Monster Girl Base

by Logan Jacobs

  The climb down to the bottom of the valley only took about ten more minutes, but the hill barely had two yards to flatten out before the next incline sloped right up again. The trees stopped a few feet before the level bottom off the valley and gave way to moss and weeds on both sides. The slope wasn’t much steeper than the one I’d just come down, but it still took over a half an hour to get up to its top.

  I stopped at the top of the hill and sat on a rock so I could catch my breath and check my watch. I groaned as I realized that it was already 3 pm. My climb up the pine had taken a lot longer than I’d thought, and even though the stream was just up the next hill I knew I’d still have to make it up two more slopes on the way back before I’d be safe in Honest Abe again. I added up the time in my head and estimated that if I kept moving at the same pace I’d been going, plus however much time it would take me to fill the bottle, drink, and then fill it again, I should make it back sometime around five in the evening, and that would only leave me a few hours to figure out what to do when the sun went down. My stomach had also started to growl a little bit, and I realized that the four hundred calories I’d eaten in the form of greasy shortbread had refueled me a little from my exhausting morning but probably hadn’t been quite enough to keep me going. I debated trying to go back to grab another one of the energy bars, but the thought of retracing my steps sounded even more exhausting than pressing on. I told myself that the water would refresh me enough to make it back, waited until my lungs stopped aching, then staggered to my feet and pressed on.

  It was a relief to walk downhill again, and I grinned when I saw the glint of water through the trees. Once I got to the tree line, I poked my head out of the forest and glanced right to see if there was anything upstream of me. I couldn’t see any animals drinking from the stream, so I glanced left and peered into the distance to see if I could figure out which way the stream went after that.

  The little river looked like it headed toward the right before it hit the leftward slope of the valley floor. The stream curved a few times, but then disappeared into the distance without seeming to commit to a path. The river looked like it was only about four feet wide, and the clear water flowed barely six inches below the sandy banks, so it would be easy for me to bend down and stick my Nalgene bottle right into the current. It was harder to tell how deep it was, but the clearness of the water as it flowed over the smooth gray stones that covered its bed suggested that it wasn’t much more than a few feet deep.

  I took the Nalgene bottle off my belt loop, then knelt at the edge of the stream and dangled it into the water. I didn’t want to stick my scraped and scratched hands into the water in case it was full of sloth crap or tiny parasites I couldn’t see. I was pretty sure my hands would heal before too long, though.

  I glanced at my watch as the water drizzled slowly through the filter. I’d made decent time down the hill, since it was only three-thirty, but it looked like it would take me a while to fill up the bottle. I looked back and forth at the trees every thirty seconds or so, and my heart jumped a little in my chest at every rustle. I didn’t feel like being easy pickings for whatever huge, man-eating beasts that might come crashing out of the trees to quench its thirst or check out the new prey, so I decided to keep the pistol handy while I was vulnerable. I switched the Nalgene bottle to my left hand, then pulled the Glock out of its holster with my right hand and propped my elbow on the dirt while I waved the barrel at the trees. My heart slowed back down a little as I wrapped my fingers around the cool metal of the gun.

  I pulled the bottle out of the stream once it was full, sat up in a squat, then raised the bite straw to my lips and guzzled down the water. I’d thought the water from the stream would have been freezing cold, but even though it was just cool it was the sweetest, purest thing I’d ever tasted in my life. I guzzled it down until I felt my stomach balloon out and ache with cold, and then I poured a thin stream of water over each of my hands until I’d washed away most of the blood, sap, and dirt off of my palms. I dipped the bottle right back into the stream, and I could feel my heart rate slow down and my muscles relax as the water I’d just drunk ran through my veins.

  I’d been right about the water helping with my exhaustion. My walk back up the slope was much easier and cooler, even if it wasn’t much faster going than the last slope I’d climbed. I took a couple of minutes to sit and rest at the top of the hill, then started to pick my way down the slope again.

