by JJ Jones
The conversation was over for the moment. There really wasn’t anything good to say at that point. Still, I wondered where he had gained that reason from. Maybe he was just too human for his own good. Something about it felt weird, but I stuck my head into the search, that’s where we needed to focus, getting out of the cuffs.
We were looking for something, anything that might be used to pick the locks and get away from each other. I started to fantasize about getting away from him, out of reach and running through the forest, the wolf inside of me free to do whatever I wanted to do. I could hunt or run with a local pack or do just go around and mark trees. It wouldn’t matter. I would be free and he would be out of my hair. Eventually, I would have to find my way to a human settlement. I would have to go home, or at least get in touch with my family so that I could let them know that I was all right.
I tried to remember my family and the last time that I had seen them. I remembered something about a ceremony, but it was all kind of fuzzy, something having to do with the ancient rituals that had persisted in name only. They weren’t any good for real life, but still they gave our people a sense of power, a sense of history that would stretch on to wherever we were. It was nice to have traditions.
I was still trapped in my personal thoughts when I heard the strange noise. I couldn’t identify it at first, so I listened closely.
Devin was staring at me. “Fynna,” he whispered, “That’s the floor. It’s going to give out under you.”
I hadn’t had any experience with ancient buildings that were about to fall down around us. “What do I do?” There was a harsh panic in my voice.
“I don’t know. I don’t exactly spend a lot of time doing this.”
“Do I move fast or slow?”
I was trying to decide, my body rigid and still. I didn’t want to upset the balance any more than I had to. We were so still that the dust was starting to settle around us again. A bit landed on my nose and I sneezed, violently. I felt the floor shake a bit under me, but it didn’t crack or break. The loud groaning noise that accompanied my mucus explosion was still unnerving. I still didn’t know what to do.
Devin waited for a long while to respond. He was trying to steady himself, to find a good place within arm’s reach of me that he could use to resist the downward pull that would happen when I fell through the floor. Honestly, at this point it was a lot closer to happening than either of us was really prepared for.
“I don’t know, fast?” he guessed, but that was better than what I had.
I had to do something, to get out of there, to escape the betrayal this building was about to heap on the trespasser. Unfortunately at this point, the trespasser was me.
I took a deep breath and steadied my nerves. I was going to make one quick leap and end up on the other side of my companion. I just had to loop around him. I knew the floor was steadier over there, because that was where we had come from. I just hoped that it could handle the sudden shock of my landing. I had to take the chance. I didn’t have a lot of time and decisions had to be made. The floor was starting to shudder under me, groaning under my weight. I wasn’t that heavy, a healthy girl, slender with a light step, but I wasn’t a gymnast. I leapt, not quite sure what was going to happen, and the result was the worst thing ever.
As I bent my legs for the jump, I could hear the floor cracking more and more. I knew that I was only going to have one chance at this. I had to do it right. My feet left the floor, but didn’t move. The floor had given way instead. It only took a moment that felt like an eternity, but I was falling, diving into a basement. I must have looked like a cartoon character, hovering there waiting for something to happen. I struggled for breath because the air was full of dust and Devin was careening down after me.
I don’t know what exactly happened, but Devin told me what he knew afterwards. Apparently he couldn’t set himself well enough to protect from the fact that the floor fell out from him as well. He wasn’t prepared for that.
Strangely, I was laughing as I hit the ground. I can’t really explain why I was doing it, but it was one of those natural reactions to unnatural circumstances. Everything around me was incredibly funny and even though the wind had been forcibly ejected from my chest, I still laughed, a great heaving guffaw, one after another. It was the very definition of insanity, but it was happening. In fact even my laughter felt strange, almost like it didn’t belong in the situation and that just made me laugh harder. I looked over at Devin. He was giggling too. When our eyes met in the darkened basement, I found myself laughing harder. He joined me, two people trapped in a ruckus of falling boards and laughter. This entire building was falling down around our ears.
It took several minutes for us to be able to talk again. I was still in a fit of giggles. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know.” He was chucking, a wide smile on his face and I couldn’t help but notice how nice he looked with that wide grin.
It was like his face was built to smile. I wondered why he hadn’t done that at first, but I realized that I hadn’t exactly been smiling a lot about this either.
“We fell through the floor.”
That didn’t help me regain my composure. I erupted into laughter again.
“I know.” He joined me in my strange joviality.
His face was awash with happy lights and I couldn’t see straight. My eyes were starting to tear up. The lights that my eyes were creating blurred into a halo around him and I just found it funnier and funnier. I couldn’t stop. The giggles just kept coming, one after another. It was like a waterfall of laughter.
“We have to get out of here.” He was struggling and spurting between the words. It was hard to get them out of his mouth. I totally understood.
“We’re in a basement.” I was gasping for breath, fighting to get the words out.
“I know.” He guffawed at me.
I snickered and continued to fight for control. A few deep breaths later I found myself able to speak, at least a little bit. “How are we going to get out?”
