Chapter 3
CHAPTER
CHARLEY
A sharp pain in my hip woke me. When I opened my eyes, I saw red.
Literally.
Jagged rocks the color of rust stretched as far as I could see.
Boulders as big as buses, small chunks like cars, and a million smaller rocks the size of balls—golf balls, baseballs, volleyballs, you name it.
All were uneven, with weird serrated edges, and all were the same exact shade of burnt red.
I lay on a raised outcropping, on my side.
And I was naked.
Outside, in a creepy rock field I’d never laid eyes on before in my life.
I scrambled to my feet, and brushing off grit, I stumbled toward the edge. Spiky gravel covered the rock like sprinkles on a cupcake. That explains the pain in my hip, I thought randomly. I slipped twice but didn’t fall.
My rock, shaped like a mushroom with a fat stem, was mashed against a clump of smaller rocks masquerading as petrified red cauliflower. Using the smaller rocks as stairs, I worked my way down, moving as fast as the prickly rock would allow. At the bottom, I scrunched into the wisp of shade.
Frozen against the rock, I listened.
The only noise came from me. Air whistling in and out of my lungs, blood slamming against the chambers of my heart.
The surrounding silence was so vast, so complete, it had a presence all its own: it was eerie, almost otherworldly.
And with the desolate red landscape stretching for miles, I felt like I’d woken on an alien planet.
An. Alien. Planet.
I began shaking, violently, with the kind of icy fear I’d felt only once before, when Em and I were T-boned by a drunk driver and I’d seen Em sandwiched behind the wheel, bright red blood running down her forehead into her closed eyes.
She’d turned out to be fine. I couldn’t say the same for myself right now.
Stark naked, goodness knows where, wherever here was.
My last memory was of scalding heat, burning cold, and pain.
Jerking my head down, I expected my skin to be fried, but it looked fine. All of it, which I could see, because I was naked.
Slowly, I pressed my head back against the rock. The red rock landscape stayed silent, and still. At least the sky was blue. Brilliant, clear blue.
Maybe I’m dead.
I thought I’d passed out, but maybe I had actually passed.
Did that awful heat mark the entrance into death?
Absorbing my God-forsaken surroundings, I abruptly thought, Hell.
Hell was a red rock desert, where you woke up naked and alone.
I’d always thought Hell was an underground cavern teeming with the moaning damned, but maybe we all got our own personal Hell, crafted just for us, because mine sure looked a lot like this: no clothes, no people, and definitely no clue.
But it didn’t feel like Hell. And even though I’d skipped church lately, I was a pretty good kid.
Sneaking out at night to drink beer on the local golf course with Em was the worst thing I’d ever done, and that really wasn’t so bad.
Not bad enough to wind up in Hell anyway.
My gut told me I was alive, then my gut told me I should be afraid. Very afraid.
My Em-bleeding-behind-the-wheel fear was back. Was the air thinner here? I couldn’t seem to get enough air.
Around me, nothing moved.
I swept the area, looking for something to tell me where I was, or wasn’t, but all I saw was rock.
It coated the ground, hunkered in clumps, and giant piles of it blocked my line of sight.
If I wanted to see anything, I’d have to climb.
But I knew if I could see past the rock hills, then anything lurking out there could also see me.
Trapped, I thought humorlessly, between a rock and a hard place. Revealing myself seemed like a really bad idea. On the other hand, I couldn’t stay plastered against this rock forever.
Hunching over, I crept toward the largest pile and started up.
Scaling the rocks was like walking barefoot over spiky balls from our giant sweetgum tree—uncomfortable, but doable, as long as I watched my step.
Near the top, I peeked over the edge. All I could see was more rock.
I hesitated, hearing my volleyball coach’s voice in my head.
Use your height, Charley. Make it work for you.
Okay, well, on the court in a uniform is one thing, outside stark naked was another.
I took a deep breath—and then I climbed. On the summit, I stood, but I couldn’t help covering my chest with one arm and my privates with the other. Feeling like an idiot, I surveyed the broken landscape.
A blue haze rose in the distance, speckled with green.
Mountains, I thought, feeling a spark of hope.
