by P. Mattern
As we move past the giant thing wedged in the pipe, I see the profile of rows and rows of jagged teeth and realize we are passing in proximity to a creature that I have only seen in books about prehistoric creatures. I realize it might be a Megalodon, it is so huge, roughly the size of a water-treatment tank.
Lucky for us, it’s dead.
We hit the surface inside the Pump House, gratefully gasping in lungsful of air. We manage to clamber up some concrete abutments to where it is relatively dry, and spontaneously hug, happy to be alive.
That’s when I notice Rollo’s hand is bleeding bad.
We scrabble through our bags and realize we have no first aid equipment whatsoever. Finally, I sacrifice a tee-shirt, ripping it into a decent pressure bandage to help staunch the bleeding of the nearly four-inch slice across Rollo’s palm.
I hug Rollo again, I realize that he is my hero, and I am his faithful sidekick. We are outside the Collesium, and we are alive, and that is already more than I thought possible.
“Wait, aren’t there any guards on the perimeter?” I ask, but Rollo puts a finger to his lips and points upward.
Right above our heads, I can clearly hear the hollow echo of footsteps. I look around and realize that the Pump station is comprised of both stone and concrete blocks.
Rollo points ahead of us and I see something that I haven’t seen in a lifetime of living in Naris: daylight. It stings my eyes to look at it, it is so bright and unfiltered. I can feel my heart thumping in my chest.
The next logical thing would be to dress, but as it turns out we don’t have time. Behind us we can hear multiple pairs of feet coming down an unseen stairway behind an alcove. We wait until the guard above us passes.
Shielding our eyes, barefoot, we step forward into the unknown.
* * *
The cold doesn’t register at first, because we are so full of adrenalin. We stay close to the exterior walls of the Naris complex, afraid of being seen, all the while checking out the strange, yet somehow vaguely familiar terrain.
There aren’t enough old-time movies to prepare us for this. There is a sun in the sky, but its light provides no warmth.
In the end, without any words being exchanged, we scamper off toward a tangled growth of trees and tall grass, for the sole purpose of hiding ourselves until we can get clothing on.
By the time we reached a fairly secluded spot, we are shivering so badly we can hardly manage to take our packs off and retrieve the blankets. Rollo peels off his soaking trunks and jokes that the fastest way to get warm is to cuddle up. I take him seriously, and add my blanket to his. Hypothermia makes you realize what’s really important in life.
We both laugh, and I get warmer. Once we start to get dry, we finally put our clothes back on. The clothes are also ice cold, so we get some fresh blankets and try to make a bubble of warmth on our own. We’re also famished, so we eat some of the stuff we raided from Bree’s stash, drink water, and start to feel better. We start to laugh at each other, spontaneously, and share a high five. We’ve made it.
We figure it’s the afternoon, wherever we are. Obviously, there’s still some vegetation growing despite the cold. The landscape reminds me of the tundra we studied in class, except for the trees.
“Weird,” Rollo mutters after taking out a pair of binoculars that I am grateful to see he has packed, “I see dwarf willows, birch, spruce trees, and alder.”
He abruptly shifted to surveying the landscape in a Southernly direction. I had a compass, not a good one but kind of a toy one that I had packed. I think I got it as a prize for junior safety inspectors, but it worked after a fashion and I knew what Rollo was thinking.
If we traveled South it might be warmer.
“It might get easier closer to the equator,” he says, as if he’s reading my mind, “More vegetation, maybe some food, maybe even some villages above ground, we don’t even know.”
“How cold do you think it is?” I ask, knowing Rollo has a thermal indicator on his backpack.
“Right now, about zero degrees Celsius, maybe a few less” he says soberly.
“It doesn’t seem too bad,” I say, grinning, “I think this is doable. This is not the ‘uninhabitable terrain’ they tried to scare us with. What the hell?”
Rollo gives me a sad look.
