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It wouldn’t be until years later that we learned the why behind the sudden firestorms that consumed our engine. It was a conflux of mundane Earth-physics meeting the arcane background systems of this new universe. Ask Rita the Witch for the particulars; she’s been studying it ever since she broke off from the camp.

Really, it’s a simple matter of survivorship bias that anyone here is even alive. As far as our hometown is concerned, we probably just dropped off the face of the Earth decades ago. An unsolved mystery, no doubt. Imagine if we fell into a world with the temperature set as if it was a month after the big bang; or one where human neurons couldn’t properly fire. We’d have all died instantly, no story left to be told. Heady concepts for children raised on a planet that’s flat, no doubt. Just nod if you all get the gist of it.

“Michael!”

Everyone was still in their uniforms. Big bulky shoulder pads. Not unlike bark-armor, really, but far less likely to take a blow from a jagged war club. And with the luggage bus missing, it was the only clothes we’d have. Vests had all our surnames on the back. You’ve seen our ‘ancestral armor.’ There have been some modifications, but same color, same fabric.

The cheerleaders were evacuated safely. I rushed up to meet the team cheer captain, Clarissa Flores, my girlfriend at the time. We’d seen a few movies together. Ah, let’s not pause to explain what a movie is.

Moving on.

“Back bus is a massacre,” I said after ensuring her safety. “Couple survivors managed to jump out. The rest…”

“What happened?” Clarissa asked.

“Still trying to figure that out. Anyone hurt?”

Coach was still trying his satellite phone. Everyone else knew at this point it wasn’t going to work.

“Don’t think we’re in Waco anymore, Mikey,” Hector said.

“We’re dead,” said another player. “We’re totally screwed, man.”

“Maybe we got T-boned by a dump truck and are in a mass coma,” suggested a cheerleader.

“All the buses at once?” asked another.

“Ooh, we’ve all died and gone to hell!”

“Sure don’t see any pearly gates,” Richard mused.

Panic was setting in. Coach started yelling at random, often injured, players to “go run back and find the road!”

I turned to one of Clarissa’s friends. “Maria. You have medical experience?”

“Bit of work at my parent’s clinic.”

“Can you treat the injured?”

“Quizas? Set a few bones. Maybe.”

“It’ll have to do. Help out who you can. Please.”

Maria nodded.

“I have CPR training. Oh, and a cert about how to deal with burns from that class at the community college.” Clarissa said. “I’ll help.”

“Thank you, Claire.”

Clarissa ran off to corral the wounded together. Take stock, see who was hurt the worst. Maybe do triage if it came to that.

“Going to need shelter,” Richard said offhandedly.

Just as he’d done in all our drills and in classes generally, Richard Atkins stayed near the group’s periphery, studying the scene.

“It’s the first thing you should look for in a survival situation.”

I shrugged. “Can’t stay in this field.”

Now, the nature of our athletic pursuits brought some advantages. Kept the group together, had some form of hierarchy of positions people looked to make decisions. It also had drawbacks. The land of Texas really likes sports. And if you’re on a team, it’s a full-time job in addition to standard schoolwork. You’re up at three in the morning, training until nine at night. Daily. Noon was scorching but not killer if hydrated. Texas has twenty-four hour days, not the sixty-hour cycles of the isle.

This is all to say, the members of our team did not pursue other extracurriculars. No boy scouts with wilderness survival training. Hell, I’d take anyone in JROTC over Coach Murphy’s performance up to that point.

Still, Richard’s advice did seem sound.

“Hector, go round up all the remaining water bottles, snacks, whatever. We’re going to go find somewhere close by for shelter.”

“Rodger, bossman.” Hector ran off to rummage through what we managed to evacuate off the buses.

“Everybody who can stand, we’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes,” I said. “If you can walk, help someone who can’t.”

Keeping busy helped keep despair at bay. All the cheerleader and football uniforms milled about. Of course, the fact that we all knew each other helped with cohesion. A bus full of strangers may well have drifted off in a panic then and there.

There was one exception to the now determined calm that had settled over the survivors: a pair of children’s wails. One of these I knew implicitly, the other…

“Assistant coach’s kid.” Hector said while sorting their rations.

