by James Maxey
One second, I was looking at stars. The next, I was staring up into rays of sunlight, with no awareness of time having passed. Huge black flies crawled over my face. I sat up with a groan, swatting away the nasty things. My whole body felt stiff. My fingers and toes were swollen from all the bug bites I’d suffered during the night. My thoughts churned slowly, with unfocused images of all the crazy things I’d seen in recent days dancing before me like blurry ghosts.
Thirst finally got me onto my feet. Dew clung to the leaves around me. I spotted a bush with huge, heart-shaped leaves. I rolled one into a cone and shook a slender tree, producing a rain of dew. I caught a few teaspoons worth in the leaf, and after a few more trees I had maybe a quarter of a cup. I poured it into my mouth, holding it there for at least a minute until my teeth no longer felt glued to my cheeks, before swallowing it.
The flies kept buzzing me, so I decided to move on to find the pterosaurs. In the bright daylight it didn’t take me long to find glints of metal peeking out of the bushes. I rolled one out onto an open area. I wasn’t certain if I had it facing up or not, but figured the AI would turn it upright once I activated it.
“Giddy up,” I said.
The ball didn’t move.
“Come on,” I said, giving it a little shake. “Open up. Start. Activate.”
Nothing. Maybe it wasn’t positioned right. I rolled it 180 degrees and said, “Wake up. Time to go.”
I was talking to a piece of lifeless metal. I frowned. My mind was fuzzy, trying to remember watching these things unfold for the first time; it seemed like something that had happened months ago. I finally remembered the little key fob Elsa had used to signal these things to unfold. I’d never been given one of these fobs. Had hers controlled all of them? Probably the reverend had some keys on his utility belt. But I not only didn’t know where to find their bodies, I suspected if I did find them, they’d have been pulverized and incinerated by the explosions.
Could I hotwire these things? I mean, I’d picked up a few tricks from Chopper when he’d fiddled with his motorcycles. I ran my hands up in the joints and seams, feeling around for any wires, switches, or toggles.
Nothing.
I gave brute force a shot, finding the edge of a wing and pulling hard. I snapped the thin, light metal completely free of the joint. I tugged out a yard or so of fabric before accepting that this thing wasn’t going to fly again even if I did figure out how to turn it on.
“Motherfucker,” I said, before grabbing the rolled up robot in both hands and throwing against a tree with a growl. I sat down, cradling my head. As I stared down, something white and tiny dropped to the ground before me. It looked like a grain of rice, except it was wriggling.
I touched my fingers to my swollen eyebrow. My wound felt hot as a skillet. When I pulled my finger away, three maggots had latched on.
I screamed. It was wordless, kind of shrill and girlish, though not as girlish as my jumping around waving my hands limply as I succumbed to full-blown heebie-jeebies. Fortunately, I was far too exhausted to sustain a state of mindless panic for long. I calmed myself, drawing deep breaths, letting my heart slow.
Maggots! I had maggots devouring my forehead! It was weirdly painless, but now that I knew they were there I swear I could hear their tiny little teeth clicking as they chewed. In a different place and time, I might have figured out that maggots probably didn’t have teeth, but my brain still hadn’t broken free of the trauma fog that blanketed it.
All I could really understand at that moment was I had to make a decision. I could curl into a ball under a tree and wait until the maggots finished me off, or I could start walking. I was on a road, or at least some parallel ruts. They went somewhere, right? Someplace I might find a blowtorch to use on the maggots.
So I walked, and kept walking, for what felt like hours. The air grew unpleasantly hot, then oppressively hot, then downright hellish. Thirst tormented me, but the sun had baked off all the dew. By afternoon, the sky grew dark and I heard distant thunder. The wind kicked up and the thunder sounded much closer. Then, CRACK! Lighting hit close by. The thunder hit me hard enough to rattle my teeth. Two seconds later, water came down in buckets.
I laughed and turned my face skyward, jaws wide. The rain pounded down as hard as any storm I’d ever been caught in. Still, catching raindrops in my mouth turned out to be a painfully slow way to get a drink. My fur was soaked through. I looked at my hairy, waterlogged forearm. Then I licked it.
