by Max Brooks
As the cow took a quick grass break, I kept pontificating.
“And I need to start with our strategy. Cover the basics, right? Food, shelter, safety. So, I got shelter, and food, well…I just figured out that there’s nothing left to eat on this island other than sprouts which need time to grow. But safety?” I held up my wounded foot. “The whole reason I’m all panicked about food is because I can’t hyper-heal anymore, but I wouldn’t need to if I knew more about the creatures that can hurt me.”
“Moo,” said the cow, which I took for “Okay, I’m with you, but what does that have to do with your new method?”
“I’m getting to that,” I said. “If I can study the creatures from a safe place and figure out where they come from, how they hunt, and how long they last when the sun comes up, I can keep out of trouble long enough to get a handle on food.”
At that moment the rain ceased. I looked up at the sun, then down to the hill, then back over to the cow. “I’ve discovered how to make glass, so what if I built another room into this side of the hill to safely study the creatures, and that”—I held up a triumphant fist—“is where the method, or the ‘way,’ comes into play.”
“Baa,” said the white sheep, ambling over to us.
“Will you explain it to him?” I asked the cow, limping back toward the hill. Behind me, I could hear the sheep’s confused “baa” and the cow’s exasperated “moo.”
“Take it in steps,” I shouted over my shoulder. “I gotta take life in steps.”
I was thinking of crafting items in this world, how the process could be mental as well as physical.
By the time I’d swum back around to my beach, three clear steps had crystalized.
PLAN: What do I want to do, right down to the smallest detail?
PREPARE: What do I need—tools and materials—in order to make my plan work?
PRIORITIZE: What do I need to do first in order to do everything else?
This “way” guided my process in the creation of something I would soon dub my “observation room.”
In my initial plan, I imagined a small chamber at the base of the hill’s western slope, with an outer wall of glass blocks.
In order to create this room, I would need to prepare the following: glass blocks, torches, and extra tools.
Priority One was tools. Digging through the entire hill would take one, maybe two, extra pickaxes, which would take cobblestone and wood, which I had plenty of. Now that I was prepared with all the tools and materials I needed, and I had a mental plan of what I needed to build, I got right to work picking at the back wall of my bunker. At first things were going great. I almost forgot both my empty stomach and my aching ankle, until the deepening tunnel got darker.
How big is this hill, I thought, sticking a flickering torch to the wall. What if I run out of torches?
“If that happens,” I said aloud, “then I’ll just go digging for more coal and finish the observation room later.” It felt good, for once, to have an answer instead of just worrying questions, to act instead of just react. Maybe this really was the way.
Turns out I didn’t need more torches just yet. It wasn’t long before I broke through onto the other side, and saw that the sun was dipping below the horizon.
“See!” I shouted over to the cow and sheep. “The way is working!”
“Baa,” said the white sheep, reminding me that in less than a minute I’d be caught out in the open, in the darkness.
“Right,” I said, placing my glass blocks. Should have factored in the sunset, I thought angrily, and the size of the hill. Stupid planning, stupid mistakes.
The cow must have known what I was thinking because it gave me an encouraging “moo.”
“Good point,” I called back. “This is my first time practicing the Three P’s, which, now that I say it, means I should add a fourth: Practice!”
As the sun sank and the stars rose, I hollowed out a three-by-three-by-three chamber behind my new clear wall. All that was left was to fix my last, comforting torch to the wall.
“Not bad,” I said proudly, wishing this world would let me rest my hands on my hips.
I turned back to the giant window, staring out at the twilight. So far nothing moved except the animals. “Well, at least I’m learning that you never stop eating,” I told them. “Now, if only the monsters would show up.”
“Add another P,” mooed the cow. “Patience.”
“Can’t argue with that,” I said, and settled down for a long wait.
The first thing I learned that night was that monsters didn’t appear until the sky was completely dark. The next thing was that they literally appeared. They didn’t crawl out of the ocean or the ground, like I’d initially thought. One second they weren’t there, then the next, PLING! Okay, maybe I added the PLING! for dramatic effect, but you get it, right? They just materialized, and they didn’t do it one at a time. They came in mobs, zombies and spiders and even those sneaky, combustible creepers.
I noticed that they didn’t care about any of the animals, even when one of the sheep walked right in front of a zombie.
That zombie saw me, though, and made a beeline across the meadow. Instinctively I backed away into the tunnel. Gotta build a door for this, I thought, ready to slam down a couple cobblestones in the entrance.
The undead brute skulked slowly from one end of the window to the other, never taking its black eyes off me. Feeling a little emboldened by its passivity, I took a step forward, then another, then hobbled right up to the glass.
“Well?” I asked. “You gonna attack or what?”
Fittingly, I got a less than eloquent “Grrruuugggh.”
“I know you can see me, and your buddy kept trying to break down my door, so what’s the difference now?”
“Grugh,” it growled grumpily, content to trade looks instead of blows.
“Well, at least I can’t smell you,” I sneered, but then added, “Can you smell me?”
The ghoul moaned, standing like a statue of rotten meat.
“Is that it?” I asked, pressing my face to the glass. “Is it ’cause you can’t smell me?”