I approached the kid. “Rita, right?”

Still bawling, the six-year-old girl nodded. The two youngest kids had been situated near the front of the cheerleader bus.

“Assistant coach is with the luggage bus,” Richard said. “Ain’t here. Maybe it’s still on the road?”

“Right.” I knelt to Rita’s level. “We’re going to try and find your dad. It may take some time, but he’s probably around here somewhere. In the meantime, you stick close to either myself, Richard here, or Clarissa and Maria if they’re not busy.”

Still silent, Rita nodded.

That left the second youngest child. No older than eight.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Trevor, c’mere.” I offered my arms. “Sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. Coach Murph is… in over his head. Had to keep the group together.”

Only, my little brother was terrified beyond the capacity for words. Actively shivering, mouth chattering so hard he wouldn’t talk. He’d never done that before. I should’ve gotten to him sooner, regardless of the panic of the others. Still, it kept the group from disintegrating in a panic…

I hugged Trevor until he stopped shaking.

“Good with kids, Mike?” Clarissa asked, leaning against the bus. “I like it.”

“Just doing what needs to be done,” I said.

My younger brother didn’t say another word for the first week. Honestly, I think he’d guessed something about our new surroundings early on. Maybe saw whatever portal or hole we fell through. Wish I could’ve thought to ask him.

It’d be another six months before we ever found any evidence of the baggage bus. Found enough remains to declare the assistant coach deceased. Didn’t tell Rita until we felt she was old enough to understand. I don’t know how much she remembers.

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Coach Murphy took the lead of the group, sending us on a looping path through an unknown rainforest. All the while, he blamed the now-deceased bus drivers for getting us lost.

The idea that we’d been transported into a new and alien world hadn’t quite registered with anyone yet. I had my suspicions – the trees were like nothing we’d see on Earth, let alone Texas. But it’s something so impossible your mind has ways to rationalize it all away, cling on to any other possible explanation.

So, our very first night on the isle was spent underneath a felled whitewood, a full mile from the glen. It was a precarious position; the trunk was rotting and could have dislodged itself from the clump of rocks it was perched upon at any time. Whole group would’ve been flattened in an instant. Maybe that was Murphy’s hope?

I closed my eyes and slept immediately. Awoke with no dreams to speak of, just closed my eyes, went through an extra-long sleep cycle, then opened them with seemingly no time passing aside from the fact it was light out now. The new world was still there; no nightmare, no trauma-induced coma.

So unprepared were we that no watch was set. Richard volunteered unprompted – I found him still up when the team awoke.

“No bugs,” he said.

“What?” I rubbed my eyes; sleep having done nothing for my full-body fatigue.

“No mosquitoes. Noticed that last night. But there are no bugs at all. A few of these fist-sized rodents poked around the camp overnight. Sure ain’t from around Temple. They were particularly interested in the flowers over there. They may have the role of pollinators.”

Rick pointed at a bush with blue flowers that stood out amidst the white-tinged bark of the forest.

“Oh.” I held a hand up to my head to nurse a spiking icepick headache to my temples. “God, this really is happening, isn’t it?”

Rick held an unlit cigarette he’d evidently smuggled onto the bus. “Pretty much.”

The rest of the team was still out cold. Heat was rising, with a humidity that was already extreme even by Dallas standards. It’d force them to wake up before long.

“How long was I out?”

“Twelve hours. Sun’s just now rising, too. So that also ain’t Texas. Hector said we had enough water for about half a day. But if days last longer here...”

A yawn from the broken side of the tree. Hector arose, stretching, his jersey drenched in sweat. He fumbled for his glasses.

“Hey, chief. Hell of a postgame party last night.” Hector looked around the surroundings. His head dropped with a silent sob. “Goddamnit.”

Thus began day one.

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“We need to find food,” Coach Murphy declared. “Everyone spread out and report back when you find something.”

“There’s enough jerky and trail mix for a day and a half,” Richard said under his breath. “A small team should go looking for a river or lake. The rest of us should build proper shelter. Heat will only get worse. Need to find out something about wherever the hell we are.”

I took Richard aside. “Look, Coach’s call won us the big game. At least trust him for a bit.”