Green meant life, and more importantly, water.
Are there mountains on Mars? I wondered.
Then I wanted to slap myself. I didn’t—because that would mean flashing more of my already overexposed self—but I wanted to, because mountains or not, there was no oxygen on Mars, and I was definitely breathing oxygen-filled air. This wasn’t Mars.
But that didn’t mean it was Earth.
The sun—only one, thank heavens—hung high in the cloudless sky. Feeling heat on my bare shoulders, I knew I needed to find cover. Even with my olive skin, eventually I’d burn, especially certain parts that had never seen the sun.
I looked left. West, perhaps. The ground sloped gently away. No mountains, but I sensed that direction was safer. Follow the lead, my dad would joke as he tapped his nose, his golden-brown eyes twinkling. Along with his looks, I often thought I’d inherited his lead. Heading west felt right.
I turned and my breath caught. Twenty yards out, the red ground was shimmering. The air lay still. And if it was quiet with the wind, without it, this place was dead calm.
The shimmer lifted into the air, and then it moved—straight toward me.
I scrambled right, aiming not to outrun it but skirt around it, likening it to a tornado; we’d had one in Georgia once.
Running over the crumbly rocks and leaping to hit flat spots, I missed.
Pain slashed across my heel, making me stumble, and when I looked back up, the shimmer hovered fifteen feet away and closing.
Not speeding up, not slowing. Just drifting … toward me.
Kicking into high gear, I sprinted across the rocks, leaving a trail of red on red.
A flat portion of rock caught my eye; behind it was a small cave—more like a scoop carved out of the rock face, just big enough for me.
I darted toward the opening. Folding like an accordion, I tucked inside the shallow hole.
Shade dropped like a curtain. I pressed my back against the cool rock, letting my eyes adjust.
The shimmer approached, silent and sinister.
Seconds later, the wall of wavering air drifted so close I could reach out and touch it, not that I did.
But I couldn’t look away. Glistening like water under glass, a million pinpricks of translucent light winked at me.
Every color was there, rippling and moving, filled with an unnatural iridescence.
Then the shimmer’s edge hung directly in front of me.
A razor-thin streak of silver back-lined in black onyx, the air in front and behind was clear and as blue as the sky above.
I sat completely still, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, terrified the shimmer would suck me in and take me goodness-knows-where.
The shimmer kept moving, drifting out of sight.
A second ticked by, then two.
Outside my hole, the wind was back. It blew fine dust across the landing near my toes, miniature funnels of red.
I stared at the funnels, thinking of tornadoes and shimmers.
Tornadoes were definitely bad. I didn’t know whether the shimmers were good or bad, but I felt I should avoid them.
One had obviously brought me here, which was bad, or at least not good.
It was like some twisted Wizard of Oz experience, minus the red sparkly shoes to take me home.
I uncurled myself in time to see a second shimmer form off to my right, in virtually the same place that the first one had appeared.
Without hesitation, I ducked back into my cave. The dust lay flat. This shimmer drifted farther out than the first, and when it passed, its edge lurked yards away, not inches. Like the first one, the second shimmer passed without stopping.
Tucked into a silent ball, I watched the dust, waiting.
The wind stalled; the dust funnels collapsed.
A third shimmer swept across the red field in my line of sight, this one farther out than its predecessors, much farther.
It, too, disappeared off to my left, shrinking into itself in the time it takes to blink, and then was gone.
The shimmers looked less ominous in the distance, less sentient.
Most important, they didn’t seem intent on finding me, but they were still as freaky as Dorothy’s tornado.
And that’s when I thought, If one shimmer brought me here, maybe one will take me back.
So when a fourth shimmer appeared, I ran for it.
I loped toward the wall of wavering air, ignoring the pain in my heel, feeling ridiculous in my galloping nakedness but hell-bent on catching the shimmer anyway.
It moved slowly across the red rock, hovering inches from the ground and stretching ten feet high and half as wide.
As I gained on the shimmer, I wondered exactly what would happen when I hit the roiling air. Will it burn? Feel like ice? In ten feet, I was about to find out.
Five.
Two.
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.