It seemed
like an instant later, you were lying on your back on the ground, staring up at
the night sky. The stars were suddenly gone, and cloud blanketed the sky. The
smell of ozone was in the air, like it had just been raining. Frogs were
singing. You were wet and kind of numb, sedate, but aware enough to know you
weren’t dreaming, but not aware enough to panic.
You were
half embedded in thick, sticky mud, which pulled at your body like treacle as
you fought to get to your feet. The mud made a kissing sound as you came loose.
Half your body was wet and clay brown. Feeling gross, you stumbled forward and
the mud sunk and squelched under your bare feet. It was horrendous, so thick,
like a pool of tar. How deep did it go? For a moment you seriously were afraid you would sink under and
drown. You were bare, clothes nowhere in sight. Your vision was blurry, but
slowly began to focus as your night vision kicked in.
A voice
hollered groggily:
“Hello? I know someone's there —Answer me!"
It was Will.
“I’m here,”
you replied, and heard him let out a relieved sigh. He repeated your name a
couple of times, weakly, as if in shock.
You
couldn’t see anything, masses of tall reeds blocked your view. You had to push
them out of the way as you stumbled around, trying to find Will. The mushy
earth squelched under your bare feet, which strangely was, and wasn't, cold. You could
feel the cold, but it didn’t stop you. The numbness was lifting and feeling was
coming back into your body.
“Will, are
you still there?” you called out.
“I’m over
here!”
“Keep
talking,” you said, using the sound of his voice to locate him. When you
finally stumbled upon him concealed within the reeds, he stared at you in
shock. You stared at him. He was also slathered in mud.
You were
both naked.
Will’s feet
were half sunken into the soft, wet earth, and he didn’t seem too concerned. He
lifted one foot out of the slush, only for it to sink in again when he put it
down. His eyes widened.
“Is this
quicksand?”
“We need to
get out of here,” you said.
“Well,
which way is out?”
You looked
around, feeling hopelessly lost.
“Good
question,” you said.
“Seriously,”
he was growing impatient now, “where are we?”
You both
stared around.
Somehow,
the two of you had been dropped into the middle of a thick swamp. Your bare feet sunk into the moist earth, and
in every direction you were surrounded by tall, thick reeds surrounded you in
every direction.
“Oh god,
what smells weird?” said Will.
The air
reeked of some kind of noxious odor. Swamp gas? If you hung around any longer
it was going to give you a headache.
Craning
your neck, you stared directly up. The trees reached the sky and the girth of
their trunks was incredible. They must have been sequoias. Past the treetops,
the night sky was cloudy, with some stars winking through. There was no end to
the swamp.
“This way,”
said Will, pushing through the reeds. You quickly followed him. The reeds were
over adult height, it would be easy to become separated again, if you weren’t
careful.
“How do you
know where you’re going?” you said.
“I don’t,”
he replied impatiently. “But you have a better idea?”
You
couldn’t argue.
Tired,
groaning, and sweat running down your bodies, you cleared the reeds, and
stepped out into a clearing of bare earth. Wisps of fog danced around, and it
stank even worse, a burning gaseous smell, and rubber, like a big burning tire
yard. You always assumed fog was odorless.
A broad saltflat
met the edge of the reeds. The earth was coal black, cracked, rock hard and
bumpy, and drier than cardboard. The flat stretched both ways into the dim
black night. You looked on in despair.
“This
doesn’t go anywhere,” said Will, throwing his hands up. “Well, that’s great.”
It was
strange that the wet mud immediately ran into the parched black rockbed, you
thought. Like there was an invisible line dividing the two.
Not having
heard from you, Will spun around and looked at you.
“Did we do
something after the run?” he asked. “Drink something? Take something? Do you
remember anything from yesterday?”
“I honestly
have no idea,” you said, running a hand through your hair. You kept noticing the
hairs on your arm were standing up and you had goosebumps from the cold, but it
didn’t bother you. This seemed vitally important for some reason. But you
didn’t understand why. You fought your memory for some sense of where your
clothes were, but there was just a big fuzzy void of lost time. You earned your nickname in that moment, you felt like one big fuzz.
The
fundraising race was yesterday, you recalled. You could remember crossing the
finishing line, and then…nothing. You woke up here. You wondered if you’d
fallen or had an accident, and got a head injury. But then, how come you ended
up here, with Will, in a swamp? A puzzle
piece was missing.
“What do you remember?” you said.
“Dude, most
days I can’t even remember what I had for dinner the previous night.”
“Well,” you
interjected, “I can’t remember anything at
all about the previous night. At least not past six pm.” You puzzled over
this for a moment. It was like after six pm, time just stopped. And now it was
running again.
