by A. L. Knorr
"Ooof!" Jordan's back slammed up against something solid, meaty. The acrid, horrific stench of rot filled her nostrils and nausea came up swiftly like a punch in the throat. Dizzy and bruised, but finally no longer falling, she put a hand out to brace herself on something, anything that would make her world come to a standstill. It landed on something bristly and rough, like the skin of an elephant. A shapeless blob of dark matter whirled by her vision, like her eyeballs had been replaced by the googly kind found in the heads of dolls.
She pushed against the blob in an effort to stand and heard a sound like a soft fart. She managed to get her body positioned over her feet, though her weight wanted to slide forward and fall into whatever had ended her rolling.
Miraculously, the locket was still clutched in her hand. She almost had to pry her own fingers open, so tightly they'd been clenched around it. She stuffed the locket into the pocket of her jean shorts.
A cloud of reeking wind drifted by her nose and Jordan gagged and spat. Her mouth watered, telegraphing the possibility of forthcoming vomit. The world was still spinning. Jordan swayed and bent down. She crawled on her hands and knees away from the farting thing, making a crooked path through the shrubs and dry grasses along the steep hillside. The smell was so pungent, Jordan's eyes filled with water and tears coursed down her cheeks. She gagged again and tried to get to her feet. Slowly, the world was ceasing its spin.
With great effort, Jordan stood. Everything hurt and the world was a blur. Her hands flew to her face where she found no glasses to aid her.
"Sol?" Fear lurched into her heart like a beast from a nightmare. She couldn't survive without her glasses and nothing around her was familiar. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "Stay calm," she coached herself. "Deep breaths." She took a breath, but only gagged again. When she opened her eyes, the world wasn't quite as blurry. In fact, the reeking thing that had stopped her fall was starting to take shape.
Its details slowly came into focus as Jordan squinted at the carcass. It was massive, the size of a bull elephant—maybe bigger. But she couldn't make out its features, as it lay with its back to her. Its skin was a shade of brown, bristly with stiff hair and was stretched tautly over a mound of ribs. A strip of shaggy hair lay scraggly on the back of its neck.
Jordan staggered around the thing, horror slipping its cold fingers around her. Horror that she'd landed against a rotting carcass, but it went deeper than that. It was the kind of terror that dawned slowly, like a sunrise – the warm light illuminating first this, then that. Horror, because she'd never seen an animal like it – with her own eyes, in a picture book, or on any nature documentary. She covered her mouth and nose as her vision grew sharp. She had never really believed it, that there could be a portal to another place.
Oh, yes, she'd seen the tree snap and flicker and send out its showers of sparks. She'd seen a man fly out of nowhere, a man in foreign clothes and with a foreign accent. She'd seen him bleed and helped him put his dislocated shoulder back into place.
But we're told all kinds of things as we grow up.
A fat man in a red suit squeezes himself and a bunch of pre-wrapped presents down your chimney once a year. A fairy with gossamer wings and a tutu loves to collect your baby teeth and will even pay you for them. Yes, she'll leave a silver coin under your pillow while you dream. If you squash your face together so your lips pop out fatly and you hold it for too long, your face will never go back to normal.
We're told all kinds of things like that. But the uncharted beast before her, this great corpse, was not of Earth. Not of her world. And seeing it kicked her in the teeth with its truth. Welcome! Come on in! Come be part of the greatest show on earth, it seemed to bray into her mind, laughing with the rich and resonant tones of a showman.
A strangled "No" was all that slipped out, as what Jordan was seeing played across her mind.
Huge, ragged gashes across the animal’s side were open and crawling with maggots. Its four eyes had sunk into its massive head, which also had four tusks and a line of hair down the center of its face, to four big nostrils crusted with dried blood. She stepped around hoofs the size of manhole covers. More gashes across its gut. Intestines spilled out onto the grass and a dark shadowy hole gaped at its belly. Jordan turned her head just in time to spew onto the scrubby grass beside her. Spitting and gasping, she stayed on her hands and knees until she caught her breath. She passed a hand over her face and mouth.
