“Oh, geez.” Tom looked out the window again. The cavemen had stopped throwing rocks. Instead, they were now rolling a large boulder sideways along the top of the ridge.
“They’re going to roll that giant boulder down the hill and knock us off the cliff, aren’t they?” Tom asked.
“Yes, they are.”
“You think we’ll be okay?”
“Definitely not.”
“We’ll survive, though, right?”
“Not a chance.”
“Not even if we brace ourselves?”
“Did you take physics?”
“Yeah. But I got an H in it.”
“What’s an H?”
“It’s a little worse than a G.”
“What’s a—?” Marisa stopped herself. There was no time. “Look, we’re in a metal box. No seat belts. No air bags. Nothing to hold on to. And we’re about to get hit by a …”—she looked out the window and did some quick math in her head—“call it a two-thousand-pound boulder accelerating down a fifty-foot hill at a forty-degree grade. Then we’ll free-fall another hundred feet before we hit the mud on the edge of the lake. The odds of our surviving that are worse than your physics grade.”
“OHMYGOSH, THEY’RE AN I?!” Tom yelled. “What are we going to do?”
“Jump out, climb down the cliff, and get back inside before the time machine leaves.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Neither is dying.” She looked out the window. The cavemen had rolled the boulder into place directly above them and were starting to push it down the steep hill.
“Are you sure about this?” Tom asked.
Instead of answering, Marisa pushed past him, opened the door, and jumped out.
Tom took a deep breath and followed her.
CRASH!!
The boulder struck the time machine just as Tom jumped clear of it. He landed on the rocky ledge next to Marisa. As he began to get up, there was another—
CRASH!!
The second crash came from somewhere far below him. He peeked over the edge of the cliff. A hundred feet down, sunk into the muck on the shore of the lake, was the crumpled time machine.
“Oh, wow,” said Tom. “That DEFINITELY would’ve killed us.”
Marisa didn’t answer. She was too busy sprinting away across the ledge.
“Where are you going?” Tom yelled.
Then he remembered. They had to get to the time machine before the five minutes were up.
How many minutes had passed already? Two? Two-and-a-half? Thr—
“OWW!” Something sharp and heavy hit Tom in the upper arm. He looked up.
The three cavemen were staring down at him from the hilltop above.
They looked very angry.
And they were all holding rocks.
They cocked their arms back to throw.
Tom sprinted after Marisa as a volley of rocks clattered behind him.
PLUNK!
CLUNK!
PLUNK-CLUNK!
Up ahead, the ledge took a sharp turn. Marisa rounded the corner. When she saw what was up ahead, she stopped short.
The ledge went on for a hundred yards—and then disappeared, melting into the sheer rock wall of the cliff. There was no way to get from the ledge down to the time machine.
And the clock was ticking away. There was no time to go back and try running in the other direction.
If she wanted to make it to the time machine before it disappeared, she’d have to jump.
Which would probably kill her.
Unless…
Directly below, where the cliff and the ledge both turned sharply, there was no muddy shore. Instead, the lake’s waters lapped against the cliff wall itself.
As Marisa peered down at the natural swimming hole, Tom came barreling around the corner, nearly knocking her off the ledge.
“Watch out!”
“Sorry!”
She pointed down to the water below. “How deep do you think that is?”
“I dunno. A few feet?”
“More than six?”
“No idea. Why?”
“If it’s less than six, this is really going to hurt.”
“What is?”
Instead of answering, Marisa jumped off the cliff. Tom gasped.
An endless second later, she hit the water and disappeared.
“DR. MORICE?” Tom yelled.
Marisa’s head bobbed up from below the surface, so far away it looked to Tom like it was the size of a pea.
“ARE YOU OKAY?” he yelled.
“POINT YOUR TOES WHEN YOU HIT THE WATER!” she yelled back.
“WHY?” he yelled again.