  I was about three-quarters of the way down the slope when I started to hear quiet rustling in front of me. I pulled my Glock out again and crept forward as slowly as I could while I watched the branches for movement. Soon, I could see flashes of gray and white through the treeline at the bottom of the hill. I knelt behind a three-foot-thick fir tree and peered between two leafy branches to see what was making the rustling noise.

  A flock of three-foot-tall birds strutted around the moss and weeds at the bottom of the valley. They had beaks like Toucan Sam that looked as though they’d been glued onto the frilly white faces of a mop-headed Polish chicken, and their beady yellow eyes blinked slowly at me from between their puff of feathers. Their long, fluffy necks tapered about a foot down into their football-shaped, gray-feathered bodies. Big, fluffy fans of gray feathers hung down from their pointed rear ends, and their tiny gray wings fluttered at their sides as they bobbed their heads up and down into the weeds. The wings looked ridiculous, but the big yellow feet that ended in three long, curved black claws suggested that they could deal plenty of damage if they needed to.

  I didn’t think the birds were likely to give me much grief if I passed through, since they were a lot smaller than I was and looked like they were mostly interested in eating weeds and bugs, but I considered shooting one anyway. I would need some protein when I got back, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stuff myself with one of the MREs after I’d already expended most of the energy I needed to for the day. I didn’t really have any experience with butchering animals, but I had helped my mom make the Thanksgiving turkey we’d shared with Sol more than once, and I felt like I had a pretty good idea of which parts of a bird were edible. I could probably carve off some breast meat and the legs without cutting too far into the body and having to deal with the guts.

  I reminded myself that I had no idea how edible the bird would actually be, or how easy it would be to pluck or skin it, or how close its anatomy actually was to a domesticated turkey that had been fattened up on a farm. I’d definitely never actually plucked a bird in my life, and I had no idea how long it would actually take. I could easily waste precious hours and strength carrying and trying to prepare something that would end up being too nasty to eat or end up making me sick. I had no idea how to get a fire going without matches or a lighter anyway, and I might have to make that my priority since I had no idea how cold the nights would get around here.

  Fire would also keep wild animals away, if I was remembering that vague part of survival lore correctly, and I had no idea what kinds of nocturnal creatures might lurk in the darkness in this world.

  “How did the kid with the hatchet start it?” I muttered to myself as I watched the birds. I vaguely remembered something about stuffing dry grass in a hole and spinning a twig around in it, but I couldn’t quite recall the exact technique. I racked my brain for what else besides pure friction could make a spark, since sitting around twirling a stick until it got hot sounded pretty fucking exhausting anyway after the day that I’d had.

  “The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys,” I exclaimed to myself as I realized what I needed. I knew Michigan had to be full of flint, since there was an entire city named after it, and I was pretty sure that flint and steel was a classic combination for sparking up a fire. Now I understood why Sol had told me it was a high-carbon steel knife. It was probably the best kind of metal to use with flint, and he’d trusted me to remember that little tidbit of information.

  A few of the long-necked pigeon-toucan birds looked up at me, and I froze for
a couple of seconds, but they returned to their pecking quickly. They seemed like harmless enough little birds, and I was about to stride through the flock when one of them shrieked and slammed its claws down into the weeds. It kicked its foot up to show its flock mates the striped rat creature it had impaled on its long claws.

  The rat creature was still wriggling, and I felt my stomach flip over at the pitiful sight.

  The other birds clustered around the successful hunter and gobbled appreciatively. Then the birds opened their huge toucan mouths and started to jab at the rat creature with the can-opener tips of their beaks. They pulled chunks of fur, fat, and meat away from the creature’s body as the little rodent squeaked pitifully. It only took about ten seconds before they had stripped the striped rat down to its skeleton.

  I decided that trying to bother the long-necked pigeon-toucan birds was a bad idea, even if they were smaller than me, so I followed the treeline slowly and quietly until I was about ten yards away from the birds. I kept the Glock trained on them while I crossed the valley in case they decided to come after me, but they barely even looked up from their hunt.

