A split second ago, she was hovering underwater, with the jaws of death rocketing towards her. Instant later, she found herself tumbling down from the sky. Her world spun wildly, with the blue of the sky and the green below her rapidly switching places. Her whole body was shot with incredible pain, and yet her mind managed to perceive the sheer absurdity of the scene. The sky, the woods, and even the goddamn shark tumbling through the air beside her, certainly as shocked by this development as she was. She hit the canopy, breaking through thin branches, and by sheer luck fell butt-first onto a soft mossy knoll, crashing through it and into the mire below. The pain caused her to black out, but before fainting she managed to hear two additional thuds and a loud crash.

She awoke a few minutes later to the sound of shrieking teens. Body shaking, she rose from the stinking water. She hurt all over, as if she had a full body cramp or were electrocuted. She frantically checked herself for injuries, but the only damage she noticed was a shallow gash on her stomach, likely caused by a branch she fell on.

The screams grew louder, and she fought through a massive headache to focus her eyes and scan her surroundings. She saw the teens, and froze. The younger girl stood not far from her, screaming her head off, in a language Candace could not recognize. The older girl was sprawled on the ground under a massive tree, shaking and heaving in agony, her left leg bent sideways at the knee.

The true problem, however, was a half-ton shark hanging right above her, its massive body suspended on branches that it got impaled on. The shark thrashed, snapping its jaws in silent, pain-induced rage, and bled all over the girl and the swampy ground. With every swing of its massive tail, the branches holding it creaked, and threatened to give in. If it fell on the girl, she would be killed by its sheer mass, never mind its bite.

She leaped towards the girls, fighting each step as her feet got sucked deep into the swampy muck. Her sudden movement caused the shark to panic, and it fell two meters lower, as the branches snapped. Now it hung only an arm-length above the girl. Candace dove for the teen, grabbed her and rolled in one motion, as the giant fish slammed maw-first into the very place where she was a second ago. It fell sideways, and in its death throes slapped Candace with its tail, sending her flying. She bounced off the trunk of the three with enough force to get dizzy, and fell on her knees. The giant striped mass rolled towards her, and onto the injured girl who uttered her last scream and fainted. Candace sprung like a steel piston and hit the fish with her shoulder, trying as hard as she could to stop it from crushing its hapless victim.

“Pull her out!" she yelled to the other girl. "Pull, now!" The younger teen woke up from her hysterical stupor and did as told, grabbing her sister’s arms. The shark trashed again, an undulating shake of a dying fish, and Candace chose the moment it swayed to push at it with all her strength.

For a moment, the enormous weight of the shark fell on her shoulder and she felt like her spine was going to snap, but she just tensed her muscles harder in adrenaline-fueled desperation, and it rolled off the girl. Before it could roll back, she pushed her away with a foot, putting her out of danger. This however, put her directly under the falling head of the shark, which pinned her hand to the ground with, and snapped its jaws right beside her face.

Her fear was replaced by animalistic rage. She grabbed a piece of a broken branch sticking out of the creature’s gills, and stabbed it right back with vengeance. She stabbed, and stabbed again, turning the gills into bloody mince. Finally, she rammed the stake into the shark’s beady black eye. She had no strength left, but neither did the shark. it was no longer trashing, just laid there, its maw closing and opening as if biting the air it could not breathe. She fell on her back, panting.

“Jesus. Fucking. Christ," she muttered, exhausted. "Child, help get that bloody thing off me.”

The girl approached the shark cautiously, but mid-step something changed in her, and she gave it a violent kick in the gut.

“Oi! Stop that, I beat it’s arse, it's dead. Just push at the fin, will ya? I will try to pull my arm out from under it.”

The good news was, that her arm was not crushed, or even broken. The bad news, her wrist was probably sprained, and she did not remember her fingers bending in such a funny way before. But with effort, and clenching her teeth through pain, she could make a fist and move her fingers. She took that opportunity to flip a bird at the dead shark.

