by Logan Jacobs
I twisted the top off and held up one of the pills to the light. Now that I’d taken it out of the orange bottle, I could see that the pill was a metallic emerald green color that gleamed with tiny silver flecks. I popped the pill into my mouth and dry-swallowed it, twisted the top back onto the bottle and put it back into the envelope for safekeeping, then shoved everything but the gun, knife, and water bottle into the glove box.
“Okay, what now?” I asked the thin air as I sat back in the tattered leather seat and stared at the sloth’s dead body through the window.
The ten-foot-tall sloth had collapsed into a heap when I’d shot it, and now it laid in a brown, furry pile just outside of Honest Abe’s door. It didn’t look like it was blocking my exit, but I also didn’t want the big stinking thing anywhere inside of my pocket dimension. For one thing, its shattered eye socket was already starting to attract huge black flies, and I was pretty sure that it would attract larger and more aggressive creatures soon.
“Sloth removal first,” I decided.
I opened the car door and narrowly missed hitting the sloth’s body with the sharp metal corner. I had to turn in my seat and swing my legs over to the side to avoid stepping on the sloth’s corpse, but I managed to lever myself out of the seat. I closed the door, prodded the sloth with the toe of my boot just to make sure there wasn’t any life left in the thing, then walked over to its head.
The sloth’s head was matted with blood that was already starting to clot, and I didn’t want to get any of the gore on my jeans or on my sweet Omnicorp Consumer Products T-shirt since I had no idea when I’d see a bar of soap next. Fortunately, the sloth’s long arms had collapsed by its sides, and they looked like they’d be a lot easier to deal with than the beast’s head.
“Alright, let’s go.” I positioned myself facing the Lincoln with the sloth’s fat, hairy belly between my legs, crouched down, and grabbed the sloth’s furry wrists. I winced at the greasy feel of the sloth’s matted hair under my hands, but I dug my fingers into the fur anyway so that the sloth wouldn’t slip out of my hands. When I felt like I had a good grip on the sloth’s hands, I glanced behind me to make sure that there weren’t any other nasty predators waiting for me, then started to walk myself backward.
I got the sloth’s arms over its head without much trouble, but when I started to tug on the sloth’s body in earnest, I realized just how heavy it was and how very little working out I’d been doing in the past few years, My arms ached as I yanked the beast’s corpse backward inch by inch, my hamstrings burned as I dug my heels into the dirt for traction, and I started to feel little twinges of sharp pain in my hunched back all the way down from my shoulders to my butt. I’d already exerted myself more in the last couple of hours than I usually did in a week, and I just hoped that my mushy muscles wouldn’t give out before I managed to get the gross sloth corpse out of my pocket dimension.
I finally managed to get most of the sloth’s torso out of the dirt circle before my arms gave out, and I sat on the ground and breathed hard while I tried to rub some life back into the stretched-out rubber bands of my biceps. I squinted at the sun, glanced at my watch, and realized that it was already almost one in the afternoon. All I’d had to eat for the entire day was my cup of black coffee, and it was definitely past lunchtime.
No wonder I was so exhausted.
I staggered over to Honest Abe, slipped back into the driver’s seat, yanked the glove compartment open, pulled out the colorful box of Millennium energy bars, slid my fingers under the cardboard flap, and read the label on the first one I pulled out.
“Four hundred calories, rich cookie flavor, thirst-preventing formula,” I read. I licked my dry lips as I realized that the black coffee was also the last thing I’d had to drink. I really needed to find some water, or I’d pass out long before I starved to death, regardless of how thirst-preventing the energy bars were supposed to be. I ripped open the plastic wrapper of the energy bar and shoved a chunk into my mouth.
The Millennium bar tasted like greasy shortbread, but whatever was in it did help moisten my mouth a little, and I could feel a little energy returning to my muscles. I chewed through the energy bar, stuffed the plastic wrapper into the pocket on the side of the door in case I needed it later--I wasn’t usually a trash hoarder, but I had no idea what kind of resources might come in handy as I zipped through dimensions--and pulled the Nalgene bottle out of the glove box.
