This is my Round 1 entry, my assignment was:
Genre: Open (boo!)
Place: The 13th floor of an office building
Object: A Toy soldier
I literally sat in front of the computer for 2 days straight trying to come up with something. I started four different stories and scrapped them all about 300 words in. I finally went back to my second shot and dutifully finished it. I am not pleased with the title AT ALL. I wrote the story and could not for the life of me come up with a title. It stinks. As does the story. I really don't know why I had such a problem with this. I think the open genre threw me off; at least getting a specific genre narrows it down a little more, but when it's left wide open like that, well... ok. Enough complaining. Here is my entry, "Digging up Superstition"
Morris still
couldn’t believe his incredible luck.
After months of fruitless searching, his excavation team finally hit
something solid. One more week and the
ships would have arrived to take them all back to Greluan 9. It took a lot of resources to keep a team of his
size on Earth for that long, and he was pushing the envelope being there in the
first place.
Catherine
ran over to him. “Let’s get down there,
they’ve finally dug down enough to walk inside!” she crooned. Morris couldn’t stop grinning as he leaned over
to put an arm around her slim shoulders and survey the scene before them. Not too many on their home planet were still
publicly interested in Earthen culture and even less were willing to fund
expeditions to Earth due to it being outlawed in many provinces.
“Yes,
let’s. There are still so many artifacts
left to be uncovered. I still can’t
believe our luck.” The sun beat down
mercilessly on the dry, ravaged land, pockmarked with six months’ worth of
excavation. Rocks, dirt, and sand were
all that was left on the surface of the planet.
Experts surmised that it had been a nuclear wasteland for thousands of
years even before the first Greluan explorers had found it.
Morris
followed Catherine into the recently opened cavern, turning on his flashlight
before the darkness enveloped them.
Catherine stayed near him, leaning close to speak as if any noise louder
than a whisper would bring the whole thing down on their heads. “It seems that it is nearly completely
intact!”
“Yes,”
Morris answered, almost afraid to breathe too hard. “This is incredible!” The flashlight lit up enough to see the
remnants of a large room with crumpled desks and chairs strewn about across the
floor. Glass crunched under his boots as
he crossed the room. Catherine turned on
her light and went in the other direction to pick up something that had caught
her eye.
Morris continued
forward toward a silver glint on the far wall.
He pulled a large stiff brush from his tool belt and used it to sweep
some of the dirt away from the surface.
It seemed to be a door of some type, two halves that slide apart from
each other. They were partly open;
Morris shined his light through the crack, but there was nothing but solid
ground beyond it. He turned his
attention to the wall to the right of the doors. He brushed debris from what looked like a
small instrument panel. One button had
an arrow pointing up next to it and the button below it was paired with an
arrow pointing downward. Morris couldn’t
stop grinning; it seemed they had found one of their primitive lifts. Using the brush, he started clearing dirt
from around the rest of the door and revealed a “13” above the buttons.
“Catherine! Come here!”
Soon Catherine was beside Morris, gaping at his discovery.
“Thirteen,
right? How amazing, their buildings were
taller than anyone had guessed…”
“But we did
know,” Morris interrupted her, “we knew they were at least thirteen levels
high, because of their superstitions of the number thirteen being unlucky.”
“How could I
have forgotten?” Catherine said through
a grin as big as Morris’s. “Humans
certainly were strange creatures.”
Morris nodded in
agreement. “What have you found?” He reached down and touched Catherine’s fist
in which she was holding some small objects.
She opened her hand and revealed three small green plastic figurines of
what looked to be men in military uniforms.
“There are many other things across on the other side there…”
Morris suddenly
grabbed her wrist and pulled it up towards his face to get a closer look at the
objects. “Catherine… I’ve neglected
something important…”
“Morris? What do
you mean?” Catherine was startled by her
partner’s strange change in mood. She
heard his breath quicken as he let her hand go to reach into his vest pocket.
“They aren’t
just plastic.” He shone his light on a
photo of a small group of humanoids, plastered in dirt as much on their skin as
on their mottled green clothing. It was
blurry, but Catherine could tell it was because everyone, including whoever
took the photo, looked to be in the middle of some hasty movements. The humans looked angry and off-kilter, but
then she noticed a fellow Greluan behind them.
Catherine cried
out. “What do you mean by this trick,
Morris!?” They both heard yelling from
outside the cavern.
“I’m sorry, we
should have left here weeks ago, but I couldn’t stop until we found
something!” Morris grabbed her wrist
again and pulled her toward the entrance after him. “Humans survived underground somehow. That is why they stopped sending ships
here. They were violent, animalistic..
Through my selfishness I had pushed it out of my mind until you showed me those
figures.”
“How?” Catherine faltered behind him and he paused
to steady her. “How did they survive so
long? You knew all along? We shouldn’t have come!” Morris pulled her into an apologetic embrace.
“You’re right… it
was covered up so as not to alarm anyone.
That is why it was so difficult to get out here. They survived underground, there are water
springs, and myriad fungi that evolved, and…”
Catherine screamed and they both turned to a sudden blinding light
pointed at their faces.
“Get out!” a
male voice commanded. When they didn’t
move, he shouted again. “Get out before
I kill you both!” The Greluan pair
stumbled into the daylight and saw the rest of their team on the ground not too
far away, beaten, but not dead. Yet.
“Our planet. Got it?” the dirt-encrusted man told them,
sticking the muzzle of his rifle into their sides. “Tell your people to stay off our rock and
don’t come back, got it!?”
“I guess they
were right,” Catherine mused.
“About what?”
Morris asked through clenched teeth.
“The thirteenth
floor. I guess it is bad luck.”
© Elizabeth Cordes, 2011
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