Jane Carver of Waar (2 page)

I searched around, shaking with panic, looking for a tree, a big rock, anything. A shadow caught my eye up the hill from me. Fifteen feet up was a long, narrow patch of dark, sandwiched between two slanting slabs of rock. A cave? Probably not, but I was all out of options. I scrambled up the slope as fast as my shaking arms and legs could carry me.

It
was
a cave. I stopped at the entrance even though I could smell the dogs behind me. It was pretty cramped in there, and dark. I don’t like cramped, dark places. Then again, jail is pretty cramped and dark. Still I hemmed and hawed. It was like cutting off my head to stop gangrene from spreading to my body. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go in there.

I heard cop shoes, dogs and radios behind me. Decision made. I dove in.

The tunnel wound up and back, shrinking as it went. I was sweating stink like yesterday’s fish. I clawed my way through the dark, wishing, not for the first time, that I was a flat-chested, no-assed little pipsqueak that nobody ever paid any attention to.

Ten feet in, the entrance disappeared back around a twist in the passage. The light went with it. Pitch black. I couldn’t see forward or back. I could barely turn my head to look. It was tighter than a coffin in there. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. If it hadn’t been for the sound of dogs snuffling behind me I think I might have froze there forever, but the thought of sharp teeth tearing into my ankles got me moving again.

A few feet later the darkness wasn’t so total anymore. Above and ahead I saw a pale green light, or almost saw it. It was so faint it disappeared when you looked right at it. Moonlight? No moon tonight. Street light? Was I coming up in somebody’s basement? Whatever it was, I was all for light. Trapped is bad. Trapped and blind gives me the crawlies.

I followed the ghost light and finally pushed through a keyhole opening halfway up a rock wall. The tightest squeeze yet. I had to get my shoulders in one at a time, and then my tits and hips, but finally I popped out the other side into a low, tent-shaped space with a sandy floor, which I could see ’cause it was lit by a strange glow coming from the far end. It was some kind of gadget, half buried in the sand. I crawled closer. It looked like a little clock. It was silver, with hood-ornament fins curving out from its sides, but where the clock face should have been it had a round, glowing jewel the color of lemonade.

I didn’t get much time to look at it. Suddenly the tiny space was full of barking echoes, ping-ponging off the walls and the inside of my brain. I turned. German Shepherds were squeezing through the keyhole and jumping at me.

I stepped back.

They leaped.

I fell.

My hand touched the glowing silver clock thing.

Somebody hit me with a building. No, it just felt that way, like a giant had grabbed me by the leather jacket and yanked me through a thick velvet curtain, into... where? It was ice cold, and blacker than ten caves. Weird voices were jabbering at me in some gobbledygook I couldn’t understand, and that giant kept yanking at me, harder, and harder, and...

And then I blacked out.

CHAPTER TWO

STRANDED!

I
woke up flat on my back with the bed-spins so bad it reminded me of the time in high school my friend Briana made piña coladas with Southern Comfort and we drank two pitchers.

Where was I, anyway? Did the cops put me in a body bag? It felt like it. It was hot, and the air was thick and dusty in my nose. The color above me couldn’t be the sky. It was blue, but the kind of deep blue you get with sapphires or bottles of fancy water... or plastic tarps.

I started to panic. I was weak, but I had to thrash around and let ’em know I wasn’t dead. Being buried alive was right up there with caves and prison in my catalog of claustrophobic no-nos.

Just as I lifted my hands to start pushing at the body bag an insect buzzed past my nose, and a fluffy white cloud edged into the corner of my vision. That Ty-D-Bol blue
was
the sky. What the hell?

I struggled up, rubbing my eyes. Maybe my vision was fucked up. That glowing gem could have damaged... I looked around 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 feet from my hiding place. They weren’t coming for me after all. They were too busy fighting each other.

Now I could sort all the parts out. It was a bunch of purple guys swinging swords and riding big, two-legged birds. Sure, why not. Happens every day.

Except for being purple, the guys weren’t quite as weird as I’d first thought. Their funny-shaped heads turned out to be funny hair-cuts: sumo top-knots, mohawks, braids and fancy shave-jobs. What I’d thought were giant, mutated right arms were actually thick sleeves of scaly, bronze-looking armor that covered their sword arms. Besides that they were nearly naked. Just the sleeve and a few other scraps of armor covering their groins, shins and knees, all held in place by leather harnesses like something out of an SM club. Capes of red or gold flapped around their shoulders, and they waved around long thin swords with lots of curly metal bits protecting the grip. Most of the swords were red with blood.

