I woke up to the feeling of being on a roller-coaster.

  I thought I was dreaming at first but when another jolt threw me to the side I slowly opened my eyes. Flashing red lights flared around me. I saw Willis's head in front of me and Poppy in front of him trying to battle the controls as best as she could.

  I was back inside the Pit Bull.

  How did that happen?

  All I could remember was falling, falling and being shocked within an inch of my life.

  I was thrown against the harness that strapped me in and held on as I was pushed back in my seat. My vision was still blurry as I looked about in some sort of half daze.

  “This is going to be tight!” yelled the voice of Poppy in the distance. Why did she sound so far away?

  “Do the best you can!”

  “I don’t know how close we’ll land to José, but everyone within a hundred-mile radius is going to see us coming in to land so the element of surprise has well and truly been lost.”

  “Don’t fucking worry about that. Just make sure we survive this shit. Oh, heavenly Father, I pray you guide our landing safe and true with your beautifully manicured hands. I know you have enough on your plate with you looking after the universe and whatnot, but if you can see it in your heart to—”

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Where do you think, dickface?”

  “I know we're in the Pit Bull, but I thought we would have landed already, or more importantly I thought I would be dead.”

  “Well,” said Willis, speaking over his shoulder, “sorry to disappoint you on both counts, and thank you very much in interrupting me during my period of prayers. I always knew you were a selfish cun—”

  “Hold tight! We’re coming in to land,” said Poppy.

  “I thought we were crashing?” I asked.

  “Now is not the time, Quinton!”

  I held onto the straps with a rock climbers grip as the world around me turned upside down. My body banged against the sides of my chair and I gritted my teeth as my stomach felt like it was going to come out of my mouth.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  I shut my eyes and said a silent prayer to the universe that it would get me out of this situation in one piece.

  A bone-shattering crash filled my ears as I was thrown up from my seat but didn’t get very far as the straps held me in place and slammed me back down with a thump. It sounded like the world around me was coming to an end as I heard nothing but metal fighting against earth.

  It carried on like that for what felt like an eternity before silence stole everything around me.

  No one said anything. No one breathed. We all kept as silent as possible while we enjoyed the simple pleasure of just being alive.

  “Well, fuc—”

  “Willis, no,” I said, quietly leaning my head against my chair. “Just… no. Let’s just all be quiet and enjoy the silence for what it is.”

  Willis said nothing as we all sat in our seats and allowed what we had just gone through to sink in, but I knew the silence was too good to be true. “Oooo, is pissy pants getting upset? We wouldn’t want you to pee all over yourself again. Can you believe he pissed himself, Poppy? Good thing you carried him to the ship because if he was with me I would have left his pissy ass on that Xcorp ship to die.”

  As Willis continued talking to Poppy, the only other woman who I had slept with apart from my wife in the last fifteen years, I felt my face getting redder and hotter by the second.

  Fuck me…

  I had survived being shot at, tortured, beaten, and I had just been on a ship that had crash-landed on another planet, but I would go through all of that again if this conversation never happened.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Come on, pissy drawers, let’s go and help the captain,” said Willis, slapping me on the shoulder as he walked past.

  Sideways rain lashed against my body as I held a hand up and surveyed the surrounding scenery.

  Water was everywhere as far as I could see. An ocean stretched out endlessly to my left, and varying sizes of lakes were embedded in the landscape to my right. The land around the lakes was marshy with flowering reeds that came in different hues of pink to red. I stood on top of a hill and stared out at the foreign land before me.

  Turning back I looked upon the crash site we had created.

  The groove in the earth the Xcorp ship had created would be seen for miles. Like a hand being dragged to hell, it had clawed the earth. Bits of the ship were scattered here and there for miles until it had finally come to rest in a heap. Poppy had successfully detached the Pit Bull from it and had piloted the last section of our journey on pure grit, stubbornness and luck. We had come to a stop a long way from the initial crash but we were pushing a swift pace because our landing would no doubt welcome unwanted visitors.

  Willis was some way up ahead while Poppy and I were bringing up the rear.

  “How close are we to José’s location?” I asked.