I had no way to test this theory, other than breaking a hole in the glass—which I was not willing to do—so I chalked it up, once again, to the rules making sense, just not to me.
Whatever the rule was—smell or maybe sound, or even some other, sixth sense I wasn’t aware of—all the other mobs seemed to obey it, too.
Several of the spiders came skittering toward me, their eyes sending chills down my spine. One of the arthropods just sat there looking at me while another scuffled right over my window and up the hill. Like the zombie, neither seemed to have any interest in attacking.
Next came one of those silently gliding creepers, and this time I backed way up into the tunnel. If I was wrong about my sense theory, and if that living land mine decided to detonate next to the glass, I was toast. I even placed one block in the tunnel’s entrance, and was ready to plant a second if I saw the creeper start to vibrate. Fortunately, block in hand, I watched the monster glide away.
My sigh of relief, however, was cut short the moment I saw another creature emerge from the woods. Like the zombie, this one was humanoid. However, unlike the putrid, stumbling flesh-bags, this thing had no flesh on its bones. In fact, it was only bones. It was a human skeleton, and the CLICKETY-CLACK sound it made matched what I’d heard that first night in the woods. “Was it one of you guys that shot that arrow?” I whispered.
I got my answer a second later when I noticed that the skeleton had something in his hand: a curved stick, or collection of sticks, tied together on either end by a taut string. “A bow. Mystery solved.”
Just then another skeleton clacked into view and for a second I worried about the two of them taking pot shots at my window. Worry vanished when, to my astonishment, the two bone-beasts looked at each other, raised their bows, and began shooting! With each impact, the wounded skeleton was knocked back, flashing red, then
returned fire.
“Oh I so gotta get one of those bows,” I said, giddy with the idea of a ranged weapon. “Please just kill each other so I can grab one in the morning.”
And then, as a teasing answer to my prayers, the skeleton battle was over. The new challenger had beaten his rival, shooting him into a cloud of smoke. I saw a bow hovering where the loser had vanished.
Patience, I reminded myself, watching helplessly as the bow hovered just a few dozen blocks from me. Glancing down the tunnel, I thought I saw the sky lightening through my door. “Won’t be long now,” I said, looking back at the prize. And then, to my utter anguish, the weapon blinked out of existence.
“No!” I whined, realizing that dropped objects in this world apparently have a lifespan.
I did pick up something that morning though: vital proof that my shade theory was correct. Watching two zombies, one in the meadow and the other in the woods, I saw the exposed one burst into flames, while the other remained safe.
While this was happening, I thought I heard a rapid clicking above my head. Was a skeleton running, or dying, somewhere up the hill? Maybe I’d get lucky and snag a bow after all! I waited until the CLICK-CLACKING ceased, then limped back to the tunnel.
I grunted and groaned with every smarting step up the cliff wall. In a replay of the previous morning, I got to the summit and into another staring contest with a spider.
“Okay,” I said to the daytime nightmare, “If I’m right, then daylight makes you passive, and I’d really like to be right right now.”
I could see something hovering behind its bulbous body. A bow?
“Good spider,” I said, taking a cautious step toward it. “Good giant, carnivorous mutant.” It stayed still. I took another. It looked away. I crept right past the arachnid and right over to the prize I’d literally risked life and limb for.
Not a bow, but the next best thing. The shaft was wood—oak or birch I couldn’t tell—and the sharp, triangular tip looked a lot like flint. The end was made of a feather, which I guessed helped it fly straight. So this is an arrow, I thought. Now if I can only get the thing to shoot it with.
“Moo,” came a call from down in the meadow.
“Yeah, I got it,” I called back, holding up the arrow triumphantly. “But I also got reams of intel on those creatures of the night.”
Mentally I ran through everything I’d learned from just one observation: how shade worked, how skeletons attacked each other, how nothing attacked me as long as I was safe behind glass. And that last observation brought up a lingering question.
“Why did they stay away? Was it the absence of smell or…or the light?”
“Moo,” replied the cow, going back to its breakfast of green squares.
“Is it the light?” I pressed. “It makes more sense than smell, right? I mean, if sunlight kills monsters or”—I glanced sideways just in time to see the spider vanish—“banishes them, whatever you want to call it, then does a less powerful light, like a torch, keep them away?”
“Moo,” called the cow over its black and white butt.
“I know,” I said. “Only one way to find out.”
Hiking down the easier but still painful western slope, I continued to talk out my next project with the cow.
“What if,” I began, “I set some torches outside near my observation bubble so I can see if they work?”
Planning.
“But,” I continued, “in order to do that, I need to make more torches, and to do that, I need to get more coal.”
Preparing.
“Which means the first thing I need to do is make sure I have enough pickaxes and maybe a shovel or two in case I hit dirt or sand.”
Prioritizing.
“Which I already know how to do.”
Practice.
“Moo,” warned the cow, reminding me of the need for…
“I know,” I griped, eager to start my new adventure. “Patience.”
It turned out that practice was really what I needed because I had no experience with mining. Isn’t that what it’s technically called? Mining? Digging down into the earth for mineral resources? Well, whatever it’s called, I didn’t know how to do it.
