by Eddie Patin
Roaring with determination—more in his head than out loud—Jason pulled and pushed his arms, unable to move his legs. Then, he could feel the strange pain of his toes waking up, and found himself able to flex his left leg, throwing one knee forward—carrying his numb and unresponsive right leg with it—to help him crawl through the bones. He thrashed and writhed around on the cave floor, pulling himself through the litter of dinosaur remains scattered around the tunnel floor, back toward the entrance. Jason growled and strained against his deadened body and its lack of response, feeling his nerves flaring and his skin and arms and legs burning with more and more life...
The man was surprised when he made it to the outside air again.
Jason flopped around lying on the grassy ground, staring at the night sky and panting heavily with his heart hammering in his chest. He was still clutching at his pistol with his right hand—which vibrated with insane nerve activity—and still felt fear sweep over him in waves. His skin was prickling and cold until the pain started up again all through his body.
Wracked with weird, fiery buzzing, Jason wanted to scream. He wanted to cry out and whimper until he felt normal again, but was afraid to draw predators. He was afraid that the big spider and its hand-sized brethren would eventually gather up the courage to swarm out of the cave mouth and attack him en masse...
The night was quiet. Raptors trilled and chirped in the distance as Jason's nerves buzzed on fire, but no dinosaurs came.
After what felt like a long time, the man felt almost back to normal. The buzzing ceased, first in his shooting hand, then his body, arms and legs, and finally, in his back and face. When he could move again without the weird numbness making him want to cry, Jason turned to the black tunnel extending into the side of the ridge. Before doing anything else, he pulled out his pocketknife and frantically cut the webbing off of his ankles, lower legs, and boots. It was more difficult than he'd expected—it was like gummy cords of wire and as tough as plastic packing straps. Eventually, Jason's feet were freed, and he knew that he'd be trying to clean his knife-blade for a long time that night.
He eyed that place of terror and death and crawling, hairy claws...
The bipedal arachnid creature didn’t follow. Neither did the large spider or any of the smaller creepy-crawlies.
There were no sounds coming from inside.
Maybe the man-spider was dead...
Jason could hear the dinosaurs engaging in their nocturnal hunting and scavenging all around him, but the raptors didn’t approach the mouth of the slithery, dreadful place...
After a while of watching and waiting, Jason stood. He rubbed a big, painful egg that rose on the back of his head where a rock had hit him during the dragging.
"Have to make sure," he said to himself, his voice sounding odd after seeing so horrible a sight. "It might come back for me if it’s still alive..."
With that, Jason crept into the tunnel, on his feet this time, ignoring the pain in his knee. He held his Glock before him in both hands. Bones clattered and crunched under and around his boots, and the man carefully navigated the darkness, waiting to see again by the dim glow of the blue and yellow mushrooms growing out of the cavern’s back wall. No spiders charged at him and no wounded two-legged man-spider lashed out at him from the dark.
"Ettercap," Jason muttered suddenly.
That’s definitely what the monster reminded him of. The creature was like a freaking Ettercap from the DnD world—an intelligent, spider-like humanoid that hunted from the darker shadows of the forests...
What the hell was an Ettercap like this—or whatever it really was—doing back in the Cretaceous Period of Earth? There were no Ettercaps—not in real life! There were no wyverns or lizard-like cannibals, either...
A cold, creeping dread wriggled along Jason’s spine.
Was this even Earth? he thought. Was this his Earth?
He'd been entertaining the idea already, but the realization was creeping through him, and the concept of being somewhere other than his own freaking planet terrified him...
"Where the hell am I?!" Jason whispered, raising his gun's muzzle as the soft glow of the cavern came into view...
He stepped quietly and carefully into the main chamber of the cave. Tarantula-like spiders the size of his hand scattered before him. Aiming down with his Glock, Jason approached the body of the Ettercap-thing. It lay still and twisted, clearly dead. Probably dead, he corrected himself in his head.
Jason kicked the creature, and it rolled stiffly but didn’t react.
He kicked the big spider, too, which was withdrawn in on itself—hairy legs as thick as tree branches folded tightly in against its abdomen, laying on its back. Unspeakable goop bubbled forth from its shattered, hairy face.
Obviously dead.
There was a skittering sound on Jason's left, and he aimed his pistol at where he’d seen the other big spider last.
It was still there, cowering in the darkness.
Jason lowered his Glock, switching it to his left hand, and looked around on the ground briefly, stopping to pick up a large dinosaur bone. It was three feet long with a big knob on one end—probably part of a gigantic femur.
Keeping his pistol lowered for backup, Jason strode up to the spider that was as big as a small dog with an abdomen the size of a football. It scrambled to get away from him on legs as long as Jason's arms. The man's face felt hot and his blood pounded in his arms and neck. Jason suddenly hated the miserable creature, and he hated the bigger spiders he’d killed. He felt a fire of fury burning inside him and he suddenly hated all of these damned predators that kept trying to kill him and eat him—he wanted to smash the shit out of that damned spider and all of the others here!
