It looked much like a dirt road on Earth, all rocks and pebbles where soil and lichen were rubbed away by traffic. It was breath—taking: I was not alone. Somewhere on this world, there were others. Not humans, surely, but thinkers, builders, travelers. Intelligent life! And they traveled past this point—how often I could not know.
Wayworld had just become an entirely different planet.
Who were these road-builders and travelers? Would they prove hostile or peaceful, trusting or wary? Was this a road traveled by merchants ready to trade? Soldiers on their way to war? Would travelers on this road see me as a lost and friendless castaway needing help? A threat? A victim?
Did I dare take to the road? At Augie Field I had food and shelter, such as they were. I had learned to survive these past however-many weeks, mainly due to the creek that flowed nearby. What food or shelter would I find on this road? I knew nothing of preserving the food I had.
But Augie Field offered me nothing beyond mere survival. The road might lead to destruction. Or it might bring me to civilization: food, shelter, clothes, companionship. Maybe the people of this world had space travel—not that a dirt road was any indication of that, but maybe these travelers knew of other people with better technology. On Earth there were still tribes without electricity or running water, yet we had colonies in space. The road might give me some real future. And if death waited for me on that road, was that really worse than a life of savagery alone in my hut?
“How best to survive on that road?” became the only question in my head.
* * *
It took hours to find my way back to familiar territory. My adventure had started at the edge of my known territory. Then the flight into the copse, and finding my way out, followed by the amazing distraction of the road, and I was lost. I knew I was north of the stream, so I headed south, slashing down ferns and brush with the spear shaft to mark the path back.
In another hour or so I found my way back to the creek and by then it was dusk. I traveled upstream for a while before I heard rustling in the brush. I quickened my pace but each time I looked back there was something dark moving through the foliage near the stream. I was being pursued. I caught only glimpses of three or four dark shapes stalking me. Size was hard to determine—larger than a raccoon, smaller than a bear.
A beaked face poked out from the brush, and a taloned foot crept forward. At first I thought I was under attack by giant bat-birds, but as it came forward I saw it was four-legged. It had two fan-shaped ears rising off the top of its head and spiky fur bristled round its neck and down its back. It was the size of a German Shepherd. It shrieked a cat-like shriek and its two comrades leapt from the bushes behind it.
In a flash I remembered the thorn-wolf lolloping off with my fur-lizard meat and without hesitation threw the haunch of meat I’d butchered into their midst. Instantly they pounced on it and began shredding it with their massive, curved beaks. I didn’t know if it would fill their stomachs, but I was not going to hang around to find out.
I dashed along the stream as quickly as terrain permitted. I ran until it became too dark to see my path. I marched away from the creek bed, climbed a nearby tree, wrapped my poncho around me and tried to rest until daylight.
It wasn’t very restful. I was scared and very uncomfortable. When at last I dozed off, I nearly fell out of the tree. Creatures scurried across the ground beneath me. Bugs crawled across me. The cloudy sky threatened rain and obscured whatever light the moons might have supplied. Twigs and bark poked me everywhere. I started every time something grunted, yapped, or growled anywhere near. It was a long, unpleasant night.
As dawn arrived I took stock of my surroundings and climbed wearily out of the tree, nearly stepping on a snake with a chitinous exoskeleton that rattled as it slid away. I was famished and so started the day with my hunt instead of returning to camp first. I was shaky and weak. I munched on leaves as I sought out fan-finned eels and lousters. I caught a few of each, making it a very good morning, then returned half-dead to Augie Field. I collapsed to the ground when I saw that my fire had died.
A day away from “home”, a fight with a monster, the shocking evidence of intelligent life, a night in a tree with no food and little sleep, a morning of foraging, and now I had come home and had no fire. I was not prepared to eat raw louster or eel. Oh—and the battery I used to start my fire was dead. I would have cried, but I was too exhausted. I lay on the dirt floor of my hut for a while and stared unblinking at the wall. I just lay still and from time to time my body forced an inhale and let the air out of its own accord.
