The Universe Next Door: A Jake Corby Sci-Fi Thriller (Jake Corby Series Book 3)

by Al Macy

  I reached down and pulled on the spear, but it was stuck. Keeping my eye on the predator, I pushed the spear from side to side and slid it out. The monster just wanted the roo carcass. I’d let him have it. I could get more later. You win this one, motherfucker.

  It charged the carcass but kept going, straight at Marie. What? Why wasn’t it satisfied with the dead roo?

  Did it prefer live prey? Warm-blooded creatures? Did it sense Marie’s weakness? Reacting too slowly, I sprinted after it and drove the spear down at the monster’s back. It bounced off. Its armor plating was as tough as a cement sidewalk.

  “Run, Marie!” Of course, I didn’t have to tell her. She was already on her way to the forest.

  Had she been twenty-three instead of eighty-three, she might have made it. But the croc thing soon caught up with her and rotated its head to snap. No! I’d let her down.

  Boonie darted in and bit down on its leg. The beast thrashed to the side, knocking Boonie loose. I caught up and swung my spear down on its head with all my strength. We slowed it down just enough to give Marie the chance to open a gap.

  Marie was limping badly now. She’d told me about some old injury to her left leg. The creature easily closed the gap.

  But Boonie and I landed a one-two punch. He got his teeth into the animal’s softer underbelly, and I drove my spear into its mouth, into its tongue.

  It bit down, snapping the spear, and stopped, facing us. It whipped its powerful tail, landing a direct hit on Boonie. He let go and retreated a few steps, growling. It stared at us, swishing its tail.

  If it weren’t for Marie’s bum leg, she’d have made it. She stood on her good leg, just touching the ground with the toes of the other foot. I beckoned her over, and she hobbled to my side. The croc shifted position, now directly between us and the forest.

  “Think you can run?” Stupid question. I kept my eyes on the croc-monster.

  She shook her head, out of breath.

  “Climb onto my back, Marie.” I pulled out and opened the Leatherman knife, glancing past the creature at the forest. If we could just get around him, we’d be safe. She didn’t stand a chance by herself.

  The monster swished its tail. A rumble accompanied each of its breaths, and the scent of dead fish wafted over us.

  “Jake, with me on your back, you won’t—”

  “Please don’t argue, Marie.” I squatted down, and she climbed aboard. I took the first step on the path that would take us around the croc and to the forest. This had to work.

  My foot hit a softball-sized rock. Perfect. Keeping my eyes on the croc, I bent down and dug my fingers under it. It came loose from the soil. The creature charged.

  Boonie zipped in and fastened his jaws on the tip of the creature’s tail, but a flick sent him flying and rolling through the grass with a yelp. I’d planned to throw the rock at its head, but the size of the stone gave me a better idea. Its jaws were still open, and I pitched the rock into its throat. Right in the strike zone. Would it choke him?

  It raised its head up high. With a rumbling cough it swallowed the rock. So much for that.

  It was still between us and the forest. Damn! Boonie dashed in and clamped on to a softer area just in front of the croc’s muscular legs.

  It whipped its head back toward Boonie, who released his grip at the last second and rushed under the animal, tearing into its other leg. It spun around the other way, but Boonie was too fast. Score one for the mammal team.

  A fresh adrenaline rush hit me. I was invincible.

  Its mouth was still open. I took one step forward and threw in my broken spear. Right down the throat. I didn’t dare get close enough to push it in farther, not with Marie on my back.

  Swallow that, asshole!

  Didn’t work. It gagged and whipped its head back and forth. The spear dropped out.

  How to get to the forest?

  It lowered itself to the ground. Lying down, its vulnerable soft spots were protected. Boonie kept up his counterattacks. He got his teeth into the animal’s thigh. It gave up on its attempt to rest and rose to its feet again. Was it tiring?

  Now or never.

  “Hang on, here we go.” I feinted to my right, then sprinted to my left. It was a move I’d used back when I played football—harder to execute with extra weight on my back. The creature popped up and lunged as I passed, rotating its head to one side and snapping at my ankles. It missed.