A piss poor justification? Yes. But it kept the team together in the early days. If I’d known how things were going to turn out…

Trevor clinged to my shin, gazing up at Richard fearfully. I rustled his hair.

The search for food proved disastrous. So different was the biology from Earth that we didn’t know what counted as a fruit and what was an acidic gland to a carnivorous plant.

Hector and a few of the guys returned, out of water but having salvaged what they could from the bus crash site. They recovered a tire iron, a shovel, and some rope. One spare tire that had fallen free of that smoldering bus was still hanging out of the tree. If the luggage bus had just crashed in the same field, we at least would’ve had some materials with which to build the early shelters.

“Coach says he’s found some berries up the hill,” Hector said nonchalantly.

“There has to be some way to poison test those,” I said.

“Too late. Frank and Hunter have already downed a few.”

I swore. Well, we’d know eventually either way.

“How’re we doing?” I asked Hector.

Hector let out a mirthless cackle.

I asked again. He cackled again.

“Clarissa, how are we doing?” My molars ground against each other.

“D-minus. Not bad given the circumstances.”

“Thanks, dear.” I exhaled sharply.

“Better than you’re last algebra test, eh, Cap?” Hector managed, still cackling like a supervillain.

“How about we talk only when absolutely needed?” I asked. “To conserve energy. This heat’ll kill if you let it.”

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Sometime later, Richard returned from an unprompted scouting endeavor of his own.

“Hear flowing water off to the west,” he said. “No sign of a river yet. Once we find it we can follow it downstream until we find someone. Anyone.”

Catching fish would alleviate upcoming food supply issues better than berry-picking. Plus, it would help resupply our canteens with some proper boiling.

“Alright. You’ve got a point. We’ll head out there once the heat dies down.”

Twelve hours of near continuous heat and humidity building up in the atmosphere. Sun was barely even overhead. I’m still not used to it, even today.

“What’s this about heading west?” Hector asked.

It was proving hard to get our bearings. We mostly operated by setting up waypoints and finding particularly memorable trees. Risk of wandering around in circles assuming we were making progress was high.

Richard presented a compass. It still worked. West pointed back behind him. Funny thing, though, that was where the sun had risen from. It was drifting east. Because even that couldn’t be normal.

My hair stood on end suddenly. Richard felt it too, his head swiveling towards some commotion up a nearby hill.

This was before we heard the screams.

“Trevor, keep five feet behind us,” I told my brother.

Hector, Richard, I, and Clarissa were joined by a few cheerleaders as we ran up the hill. Skimpy rations, general humidity, and a lack of potable water left us anemic and out of breath even on a short incline.

Screams and curses came from the edge of a thicket of bushes with berries that glowed a faint bioluminescent blue.

Hunter and Frank were doubled over complaining of stomach aches. But they weren’t the object of concern. Coach Murphy held his left hand close to his chest.

“Stings. Plant frickin’ bit me, by God!”

I held my hand out to my side, urging the group to stay back.

Coach Murphy’s hand wasn’t bitten, it was melting.

“Damn fruit has a stinger on it,” the coach rasped, stumbling about.

I turned to Claire.

“Where’s Maria?”

It would be ten minutes before Maria could arrive. Others had consumed various berries unprompted and come down with a range of illnesses.

“This plant is acidic,” I informed her.

Maria took a step back from the bush. Better safe than sorry.

Nowadays, we know that fruit with red spots is deadly poisonous, and purple fruits are survivable but will give you a hell of a stomachache. That anything with a faint blue glow is an acidic gland. That carnivorous acid-dripper bushes can melt flesh and use the bones of felled mammals as fertilizer. No way of knowing that then – though the corpses of various rodent-analogs should have alerted Murph.

“Can you save his fingers?” I asked Maria.

Maria looked back in wide-eyed shock.

Unlikely.

I gently grabbed Maria’s shoulder and leaned in. “Just, get him stable. Please.”

Maria nodded, more confident this time.

Coach Murphy would lose three fingers on the hand that grabbed the acid-dripper. Lost his pinkie on the hand that had grabbed onto the wound. All that, and he wasn’t even one of the people who tried eating untested fruit yet.

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