The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1)

by Michael Beckum

  Black goo and saliva gushed forth, sliming across my arms and down the thing’s ‘chest’, and both centipedes were now rendered useless from agony.

  Trying to remain silent, I signaled to the others to follow me.

  As a unit we hurried quietly out of the arena, and up along a narrow aisle dividing the stones forming the general seating area. Behind us the monkey-men scattered from both centipedes and angry wolf-cats. There were a few stragglers in front of us blocking the way, but a couple well-placed shots from the stones my cave girl and I had picked up sent them all fleeing for safety. Once an escape path had been cleared we could see before us the ridge leading out of the tiny valley, toward freedom, and we all smiled.

  But we shouldn’t have.

  As we hurried to escape, an entirely different type of man came over the lip of the canyon riding on the back of a good-sized, two-legged dinosaur. The rider was tall, almost black in color, and resembled a panther more than anything. One of our monkey-man captors had been focusing too much over his shoulder on the carnage behind him, didn’t see the newcomer’s arrival, and ran right into the open mouth of the panther man’s mount. The thing ripped him instantly in two, sending legs, tail and a hand flying in three different directions, then quickly swallowed the remaining bits.

  The rider didn’t react at all, and never took his eyes off me.

  Two other panther-men rode up alongside the first, and one of their mounts finished the bloody legs and tail of the previous kill. The cave girl grabbed my arm saying something I didn’t understand, pulling me anxiously in another direction.

  “Angara,” she said, pulling me hard in the opposite direction, the fear in her eyes obvious, and we ran as fast as we could away from the new arrivals.

  But now we were moving in the same direction as some of the panicked monkey-people, and they were forming a wall between us and safety. Bodies piled atop one another, crushing the ones further down. With no nearby trees for them to leap into, they were just a normal crowd trying to escape a burning theater.

  I tried scrambling over the squirming pile of our terrified and dying captors, pulling the girl up by the hand behind me, Milton helping the other woman to keep pace.

  Behind her, streaming in our direction through the pass, which led in from the valley, came a swarm of the huge, hairy panther-like ‘Angara’ on their weird mounts. Armed with spears and axes, and protected by oval shields they descended like demons on the monkey-people, spearing them viciously, slicing off body parts, and splitting skulls. One ‘Angara’ went down, attacked by a wolf-cat thing, but the leopard spotted creature was soon dead inside the mouth and belly of the rider’s long-toothed dinosaur ‘steed’.

  Racing past us in every direction flowed the pursued and the pursuers, the hairy ones giving us nothing more than a passing glance as they chased down their tailed prey and slaughtered them mercilessly. With the chaos and insanity now spread all around us, we very soon had nowhere to go and little to do but wait until it was all over.

  Trying to avoid the bloodbath we carefully and quietly moved back to the center of the amphitheater to watch and wait. Finally—all monkey-people now dead or escaped—the attacking horde returned to us, an apparent leader riding up close to stop before us, studying me with more than casual interest. After a while he motioned around his groin and again near the top of his head, looking at the others and laughing. Apparently they were amused by my choice of hairstyles—both above and below.

  After a moment of staring and laughing, the leader motioned disinterestedly that we be brought with them.

  One of his men grabbed the cave girl and reacting instinctively I punched the guy in the side of the head, then moved her behind me for safety. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I was going to die in the mouth of some wolf-cat just moments ago, and these guys handled them—and all my captors—quite handily. I was obviously no match for them.

  The Angara all stopped what they were doing and turned back to look at me in complete surprise. The guy I’d punched touched his cheek as if it tickled, and was wondering what had caused it. All their expressions told me this must be the absolute last thing they expected from me—or anyone.

  The leader reigned his mount in my direction and stopped right beside me. We locked eyes, and he studied me as carefully as I had been studying him. His hair was graying, and a scar split the right side of his face as if he’d been hit with an axe that had been stopped by his orbital bone before reaching the underlying eye—and he had just shaken it off. I began to feel stupid and afraid, until the cave girl placed a gentle hand on my shoulder from behind, leaned closely to me until I could feel her cheek against my back.

  Suddenly I felt as if I could fight a hundred of these guys, and spit on them when I was done.

  That’s when the lead Angara snapped his foot out, kicked me in the face and sent me sprawling in the dirt. So much for confidence.

  I rolled on the ground, holding my head, my eyes feeling like they were going to burst, hoping he hadn’t caved in my skull. Through the fog that surrounded my brain and eyes I heard the panther man bark something harsh and guttural. Two of his companions leaped down from their saddles to clank a cuff and chain around my neck, then yanked me to my feet with it, and linked me to both the girl, and Milton. They then fastened Milton to the other woman. Our captors performed their function with a lot less gentleness than they might have had I not foolishly punched one of them.

  Suddenly the ground burst upward very near where I had fallen, and another chitinous centipede threatened to bite off my head. But the Angara who had kicked me simply raised an axe and split the thing nearly down to its clacking maw. It was dead before the two pieces hit the arena floor.

  I have to admit, I was impressed.