“BECAUSE OF PHYSICS!” she yelled. Then she started to swim around the turn in the cliff, headed for the time machine.
“DO I HAVE TO JUMP?” he yelled. “I’M NOT GOOD AT PHYSICS!” He was also—to be completely honest—not good at swimming.
Actually, that was an understatement. Technically, speaking, Tom couldn’t swim at all.
Maybe he should just—
“OWWW!” A rock hit him in the upper back. He looked up. The cavemen were letting fly with another round.
Tom jumped off the cliff.
It
felt
like
it
took
forever
to
hit
the
SPLASH!!!
A moment later, his head broke the surface, sputtering and gasping. He could see Dr. Morice fifty feet away, making the turn around the point toward the spot where the time machine had landed.
He dog-paddled after her as best he could and managed to thrash his way to the rock outcropping of the point. When he got that far, gasping for breath, he could see Marisa ahead of him. She was halfway to the shore where the time machine lay.
Tom kept going, but his legs were getting tired and starting to sink. As he reached the shallower water, his left foot brushed the lake bed and caught on something, yanking him back sharply.
Tom windmilled his arms and kicked as hard as he could, but he couldn’t free his foot. The harder he tried, the more stuck he seemed to get.
Suddenly, it was very hard to keep his head above water.
And this made it very hard to breathe.
Marisa had just reached dry land and started running, less than a hundred feet from the time machine, when she heard the half-gurgled scream.
“HEE-GL-EELP!”
She looked back. Tom was thrashing in the deep water, his head half-submerged.
Was he drowning?
Did he need her help?
He’d be fine. It wasn’t serious. He yelled about everything. He was a yeller.
She kept running.
“HEEE-GLGLGLG!”
This time, the gurgling cut off Tom’s yell entirely.
Marisa stopped.
In a split second, she tried to guess how much time she had left before the time machine vanished. She knew it wasn’t much. And swimming back out to rescue Tom would take up most of it.
She had to make a choice.
Marisa turned around, plunged back into the water, and swam to Tom.
“HEGLGLGLPHT!”
“Hold still!”
Tom held still.
Marisa dove under the water.
His foot was caught in the fork of a submerged tree root.
She pried the sides of the root apart. Tom’s foot slipped free.
When she surfaced, he tried to thank her, but his mouth was full of water.
And she was already twenty feet away, swimming for shore.
She reached land.
She sprinted to the machine.
The door had slammed itself shut. She reached down to open it.
But it was stuck in the muck. The door wouldn’t open.
She pulled harder.
It still wouldn’t open.
She kept pulling.
Tom arrived. He pulled,
too.
They both pulled together and…
SPLUCK! The door came unstuck, flying open with such force that they both fell backward into the mud.
When they did, the door slammed shut again.
Marisa leaped up, yanked open the door again, and—
POP!
The time machine disappeared.
Marisa didn’t.
Neither did Tom.
They looked at each other, spattered in mud…on the shore of a lake…at the base of a cliff…stranded in the year 10,000 B.C.
Hoo-boy ! Now we’re REALLY stuck in the Stone Age! See Storytelling 101: Make Your Problem HUGE.
Tom stared at the six-inch-deep rectangle in the mud where the time machine had been.
“Oh, geez,” he said.
Marisa’s heart was thumping like a jackrabbit. Her breath was coming in rapid-fire huffs. She was on the brink of a full-blown panic attack.
“Hoo-boy,” said Tom, slowly shaking his head.
Something deep inside Marisa’s brain suddenly shifted gears, and her panic made a sharp detour into rage.
“This is some tough biscuits,” Tom declared.
Marisa kicked him hard in the seat of his pants.
“YOWWW! What’d you kick me for?”
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! You ruined our lives, and all you can say is ‘TOUGH BISCUITS?!’” Marisa’s voice was getting hoarse. She’d done more yelling in the past five minutes than in all of the past five years.
“I didn’t ruin our lives! You’re the one who pulled the lever!”