  It had a lumbering gait but was fast, putting on a burst of speed that frustrated my attempt to curve around it and gain the forest.

  Alone, I could have escaped, but I had no intention of letting Marie down. Stamina was on the side of the warm-bloods. We increased our lead and angled toward the forest. This will work. Boonie attacked on the forest side. Could he understand our strategy? No, probably just luck.

  It did work. The tiring gator wasn’t able to cut across our curve, and soon the forest was only steps away.

  My foot hit something on the ground. A root or a stick. We crashed forward, Marie tumbling off into the grass. The creature put on another burst of speed and rushed her. It snapped its jaw onto her foot. No! It jerked back and lunged forward, improving its grip.

  Marie screamed, bent double, and smashed her fists onto its snout. Boonie and I both jumped onto the animal, whose deadly jaw wasn’t available for defense.

  It couldn’t bite us without releasing Marie. Thrashing and rolling, it threw me off. Boonie had a bulldog grip on its soft underbelly.

  I still had my knife in my fist. I jumped on its back and plunged the knife into the creature’s eye. It roared. A shake of its head dislodged my hand, but the knife remained stuck in the eye socket. The croc-monster headed for the river.

  It dragged Marie as she continued to scream. Then, shaking its head as blood poured from its ravaged eye, it released her. She lay motionless in the grass.

  I needed that knife. The creature lumbered toward its home territory, now limping. Boonie held his bulldog grip on the underbelly. He growled and tugged like a dog with a pull toy, his paws slipping through the grass. He slowed the monster down.

  Help Marie or get the knife? Making my decision, I jumped on the croc’s back once more and grabbed for the knife. We reached the river, and the monster slid in, blood blooming in the water. This was its world, now. The back of my hand knocked the knife. So close.

  The animal lunged forward in the shallow water. Boonie was dragged under then popped up and swam to shore. Making one more desperate grab, I got my fist around the knife. I tugged at it as we both submerged, the water getting colder.

  The knife came loose, and I released my grip on the creature’s back. With an unintentional parting blow, the croc’s tail hit my hand. I dropped the knife. My lungs screamed for oxygen, but I could not lose that knife.

  It drifted down and settled on the bottom. Our struggle had stirred up some mud, but not enough to obscure the shiny glint.

  I pictured another killer swimming toward me but didn’t care. My whole being was focused on retrieving the knife. I swam down, grabbed it, set my feet against the stones, and pushed off.

  At the surface, I took a ragged breath and swam to the shore. I high-stepped out of the river and sprinted to Marie.

  She lay in the field, still unconscious. Worse, a snake like the one that had attacked me hung on to her neck. I ripped it off, made a small cut along the line of the holes from the fangs, and sucked out as much blood and, hopefully, venom, as possible. Myth or not, I had to do something.

  I looked at her foot and my heart clenched. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  The tip of her shoe was gone, and her toes were a bloody mess. Blood pulsed from her ankle, forming a puddle in the grass.

  My FBI training kicked in. I whipped off my belt and wrapped it above her knee. Only one bone in the upper leg, that was the best place for clamping the artery. I pulled the belt off and made new holes with the precious knife. I refastened it, put my foot on her knee, and pulled the belt to the innermost ho
le.

  “Marie! Marie, can you hear me?” Nothing. I slapped her cheek. “Marie!”

  I tightened the laces on what remained of her sneaker. They broke. No matter, the bleeding had slowed. The tourniquet was doing its job.

  I lifted Marie and carried her as I would a baby. Keeping her leg above her heart, I trudged back to the cave.

  She regained consciousness briefly during the night, not fully in her right mind. She told me how much she was enjoying our time together, and how she couldn’t imagine a better grandson-in-law. She also asked why Charli hadn’t visited her. I kissed her on the forehead and told her everything would be okay.

  “But no shoe soup, okay?”

  I nodded. “No shoe soup.” Unless she needed it.

  “I’m so lucky. So lucky.” She drifted off again. Boonie whined and placed his head on her arm.

  While she dozed, I lay back and stared at the roof of the cave, our home of almost three weeks.