“How’s your sis?" She asked the teenager, who immediately went from adrenaline-ruddy to terrified pale. They both crouched over the prone body of the older girl.

She was breathing, and her heartbeat was even and sound to Candace’s estimation, but she remained unconscious. Her leg was in bad shape. The knee bent almost completely sideways, and the joint was a swollen mess that started to turn red from the internal bruising. 'Defo rooted', she thought. Not beyond repair, but her long experience with sports injuries taught her an injury like that will make the girl immobile for weeks, if not months.

“Kid, you now listen to me closely. We need to do something while your sis is still unconscious. You grab her tight. Put a stick between her teeth. Hold her down, so she won’t buck.”

She waited for the girl to do as told, and psyched herself up. She was no stranger to pain, but hurting someone else was a different challenge altogether. She straddled the prone girl's pelvis, and examined her knee. The girl buckled and yelped in pain, suddenly awake, but they held her down. Candace pushed her fingers into the swelling, and felt that the joint was dislocated, but not shattered, at least she did not feel any broken lumps in there. She grabbed the leg by the calf, her one injured hand protesting, and, with a fluid motion set the popped joint back into the proper place.

The girl immediately shot up, nearly buckling her off, bit through the stick in her teeth, and ushered an ear-splitting shriek. The warmth running down their legs informed Candace that the girl also pissed herself, but she had no strength left to be annoyed by that. She fell off the crying teen, and curled into a ball herself. For a while, the only sound around was the sobbing of the three women, and the song of swamp birds, oblivious to the horror under the canopy.

“Miss? Where are we? Why we in forest?" called the younger girl. Only now did Candace notice her strange accent. Was it Russian? Slavic, definitely.

“I…uh… bloody Hell kid, I have no idea.”

Only now, when the danger was gone, did she notice how impossible the situation was. Barely a few minutes ago, they were splashing in the ocean, almost two hundred meters off shore. Now, they were deep in the woods, or to be precise, an overgrown swamp, with no ocean in sight.

Worse, this did not look at all like Australian wetlands. Candace was no botanist, but the trees and the shrubs were completely wrong.

And why were the three of them nuddy as newborns? She could think of several scenarios where unconscious young women are kidnapped, stripped naked, and dumped in the woods, and none of them were optimistic thoughts. However, none of those scenarios explained how five hundred kilos of stripey 'Noah' ended up there with them. Nor why they fell from about two stories high crashing through treetops.

'So', she thought, 'we are not kidnapped by some rapists or human traffickers, I can cross that off the list of possible dangers. It's just a matter of being inexplicably stranded in the woods, with a sprained wrist, two hysterical kids, and a dead shark for company. Fucking excellent.'

She stood up, grunting in pain. Trying to shoulder-press a shark did a number on her back. Looking around made her even more confused than she was before. They were nowhere near Perth, or likely anywhere in Australia. For one, the tree she stood next to was a giant gnarly oak, the likes of which certainly did not grow in the Australian wilderness. Maybe there were some planted in parks, but none would be as thick and ancient-looking as this one. And they weren’t in a bloody park, that was sure!

Only then she noticed that the girls were shivering, and huddling together. She felt the shivers as well, but just chalked it up to post-traumatic stress. Less than an hour ago, she was baking in the sun on a beach so heated the sand could roast your feet. But in these woods, the temperature was maybe a third of that, if not less.

They needed to move and look for help. Being stuck in a cold swamp, knees deep in water, was not good for anyone’s health.

“Kids, I have no clue where we are, or why we are here. I'm just as confused as you are. But we need to move. We stay here, wet, cold, in the dark, and we'll get hypothermia so bad our arses will fall right off. “

“But Miss! "protested the younger girl, "This emergency!" she paused, looking for words in unfamiliar language. "We learn in school, when emergency, stay and call for help. Not move. Rescue come. Politsiya? Police? We call Police!”

