The Blog Next Door

"Hey!"
"Hey, wake up!"
I slowly awoke from my unconsciousness with a voice plowing into my brain and a bright, opaque light piercing through my eyelids.
"Whass happening?" I mumbled.
"We were hoping you could tell us that," the voice plower said.
I slowly opened my eyes to a sight I did not quite expect. A man was leaning over me with a slightly concerned, mostly scared expression on his face. Three other people were milling around about thirty feet away, with bemused expressions on their faces, looking at the sky and kicking the ground. As far as my eye could see, were hills and dunes and vast expanses of an orangish sand.
"What is this stuff?" I asked, slowly rising to my feet with the help of the voice plower.
"We don't know. We were hoping you knew something. Whats the last thing you remember? Do you remember who did this to you?"
"No," I replied, wracking my brain, "I was checking my email at home, then everything went black, and I woke up here."
"Yeah," the plower said disappointed, "That's about the last thing we remember too."
"Who are those other people?"
"Oh, sorry, from left to right, that Jing-el, Heimer, and John. And I'm Jacob. And you are?"
"My name's Smith."
"Nice to meet you Schmidt," he turned in the direction of the three others and yelled, "Hey guys, he's awake, come meet him!"
I brushed the orange sand off my body as they approached.
"Guys, this is Schmidt," said Jacob.
Hey's were murmured almost in unison.
"Schmidt's a weird name," piped up Heimer, with a defiant look on her face.
"Well, so is Heimer," I retorted, taken aback.
"Heimer's my last name," she said, looking a little embarassed at her outburst, "my parents were Swedish, and I hate my first name."
Jing-el was a quite pretty, quite quiet Asian woman. She hadn't so much as looked at me since walking over, let alone say something. If I had to guess, I would say Vietnamese and John was a rather portly fellow with a round, jolly face.
"So," I said, "Does anyone know what the heck is going on around here?"
"Well," John said, "I took a second to examine the sand for a bit, and it seems to be quite a sticky type of substance. If you rub it on your fingers, your sweat kind of makes it clump together."
We all took a second to reach down and feel the sand. None of us spoke for a minute as mulled over what this meant.
"Well, nothing's gonna happen if we stand around here. Lets walk and talk."
I turned to walk in the opposite direction of the group, hoping that they would follow, when I ran smack into something invisible that knocked me back onto the ground.
"Oof," I exclaimed. "What the heck was that?" I said as I slowly sat up, with the help of John and Jacob, rubbing my head. Jing-el was slowly running her hands through the air where I had run into something invisible.
"Are you miming or something?" I asked.
"I can't move my hands any further than this," she said quietly. "There's something blocking them."
"What does that mean?"
"I think I know what it means," she said cryptically.
"Well don't hold us in suspense, tell us what it is!"
"My father was an author," she said, slowly turning around, "and he used to tell me about these type of stories that authors would write about. It usually involved a big build up of the world and some kind of plot elements. Then, the ending would crash and burn. It would be utterly ridiculous. The author wouldn't be able to figure out how to end it, so he'd just use a cop out. It had a specific kind of name. I think we're stuck in one of those stories now."
"That sounds idiotic," scoffed Heimer, "How can we be stuck in a story? What is this, some kind of Matrix shit or something?
"I don't know!" Jing-el snapped back, "but I'm telling you, that's what's happening right now."
"Jing-el," I said calmly, "how do you know that's what's happening now?"
"Because of the name of the type of story they were."
"Which was?"
She escalated every word as if each of them were an increasing cry for help. A desperate plea for help from a terror that was greater than any she had known before it seemed, "We are trapped...." she paused and took a deep breath
"in a giant glass jar OF TANG!"

Fin

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