"Sol!" she screamed again with gusto. She got to her feet and backed away from the carcass. Is that the sound of waves behind me? She turned and caught the sight of a stretch of blue.
But the sound of something wet and juicy and much closer made her turn back. Something the size of a cat and armed with pincers and mandibles appeared from the cavity of the dead beast. It made a loud hissing clack; its eyes, on the ends of upright stems, darted around independently of one another until they both landed on her. Jordan screamed in terror. She stepped back, her arms flailing and lost her footing on the steep ground. Landing on her butt on a downward slope, the momentum carried her body over and she tumbled again, continuing on her journey downward.
"Ooooof!" Air whooshed out of Jordan as she landed with her hand under her stomach and was flipped onto her back. She slid down an embankment, ploughing up sand in front her before finally coming to a stop. The sound of waves was louder now. She craned her aching neck and saw water lapping at a small beach not far from her. She groaned and rolled over onto her stomach. At least the air doesn’t reek of rotting meat here and whatever that horrid beast was didn’t chase me down to the water's edge.
She got to her hands and knees, sand cascading from her clothes and hair. She brushed herself off, groaning at the hundred bruises forming from head to toe. A dull headache throbbed in her left temple. She rubbed her eyes and remembered that she'd lost her glasses. She froze and then pulled her hands away from her face to look around.
She could see the scrubby grass poking up through the sand beneath her. She could see the foam in the waves as the water pushed up the beach, only to drop away again. She could see the winged shapes of birds as they flapped and climbed up over the treetops along the distant shore. She could see. She lost track of time as she stood there in awe, taking in the world around her without the assistance of spectacles.
A dark shape darted from the shadow of a bush draped with vines. Jordan gasped. A crab the size of a coffee table scuttled across the sand and headed straight for her. Its flat, gray shell was ringed with nasty looking horns and one snapping claw was twice the size of the other. It moved way too fast. That claw could cut my leg off!
Jordan shrieked again and began to run up the sandy embankment. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw a second giant crab join in on the pursuit. Her toes ploughed into the deep sand, slowing her getaway. "Where the hell are you, Sol?!" She screamed as she scrambled. A sharp snip sounded behind her, like massive pinking shears, ready to cut her in half. This is it. This is how I'm going to die. Dinner for overgrown crabs. A crab cake, she thought, irrationally.
Something whizzed by her head and a thud made her turn. The first crab collapsed with a short spear buried in its face, right between its eyestalks. The second crab passed its fallen comrade without notice or concern, its claws and mandibles waving menacingly. Jordan squealed and doubled her efforts to get away. Panic overtook her and she tripped in the sand, falling to her knees.
Sol appeared over the bluff, carrying a tree branch. He ran past Jordan lifting it like a golfer preparing to swing a club. As the crab closed in with its huge, razor-sharp pincer opened and aimed for Sol's shin, Sol lifted his leg out of pinching range and swung, hard.
Snap! Thwack!
The claw closed around air as Sol struck the crab with the branch, hitting it in the mandibles and lifting the front four legs of the heavy crustacean right off the ground. Its legs scrabbled at the air before it fell back to the sand. It closed both its pincers over its face and reversed direction, scuttli
ng sideways into the water and disappearing under the waves.
Jordan lay there in shock, buried up to her forearms in sand, panting hard, her chest heaving. Sweat trickled down the side of her face and she pushed her hair back, leaving a sandy streak on her forehead. She rolled over onto her elbows and put a hand to her pounding heart. With her eyes as wide as saucers, she watched Sol approach the dead crab and pull the spear out of its face. It came out with a sucking sound.
"Monster... crabs..." Jordan panted.
"Those were the babies," Sol said matter-of-factly. Jordan's stomach folded in on itself, writhing like a salted leech. How big are the mommy and daddy crabs, then? The thought had her scrambling to her feet, though her legs were quaking. Her eyes scanned the water for signs of a Volkswagen-sized crab.
