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.