“Billy, you don’t get it,” he says, shaking his head from side to side. “This is as warm as it gets in a tundra. It’s summer here right now. We’ll need to get moving soon, because we got a lot of distance to cover before three seasons of winter set in.”
I let that info byte sink in while Rollo kicks around our temporary encampment site, which is basically a bare half circle of black permafrost soil. I notice he is gathering sticks, so I start looking for some that are similar to what he is collecting.
“Have any paper?” he asks me. I think, then nod and retrieve some tissues and a sheet I’ve torn out of a notebook that I always carry with me.
“Sweet!” he comments. He rummages in his own pack and pulls out a magnifying glass that I recognize as being one from our Natural History classroom.
“How long have you been a thief?” I ask casually. I know that he is going to try to start a campfire with all the different items, that much is obvious. But I also wonder if his kleptomania is recent and due to circumstance or if it’s a secret lifetime habit.
“For a while,” he says, as he attempts to angle a magnifying glass just right to shine an intense beam on the crumbled paper. He’s sitting next to a carefully arranged pile of thin dwarf willow branches. I have just the empty lighter, some dry grass and some dry sticks, and I’m trying to start it without using the limited amount of benzine we brought with us. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’ve been collecting things that could be used for primitive survival since I can remember. My dad once told me we might have to learn to live off the land again, once things heated up. I always told him I wanted to be that: a pioneer on an open frontier. He disappeared after that. I had the good sense not to mention it to anyone, but I always kept looking for survival tips and tricks, in case I ever got the chance.”
I shake my head, smiling. There’re so many more things we can talk about, so many more things we can think because the Collesium isn’t watching us anymore. At the same time, I start getting excited because the first flame has appeared.
The fire is starting to radiate what we are both craving: warmth. The fierce amounts of adrenalin dumped into our systems during the escape are starting to wear off and I’m getting jittery. We sit silently by the fire for a few minutes. Rollo keeps up a patter of conversation without really saying anything, which I chalk up to sheer nerves.
What we did was kind of death defying, and maybe even heroic. The only reason we aren’t celebrating is because we don’t know what to do next. The outside is so big and so flat and so covered in trees, Bree could be right next to us and we’d never know it. How are we ever going to find her?
The sun is starting to set. Rollo fusses about not finding Bree, but I tell him that since we have no idea which direction to go in, we should stay put. If she’s found a warm spot, she can stay there overnight. If she hasn’t, she might notice the smoke, or the fire, and come find us. We aren’t going to save her by getting lost in the woods at night.
“You really think she’ll find us?” he asks. I nod. I have no choice but to trust her now. I’ve done all I can think to do.
We have banked the fire so that it will continue to burn through the night, but as I drift off on a final wave of exhaustion, a face appears in my mind’s memory, and I realize that there is only one person who will care what happened to us.
Pagan.
Chapter 5
LADY OR THE TIGER
We were both so exhausted that it was no surprise we let the fire burn down, but I still didn’t appreciate the frantic nerve jolting wakeup call I got just before dawn the next day... Rollo’s sweating urgent face was hanging over my own and his fingers were digging painfully in
to my shoulder.
“Listen,” he tells me.
Just outside of our cleared and circular campsite I could hear something thrashing around in the underbrush. A snapping branch that sounded like a gunshot caused me to untangle myself from my sleeping bag and crouch alongside Rollo.
I glanced down and realized he had the metal flare in his hand, and I briefly scrabbled in my pack to retrieve the other one.
Rollo rises quietly and motions to me. I realize that he wanted to move us over so that our backs were against the one large tree at our campsite, so that we aren’t completely exposed.
We both hear a low growl to the right of Rollo, and both turn to aim our flare in the direction it had emanated from. At the same time, the wind picks up, and it must have floated our scent through the foliage and to the nostrils of the predator stalking us.
When it roared and broke through into our camp, I immediately froze.
All I can describe is the sensation of something powerful tensing and then leaping, an airborne expanse of white fur and a deafening pop from a flare gun that causes me to temporarily lose my hearing in one ear, followed by the blinding light that stung my eyes and sent me stumbling to the ground.