  I’d always thought I could live like a hermit in a cave, but no. I needed Marie’s companionship. Even if I could live without her Animal Planet knowledge and Down East wisdom, I couldn’t live without her.

  The civilization behind those aircraft would give her medical care she needed and send us back to our own world. I just had to contact them somehow and keep her alive until then.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Eight months after Marie’s death, I sat in front of the cave, gazing into the fire—the outback TV, as she had called it. She’d never regained consciousness after drifting away the night of the attack. Whether she died from the blood loss or the snakebite, I didn’t know. Didn’t matter.

  I’d put her in a shallow grave near the cave and piled rocks on the top. Said a few words. Thanked her for being a good friend.

  Over the months, Boonie and I stopped by frequently, letting her know how things were going, sharing our adventures. I pictured her not being surprised at anything I said.

  I held my watch so I could see it in the light of the fire. March 3, 2021. I thought about what I knew. Not much, really.

  An advanced civilization occupied this world, but they weren’t paying attention. Contrails appeared in the sky every few days, and a supersonic, advanced craft sometimes boomed by at low altitude.

  Usually, those low fliers streaked by too fast—by the time the sound reached me, they were already well past. But one day, I happened to be looking into the sky at just the right time, and I’d gotten a good look. A wingless triangle. Bright blue.

  I became a master at creating crop circles but gave up. They weren’t doing their job. Smoky signal fires struck out as well. No one noticed me.

  At night, satellites drifted across the sky. Once, an impossibly bright star to the south caught my eye. It rose from the horizon. A spacecraft launch? I’d recalled that observers could see NASA launches from hundreds of miles away. I guessed this one started from the San Francisco Bay Area.

  I wasn’t any closer to figuring out what had happened to us. Perhaps I was in a coma, and all of this was a dream. Or this was real and my former life was a dream. Ridiculous, but more plausible than some of the alternatives.

  No reasonable explanations made sense. I was familiar with the landscape. It matched the topography of the land near my house. Conclusion: same place. Based on the erosion of the river, it was the same time. Same place and time, but most of the land animals were different. Quite a puzzle.

  Once, Sophia and I had gone to a father-daughter dinosaur-discovery weekend at the local college. It was a special treat—just the two of us. We went to one talk called “What if the Dinos Hadn’t Gone Extinct?” It described what might have happened if that asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.

  The upshot: If the dinosaurs had survived, land mammals larger than mice would never have evolved. They wouldn’t have been able to compete with the dinos. So, with sixty-five million years of evolution, you’d have a lot of different animals, all evolved from the big lizards. Some would have intelligence rivaling that of humans.

  The speaker had slides of made-up animals with funny names. Some were reptiles with fur. Nothing exactly like what I’d seen, but just as weird.

  I’d debated hiking down to the Bay Area, but chose instead to stay and let the civilization come to me. I changed my mind in September, but the rains started early and didn’t let up all winter. Now, with a week of no rain, it was finally time to go.

  Boonie lay next to me on a hide.

  “Wag your tail if you want to go on a road trip.” I put my hand on his head, and his heavy tail whomped out a few beats. I’d started talking to myself only a week after Marie passed away. Or talking to Boonie, which was pretty much the same thing. Without him, I’d have cracked up.

  Life was cushy, caveman-wise. As back in my world, the winter temps rarely got down to freezing. Game was plentiful. Not surprising, since I never saw a large predator away from the river. It made no sense. With plenty of fat, dumb animals roaming around, a big meat eater should have evolved or, at least, failed to go extinct.

  The roos provided me with satisfying meat and good hides. Their fur was thick. I never got the hang of tanning the skins, so my coat was almost like a suit of armor.

  Despite the fur, they were reptiles. They laid delicious eggs. As for mammals, the largest one I encountered was smaller than a house cat.

  I made spearheads from obsidian—another craft that took a lot of experimentation. No problem. I had plenty of time.

  Did I miss toilet paper? Yes. Did I have close calls? Yes. I came to understand why predators were so cautious. Even a minor injury could be life-threatening. When I sprained my ankle, I’d have starved were it not for Boonie’s rat and turkey hunting.