  Once the four of us were linked together—Milton, the cave girl, the older woman who’d been with us in the arena, and I—the panther men dragged us all up one of the paths and out of the small enclosure, heading back toward the great plain. Shuffling over the rise we saw a caravan of men and women—humans like us—and for a moment hope and relief filled me with something like joy. Even though they were all as dirty and wild and naked as the girl who’d saved me, they were at least more human than anything besides her that I’d seen since arriving in this bizarre, bowl-shaped world—and it made me hope I might be able to communicate with someone, and through them find out just what the fuck was going on!

  Sadly, none of them spoke any more intelligible language than the cave girl, or the older woman. Milton made a few attempts, but most of the other slaves wouldn’t even look at us. We both sighed and moved to the end of the line as instructed by an Angara, where we were chained to the others, me first, then the girl, then Milton, then the other woman. One of the panther-men stepped over with an ornate box, and carefully removed its contents. I became concerned when the eyes of my pretty savage girl widened in horror, and she began to back away, shaking her head in what was obviously a fairly universal gesture of fear and refusal. I stepped forward to block the Angara, but another guard—probably the one I’d punched—yanked me nearly to the ground with the chain around my neck. As I watched helpless, my dark-haired savior—still shaking her head, eyes closed and pulling tightly against the length of chain that connected us, began to scream, horrifyingly, as whatever the panther man had removed from the box was pressed tightly against her face and forehead.

  I yanked hard against my chain, and to everyone’s surprise managed to jerk my antagonist to the ground, but too late. Whatever the device in the box was, it had knocked the girl unconscious, and to keep from choking her Milton and I had to move quickly together to slacken the links and lower her limp head so it could rest against the carpet of sand and matted grasses.

  Then the panther man turned the thing from the box toward me.

  “Brandon,” Milton said with deep concern.

  I considered resisting, perhaps testing my strength against all of them, but even the slightest of movements placed tension
on the link of chain surrounding the girl’s neck, and rather than risk her life, I knelt motionless and waited as a weird, grasping, slithering, organic, metal squid-like-thing was pressed over my face. There was an instantaneous blast of horrifying pain in my forehead and through my temples that went deep into my skull—my brain—my mind—and screaming like a dying man, I—mercifully—blacked out.

  * * *

  NOVA THE BEAUTIFUL

  * * *

  Someone was kicking my head.

  “Get up, fuck-face,” a voice commanded.

  Scrunching my eyes against the light, I slowly lifted myself off the ground, and struggled back to consciousness.

  “You’re still alive,” a female voice said, sounding grateful. “I’m so glad. Milton was getting worried. Not that I was. I knew you wouldn’t die. Not yet.”

  I opened my eyes and saw the dark-haired savage girl, squatting near me, grinning, mischievously.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said I couldn’t imagine you dying, yet,” she repeated. “The gods had brought us together for a reason. I refused to believe it was just so I could watch you die before being able to even speak with you.”

  “I understood you,” I said, amazed. “How can I understand you?”

  “Ah,” she said, realizing, her face falling and darkening with unexpected sadness. “The thing in the box. It steals our language and fills us with the words of the Grigori. We now speak only the language of slaves. We will never be able to return home—never be able to speak to our loved ones, again—not in a way that they will understand.”

  I looked up at the panther man who had kicked me awake.

  “Who are they, these Grigori?”

  She studied me for a long beat, her brows furrowing deeply at the center. Then she glanced up quickly at Milton.

  “You weren’t kidding,” she told the old man. “You two really are from someplace very far away. I never imagined there was a place anywhere in Pangea where people had not heard of the Grigori.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “There’s a place. And what’s ‘Pangea’?”

  She snorted a sudden laugh.

  “Now I know you’re joking.”

  “No,” I said. “Really…”

  “It’s the name of the world we’re in,” Milton interjected. “That’s what they call it. ‘Pangea’.”

  “Oh,” I said, “So… these Grigori …” I gestured toward the panther-men nearby.

  “No, not them,” she said, seeing where I was looking. “They’re slaves, as well. But more trusted than we are. They are the Angara—a stupid but very strong, very violent race of people. They are the muscle for the Grigori who can’t do things for themselves, for obvious reasons.”

  “Obvious to you,” Milton said. “Not to us.”

  She studied him carefully, then shrugged. “Weird,” she said. “Someday I would like to go to this place with no Grigori. I think I would like it there. Except for the way you shave your bodies. Especially your genitals.”

  She grinned and glanced down at my bald penis.

  “It’s—uh—kind of the fashion where I come from.”

  “Crazy fashion,” she laughed. “Sharp objects scraping away at people’s most sensitive areas? We thought maybe someone had tortured you.”

  I laughed, and finally understood the fascination back at the panther village.

  “You do not shave, Milton,” the woman said to my friend.

  “I have no one to shave for,” the old man admitted with a smile. Beside him, the older woman from the arena laughed a little into her hand.

  “Ah,” she replied, turning toward me, and seeming to deflate a little. “You do this for the benefit of your woman. Interesting kind of ‘fashion’. I wouldn’t want my man to do it for me, though, and I think I’ll leave my fur the way it is, if you don’t mind.”