  This time, I shuffled along the forest floor and kicked the pine needles away from the dirt as I walked. I picked up every smallish gray rock that I saw and stuck it into my jacket pocket. I started to feel a little weighed down by the stones about halfway up the hill, but I reasoned that it was probably better to have more rocks with me even if it meant that it took me a little while longer to go up the last slope, since it would be easier to test them out all at the same time instead of stopping to unholster and scrape the knife every time I found a stone. It would also give me a decent pile of ammunition to throw at creatures I wanted to chase away from the fire, since I didn’t want to use up my bullets too quickly. I had no idea when I’d be in a world where I could get more 9mm bullets.

  I saw more gray and brown striped rat creatures rustling in the pine needles as I trudged back up the hill, but they were all running along with me this time. I frowned as I picked my way through the fallen pine branches and wondered if the rat creatures were running away from something, but I figured that if the rats were scared of something that was bigger or more dangerous than the birds, the birds wouldn’t have been milling around so calmly in the valley.

  I realized what the rat creatures were scurrying to the moment I stepped out of the tree line and into the dirt circle.

  Rat creatures swarmed over the sloth’s hairy body. A new, hungry rat creature scampered out of the woods from a random direction every few seconds. The soft sound of their gnawing teeth filled the air as they chewed on the beast’s crumpled corpse, and their cute faces and sleek bodies were stained dark red. The rat creatures hadn’t been scared at all. They’d scented blood in the air, and they’d come to feed.

  I watched the swarming rat creatures carefully while I backed away toward Honest Abe’s driver’s side, but the rodents were much more interested in feasting on the sloth than in the shallow scrapes on my hands.

  “Try to finish it before it starts to stink,” I advised the rat creatures as I opened Honest Abe’s front door. I jumped into the car and slammed it shut behind me before any curious rat creatures could investigate the smell of the leftover shortbread on the plastic wrapper. I wasn’t sure how appetizing they’d find it, but guessed their noses were pretty sensitive if they found the sloth’s body, and I suspected that something that seemed to be made entirely of fat, flour, and sugar might be pretty interesting to a hungry rat creature. I debated trying to open one of the MREs, considered the effort involved in ripping open all the packets and heating the things up versus just shoving another Millennium bar into my mouth, and opted for the Millennium bar.

  I ripped another bar open, shoved the gummy shortbread into my mouth, and decided that I’d go through the rocks in my pockets tonight before the sun went down, since that was a fairly low-energy task, I’d spend the night in the backseat of the car away from the rat creatures, and then I’d eat an MRE in the morning before I started on the hike to get more water. That way I’d save the food with the highest calorie count for the day I’d have ahead of me instead of just filling my stomach before I went to bed.

  I glanced at my watch and groaned as I realized that it was already six in the evening, I’d spent an hour more than I’d planned to looking for the gray stones. I knew that sunset had been coming around eight-thirty back in my home dimension, and that meant I only had a couple of hours to test out the stones in my jacket before the sun went down. I finished the Millennium bar and stuffed the wrapper into the passenger’s side pocket next to the one from lunch. Next, I opened the car door, slid out quickly, and slammed the door behind me before any rat creatures tried to get curious about Honest Abe’s insides.

  I slumped down against the car door until my ass was nestled in the relatively soft dirt of my pocket dimension, unsheathed my knife, then pulled out the first gray stone from my left pocket. I rubbed the stone against the flat piece of steel at the bottom of the knife’s blade.

  No sparks.

  I pulled the stone along the steel more quickly, then rubbed it up and down as fast as I could.

  No sparks.

  “That’s okay,” I said. I set the stone by Honest Abe’s bald front wheel. “Not every stone is a flint. There’s got to be one in here.”

  I didn’t get the next stone to spark, or the next, or the next. I sat there in the dirt rubbing stone after stone on the steel as the light faded, and it was almost totally dark out by the time I ran out of stones. I had a pretty decent stockpile of light throwing ammunition next to the front tire, but nothing I could light a fire on.

