A Heart Alive

Rain. I had heard of it, but I was one of the first humans in hundreds of years to see it. It was raining as we landed. For some reason, it seemed to depress the others. I couldn’t understand how though, and I have dealt with depression for a long time now. Maybe I just can’t get any lower.

Yes, the rain didn’t have the same effect on me as it did on the others. I felt strangely comforted by it. It was one thing I had heard of Earth that was true at least. Honestly though, from my initial observations after landing it seemed like most of what I had postulated in my less official studies was true. Earth was recovering.

And we were back, bringing with us bloodshed that the earth hadn’t seen in hundreds of years.

I wasn’t surprised. We had worried about the conflict between the two groups. It would be the natural move for the government to still allow the nullists to be represented on the expedition while also ensuring that no word of a possibility of us returning to Earth would reach Terra Nova.

It was simple, let the Nullists join the mission, make sure that their ranks consisted of scientists and historians unfamiliar with combat and weapons, and make up the other half of the expedition with Novist police-trained “security.” Give everybody weapons to keep them happy, but in the end…

We all somehow restrained ourselves from killing each other until after we had invaded earth with our landing craft and rovers.

I say we because I participated. I didn’t plan to, and I guess I didn’t directly but, what’s done is done.

In our early exploration I fell behind the group, slipped down a muddy hillside, and was lost in a ravine. I tried to fire my gun to signal for help, but it turns out it wasn’t loaded.

At this point I was still recovering from the sensory shock of exploring Earth after having been born and raised on Terra Nova (Or Terra Nullius, depending on which side of the political spectrum you land on). The colors, the humidity, the naturally occurring life. It was overwhelming. For the first time since the loss of my wife and son I felt a deep purpose, a pull towards life. There was something here, on our ancestral home, that was deeply right, and it was calling to a place within me I had buried years ago with my family.

This overwhelming sensation had made it difficult for me to stay focused and aware of what was going around me. This probably led to my tumble and then to the lack of understanding of what my gun being empty meant.

Initially my empty gun appeared to be nothing more than an oversight to me. Had I understood the darker implication, I may have exerted myself a bit more in returning to the group to warn the Nullists. However, as I said before I thought nothing of it at the time, and that probably saved my life.

After my gun didn’t fire I stopped to look around at where I had landed. I had been lagging behind the group already, and I knew I had to get up and out to catch up with the rest of them. But I couldn’t resist the deep call to take in my surroundings. Initially it was more of a scholastic interest. It was the distant, emotionless aspect of myself I had spent the last twenty years cultivating.

But then I felt something… younger. My wife’s face came clearly to mind, and it was as if I could see her standing in front of me, holding our son who had never drawn breath. They were surrounded by the intense beauty of the glade with me.

The trees, the shrubs, all deflecting the light rain down to their roots with the assistance of specially evolved leaves. Life. Life as I had never before seen or felt, the life I dreamed for my wife and child.

But they were gone.

I blinked my eyes, clearing the raindrops that had accumulated on my lashes while I had been staring fixatedly at my imagination’s apparition.

What was that on the ground where the vision of my wife had stood?

A small unnatural-looking mound of earth covered in rocks. It had clearly been disturbed, dug up and torn at by who knows what. I was more of a historical botanist, not a zoologist. I saw a bleached-white log, probably about three feet long, laying along the disturbed mound. It also looked unnatural, and I could vaguely make out markings that looked too regular to be anything but writing. I couldn’t make out the words, but I did see something metallic twisted around one end of the log.

It was a small chain. I twisted it back around the log, freeing it and pulling it loose. It was a necklace. On the simple chain was a small, rusted locket. Out of curiosity I tried to open it. The hinge easily snapped, and the front half broke lose. It was plain, just a lid, and I discarded it. On the piece that remained attached to the chain I made out an inscription in English.

“A heart alive”

Something about this moved me, and I sat there trying to understand why. Why did this phrase increase that stirring I was already feeling? What was it about these words that was moving my heart in ways which I had long ago left behind? Why was I so much more aware of the beat of my heart in my chest? Was it just the novelty of this awareness or was my heart beating stronger than usual? Probably awareness. Maybe some leftover exertion? How was this connected to my wife and son?