“Stairs.” It was all that he could say. His eyes wandered around the room. “Broken.” It was a complete thought in one word, surrounded by breathless laughter and forced out of his mouth. He pointed.
“Damn.” It was to the point.
“Damn.” He mimicked my sentiment.
It was the only thing to say. The laughter continued, wordless, filling the stale air and stirring up the dust around us. We were in a loud tornado of misplaced laughter and something about it just made it all the more amusing. There was barely any light here, but I could see him, struggling to his feet, still chuckling uncontrollably.
I struggled for my breath and tried to climb to my feet. “Hic.”
“You have the hiccups.” He dissolved into laughter once again, and I joined him, our voices rising out of the basement.
To be honest I don’t have the slightest idea of how long we sat there, unable to move, trapped in laughter, but we were there. Eventually it ended and my hiccups faded. It was time to get out of this basement. It would do us no good to stay trapped in this tiny room. We had to explore the town and try to find a way to get out of the trap that we had landed it.
“What do you think?” I squinted and fought to see through the swirling dust and darkness.
My eyes were good, having been honed through the years of access to my more bestial side, but this was too much. My face burned and teared with the years of neglect. I couldn’t see anything.
“I can’t really see.” He echoed my sentiments and we started to search with our hands.
Eventually we were able to pile up enough stuff to climb out through the hole that we had fallen through. We looked up and saw some light was filtering out of the hole. It was time to get out of there. We started, each moving independently, and it wasn’t working.
He slipped down first. “Damn it.” He rubbed his knee as I came crashing down, flat on my back.
I had been knocked off balance by h
is slip. We were on the ground again, his hand bending down toward me as I tried to pick myself up.
“We have to do this together.” I should have suggested it originally, but it didn’t matter now. I was going to take credit for the idea.
“Okay, so let’s move our chained arms at the same time. We can do that if we communicate,” he suggested. It was reasonable and I went along with it. It was a long, slow, awkward process. “Now.” It was a command to move our chained hands up to the next level then we made sure that we were both secure. “Now.” Again and again it happened until I managed to climb up to the next floor. It was still shaky and I was forced to stoop as I pulled myself up.
“Help me.” Devin’s arm was stretched out over his head and I got myself into position, carefully shifting my weight so I didn’t bring the floor and both of us down once again. “This is like a scene from an action movie.” I grunted as I lay on the floor, carefully gripping his chained hand with both of mine.
“Except, for most of the time it would be me pulling you up. Sexist bastards.”
I have to admit that I almost dropped him when he said that. I hadn’t been expecting it at all. “What did you say?”
“Can we discuss this when you get me out of here?”
He was right. I pulled on him, struggling to get him up to my level. The floor groaned underneath me and I closed my eyes, praying for the first time in what felt like a thousand years, but it couldn’t have been a thousand years. I was only in my early twenties, the right age to be looking for a mate. I shuddered at the idea and started to actually be happy that I was in this position. There was only pressure to survive here, not the overwhelming pressure to have a few litters of cubs and give up my life for a man.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’m starving.” I rubbed my stomach, eager for something solid in it. We had searched the town and found nothing strong enough to break through our bonds.
“We need to eat something soon.” He was looking at me, carefully examining the way I was starting to shake. The sun was about to go down. It was fall in the mountains. This couldn’t end well. There was a possibility that the two of us could die from exposure to the elements. “Can you hunt?”
“I don’t think we have much of a choice.” I shrugged, or at least I tried to under my chattering teeth.
“Let’s go.” He stood and reached down to help me up.
I gladly accepted his aid, but something about it made me feel indebted to him. I didn’t like that feeling. There was something that was helping me warm up to him. The truth was, I had been doing a lot of thinking about what he had said about action movies lately. I had noticed the severe lack of female heroes myself. It felt strange to hear someone else voice the concerns I had never worked up the courage to speak myself. It was strange to hear them from a man; someone who I thought would never notice the disparity in our society.
The truth is, I like to think of myself of an activist, something that I was always secretly ashamed of. I could have been better, not sitting there expecting people to stand up for my rights when I couldn’t be bothered to stand up for my own. The honest to goodness truth was that, in shifter society, I was pretty much equal to men in my same position. We were so busy playing dominance games based on strength to worry much about gender. There was an even spread of minority and female alphas and other ranks with in our groups, but the truth was that it wasn’t based on things like skin color or personal plumbing, instead it was based on how much ass one was capable of kicking. A part of me liked that; it was simple.
In reality, however, we needed people with leadership ability rather than combat ability. We might be able to live in peace without the need to fight out way into some semblance of control of our surroundings. The need to be on top is slowly destroying my people. I didn’t like it then, and it was something that needed to change. Still, I am too lazy to lead that change, and even if I wasn’t, I had no idea where I would start this great social change. I sighed and got to my feet. This really wasn’t the time to contemplate the changes that society needed to make; instead we needed to worry about eating.