“Lassie, do you maybe have a mobile stashed up your cooch? I know I don’t! We can't call anybody if we have no damn phones on us! Nobody is coming for us. Nobody knows where we are. Hell, we do not know where we are, and we sure are not anywhere close to where we met. Does that look like Cottesloe Beach to ya?" she gestured around and felt anger rise in her, but seeing the girl shrink under her gaze, and on the verge of tears, she curbed it.

“Im sorry!" the girl said, scared but adamant. "how we go? Sveta… with her bad leg. Not walk.”

Candace exhaled and rubbed her nose in exasperation. She was not what one would call a people-person, and she hated teens in particular. Empathy was not her strongest suit. Which, she thought, might have been one of the reasons her career as a coach never took off.

“Fine. I’ll carry your sis. But you need to help me. And we need to find a sturdy walking stick to test the ground with. I don’t want to walk straight into a sinkhole.”

Trying to load a semi-conscious and lamed girl on her back was easier said than done. Finally, they grabbed her underarm on both sides, and limped forward like a five-legged animal. On the way, Candace found a sapling she turned into a long pole to feel the swamp in front of her. Various slithering creatures fled their wake, and she tried hard not to think what they were stepping on. Or, in fact, where they are going, other than away from water.

The lamed girl moaned and seemed to become more lucid. She tensed her muscles every time her injured leg brushed the undergrowth, which was with almost every step.

“Thank you, Miss. You saved us," muttered the girl through pain-clenched teeth.

“No worries. And don’t thank me yet, I have no idea what I'm doing. We ain’t saved, til we're found by some people in uniforms. Or find a road. Fuck, finding some trash, a stray candy wrapper or a frothy can would at least show us that there are humans around. This place is too bloody pristine for my taste."

She saw the girl’s face go pale. "Soo, what is your name... Sweetie?", she changed the subject quickly.

“It’s Sveta. Svetlana. And my sister is Natasha. We call her Nata.”

“You girl’s Russian?" she asked, to keep the distracting conversation rolling, as she scanned the wilderness for the least dangerous path.

“We are half-Russian. Our Papa is Russian, Mama is Moldovan.”

“So what were you two doing off the shore of Perth? Quite a paddlin’ from Russia I gather."

The joke fell flat on Nata, but Sveta grinned.

“Our Papa is a big businessman, shipping industry. Was working on a deal in Perth. Told us it is a family vacation and we must go as well. He was busy, and Mama went to do some shooting, so we decided to stay in the hotel by the beach.”

“Mama went shooting? She’s an assassin or something? A big game hunter?" Candace was quickly running out of corny jokes, but it seemed to be working.

“Noo," Sveta laughed." She is a model. Was a model. Maybe is, again? You never know with Mama. She was swimsuit model before she met Papa. Now she wants to be classy model, for big modeling house. Papa say it is too late for her. She is an older woman, like you Miss.”

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Candace resisted the temptation to slam the girl face-first in the mud and hold her there until the bubbles ceased coming out. Her? Older woman?! That rude little fuckwit… She was barely thirty-five, and looked no older than twenty-nine, at least according to the lads at the pub. She had the body of a goddess, though she would be first to admit she was much closer to a muscular Athena than a curvy Venus. Though, to the girl’s defense, she and her sister were a pair of ridiculously cute blonde Barbie dolls straight out of a schoolboy’s wank fantasy, so compared to them she must have looked like an ancient mannish hag.

“soo, Yous Daddy rich? Some kinda Ruskie Oligarch, or a business genius?" she switched the subject, but not without a sarcastic barb.

“Noo, Mama is business genius. Pappa is… what the word… work-a-holic?”

“Whatcha mean?”

“It is like this, Miss," the girl grinned mischievously. "Papa work very hard twenty years to be millionaire. Mama met Papa on date, work only one night to be millionaire girlfriend, then millionaire wife. Who better business genius?”

Candace snorted a hearty laugh, scaring a flock of tiny birds from a nearby branch. She could appreciate healthy cynicism in young women, it made her more hopeful for the future of womanity. Maybe these two were not as stupid as they seemed.