And after five or ten minutes the stupor ended, the fog lifted, and I picked myself up. Time to start a fire.
I first tried using my bow, its string wrapped around a stick, to start the fire: spinning the stick on a piece of wood covered in kindling, a rock on top holding it in place. The rock slipped and I fell, the stick poking me hard in the chest. After a long while, my bow snapped where the string attached at one end and I threw it to the side in frustration.
Next I tried my flint knife against the metal spear head. I got a few tiny sparks, but that was all. I wished I had a magnifying glass—I’d started fires with them as a kid. Tired and frustrated, I grabbed a water bottle and left the hut to wander around the field a bit.
Sipping the water, I realized this was also a problem. No fire meant no way to purify my water. I slumped down next to a chimney tree and sat musing, staring at my existing supply of clear, clean water. I stared glumly at my giant-looking fingers, distorted by the water bottle. Then I started grinning. I did have a magnifying glass!
I scrambled to my feet and rushed over to the hut and pulled some of my kindling outside, piling it up along with a few sticks. I held the bottle and saw its semi-shadow on the ground. Yes! It held a single bright spot, with the water bottle acting as a lens! I shifted the height until the bright spot became a single, brilliant dot, the size of pencil eraser. The sun was bright and high in the sky, last night’s clouds having burned off in the morning.
How long I held the bright spot over the kindling I don’t know, but I shifted the bottle between my two hands as each arm got tired. The kindling browned at last, and I saw the faintest whiff of smoke, but a minute later, it had not ignited. Undeterred, I pulled an alcohol swab from the medkit and added it to the kindling, making it the focal point. Again the kindling browned and smoked, and with a little blowing, the light spot caught fire on the swab!
I nursed the tiny flame with all the tenderness of a mother with a newborn. I shielded it from wayward winds and carefully fed it tiny sticks. I built it up considerably before I dare to leave it long enough to rebuild the one in my hut and set it alight with a stick from the other. Feeling very proud and confident, I sat down to cook my morning catch.
I walked around my camp after eating, looking at my handiwork. My hut was wretched, my food supply lamentable, my sleeping arrangements uncomfortable. Still… it was mine. I had made this. I was the builder, the gatherer, the hunter. It was nearly nothing, but it was all me. I had already made up my mind to explore that road, but I knew that good or bad, it may very well mean leaving Augie Field and not coming back. Now, thinking of how I had accomplished this much, the prospect of moving on seemed a lot harder. Had this actually become home, after all?
I’d spent most of my childhood bouncing back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s. I’d spent most of my adulthood bouncing back and forth between Earth and this station or that outpost. I’d lived in half a dozen different apartments, none of which I ever saw much. I’d spent more time at Augie Field than some place I’d lived in the last few years. After a lifetime of playing it safe I’d been thrust into daily risk to survive, and now I was planning on leaving what little security I had for more unknown, more risk. More opportunity?
I slept poorly that night, troubled by doubt and indecision. I knew that the road had to be the smart choice, but I was daunted by the element of chance it represented. I did not have
all the facts.
After a month or two of living like a caveman, I longed for my clipboard and pad, my checkboxes and easy choices that cost me nothing. One rash decision to save the woman I loved, or at least wanted, ended that life and flung me somewhere across the galaxy to a life dangerous and primitive.
The road might take me to civilization or savagery of a worse type. I might starve along the way, unable to find sufficient food. I could die of exposure with no augie and no hut. The reasons to stay were simple: they all revolved around the “sure thing”. But the sure thing was substandard, and I had no reason to expect it to improve. The only way things might get better was to leave the relative security of Augie Field.
I woke the next morning and set about learning to preserve food. I had no salt or spices, but I had smoke. Over the next few days I wasted a lot of food learning how not to smoke meat.
