I was inches away when the shimmer crumpled into a black dot. Then the dot vanished. The wind instantly returned, whipping my hair with a vengeance.
The shimmer was gone.
I stood naked on a strange rocky plateau, feeling a sense of failure for something I didn’t even understand. I’d missed it, whatever it was. And with the distance between the shimmers widening, I knew I couldn’t run fast enough to catch the next one.
But unable to help myself, I waited, my eyes scouring the ground for movement.
No new shimmers appeared.
Did the shimmers come in sets like waves? How often did they come?I’d no idea. And I had no clue what they really were.
Without warning, I was totally aware of my vulnerability without clothes or cover.Get out!my gut screamed.Out of this field, out of the sun, and out of sight. Something told me this field was a dead end, and tomove.
I spun, took a step, and buckled in pain. Glancing at my heel, I winced. It was shredded, bathed in blood, and there was nothing I could do—except keep moving.
The going was slow, and painful. I fell into a pattern of taking several steps, then pausing to get my bearings, not that I really had any. I took two awkward steps to my left, then hopped forward, aiming for a flat spot and feeling like I was playing Stephen King’s version of naked Twister. I was so intent on my footing that I almost missed seeing it: a flash of cream among the red.
Hobbling over, I found two sandals and some cloth. No,clothes.
Beside a deep crevasse, a pair of shorts and a bandana lay in a heap. Both were a strange off-white. Giddy with hope, I snatched up the shorts, and something bright went flying; it whistled past my ear, disappeared into the crevasse, and landed with a muffledcrack. I wondered what it was, but I wasn’t about to peer into the dark hole to see what fell. At the rate I was going, I’d probably fall in myself. Whatever it was, it was gone.
I held up the shorts. The fabric was soft and worn. Straight cut with rough stitching and a jagged lace-up fly, they looked like primitive boys’ Bermudas. One side was torn, but they were definitely wearable.
“Sweet,” I said.
The word rolled through the open air like a shout. I stopped, instantly freaked out, realizing these clothes belonged to someone.
Someone who might be watching.
A fresh jolt of panic made me shake. Clutching the shorts like a thief caught red-handed, I scanned the rocks, every muscle taut as I waited for someone to leap out shouting, “Those are mine!”
No one did. The land stayed silent.
This morning I would’ve never picked up random clothes off of the ground and put them on, but then again, this morning I was not stranded buck-naked in a creepy red rock desert.Beggars can’t be choosers, I thought, slipping on the shorts. Then I laughed, because in some weird twist of fate, they actually fit.
I’d always been skinny, built like a boy, with a boy’s name tomatch. When all the girls grew curves, I’d just stretched, growing like crazy until I hit six feet. Recently my chest had made a small effort to catch up—the key word there wassmall—but I still had no hips. The boyish Bermudas were perfect.
I wrapped the bandana around my chest like a contestant onSurvivor.Where the heck’s my tribe?I joked. Glancing around the silent rocks, I realized that if there was a tribe here, I might not want to meet them. They might not be friendly.
No longer naked, I felt a million times better.
The sandals were big but better than nothing, and with protection for my feet, I moved quickly through the sea of red. Some rocks slid, others held firm. Soon the back of my right sandal looked like I’d dipped it in red paint.Lookin’ good, I thought wryly, watching my step. These rocks seemed made for snakes. But nothing moved, except me.
Working my way around another deep crack, I slipped. Shards of red skittered away, like they were running, too. One looked like a dagger. I picked it up, hefted it once to gauge its weight, then whacked it against a boulder to test the dagger’s strength. It held; if anything, the dagger scraped the boulder.Like rock, paper, scissors, I thought.Dagger beats boulder.
I tucked the shard into my waistband, thinking it might come in handy.Dagger beats snake—or worse. Then, the idea of me engaging in hand-to-hand combat, armed with a piddly rock dagger, was so absolutely ridiculous that I laughed, which was better than crying, but both emotions were so raw, so powerful, like two sides of the same coin, I feared too much laughing might flip me into tears and if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I stopped laughing, took a deep breath, and trekked on.
But I kept the dagger, just in case.
Eventually the red rock gave way to wavy black, like asphalt thathad been poured but never flattened. Cracks split the black like snakes, but other than the cracks, this rock was fairly smooth. Best of all, it didn’t shift under my feet.
Scrub brush popped up, dotting the black like dry tinder. As I passed an especially large thicket, a zebra peeked out.Do zebras charge?I wondered. Unsure about zebra aggression, I took a slow step backward.
I blinked and the zebra was gone.
Of course I’d hallucinate a zebra. Why couldn’t I dream up Robert Pattinson or, better yet, a river of Gatorade? My mouth felt as dry as the cracked ground under my borrowed sandals.
The flat black rock gave way to rocky black earth with strange trees, trees with gray skeletal trunks and crispy green leaves dripping off branches like rain that wouldn’t fall. Odd trees like skinny pines cropped up, and then I heard a familiar sound: the ocean—distant, but real. Before I could celebrate, the ground flashed like a mirror, and for one agonizing second, I thought it was a shimmer ready to rise. I was still conflicted as to whether the shimmers were good, or bad, or both.