“I guess ya right. What do you think, Blondie Number Two? Your Mum’s the real mastermind?" she asked Nata, who seemed to be coming off the initial adrenaline high, and looked more and more distracted and tired as they trudged on.

“Mama…,” she searched for words. "tricky-smart, not smart? " she ran out of English and looked at her sister.

“Nata want to say Mama is clever but not very smart. Make big plans, manipulate, but no success in the end?" Sveta said, seemingly not comfortable with this line of questioning.

“ Oh, I know the type," said Candace. "Trust me girls, I'm the exact opposite. I make the least clever plans and work like a maniac to accomplish them. Like, do you see that hill on the horizon? My genius plan is to drag you two there, climb on top of it, and shout at the sky until someone finds us. Piece’a’piss, it's only maybe ten or twelve kilometers from here, through treacherous wetlands. We’ll get there in no time.”

It was not, however, as easy as Candace tried to make them believe. They only managed to cross another two or three klicks before Nata was completely winded and Sveta turned pale and started shaking. Walking like that kept aggravating her injured leg whenever they misstepped or hit a lump of swamp-grass.

The hopelessness of their situation also seemed to finally be downing on the girls, making them shiver not just from the cold but from pent-up anxiety as well. Candace felt it too, her iron shell of trained willpower started crumbling.

Being in the middle of untamed wilderness was completely unfamiliar to her, and somehow scarier than swimming through the ocean away from shore. Even the shark that almost killed her was at least a familiar danger she was trained for, but she had no idea what could be lurking in these woods. She felt watched by countless inhuman eyes, and was suddenly reminded that she was a prey animal here, just like she was in the water. And atop of that, being naked made her feel even more vulnerable. She spent most of her adult life in a swimsuit, and had no problem with being seen nude by fellow humans, but being nude under this dark, green canopy where hell knows what hid in the shadows, made her skin crawl. She forcibly averted her attention from the leeches and creepy worms that stuck to their bare feet and calves, at least their bites were painless. Luckily, the girls were too knackered to pay attention to their legs, for they would almost certainly freak out. The sun, barely visible through the gaps in the green in front of them, was nearing the horizon.

“Ok my Pretties, we did our best, but we won't make it to the hill before the night falls. No use stumbling in the dark, we might get ourselves into a sinkhole or walk in circles and miss the hill completely. I think we need to find a dry enough spot and build ourselves a safe nest. We need to think of some way to keep ourselves warm, and to secure Sveta’s leg better. Draggin’ it through the muck like a plow is not the best strategy.”

About a half-an-hour later, they found a small island of bushy grass. Candace felt as if her muscles were put through an industrial thresher. First a forceful swim against the surf, then the agony of her inexplicable vanishing and reappearance in this weird place, and then a long trek over the most inconvenient terrain with a teen hanging on her shoulder.

She crawled onto the pleasantly dry grass, pulling the girls with her, and laid there, panting. She closed her eyes, only for a minute. That minute lasted long enough that the sun had set almost completely, bathing them in stripes of fading orange light cut with dark shades. She woke up to the feeling of pinpricks on her calf.

“What..? What are you two doing?" Nata sat cross-legged next to her, while Sveta cuddled to her side. Nata was working on Candace’s leg, methodically scraping off leeches with a sharp stick.

“Thanks, love. Those things are disgusting! Hope they don’t carry diseases. I feared yous be freaked out by them. You’re taking it better than I thought you would." She said sitting up. She wanted to reciprocate, but the girls seemed to have already groomed themselves. They even cleaned up most of the dirt, and, incredibly, seemed to have combed their hair and put them in high buns using grass strands as ties.

“You know Miss. We Russian," Sveta said, shrugging. "Russian know life hard and bad. It is what is. This only small bugs. Pyavky, we call. Not harm. Old women say pyavky good for blood flow.”