  So, life was tolerable, but I was lonely. A surprising development for an introvert, I craved two-way dialogue. Even prisoners in solitary confinement have a word with their guards sometimes.

  I needed someone to share the stunning sunsets with. Someone to tell me about his or her day, or listen to my description of a hunting trip.

  I yearned to find and talk with the advanced civilization to the south. And to have them send me back to my world. I pictured Charli’s shock when I returned. I’d lost lots of weight, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I had a thick, grizzled beard. My ear had never healed properly. It was a mess—a cauliflower ear with a bite taken out.

  If game was as plentiful along the three hundred miles to San Fran, and predators as scarce, the trip would be doable. The only problem would be river crossings. Even if I could will myself to swim across, water was the one thing Boonie feared. We’d have to cross those non-bridges when we got to them.

  “Boonie, wag your tail if you’ve conquered your fear of rivers.”

  Whomp, whomp.

  * * *

  Boonie and I began our trip on a drizzly morning. My watch showed March 4, 2021. Of course, it could no longer communicate with the time center in Fort Collins, Colorado, but the battery was still strong. Who cared if it was off by a few minutes? I figured I’d have another year of battery life to go. Would I be home by then? My phone had long since died. I left it in the cave.

  I’d filled the backpack with sun-dried roo jerky, my best ceramic pot, spare spearheads, some bones for Boonie, and rope. I’d fashioned my sleeping pouch from roo hides sewn together with roo gut. The gamy, dead-animal smell never left, but I got used to it. I rolled it up and tied it to the bottom of my primitive pack.

  My jeans and denim shirt had held up well. Fortunately, I’d been wearing my L.L. Bean hiking shoes at the party. Did the lifetime guarantee cover parallel universes?

  I slipped on my fur hat. I’d made it from the skin of a dead sea mammal that had washed up on the beach. Softened with hours of soaking, drying, and massaging, it sported a stylish flap in the back. What all the most fashionable cavemen were wearing.

  Before leaving, we stopped to say goodbye to Marie. Her grave was close to the cave. Close enough that a
few times I’d caught myself yelling out a question to her when sitting in front of the fire. Like, “I know you’re decomposed and all, and covered with rocks, but do you think—?”

  I stood in front of the grave, Boonie sitting on my left. He was used to this ritual.

  “We’re leaving now, Marie. You’ve been worried about the state of my mind over the last few months. You don’t need to be. I know you’re not really here. Of course I know that.” I poked at the ground with the butt of my spear. “And, uh, that time I brought Charli with me. I now know that was just a hallucination. I may have even known it at the time.”

  I blocked my memory of the time I’d started to dig Marie up again. “But we’re finally on our way south, and I’m going to find someone alive to talk to, and I’m going to insist that he or she or it send us back to where we came from. And I’m never again going to wish I was a hermit in a cave. Right. Yes, Marie, you have heard all this before. Well, you Down Easters aren’t into sappy stuff, so I’ll just say goodbye and thanks for being a good friend. Thanks for keeping me sane.”

  I turned and we headed down the hill toward the river. Our first test came with the crossing of the Yurok River. We hiked to the beach and to a place where the river fanned out on the sand. A piece of cake but for the deeper channel in the center.

  During the fall, salmon—just like those in my home world—had clogged the channel. The croc-monsters had their fill of food and paid us no mind. In their haste to escape the jaws of the crocs, salmon often squirted out onto the sand, and it was a simple matter to grab one and carry it back to the cave. I was on my own for this fishing, however. Boonie watched from well up the beach, whining and barking.

  Before attempting the crossing, we sat above the river and watched for an hour. No evidence of the crocodile monsters, but they might have been lurking below the surface. Time to do it.

  I swam across the seven-foot-wide channel easily with my spear at the ready and looked back. This wasn’t going to work. Boonie ran back and forth on the north bank, barking. I had hoped I could stand guard with my spear while he swam across, but nothing I did enticed him into the water. If I walked south, he’d eventually follow, but then I’d be too far away to protect him.