Morning all. Running a little bit slow today. I oddly enough had dreams of missing my alarm most of the night. And when I woke up I realized I hadn’t set the alarm. Apparently that was my brain’s way of telling me it had not been set. Not helpful, but interesting at least. And so we start a new week. Soon, thee will be much coffee. For now, there is a prompt. Timers at the ready and off we go.
I like this. I don’t know why someone is shooting at Marcus with lasers but I think we are about to find out this isn’t earth. maybe I’ll figure out why he is being attacked then. I didn’t see this story line coming and I rather like it. Not a bad way to start the week.
Monday, August 14th: The air smelled lightning charged.
The air smelled lightning charged. For a moment he wondered if he arrived after a lightning strike. ‘Stupid,’ he thought. ‘Not a cloud in the sky.’
Still Marcus found his gaze creeping skyward. It was an inky black dotted with stars. Clear, dark and completely devoid of storm clouds. ‘So probably not lightning,’ he thought.
The path was well lit despite the darkness of the night. There was no moon tonight but thesun provided the illumination for the solar powered lights to each side of the path. They were small things, but they gave off a cheery glow and made him less paranoid about going into the woods at night.
He knew, theoretically, that there were no large predators out this way. He looked up the details of the flora and fauna before agreeing to come out here. He saw several references with the word once, so he found himself looking up statistics and found that most of the larger wildlife, both predator and prey were hunted out of this area and the rest were more or less pushed out due to development.
While he could resent that from an ecological point of view, from a personal one, on this night, he was glad there seemed to be nothing in the woods. Marcus was a city boy at heart. His few ventures into the wild when younger had not ended well. In fact on one of the hikes he had been taken on when young, the leader of their party had a heart attack and died when they were cutting cross country. While they tried to get back to civilization, retracing their steps didn’t work. They became horribly lost.
They wandered for four days before the rescue teams found them.
It was not an experience Marcus ever wished to repeat. So, in addition to looking up wildlife in the area, Marcus studied the maps of the surrounding countryside. He didn’t anticipate leaving this path, but if he did, he could find every road in the vicinity as well as any necessary safety stations.
The knowledge quelled some of the panic he felt at being asked to once again venture into the woods. It was, truth be told, the first time he had ventured out of the city since the ill-fated camping incident when he was nine. He was finding the solar lights at the edge of the pathway far more comforting than he wanted to admit.
The path turned and he saw that one of the solar lights was knocked askew, its spike no longer buried in the dirt and its panel facing upwards. He couldn’t stand the sight and knelt down to fix it. The thought of all the lights being knocked out and the clear cut pathway disappearing filled his thoughts. He straightened the light and planted the spike firmly back int the ground. The act steadied him.
It also saved his life.
He felt a flash of heat, just over his head. The tree behind him burst into a flash of flame. The flame died, the wood too wet to burn, but he knew now why the lightning strike scent rode the air. Someone was shooting. Someone meant to kill him. He turned and sprinted off the path and into the woods, his mind calling up the map of the area, guiding him away from the settlement and into the woods.
Ten til Midnight 