OGENUS EARTH 🌎 🌊 {Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure}

Unwell

They say that one's life tends to flash before their eyes when teetering on the precipice of oblivion, which meg now knew to be patently untrue. There is a singular truth when the sweet kiss of death is nigh. It is a conviction so crystalline and pure, it steals your last breath with its tragically captivating beauty. For Meg, there was nothing but the exquisite pain of her mother's voice, and it was as excruciating as the saltwater clawing its way out of her lungs. 

She could no longer control her chest as her insides seemed intent on crawling out of her throat. A slimy brew of acidic stuff slithered up her neck and bubbled over her lips. Spewing the stinging bile out of her mouth forced her eyes open to find that she'd been transported away from the nothing of complete release.

"Ugh, gross!" A familiar man's voice exclaimed, tickling Meg's eardrums with confused excitement. "She threw up in my mouth!"

Disoriented and aching from her teeth to her toes, Meg blinked against the blurry lights that were attacking her irises until they came to rest on a hunched form close by. She could have sworn that she'd heard him, but that could be wishful thinking. A chorus of laughter filled the air, and Meg's head snapped in Big Joe's direction.

"You're here!" She cried against the terrible burning in her throat. Her eyes hadn't fully focused yet, but there was no mistaking the massive mariner's jovial tone. "Where are you? What happened?"

"Of course we're here!" Big Joe didn't wait and scooped Meg up in a waterlogged hug. "We would never leave you behind!"

His bone-crushing squeeze was as comforting as it was uncomfortable. Every joint in Meg's tiny body seized in pain, but she didn't care. Either she'd died and managed to meet her friends in the great beyond, or they'd survived. She really hoped for the latter as she tried to peek around the mounds of flesh holding her tight.  

She inhaled the musky odor of sweat and grease with a grateful sigh. "Did we do it?"

"You did it!" Big Joe confirmed with a hefty sigh. 

"Hey!" Harrison complained, still scraping the puke off his tongue. The hairs in Meg's inner ears pricked with exhilaration. She recognized the swarthy baritone of that voice in her bones.  "I just navigated a ship through an underwater asteroid field to retrieve her, but I'm fine! I don't need a hug!"

"Then join ours you fool," Big Joe snapped with an affable chuckle as Meg wriggled to confirm her hopes with her own eyes.

"Harrison?" Meg breathed from inside the layers of gleeful hug.

Meg was too smushed to see past Big Joe's soaking armpits, but hope welled in her chest. Something solid squashed her from behind, and she relaxed into his masculine scent. A moment ago she'd been searching for her mother's ghost. This was somehow just as good. She hadn't known these two for long, yet they felt like home.

"Well done little Seamonkey," Justin's voice crackled over a speaker somewhere overhead. "Alright  you two, let the girl breathe. Stop wringing her out like a sponge."

Big Joe lowered Meg to the ground with great care, the way one might handle a rare china doll. 

As her rheumy gray eyes adjusted, her stare fell on Arturo's shrunken posture watching their happy reunion from a grainy hollocast projected into the cramped, unfamiliar room. The slightly green tint of the image couldn't hide his aged mouth pressed in an expression muddled with worried relief. Crowded over the Arc's founder was an anxious Justin peering at the three friends with trepidation. 

Before she could speak, MAX rolled up to give Meg a brief scan, chirping with the robotic equivalent of elation. 

Harrison couldn't take his eyes off the willowy woman he honestly thought he might never see again. Onlookers be damned! He wanted another hug, this time all to himself.