I blink my eyes several times and begin to come to. The beast is a pile of white fur on the ground. A flaming hole in its underbelly seems to expand as we watch it.
I walk around to the front of it and catch a glimpse of fangs that are so big they look like tusks, before I look away. Even dead, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.
It makes a few noises. But thankfully, they are dying ones. Then it stops moving.
Rollo staggers to his feet then leaps up, whooping and hollering and grabbing me and spinning both of us around.
“Look at all that meat!” he screams in exultation, right into my ear.
“What the hell is it?” I ask. “What did we kill?”
“Well… Can’t be sure, but it looks like a prehistoric version of a large mammal from the cat family. My best guess would be a Smilodon—a type of saber-toothed tiger. Look at its damn canine teeth—they must be a freaking foot long!”
We both stand staring for a moment, then Rollo pulls out a scalpel that I was assuming he’d filched from the Medical Research Floor.
“First things first,” he tells me over his shoulder as he squats down at the beast’s head, “We need to arm ourselves!”
I watch as he cuts away the gummy flesh around the canine teeth with the skill of a surgeon and hands me a warm and oozing tusk-like tooth. The end of it appears dangerously sharp.
“Your weapon, sir!” he announces with a fake British accent. He soon extracts the other one and shoves it through the utility belt he is wearing, motioning for me to do the same.
It feels like we are official at that moment, armed and dangerous. Junior versions of Rambo.
We get the fire going again and cut up some of the meat, holding it over the flames while our stomachs rumble in anticipation. I help with cutting up strips of meat into squares. Rollo removes the heart and tells me that it is considered the choicest cut of meat of any animal, and that we need to eat it. He isn’t lying—the flesh is tender and more succulent than even the best fried chicken I’ve ever had.
We stuff ourselves. We know that the environment will keep the meat fresh, as long as we pat it dry, so we store pieces of it in outside pockets of our backpacks to preserve it.
“You saved our lives, Billy. Thank you.”
I look at him like he has lost it.
“What are you babbling about, Rollo?” I demand. I am tensing up, thinking that he is putting me on or setting me up for some kind of joke.
“No, I mean it,” he tells me, brushing his hair away from one eye. “I didn’t have time to pull the trigger! You beat me to it!”
I let that sink in and realize that he’s right. It feels good to know that even though I was raised in captivity like a hothouse plant, I still have some survival instincts.
Then I start to wonder about Bree.
“You think my sister’s alright?” I ask him.
Rollo shakes his head, “No way to tell. Maybe she got the same idea as us and we’ll catch up. Maybe she’s dead already. We don’t know. All we can do for now is survive. And that means going south.”
Chapter 6
THE OBLIVION TREK
“Why is it getting colder?” I complain to Rollo and we’ve trekked a few miles without seeing anything—no animals, no people. The tundra is a frozen desert of sorts, and I feel less paranoid because it’s obvious that no one from Citizen Cove is going to find us out here.
“Look Billy, I don’t know,” Rollo tells me. He sounds as crabby as I feel. The high we were riding on after making our first kill has subsided and I am craving a hot shower and a few other creature comforts. Also, reality is sinking in.
We’ll probably never find Bree. And I am missing Pagan terribly. The only reason I am not more upset is because she’s probably safer without me.
Occasionally, very far off and flying high, I see a flock of what sound like geese. Rollo and I lack rifles or any means to shoot them down, and they are probably too far off anyway.
We also hear some very odd, echoing noises from time to time. One sounds like a giant owl, maybe an owl as big as a small house, hooting.
I try to appreciate my surroundings, the wide expanse to the horizon punctuated with an occasional grove of trees or clumps of willow and birch, but despite our initial sense of relief at being out in the open what strikes me is the feeling of emptiness and futility.