  “I won’t mind at all,” I said, becoming hot with the impression that she seemed to be talking about me as if we’d be sharing our fashion choices on a more intimate level. “What’s your name?”

  “Nova,” she said, glancing down, shyly. “Nova, the Beautiful.”

  She smiled, as if she’d made some joke I didn’t understand.

  “You’re well-named,” I said, smiling back at her.

  She studied me carefully, turning her head a bit to the side as if waiting for something, then she smiled and seemed to melt a little.

  “I’m glad you think so,” she said, finally.

  We sat like that a moment, just smiling and staring at one another, and I became overwhelmed with the sense that this woman wanted to kiss me. But I also had the distinct impression there was something going on underneath the surface of our conversation that I didn’t understand—along with everything else I didn’t understand—and before I could ask, or explore the kissing thing, we were distracted by the snarls, threats and jabbing spear-points of the panther-men letting us know it was time to get moving.

  And moving.

  And moving.

  The journey itself to wherever we were going felt endless, the never moving sun giving you the sensation of having made no progress—none that could be judged by time, anyway. The upside was the seeming ‘perpetual time’ it gave me with Nova. I was never bored, so other than the chains and the obvious drawbacks of being a captive, I was content to just walk and talk and laugh with her.

  I’d never known a funnier, sexier, more charming girl, and she seemed to enjoy me as much as I did in her. In spite of the fact that she was a naked savage in some backward world of cavemen and dinosaurs, she honestly seemed smarter than any female I’d ever dated on the outside world—short of Lena. Not that I’d ever dated Lena, though, so I guess the comparison still holds. Simply put: Nova’s obvious intelligence and zest for life made me wonder about my choices in the past.

  We would stop occasionally, and the panther-men—the Angara—would feed us an unpleasant mixture of fruits, nuts, and raw fish. We were all so hungry we devoured it instantly with no complaints. Afterward we were given time to relieve ourselves along the side of the trail, or just relax, and even sleep if we could manage it.

  Occasionally, ahead of us in line, other prisoners would come together so they could engage in sex, apparently unconcerned about privacy. The others took it all in stride, and I wanted to ask Nova if this was how things were done in Pangea—shameless public fornication—or was it only because we were captives. But I was too nervous about the topic to even bring it up. She would often watch the couple, amused and apparently pleased, then look at me with a questioning—perhaps hopeful—look in her eyes while she fidgeted nervously with her hands, but I was too fearful of the possibility of offending her that I refused to even ask. The silences that fell between us when I ignored her interest were the only unpleasant times we shared.

  I could never make myself fall asleep, mostly because I never wanted to miss a second with Nova. She did sleep, occasionally, and I took pleasure in just watching her doze. Eventually the Angara awoke all slumberers, broke up the rutting pairs, and forced us back into a marching line.

  Once moving again, the awkward silences ended, and we returned to the fun relationship I was beginning to need more than food. As we talked, I rubbed my chin, feeling the stubble thicken, and Nova laughed at the sight of it.

  “I saw a sharp rock back there,” she said, smiling sarcastically, “if you want to shave yourself. Or maybe an Angara will lend you a blade. We wouldn’t want you to not have fashion for your woman.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said, wondering if she even knew what the word fashion actually meant.

  “The growth of my beard makes me realize there probably are ways to tell time here in Pangea, after all.” I said, looking over at Milton, sadly realizing that I sometimes forgot he was even there. His face had become as grizzled as my own. “What do you think, Mr. Alvarado?”

  “I think in a place with no night… time will always be malleable,” he said, “but you’re right. Ther
e will be ways to measure it, if we learn to focus on them.”

  “What is ‘time’?” Nova asked, sounding almost poetic, but intending to sound simply confused.

  “You two say that word a lot,” the older woman beside Milton asked, “and I feel I should know what it means, but I don’t. It’s very confusing.”

  “The word is in this new Grigori vocabulary,” Nova added in an effort to be helpful, “but I don’t understand its complete meaning. It is… the measurement of age?”

  “That’s a way to put it,” Milton answered. “A distance along an arbitrary line that moves—not in a physical direction—but a temporal one.”

  She looked at him, blankly, as did the older woman.

  “Yeah, you’re probably not helping,” I told Milton with a grin.

  He shrugged, dismissing it as their problem, not his.

  “It’s a way to measure…” I said, then thought about it for a moment, realizing I had no idea where I was going with my answer, “…how much of your life is being used up.”

  “Ah. Because life lasts for so little in the stream of existence?” Nova said. “I understand. Pangea goes on, but we do not. Like how much of our life is being wasted on this march, or in talking, or in anything.”

  “Well, not necessarily wasted. Not for me, anyway.” I said, grinning.

  “But time we could spend in living our lives, playing together, mating, loving…”

  “Uh… yes. Those things.”

  “Time is an amount of life,” the older woman beside Milton said, contemplatively. “How much life it takes to go to a place, or grow a beard, or urinate, or defecate, or before a woman next bleeds.”