It's hot outside. I can tell.
I remove my hand and look back at the insides of the ship, and begin to move things around.
I shift crates that uncover bodies, and create a pile of the simple things. Some crushed bars, water bottles, and energy guns.
I step past where I woke up on the higher head end and look down into the ship's body.
And, there are even more bodies than I imagined. Probably a hundred, maybe two. Some of the faces are recognisable, some of them are my crew members. They’re all dead, dried blood streaming down their faces, piled and stacked so high that you can't even see the floor.
Then I look at myself.
I’m covered in blood that probably isn’t mine because I haven’t got any open wounds, and my clothes look burnt and torn.
Then I look past the bodies and supplies and myself. The tail end of the ship is missing, ripped to shreds. It looks out to the varied alien world.

There are tons of supplies all around me, the ship's supplements. Everything needed to survive for a bit.
I shuffle my way over to the tear in the light and jump off a ledge. I step outside. Something that hasn't been done in a very, very long time.
I can feel the grass between my toes and the constant rushing, overwhelming wind. The sun hits me, and my forehead burns instantly. The air has a smell that I begin to dislike because it smells so… different. The sun is shining less bright now that my vision's back, and there are two moons in the sky.

Two.
The outside of the ship is ablaze, and there's a trail indented into the planet of where the ship first made contact and dragged across the ground. Trees toppled, and ground breaking.
I climb back up into the head of the ship, and what happened here?
I shouldn't be here.
I don't belong here.

Then there's an image. It's not much, but it scintillates through my mind, and it feels like a memory.
Just one image, but it tells a long story as I start to remember.
I see a line of people like a snake, being hit and beaten by space marines, forcefully pushed into one of the probe ships.
Which is the ship I stand in?
And now everyone's dead, apart from me.

I start to ravage through bodies and supplies, and I throw things that may be of use back into the pile of simple things, and then I fall.
I fall over, and I fall fall fall.
Spinning and flailing as I go over the head of the ship, falling onto the ground, ceiling into the ship's body.
Through two hundred dead bodies, I'll never be able to find anyone I know. Even if I manage, they're dead unless I can get the reviving room running.
And then I see a face amongst the crowd, a face full of life that coughs and spits on the ground, emerging from underneath the mess.
"Hello?" I say.
It's a child, and he says nothing.
"Hello? Are you alright?"
Something blasphemous and unholy spreads through his body at the scene of all the dead, his face crumples, and then he begins to run.
"Hey! Stop!"
He runs, and I chase. He's fast and doesn't care that he's stomping on bodies, unlike me, hopping and balancing my way through the mass. But he's already out the other end of the ship, and I think he's smiling.
Why is he smiling?
Nothing about anything that has happened here is worth smiling for.
"Hey! Stay there!"
He still doesn't say anything, and the smile is gone from his face now as he looks back at me.
Then he starts running again. Off he goes, the running boy into the alien north we know nothing about.
Now I'm upset. So I give up and start sprinting through the fields of bodies, outside the half of the ship, into the gully made by the crashed ship, where the boy runs down.

"Stop! Wait!"
I'm panting now, like a dog, and then I fall to the ground. "I'm not chasing after you boy!
And he keeps running through the gully.

What is there to this ship? Food, water, and guns? That may sound good, but in the scale of our technology, it's not. There could be way more useful stuff. Stuff like pathfinders, thermal scanners, repair kits, and resolution chargers, all of which should be on this ship.
They wouldn't leave without them. Yet in front of me is the ship. The ship with nothing the—
Half of the ship. I only have half of the ship in front of me. The other half must've been ripped off in the crash.

That boy. That boy who was following the path made by the ship, that path must have the other end of the ship somewhere on it.
That boy's genius, if that's what he was doing. And another half of the ship means another half of the bodies.
This is only half of the dead people.

I walk back inside, grab a vector pack, and shove in the crushed bars and water bottles. Leaving the guns, I begin to scavenge through the gully.
I can still see the boy, who stops every minute to look through the wreckage to find anything salvageable. He doesn't have a backpack, so he's got no way to store anything. It seems he's found nothing.