It was a fair point. But Marisa kicked him again anyway.
“OWW! Cut it out!”
“Why can’t you swim?!”
“I didn’t know it was part of my job!”
They might have kept fighting for hours. But just then, the three cavemen appeared, swimming around the point. They’d followed her and Tom off the cliff. And they were surprisingly strong swimmers, especially considering that they were all carrying rocks.
“They’re coming after us!” Marisa started scanning the shore for rocks of her own to use as weapons.
“There’s only one thing we can do,” Tom said. “We’ll just have to—”
“Kill them,” Marisa said.
“—make friends with them,” Tom finished. “Wait—what?!”
“Find some rocks! Quick! While they’re still in deep water!” There was an unfortunate shortage of deadly sized rocks on the shore. Plenty of giant boulders and tiny pebbles were lying around, but not much in between.
“We don’t have to get violent!” Tom pleaded with Marisa.
“Yes, we do! They’re trying to kill us!” Finally, Marisa found a decent-sized rock and hurled it at the cavemen. It missed the closest one’s head by inches. He bellowed in anger and swam even faster toward them.
Marisa started searching for more rocks. But Tom wasn’t ready to give up on diplomacy.
“WE COME IN PEACE!” he called out to the cavemen.
If she weren’t so busy trying to save their lives, Marisa would have kicked him again. “THEY DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH! Grab some rocks!”
Tom thought for a moment. Then he tried again.
“HOLA, AMIGOS! MI NOMBRE ES—”
“THEY DON’T SPEAK SPANISH, EITHER!”
Secretly, Tom was relieved. His Spanish was terrible.
But now he was all out of languages. The cavemen were closing in. If he didn’t think of something quick, there was going to be a rock fight to the death.
Tom was pretty sure he and Marisa would lose.
Suddenly, he had an idea. Like all of his ideas, it came from a Star Trip episode. He reached into the pocket of his pants—still soaking wet from the swim—and pulled out his cell phone. Fortunately, its case was waterproof. (It was also acid-proof, fire-proof, and supermonkey-proof. After he got the janitor job, Tom had splurged on a phone case that could handle all of his job-related hazards.)
As the cavemen reached knee-deep water and stood up, rocks in hand, Tom quickly pressed a series of buttons on his phone, then held it up as he cried out:
“BEHOLD MY MIGHTY POWER!”
He’d meant to turn on his phone’s emergency strobe while playing the opening bars of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” which was the most fear-inspiring song he could think of. He figured it was the perfect combination of light and sound to amaze and frighten the cavemen into thinking he had magical powers.
Unfortunately, Tom hadn’t pressed all the right buttons.
The strobe light began to flash, but instead of “Ride of the Valkyries,” his phone started to play the peppy, four-note theme to the Fruit Fight game app.
“Do-dee-doot-doot! Do-dee-doot-doot!” chirped his phone.
The Fruit Fight song did not frighten the cavemen. But it DID confuse them enough to stop and stare at the flashing strobe light in Tom’s hand as it bleated out its cheerful ditty.
“Do-dee-doot-doot! Do-dee-doot-doot!”
Marisa groaned. “Will you GET A ROCK?!” She’d just found a good-sized one of her own. She cocked her arm back to throw it at the nearest caveman.
But before she could let fly, the caveman screamed.
“TOOKA!”
He pointed in Tom’s direction, his eyes as wide as dinner plates.
In an instant, all three cavemen dropped their rocks, turned, and plunged back into the water, fleeing as fast as they could swim.
Tom looked down at his cell phone. “Holy cow! It worked!”
He grinned at Marisa—but she was staring past him, her eyes even bigger and more terrified-looking than the caveman’s.
Tom looked back over his shoulder.
A saber-toothed tiger was running down the shore toward them.
Tom and Marisa did what anyone else would do in their shoes: They panicked. With nowhere to run or hide—there were cliffs on two sides, angry-cavemen-infested water on the third, and a tiger on the fourth—they sprinted to the cliff wall and started to climb it.
