The Heroes of The Camps

The glass platform shattered as my feet left it, pushing myself forward and lunging for the edge of the Grand Canyon. My fingers clawed at the edge, dirt crumbling beneath my meagre weight. I let out a whoop of relief, but I had relaxed too soon as the dirt seemed to disappear in crumbs and I found myself falling.

I screamed an embarrassingly girly scream as I went into free fall, leaving my stomach somewhere far above me, flailing widly. But my panic was short-lived.

I smashed feet first into more red earth in a crash of blind white pain. When it subsided I looked down at my ankle and I immediately wished I didn't. It was bent at an angle that even I - with my failing grades in biology - knew to be the wrong way. The very wrong way.

I stripped off my heeled boots carefully and looked above at the raging storm that haunted the sky. The edge of the canyon was at leat 20 feet above and I was on a wide ledge with shattered glass lying in a carpet of remnants beneath me.

My brain began to tick with an instinct of planning I didn't even know I had. All of the students would be back at the bus, hopefully including Dani and Ira. But surely the nurse would notice a missing student and come looking for her, right?

"Nurse Harry!" I cried, suppressing my panic as best I could and putting on my usual happy-go-lucky front. "It's really nice down here and all but I think it'd be nicer if I was up there! Preferable even!"

A familiar, annoying face stuck over the cliff. It was one of the boys from our class - Daniel. I hated him. It was nothing personal, he was just a legitamite creep. Making perverted misogynistic jokes and hitting on girls who so didn't want to be hit on. But unfortunately he was the only help in sight.

"Daniel! Get help! Get Harry!" I called upwards of the crashing lightning of the growing storm.

But to my confused surprise and hindsighted horror he just grinned at me menacingly and dropped down from the cliff towards me, floating rather than falling.

I stared at him, my mouth agape. "You... didn't die?" I said like the blubbering idiot I am. Before I could do anything else like faint, his arm shot out and he grabbed me by the wrists, pulling me up into the air which was a rather novel sensation for me. If you're scared of heights, falling or dying then I highly suggest against it. We reached the top of the cliff but Daniel kept floating upwards as I struggled against his grasp.

"Put. Me. Down." I demanded. "Now!"

He didn't, pulling me higher into the crashing depths of the storm with my wrists aching from his grip and my whole body feeling like one big bruise as the rain pelted it.

"PUT ME DOWN!" I screamed.

"Gladly." He replied, his face turning into a transparency that rushed down his body to his hand which disappeared into air under my grip and I found myself falling for the second time.

I fell for far longer than I should have before I crashed to the ground in another smash of pain. I lay on the ground moaning for a few seconds before I was able to gather the will to struggle to my feet, ignoring the vicious pain that shot through my nerves and blurred my vision slightly. Okay that's the sugarcoated version, I could barely make out where the ground was. But that's a minor detail, right?

I saw a vague shape rush towards me and I braced myself in a defence position I had learned long ago from one of my more violent foster siblings and was now instinct.

"Who is it?" I called into the grey murk. A firm hand rested on my shoulder and propped me up.

"Are you alright, Phoebe?" Nurse Harry's voice asked me. I gestured vaguely into the area where I supposed my foot to be and he pressed something into my hand that seemed to be a slice or cookie of some kind. "Eat up." He told me and I did, or tried to, actually missing my mouth the first time in a spectacular display of my coordination.

When I actually managed to stuff the food in my mouth I almost choked. It tasted like the butterscotch hard candy that my mom used to bring home for me when I was very little. That taste totally didn't match the texture and I found it rather disturbing. I swallowed and a warmth rushed through my limbs, numbing my akle and clearing my sight.

Though then again maybe it just made me hallucinate.

I saw Ira fly out of the Canyon holding Dani and a huge golden sword, barely landing before beginning to fight... horses made out of wind?
Nurse Harry joined the fight holding a huge stick and wearing no pants, instead his legs were some kind of barnyard animals, a donkey's maybe?

And then as if I hadn't already had enough weirdness for a lifetime a huge chariot appeared through the pelting rain pulled by flying horses.

My body may have been used to pain but my brain was in no way accustomed to these weird hallucinations. So there on the soaked earth surrounded by mythological characters, my tongue still tasting butterscotch, I fainted.

Notes