Sol reached down, picked up the dead crab’s big claw with both hands and twisted it until it made a cracking sound. Then he twisted it the other way, grunting with the effort – or maybe with the pain of his recently dislocated shoulder.
Jordan winced as the nausea gave an encore at the back of her throat. "What are you doing?"
Sol rotated the claw around and around; snapping and popping sounds filled the air when the limb finally broke free. He picked up the busted claw and put it over his good shoulder, where it hung and dripped ooze into the sand behind him.
"Dinner," he growled and stalked past her.
CHAPTER NINE
"Ouch, dammit!" Jordan hopped on one foot and plucked a thorn from the side of her big toe. She'd been following Sol and the oozing claw for fifteen minutes across sharply angled, scrubby hillside. A green line of forest had appeared in the distance. Already, her feet were bleeding from half a dozen cuts. She was in shock. Her mind was in a fog and there were so many questions in her brain that they jammed up in her brain like a pileup on a freeway. Sol ignored her cry of pain.
"Shouldn't we be heading uphill? Back to the portal?" Jordan called at his back.
Sol didn't turn and didn't answer.
"I'd like to be back before my dad gets home, if possible."
Sol halted, seemingly frozen to the spot.
"What?" Jordan stopped as well and took the opportunity to remove a weed from between her toes. The evening sun was hot and surprisingly blinding and she blinked at him in the light. If it was so warm this late in the day, what would it be like at high noon?
Slowly, Sol turned to face her. The claw swung around like the arm of a construction crane, a line of slime swinging from it. The slime drooled onto the ground with a plop.
Jordan straightened. "You look upset."
A screaming roar in the distance made Sol's eyes dart upward. "Keep walking." He turned and continued along the hillside. The giant claw cast a long, strange shadow behind him.
"What was that?" Jordan scampered to catch up, dodging the sharp stalks of scrubby grass that poked up from the sandy soil. She caught a whiff of pungent air and staggered back, her hand going to her nose. "Dude, that claw stinks."
Sol mumbled something incomprehensible and kept walking.
"Why are we going away from the portal?"
No response.
Her face flushed with annoyance. Does he have to be such a jerk? Why isn’t he telling me anything? He obviously had ideas about where they needed to be, but whatever those ideas were, they took the pair in the opposite direction of where Jordan thought they needed to be. Jordan stopped walking and put her hands on her hips, thinking. She watched Sol continue to walk away from her and from the hill they'd tumbled down.
"Fine, I'll go back on my own." Jordan turned and began heading uphill. "So rude," she muttered. "I have the locket, now. I don't need you."
"That feroth carcass was a harpy kill," Sol called over his shoulder. "If you'd like to be dessert, by all means, keep going that way."
Jordan froze. A harpy kill? The image of the massive gashes in the body rose to her mind. She turned back to her prickly companion. "A harpy? Body of a bird, head of a woman, three boobs? That kind of harpy?" She wouldn't have believed it, except that she'd already seen enough wildlife in this place to last her a lifetime. She had no desire to add a harpy to the mix.
Sol gave a humorless laugh and shook his head. "Yeah, just like that." His words were laced with sarcasm.
Jordan caught up to Sol, getting as close as she could without having to smell the ooze from the dismembered crab claw.
"Can you at least tell me what your plan is? Cuz from what I can see, we're getting further and further from the doorway that will take me away from this crazy, dangerous place. My dad is going to worry when he gets home and sees I'm not there." She added to herself, "Our family has had enough of people randomly disappearing without a trace."
"You should have thought of that before you pushed us both through the portal," Sol replied with a nonchalance that made Jordan feel cold. "You won't be going home today, or tomorrow, or possibly for quite a while." He shook his head again. "Earthlings," he muttered.
Jordan froze the spot. "What did you say?"
Another hair-raising scream in the distance made her wince and look over her shoulder.
"Pick up the pace, Jordan," Sol said and showed her what kind of pace he meant. "We need to get as far from here as we can before nightfall."
Jordan clenched her jaw and began to jog on her sore and naked feet.
