This short story is based off of the quote: "I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." - John Peel
Please enjoy possibly the most weird Sci-Fi I've ever written.
***
Haeley screamed in terror as the wind ripped forcefully through her hair like a spinning blade. There was little else, of course, for her to do. After all, she was stuck.
Freaking stuck.
That's right. She had successfully pioneered the first teleportation tool in all of recorded history with only a screwdriver, fifteen rolls of coiled copper, and a couple diapers (thankfully her little sister would never miss them) and she had gotten stuck.
"Why, why cruel world?" she moaned, her voice instantly lost in the rippling storm clouds of fog that surrounded her.
There was nothing in the world she had found herself in, waking up. Just a cold, bitter wind that swept through everywhere. There was a ground, though - what else could she stand on? But she knew that something had gone wrong. Yes, something had gone very wrong.
She knew she wasn't dead. A hunger, like none she had ever had the displeasure of having, swept over her like a tsunami over a small town. Surely she would be dead - in the time of a few moments. From all her research, she knew that one could only stay in the void of space for a few minutes.
Of course, she'd never though of an exit.
"Just walk into the glowing darkness!" she'd said. "It'll be easy!" she'd thought.
And then she saw it - an exit. Amid the foggy darkness, a swirling mass of darkness.
She waded towards it, the trip that had only seemed a second long turning into what felt like hours of slow movement.
And she made it. She fell through it, letting the odd sound of spacial travel resound through her ears.
She had done it, now all she needed to know was where she was.
A house stood around her, though that was not exactly the entire story. There was no roof, the entire infrastructure being in complete shambles. No matter where she looked there was desolation, rotting houses and wrecked vehicles sitting on the side of the road.
"What happened here?" she mumbled.
Perhaps she was somewhere near an earthquake had recently taken place, but that didn't make sense. That, along with all the other disasters that had happened recently she could think of, all would not do something like this. The town looked like it had been deserted for years.
A ghost town?
She was prepared to turn around, back into the portal where she had came through, when she saw something glinting out the side of what seemed to be a room. In a single stride she picked it up, and gasped.
It was her mirror.
No, it had to be something else. She frantically looked it over, but there was no denying it - this was her mirror. She remembered every scratch on it, the custom engraving that her older brother had so kindly done with his army knife.
"How?"
And then her eyes lit up, first with excitement and then with horror.
"It's not a different place," she mused, "but a different time. And yet this can't be all too far into the future. What could have happened?"
What could have caused something like this?
And then she felt a revoltingly painful sensation on her arm, like it had been ... bitten.