I tasted awful. At almost any other moment of my life, I’d have spit out the mouthful of nasty water. Instead, I swallowed, shuddering with joy as the fluid flowed down my throat. In five, maybe ten minutes, I’d sucked enough water out of my fur that I no longer felt thirsty, but now I had a new problem. Even though not a half hour before the heat had been like an oven, I started shivering, chilled to the bone by the rain. I managed a grim smile. Perfect. Just perfect. I’d survived killer robots, crazy gorilla girls, and a huge explosion only to freeze to death in the fucking tropics. I thought back to all the fabric I’d pulled out of the pterosaur only a few hours ago. Why the hell hadn’t I brought that with me? I could make a tent. For that matter, why hadn’t I torn the thing to pieces? It had claws. I could have used them for knives. I could have turned the jaws into a saw.
Far too late to do me any good, my brain was finally working again. Just add water.
I took shelter next to the biggest tree in the area. I knew it was a target for lightning. On the other hand, it had apparently survived a lot of storms, and right up against the trunk things were relatively dry.
I hunkered down to wait out the storm. It kept getting darker. I guess I nodded off.
When I woke up in the darkness I was covered in ants, except for the parts where I was covered in mosquitoes. This time, there was no panic attack. I was too emotionally dead for panic. My mind was reduced to a few primitive urges and a small, quiet voice whispering that it would be nice to take some sort of action to no longer be covered in insects. I found a bush and broke off a branch about as thick as my thumb. I chewed the end into a makeshift comb. As I scraped away what had to be a few pounds of insects, I staggered back onto the road, which was now bathed in pale, misty moonlight. The twin ruts glimmered with ghostly pools of water.
I decided to go back to salvage what I could from the pterosaurs. I followed the ruts, mindlessly placing one foot in front of the other. After walking for what had to be miles, I could hear a faint roaring sound, almost like an interstate in the distance. Could I really be close to a highway? As I kept walking, I finally figured out I was hearing water, not traffic. Weird. I hadn’t passed over any rivers, or even any streams. Maybe it was run off from the storm?
I climbed up over a rise and found myself looking down on a rocky, turbulent river. Where the hell had this come from? With a groan, I finally understood. In my bleary disorientation, I’d walked the wrong direction. I was now even further from the pterosaurs than I’d been before.
On the other hand, I’d found a river. I tripped as I went down the bank, tumbling and bouncing down large rocks until I landed with a splash in a shallow, swirling pond at the edge of the roaring water. I pulled myself onto my hands and knees and plunged my face into the current. I shook my head vigorously, trying to dislodge the maggots. I gently probed the edges of the wound with my fingers. I couldn’t feel anything crawling around beneath my skin. Maybe the ants had devoured all the maggots, or maybe the maggots had just eaten all the dead skin they could handle and moved on.
I sat by the riverside, shivering in the dampness, until the sun rose. I was thirsty again, and hungrier than I’d ever been in my life. If I drank from the river, I’d probably get some horrible disease and shit myself to death. Could I build a fire to boil water? In theory, I could bang some of the river rocks and break them until I had a sharp edge. Could I weave tufts of my fur to make a cord? Build a bow drill? What would I use for a pot?
I shook my head. Trying to build a fire seemed like
a huge waste of time. Every piece of wood within a hundred miles of me was soggy. I could go back up the road to find the robots, but what was the point? It wasn’t like I could build a fire out of them either, so unless it rained every day, I was going to die of thirst. Or, I could drink from the river and take my chances.
I searched along the riverside for a sandy patch of bank and dug a hole about two feet deep, scooping out the sand with my hands. Water seeped in quickly, filling it. The water was brown and milky. But after barely an hour of sunlight the chill of the night was again giving way to the jungle furnace. Time to man up and take a drink. Or, more accurately, animal up. It wasn’t like my chimp ancestors drank tap water.
I cupped my hands and brought the water to my lips, sucking it down. It didn’t taste too bad. Much better than fur water, at least.