Will turned
adjacently and began to trail the edge of the black flat ground. Without
thinking, you followed. Neither of you wanted to cross the dry saltflat, but
you didn’t want to go back into the reeds with the thick abhorrent mud. It was
either dry or wet. There wasn’t a third way.
The two of
you were silent for several minutes into the night, just walking. Your thoughts
cycled around and around…
You had an
accident, you decided. You fell, hit your head, and passed out for a few hours.
Now it was probably still Saturday – the same day of the race – but later
Saturday night. It could even be, at latest, Sunday, very early morning,
between one and four am. If you could find the moon you could probably guess
how early it was, but the trees blocked it out.
Your
clothes were gone. Some lowlife must have stripped you and stole them –creepy. Or…
your head injury caused you to be momentarily confused, and you took your own
clothes off and left them somewhere.
That didn’t
explain Will. In fact, it didn’t explain a lot of things.
So maybe Will
and you got stuck in the swamp, you both got confused, fell over. Your clothes
got wet and you had to take them off before you got hypothermia. In all this
time, your surroundings hadn’t changed. The black saltflat kept going on and
on, in a straight line. Out of
nowhere you thought: she's waiting for me.
I have got to meet Courtney.
She had
looked at you that way, and it was like your heart made an unbreakable promise
to yourself. You would meet her at the restaurant. Then she would drive you
back to your place. And then…and then…
…And then you
and Will didn’t show up to the restaurant. You were missing. And Will wasn’t
answering his phone, so no one could contact you.
Let’s say,
on the way to the restaurant, Will and you were jumped by some thugs. They beat
you over the head, stole your clothes, and dumped your bodies in a swamp. With
a sinking feeling, you realized this all fit. It explained basically
everything.
You mentioned
your theory to Will. He stopped and stared back at you for a second.
“You think
so?” he said. “So where’d these jerkasses run off to, with our gear?”
“Beats me,”
you said.
“Yeah,
so…where are we?” Will had stopped
walking, and bent to take up a stone. “Are we even getting anywhere?”
He had a
point. You must have been walking alongside the marsh for the past forty
minutes, but the marsh just kept going on.
Will
suddenly tossed the stone and you both watched it skipped over the dry black
rock like a tennis ball. You both stared in surprise. It made no sense. Either
the stone was much lighter than it looked, or Will must have thrown it pretty
hard for it to do that. When the stone stopped moving, it had almost crossed
the marsh. You never knew Will was such an amazing shot. He should be playing
baseball.
Actually, now
you noticed something about the shape of the black flats; it ran in a wide,
very straight line. It had been running like this since you first came upon it.
Across the other side of the black flat was a bare plain that went on to a line
of towering trees, into the distance. In the dark, the trees were just black
silhouettes.
The cracked
flat probably used to be a river, but the water had all dried up, leaving a
wide trail of black, desiccated, cracked earth. You were positioned on one side
of this ancient black river bed, looking across to the other side.
Suddenly, Will
gave the saltflat a strange look. He stepped forward onto the dry black earth
and knelt, running a hand along the ground.
“Hey, do
you feel that?” he said.
“What?” you
asked.
“Is
somebody drilling around here?”
Curious, you
reached down, pressing you palm against the ground.
There was
nothing at first. Then you felt it. A tiny vibration spasmed through your hand.
Then another. Steadily, they began to increase in size, and come in faster. It
was like an approaching storm.
Will stood
and looked at something in the distance, over your shoulder. You turned to see
two pinpricks of light in the dark, and watched with interest as they rapidly
grew larger.
The
vibrations now ran under the soles of your feet, and still got steadily bigger.
You instinctively stepped back, receding just into the reeds, but continuing to
peer out in curiosity at the oncoming lights.
It was
clearly some kind of oncoming vehicle. But why would anyone drive a vehicle
around on this strip of baked black earth.
Will hadn’t
moved. He stood on the edge of the black earth like he was in shock. When you
gazed out again, the pinpricks of light had grown into enormous strobes, and kept
growing into stadium sized flood lamps until they were too bright for you to
make sense of. Your brain shrank back in pain. The lights flooded up your
vision like balls of white fire. You scrunched your eyes.
You
stumbled back, dazed, as the strobes’ intensity seemed to penetrate your brain
with injections of pure light. Off to the side, Will winced aloud. He was
standing on the black rock, rendered a complete idiot from the light.
The
rumbling deepened as the vibrations in the ground rattled you. Your first
thought: a semi-trailer…then a steam train…and then you no longer had any idea
what it could be. It was big, bright, and fearsome.
Momentarily
coming to your senses, you screamed:
“Will!”