It was their best option, but it was doomed to fail. The cliff grew steeper and more sheer as it rose. While they could climb just high enough to get out of the tiger’s reach, they were bound to get stuck, unable to go anywhere but down.
After that, it was only a matter of time before their arms would give out and they would fall into the tiger’s waiting jaws.
Nobody knew this better than the tiger. When he saw the two humans start up the cliff wall, he smiled behind his huge curved teeth and slowed to a jog. There was no hurry. The humans were trapped, and he was going to enjoy a long, leisurely day of killing and eating them.
He probably wouldn’t eat much. He wasn’t very hungry. Until all the noise had woken him up, he’d been snoring in his den, sleeping off his full stomach from the human he’d eaten just the day before.
No, this wasn’t about food. This was about revenge! How dare they wake him up? All that yelling and rock-throwing. And what was that ear-splitting crash a few minutes ago? It sounded like someone had dropped something extremely heavy off the cliff.
But there was nothing down here now. Just a big, rectangular crater in the mud. Weird.
That wasn’t the only weird thing. These humans smelled funny. They weren’t like the usual stinky ones he ate, with their body odor and shaggy hair. As these two scrambled in terror up the side of the cliff above him, strange and exotic smells wafted down to him. Since he lived in 10,000 B.C., the tiger had no way of knowing that these scents went by unusual names like “Floral Essence Shampoo” and “Cool Breeze All-Day Deodorant.”
He was very curious to find out how these smells tasted.
But not right away. First, he was going to play with his food for a while. It was more fun that way.
The tiger sat back on its haunches and stared up at the doomed humans, clinging terrified to life a few feet above him.
This was turning into a really good day.
“We’re stuck,” said Marisa. “We can’t go any higher.”
Tom’s arms were already starting to hurt. He looked down at the tiger, sniffing the air and growling just a few feet below them. Then he looked to his right. “We can’t go right, either,” he said. “There’s no handholds over here. What about on your side?”
“There’s no way to get past that bush.” To Marisa’s left, a five-foot-long bush grew out of a crevice in the rock wall. From the way its ripe berries drooped on their stems, Marisa could tell it was too flimsy to use as a handhold. Worse, it was too thick to climb through, too tall to climb above, and impossible to climb below without coming back into eating range of the tiger.
They were definitely stuck.
Then a thought crossed Marisa’s mind.
What kind of berries are on that bush?
When she was ten, Marisa had been sent to sleepaway camp for three weeks. She was terrified of the other campers. They seemed louder, meaner, and even harder to talk to than the kids at her school, who also terrified her. The only way she could avoid them was by keeping her nose buried in a book.
The lone book in their cabin had been A Field Guide to North American Plant Life. Over the three weeks, she read it fourteen times. She’d learned an awful lot about plants, but she’d never found any use for all that knowledge. Except for when she occasionally passed a vacant lot and thought to herself, Somebody should weed that polygonum cuspidatum before it takes over the whole block.
Until now.
“Can you get a hand free?” Marisa asked Tom.
“I’m kind of using both of them?” Tom told her. “Y’know, to keep from falling off the cliff and getting eaten by that tiger?”
“If your life depended on it, could you get a hand free?”
“I guess so.”
“Good.” Marisa took one hand off the cliff and rummaged in the pocket of her pants. “Hold out your hand,” she told him.
Tom did as he was told. Marisa dropped a wrapped sandwich in his open palm.
“You’re eating lunch?”
“No! I have a plan. Hold still.” With her free hand, Marisa carefully unwrapped the sandwich.
“Why was there a sandwich in your pocket?”
Even clinging to a cliff with one hand, the question was embarrassing enough to make her blush. “I was too nervous to eat before the Show and Tell. This was going to be my celebration sandwich for afterward.”
Stuck in the Stone Age Page 4