Kneeling on the sandy bank, I noticed a lot of small fish swimming in a shallow, rocky pool a few yards away. There had to be hundreds of them, some two, maybe three inches long. I didn’t stop to form a strategy. I lunged, spreading my fingers wide. I was probably more startled than the fish when I came up holding three minnows in my left hand and four in my right.
Without a second thought, I popped them into my mouth. They crunched as I gave a few perfunctory chews. They tasted, honestly, like nothing at all. Not salty, not fishy, just watery and bland. The primary sensation eating them was the feel and the sound, like chewing gristle.
I caught a few more, but after that my splashing around had sent the majority of fish toward deeper water, and the ones left in the pool were too spread out for me to catch. I thought about building dams with rocks to group them, but that seemed like work and I still had God knows how many miles of walking ahead of me.
I’d decided against going back to the robots. The road I followed had to lead to something resembling civilization and I wasn’t in the mood to backtrack. Unfortunately, when I tried to cross the river to pick up the road on the other side, I slipped on the rocks and got swept downstream maybe a quarter of a mile. I worked my way back along the bank until I could see the road I’d followed on the other side, but no matter how far I went up and down the bank, for the life of me I couldn’t find where the road picked up again on the side I was on. The river didn’t look navigable by a boat. What the hell?
With a clearer head and more patience, maybe I could have found the road. But, the same small, quiet voice that had told me how to make a comb was now telling me that I didn’t need a road because I had a river. If I did find and follow a road, I’d have to worry about water and food. If I followed the river downstream, I’d have drinking water and at least the occasional minnow. An hour had passed since I drank from my makeshift well and I wasn’t vomiting. No cramps at all, in fact. Eventually, this river would take me to a bigger river. Maybe one big enough for me to build a raft. I could float until I found a village. Hell, maybe I’d reach the goddamn ocean. I knew there were cities on the coast.
I started walking, feeling good about my plan.
Then I reached the fucking swamp.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A Touch of Bitterness
I WAS NEVER in the Boy Scouts. I don’t have much experience with the great outdoors. I’d assumed the burbling, rocky river I walked next to would stay that way until it turned into a broader, less rocky river that still had clearly defined banks. Unfortunately, as I came down out of the hills into flatlands, the river did indeed get broader, but the whole concept of banks turned out to be completely optional. The water spread out under trees and kept going as far as I could see. The stony, sandy soil gave way to muck. I couldn’t take a step without sinking into mud up to my knees. B-movie visions of quicksand filled my mind. Every fallen log jutting from the water looked like a black caiman.
Fortunately, my experience with cities did have some value. Just as it was faster to get around dense cities via rooftop, the trees here were so closely packed that it looked possible to travel over the swamp via the canopy. I scrambled up the nearest tree. In the upper branches, the shadows gave way to an alien, sundrenched landscape. The upper limbs teemed with exotic plants growing out of the crooks of branches. If you’ve ever wondered about the natural habitat of some of the spike-leaved potted plants you find in office lobbies, it turns out they literally grow on trees. So did a thousand kinds of flowers, and vines of various thicknesses and leaf shapes. Some of the bigger crooks of branches held ponds teeming with tadpoles. I was tempted to find out if they tasted like little fish, but some tiny bit of book-learning reminded me that a lot of jungle frogs are poisonous. I decided to leave the tadpoles alone. Drinking from the little ponds probably wasn’t a great idea either. But, there were fruit everywhere out on the ends of the limbs, albeit most of it green. You got juice from fruit, right? I could eat and drink these buggers. The limbs were too thin to hold my body weight on the narrow branches that held the fruit, so I snapped off a branch and reeled in the prize. It was no fruit I’d ever seen before. It resembled a runty pear. Actually, it was dimpled, so it most resembled an unripe golf ball.
The fruit turned out to give off about as much juice as a golf ball when I squeezed it. I bit into one and immediately spit it out. Nothing in the world should have been that bitter. I’d take my chances with the tadpoles before trying one of those again.
