Twenty years earlier
Savin grabbed Jett’s hand and together they raced across the field behind their parents’ houses. The lavender grew high and wild, sweetening the air. Butterflies dotted the flower tops with spots of orange and blue.
Jett’s laughter suddenly abbreviated. She stopped, gripping her gut as she bent over.
“Wait!” she called as Savin ran ahead. “I’m getting a bellyache. Mamma’s cherry pie is sitting right here.” She slapped a hand to her stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten that third piece!”
Savin laughed and walked backward toward the edge of the field where the forest began. The dark, creepy forest that they always teased each other to venture into alone. Neither had done it. Yet.
Today he’d challenged her to creep up to the edge and touch the foreboding black tree that grew bent like a crippled man and thrust out its branches as if they were wicked fingers. If she did, he’d give her his Asterix comic collection. Fortunately, he knew she wouldn’t do it. Jett was a chicken. And he teased her now by chanting just that.
“I am not!” she announced as she approached him, still clutching her gut. Her long black hair hid what he guessed was a barely contained smile.
“You can’t use that excuse to get out of it this time.” Savin planted his walking stick in the ground near his sneaker. The stick was one he’d found in the spring and had been whittling at for a month. He’d tried to carve a dragon on the top of it, but it looked more like a snake. “Girls are always chicken!”
“Am not.” Jett stepped out of the lavender field and stopped beside him to stare into the forest that loomed thirty paces away.
The trees were close and the trunks looked black from this distance. Savin nudged Jett’s arm and she jumped away from him and stuck out her tongue.
“I don’t need your comic books,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll get them all when we get married someday.”
Jett was the one to always remind him that they’d get married. Someday. When they were grown-up and didn’t care about things like comic books and creepy forests. Which was fine with Savin. Except he thought maybe he should kiss her before that happened. And actually love her. Jett was a girl with whom he raced home from school, ran through the fields and played video games. They spent every day with each other. But love? Right now that sounded as creepy as the forest.
“Whatever.” He stubbed the toe of his sneaker against the walking stick.
“Why don’t you go in there?” she cooed in that cotton-candy voice she always used when she wanted him to do something.
It made Savin’s ears burn and his heart feel like bug wings were fluttering inside.
“Maybe I will.” He took a step forward and planted the stick again.
Looking over the forest, he thought for a moment he saw the air waver before him. Did something flash silver? Of course, a haunted forest might be like that. He didn’t dare say “maybe not.” So he took another step, and then another.
And he heard Jett’s gasp behind him. “Savin, wait—”
He turned to see Jett’s brown eyes widen. She pointed over his shoulder. When he swung around to face the forest, Savin didn’t have time to scream.
Sucked forward through the air, arms flailing and legs stretched out behind him, he dropped the walking stick. Cold, icy air entered his lungs, swallowing his scream. Yet beside him he heard Jett’s scream like the worst nightmare. The world turned blacker than the cellar without the lights on. And the strange smell of rotting eggs made him gag.
Of a sudden his body dropped, seeming to fall endlessly. Until he landed on his back with a crunch of bones and a cry of pain.
He lay there, silenced by the strangeness of what had happened. Had a tornado swept him off his feet and into the depths of the dark forest? Had the sky opened like a crack in the wall and sucked him inside? What was he lying on? It felt...squishy and thick, and it smelled like the worst garbage.
“Savin?”
Jett was with him. He sat up, looking about. The landscape was brown and gray, and a deep streak of red painted what must be the black sky. His fingers curled into the mud he lay on, and he felt things inside it squirm.
“Jett?”
“Over here. Wh-what happened? What is that!”
An insectile whine preceded the approach of a creature that looked like something out of one of those nasty video games his parents had forbid him to play. Jett scrambled over to Savin. He clutched her hand and they both backed away from the thing that walked on three legs and looked like half a spider...with a human face.
“Run!” Savin yelled.
* * *
They ran for days, it seemed. They encountered...things. Monsters. Creatures. Demons. Evil. They were no longer anywhere near home. This was not the outer countryside surrounding Paris. There was no lush lavender field to run through. Or even grass. Savin wasn’t sure where they were or how they’d gotten here, but it was not a place in which he wanted to stay.
Jett cried as often as she wandered in silence and with a drawn expression. She was hungry and had taken on many cuts and bruises from the rough, sharp landscape and the strange molten rocks. Every time something moved, she screamed. Which was often.
This had to be hell. But Savin honestly didn’t know why they were here. Had they died? They hadn’t encountered people. But they did see humanlike beings. Strange creatures with faces and appendages that morphed and twisted, and some even had wings. None had spoken to them in a language they could understand.
“I want to go home,” Jett said on a tearful plea.
Savin hugged her close, as much to comfort her as for his own reassurance. He wanted to go home, too. And he wanted to cry. But he was trying to be brave. He’d hand over all his Asterix comics right now if only they could be home in their own beds.
“We’ll get out of here,” he murmured, and then clutched Jett even tighter. “I promise.”
* * *
They tried to drink from the stream that flowed with orange water, but it burned their throats. Jett’s tears permanently streaked her dirtied face. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her hands were rough and darkened with the gray dust that covered the landscape, and her jeans were tattered.
Savin had torn up his shirt to wrap a bandage about her ankle after she’d cut it on what had looked like barbed wire. But after she’d screamed, that strange wire had unfurled and slunk away.
They sat on a vast plateau of flat gray stone that tended to crack without warning, much like thin ice on a lake. No other creatures seemed to want to walk on it, so they felt safe. For the moment.
Savin had fashioned a weapon out of a branch from a tree that had appeared to be made of wood, until he’d broken off the branch and inspected it. It was metal. That he could break. But the point was sharp. That was all that mattered. He’d already killed something with it. An insect the size of a dog, with snapping mandibles and so many legs he hadn’t wanted to count them.
“Do you hear that?” Jett said in a weary whisper.
Savin followed the direction she looked. An inhale drew in the air. For some reason it smelled like summer. Fresh and...almost like water. Curious.
“I miss my mama and papa,” Jett whispered. She shivered. She shook constantly. They hadn’t eaten for days. And Savin’s stomach growled relentlessly. “If I die, promise me you won’t let one of those monsters eat me.”
“You’re not going to die,” Savin quickly retorted.
But he wasn’t so sure