by Rachel Ford
Her voice was rising again, and he had no good response to her question. So he did the wisest thing he could think of, and changed the topic. “We need to locate a water supply. And something to eat,” he declared authoritatively.
“I literally just said that.”
He frowned at her. “I know. I was just…repeating it.”
“Do you think it sounds better – smarter – when you say it? Or do you just like to hear the sound of your own voice?”
His frown deepened. “That’s uncalled for,” he declared superciliously.
“Is it?”
“Yes. We’re stuck here together, Nancy. If we’re going to survive, we need to work together.” Then, adopting a superior tone, he reminded her, “That’s the only way our hunter-gatherer ancestors survived, you know: teamwork.”
“Oh God,” she groaned. “Go on, Alfred: mansplain humanoid social evolution to me.”
He blinked. “Mansplain?”
She wasn’t finished, though. “You do it with everything else. Why not early human history too?”
“What is ‘mansplain’?” he asked. That was another term unfamiliar to him. He instinctively felt the criticism wasn’t merited – little of what she’d said, he thought, had been – but he felt it best to understand the charges against him before mounting a defense.
She scowled. “When a smug man – you – assumes a woman needs him to explain something that she already knows. Especially when he knows less about it than she does.” Her glower deepened. “Also, you.”
“You’re saying I do that?”
“All the damned time.”
“I don’t do that!”
“You do.”
“I’ve never done it. Not once!”
She crossed her arms and faced him. He did the same. “You mean, like trying to mansplain the fire code at work? Or the office safety guidelines?”
“That was months ago,” he protested. “You can’t bring up things from months ago.”
“You said you ‘never’ did it.”
“And you said I always did it.”
“You do. Like yesterday, telling me to make sure the computers were plugged in. It’s only my job to work on computers. I mean, why assume that I know to plug them in? Why not double check, right? And telling me to restart the router. You didn’t even know what to call it, but you still had to tell me how to do my job. My favorite, though? How about when you tried to tell me how to get the virus – the virus you got – off the breakroom fridge?”
“I was only telling you how I thought you could get rid of it…” He trailed off at her expression. “Alright,” he admitted after a moment’s reflection, “I might have overstepped on those ones.”
“Might have?” she scoffed.
“Yes. But I was just trying to be helpful. And you can’t hold the HR complaint against me. First of all, that’s whistleblowing, and that’s protected by law. And second of all, I was right.”
Whatever good will his admission might have earned, he seemed to have blown it with this retort. “Whistleblower protections don’t shield you from well-earned dislike,” she snapped. “And you weren’t right. HR sided with me.”
“They were wrong.”
She spread her hands in exasperation. “Well, isn’t everyone? Everyone but you?”
“And I didn’t report you because you were a woman. I reported you because you were violating policy.” His own tone was rising. The fact was, he felt really aggrieved by the accusation. “I filed over a dozen reports last year. You were only two of them. The rest were all men.”
“Oh, well, don’t I feel special.”
“And, frankly, Nancy, I’m really surprised that you’d think I’d do that,” he continued. “I don’t see gender.”
“Oh God,” she groaned. “Let me guess: is your best friend a woman too?”
“I don’t have a best friend,” he said, confused by the question. Then, he thought it right to add, lest she get the wrong impression, “I do have friends, of course, but I like them all equally. But only one of them is a woman.” It didn’t seem necessary to point out that he considered only three of his acquaintances in such a light – and of the trio, only one, his freshman roommate, really qualified for the honor of friend. “But I fail to see how any of that is relevant.”
She stared at him. “You don’t listen, Alfred. You just missed everything I said to you.”
He was more confused than ever, now. “I heard every word.”
“You heard, but you didn’t listen.”
“Well, actually,” he started, about to explain that – definitionally – hearing required listening.
She interrupted, “Don’t!”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t ‘well actually’ me.” For a minute, they stood in silence, staring at each other. Then, in more moderated tones, she said, “What I’m saying is, Alfred, you heard the words, but you didn’t listen to my point. You just responded. You didn’t think about what I was saying. You just – you always – want to be right.”
“But…I usually am,” he said. It sounded conceited, but he didn’t mean it that way. On balance, he was right more often than he was wrong; and it seemed as a general rule simpler and safer to operate on the assumption that, in a conflict situation, he was in the right.
She was incredulous. “Do you hear yourself?”
“I just mean, I’m not trying to be right. I’m just used to being right.” Her flinty expression didn’t convince him that his explanation was helping, so he dug deeper. “And maybe – sometimes – I assume that I’m right when I’m…” He swallowed his pride. “Not right.”
“Sometimes? Maybe?”
“Yes. Definitely. I shouldn’t – I shouldn’t have pushed the button. I’m sorry.”
She blinked. “You’re apologizing?” Her tone was skeptical, as if it was some kind of trick.
“Yes.” He nodded miserably. The truth was, she was right, and he was wrong. He shouldn’t have pushed the button. He should have listened to her. “And I’m sorry about being pushy. About telling you your job. But Nancy?”