Luckily, fruit wasn’t my only food option. There were birds everywhere, bright, colorful things you’d normally see in pet stores. Canaries, parrots, and big, flame colored birds with sharp, black beaks fluttered all around. Also hummingbirds. I heard them buzzing when I first climbed up and was afraid I was heading into the realm of monster bees. Instead, hummingbirds flitted from flower to flower, a dozen different species, maybe more, all iridescent, shimmering red, blue, green, and yellow. Enough of the birds might make a decent meal. Unfortunately, birds have amazing reflexes. I tried to peg a few by whipping the golf ball fruit at them. They all zipped clear of the green missiles with ease.
I was starting to get really hungry. Luckily, I’m easily distracted. As I jumped from the branches of one tree to the next, there were plenty of bright, flashy objects to take my mind off my hollow belly. Here was a kind of orchid I hadn’t seen before, there a snake green as an emerald slithering along a branch. There were sapphire beetles and ruby beetles, ginormous black ants with yellow stripes, and butterflies coated in diamonds. From time to time I’d see dull, bark-colored lizards, and striped frogs more dazzling than the butterflies. Further away, smart enough to keep their distance, I spotted things that looked like squirrels with fur red as firetrucks.
Thanks to my ooh-aah sense of wonder, I wasn’t moving very fast across the treetops. Also, finding branches that could support my weight turned the canopy into an ever-changing maze where travel in a straight line was impossible. From the highest trees, I could see the mesa that I’d departed from in the distance, smoke still rising from its burnt surface. As long as I kept it to my back, I had to be getting closer to civilization. Of course, if I kept taking two hours to move a mile, I might not reach the nearest McDonald’s until I was old and gray.
That evening, I found monkeys. I heard them before I saw them, hooting and chittering somewhere up ahead. I thought the sounds might be coming from birds until I climbed onto a high branch and looked around. Just two trees ahead, a troupe of maybe fifty monkeys clustered, eating yellow fruit. I’d read quite a bit about monkeys and was disappointed I didn’t recognize these. They were roughly the size of spider monkeys, but their faces were patterned more like the classic monkey-grinder capuchin, with dark red-brown hoods around pale tan faces. But their tails were thick, more like a howler monkey. So, who knows? I didn’t have a phone handy to google the things.
What I did have was a realization that they were crowded on that tree because the fruit was ripe. You could tell from the smell on the breeze, a sugary, white-wine aroma that promised the carbs and liquid my body craved. I threw caution to the wind and jumped from my branch to the next tree, even though the bran
ch I aimed for didn’t look thick enough to support my weight. Appearances weren’t deceiving. It sagged down, snapping, but not snapping cleanly, turning into a wooden rope that swung me down to a thicker branch. I clambered across and back up in search of the next segment of the limb maze I’d need to get across to reach the fruit. As I climbed back into the upper canopy, the monkeys caught my scent. They jabbered and shrieked, jumping around like their tails were on fire. A few of the bolder ones charged at me, stopped a few yards off, then darted back.
They weren’t happy to see me. I figured I was only a few seconds away from being showered with hurled feces. I rose on two legs and let out my best Tarzan bellow, beating my chest with my fists. It worked! The monkeys turned tail and flew away in long, graceful leaps, vanishing into the distant canopy without looking back.
I spotted a branch that could hold me and leapt for it. Half eaten fruit lay in the crooks of the branch. I lifted one, sniffing it, finding it floral and sweet. It was yellow as an apple, but definitely not an apple. Some kind of fig maybe? Nothing I’d ever seen in a supermarket. I swatted away the bees that buzzed my find and sank my teeth into it.
Yum. Sugary, acidic and tart with a bubblegum undertone, and absolutely dripping with juice. I snapped the branches and reeled in fruit by the bushel. Practically none of the fruit were intact. Birds, bugs, and who knows what else had smelled the ripe fruit long before I reached it. I got over my squeamishness pretty fast, squeezing the mushier fruit in my fists and letting the juice dribble onto my tongue, then chomping into the ones that still had a little structural integrity. Whatever these were, they belonged in every supermarket in America. I could eat them by the truckload.