"This is ridiculous," Larann C. Habre thought as she flew through the air. She could still feel the grinding of the sand under her foot as it slipped, sending her tumbling over the side of the cliff.
The wind howled in her ear as she dropped down, her stomach left back on the edge where she had started, or at least that is what it felt like. She thought about her night so far.
Terrible in every sense of the word, she thought. As if time decided to slow down, the events of the day replayed in her mind. Pot of coffee in the morning, skipped breakfast. Day at the office as a corporate zombie pretending the three-inch heels were not a hazard to her health. Lunch at her desk and rushing home to get ready for a date.
She had bought tickets to an escape room and picked one of the guys who wanted to date her on one of her many dating sites to go with.
But as soon as she got home, the guy called and said he didn't have a car and couldn't get to the location.
I should have just cancelled. Why did I give him a ride? Larann bemused. The escape room had been a failure, but then came the total fail. Her date decided that it was a good night to take a hike. Literally up the trail of a local mountain.
"I should have said no." Her heels hadn't been changed for more sensible wear. But he was cute and she was hoping to get lucky tonight. He didn't seem like a bad guy, and she was getting desperate.
Leave it to her to pick up a guy that was a murderer. He didn't even take her to dinner before he tried to kill her as her stomach grumbled at the lack of sustenance.
When they had reached a lookout over the city, Larenn had insisted on stopping. The backs of her feet were bleeding from mistreatment and she was done. The guy flared his nostrils, as if he could smell the blood.
That is when he pounced, or tried to. At first, she thought he was leaning in for a kiss and she leaned in as well, but then she saw a glint in his hand at the last moment.
Screaming, she pulled away and grabbed at her pepper spray. She aimed it at her assaulter and pressed down hard on the button. He screamed and fell back, the long kitchen knife in his hand falling to the ground. Where had he been hiding that? She wondered. She grabbed the knife to defend herself before running down the trail back to civilization.
Sure, pepper spray was illegal in the state to carry, but safety first. And honestly it had just saved her life.
Or it would have if she hadn't slipped and fallen off of a cliff. The bastard wouldn't even get jail time since all he would have to do was pretend that he's an upset date! How tragic.
He wouldn't even have to report her missing. He could tell the cops if asked that she had left him stranded on the top of the mountain.
As she was thinking up all the ways that her attacker would get away with her death, she realized that something was wrong.
That's funny, why am I still in the air? She looked around and realized that time itself had seemed to stop around her. The whooshing of air had stopped, and all was still in the bubble that surrounded her.
She shook her head and reached out to try and touch the filmy barrier, but it moved away from her. Beyond it, she stared into the darkness as the stars twinkled in the sky and the trees swayed in the night winds.
Growing bolder, she sat up but at that moment the world around her spun and tilted. Grabbing at her head, she screamed as she felt a sudden yanking from the core of her being. She heard a loud pop and then the world when blank.
When Larenn woke, she noticed a few things. She was naked. Like birthday suit naked. Except for her heels.
"What in the goddess of foot fetishes is this?" Scrambling, she tried to cover herself until she noticed where she was.
An ancient forest stood tall around her. She didn't see the cliff she had fallen from, nor did she see anything familiar. The silence was eerie.
Standing in wonder, she saw no one. Not even the animals were chirping or rustling in the forest.
"This is no time to freak out," she said to herself. "Of course, this must be close to the place I fell." Ignoring the fact that she was without attire except for the shoes, she didn't feel as if anyone had violated her.
Nothing that would have been sore or hurt was having any issues. Just her feet. Her heels sunk down into the moist earth and she tipped over again, her womanly bits exposed to whoever wanted to see. Luckily, the woods seemed empty.
She pulled the heels off and glared at them. They were her favorite brand named heels. The ones she wore anytime she needed a confidence boost. A presentation at work, a first date, now they were what she was wearing the first time she ever got lost in the forest.
Sighing, she held them as if they were weapons. She had read somewhere that the heels were hard enough to break a skull if needed.
"But where am I?" She had heard that it was best to stay where you were if you were lost, but did that apply here? If she didn't find something to cover herself and someplace that had water, she would not survive very long.
She squinted up at the sun peeking through the treetops. It was dark as evening twilight, though the sun was directly overhead. The gloom under the canopy would have been depressing if she cared to think of it.
She looked around the forest floor and noticed a familiar glint. Walking over, she extracted the long knife from where it had fallen on the ground.
A close look at it made her realize that the knife probably wasn't something people would have used in a modern kitchen. The blade was sharp but made with a type of stone while the handle looked to be bone.
With her decision made, spun around in circles with her eyes closed to pick a direction. When she opened them, her gaze landed on the biggest of all the trees that surrounded her. She picked up a stick and used it to cut a deep mark into the ground near it. Holding the knife and her shoes up in front of her, she began to walk.
With her feet bare, the forest floor was punishing. Sticks and stones would poke up and she would curse and hiss in pain.
The brush under the trees weren't anymore helpful. She used the blade to try and cut though the worst of the underbrush, but the knife wasn't made to work like a machete.
The undergrowth would scrape and nick her exposed flesh every so often making this hands down the worst experience of her life. After a while, she got used to the pain.
Larenn listened carefully, hoping that she would be able to hear someone or someplace that had water.
As she got further away from where she started, her worry grew. She hadn't been a nature girl though she had done her fair share of camping over the years.
But that kind of camping came with a pop-up tent and water bottles that you filled at the campsite that had safe drinking water. This was more like one of those hardcore survival camping television episodes. Larenn had watched a few and was glad that she at least had a knife.
It would have been better if she had something to start a fire with. She shivered as the wind picked up.
She began mumbling to herself after a while to keep from thinking too hard about what was happening. After a while, she came to the edge of the forest to a vast plain.
Tall golden grass swayed in the wind and it was the first time that it occurred to her that she may not be in Kansas anymore. Not that she had been there originally, but the sentiment was the same.
That was because in this field stood a creature that she had only ever seen in museums, sans their flesh. In front of her was a life-sized dinosaur. The arched back and long tail with the extra long neck reaching out to the trees at the edge of the forest made her want to scream, but the shock made the sound die in her throat.
She blinked and shook her head, certain that she was seeing a hallucination.
Where the hell am I?