Before the big spider could climb further up the rock wall out of reach or grow the gall to turn around and attack him instead, Jason rushed up swinging his makeshift club. He smashed the ball of the bone weapon into the big spider’s center, partially crushing it and splashing guts that looked like yellow glue across the stone wall.
The arachnid froze in shock, drawing into itself for a moment while slowly falling, then it dropped to the ground.
Jason smashed it again and again until its legs were in pieces and its carapace was a mess of hairy shell fragments and disgusting arachnid innards.
A big tarantula dashed past Jason on the ground. The man growled as he lashed out, stomping the spider with his right foot. His knee gave a twinge of pain, but he didn’t give a shit.
The crunch of the creature under his boot made Jason smile.
He felt better.
Avenged.
The vicious Ettercap and its pets wouldn’t be trying to eat him again. In a frantic moment of realization, Jason tore off his backpack and pulled out his flashlight, holstering his Glock. He shined the light on a dark corner of the cave and watched with a grin as the hand-sized spiders fled from its white spot.
No more of those big damned spiders would come from here...
He would clear this damned cave.
Hefting the bone club in his right hand and shining the flashlight with his left, Jason went to work, intent on smashing every living arachnid in this cavern. He would make sure that these spiders wouldn’t ever come after him again...
Chapter 21
The pale light of morning pierced the heavy cloud cover, illuminating the valley and the sea of deep green trees down below.
Thunder rumbled gently through the warm, heavy air. The valley down below was shrouded with mist.
Jason sat at the mouth of the spider monster’s cave, his forearms on his knees, his thick arachnid-splattered bone club on the ground beside him. The man looked out over the valley and watched the giant beasts roam slowly below. He sighed and looked down at the weapon. It wasn’t worth keeping; it was gross and covered with strips of desiccated meat and tendons.
But it served its purpose last night.
His knee hurt. And the cuts on his shoulder stung and itched, and his face felt
like a big bruise—he probably had a black eye at the very least. His stomach growled and cramped terribly.
Jason took a drink of water from his pack. Over the night he’d topped off his pistol magazine—the shorter one he carried in the Glock—once he finally had full feeling back in his fingers. The bigger backup magazine was now almost empty.
Looking back down at the valley, Jason peered at the rolling, white mist. He figured that he was somewhere up the ridge from his crook shelter—obviously—but he couldn’t see his old camp from here. It seemed like the thick copse of dark forest down the hill from him was the place where he saw the ostrich dinosaur steal an egg from the family of Monoclonius. That meant that the crook campsite would be across the empty stretch of grass that ran north; somewhere out of sight and blocked by boulders from his view. Even further down from there, the trees and occasional clearings ran down and down until eventually dipping into a thick green wood that probably had the creek running through it. Past Doe Creek, across more fields of dense trees, the foliage finally started to lighten up at the edge of the valley.
From up here, Jason had an amazing view. He could fully see the valley—at least what was beyond the choked visage of the tall trees—across the wide, grassy expanse teeming with large dinosaur herds, crops of bushes, marshes with cattails...
He could even see the wyvern’s cave on the other side.
Even now, as the mist crawled across the valley, making the dumb herbivores grazing within its veil seem more eerie and foreboding, Jason could see the shadows of cannibals running around the big, flat rock down the slope from the wyvern’s cave. The strange humanoids dashed around in the pale morning stacking sticks and deadfall around their sacrificial slab, running as fast as they could in and out of sight.
The way the cannibals sprinted around like that was terrifying. It was so off-putting how they acted like men but also ran around so sporadically—so aggressive and random. The idea of those creatures running around Jason the other night sent a chill up the man’s spine.
Jason took another sip from his bite valve.
As he watched, the savages down below dashed around, pausing to jump up and down and adjust the wood that would await the wyvern’s fire. Finally, they brought out a fresh kill. Jason knew that they had to be making all kinds of raucous noises down there, but from way up on the ridge, he couldn’t hear them.
The wyvern emerged from the cave as thunder rumbled through the sky.
The beast crawled down the slope, all scales and spikes, moving like a snake on bat wings. It reared up its head and neck considering the primitives leaping about. The wyvern’s sinister head and tail both whipped back and forth as it looked over the small creatures tumbling around it just out of reach. Ultimately, the monster set its sights on the dead dinosaur left on the rocky slab.
When the wyvern screeched, Jason could hear it from where he was sitting, and the sound drifting across the valley gave him gooseflesh.
"Holy shit," he said, leaning forward and watching as the monster approached the carcass and began eating the dinosaur amidst small bursts of flames around its jaws. The cannibals jumped and dashed around in a frenzy as it lit the body and surrounding stacks of wood on fire.
That wyvern was truly a sight to behold in this terrible, prehistoric world.
It didn’t belong here—it wasn’t a dinosaur.
What kind of world is this?! Jason wondered.
A familiar sense of dread returned to Jason as some details started rubbing him the wrong way; little things that didn’t make sense in his idea of the world he lived in. There were many discrepancies that made the man question whether or not he was even on his own Earth anymore...
Was he really on a different world? Could it be a different plane of existence, like the extraplanar worlds of DnD?
"But that’s crazy," he said.
Being transported back to prehistoric times is crazy, his mind retorted.
