Postcard from Nowhere

"Funny thing about paradise—it's a lot less impressive when you're carrying a corpse through it."

I don't know how long I lay there in the dust. Could have been five minutes, could have been an hour. Time had gone slippery, impossible to hold onto. My body had stopped shaking at some point, settling into a dull heaviness that pinned me to the ground like wet concrete.

Glenda's figure was just a smudge in the distance now, disappearing over one of the dunes toward wherever that scream had come from. Part of me knew I should follow. Part of me couldn't remember why it mattered.

Then something cold and wet pressed against my hand.

I flinched, my eyes snapping open, my body tensing for whatever fresh horror this place had decided to throw at me. But it wasn't horror. It was fur — white and tan, familiar, a small face with dark eyes peering at me with the particular concern that only dogs seem capable of.

"Duke."

The name came out hoarse, barely more than a croak. But Duke's tail started wagging anyway, his whole back end wiggling with that ridiculous enthusiasm Shih Tzus have when they've found someone they know. He barked once, sharp and insistent, like he was telling me off for lying in the dirt feeling sorry for myself.

Fair enough. He probably had a point.

I uncurled slowly, every muscle protesting the movement. The dust had worked its way into everything — my hair, my clothes, the creases of my skin. I felt like I'd been rolled in flour. My palms pressed into the soft ground as I pushed myself upright, the effort leaving me trembling and light-headed.

Duke sat watching me, his head tilted to one side in that way dogs do when they're trying to figure out what the hell their human is playing at. I reached out and scratched behind his ears, my fingers sinking into the soft fur, and the simple reality of him — warm and alive and familiar — was enough to make my throat tighten.

He barked again, his eyes flicking toward the tent entrance, then back to me. Then toward the dunes where Glenda had disappeared.

"What in the hell is this place, Duke?"

He tilted his head the other way, as if he was actually considering the question. No answers in those dark eyes, though. Just canine patience and the unspoken suggestion that maybe I should stop asking questions and start moving.

I managed to get my feet under me, swaying slightly as the world tilted. The tent flap hung open behind Duke, the dim interior visible beyond. Outside, the dunes rolled away in every direction, that endless landscape of dust and sand.

Glenda was gone. Luke and the bloke whose name I'd still not caught — were gone. Uncle Jamie was out there somewhere, doing Christ knows what.

And I was standing here like a stunned mullet, talking to a dog.

Duke barked a third time, more insistent now, and took off at a trot toward the dunes. He paused at the base of the first rise, looking back at me with an expression that clearly said well? You coming or what?

I went.

The dunes were murder on my legs.

Every step sank into the loose, sandy surface, the dust sliding away beneath my feet and making me work twice as hard for half the progress. My thighs burned. My lungs burned. The strange sun beat down on my back, warm in a way that felt wrong for what should have been a Tasmanian winter.

Duke bounded ahead, his small body somehow navigating the terrain with ease, pausing every few metres to make sure I was still following. Little bastard wasn't even breathing hard.

I crested the first dune and saw Glenda's blonde hair disappearing over the second one. Pushed myself to keep going, my feet slipping and sliding, hands occasionally grabbing at the ground for balance when the slope got too steep. The dust got into my mouth, gritty between my teeth, coating my tongue with a taste like nothing I'd ever experienced — not quite sand, not quite soil, something else entirely.

The second dune was steeper than the first. I had to scramble up on all fours for the last few metres, my fingers digging into the soft surface, the muscles in my shoulders screaming. But I made it to the top, and then I stopped.

Stopped and stared.

Below me, the landscape opened up into something that knocked the breath clean out of my lungs.

It was beautiful. That was the first thing — the sheer, unexpected beauty of it. The dunes rolled away in waves of yellow and brown and rust, colours bleeding into each other like someone had spilled paint across the earth. Scattered rocks jutted up here and there, pale against the darker sand. And cutting through all of it, bright and impossible, was water.

The river I'd seen earlier widened here, spreading into a lagoon that sat like a jewel in the middle of all that barren emptiness. The water was the same crystal blue I'd noticed before — so clear you could probably see straight to the bottom, so vivid it looked fake, like something from a postcard or a screensaver. The kind of water you'd expect to find in the Maldives or the Caribbean, not in the middle of a dust bowl in another bloody dimension.

"It's so empty," I murmured, more to myself than to Duke.

Because it was. Despite the beauty, despite the water, there was nothing here. No trees, no grass, no birds, no signs of life beyond the handful of figures moving near the lagoon's edge.

Figures.

I squinted against the glare, trying to make out details. Four of them, maybe — no, three near the water and one further away, on the opposite side of the lagoon. The three were grouped around something on a sandbar where the river split, their postures tense and focused.