By the time they reached the trees over an hour later, Jordan was limping. A softer trail of ferns and grasses opened up between the trees and Jordan breathed a sigh of relief to be off the scrubby hillside with its sharp foliage.
Sol hadn't spared her a glance. Anger and annoyance radiated from him. Jordan was accustomed to men falling over themselves for an opportunity to help her; apparently Sol was not a sucker for a pretty face.
"I should have left you to rot in that tree," Jordan muttered as she limped after Sol. "Cretin."
If Sol heard her, he didn't respond.
Several hours later, the sun was nearly down and they were deep into a lush forest full of mushrooms, ferns and moss. Jordan opened her mouth to beg for a break when Sol finally stopped in a small clearing. Jordan limped to a nearby log and wilted down onto it. Picking up one foot to examine the sole and brush away the dirt, she bit off a whimper at the multitude of tiny stinging cuts she uncovered. When she looked up again, the crab claw was on the ground and Sol was nowhere to be seen. She straightened, taking a look around. The sun was nearly set and, this deep into the woods, it was almost too dim to make out the details of their little clearing. She was about to call after Sol when he reappeared.
"There's a spring through there," Sol said, pointing through the trees. His hair and face were damp. He rolled his shoulders and flexed his injured arm. "Wash your feet."
Jordan nodded. “Thanks.” She got up and limped in the direction Sol had pointed. Not far into the brush, there was indeed a small stream burbling up from underground. Jordan sat on her butt and dipped a toe in. Sighing at the cool water, Jordan lowered both feet in up to her ankles. She washed off the dirt and massaged her aching muscles. The stinging of multiple cuts and scrapes seemed to ease almost immediately. Amazed, Jordan immersed her hands, too. The pain from the scrapes she'd received from the sharp, hidden stalks as she’d crawled through the sand also seemed to disappear. She scooped a handful of water to her face and tentatively slurped the liquid. It was sweet and slightly minty. Suddenly consumed by thirst, Jordan drank mouthful after mouthful and almost moaned with relief. With each swallow, she could feel vitality returning to her tired limbs.
"Don't drink too much." Sol's voice came from behind her. She turned to see him holding an armful of twigs and branches. In one hand was a nasty looking blade. The sheath at his thigh was empty.
"How come? It tastes amazing and I feel so much better." Jordan flicked water off her hands and stood, still soothing her feet in the stream.
"Too much puutso water can be a hallucinogen to someone who has never had it before." Sol turned and went back to the cleari
ng, where he stooped and began to make a fire.
"Now he tells me," Jordan muttered.
“Puutso water works on suggestion,” said Sol as he worked to prepare their dinner. “I would have to tell you something is there before you could see it. But I wouldn’t do that to you. Teenagers like to sneak the water to their friends and scare them out of their wits.”
“Like being hypnotized,” said Jordan, stepping out of the stream.
“Something like that.”
Sol had the crab claw skewered and balanced between two Y-shaped sticks that he'd jammed into the earth. He'd arranged his collection of dried wood and twigs into a rough tent-shape. Jordan watched as he took a flint from one of his leather satchels and used it to spark a fire to life. As he blew on the tinder, the flames caught and flared.
Jordan sat on the ground next to the fire, her eyes on Sol as he worked.
"You're quite the survivalist," Jordan said.
Sol's eyes flashed to her, one eyebrow raised and then back down to the fire.
Jordan rolled her eyes and let out a sigh. "Can we talk now, or is it more fun to keep the stupid human in the dark?"
Sol took a breath through his nose and let it out slowly, purposefully. "Ask whatever you want."
"Why did you say I wouldn't be able to go home right away?"
Sol shifted from a squat to sit fully on the ground and turned the claw as the flames licked at it. "Your relic has enough magic to open a portal, but it’s a rudimentary magic. If you could even find the portal we came through and not get killed by harpies on the way, there is no guarantee it would take you back to your property. It could spit you out somewhere in Africa; or worse, your relic could only have enough magic in it to do half the job."