  “Way to human, Dave,” I muttered to myself as I watched the silhouette of the rats wriggle against the deep blue of the evening light. “Day one, and you have failed to master fire.”

  “Yeah, well you don’t have a rebel Anunnaki from Niburu who’s willing to piss off his rapist lightning-throwing boss just to come down from the heavens and hand you fire on a silver fucking platter, do you?” Sol’s voice asked at the back of my mind. “You gotta work for it, kid. Takes time. Don’t fucking give up on me just because you didn’t collect enough goddamn rocks today.”

  I wasn’t sure that I’d gotten the mythology right, especially since I’d learned about the old myths largely from watching Chariots of the Gods and Ancient Aliens with Sol, but it was encouraging enough. I wasn’t going to be able to look for stones today, but I’d have plenty of time tomorrow.

  I only had a day and a half before I left this fucked-up carnivorous wilderness behind forever, after all.

  Chapter 4

  I spent the night curled up in Honest Abe’s back seat desperately hoping that sleep would eventually slam me in the head with the big cartoon mallet of blissful rest, but I couldn’t turn my brain off no matter how hard I tried to ignore the anxious thoughts that whirled throughout my mind. I watched my worries about Sol and survival and the multi-dimensional monsters after us swim around in my mind until I could barely comprehend my own thoughts. I might have dropped off for an hour or two of sleep by the time the dim gray light of dawn started to creep in through the car’s windows, but I was nearly as exhausted as though I hadn’t slept at all.

  The rat creatures had nearly stripped the sloth’s skeleton clean by the time it was light enough to see well, and I watched the last few critters gnaw at the big beast’s red bones as I sat in Honest Abe’s backseat and chewed through my own breakfast. The spaghetti and meatballs MRE wasn’t the best pasta I’d ever tasted, but the chocolate chip Pop-Tart was pretty good, and I made an open-face sandwich out of the biscuit, peanut butter, raisins, and jelly before I washed the meal down with the package of cocoa and the last of my water.

  I stashed the envelopes with the other plastic, hooked the Glock, Nalgene, and knife onto my belt, then got out of Honest Abe and started down the slope toward the stream. I chose a trail about a yard away from the path of kicked-up pine needles I’d left yesterday, and
I took my time kicking the needles up so I could keep filling my pockets with stones. I had a vague memory of a display of rough-grained gray flint arrowheads flecked with white and yellow in the Detroit Historical Museum, so I studied each stone a little closer this time to see how much it looked like the arrowheads before I stuck it into my pocket. When I made it up to the top of the slope, I sat down and tested each one for sparks on my knife. I dropped the stones in a little pile right by where I’d come out of the treeline as a marker.

  It was almost noon by the time my pockets were empty, and my legs were still aching a little, but I hadn’t used up nearly as much energy as I had by noon yesterday, so I figured that I was still on top of the game. I sheathed my knife, got up, and decided that I would conserve energy as much as I could today. It was a lot easier for me to shuffle up and down the slopes slowly while I looked for stones than it was to hurry through the woods. I would have hours to get back before the sun went down. Even if I couldn’t manage to find a flint before night time, I would still have the shelter of Honest Abe’s chassis to protect me against wild animals.

  I cleared an even wider path in the pine needles as I sauntered down the slope to the stream, and by the time I saw the glint of water through the woods my pockets bulged with grainy stones. I poked my head through the trees, looked to the right and left again, then knelt down at the bank of the stream and dipped my Nalgene into the water while I waved my Glock at the trees. I waited until the bottle was full, then sat back on my haunches and drank my fill slowly so that my stomach wouldn’t cramp up this time.

  I kept hearing faint little rustling sounds in the woods behind me, and I glanced backwards each time with my Glock, but the only thing I saw was pine branches swaying faintly in the gentle breeze that blew through the valley.