The First Moment
Copyright© 2026 by TMax
Chapter 14: Everything
A warm wind pushed past us, so warm that sweat dripped off my chin and dotted my chest. Memories of the infinite hallway surfaced, but Alice and Morgan kept me grounded in the present. I don’t know what I would have done without them.
Sasha peered around a corner and whispered to Lanka, “Moving around the corner, stay close.” Who passed the message down the line. Sasha watched as his instruction passed me and finished with Hank, who gave a thumbs up. Sasha nodded, his eyes wide, teeth too white in the gloom, and moved around the corner.
Lanka followed.
As each person passed the corner, the next moved faster, pulled partly by the person in front and partly from fear.
Alice went around, and I hurried to follow. Morgan pushed against me, and we paused in another long tunnel. In the distance, maybe about a football field or a bit longer away, it split into two tunnels.
Again, Sasha whispered to Lanka and waited as his message traveled the line, “Taking the left-hand passage. Always left.” Which made sense. If you want to guarantee that you find your way in a maze, always follow one of the walls. Of course that only works if the maze doesn’t shift or change.
Morgan must have read my mind as she said, “Fingers crossed that the builders don’t modify the maze.” I nodded as I whispered that to Alice, who gave me an eye-rolling look and didn’t pass it along.
Alice moved, and I followed, my left shoulder lightly touching the wall. Alien wall, because while it felt rough, like rock, it never scraped my shoulder, or at least didn’t abrade the skin in any way.
I peered past Alice’s head, into the gloom. Lanka’s long blonde hair appeared to glow from some light source that I couldn’t figure out. And yet, her skin appeared muted.
Morgan’s hand squeezed my shoulder. Her nails bit into me but didn’t break my skin, although it felt like it. Alice would squeeze and release with each shuffle step.
The snorts and scratches grew louder as we moved deeper into the tunnel. One thing about our naked bodies: they didn’t make much sound. But Nate breathed too loudly, and Alice would hold her breath, then exhale and gasp, but the noises from deeper in the tunnel easily drowned out our unconscious noise tics.
In the movies, the trained marines had body armor, advanced weapons, and used bullets for some reason, but a single alien could always rip whole companies of soldiers apart. Of course the hero somehow survived, but none of us would make a great hero except maybe Lanka as the damsel, Alice the wise-cracking sidekick, and Sasha the grizzled old soldier. They would all survive to the third act. However, the rest of us would have died in the opening scene to establish the creature’s bloodlust and superior physiology.
And of course, in the third act, Sasha would die first to show how little wisdom and bad-ass’ness mattered. Then Alice, with a pithy remark like “Fuck me,” as the alien stabs her through the gut. Lanka would die last, mainly to keep the teenage boys happy.
I might not even appear on screen. Just a splatter of blood on the wall or a blood pool in the sand.
My legs twitched and hurt from the slow, tense shuffle. Much more, and they would cramp, which suddenly happened to Shivam, who stopped and grabbed his calf. Everyone stopped. Lanka jumped behind Sasha, while Alice moved into the middle of the tunnel as if she wanted to fight something. Morgan hid behind me, while Nate asked, too loudly, “Dude, what the hell? What happened?”
“Cramp,” Shivam said as he knelt and held his right calf, which looked like a little brown apple taped to his leg.
“Shit, so stupid,” Alice said too loudly again. Once again I tried to find comfort in my wife’s ring, and once again the initial panic that I lost it caused me to forget the world around me. With it back on Earth, I may have lost her ring forever. I may have lost everything, forever. Who knew if I would survive this? Who even knew if we would ever go home? After all, we didn’t know what the aliens wanted. We didn’t even know how they thought about us.
Lanka giggled, more of a nervous laugh, and said, “Shut up, you gotta stay quiet.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.