Their mounts were like emus on steroids, shaggy monsters with gray and black feathers, and powerful legs that ended in heavy claws big enough to close around my chest. They had useless little wings almost hidden under their saddles, and mean-eyed, turtle-beaked heads as big as air conditioners. And to make them look even more like a cross between a T-rex and an ostrich, they had shrunken little arms dangling from their chests like broken doll parts, as weak and pointless as their wings.

Men and birds were kicking the crap out of each other, claws slashing, beaks snapping, swords clashing. It took me a second to make a guess at what was happening, and by then it was almost over.

The guys in the red cloaks were protecting a fancy coach drawn by four of the massive birds. The guys in the gold cloaks were trying to stop the coach, and were handing the red-cloaks their collective asses. There were more of the gold-cloaks, and they knew their stuff, turning their big birds on a dime and tagging the poor red-cloaks at will. I looked back the way they’d come. Dead red-cloaks all the way to the horizon. No gold.

I turned back in time to catch the big finish. The coach’s four harnessed birds, panicking in the middle of the brawl, turned too sharply. The coach heeled over on a big rock and slammed to the ground on its side. The wooden tang holding the birds to it snapped and, still harnessed together, they ripped free and sprinted for the horizon.

After that it was a slaughter. The gold-cloaks weren’t going to let the red-cloaks off with just a whipping. They rode down every last one of those poor bastards and chopped them to pieces. It turned my stomach. They might have been purple aliens, but their screams were plenty human.

While his riders finished mopping up, the leader of the gold-cloaks, a square-jawed superhero with a pencil-thin moustache, a flopped-over mohawk, and two pigtails hanging down in front of his ears like a yeshiva boy, climbed onto the coach. You could tell he was the leader. One, ’cause his guys ducked their heads whenever he gave an order, and two, ’cause his shit was flashier: zigzag designs on his cloak, gold sleeve armor instead of bronze, jewels all over his sword.

When he got to the top of the coach—which was the side, if you see what I’m saying—he wrenched open the door. A little long-haired purple guy in white popped up like a jack-in-the-box and flailed around with a dagger. Square-Jaw hardly blinked; a casual backhand with his sword and Long-Hair dropped back into the coach with a thump.

Square-Jaw grinned. His teeth were as white and straight as a row of sugar cubes. He reached down into the coach and lifted somebody out by the wrist. For a second I thought it was Long-Hair again, ’cause this one had long hair too, but when square-jaw lifted her a little higher I saw there were one or two differences.

She was your standard-issue hot babe, except in purple. Not exactly my type. When I go for gals, which ain’t that often—I’d been gay-for-the-stay in a couple of young women’s correctionals in my youth—I tend to go for big-ass, baby’s-got-back chicks. This gal was a mite too delicate for me, but it wasn’t hard to figure why Square-Jaw had the hots for her. Even screaming and trying to kick his teeth in, I could see she had the goods: pin-up body in a tiny yellow bikini-top and loin-cloth outfit, long black hair, pouty lips. The whole package in a handy, carry-out size.

Square-Jaw laughed off her attacks and threw her over his shoulder. He looked down into the coach again, like he was making sure Long-Hair was dead, then shot a glance around at the empty prairie. He shrugged. I read him like he was Marcel Marceau: “Why bother, he’s a dead man anyway.” He hopped back on his mount, signaled his gang, and off they rode, back the way they’d come.

Maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t leap into the fray and rescue the damsel in distress. Well, I’ll tell you. I’m not an idiot, that’s why. I’ve never minded a scrap, but naked and unarmed against the Ginsu clan wasn’t my idea of good odds, and besides, it was all coming over the plate a bit fast, new planet, new gravity, giant birds, guys out of an episode of
Xena: Warrior Princess
. And anyway, I hardly had a chance to react. It was over in less than a minute.

The part I don’t have an excuse for is why I didn’t try to help the dying red-cloaks as soon as Square-Jaw and his posse had giddi-upped off back the way they came. I could hear the poor guys moaning and sobbing, but I just stayed where I was, crouched behind the stone disk with my jaw hanging open.

Maybe I’d seen too many movies where the hero thinks the monster’s dead and then something rips out of its stomach and eats the guy’s face off. Whatever. I was chicken, and some of those guys probably died because of it. By the time I finally got myself moving, clouds of alien flies were settling over them for a mid-day blood binge.

Getting to the guys was like trying to walk on a trampoline. I kept springing up twice as high as I expected, and crashing on every part of my anatomy except my feet. At least I fell down as lightly as I stepped, so I didn’t get more than a few cuts and scratches. By the time I’d reached the killing ground, I’d adjusted my walk to a wobbly glide.