Excerpt: SoS

Prologue

The man stumbled through the heat. It beat down on him from above and rose up from the sand in waves so intense they bent the air. He felt like he had been walking for days, but he had only been walking for... Walking for...

Well, it seemed like a few hours. It was hard to tell, but the sun, which had been high overhead when he first became aware of walking, hadn't dropped more than a few degrees. He stopped, squinting, hoping to find an outcropping -- something to get him into some shade. He could wait out the rest of the day, do his walking at night.

How did he know that? Somehow, he didn't think survival skills had been much a part of his life up until now.

Was that something over to his right? Or was it a mirage? He pulled his feet -- why was he wearing slippers? -- out of the sand and began slogging wearily towards the cliff. Of course, it would be further away than it looked. The flat, monotonous landscape of the desert lent itself to misjudging distance.

Deja vu? How did he know all this, when it felt to him like he only came into existance a few hours ago? To pass the time and take his mind off the terrible heat and thirst, he tried to remember anything other than desert.

The sand. It was a lot like the sand at the beach (which beach?), except of course there was no tide coming in to suck his feet down. Still, it was hard enough walking as it shifted treacherously beneath his feet. And the slippers didn't help either.

He looked down. Somehow, it hadn't struck him until now how ridiculous it was: a man walking through the desert in pajamas and slippers. Did he leave a bed behind him in the middle of the desert? He glanced back. Nothing. He hadn't really expected to see anything but the flat surface, broken by the occasional cactus.