Without
thinking, you sprinted forward, grabbing Will’s arm and yanking him back just
before something as big as an ocean liner roared past, going at supernatural
speed. The air swept you like a whirlwind, taking you right off your feet. The
two of you were blasted backwards, tumbling over each through the reeds, and
plopping into the soupy, watery ground. Will was on top of you, pressing you
into the film of moisture. You couldn’t breathe. You pushed and kicked at him,
and he finally rolled off you and helped you up.
For a
moment, neither of you spoke. Dripping wet and splattered with mud, you both
crept out of the reeds to peer into the darkness. A plume of exhaust swept over
your face, and trailed away into the night. That was the cause of ‘swamp gas’
smell. Gas exhaust. It rolled vaguely in the air. That giant cruiser belched
fumes in its wake.
“What the
hell was that?!” said Will.
“Will,” you
said, blandly, “that was a car.”
“That’s not
possible,” he countered. “A car that big…it wouldn’t even run under its own weight.”
Even as he
said this his nostrils flared with distaste at the oily smell wafting in the
air, of burned fuel.
You stared
at the cracked, rocky black ground bordering the forest of reeds, judging its
width. Your eyes followed one reed up to the sky, trying to estimate its
height. Finally, you looked down at your feet, which had sunk into the watery
earth again. The mud came up almost to your knee. You did a few quick
calculations in your head. You thought of how Will had thrown the stone amazingly far. Like gravity was different.
“Will,” you
said, calmly, “what if we’re small?”
He shook
his head.
“What gave
you that idea?” he said sarcastically. “No, there’s got to be something weird actually going on here.”
"Is this weird enough?" you pointed out.
He wrapped
his hands around one of the reeds and yanked angrily.
“Is this
stuff even real? I bet it's like astroturf."
"Are you serious?" you exclaimed.
His muddy
hands slipped off. He seemed surprised that the reed was so tough to break.
“We’re tiny,”
you went on. You nodded at the reeds. “This is grass,” – you pointed past Will,
out towards the dry black ‘saltflat’ – “And that’s the road. And that giant
thing was a car.”
If the
reeds were blades of grass, it meant the two of you were as big as a pair of
walnuts. You said this outloud.
Will
scowled and stormed away, heading back into the grass.
“This is
crazy!”
You heard
Will groan and turned. He’d tripped over an object half submerged in the mud.
It looked like a plastic hubcap from a Monster truck. You helped Will up, and
then the two of you pulled the object out.
It was a
bottle cap. Even Will could see that.
Then, all
at once, it began to rain.
The two of
you stared at the road, astounded, as water balloon-sized raindrops fell and
burst across the asphalt. The hissing white noise of rainfall filled the air. Will
opened his mouth, saying something, but you couldn’t hear him. Something big
and cold splat on your head. Then again. And again. You went to shout to him to
get cover, but a huge raindrop fell in your mouth. It was like someone hosed
water into your mouth; the spurt of water filled your throat and choked you for
a second. There were crunchy dirt particles in your mouth from the drop.
Meanwhile
the rain filled the air. It didn’t patter, it smacked and burst. The raindrops
had a lot of surface tension and clung to your face like watery slime. You
desperately rubbed your face to wipe the thick water away before it suffocated
you. You couldn’t see; as thick water slapped your face the world was hidden
behind a blurry curtain.
In shock,
you put your head down and, reacting on pure instinct, began bending and
creasing the blades of grass to provide cover. Nearby, Will was frantically
doing the same. Soon you had made a crude thatched roof for shelter, and the
two of you huddled beneath. All around you the rain slapped and burst.
After ten
long minutes, the drum roll faded away, leaving you wet, puzzled and
disquieted. Will was silent, still trying to accept reality. That morning you
recall seeing clear skies on your run earlier, and you’d felt grateful. The
rain had come out of nowhere.
Considering
this, you stepped out from under the grass roof, where the bottle cap lay on
the ground, and now full of rain water. It suddenly occurred to you hadn't drunk much in a while, given you had just run a marathon. You should be very thirsty, although you weren't.
Picking up
the bottle cap, you took a sip of the water. It was slightly thicker than
expected, like a sticky, melted, flavorless slushie. Strangely, the drop clung
together inside your mouth, and was entirely pulled down your throat in one
swallow, somewhat like a spaghetti strand. You offered the bottle cap to Will,
and without argument he took a long sip. Then said:
“We’ve got
to find someone. Tell someone where we are.”
As soon as
he said this, a strange notion entered your head. If you were the size of a
walnut, that meant other people were much bigger than you. Unthinkingly big.
They were
so big they could pluck you up daintily between fingertips, like a grape. You
could barely imagine what this would be like. How could you even interact with
someone so huge?
Will didn’t
even acknowledge this. So you didn’t bring it up.