“What?”
“It wasn’t because you’re a woman. I tell Jeff how to fix my computer all the time too.” Jeff Filmore was one of Nancy’s colleagues in the nerd bunker – the one who, more often than not, was assigned Alfred’s emergency tickets when his computer locked up, or his phone stopped working, or the printer wouldn’t print.
She frowned at him, but some of the fire had left her eyes. “Your defense is you’re not a sexist, you’re just an asshole in general?”
He cringed at the word as much as the sentiment. He cringed because she’d summed it up too well. He cringed because it had taken being thrown back in time millions of years ago to see himself for who he was. “Basically,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”
Chapter Eight
An apology, it turned out, was all it took to placate Nancy. His misery had extinguished the flames of her wroth, and the more miserable he felt, the more forgiving she seemed to be. “Look, Alfred,” she said, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I said some things I shouldn’t have said. I’m sorry about that too.”
“You weren’t wrong,” he said dejectedly.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to figure out what to do for food and water, remember? And shelter.”
He tried to rouse himself from his melancholy. There would be time enough to reflect on the failures of his life later. “Yes,” he said.
“We should probably try to find high ground,” she mused. “Some vantage point to get a look at the area.”
They were in a clearing, but surrounded by fairly dense foliage. “There looks like some kind of path this way,” Alfred said.
She followed the direction he indicated, and nodded. “Alright. Let’s see where it leads.”
They walked in silence for a time. The sun bore down hot on them, and Alfred felt his thirst return with renewed vigor. Worse, though, was the hunger. He hadn’t eat
en since the night before, and he’d only had cookies then.
His stomach started to growl. He wondered what kind of food they’d be able to find in the Cretaceous period. Would there be anything edible here among the prehistoric flora and fauna?
As the afternoon wore on, he started to contemplate what a dinosaur might taste like. He’d never eaten lizard before. Would it be gamey? Could a lizard be gamey? There’d be a lot of meat on a dinosaur. He didn’t envision himself taking down anything quite as big as a T. Rex. On the contrary, he’d be happy to go his entire life without seeing one of them again. But maybe one of those drooling green things that had woken him in the morning?
Sugar cookies. Was it only this morning? It seemed a lifetime ago.
Still, he could see himself taking on one of those gentle, plodding creatures. We’ll need spears or something first. His mind returned, now, to how such a thing might taste.
“Here,” Nancy said beside him, fishing into her pack and producing the bag of jerky. “You’re going to attract every predator for miles with the noise your stomach is making.”
“What?” He was concerned, but, at seeing her grin, realized she was joking. He reached for the bag, thankful for the prospect of food; and then stopped. “I shouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s yours.”
She snorted. “We’re in this together, aren’t we?”
He nodded. “Still…”
“Still what?”
“You should keep it. We’ve got limited rations.”
“We’re still going to have limited rations if you starve yourself. You’ll just be weaker and less alert. Come on, Alfred. Eat.”
He couldn’t fault her logic, and to his stomach’s relief, he accepted. Still, he limited himself to a few pieces only, and then handed the bag back. “Thanks.”
“Of course.”
It was nowhere near enough to satisfy him, but he did feel better after eating. His fatigue lessened, and his outlook improved ever so marginally.
The road, meanwhile, went on. “Do you think Futureprise cleared this path?” she asked. “Or do you think it’s some kind of animal trail?”
“I hope it was Futureprise,” he said.
“Yeah, me too.”
He threw a glance around them. The path was grassy, scattered now and then with broad-leafed shrubs and plants. To either side, though, they were still surrounded by forest.
He looked up at the sky. The sun was beginning its downward arc for the day. He shivered at the prospect of being out here at night. “I hope we find something before it gets dark.”
She nodded her agreement, and for awhile they traveled in silence again. Then, she asked, “You don’t suppose any of them survived, do you?”
“Any of who?”
“The team. Nash’s team.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t considered that, but he turned it over in his mind now. “Probably not. It didn’t sound like they were planning a permanent stay. Nash – I assume that skeleton we found was Nash – was supposed to follow them, but something obviously happened.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “He looked like he got eaten.”
Alfred cringed at the thought. “So whatever happened to him, probably also happened to whoever was supposed to bring them back.”
“You think they had a way back, then?”
“Who would travel back in time without one?”
She mused this for a while. “It depends,” she said. “I mean, if you could pick whatever era you wanted, but there was no way back? Wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
She laughed at the emphatic tone of his answer.
“Why, would you?”
“I might,” she admitted. “Not the Cretaceous period, of course. But maybe-” She cut off suddenly.
Alfred glanced over at Nancy, and was startled to see a shadow crossing the ground a few steps ahead of her. “What the-” It was a large shadow, and he glanced up to find its source. He almost loosed a scream at the sight.
It seemed some monstrous cross between bird and dinosaur was floating just above the treetops. Its wingspan covered, he guessed, a good two and a half meters; the wings were leathery and bat-like. From them, reached a set of spindly claw-tipped appendages. A crested head with a pointed beak was turning from side to side on a long, thin neck and squat body, studying them. And when it opened its mouth, he could see rows of teeth: sharp, gleaming teeth.
