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Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 168
"Early dawn hues breaking across the skies above the wild and wintry slopes of an icy Glyderau, with the first sunlight of the day hitting the very peaks of Snowdon to the left and Glyder Fawr to the right. It had already been a cold start to the day after camping out for th enight just below this point amongst the rocks and snow - but this dawn colour soon warmed the heart."
I went somewhere different with this story. It could even be a beginning to a story or novel.
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Contaminated
Annabelle woke up in time to watch the sunrise. The sky reflected a glorious warm pink that lit up the mountain tops and made them glow. She snuggled down into her sub-50 sleeping bag to watch it. It had been a hard climb up the day before, especially with her backpack full with a month’s worth of supplies, but at least now she was safe.
Hopefully they wouldn’t find her up here. This was as remote as you could get. There’d been talk of them finding others in the wilderness; having some kind of special drone scanners that could see through trees and foliage, but she hadn’t heard about them looking along mountain tops. Saying that, they could easily access them with their flying capabilities; if you could fly to Earth from space, a mountain range was a piece of cake. Yet, they’d halted all flying machines – in fact everything on Earth had stopped since their arrival.
They were obsessed with how people were treating the planet, which yes, wasn’t good. But now they were rounding them up, claiming they were contaminated too. Annabelle wasn’t sure if they were killing people or taking them to use elsewhere. She hadn’t been able to find that out. They’d arrived so fast all media had ground to a halt, even the internet had gone down. There’d been a few last broadcasts, but then silence.
It wasn’t too hard for Annabelle though, she was already living a remote life out on the edge of a tiny village with Snowdonia at her backdoor. She hiked daily, so coming up here wasn’t new for her, although she’d never stayed overnight. But at least she was equipped for it. She’d planned to go to the Himalayas the following year, climb the Annapurnas, maybe reach a base camp. She didn’t think she’d ever try Everest, but she’d wanted to experience being in its shadow.
But such plans were gone now, along with normal life. She didn’t know if being up here for a month would be enough, but they’d been working their way through the region and were days away from her village. She hoped that maybe they’d be finished by the time she needed to come back down.
She spotted movement on the skyline. Had other climbers had the same idea as her? Maybe it was someone she knew. She sat up, edging closer to one the jutting rocks to shield herself from view. She couldn’t make out details from this distance, but they didn’t seem to be loaded up like her. She couldn’t see any backpacks and they were moving towards her.
A bad feeling spread across her stomach. She could see the colours of their coats now, but it was their faces she needed to see to find out if it was them or not.
The difficulty with these aliens was that they weren’t really alien; they were human. The only thing that separated them from the people on earth was their eye colour; they had translucent, reflective eyes, but from this distance she couldn’t see them.
They’d come to ‘reclaim’ the Earth. Humans had been left here millennia ago to take care of it, but hadn’t done a good job. They weren’t happy.
Annabelle shuffled out of the sleeping bag and rolled it up while watching their progress. There was still nothing to define whether they were friend or foe. She attached it to the bottom of her pack and slipped her arms through the straps. Should she stay or go? Was she about to be caught or were they also people trying to escape?
The sun peeped over the top of the range and as they glanced over their shoulders there was a flash of light. It was them!
She slid backwards along the snow on her bottom, not wanting to stand up. She could maybe slide down over the edge a bit, and get to her feet out of view. She reached the edge and swung her legs round. She might make it. Then the rocks gave way under her feet, and she descended faster than expected, the stones taking her straight down. Then she was thrown forward into a hollowed out cavern on the side of the mountain.
She lifted herself up, checking her body as she went. No serious injuries, only a few scrapes. She looked out of the hole in the side of the mountain amazed and relieved at her escape. Then she heard a shuffling behind her and turned. Ten figures appeared out of the gloom.
‘Did they see you?’ one of them asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Good,’ said another.
It seems there had been other that had had the same idea as her.
