by Inmon, Shawn
“You work well together,” Untrin-ak observed. “What job can I do?”
“See if you can find a stick and dig us a fire pit here.”
When Alex returned with the water, the pit was not only dug, but Werda-ak already had a fire going. They were in a flat area in the middle of nowhere, but it began to feel homey.
Senta-ak returned with the Kragdon-ah equivalent of two squirrels. Two twenty-first century squirrels wouldn’t have fed any one of them. Like most everything here, though, they were outsized and there was enough meat for all of them. Alex noted that both squirrels had been shot through the eye. Her aim was uncanny.
Werda-ak skinned the animals and spitted them on sharp sticks Untrin-ak provided. While the meat sizzled and popped, everyone sat on rocks or against logs and rested.
Untrin-ak took a small piece of wood that had been hidden in his backpack. It was oblong, wider at the bottom than the top, and a second piece of wood had been sistered onto it, forming a short neck. With four strings attached across the body, it looked like a primitive ukulele.
He settled back against a log, laid the instrument down on his lap, and strummed. It was a simple, plaintive melody that touched Alex deep inside. Beyond percussion and voices, there were no musical instruments in Winten-ah.
Alex waited to see if Untrin-ak would sing, but he seemed content to just strum and pick at the strings gently.
Senta-eh and Werda-ak tried not to stare, but couldn’t help themselves. They had never seen anything like this. Monda-ak turned his head sideways, trying to puzzle out what was making this sound. Untrin-ak was entirely un-self-conscious about the attention. A small smile played on his face, but he stared off into the distance, lost in the music.
For a moment, Alex swore he heard a melody from an old Cat Stevens song, but he dismissed that as impossible.
When the meat was cooked through, Senta-eh divided it into four equal shares, trusting the dog to provide for himself. When he saw that none of the food was coming to him, Monda-ak sneezed his disapproval, and trotted off into the trees to find some unwary animal or bird.
Untrin-ak set the instrument down beside him and said, “Thank you for the food. You do not need to provide for me. I have enough food to get me where I am going.”
“Oh? Where are you going?” Alex asked.
“I will know it when I see it.”
Alex laughed a little, feeling he had been set up for that question. “Fair enough.”
Meals were not long, drawn-out affairs on their journey. Within fifteen minutes, the meat was downed, the bones were buried, and Monda-ak had returned.
“No need for a watch here, I don’t think,” Alex said. He turned to Untrin-ak. “We will sleep in the trees.”
“Good enough.”
Alex, Senta-eh, and Werda-ak looked around and found trees that were climbable and had branches that would support them safely through the night.
Untrin-ak wandered the area and found two trees that were a few paces apart. He removed something from his bag and unwound it. He climbed up a tree until he was perhaps ten feet off the ground and tied one end around the trunk. He let the rest of what he was holding drop, then followed it to the ground. He took the other end and repeated the process with the other tree. He lifted himself gracefully up on an overhead branch and went hand-over-hand along the branch, then settled himself down into the hammock he had strung.
Again, Senta-eh and Werda-ak gaped.
Alex simply smiled to himself and shook his head. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of making one himself. If he had, they all could have rested better on this long journey.
Definitely still have things to learn about living in Kragdon-ah.
He found the proper branch, cast one more longing look at the hammock, then laid his head against the trunk and was asleep. It had been an exceedingly long, dangerous, and trying day.
Still, Alex was the first person awake. Only the slightest pink light formed in the east. He allowed himself a few moments to contemplate the task ahead of him—mainly how to close the gap on the invaders—then dropped to the ground.
Untrin-ak was the next to awaken. He slipped quietly to the ground, then went about untying and wrapping his hammock into a small ball that fit inside his pack.
Alex was covering their fire with dirt, making sure it was completely out.
Untrin-ak said, “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Alex answered, then stopped dead.
It took a few seconds to filter through his brain, but when it did, Alex realized that Untrin had spoken to him in English.
Chapter Eleven
Another Traveler, Another Door
Alex whirled around. “Where did you learn to speak this language?”
“Likely the same place you did,” Untrin-ak said. “Through my mother’s teat.”
Alex sat down hard on the nearest log. He had known it was possible that he might meet others like himself. After all, Dan Hadaller was one of his best friends, and he had already met Douglas Winterborne. He just didn’t expect one to sneak up on him like that.
Untrin-ak smiled at the reaction he had gotten. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that. I knew you were like me when I first laid eyes on you. Nobody is full grown and as short as you are around here. Plus, you’ve got a tan, but there’s no white people here, either.”
“You’re smarter than me. I just thought you were a short native.”
“Well, since my mom was black, I blend in a lot more than you do. And hey, I’m six-foot-four. In our time, everybody assumed I was a basketball player.”
“And...?”
“No, I wasn’t. The way you killed Grunta-ak yesterday, you’ve obviously been trained. Military?”
Alex nodded. It felt strange to nod at someone who instantly understood what that meant. “You?”
“No, not me. I’m a pacifist, at least whenever possible. Not that I always can be in this world. I don’t go looking for trouble, but sometimes it finds me anyway. I was born Reggie Standish, by the way. Well, Reginald, but no one ever called me that. I was not born with a silver spoon.”