“Forty-eight ounces,” I read from the side of the bottle. “That’s six cups, right? I should be fine for the day.”
I hooked the Nalgene bottle onto my left pocket, slipped the gun into the holster and clipped it onto my jeans next to the knife, and straightened my Carharrt jacket over the whole assemblage. Then I opened the car door again and stepped out, ready to face the world. I felt a lot more equipped to deal with the unfamiliar world in front of me with a gun and a knife by my side.
I decided to take care of the rest of the sloth’s body first, since the energy bar had restored so much of my strength already, At least all I had to take care of was its legs. I went over to the hairy corpse and kicked at its long, furred limbs until I’d shoved them past the dirt line and into the mess of pine needles and moss that covered the forest floor. I didn’t love the idea of having a rotting sloth corpse next to my campsite for the next day and a half, but it was better than having it inside the dirt circle and coming with me the next time I shifted realities.
“Water, water, everywhere,” I muttered to myself. I knew that in my version of Michigan, you were never more than five or six miles from a source of natural fresh water. I even knew how to get to the small branch of the Rouge River that flowed through my neighborhood.
My Michigan was gone, though. The entire geography of the state might be different, not just the pine trees and weird wildlife. I had no idea how far back this world might have diverged from my own, and I couldn’t even rely on my own internal knowledge of my neighborhood to help me.
I was a total stranger here.
“Don’t think of it as being in a parallel universe,” I suggested to myself. “This is just a survival exercise. You know, like that book with the kid who survives a plane crash and has to live in the forest with a hatchet. He was fine for like a year. You can deal with it for two days, right? Someone dropped you in the Upper Peninsula, there are sloth cryptids running around, and you have a lot more on your side than just a fucking hatchet. You can do this, kiddo. Now, get out there and fuck up those sloths.”
So maybe my internal monologue was starting to sound like Sol. I grinned. Even if I could never see my version of my real father again, I still had a little piece of him with me in the back of my mind.
“Time to synchronize watches.” If I was going to leave the dirt circle, I was going to need to make sure I was back by the deadline. I walked over to Honest Abe’s front and slid my fingers under the gap between the engine and the hood. When I lifted up the paint-flecked metal shell, I realized that the burn in my arms had already gone from a screaming pain to a mild, pleasant ache in less than an hour.
Maybe I wasn’t really as out of shape as I’d thought?
I’d been carrying huge bags of food up multiple flights of steps in apartment buildings countless times per day while I’d been delivering for GoGroceries and GetGrub, and even though I hadn’t been trying to work out, I figured all that climbing and lugging had to have done something for my body.
I decided to take Sol’s advice and ignore the red numbers at the top for the moment, especially since I had nothing to write on besides the backs of Sol’s letter pages and nothing to write with anyway.
“Hello, Dimension Engine, Patent Pending,” I murmured. “Or should I call you DEPP for short? Ohh, like Johnny Depp!”
Sol had liked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because “Doctor Gonzo was a real one, kiddo,” and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but he’d hated the all of what he called the “doomy-gloomy Robert Smith hair fuckin’ bullshit” stuff Johnny De
pp had been in, so I figured that maybe he’d named his machine after the actor as his own private Amber Heard joke.
The timer read 00:1:15:05:39, and when I glanced at my G-Shock-looking watch I realized that the countdown timer on my watch’s digital face showed the same thing as well as showing the time to be 1:15 PM.
I smirked a little at the coincidence, then calculated the hours left in my head. I had thirty-nine hours to go. I had fifteen hours from the same time tomorrow to get back here, so that meant I’d shift into another universe at four in the morning. That meant I’d be right in the middle of my sleep cycle. Either I had to wake up super early and deal with getting used to the dangers of a completely new world in the dark with half the sleep I really needed, or I had to trust Honest Abe’s chassis and my own reflexes.
