NOLAN KUMAR

There was... a party. Down in Leices- no, London. Yeah, that sounded about right, London. With one... two friends. I remembered some old twenty-first century pop music being played, there was a lot of alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. The shit kind that somehow kept you coming back for more. Blissful screaming... rainbow lights, then a couple scraps, one just outside in the alley, another... on a starship? That... Jesus it was hot. Really hot. Like he was wearing a jacket in the middle of the bloody Sahara.

I immediately retched to the side, grasping tightly onto my churning stomach. "Oh, bloody hell," I groaned dryly, coughing up some extra vomit. I'd have killed for some InstaSober right about now. I rolled onto my back, diverting what little energy I had to my eyelids, immediately squinting as I literally swore the sunlight was close to disintegrating my retinas.

I placed my hands on the... sand? That was sand right? I ripped myself upright, groaning once again from the muscle pains, widening my eyes to the-

Okay, maybe I was in the middle of the Sahara.

"Oh, you're joking!" I shouted, my mouth drier than a rock.

I stared at the empty landscape ahead of me. Weren't any buildings, cars, pubs, singing birds tweeting how desperate they were to shag, just an endless wasteland of sand, rocks, and a few cactus-like plants. What the actual shit happened last night?

I patted around my pockets. Wait, I wasn't wearing those jeans earlier was I? Actually, I didn't recall wearing any of these clothes last night. Goddammit, no phone. On the ground? I gazed around below, only finding a smashed bottle of... something, I couldn't really tell. I picked it up by the neck, taking a quick glance of the whole thing. Seemed it used to have a label, but it was torn off somewhere, so it was hard to say.

I took a quick whiff of the remaining underside of the bottle. Yep, definitely alcohol. Perfect. Just perfect. I sighed, before noticing something on the bottom half of its body. A few strange stains of dark red were scattered over the small shards, quite recent too. That wasn't blood was it?

I struggled onto my feet, taking a glance to the sides, a part of myself hoping something would change. Nope, just more sand. I turned behind, and my heart almost gave in.

There was a guy lying face-flat on the ground, barely a couple metres in front of me, surrounded by bits of glass, blood and bullet casings from some ugly makeshift handgun. He was wearing some sort of weird knock-off military clothing, thick enough to easily have given the guy a heatstroke. Like, seriously, the heat made India seem like the bloody arctic to say the least.

"Uh, mate? You all right?" I asked nervously. There was no response. I then crouched down, and started to roll his heavy body into his back. "Please don't be dead, please don't be dead, please don't be dead." Can't've been dead from getting whacked by a bottle, right? This was real life, not some old Hollywood film. "Please don't be-"

Well, the bottle did seem to cause a few marks and cuts over his shaven head, but it was nothing fatal. No, in fact that was the massive stab wound on his neck.

"Oh shit," I cursed, subconsciously taking a step back. "Shitshitshitshit!" I was panicking, if those four shits didn't give it away already. What the hell was I gonna do? It was already clear this was my doing, and I didn't want to rot ten years in a Lunar prison.

What if I just said this was an act of self defence? The guy clearly was armed with a firearm, I just got lucky with that bottle of alcohol.

Awful idea. That wasn't really have much of a story. Even then, I'd likely be charged with manslaughter.

Then again, I was in the middle of the desert, just let the sands have their lunch and nobody would know.

No, I couldn't do that, could I? What if somebody found out?

Who would find out? As far as I was concerned it was just plain sand for miles, wasn't like there was a Costco ten minutes down the road was there?

Actually, that reminded me. I needed to get out of this place, and there wasn't really any clear indication which way to go. Maybe the corpse had something on him?

I scrounged through the guy's pockets, almost shuddering each time I touched him. Magazines, extra bullets, some wrapper with an unfamiliar writing, junk, lint, sand, more sand, some alien tic-tac ripoffs, some broken compass-looking thing, and a flask of water, to which I ripped the cap off and downed it immediately, before spitting it out. Goddammit, it tasted like piss. The guy didn't plan this journey well, did he?

There had to have been something else on him. Something useful he had the brain cells to bring. I went back to scrounging through his things, and managed to find a small tablet.

It wasn't hardlight hologram like most mobile tech, more like those old touch-screen appliances. I turned it on, putting his body's shadow over the screen, just so I didn't have to strain my eyes further. Great, more alien writing. Had to be a language thing somewhere. This was clearly Human technology, shouldn't be that hard to navigate, had its own App system and everything. I mashed a few buttons, then more, and then more. After a few random combinations, I luckily made it to a place probably resembling that. Let's see, good, looks like there's a couple Human languages: Hindi, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Cantonese, Gujarati, French, Aneurysm, where the hell was English? After about a minute of scrolling, I gave up. They had thirty or so Human languages on there, but somehow English was absent. One of the most spoken languages in known space, and it wasn't even on there.

I'd have tried Gujarati, but Sanskrit wasn't something I was good at. Screw it, German was the closest I could get. Might've flogged it in my GCSEs, but whatever.

I pressed on it, and all the words and numbers had changed. Finally, now I was making some progress. It was easier to navigate now. Might as well tried to figure out who this guy was. I browsed through his pictures, though it consisted of weaponry, random locations, side-shots of strangers, and a mutilated corpse. Yeah, might skip all that then. Wasn't any ID anywhere, might've not carried it. Messages? He had quite a few actually.

I checked the most recent one, coming from an 'Unternehmer'. Okay, I could make out some of it, thank you, Mrs Small. Something about work, several hundred grand was mentioned, probably a reward. With 'Brauner Brite' definitely referring to me. Brown Brit, though? Seriously?

There were a couple messages above with more details on him. Stuff about me being part of crime, violence... that was all I could make out. Christ, what the hell had I been up to? I then looked at the date, it wasn't the Earth calendar, unfortunately. But I was definitely gone for longer than a day, maybe a week, or even a couple months. My family back home must've been worried sick!

I didn't jump to any conclusions yet. But I still found a bit of certainty in the idea that this guy was hunting me. Now, I just had to figure out which way to go. Had to be a map somewhere on there, right? I managed to find one, though it appeared more hand drawn than whatever you'd find in a travel guide. Looked like the guy had been marking his steps, so at least that was something. I swiped south, following the path, hoping to find something in the endless yellow. I suddenly eyed something, finding a place south-east of the map. I leaned my head in for a closer look... oh for fuck's sake.

The battery died.

I tossed it onto the ground. Piece of shit. Well, at least I had some idea where to go. Now, which way was south? I looked to the sky. The sun was rising from over there so... was south right or left? Eenie, meenie, miney mo...

Screw it, left always worked out for me. I picked up the gun and magazines off the ground, who knew what the hell dwelled out there, and started on my trek, hoping luck would bring me back to civilisation.