Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 177

Chapter Twenty-Six

I open my heavy eyelids. My vision is unfocussed to the point that all I can see is a collection of dots swooping overhead. It’s as if I’m watching a dance through a pane of translucent glass.

I raise my hand; it feels dirty, gritty, as if it had been lying in sand for days on end. My lips are to the ground, with sand between my teeth. My tongue feels useless in my mouth, as parched as a wrinkled old piece of paper.

The sun beats down on me, its orange rays shimmer in the sunset still scalding hot.

I keep on expecting my memory to return. That’s what usually happens isn’t it? The flood of recollection after sleep - the end to that blissful honeymoon period when all is right in the world.

My head pounds as I try to sit up, so I lie back down again on the sand that I’m sure is cooking my areas of exposed flesh. Slowly my vision returns. I gaze around slowly. The dots, still circling overhead, are vultures waiting for me to die of starvation and despair. This feels like the time I died.

Everything rushes back to me. It’s like being in the crash all over again. I raise my hands to my temples and struggle to handle the onrush of information. Elle, Yates, Teague, Thacker. The Council. Everything that has happened to me in my year of death. And now I find myself here of all places. Where has the old woman sent me?

This truly is a hellish place.

Very tentatively, I sit up. I cry out as it feels like my head is splitting in half. My bones ache as if they have been taken apart, individually beaten to a pulp, and then rammed back together by someone with no perception of pain or mercy.

The landscape is barren, flat in all directions, punctuated by the scorched carcass of a dead tree that had long forgotten the feeling of life.

I feel a groaning, aching hunger in my stomach like I haven’t eaten for days. I haven’t eaten for days. I don’t need to, I’m dead. The only times we eat are the times when we feel like indulging ourselves, one of the benefits of death. Food without consequence. Now I feel the pain of a hundred starved days.