Or I could just add a few hours, I reminded myself. I pressed the beige “up” button above the hour display six times so that I’d shift at nine-fifteen in the morning, when I knew I’d be awake and ready to face the world, then I added ten minutes so that the shift would sync up nicely with the time. When I glanced back at the G-Shock, I realized that the timers matched again.
Now that I had my timer and compass with me, it was time to survey the area for a water source. I could just blindly head out in one direction, but I had no idea what the terrain around the trees was like. I glanced around the tiny clearing to see if there was a higher point nearby, but the only things that towered above me was the tops of more pointed green trees. I sniffed the air to see if I could smell any water nearby, but the only thing that filled my nostrils was the sickly scent of the sloth’s body and the pungent scent of the waving pine branches.
I’d need to get up a lot higher than I was to scope out the territory.
I gave the trees around me a good, hard look. Five dark green pines towered over the others, and I decided to pick the one with the thickest trunk and the most ladder-like branches, even though it wasn’t the tallest out of all the high pines. It was only a few feet shorter than the largest two, anyway, and the important thing was that it would be easiest for me to climb without wearing myself out too much to get to the water afterwards.
I flexed my arms, propped one foot and then the other on a fallen log to stretch my hamstrings, and raised my arms over my head to stretch out my back. I stuck the sheath of my knife into my pocket so that the rough bark of the pine tree wouldn’t push it off of my jeans, double-checked to make sure my Glock was secure in its holster, and headed toward the tree I’d chosen.
My tree was almost five feet wide. It was hard to tell exactly how tall it was in feet, but I judged that it was about as high as my three-story high school had been. Fortunately, there was a six-inch-wide branch right in front of my eyes, so I gripped the branch with both hands, stepped up onto the fat lowest limb on the tree, and started to climb the towering pine like a ladder.
It had been a long time since I’d climbed a tree, but the knack came right back to me, and I shimmied easily around the trunk and balanced my toes on the rounded edges of knotholes as I pulled myself up branch by branch. The feeling of the rough bark and the sticky branches under my fingers made me flash right back to the sturdy pines and gnarled oaks that I used to climb in the nature preserve. I had been a lot smaller then, but the trees in the nature preserve had also been smaller, since they’d just grown up over abandoned farmland during the last seventy years or so instead of being an apparently undisturbed wilderness. I wondered how often forest fires swept through the land, but I didn’t see any clouds in the sky no matter how far up I climbed.
Finally the tree’s trunk started to thin out, the branches got a lot springier under my feet, and I could feel the trunk starting to sway a little under my weight. I decided it was time to stop climbing and take a good look around, so I inched my feet closer to the trunk while I surveyed the area.
The landscape around me was an endless series of tall hills covered in pine and fir trees that all seemed to be nearly as tall as the one I’d climbed up on. The suburb I’d grown up in was full of gentle, rolling slopes that weren’t much more than thirty or forty feet high, but this Michigan looked like it was filled with mountainous foothills, and honest Abe and I were on top of one of those foothills. The hilltop looked like it extended about twenty feet in either direction away from my circle of dirt before it dropped off.
“It’s over, giant sloth,” I said in my best Ewan McGregor impression. “I have the high ground.”
Yeah. Maybe I was already starting to go crazy.
I wrapped my left arm around the trunk, reached out for the next branch in front of me with my right hand, then ducked carefully under the branch I’d been holding onto. I reached my left leg out to the branch that stuck out in front of it, then caught my breath and clutched at the trunk as I felt my left toe slip. I felt the pines and clear blue sky reel around me for a sickening second, but I managed to shove my foot forward again and got a purchase on the rough bark. I walked my hand up the trunk of the pine, then inched my hand over the circumference of the trunk until I could grip the base of the branch my left hand was already clinging onto for dear life. Then I swung my right foot onto the branch I’d planted my left foot on and peered out over the rolling hills in search of the telltale glint of water.
