The Forgotten Colony

by J.B. Ryder

With his eyes trained on the man, Zach's face went pale, as if he had seen a ghost. Because he had.

With Victor distracted with Quinton, Carver reached his hand down and discretely flicked one of his own pool balls into the corner pouch.

Cora smiled a bit at the thought of Zach as a miner, picturing him with a pickaxe and a helmet, covered in smears of red dust.

"Fine. Maybe you were a part of Prescott. Maybe I shit rainbows and have a pot of gold in my office.

"Please, Zach. You left me behind once," said Ryker. "Don't do it again."

Was Zach suffocating under an airless dome as Cora stood there, hyperventilating?

Damn it, Zach thought. I loved that sweater.

Zach didn't care, though. As soon as he saw her shoe, he sloshed through the flooded grass and drove his arm right into the rose bush. His fingers wriggled as he attempted to grip the slippery mesh.

Not for his hand in Zach's death—not entirely—but rather for the fact that he saw the light in it. With Zach gone, his problems were solved.

"I think I got it," said Erik. He waited a moment before elaborating. "You woke me up just in time for the end of the fucking world."

"Then, there was a third choice: pick me up and trek four miles to the clinic, not stopping until I was on a stretcher. Which do you think he did?"

For years, Zach had believed Prescott fell in 2030, with the Red Plague. But looking around him—at the skeletal buildings collapsing, at the sinkholes opening in the ground, at the webs of cracks forming in the regolith streets—Zach knew he was watching the actual downfall of Prescott.

"Then, a species will emerge and destroy itself. Just like we have."

"I'm okay. I keep feeling like I forgot something, though..." He patted his pockets, then his empty pant leg.

"They probably think we're dead." Ryker frowned. "Wouldn't be the first time."

Cora, Cora, where was she? Had she made it? He wouldn't know what to do if she hadn't. He wouldn't be able to go on.

Jason had always wanted to see outer space. On those summer nights when he, Cora, and Zach would sprawl out a blanket on the grass and stare up at the stars, he'd speak of venturing to Saturn.

It was a vibrant world, with lush fields spanning far into the horizon under impossibly blue skies. Laughing children played games in the forest while adults built cabins on a nearby river bank. It was paradise.

"You're not a killer, Zach. You're a survivor. But not a killer."

"What if we wake up ten or fifteen people at a time and have them donate blood?" The hydrofarm was on its last legs, but it could still indefinitely support a small crew of people. "Or we could just use Carver," Ryker suggested.

"And clothes?" a woman asked. "I don't want to wake up one morning and see Larry's bare ass prancing through the streets."

"If you're here for me, then check the Gateway again. Send someone up there. Bring my friend home."