Author: R. J. Erbacher

The road ahead was dark and going darker as it banked down into the shadows of the towering mountains, blocking the angled light that was parching the land. Pausing there at the summit he wondered if there was anything in the valley below that waited for him. Something nefarious or malicious. There had been wild rumors that there was once teeming life here. Active, angry and destructive. But he did not buy into any of that conjecture. Still, he could not be sure.

This was not his world. Not even on his regular tour of planets. He had been sent here by decree. Given a task. Investigate and document. There had been a very old, very faint distress signal, and the commission decided it was worth looking into. They pulled him from his regular surveying route and redirected him here. He doubted that ‘the powers that be’ were even concerned for his wellbeing.

As he circled, looking for a place to land in a safe, flat area, as near to the beacon’s last location as possible, he saw no signs of existence or what might have been existence at one time. Only open stretches of desolation. There was just the road.

And not really much of a road. More of a demarcation, as compared to others he had seen in his travels, but something had created it. Had it a purpose at one point? Did it lead to someplace important? Connect two locations? Was it a thoroughfare for ground transportation or beaten down by continuous use as it had been trodden upon over time? Maybe it went nowhere. Did he really need to know what was at the end of the road?

There was something… not right about it, about this whole place. He could not shake the feeling that a bad thing had happened here. His overwhelming sense of self-preservation finally displaced his weakening responsibility to his duty, and he decided to leave. No mission was worth that kind of risk.

A dangerous organism had supposedly lived here a long time ago and now, no longer did.

Eight billion of them.