I was startled out of my reverie by the sound of gunshots in the distance. I threw the necklace over my head, grabbed my discarded pack, and ran up the ravine looking for a way to get out.

As I scrambled up the treacherous ravine I heard more gunshots and what may have been screams. I didn’t know what I would do when I got there. I had a gun but no ammunition. But something deep inside me urged me forward, something beating rhythmically in my soul. Pushing me forward.

I was terrified, but also… exhilarated?

Why was everything so much clearer? Why did I feel… anything? I spent so much of my life numb, just like everyone else seemed to be back home. Now, I felt an awareness I hadn’t felt in years. I felt… alive? Like when Marshall was about to be born, but before the complications.

I pushed through the brush and found what appeared to be some small track leading up the side of the ravine. I took it and after several gasping stops made it back up and out onto the ancient overgrown road we had been moving up to get farther into the mountains.

I initially thought it odd that we would go through so much work to avoid heavily forested areas and then after landing in a desert valley decide to push our expedition up into these wooded hills and mountains. I thought the captain was worried about the dangers presented by our “savage and untamed” home planet? Perhaps the pull of something so alien (and yet so familiar) as a forest had called to them as well.

I heard voices ahead around a bend in the road. I ducked into the bushes, and ineffectively tried to stay silent as I groped my way inexpertly through the undergrowth along the road. It was as I did so that I felt the uncomfortable sensation that someone was watching me from behind. Expecting an armed Novist to have a gun trained on my back I whirled around and dropped to the side. Not that this would have helped me. I’m forty-seven and not exactly a prime physical specimen. Fortunately for me, there was no one there.

I turned back and moved forward a few more feet, but still had that creeping dread low in the pit of my stomach. Something primal inside me, something of this world, not the world I had been raised on, told me there was something back there, and it was dangerous.

I started forward as if unaware that something was behind me. Following my gut I spun back around again after a few feet and stood frozen in shock. I had no idea what I was looking at. Something was following me, and it had just stepped out of the trees on the other side of the road when my abrupt turning caught it off guard. It froze. So did I..

We stood there, staring at each other. It looked like our domestic cats back home, but as a cat was to a mouse so this was to me. It was once and half again as large as a fully grown man;, its head must have been as large as my torso, and those two savage, curving teeth sloping down from its upper jaw to hang past it’s chin… I stood transfixed with terror and awe at the same time.

The largest mammals we had on Terra Nova were cows, and there were no carnivores to be heard of. But I had read enough to know what those teeth, scythe-like claws, and rippling musculature meant. This was a predator, and for the first time since humanity left earth, I, a human, was prey.

A sharp shout behind be startled both of us back into motion. I stumbled backwards with a sharp cry as I knew I was about to die. The feline monster leapt in pursuit. I fled around the bend in the road and briefly saw death before me. Several bodies, painted with the speckled red of bullet holes lying on the ground. And the Novists, turning towards me with guns raised.

It was too much, and I collapsed.

I don’t feel like I lost consciousness, though I couldn’t remember anything that happened until I sat back up again.

My head still clearing itself, I looked around and saw more bodies. Instead of speckled dots these had long gaping lines of red across faces, arms, chests, and legs. Then I saw the beast lying there on its side, a Novist’s neck clamped in the death-grip of its jaws. The beast, like the first bodies, was riddled with holes. It too was dead.

I stood there in shock, slowly coming to the realization that I had escaped death.

Feeling flooded into me, probably helped by the adrenaline my body was pumping at a previously unheard-of rate. I was alive. I felt alive.

Against the heat of my beating chest I felt the cold shape of the locket.

I pulled it out and knew what it meant. I had never known before. I think I had almost known when my wife and I were waiting for our child, but after her death, I lost… heart. I hadn’t been living for anything, just drifting aimlessly without purpose.

Until now.

This world, this was my home. I knew that something here, in all of its terrible danger and wildness, was what I was made for. It felt so right. If there is some divine power or purpose to this universe, I feel that it brought me here, here to my home. I didn’t believe in heaven, but if there was a place I could be with the spirits of my wife and son again it was here.

I picked up a gun and gathered scattered supplies into a pack. With the locket against my chest and the vision of my wife and child ahead of me, I walked down the road into a new life.