“Are you doing all right?” He was stumbling too, struggling to keep his feet.
We needed to eat, and soon. Shifter metabolisms need a lot more caloric intake than humans.
“Fine, do you smell water?”
“Yeah, water means game.”
“A nice deer. That would be perfect.” He smacked his dry lips.
“A drink.” That’s what I was thinking about.
The hunting could wait just a bit longer, a drink first. That’s what we needed.
“Water would keep us going,” he agreed.
We both found the burst of energy taking over us and we rushed through the trees to a nearby stream that held lovely clean and crisply cold water. We drank our fill then went to hide and wait for game to arrive.
“Turn around,” I groaned after we had waited for almost half an hour.
“What?”
“I have to pee.” I was about to start dancing. “Turn around so that you can’t see me.” He turned, but it wasn’t easy to get my pants down. “Closer, move closer.” I pulled on his arm, and he swung it backwards towards me.
“Close enough?” He shifted back.
“Why did they have to put us in jeans with the cuffs? Did no one think this through?”
It was a commentary on the decisions of our captors. Not that it made any difference. I was pretty sure anyone who would kidnap two shifters, block their ability to shift and chain them together in the woods with no help or food didn’t have much use for logic. Or at least that’s what I was thinking at the time.
“Watch it, don’t pull my arm out of its socket.” He groaned and tried to shift to make it a little easier on himself.
“This isn’t working.” I tried to pull the jeans down, but they were just a smidge too small. “Who picked out these pants?”
“They do look good on you.”
“But they don’t exactly work in the woods.” I reminded him of that fact. “Fashion has nothing to do with survival.”
“I don’t know, I think you’d look pretty good with deer horns on your head, maybe like that buck over there.” He pointed, his eyes still turned away from me and I followed his hand. There was indeed a large buck there, staring at us from across the pond.
“I can wait.” We both slunk down, dropping out of sight.
I carefully watched the creature as it looked for us. I was grateful for the fact that the beast was downwind from us. I got a good whiff of the creature and I’ll tell you what. It was delicious. We crept up on the deer, slinking through the shadows while we carefully gripped the chain to keep it from clinking and giving away our position. It wasn’t easy, neither of us was particularly used to hunting in a group and hunting in the modern age were pretty much entirely ceremonial. We didn’t have to hunt for survival anymore. The humans had invented grocery stores and, just like humanity, we had gotten used to the convenience. It was a nice thing to not have to struggle every day for the basics of survival. It had changed many things in our world. We seemed to follow the humans in many things. It was just easier that way; they outnumbered us anyway.
It took us a while to sneak into position, but we eventually got there. When we had finished the bloody deed we were both exhausted, but we still had a job to do. We had to drag the beast back to the small campsite that we had made and figure out how to cook and skin the meat. It wasn’t a pretty thing, but it was something that we needed to do in order to survive. The food would be good for us. On the way back to the ghost town we found ourselves a sharp stone and a few sticks that had fallen off of trees. We could use these items to fashion some sort of tools that might help us survive whatever this ordeal was.
All in all, I was quite pleased at the way our first day in the wilderness turned out. Of course, it could have been better, we could have been at home in our own comfortable little world dealing with the problems that come with adu
lthood in the shifter world; finding a mate or establishing one’s place in their pack. It was the way that things worked in our world. Surviving in the wild wasn’t something that we did anymore. We’d become too adept at hiding in human society. It was our new way, the way that had come with the advent of cameras and ways that we could be found by the humans with more precision. We had to hide better; there was no more running free through the wilds, at least not if you lived anywhere near human society.
It took us a while to figure out how to make and use the tools that we had. We didn’t exactly have the experience or the arm mobility that we were going to need. It wasn’t easy, but we managed to gather kindling and get enough of the skin off of the meat. Then we used the old iron cuffs to help us start a fire, allowing us to cook the meat.
In our human form, we had to cook our food. Our stomachs just couldn’t handle the dangers of raw meat. It was safer to cook it for both of us. We set up our camp. It wasn’t the first time that I had dried meat over a campfire, so I worked to rig up some sort of frame, using strings and vines to stretch out cuts as thin as I could make them. We wet down the fire, making a smoke and placed some thick walls made out of bark around the fire, closing the smoke. We kept water handy, after having found a container that we could reasonably clean from the ghost town. It wasn’t much, but it was starting to get a lot more comfortable.
“This isn’t that bad.” I was eating a chunk of deer that I had stripped off of one of the sticks that we had pulled off of the normal fire.
“This isn’t a bad place to be stranded.” He was sitting cross-legged with one knee up almost to his chin. He was casual, comfortable, eating his own bit of freshly cooked deer meat.
“Not really.” I smiled and I could see him smiling back. We ate on for a bit in silence, until we had our fill. “Let’s get some more firewood.”
“Is it safe to leave the fires going?” He pointed to our makeshift smoker and the fire that we were using to cook the fresh meat.
“I think it will be fine.”