The Last Night Chapter 13 Home Again Home Again

The Last Night 

Chapter 13

Home Again Home Again

38

 

   It was dark outside. The sun was still buried deep behind the horizon. Four-year old Wyatt Faraday did not know this. He was fast asleep.

   “Get up Wyatt.” His mother’s words were sharp and shrill. It cut through his dreams with razor edged suddenness. 

   He jerked up and tumbled from his bed, ran from his room and down the long narrow hallway that led to the living room the source of his mothers’ demanding voice.

  Black windows were the first thing he noticed. His Mother always woke him in the morning. It was always light. Black windows are night windows, not morning windows. How could this be?

  Relief like a soft warm blanket dropped over him. A smile cracked his face and pushed his sleep clouded eyes up and open.

  The words, ‘we’re going home,’ flooded his young naïve’ mind. Joy throbbed through his little pounding happy heart. “It’s over.” He sighed.

  “What’s over?” Martha Faraday demanded.

  He sucked in his words. Held his breath. The window suddenly shrank away from him. The house. Its walls, floor ceiling fluttered past his face like wind -blown leaves. Darkness swallowed him, leaving him alone in pure blackness that raced away unseen until the darkness finally turned gray then white. Cool dry air curled around his crumpling body as it dropped to the floor.

  An alarmed blared from somewhere far away. Then fell silent.

  Warm softness gently massaged him back to the light, the world, his world. The world until just recently he had spent the last six months. “Where?” he moaned.

   “Wyatt? You, coming back to us?”

  He grunted and shifted beneath the smooth warm sheets. “Where, am I?”

  “Back.” A gruff male voice assaulted his ears.

39

  “Captain, please. Can’t this wait?” 

 “Ariel! Where are you?” Wyatt struggled to open his eyes, but the room was filled with blinding white light.

  “See Captain, he’s coming around.”

  “He’s talking nonsense. Doctor Sain, I need to know where he’s coming back from! My ship was breached! I need to know how! Hey! Wake up!” The captain yelled.

  “Captain Fletch, Sir, my patient is my first concern. You’re shouting is not helping.”

  “Where am I? Captain? What is this place?”

 The Captain, a tall slender human, sporting a thick shock of bristly white hair, neatly dressed in a perfectly creased brown and black uniform and gleaming black patent leather boots, bent down over the bed and looked Wyatt squarely in the face. “How did you get off my ship?”

“Ship? We’re on a ship?”

   Doctor Sain, a surprisingly pretty, short red -skinned Alurian with shoulder-length rippling tenacles rather than hair and sparkling green stone -like eyes dressed in a snuggly fitting knee length white dress and no shoes. Her feet being fur crowned hooves.  

  “Yes dear, you’re on a refugee transit vessel.” She smiled sweetly, when she drew near, gently bumping the Captain away. “You’re going home, sweetie, everything is good for you.” 

   “I could have you barred from any ship duty….”

 “Don’t care. The patient comes first. We both know there have been no contaminants detected. Wyatt’s, event, warrants further study of course, but he is the same as he was when he boarded six months ago. 

   “No contaminants, the same.” Fletch held up a golden ring. “Then what is this?”

  “That’s my wedding band!”

  The Doctor sidled down beside him, “Dear you’re only seventeen. You don’t have a wife.”