“Quite a philosophy for new-rich princesses, but who am I to judge? I'm pretty sure my circulation is very good after that hike, no medieval blood-letting techniques necessary.”

She stood up and stretched. Her sorry back popped loudly, protesting the previous abuse. She knew that whatever soreness she felt now would be twice as bad in the morning when the burn set in.

“Alright, before the night falls, we need to take care of some business. It’s cold, and it's going to get much colder than that. You two stay here and tear up as much of that grass as you can, we need to cover ourselves with it for the night. Im’a head out and find some sticks and vines to make some kind of a split for Sveta’s leg. Maybe a crutch for her to lean on. She can’t be dragging her foot over the ground, that will make the injury much worse. We also cannot keep her weight on our shoulders, we already ran out of strength, and we're nowhere near civilisation." She felt through the murky water in front of her with her walking stick, and hopped off the grassy patch. Yuck. Bon appetit, leeches.

“But Miss! You cannot leave us here! What if animal come?”

“What animal?" asked Candace "I doubt another shark will spontaneously fall from the sky, though you never know. And besides, you vastly overestimate my ability to fend off wild beasts. It might be that I defeated one giant shark in single combat, but that is an outlier, not a rule. Don’t let my glorious musculature fool you, I'm not actually a barbarian warrioress, just look the bit. I am sure you two can avoid being eaten for ten minutes while I'm gone.”

“But…”

“No butts! I need to take a piss, and I have exactly one percent dignity left after all that happened, so I'm not pissing in front of the two of ya, and on the same grass patch I will be sleeping on. Stay here, eyes open, I’ll be right back.”

Without letting them protest further, she walked away, testing the green soup in front of her for sudden drops. A snake swam across her path, but she just sent it flying with a whack of her walking stick. She was, after all, half-Australian and half-Korean. Both kinds of her ancestors would eat such a snake for breakfast, likely literally. As she trudged forward, the wooded marsh gave way to a half-submerged clearing, overgrown with what looked like giant reeds, or maybe a strange kind of bamboo. She crouched to do her business and considered the path ahead. Cutting straight through the bamboo thickets was not possible, they grew thicker and thicker with every step, and even in the evening gloom, it was obvious that the path would not be traversable. They needed to go around, which would turn a ten-klick trek into a thirty-klick one. Worse still, the path around the bamboo-reeds looked even more swampy, and in the distance seemed to turn into an elongated oxbow lake, or maybe even a lazy branch of a river.

But maybe this was a solution, not a problem? Floating downriver was almost certainly easier than forcing their way through the bushes on foot.

She tried to break some of the false bamboo plants. They were too elastic to break, but luckily, twisting them around tore the delicate underwater roots making it easy to just pull them out completely. In a few minutes, she had more sticks of bamboo than she could carry, each twice as long as she was tall. Now all she needed was a vine to tie them with, but that could wait for tomorrow, she could not see well in the rapidly falling dark, and even the grass island she left behind was nearly invisible. She tugged the bunch of sticks along with her to the grass patch.

The girls were gone.

She dropped the bundle and started frantically combing through the grass. As she turned over a big grassy blanket, a hand darted from under it and grabbed her. The girls pulled her down and the older sister whispered into her ear.

“Miss! Please hide! Rat-monster!”

“What rat-monster, what are you talking-”

“There Miss! Rat-monster in the water!”

Candace looked up. She saw two dots of reflected light shining in the dark like polished pennies. Below the eyes, she saw a wiggling rodent’s nose and a pair of giant incisors. The animal swam closer and got onto the grass patch.

“Rat-monster! "cried the girls." Kill it!”

Candace grabbed a bamboo stick like a spear and lunged at the animal. She stopped mid-step and laughed out loud.

“It's a bloody beaver, you wussy dimwits! it’s completely harmless, just oversized. I think I saw one at the zoo once, but it was not even half the bulk.”

The beaver looked confused by their unwelcome presence but did not really seem afraid.

"You see girls? "Candace said " It's like a big hamster, we are more dangerous to it than it is to us. D’ya still want me to kill it?