“Alex. Alex Hawk.”
“Do they know where you came from?” Reggie/Untrin-ak asked, nodding at Senta-eh and Werda-ak.
“Yes. It’s no secret among the Winten-ah. There was another traveler long before me, so he kind of paved the way.”
“She is a beautiful woman.”
Alex smiled. “She could twist you up into a pretzel and toss you aside before you knew what was happening.”
“Might be worth it.”
“I leave that decision to you,” Alex said, but he smiled inwardly. “How did you manage to learn the languages?”
“That was the hardest thing, but as it turned out, I have a facility for languages. I was adopted by a tribe called the Dinat-ah. I wasn’t lucky enough to have someone already there ahead of me. I couldn’t understand anything they said for six months. I had to get by with miming and sign language. That gets old fast. They just kept talking to me, though, like I understood. And then, one day, I did. It was the weirdest thing.”
“That’s an old CIA trick. I think they call it Deep Immersion Language Therapy or something like that. That’s how they trained operatives to be inserted into areas where they needed them to be able to blend with the natives. The biggest advantage was that you didn’t speak with an accent. Once you broke through, you spoke just like the natives you had been listening to.”
“And look at us now. Aside from the fact we aren’t seven foot tall, we look pretty good, don’t we? We speak the language, we dress like they do, I’ve even found I think like they do—technology bad, nature good.”
Alex laughed a little. “I suppose. How long have you been here?”
Reggie had to stop and think, do a little math in his head. “Eighteen years, I guess. How about you?”
“Four years. I’m just trying to get home.”
“So you stepped through the door
in what, 2019?” He nodded his head a bit, absorbing that. “Anything I need to know about what happened by then?”
“Nope. Same shit, different day. Until I walked through that door, nothing ever changed, really.”
“Why would you want to leave this place? Aside from the fact that most everything is double the size it should be and wants to kill and eat you, this is paradise.”
“I have a daughter at home.”
“Ah. Yeah, that’s a different story. Why haven’t you gone back already?”
“I popped out of the door in a dangerous area. There’s a wide plain patrolled by dire wolves that I have to cross to get back. I can’t do it on my own. The Winten-ah—the tribe that first found me—didn’t want to let me leave. They thought I was the answer to some ancient prophecy.”
“And look at you now, tracking down a messianic girl and fulfilling an ancient prophecy.”
Alex frowned. Before he could answer, Werda-ak and Senta-eh dropped from their respective trees.
Alex looked at them, then said, “Untrin-ak came through a door like me.”
“That makes sense,” Senta-eh said. “He’s different, like you.”
Werda-ak put two fingers against his forehead.
“You guys take everything in stride, don’t you?” Untrin-ak said, switching back to the universal language.
“No sense worrying about something that can’t be changed. We learned that Manta-ak is the same as us in a lot of ways. He had a lot of strange ideas when he first found us, but he’s learned.” Senta-eh looked at the first rays of the sun. “I thought we were going to get an early start. Why are we still here?”
“You’re right, let’s go!” Alex said, picking up his bag and slipping it over his shoulders.
They were out of the lightly forested area in just a few minutes and Alex didn’t like what he saw ahead of them—unrelenting miles of brown. Sand, dirt, a few rolling hills, but nothing else until the great wasteland disappeared over the curve of the horizon.
“We might have to ration water a bit until we get across all this,” Alex said, then turned to Reggie. “Have you been through this area before?”
“Yes. This is the long, dry part of the walk. But in a few days, the river will turn north. Once we get to that, we will start to see more vegetation again.”
“What predators are here?” Alex asked, uneasily eyeing the vast open spaces that left nothing for cover.
“Not many. There aren’t many large mammals that make their home here, so there aren’t as many predators. We’ll come to a village just before the river where they’ve built up a system of irrigation letting gravity flow do the work—like they did in Rome. That area is like an oasis. They know me there. I’ll sing for my supper and they’ll let all of us rest for a few days.”
“Glad we have you along with us,” Alex said. “Nice to have a guide.” Alex glanced at Reggie. “Is this what you do, then? Walk around Kragdon-ah? It’s a tribute to your survival skills that you haven’t been eaten yet.”
“Two things,” Reggie said as they walked. “One, I fell in with a group of traders. I traveled with them for a few years and they showed me ways to survive. I didn’t invent the hammock I carry—they did. Second,” he lifted up his tunic to show a tangled mass of white scar tissue, that started in his lower abdomen and wrapped around his back. “I haven’t been completely eaten. Rutan-ta, the mountain lion, got a decent-sized chunk of me. If I had been alone that day, I would have been done for.” He let his shirt fall back into place, covering the scar.
“Do you ever think about going back?”
“No. No reason to. I was sixteen when I stepped through the door. My dad was long gone. I don’t even remember him. My mom had died a few months earlier. No brothers or sisters.” He glanced sideways at Alex while he walked. “Here’s the sad thing. There’s a good chance no one has noticed that I’m even gone. So, why go back?”
“How did you find your door?”