It takes some sprinting and stalling before I'm crouched behind a wall of scrap metal, hiding from the boy who searches the wreckage. I wouldn't want to scare him away again.
I risk a peek around the corner. The boy is frozen, as if a pillar in the sky. He's staring down at something, which quickly becomes someone as they start to stand.
She falls forward, and the boy only just catches her weight.
And oh—
Oh, her arm—
It's torn off.
It's torn off at the lower part, and has been caught in a flame and burnt, and it's bloody. It's bloody.
I run over and help the boy balance the girl, and then we find ourselves sitting in a circle on scrap.
"I'm Levi." I start, but neither of them says anything.
Just stare at the point adjacent to where we all sit.
"I have food," pulling my bag around to between my knees.
"If either of you cares about yourselves, you'll eat something." I throw them a crushed bar each and a bottle of water. There are enough bars to eat for another day, and only 5 water bottles. Most of which are more than half empty.
"I say we keep following this gully the ship made, and maybe we can find the other half of the ship." Then we can find the other half of the people. And I think that's worth saying to each of them because the sorrow on their faces is indescribable, and they have clearly lost people important to them.
This could give them hope. "The other half of the ship means the other half of the people." Sure enough, it hits because they both look up at me like I'm a robot.
The boy is the first to stand and start walking further down the gully, taking big swigs of his water. The girl stores the bar in her pocket and gets up to.
"Cool. That's cool." I say.
I get up last, and the trail beyond us is terrible and massive. You can see it all the way to the horizon line.
"I think I'll call you frowny," I say, pointing at the girl, who frowns in return. "And you, runner." The boy tries to hide it, but I see a grin across his face.
Then the girl speaks.
"Why am I frowny?"
I stand still, and so does she for a minute. "So she speaks." I mock.
"My name's Maxine."
And for some reason, she isn't spilling out a million questions like I was in my brain. Neither was the boy. Does she know? Does she know what happened?
"If I'm frowny, then you're smiley because you are way too happy for what just happened." So she knows!
"What happened? I don't remember anything." We're moving again now, which starts with her walking away after I ask that question.
"I dare not tell the tale." She says. And I pursue.
"Really, I have no idea, I swear it! What happened?!" Is that a lie? Don't I have that image of the soldiers forcefully putting people on that ship?
Wasn't I one of those people?
"Seriously, I won't tell you. Maybe later, when Slink and I have calmed down." She replies. Do they know each other?
"You know each other?"
She just sighs and nods.
"Slink is more like Stink!" She calls.
He just stops running because he's way ahead of us, and Slink points the finger back at Maxine. And me too, maybe because I laugh.
Which makes Maxine frown, and Slink lower his hand and then she runs to catch up with him.
I stay behind for a little bit before putting on a small jog because there's a big chunk of the ship off the side, and we should search it together.
"Slink, eh? How old are you both?" I ask, towards Maxine, even though I mention Slink first.
"We're both eleven," She replies.
"But Slink here is smarter than he should be, so is two classes above everyone else. Ain't that right, Stink?"

"Leave me alone, Maxine." Slink defends, finally saying something.
"What she didn't tell you was that not only am I two classes ahead, but she's one class behind." He says sassy.
"Slink!" She calls from the other side of the ship chunk, because we're all in self-allocated searching areas.
"Ah, that's funny, that smart one and the thick one," I say.
"How old are you?" Maxine asks. fifteen.
"I'm fifteen," I say.
Moving aside a piece of metal, Slink walks over, and we both uncover a chest from the ship.
"What do you think's inside Slink?"
"Why should I know? But check it out." He says, and he's found some sort of automated clamp that wraps around his wrist. He sticks a metal offcut inside, and it's crushed thin as paper.
"Whoa, that's cool," I say.
"If anyone gets that, it should be me," Maxine says, who crept up behind me and Slink, the chest in her brown eyes.
Slink's got bluey-grey eyes.
"Use the clamp to open the chest," I say.
Slink switches the gear on the clamp and presses it between the gap on the chest, and then releases the gear hold. The chest lid flings open and back again, making a snapping sound.
"Clothes!" Maxine yells.
"Oh, yippe", Slink says.
We all grab the attire that we like and run off to get changed.
I'm only just putting on my shirt when I hear Slink potentially throwing rocks at Maxine, who yells something curse back at him.
This isn't so bad. This is almost fun.

Not long after, we get dressed, Slink gifts Maxine the clamp arm and tells her to wait until the arm is healed before using it. She thanks him, and then we continue down the road.
We continue down the road for a long time.
A long, long, endless time.
We stop because Slink need to piss, and comes back swearing he got bitten by a large alien bug while his pants were down.
And then it's another long, long, long time before something useful clears into sight.
"There it is," Maxine says.
"The other half."
And swarming the front of the ship are a minimal fifty men.
"Other survivors," Slink says, and it almost sounds like a question, because fifty men, all the same age as survivors? I don't think so.
"No. No, these men are no survivors. That's an army right there." Maxine says.
"Well, what should we do?" I ask.
And it's neither of them that gives me my answer.
It's the army, who raise their guns.

And then, we run.