The Legion / One Dark Night / Outpost Delta / Sentry
an excerpt

He woke up, and the face of a dead man looked back at him. Jumping back, he slammed into a wall, and saw his surrounding properly. There wasn’t just one dead man; there was a pile of them. At the very least, there were twenty other people in the room with him, and none of them were breathing. He could hear a rumbling, and realised that the room was moving. He could feel it. He tried not to look into any of the vacant, lifeless faces and found he couldn’t. It’s all his eyes were drawn to; there was nothing else to look at.
The man realised in a sudden dawning that he had no idea where he was, why he was there, or who he actually was. This realisation would have made most incredibly unsettled to say the very least, but as he sat against the slightly shaking wall, looking at the shells of the people that once were, he found he could do nothing but uneventfully, quietly accept the fact. Thinking about any of it further made his head hurt, so he simply didn’t.
The room jolted then, and he flopped forward onto a woman’s leg. The rumbling stopped for a moment, and then he heard a grind noise and he felt a different movement. After a moment, that too, stopped, and as he lay there making no attempt to move, the regular rumbling started up again. He rolled onto his back then, his head in the corpse’s lap, and looked at the roof. The roof and the walls were grey and nothing grabbed his attention on them except the three small white lights that went down the middle of the ceiling. He looked at the one above him, and allowed his eyes to relax, and the whiteness filled his vision. I’ve… seen… this… before. His mind formed the thought slowly, and carefully. And as it did, the world changed around him.
The light above him went from a stark white to a dull yellow. He was looking up at this new light like he was the old one, but he could tell he wasn’t in the same place. He pulled himself up and looked around. He was in a room, and this time he was alone. He was sat on a bed; the cover was soft, and he liked how it felt. There was furniture around but there wasn’t anything that told him anything new. He felt like he wanted to look back at the light, it was nicer than the other one. Then, the door opened and a woman came in. Her mouth was moving but the noises that came out made no sense to him. His attention was grasped by this new, living breathing person, and he wanted to touch her. Before he could do anything, she smiled and leapt up on the bed to him. She pushed him down, and sat on him, pushing his shoulders down so he was lying again. Over her shoulder he saw the yellow light again, and before his mind could process another thought, it was white again, and he was alone.
He was rumbling along in the grey room again with all the puppets of people behind him in a pile. He pulled himself up, and moaned. He didn’t understand where the woman and yellow-lit room had gone. He frowned and scanned the place again. This time, he saw something he hadn’t before. There was a little square set into the metal about halfway down one wall. There were lots of littler squares, and a big one. The big one had a red cross through it. He touched it, and nothing happened. Below the square, he now noticed, there was a little green square, and a little red one. The green one was brighter, and he felt powerless but to extend a finger. Touching, there was a metallic crunch, and the wall to the left of the set-in square pulled open, and wind rushed in. He recoiled, and once again landed in his empty companions. His eyes had closed automatically when the unexpected coldness had hit him. Now, he opened them, and what he saw far outclassed the nice lights.
The room he was in was soaring along the ground. It was approaching a giant tower. The tower was surrounded by other buildings, cascading outwards and downwards; the sheer scale of which was too much for his soft mind to comprehend. Nearer to him there was a huge dome. He couldn’t see through it, but it caught his eye; it was like a giant bubble. Behind, and some way away, he could see another one. There was a complex coming up, not part of the gigantic city. As he saw it, the moving room jolted again, severely slowing down, and with it he fell out. He hit grass and rolled. As he stopped, he saw the room he had been in was attached to more, and they rolled onto toward the complex in the direction of the sky-reaching tower. Train, he thought.
He began to crawl towards the buildings, not thinking to stand up. The closer he got to the city, the more the grandeur of the whole place dazed him. There were lots of smaller buildings, and regular looking places on the edge of the city nearest him, but as he followed the buildings in and up toward the tower, everything looked so foreign, and so big. His eyes darted about picked out random features, slowly allowing his mind to absorb this alien settlement. He saw a shorter tower that had a dish on top; it seemed familiar. He decided that he would head for it; it seemed a good a plan as any.
He pulled himself nearer, with surprised eyes, having no idea that he was heading back to his former home. He had no idea that this was where he had lived; that it was the last place of all humankind, and that this was where they had taken him from.