Logan breathed in the storm smell through dilated nostrils, through the very pores of his skin. Even plate glass windows closed a man in, if they were never opened to the sweet, living air.
He winced, inwardly, where no one could see. The temptation to start walking and never go back hurt him worse than any gunshots ever had. He shut his eyes, then sat listening to the storm's whistling, moaning descent. It came shrieking across the lake, driving a wall of water before it. Logan could hear the rain smash down into the black lake long before the first drops touched his skin. Lightning flashed starkly against the backs of his eyelids, blazing pink through the blood vessels in the thin membranes. A bull 'gator grunted in the reeds nearby.
Logan sighed as the rain burst over the observation platform. The deluge soaked him to the skin in a matter of seconds. Toadstranglers, he'd called them when he was a kid, these afternoon storms that swept across the land, sheeting down to flood the wet, low lands and fountain up through storm drains too choked with runoff to hold the excess. Wistfully, he wondered if bass still lurked in the deep, hidden holes along the Suwannee and Santa Fe, back under the overhanging cypresses. It had been too many years since he'd haunted those banks, cane pole in hand, his old reliable .22 propped nearby in case he surprised a water moccasin.
Reluctantly Logan opened his eyes. Hair streamed wetly into his face. He pushed it back onto his forehead. The very thought of going back left him physically ill. But lightning could be dangerous, out in the open like this. Well, he could always wander over to the state museum or take shelter at the student union. He didn't have to go back just yet. Slowly Logan hauled himself to his feet.
His leg felt stiffer than usual. He winced when his weight came down on it. Probably the rain and a whole day spent sitting in one place. God, he was getting old. Logan favored the old injury slightly as he reached for his rip-stop nylon satchel and the much-tattered jacket that had gone everywhere he had over the past couple of decades. That jacket had seen more combat than most soldiers saw in a lifetime. Like his leg, it was the worse for wear. He shrugged it on over his wet t-shirt and hoisted the pack onto one shoulder. Then, watching his footing, Logan started back along the winding path that led to the bus stop.
He didn't get far.
The dirt track was a slippery river of mud, made even slicker by last year's pine straw and decaying leaves. He was moving cautiously, head bent against the solid wall of water beating down on him, when the world erupted into a pink hell. Logan jerked his head upward. Great, sizzling fingers of lightning stabbed into an ancient, towering magnolia along the edge of the path. Gigawatts of electricity poured earthward like some demonic waterfall. Brilliance burned his eyes. Instinctively—uselessly—he threw up a shielding arm.
The tree's crown exploded forty feet above his head, then deadly rivers of raw lightning branched and slammed into the ground on all sides of him, trapping him inside a cage of crawling pink hellfire. Searing blue afterimages left him half blind. Logan felt a tremendous overpressure as thunder bruised his chest, bloodied his ears. He saw the tree begin its long, toppling crash to the ground, tried to hurl himself out of the way...
His bad leg twisted. He lurched sideways. Then started down, directly beneath the smashing weight of the tree. Time crawled like cold syrup and held him motionless. He could do nothing but watch the tree kill him. Logan felt the sizzling electric tingle of lightning as it crackled around him again. Blinding light shut out the image of the rushing tree trunk—
Then he was falling, faster than the magnolia. Faster than the rain. His stomach tried to meet his lungs, as though he'd stepped into an empty elevator shaft. Logan yelled and twisted in midair. He should have hit the ground by now—should have been crushed into bloody mud—
He got his eyes open. Icy cold mist had somehow formed beneath his feet and risen up to swallow him. He twisted backwards, then sideways through freezing air, and wondered why he hadn't felt the pain of dying.
Logan sprawled headlong into something cold and wet. He jarred every bone in his body, so hard he couldn't breathe. Instinctively he covered his head with both arms.
The tree didn't crush him.
In fact, he realized slowly, it hadn't even fallen. At least, not anywhere that Logan could hear. Cold, dead silence gripped the air. Which was curiously dry.
It wasn't raining.
Slowly Logan lifted his head.
He lay face down in a snowdrift.
—A snowdrift?
Logan blinked. Then picked up a freezing fistful of white wetness. Snow. In Florida? In July? At four o'clock in the afternoon? He looked up...
Towering, stark conifers rose blackly into a night sky. Millions of frozen stars glittered like ice chips tossed carelessly aside by a giant ice crusher. God... Logan hadn't seen so many stars since—
He winced, despite a heroic effort not to.
"Well, this sure as hell ain't Ethiopia, now, is it?"
The bite of air in his lungs convinced him the temperature was somewhere down around thirty degrees Fahrenheit. He lowered his gaze to the snow-covered ground. Creeping, ghostly white mist had formed in low-lying areas, obscuring tree trunks and blending in with the snow.
The silence was deafening.
Badly shaken, Logan sat up. Broken bits of magnolia branch lay scattered across crusted snow. Beneath him, Logan found the crushed body of an immature male skink. He picked up the little lizard. Its smooth skin was still faintly warm from the sun it had been basking in just before the rain hit. He stared at it, at his surroundings, for a long, impossible moment.
Then slowly began to wonder just where he was.
Logan snorted wryly. Given his luck, it would turn out to be one of the lower reaches of hell. He'd always figured hell for a Florida boy would be some godforsaken, frozen wasteland. Florida summers were generally hot enough to fry even Satan's ass.
Trouble was, Logan didn't really feel dead.
Which left him with some unpleasant alternatives. Either he was trapped under the tree, maybe bleeding to death or running out of air and hallucinating... or he was elsewhere. He'd never had much respect for those sci-fi transdimensional novels where the hero falls into another universe invariably peopled either with naked, big-breasted women who'd been waiting all their lives to be bedded by a real man, or crammed full of ghoulies and goblins anxious to oblige the hero in his task of proving a twentieth-century man could hack and hew with the best of the bloody barbarians, using weapons that hadn't been seen in centuries—if ever.
Logan snorted again. He didn't see any half-naked ladies or ghoulie-goblins lurking in the trees. All he saw was trees. And lots of snow. And since he didn't think dead men were supposed to get frostbite, Logan decided he didn't have the faintest idea what had happened to him.
That realization didn't bring much comfort.
He shivered violently. A little ruefully, Logan realized he was still soaking wet. The water in his hair and clothes was beginning to freeze. Wherever he was, he couldn't sit stupidly in a snowbank all night. He had to get warm and dry—and he hadn't exactly been dumped here with an abundance of survival gear. Logan spat a few choice oaths into the icy air.