She leaned down, gripping at her bare calf. Shallow lacerations marked the majority of the flesh on her exposed legs, and they felt sticky from the streams of blood that had began to cloy in its winding journey down her legs. Panting harshly she sought to stand, and cried out hoarsely as a pain more intense than any she'd ever felt ripped through her battered body and she toppled back to the cushioned support of the leafy jungle floor. Something was definitely wrong. The leg she landed on when the half rotted old wooden bridge she'd fled across to escape capture collapsed broken and if she went to even so much as twitch it, she nearly blacked out. She had to move on.

She would just have to toughen up then. Waiting around in this place was practically a death sentence. After all, what was a busted leg compared to being dinner in some unnamed monster's belly?

With a low groan that echoed her misery she began to slowly inch herself into standing position. Heaving herself up painfully using the slender trunk of a nearby tree, the gnarled bark scoring her the tips of her fingers, she leaned gingerly on her left leg. Each unsteady baby step forward presented a dilemma and she soon grew light headed from the effort.

She absolutely had to get away from this horrid, festering swampland. It was like some nightmare vision from a bad science fiction movie, but no matter how she wished it, she would not wake up back in her own bed. Shipwrecked on some unknown, uncharted island in the middle of the nowhere, her companions dead of fatal injuries, disease, and predation, she on her own now. Here one could die in a thousand terrible ways. Seemingly innocent pools of murky water, where beneath carnivorous fish the size of salmon lurked, ready to consume any creature foolish enough to enter their territory, and vegetation that towered far over the heads of man, with far reaching vine-like tentacles that wound about and gradually strangled any creature who wandered too near to its base, lured close by the beautiful, seductive vibrant blossoms of scarlet and viridian that hung like ripened fruit from its boughs.

She was injured, disorientated, and without even the simplest weapon to protect herself. She was virtually meat on a stick for the swarms of vicious creatures possessing mouthfuls of teeth that hungered for a snack of human flesh. Like that grotesque, reptilian fiend that had pursued her for days across the forest in a mad game of

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