And one of them — the one with dark hair, the one whose build I'd recognise anywhere because I'd grown up watching him at family barbecues and Christmas dinners — was definitely Uncle Jamie.

"Uncle Jamie!"

The call tore out of me before I could think, relief and fear tangled together in my voice. He was alive. Standing upright, moving around, apparently unharmed. Whatever had happened at the river, whatever had made everyone run off in a panic, he'd survived it.

Uncle Jamie glanced up at my shout, his eyes meeting mine across the distance. But he didn't wave, didn't call back, didn't do any of the things you'd expect from someone whose nephew had just appeared in an impossible world. His gaze held mine for a second, maybe two, and then he looked away again, his attention returning to whatever they were all studying on that sandbar.

A furrow formed between my eyebrows. That wasn't like him. Uncle Jamie was the warm one in the family, the uncle who actually remembered your birthday and asked about your life like he gave a shit. The kind of bloke who'd cross a room to give you a hug, who'd make sure you were okay before worrying about himself.

Something was wrong. More wrong than just being stuck in another dimension with a murdered stranger, I mean. Something had happened to Uncle Jamie specifically, something that had put that distant look in his eyes.

But I couldn't think about that now. Couldn't process one more layer of wrongness on top of everything else.

Glenda was already jogging along the lagoon's perimeter, her long legs eating up the ground as she headed toward Uncle Jamie and Luke. I started down the dune toward them, half-walking, half-sliding, the dust billowing around my ankles.

As I got closer, the scene came into sharper focus. The sandbar sat at the point where the river forked, one branch continuing on while the other fed into the lagoon. And lying on that sandbar, half in and half out of the crystal-clear water, was the body.

The dead man. His throat still a mess of dark red against pale skin, his eyes still open and staring at nothing.

"What the—"

The words died in my throat as I watched Uncle Jamie and Luke start moving, lifting the body between them with Glenda helping to support the legs. They were bringing him in. Carrying him back toward camp like he was a mate who'd had too much to drink, not a murder victim who'd been floating downstream ten minutes ago.

On the far side of the lagoon, the fourth figure — the man I didn’t know — remained where he was. Even from this distance, I could see he was hunched over, trembling, his body language screaming that he wanted to be anywhere but here.

I understood the feeling.

Glenda spotted me as I approached, her face tight with strain. "You coming, Paul?" she called across the water to the unknown man.

Paul looked up, his eyes wild and haunted in a face that had gone the colour of old porridge. "I'll meet you there soon," he managed, his voice wavering.

Right. So he was about as useful as I felt. Good to know.

The procession moved slowly along the lagoon's edge, heading back toward camp. Jamie and Luke had the body's upper half, their hands gripping the dead man's arms and shoulders. Glenda struggled with the legs, her slender frame clearly not built for this kind of work.

I fell into step beside them without really deciding to, some autopilot part of my brain taking over. "Here," I said, sliding into position to take the weight from Glenda. "Let me."

She released her grip, stepping back with visible relief. "Thank you," she whispered, and there was genuine gratitude in her voice.

I tried to smile in response, but my facial muscles had other ideas — the expression came out more like a grimace, something twisted and wrong. I looked away quickly, feeling heat rise in my cheeks.

Then I made the mistake of looking down.

The man’s face was right there, maybe half a metre from mine. His skin had gone grey-white, waxy in a way that made my stomach clench. His eyes — blue, I noticed now, a pale icy blue — stared up at the sky without seeing anything. And his throat...

I'd seen it before, at the river. But up close, with the body in my hands, it was different. Worse. The wound gaped open, the edges ragged and dark, and I could see things inside that I definitely shouldn't be able to see. Things that should be hidden beneath skin and muscle, protected from the outside world.

But he was young. That was what hit me hardest. This bloke couldn't have been much older than me — maybe younger, even. Nineteen, twenty at most. He should have been at uni or working some shit job, going out on weekends with his mates, complaining about his parents, living the kind of ordinary life that felt impossibly precious now that I'd lost mine.

Instead he was dead. Murdered. His throat cut open and his body dumped in a river in another dimension, carried back to camp by a bunch of strangers who didn't even know his name.

My heart thudded against my ribs, heavy and slow, each beat a reminder that I was alive and this poor bastard wasn't. There was something else too — a feeling I couldn't quite name, a prickling at the back of my neck like I was being watched. Like something malevolent was lurking just out of sight, waiting for its moment.

I shook it off. Focused on putting one foot in front of the other, on not dropping the body, on getting back to camp without losing my mind completely.

The tents grew larger as we approached. Three canvas structures arranged in their rough line, surrounded by nothing but dust and sand and the endless empty landscape.

Home sweet home.

Christ.