Whoever was in charge during the Great Upheaval really messed up, nearly destroying mankind on top of the ecology of the planet. I try to imagine how beautiful earth had been-easy only because of all the old movies I have watched. I’m seeing none of the growing vegetation and the easy lushness of the landscapes they portray.
I also find myself wondering if part of the planet was somehow spared. If it was, no one would tell us. All my life, all I ever heard over and over was how fortunate I was that my parents had been spared and how lucky I am to be a ward of Naris.
I glance over at Rollo, and realize that he looks tired. Pretty soon we will have to stop and rest, either taking turns standing watch or sleeping a vigilante type of sleep with one eye open for predators. With our lack of weaponry, we are definitely not on top of the food chain.
“We need to find a spot to camp,” Rollo says aloud, as if reading my thoughts. We scan the horizon and see the outline of mountains ahead of us. Mountains might be a good thing, because the supply of water we have certainly isn’t going to last, and Rollo, who is well versed in topography tells me that where there are mountains there are usually water sources.
We walk awhile longer, even though our shadows, fuzzy and indistinct because of the haze and the pale winter sunlight, are growing longer and we know nightfall is sure to come. I am exhausted to the bone and wondering what life will be like with only Rollo at my side. I am sure we will get sick of each other.
We camp out under a huge birch and under a canopy of stars, their brilliance undiminished by commercial lights. I lay on my back thinking about Pagan. I am also awed that we are probably seeing the same views primitive man did after the first Ice Age ended.
Rollo, an early riser, beats me to the punch in the morning, and I awaken to the smell of tiger meat roasting on sticks and another rich, irresistible aroma.
“It’s only instant coffee,” Rollo tells me as he hands me a steaming tin cup so hot, I yelp before I place material from the end of my shirt between my fingers and the heat, “But it hits the spot doesn’t it?”
I raise my tin cup in a salute to his foresight. Even though I usually take cream with my coffee, the enticing brew is such a welcome and unexpected gift I have no complaints.
Except I wish I could take a hot shower. That would be great.
Rollo points to the mountains and I realize we are maybe 6 or 7 kilometers from the base.
“Three
miles,” he says, winking, “I guess we’ll see what we can see.”
We busy ourselves breaking up camp, rolling up our sleeping sacks and breathing in the unpolluted air. While we are working, I realize that I can hear something that sounds like birds, trilling and hooting and clucking-only it is coming from a distance and seems amplified. I look at Rollo and he shrugs, but I notice that he starts moving faster to break camp so that we can get going again.
I am deep in thought when I hear Rollo make a noise that sounds like a cross between a yelp and an exclamation of surprise.
“There is something coming our way Billy,” he tells me in a tense tone. “And it’s a lot bigger than a tiger!”
I look over to where he is pointing and he is right, even given the cold haze that seems to partially cover the plain in front of us. We both retrieve our flare guns and step behind the nearest clump of foliage, studying the approaching danger. It moves slowly against the mountainous backdrop, and it is immense. I know we are both thinking the same thing.
There is no way our puny arsenal of weapons is going to stop it.
Hiding is our only option. I find myself fervently wishing for a foxhole to crawl into so that I can’t be seen.
As eager as we were to resume our journey, this has turned into a waiting game. Our only chance for survival will be if we can avoid being seen.
It’s difficult to tell what form our possible demise has taken, Rollo kept stealing glances at it with his binoculars and still hasn’t decided. Finally, I hear him emit a low whistle, and he hands me the binoculars.
“Take a gander my friend. Remember how we were told about the genetic recreations of extinct prehistoric beasts they made from DNA?
“Well I think that’s one of them and it is headed in our direction.”
The tension is mounting and I can see a fine sheen of nervous perspiration on Rollo’s forehead. I realize that I am sweating bullets too.
I hold out my hand for another turn at the binoculars and frown. Unless my eyes deceive me, it looks like there might be someone riding on the back of the humongous beast. Someone dressed head to toe in fur with light-colored hair blowing around in the wind that sweeps nearly constantly across the frozen plain.