“Totally by accident. I grew up in a rough neighborhood. After Mom died, I stayed in our apartment until the landlord kicked me out. I tried to keep going to school, but it was hard when I was homeless. No place to shower or wash my clothes. After a while, I just stopped going.”
“Understandable,” Alex said. He glanced at Werda-ak and Senta-eh. He and Reggie were speaking in the universal language because it seemed rude to speak in English and exclude them, but they weren’t paying attention anyway.
I guess it would be like if two people stepped through a door in my basement and started talking about living in a group of cliffside caves and getting high on magic bird eggs. No frame of reference, so it would all sound like gobbledygook, even if I understood the language.
“I fell in with a bad crowd. Where I lived, there were two ways to survive. Sell drugs, or excel at sports. I was tall and lanky, but I was no good at sports. One thing led to another and one day I ended up in a bad situation, running from some guys with bad intentions. I ducked into an old warehouse. It was dark and nasty in there, but I hoped that would make them not want to chase me too far. There was an old storage room that was even worse than the rest of the place, so I went in there. It was pitch black. I was trying to walk quietly, feeling for the wall ahead of me. One step I was in that warehouse. The next, I felt dizzy, passed out, and fell out into the sunshine. Here, on Kragdon-ah.”
“Could you see the door you came out of?”
“Yes. It was there, all mysterious-looking. Like it didn’t belong in this world at all. And then I met the rutan-ta. And she thought she had met her lunch.” Reggie chuckled, but it was as much a moan as it was a laugh as he relived the attack in his mind. “I’m fast, but I might as well have been wearing rocks for shoes. She leaped on my back, took me down, and I knew I was done for.”
“How weren’t you done for? Unarmed and rutan-ta on your back? That’s a non-survivable situation.”
“She started making a meal of me here,” Reggie said, pointing to his scarred area. “I’m making myself right with the Lord and getting ready to see my mom again when I hear this whistling sound. Next thing I knew, this freaky thing that looked like a boomerang clipped that cat right behind the ear. Then there were all these giant dudes jumping on her and stabbing her with spears. Instead of me being lunch, she turned out to be dinner. I was pretty torn up, but they took me back to their village and nursed me back to health. They had some crazy herbs and poultices that smelled so bad, but they worked. Here I am.”
Alex told Reggie how he had come to land in Kragdon-ah and noted the similarities in their stories—out of the door, attacked by an animal, then rescued by a group of hunters. He couldn’t help but wonder how many other unfortunates had stepped through a door and not been so lucky as to have rescuers waiting.
Hours passed as they trekked across an essentially unchanging brown terrain. They didn’t bother to stop for lunch because there was no reason to. They just ate the salted meat the village of Rinta-ah had provided them.
“It feels like we’re in one of those Roadrunner cartoons, where they keep chasing each other, but the background never changes,” Alex said. In English, because he didn’t know if there was a word in the universal language for roadrunner, and there certainly wasn’t for cartoon. He was happy to have someone who shared a similar background who would understand his references.
For the rest of that day and two more like it, they walked. If they found a brackish water source where they could fill their water bags once a day, they were lucky.
The next morning, after a short and mostly restless night camping in the open, Alex asked Werda-ak, “Are we just going this direction now because it’s the way they were going the last time we had a bearing on them? Or are you still picking up signs of their trail? I noticed that Monda-ak isn’t putting his nose to the ground much anymore.”
“I think he’s tired of smelling the same dirt he’s been smelling for so long.” Werda-ak sighed, tired already, even though he had just woken up. “No, I’
m not seeing a sign of them, not really.”
“Good enough. Just wanted to know where we stand.”
“But, look at the drawings they gave us back in Rinta-ah.”
Alex hadn’t been able to get he and Senta-eh to use the word map yet. He pulled it out of his pack and carefully unrolled it.
Werda-ak pointed to Rinta-ah, then pointed to a lake on the map. “We’re walking straight toward the sunrise every day. There’s no way we would have missed that lake, so we haven’t got there yet. That means that even a tiny space on this drawing will take us many days to walk.”
“Right,” Alex said, impressed that the boy was already figuring out scale.
“What does it show between Rinta-ah and the lake?”
“Absolutely nothing, which is what we’ve been walking through.”
“Right, but there is a path of a sort, right?”
Alex kicked at the dirt, which was indeed somewhat more worn down and formed a path. “Sure.”
“So where else would they have been heading? We know they headed out of Rinta-ah to the east. If they turned north or south, where would they be going? South, they would run into the Kranda-ah again. North, there is just nothingness. Wherever their home is, it might be either north or south, but not north or south of right here.”
Smart kid. Maybe he doesn’t remind me of myself after all.
“I don’t know why I ever doubted you,” Alex said, and they were off on another day’s long trek.
Later that day, as the sun was dropping low in the sky, they once again ran into the Kanda-ah river.
Alex laid the map open on the ground and used the new bearing point to see where they were. It felt counterintuitive to him that they should have been walking dead east—theoretically parallel to the river, only to find it in front of them. The map showed that the river did indeed turn north.
They all quickened their pace. They hadn’t seen fresh water in several days and their water bags were empty. Monda-ak’s tongue hung limply from his mouth.