But there were no wyverns in the real world. There were no dragons, or wyverns, or drakes, or anything like that. Such creatures didn’t fit into natural evolution. There were also no scaly reptile-people. Certainly no damned Ettercaps—or even giant spiders! There were big bugs back during the dinosaur times, but no arachnids the size of dogs, right?
Like before, once the wyvern tore up enough of the carcass for however hungry it was in the moment, the creature leapt up onto what was left of the body, seizing it with its fearsome claws with another screech that echoed over to Jason on the ridge. Then, it flapped its wings powerfully, turned, and carried the body back to the cave’s entrance, where it unceremoniously dragged it away into darkness.
The cannibals immediately dashed toward the sacrificial slab and picked up whatever burning sticks that they could. Then they ran back to the forest, carrying torches in their hands—spots of blazing light in the white mist.
They were sort of heading toward Jason but more to the south. The man could see, from where he was sitting, that there was a sort of rocky crest heading up the hillside further north which blocked his view to where the natives were all running away to with their precious fire. Jason figured that the cannibals must live over there; somewhere in the thick forest to his north on the east side of the valley.
He’d definitely have to stay away from there.
And he’d have to take note of that direction from his shelter. Danger would always come from that direction.
"Come to think of it," he said to himself, turning to look at the cave mouth behind him then glancing back down at the valley and the wyvern’s area...
Jason smiled, which hurt his face.
This spider cave would be a great shelter. Much better than the crook, and he wouldn’t have to build anything that would inevitably be torn down by those weird vines. The cavern and tunnel were already there...
"Yes," he said. "Move here."
Jason stood, wishing he had his cane when his right knee twinged in response. He leaned up against the cave mouth, massaging his knee for a while before moving on.
Over the course of the day, Jason moved all of his stuff and worked on preparing the cave for life of the less spidery variety. He made a couple of trips back to the crook—once he figured out where it was—gathering his cane, the two turtle shells (one still full of water), the spear he'd made, and cutting the rawhide sheet from his now-collapsed shelter. As he expected, close examination revealed that the support wood was inundated with scores of tiny, thin vines that had grown straight out of the surrounding dirt. He recycled the paracord from the support joints, and carried everything up to the spider cave over the course of an hour or so.
At one point, looking at the grey sky, it occurred to Jason that he might be able to collect some of this frequent rain with the turtle shells instead of hiking all the way back down to the deadly creek over and over again. He set the shells in strategic positions, using his body weight to push them down as he twisted them in circles on the ground, digging into the soft earth until they were nice and secure.
The first thing Jason did inside the cave was clear the tunnel floor of all of the bones and remains, casting it all outside. Before he moved the larger bodies of the Ettercap thing and the giant spiders, he started carting out the little, squished tarantula-like ones. The disgusting carcasses were still terrifying in their own right, being as big as his hand. At one point, Jason paused when—returning outside with more dead arachnids—he saw two tiny raptors fighting over one of the gross spider bodies in the sunshine.
Thinking that he might be able to use the bodies for bait to catch food at some point—soon, he hoped—Jason saved the dead spiders instead. In the most distant corner of the glowing cavern, he made a disgusting pile of bodies. It included scores of large tarantulas, the two dog-sized spiders, and the ghastly dead Ettercap, whose body was lighter than Jason had expected.
After moving all of the dead, Jason brought in stick after stick and scratched at the rocky walls, winding up and collecting as much of the sticky sp
ider webs and cobwebs he could. In his most efficient moments, it was as if he was creating huge sticks of cotton candy full of dirt and little bugs. Figuring that he could use the webbing as adhesive in the future, Jason stashed the web-infested sticks in another corner of the cave.
Then Jason brought his leather sheet in, folded it over once, and tucked it into the floor, making something like a bed.
With the bodies moved aside, the bones scattered, and the webs mostly cleared, it was a lot more like a shelter now than a dreaded cave of venomous death.
He left the mushrooms alone, going to great lengths to avoid disturbing them. The blue and yellow bioluminescent mushrooms were a decent source of light, and that was a great thing to have in this primitive world. Jason was also afraid to touch them, imagining the bizarre things letting out some sort of spore cloud that would do unknown, terrible things to his lungs.
Finally, Jason leaned up against a wall of the small cave, looking down at his bedding of dinosaur hide, and felt a smile creeping to his lips.
It was crude as hell, but this 'spider cave' was much better than the crook shelter. And now, more and more, Jason felt like he could maybe survive until he could figure this whole thing out...
The man's stomach cramped up violently and he frowned again.
If only he could eat.
He spent a few moments trying to lure mini-raptors to their doom with spider bait, but quickly gave up when he realized that he couldn’t catch them, and he couldn’t throw rocks reliably enough to hit the little buggers.
"Need to build traps," he said, looking over at the sun where it was lowering in the western sky. "But no time for that right now..."
Jason knew that the sun would be down in an hour or so and didn’t want to go through another night of being desperately hungry. He felt empty, like his stomach was pulling into his spine. He felt like his body was eating itself.
He couldn’t even think of how long he’d been here. How many nights was it now? How many days without food?