My best success was with fan-finned eel. The result was tough, chewy, and tasted of carbon, but it was edible, and the dried meat was no less palatable days later. Whether it would keep long-term, I had no way of knowing. Smoked louster was a lost cause. One fruit dehydrated well in my makeshift smoker, leaving a sweet leathery snack. I had already found that eggs lasted better uncooked than hardboiled, and that one fruit was inedible but held crunchy bean-like nuts that that tasted faintly of ginger that would probably keep well. The minty leaves dried on their own a day or two after picking, losing a lot of their flavor, but remaining palatable. I arranged my smoked eel and fruits by the day produced and each day tried some to see how they held up.
Late in the week I lucked upon another slain waybeast being picked over by carrion-eating bat-birds and a few cat-sized reptilians, which fled at my approach. I was sure it was the handiwork of one of the knife-toothed monstrosities I’d a battled a week ago, so I approached with great caution, hacked away a few ribs and two forelimbs, all the while looking around me, and left hurriedly. One leg was eaten with gusto right away, the other smoked with indifferent results.
A night later, I heard one of the curved-tusked animals grubbing about my augie. I carefully opened the hatch and stabbed down at it with my spear from the safety of my bedding. It grunted and growled, but had no success climbing up to get me. A final thrust into its neck ended its struggles. I flung its carcass on top of my hut to keep it from prowlers and planned to rise early the next morning to butcher it.
I had not planned for thr prowler that towered above my hut with long legs and neck. I woke the next morning to find a huge rust and yellow-colored head, large and triangular, on a long snaky neck, open its wide mouth, like a toad with crocodile teeth and snatch up my tusker in a single chomp. Tidbits of the catch dangled outside the teeth as the monster crunched it up and swallowed a few times. Its skin was leathery and warted, its eyes like a snake’s under prominent brow ridges and a frill of horns marked the transition from head to neck. The body was lean and muscular, like a greyhound or whippet, but the size of an bison. Long, powerfully-built legs ended in massive clawed feet. A long tail slashed lazily through the air behind it.
Oh—and it had six legs. The middle set of legs were near the front and built like the forelimbs. I had few scant moments to marvel at the first non-quadrupedal land vertebrate I’d ever seen before it turned its mutated toad’s head my direction.
I might have shrieked a little as it lunged its snaky neck at me, bouncing off the window of augie. It growled as it reared its head back and eyed me in hunger and anger. The wide mouth opened and emitted a gurgling hiss, a long pointed tongue lolled out dripping with saliva and the offal of the tusker. It struck again, more cautiously this time, trying to clamp its jaws about the augie and bite down, its teeth screeching across the hatch. It chewed on the lid.
I huddled down, grasping the handle and holding the hatch down as best I could. It peered around and flared its nostrils, sniffing loudly. It drug its purple tongue across the porthole. The monster reared back and snaked its long neck to and fro, seeking some means of ingress. It eyed the hatch dangerously, and began sniffing around the edge, a mewling noise coming from the throat. The snout hovered near the foot of the hatch, where the lid opened most widely—still only a few inches. The tongue darted in, licking greedily at my boots.
In horror and disgust I stomped down on the purple slug at my feet, drawing a scream from the monster as it pulled it head back and roared its gurgling roar. Angrily it lashed out with tooth and claw at my shelter, rocking it and causing creaking sounds.
The beast climbed atop the augie and battered down at me. I held firm to the handle. Claws scrambled for purchase as the creature slid off the augie, crashing into my hut, utterly destroying it. It roared again, pulling itself from the wreckage and flinging about, trying to escape the bits of burning charcoal clinging to its hide. It chased its own flank in circles, biting at the embers, then roaring when they stuck to its gums. It thrashed about, scattering the remnants of my home. The creature rubbed its flank and jaws against the ground, clawing at them with its paws.
It gathered itself back up and approached my shelter again. Sullenly it batted with its four front limbs at my shell, sniffing occasionally. It laid its front end down on my augie and glared through the porthole at me. I could see where it gums and lip were badly blistered.