For starters, as I cut a rough diagonal staircase down through solid rock, I realized that I’d left light out of my planning. This meant I had to hop back up the stairs, which killed my ankle, to grab the torch from my bunker, and to place it and replace it on the stone wall every few blocks I dug.
It was slow going, and at one point almost fatal. Digging down a few dozen blocks, I came to a hard tan stone directly in front of me. Because the stone looked like sand, I dubbed it sandstone, and when I dug it out, an actual block of sand fell down to replace it. I got out my shovel and removed the new sand block, then the next sand block that fell in its place, then the third that fell in its place, then backed up as a stream of deep blue water rushed in.
I’ve broken through to the sea, I thought, shaking my head at the blunder. I hadn’t thought about the fact that this island was essentially an underwater mountain, and digging at an angle would eventually find me out in the ocean.
At least this world’s water is weird, I thought, remembering how the blast crater had never filled up. In my world, breaking into the sea would have flooded the entire tunnel, at worst drowning me and at best destroying all my work.
“I got that going for me,” I said, turning around and digging in the opposite direction. “I don’t have to worry about drowning.” And then, looking up at the solid blocks above me, I said, “Or cave-ins.”
I shouldn’t have said that out loud. Yes, I thought I knew that sand was the only substance that didn’t stick and that if I saw another sandstone block, I’d be well warned. And yes, I know that superstition and tempting fate are silly and primitive and wrong. Still, I shouldn’t have said it out loud.
Because the next moment I knocked away a stone above my head and looked up just in time to see the block above it come crashing down.
The world went dark. I choked and gasped. I was drowning. Not in water, but in this hard, gritty stuff that scratched and crackled as I tried to struggle free. My hand burst into open air. I clawed at the smooth stone. Half crawling, half swimming, I wriggled out of the suffocating trap.
I stood panting on the last step of my tunnel, feeling like an elephant had sat on my chest. Bruised ribs, scraped skin, throat scratching like it was made of sandpaper. Looking up, I saw why. I’d just discovered this world’s other nonstick substance, a material halfway between sand and rock.
Something I’d barely noticed in my world, maybe on somebody’s driveway, had almost accomplished what zombies and giant spiders and creeping explosives had failed to do. “Gravel,” I hacked, feeling the stinging wounds I’d now have to live with for who knows how long.
Getting out my shovel, I tried to clear the column away, and just like the sand, it kept filling in. Clearing the fourth cube, however, got me a little added bonus: another sharp flake of flint. Peering up into the hole above my head, I saw a huge deposit of gravel which might hold more flint flakes if I ever needed them.
“For now,” I said softly, fearing my own voice might cause another cave-in, “I think I’ll stay well away from you.”
Changing the planning section of my way, I decided to modify my mining technique. Instead of going diagonally, I tried digging in a spiral: two blocks down, turn right, two blocks down, turn right, and so on. That way I not only avoided the ocean but also knew exactly what was above my head.
I might have been safer, but after being buried alive, I sure didn’t feel it. I don’t think I was claustrophobic at this point, but digging through these narrow confines of rock, with barely enough room above my head and only one torch that I had to keep hopping painfully back up my makeshift staircase to get, well, let’s just say it wasn’t my most pleasant experience.
At one point, when I probably should have been remembering the cow’s warning about patience, I started to s
eriously consider giving up the whole operation. I began looking behind me more often, picturing the long, punishing climb back up. Was all of this worth it? Was my stupid experiment with torchlight and monsters just that? Heck, the whole point was to work on making myself safer, and I’d almost gotten myself killed. Maybe I should just forget—
A block of stone fell away from me to reveal flecks of black coal.
“Finally,” I breathed in a chuckling groan. “About time you guys showed up.” Picking out the precious black lumps, I added, “And there’s so many of you, too.” I counted at least a dozen of them, which meant forty-eight torches if I used all of them at once. I can light a tree for my experiment, I thought happily, and my cave, and the observation room, and the tunnel, and make them all bright as…
I stopped and stared at the rock behind the coal. It was speckled, but orange, and seemed to reflect the torchlight.
Some kind of metal? I wondered. Copper? Brass? Was brass a naturally occurring ore or was it a mixture of other elements? I still don’t know the answer to that one.
I picked out the rock, and the two identical ones behind it, and unlike the coal, whatever was embedded in them stayed put.
“I think I know how to get you out,” I said, hoofing it back up to the bunker and wincing with each painful step.
Making torches as I went, I made sure to place them far enough apart to light my entire way to the surface. You might say I was wasting the very material I’d come for, but if these three new cubes turned out to be what I thought they were, then I’d be going back down there soon.
I slid the three metal-flecked blocks into the furnace, placed a lump of coal beneath them, and watched as the fire blazed up. What came out wasn’t copper or brass, but something much more valuable. What came out was nothing less than the metal that literally built the modern world. What came out was iron!
“Look!” I shouted through my observation bubble to the animals. Picking out a doorway next to my window, I hobbled across the meadow to show them the three shining bars. “Look what’s right under our feet!”