"Maybe not miss, just make it go away!

“Ya sure? I am a bit hungry and it looks like it has plenty of meat on its bones. Maybe we should eat it, to get more energy for tomorrow’s trip?

"Nooo, Miss we will not eat beaver!

Candace laughed.

“That is what my ex-boyfriend said, hence why he is an ex. You gotta eat the beaver every once in a while, if you want a girl to stay happy!”

“Miss, we don’t understand! Stop joking! Make the beaver go away, pleaaaase…”

She poked the creature with a stick.

“Right, now mate, piss off. Don’t ya have a dam to build somewhere?”

The beaver clambered off the patch and swam away. She watched it go, amazed at how big it was. She only saw a beaver once prior, but was sure they were not supposed to grow this big. What was it with this fucking place?

“Girls, where do you think beavers live? Are there beavers in Russia?”

“I think so, Miss. "Nata answered. "Never see one. But learn in school.”

“What about bamboo? Is there bamboo in Russia?”

Nata paused, and shot some rapid-fire questions in Russian at Sveta, who responded.

“We are not sure. Bamboo is in China. Maybe in east Russia. “

“Ok, now the big bickies question, is there a place where beavers live and bamboo grows?”

The girls consulted again.

“Maybe… in China? In North? We do not know.”

Splendid! She thought to herself, really, really hoping they were wrong. Admittedly, she was a dumbarse at school, and only finished secondary due to her stellar swimming skills overshadowing her poor grades, but even she knew that China was a giant country and that the North was mostly wilderness. For all she knew, the nearest town could be not twenty away, but ten times that.

Plus, she was not really keen on being found and questioned by Chinese authorities. If the girls were right, then their options were to die a thousand klicks away from civilization or end up in Chinese military prison for being spies, trespassers, or whatever. And she did not fancy the chances of two naked girls and a half-Korean woman in a place like that. Especially since the only words in Chinese she knew were two swear words and a name of a spicy dumpling dish. Not really useful.

“Alright Moppets. Now that I defeated another giant monster to save you, let us focus on what needs doing. Covering yourselves in grass was a good idea, though maybe we should tear out more of it and make some kind of a shelter on top of us, in case it rains? “

They spent another hour pulling the tall grass by the roots, and piling it up, to form a cozy nest. Then she made them put up a triangular frame out of bamboo sticks on top of it, and cover that with grass too. The resulting shelter was not wind-proof or water-proof, but when they crawled inside, the girls could no longer see the swamp around them and get freaked out by the night’s creatures.

By the time they were done, it was so dark that Candace could not see her hand in front of her face. Only the infrequent peeks of moonlight between the clouds occasionally illuminated the dark around, drawing menacing shapes out of the nearby bushes and leaning trees. Every once in a while, she could glimpse pairs of silvery pinpoints staring at them. She hoped those were just beavers. Just to be sure, she held a bamboo staff firmly at all times, ready to stab at any suspicious noise.

“Yous asleep?" she asked the girls.

“Nata is asleep. I am not." Said Sveta.

“Great. I'm stuffed. I need some shut-eye, you keep watch. Wake me up when you feel like you need some too.”

“What if animals come?”

“They won’t come, it’s past their curfew," she said yawning.

“Miss! Don’t joke, I mean it.”

“Girl, grab one of them bamboo sticks, if something comes, hit it hard. If it won’t piss off, make a noise and wake me up.”

“What if it is big animal, like bear? “

“There are no bears here… " She muttered, pulling a grass clump over her head.

“Just like there was no shark?" asked Sveta.

“Don’t make me smack ya, girl. It was an honest mistake. Now let me sleep.”

“Miss...”

“What. Again.”

“We will survive?”

“Nata and I will. Your lamed arse gets abandoned here for being annoying." She felt the warmth of the girl cuddling next to her and softened up. "Joke, girl. No worries, I’ll get us out of here.”

She drifted away to the sound of night birds calling.