Jane Carver of Waar Read Free

and seized up like an engine block with sand in the pistons. My eyeballs did a slow right-to-left over the scariest landscape I’d ever seen. Not that there was actually anything outright horrifying about it; as far as visuals went it was pretty easy on the eyes, but, well, let me lay it out.
    I was lying on a stone disk the size of a helicopter landing pad, in the middle of a wide prairie of knee high grass with stalks the blue of a junkie’s veins and pointy flowers the size and color of a match flame. Stones stuck up out of the grass, some in straight lines that made me think there must have been a building or a town built around the disk a few centuries back. Beyond the stones, the prairie humped over some low hills to the horizon, where white-capped mountains faded away to purple.
    Like I said, pretty. The thing that scared the living piss out of me was that every single piece of it was wrong. All wrong. I couldn’t say exactly how. I ain’t a scientist. But I knew, like you know your red 1987 Ford pick-up from somebody else’s red 1987 Ford pick-up without having to look twice, that I wasn’t on good old terra firma anymore.
    The sun was wrong: too big, too orange. The horizon was wrong: it didn’t go far enough away. The plants—I know there are blue plants on earth, but not these plants. Even the air was wrong. It filled my lungs too much. And it smelled off, sharp, like a gun battle in a swimming pool. It wasn’t right, none of it, and it made me shake so hard my teeth rattled.
    After a while my brain unlocked a little, and let me notice more than just the scenery. First off, I was naked. I looked around for my clothes. Not there. But I found something else. Right behind me, sunk into the center of the stone disk, was a platter-sized, lemonade-colored gem, big brother to the one in the clock thing in the cave.
    Well, I can put two and two together. I’d touched the green gem on the clock and poof , I landed here. Maybe the thing was a teleporter, like in Star Trek . Was it going to be that easy? I reached down for it, then stopped. Did I really want to go back to that cave with the cops and the dogs? If the alternative was staying... wherever the fuck this was? Hell yes! I slapped the gem and waited to get yanked back to earth.
    Another fly zipped past my ear. The too-big sun kept toasting my shoulders. I was still here, wherever here was. I took a closer look at the gem, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sun. It didn’t glow. Not even a little. It was dead.
    I haven’t cried since my first week in boot-camp. My friends call me Iron Jane because nothing gets to me, not death, not loss, not old movies, but as I looked around at that big, empty prairie and it sunk in how alone I was and how far from home, I ain’t ashamed to say that I curled up with my cheek on the smooth face of that gem and bawled like a baby.
     
    ***
     
    I must have cried myself to sleep, ’cause I woke up to a ground-shaking rumble that was getting louder by the second. I snapped my head up and looked around, blinking the sleep out of my eyes and scanning for what was making the racket.
    A big dust cloud was racing my way, filled with—I didn’t know what. I could see what looked like ostriches with giant parrot beaks, people with funny-shaped heads and right arms twice as big as their left ones, a chunky thing on wheels, splotches of red and purple, and bright flashes of steel. And it was all coming right at me.
    I hopped up—and nearly had a coronary. My leap lifted me nearly six feet in the air! I face-planted in the tall grass beside the stone disk and lay there, heart jackhammering. What the fuck? No one could jump that high! Not without a running start and special sneakers!
    I didn’t have time to think about it. The crowd of whatever-they-were was so close I could smell ’em; a weird mix of man sweat and birdcage funk. I peeked over the edge of the disk in time to see the whole circus roar past not ten