Page 196 of Hunters and Prey

In any case, I had to stop.

I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up this pace.

If they were still after me, I was going to have to come up with an alternate plan, and fast. Running indefinitely through a swamp, when I had no idea where I was going, or what I was running to, wasn’t a plan; it was a recipe for getting myself killed.

Still panting, fighting to slow my breathing, to adjust to the weird air, I stared up at the bowl-like sky. Straight above me, that sky was almost purple, mixed with gray and black clouds.

It was so fucking hot.

Even stark naked, I was drenched in sweat. My hair stuck to my back and neck.

Between that and my forced breaths, I was starting to feel claustrophobic.

I tried to assess my actual environment.

I still found the trees more unnerving than interesting. The naked, reaching branches, the weird, skin-like bark, the red sap running down the trunks that looked almost like blood… all of it made me feel I was running amongst corpses stuck in the ground.

Rather than green or brown, their bark was black, coated with streaks of that shocking crimson sap. All of them had it, even though they didn’t all appear to be the same breed of tree. The red blended with the sky, with the reddish-colored earth, with the water of the roiling lake that filled up most of the valley below where I stood.

I’d already guessed where I was, though.

It was the same place every time.

The same place, but utterly different.

As I gazed out over the dark water, I pulled the shape I knew out of its bloated and misshapen dimensions. The shape was still a familiar shape, despite how much larger that body of water was now, and how foul and choked with plant matter the water looked, and that weird red algae that seemed to cover most of the surface of the foamy water.

From what I could see of the land near where the Golden Gate Bridge should have been, someone had closed the bay off from the ocean altogether––maybe to deal with the rising tides. Instead of the opening out to the ocean, a thick ridge of black rock stood there, almost like the wall to a medieval castle, but hundreds of feet high.

It definitely looked more ominous than protective.

It also seemed to be made of the same material as those dark city towers across the bay, in what would have been Oakland in my world.

Whatever the beings of this world had done, whether it had been nature or aliens or man, the San Francisco bay––or whatever they once called it––was now Lake San Francisco.

Much of what would have been San Francisco itself had been swallowed by that lake.

The higher areas, like where I was now, were above the waterline now, but I wondered if that had always been the case. Given how completely the area where I stood had been taken over by that black, bleeding, mutant rain forest, I had no idea what used to be here, or if it in any way resembled the city I knew from my world.

I still saw familiar things, here and there.

Mirrored parallels remained. Warped mirrors, but I could still glimpse things I recognized, that resonated with my home world.

Pushing that from my mind, I frowned towards the city I could see in the distance.

This is a new one,my mind thought. You haven’t been to this one before.

The thought was there and then gone.

I wondered if I could find some place to sleep, some place where my body wouldn’t get dragged away and eaten by something, or simply killed before I could get out of here.

I still had no way to control the jumps.

I couldn’t even remember for sure where I’d been before I came here.

Shoving it from my mind, I clenched my jaw.

He was here. Somewhere. Maybe in that city.

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