  Poppy checked her wrist then scanned the terrain before checking the computer on her wrist again. “Not far. We’re closer than I thought we would be, give or take a handful of miles. We should meet up with him in the next hour. It all depends on how fast we can traverse this terrain.”

  I nodded my head, allowing the rain and wind to push it back down.

  We continued in silence until a thought that had been bothering me since we landed finished pricking the grey matter of my brain.

  “I never thanked you for saving my life.”

  “It was nothing really,” she said, shooing my comment away with her hand.

  “Not from where I’m standing. You could’ve just as easily left me behind. But you didn’t. Even if it hurts my ego to admit you had to pick me up and carry me to safety, you did something most people wouldn’t in a time of crisis, so for that, you have my heartfelt thanks and I’m in your debt until I can next pay it back.”

  She gave me one of her heartwarming smiles and nodded.

  “And by the way,” I said, my face going red, “about the whole pee thing—”

  “Don’t mention it. Don’t bring it up. It never happened.”

  “Because you know it’s not something I’ve ever done before and—”

  “Quinton,” she said, cutting me off, “it really changes nothing between us. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said softly.

  We continued on for another hour or so, my feet dragging behind me. My body ached. My stomach was empty. My head hurt.

  No doubt when I finally got a chance to rest, if I got a chance to rest, I would feel the hundred other things my adrenaline was masking. I looked around me once more and marvelled at where I was. This time two weeks ago I was in a grey cubicle, debating what font I should use for my meeting with HR, a meeting that I was so zoned out of, all I could think about was whether I should have that last doughnut in the canteen, while I poked at my ever-growing stomach.

  But here and now, on this rain-swept planet, all those thoughts seemed so trivial it made me smile.

  “You know when you guys had first kidnapped me, I hated your guts. Who were you to take me out of my comfortable routine, to upheave me from a life I had created? Yes, a life that was miserable and unfulfilled, but a life nevertheless. I hated you guys beyond words, but strangely, I must also thank you guys for unchaining me and giving me my life back. Giving me hope.

  “If you hadn’t come along when you did then... I would have died of a heart attack, or worse, of old age in some retirement home with no one willing to visit me.”

  Poppy said nothing as up ahead Willis turned around and looked our way. She rechecked her wrist and pointed ahead of her and gave him a firm nod.

  “Sometimes the worst thing that happens to us in life turns out to be the greatest thing that could ever happen.

  “I gave up living before I met the crew. I was just living off momentum. Living like a wild animal. But the crew changed all that. They gave me hope. Then I met you and…” She allowed the sentence to be left unsaid, but the way her cheeks blushed and she turned away from me sparked something in my heart that made me take her hand and give it a small squeeze.

  She returned the gesture and I pulled my hand away with a smile on my face.

  “The funny thing is,” I said, staring at the surrounding landscape, “this is not how I envisioned my life turning out when I was growing up. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to travel the stars and paint things people have never seen before, paint on different worlds, different landscapes, capture images from far-flung worlds, dangerous places, places that most people have never visited before, but—I didn’t do any of that. I just… gave up on my dreams.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first person in history to do that, nor the last,” Poppy said, rechecking her wrist again.

  “I—”

  “Will you two stop going on!” shouted Willis, turning towards us. “We get it! Everyone’s had a hard fucking life and have made choices they’re not happy or proud of, but for cunting sake, if I have to hear about it for a moment longer I’m going to put one pistol in my mouth and another to my nuts so I make sure I’m dead and there is no chance of my offspring being born and having to listen to the same shit as I do.

  “Now by my count, it would be quicker if we got off this path and made our way through the marshes—”

  A stag-like animal stopped in our path and stared our way with four sets of eyes. The antlers on its head had flowers growing along different sections. The flowers opened and closed slowly, like the rhythm of a steady heartbeat. With a stomp of its hoof, it took off over the marshes in the direction we were about to head off in.

  But it never got very far.

  We saw a splash. We saw a reptilian tail. We heard a cry. Then the stag-like animal was gone.

  We all stared at the patch of marsh where the animal had been taken until a piece of antler floated to the surface.

  I turned to Willis with a smile and said, “After you.”

  About to say something he gritted his teeth, turned on the spot and walked away.

  “I guess we’re going the long way around then?” I shouted to a retreating back. It gave me the finger.