Journey Into The Aftermath |✔

Chapter twenty four: Forever, Together

This was oddly comforting to him and he decided that was a feeling he needed more of.

If you don't get up and meet her halfway, she could wander away and lose herself in these sands forever.

He figured the feeling he was practically feeding himself: hope.

Even worse, maybe she's still in the sand waiting for you to come save her!

Fantasizing about plying hero again flipped a switch inside him. One that made him wipe the faucet of tears and rise to his feet with a much stronger breed of determination. He ran an unsteady hand through his hair and calmed himself with more heroic thoughts but mostly through deep, counted breaths.

He set out to search far and wide for the body of his would-be beloved. Tuning out of his emotional heart and into his intellectual mind, he found in best to gain some perspective through altitude. There was a nearby dune that towered twenty feet into the sky and Chase found it perfect to see farther into the distance from.

He started from the bottom and found that if he stopped moving for just a second, the loose sand would take him right back down to where he started. Once at what was claimed to be 'technically the top', he spun in a circle to get a full view.

That was when he spotted the rover half-buried not that far in his northeast direction. Imaginary hope beginning to take the physical from of a four-wheel drive, he slid down the bedazzled dune and high-tailed it to the fallen vehicle.

After heavy panting and long steps and pounding boots, he fell into the rover as he approached it, leaning a hand on it for support as he caught his breath. Moments later, he scrabbled around the rover for any hint of a body. He then saw 'the bubble' and couldn't fail but to take notice in the mess of blood on the inside of it.

Gaping, he dashed to the front of the rover and whipped through the passenger since it wasn't half hidden in sand and tried at the door that lead to the bubble. It wouldn't budge but he tried again and again until the handle actually busted right off and the door swung effortlessly open. He nearly fell over from the handle sailing off and into the windshield, but fate's undying love kept him upright. The front end of the rover was downward into the sand and the back end stuck out so he had to trek upward to get through the door.

Inside the back room that had the bubble lifted into the air, Chase tapped a pad on the wall next to the door and after a few taps, it buzzed to life, following Chase's input commands. The bubble lowered as the crackling and shedding of layers of sand was easily audible. Once it reached at it's base, the side of the bubble opened and Chase rushed inside to find his beloved unconscious at the side of the sphere.

He passed the chair the had a buckled, but torn seat belt and a shattered control panel as he powered over to my body lay slumped at the chair's base. His body swung to the ground as he cupped my expressionless face into his hands and arms.

"Skylar!" he screamed with renewed vocals, eyeing my battered and bloody body. "Please wake up, oh god, please!"

Given my absent response, his next instinct was to check for any type of pulse. He fumbled around with my thumb but was too emotionally unstable to fix on any given point on my hand so he shoved his ear straight into my chest.

By the time he could feel any pulse beneath my rib-cage, I coughed and gobbled up the air around me. "Don't bother." I wheezed.

He shot his face right up to mine and checked for any serious injury on my face as I chocked for air. "Skylar!" he shouted as I regained consciousness. "Holy shit, are you ok?"