It sat on me for a long time. After a while, it grumpily conceded defeat and wandered off north, perhaps toward the creek to cool its singed mouth. After a very long wait, I cautiously left the protection of the augie to survey my mangled home. My hut was no more, and my fire pit destroyed. The monster had eaten my latest kill in a few gulps, but had left my dried foods alone.
Leaving Augie Field suddenly became an easy decision. I had no shelter here but the augie, which surely would not have kept me safe for long from the hexapedal monstrosity that had destroyed the rest of my home. I breathed in deep and slow, soaking in the fact that danger had come to my home in the shape of a giant, slobbering, hunger that I could not combat. My sense of safety evaporated like the mirage that it was.
I spent the rest of the morning packing up my tools, food, and miscellaneous supplies in my makeshift parachute backpack, and walked away from Augie Field to find the travelers that used the road. I did not let myself look back until I knew the augie could not be seen.
* * *
I came to the road near evening. I looked left and right, trying to divine the better way to go. Going to the left led northwest and upland to hillier country, and away from any part of the creek that I knew. The eastbound road looked like it approached the river, suggesting better fishing and foraging. On that basis alone, I chose to go right and eastward.
I kept my spear in my hand, using the shaft as a staff. I did not make it far before the twilight gloom forced me to make camp for the night. I had foolishly waited too late to try using my water-bottle magnifying lens to start a fire, so I played around with a flint knife and my metallic spearhead, but still without success.
I bedded down that night in a hollow place on the side of a knoll, my thermal blanket wrapped around me and a section of parachute draped over me. I slept fitfully and woke to every sound about me. As the first hint of dawn filtered through the parachute tent, I exited my cocoon and started the next leg of my journey, munching on ginger beans as I went.
The road veered left and right, steering around steeper inclines, tracing a grey and brown scar through the ground. The ruts bore evidence of axled vehicles, and small patches of lichen and feather ferns still sprouted down its center in a few places. I could often hear the river to the south, as though the road makers were trying, like me, to stay close to food and water.
Midmorning I came to a clearing to one side, where ferns were scarce and the lichen patchy. In the center of the clearing was a small bit of ashes, smeared on the ground like poorly applied makeup. Someone had stayed here and built a fire. Judging from the lack of ground cover, I guessed it was a frequent stopping point, but I would not hazard a guess on how long it had been unoccupied.
The landscape around me grew densely populated by several varieties of anemone tree and creeping vines along the ground, spotted with patches of purple and red, orb-shaped flowers that emitted a sweet fragrance. Small animals like dog-sized waybeasts, darted between the anemone trees. Fur-lizards abounded, most too small to try hunting. Shadows leapt, monkey-like, through the tendrils of the anemone trees but all I saw were long limbs and skinny tails. Bugs crawled across the ground or flew into my face. So far, none considered me a food source.
I took a break in the hottest part of the afternoon. The river at this point was not within easy reach, so I stayed near the road and sat in the shade of an anemone tree, chewing on dried meat and sipping water.
I thought about the road-builders. I felt sure the road wasn’t used by motorized vehicles. Unless perhaps they used a motorized vehicle without tires or tread. Okay, on second thought, I had no idea what kind of vehicles they used.
Surely no armies used the road—it was too small to carry any sizable number of troops. Unless perhaps they organized into small, elite cadres, so again, no idea.
But large numbers or highly mechanized vehicles seemed unlikely. I had seen no evidence of airplanes and heard no engines in my time here. The night sky was unpolluted by excessive light. Whatever the inhabitants of Wayworld were, they were likely not a highly technological race.
Perhaps one day soon I would come across a simple village of stone age farmers, or maybe a nation on the verge of the steam revolution. It was possible that once we learned to communicate, I might even be revered as a sage, bringing other-worldly knowledge and wisdom — though I was not, of course, a scientist or engineer, and understood little of the technology of my own world. Maybe though, my vision of what could be done would revolutionize their culture.
Diggory's World (Wayworld Book 1) Page 7