She limped because the creature had bitten her in the calf.
It hurt so, and the bleeding had yet to congeal. But she had no time to stop and attend to the wound. If it was rabid or not, she'd have to worry about all that later. Right now the pressing business was to find some kind of weapon-because the thing was after her again, and it meant her harm.
"It's no pretty pickle," she mumbled, taking in the bleak desolation all around, the steep walls that ringed the canyon like some kind of infinite Bad Lands, one with no real exit.
She saw the transponders on top of the walls, and she was far from stupid; she knew they were watching; that her progress was being monitored, as if she were some mouse in a glass terrarium, and the snake was hungry. But the sandstone walls just crumbled in her hands when she tried to climb them.
She wouldn't get out that way. But the harder she ran, the more the blood oozed down into her shoes.
She needed a spear. Better, a bazooka-to kill the thing behind her. It howled sometimes in its insane fury to find her, like it was starving, desperate to eat.
Even more than a weapon, the professor wanted information-That was the key; understanding what they had done to her. Why had they gassed her, abducted her right from her very own campus? What was the point of this harrowing sadism? - She'd failed her students frequently, but they usually just moaned in her office.
Who would retaliate as murderously as this?
But the whisper in her guts told her what she needed to know-It all had to do with that newfound knowledge of Proto-World; of that she could no longer doubt.
'Why did that detective brought it to me? What part did he play in all this?'
And where was she? - On the lunar surface? The crumbling soil turned to a stark yellow in color, and the kaleiscope sky above panicked her; everything was menacingly skewered. She wanted to cry, but she was too busy trying to live.
'Is this their idea of sport? What kind of horrific death-match are they playing?'
"Aoowww!" The ghastly howl came from behind her.
It smelled her, all right.
It was gaining on her again.
YOU ARE READING
Project Purple
General FictionFourteen Americans volunteer for a unique three-month project to recreate America's early colonial experience for a worldwide on-line audience. The colonists have been deceived--They don't know their ordeal has been gradually, and brutally, altered...