At that sight, he did yelp. Nancy threw a cautionary glance his way and spoke, keeping her voice low and calm. “The trees – let’s head to the trees. It won’t be able to reach us there.”
He nodded wordlessly, and they made a beeline for the forest. The shadow pursued them, along with the sound of heavy wings beating. Alfred’s heart was in his throat the whole time, but at last they ducked under the sheltering canopies.
“What the hell is that thing?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My dinosaur taxonomy is pretty rusty. It’s looks like a pterodactyl. But I think they were small – much small than that.”
He glanced heavenward, searching for the creature. It had vanished, but the sounds of its wings were still audible. “It’s still out there.”
“Yeah. I think we should avoid the path, and stay under the trees.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” he said. “Did you see the size of its teeth?”
Chapter Nine
They followed the tree-line, keeping the path in sight as they went. Every once in awhile, their curious pterosaur pursuer would reappear. Alfred assumed it was looking for a late lunch, and had decided that foreign food was on the menu.
Nancy had laughed when he told her that. “Probably.”
In time, the forest thinned, and the horizon was more readily visible. Distant rock formations appeared, jutting high into the sky over the forest. “We can try there,” she said. “Get an idea of where we are, and what’s out here.”
They kept under the greenery as they walked. Alfred’s feet were blistering, and he was sorely repenting the long-sleeved shirt he’d donned two days ago. He remarked as much to her, and she nodded. “I’m going to make a shitty caveman,” she acknowledged. “All I can think of is a long bath, a good massage, and a glass of wine.”
“Actually,” he said, “this is the wrong era for…” He trailed off, catching himself a few moments too late, and flushed. It was a joke. She didn’t need him to remind her that the earliest humans wouldn’t have evolved for tens of millions of years yet. “Sorry.”
She nudged him. “Good catch.”
The afternoon had run long, and dusk was beginning to settle by time they reached the rocks. “We’re not going to be able to see much this time of day,” Alfred said.
“No,” she agreed. “And I don’t want to be climbing rocks in the dark, either.”
“We should try to find somewhere to hole up tonight, and get a start tomorrow morning.”
It was decided by unanimous consensus. A brief survey of their vicinity, and the great reddish masses all around them, revealed a few possible encampment locations. In the end, they settled on one that offered them a good vantage of the horizon. “At least we’ll be able to keep an eye out for predators,” Nancy said.
It was a kind of hollow nook set at the joining of two masses of rock. At its tallest, it was about two meters high, and it ran under the rocks a good five or six meters. All things considered, it was a spacious cave, but not so spacious as to conceal the presences of any unwanted roommates.
They took a few sips of water and a handful each of trail mix, and then settled down for the night. The temperature dropped rapidly as the sun set. Alfred wasn’t certain if it was really as cold as it felt, or if he was simply used to the blistering heat of the day, and so any drop felt extreme. Still, he found himself shivering before long.
Nancy had folded her camping pad, sitting on a portion of it and propping the rest against the wall to lean against. She wrapped herself in he
r blanket. He, meanwhile, was slumped on and against the cold stone a little ways away. His teeth started to chatter.
“Hey,” Nancy said in a minute, “I know it’s kind of close quarters…but if you want, you can share my camp.”
He did want. Resting with the camping pad between himself and the cold rock, and pulling the blanket tight around him, his shivering lessened, and then stopped. It was awkward – there was no denying that.
The camping pad was meant to allow one person to lie on it, and not with room to spare. Right now, the pair of them were squashed together atop it, fighting to find the perfect balance between respecting some fiction of personal space and avoiding the icy rockface. Not only that, but neither of them had showered in two days. She smelled of sweat, and he smelled of sweat and vomit.
For all that, though, sleep was not long in coming. He was physically and mentally drained, and no consideration of discomfort could deprive him of sleep’s sweet succor.
He woke to find her propped against him, still sleeping. His shoulder, where her head rested, felt numb from lack of blood. He was struck, though, by the peacefulness of her slumber. And deciding that he hated to wake her – they had a miserable day ahead of them, and she may as well get as much sleep before it as she could – he stayed where he was.
After a space, though, she did wake, and they dragged themselves out of their makeshift campsite. Slowly but surely, the blood returned to Alfred’s arm. Nancy, meanwhile, got out some jerky and water. “Breakfast is served.”
Then they turned their attention to their mission. “Hopefully there’s a river around here somewhere,” she said.
“Yeah. But who knows what kind of parasites or bacteria are in it.”
“If we had something to light a fire, we could try to boil it first.”
“We’d need a pan too.”
“Good point.”
He sighed. “Well, we better hope it’s safe to drink.”
“If we do find a river, though, we’ll find fish.” She frowned. “Hopefully. There were fish in the Cretaceous period, right?”
“Uhh…probably.”
“I wish I paid more attention to this stuff in school,” she sighed.