“A-ha!” I exclaimed. I could see the thin blue squiggle of a stream cutting through the pines on a hill that didn’t look like it was more than a couple of miles away. I couldn’t see which way it flowed once it dipped below the tree line of the valley. I could either take the direct route down into the valley, up over the hill, and then down into the next valley before I started up the slope with the stream, or I could just go down into the valley and then circle around the base of that next closest hill until I figured out where the stream went.
I would have an easier walk if I stayed in the valleys until I found the stream, but I also wasn’t really sure if the stream ran my way once it dipped into the valley, or if it flowed somewhere else entirely. Taking the route directly over the top of the hill might be a more strenuous walk, but I was pretty sure I had plenty of time to get there and back before dark if the stream was as close as it seemed.
My climb down the tree was a lot faster and easier than my climb up, but my palms had been scraped a little raw by the rough bark and spiny twigs of the pine tree, and by the time I jumped off the lowest branch and back onto the ground my hands stung. I turned them over to inspect the damage and winced as I straightened my fingers. My palms weren’t quite bloody, but they were definitely scratched up and redder than before. I wondered for a second if Sol had stashed a bottle of vodka or whiskey in the car that I could use to pour on my wounds, but I figured that if he’d mentioned the Steely Dan in the tape deck he probably would have mentioned a bottle of something that useful. I’d just have to do my best with the water when I found it.
I positioned myself against Honest Abe’s rear right corner, then headed in the straightest line that I could manage on such uneven ground. I squeezed my way between two big fir trees and swatted a huge, spiky branch away as I placed one foot carefully in front of the other and started to count. I knew that the elevation would change after about twenty steps, but I wasn’t sure exactly how steep it would be.
The trees thinned out just five or six feet away from my dirt circle, but spindly saplings poked up through the thick carpet of yellowed pine needles that covered the forest floor. The air smelled like the familiar pungent scent of pine, but there was something sharp and strangely musky on the wind that I couldn’t quite place. The sound of bugs buzzing through the air and past my ears sounded pretty familiar, but the atonal, whining birdsong that sounded through the trees occasionally didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before. The ground started to slope downward under my feet after twenty paces, just as I’d predicted, but I grabbed at the trunks and branches that reached out on either side of me as I made my way down the hill. It was hard to see more than twenty or thirty feet in front of me, and the ground was
steep enough that I was pretty sure I’d end up rolling down the hill if I missed a step and took a hard enough fall.
The slope went on for longer than I’d thought, and the light quickly grew dim and bosky as I descended into the valley. The blue sky above got patchier and patchier, and pretty soon I could barely see anything above me but crisscrossing layers of spiky green branches.
I’d only been walking for about ten minutes when I heard a rustling sound somewhere off into the woods to my left. I froze, grabbed the tree to my left for balance, and used my right hand to draw my Glock and click the safety off.
“Anyone out there?” I called softly as I aimed the pistol toward the rustle.
The next rustle lasted for a few seconds and got louder as it went on, so I peered through the trees until my eyes dropped to the forest floor. Something small scuttled toward me under the carpet of dried pine needles and stopped maybe ten feet from where I stood. Its bright black eyes peeked out from under the spiky mulch, and then it shook the yellow needles off of its back and stood up.
The thing that had been rustling under the pine needles was a fat little rat-shaped creature barely a foot high. Its pointed gray ears stood straight up on its chubby-cheeked head as its pink nose twitched, and it held its tiny white hands in front of the white oval of fur on its belly as it sat on its chubby gray haunches. It blinked once, sniffed at me, then fell onto its front paws and started to scuttle in the direction I’d just been coming from. The fur on its back was the same gray as its haunches, but thin brown stripes stretched horizontally over its back. Its long, bare, pink tail dragged behind it as it scrambled away from me.
“Okay, bye,” I said to it. I slid the Glock back into my holster, then continued down. I saw a few more of the striped rat creatures scuttle past me, but most of them only gave me a quick sniff before they scampered on.