by Logan Jacobs
Chapter 6
“No, no, no...” I whispered as I pushed my aching body forward through the trees. My heart was already battering itself against my rib cage in what felt like triple time as I slammed my aching feet against the ground, but now every time the watch beeped my heart jumped right into my throat. The feeling made my guts twist and my mouth water like I was about to throw up, but the electric prickles of fear that jolted down my spine felt like they were numbing my legs to the pain. I couldn’t help counting down the seconds as I darted through the trees on the power of my terrified adrenaline rush.
At eight, my fingertips began to prickle and my head started to reel, so I gulped down a breath of the pungent, pine-scented air and hoped that at least some of the oxygen would get to my lungs.
At seven, I could see the dark blue and gunmetal gray gleam of Honest Abe’s dappled coat through the trees.
At six, my right foot slammed down onto a huge fallen log that was barely a yard away from the tree line.
At five, I launched myself off the log and between two huge bushy firs, held my hands out to break my fall, and realized that I didn’t hear the whine of the Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending, at all.
At four, I landed with my hands and torso in the dirt circle, but I could still feel branches poking into my jeans, and I decided that I didn’t want to find out what would happen if the Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending, took off with only half of me inside its field of influence.
At three, I pushed myself up and scrambled forward onto the bare dirt of my pocket dimension beside the Lincoln. I could hear branches breaking and dull thuds close behind me, and I reminded myself that as long as I was inside the pocket dimension when it shifted I’d be fine.
At two, I reached forward, hooked my fingers under Honest Abe’s metal door handle, and yanked it open.
At one, I jumped into Honest Abe’s front seat and finally heard the whine of the Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending, starting up.
At zero, I slammed the door closed, but the only thing I could hear was the sound of my father’s invention droning to a high soprano note. I sat back against the driver’s seat and looked through the windshield just in time to see a flash of bright white light that obscured everything around the car.
The watch beeped one more time as the bright white light faded quickly to reveal a landscape of leafy green birches, oaks, and maples. These woods looked almost like home, and I grinned in relief. Maybe this world would be a little more civilized than the last one--
Something slammed against the passenger side of the car.
“Ahh, fuck!” Another jolt of adrenaline ran down my spine, my heart jumped, and my hands started to shake again, but I managed to yank my Glock out of its holster and aim it toward the passenger side window.
The cat-woman stared at me through the window. Her ears were pressed back flat against her auburn hair, and the slit pupils of her bright green eyes had gone huge and black like she was ready to pounce, but her bronzed brow furrowed in what looked like utter confusion. Her right hand was still wrapped around her spear and her spear was pointed at my nose again, but she’d flattened her left palm against the glass, and she clicked her claws in a pattern that seemed a lot more experimental than angry.
I could still hear a scraping sound that didn’t seem to match up with anything the cat-woman was doing, so I leaned forward and craned my neck to see what was outside the back window.
The scraping came from the woolly mammoth that the woman had been riding. The mammoth scraped at the ground in front of it with one big, flat front foot, curled its long furry trunk up toward its mouth, and lowered its head so that the tuft of brown hair on top of its skull and the points of its long, curled tusks aimed directly toward Honest Abe’s backseat.
I’d seen elephants charging on Animal Planet before, and a cold river of fear ran through the pit of my stomach as I wondered how easily those tusks could rip through Honest Abe’s chassis. I didn’t think that the mammoth was going to be able to overturn the car, since the front was fixed pretty firmly in the ground thanks to Sol’s buried power source, but there was no reason the mammoth couldn’t tear the rest of the car to shreds while it tried to impale me.
The cat-woman clacked her claws against the window one more time, turned her head, and waved her hand at her mammoth.
“Floppy, stop!” she called.
Floppy raised its head, uncurled its trunk, and gave a deep, sonorous snort.
I lowered my Glock and took a deep breath to slow down my racing heart. Maybe I wasn’t in as much danger as I’d thought. I took a second to look around the world we’d landed in.
The firs and pines of the last world had disappeared and been replaced by the familiar leafy green trees of my slice of michigan. Maples, oaks, and beeches towered above the overgrown green grass that waved at the edge of the circle, and I noticed that a few of the big deciduous trees were split down the middle where the DEPP’s dimensional circle-perimeter had sliced them in half.
The cat-woman’s left hand froze, her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped open. She turned her head slowly to the right and then back to the left, then whirled around and slammed her left palm against the Lincoln’s window.
“What did you do?” the cat-woman shouted. She glanced up again, then waved the tip of her stone spear around in a circle at the trees that surrounded us. She slammed her palm against the car again every time she asked a new question. “This isn’t my home! Where did you take me, you cowering rat? Are you an evil shaman? Answer me!”
I scooted over to the opposite side of the car from her while the cat-woman shouted her questions. When I’d gotten all the way into the passenger seat, I held the Glock up by its grip, aimed the barrel at the windshield so that the cat-woman could see the whole gun, and used my left hand to point to the pistol.
“Do you wanna fuck around?” I yelled through the glass.
“The thunder maker!” The cat-woman’s eyes widened as she backed away from the window.
“That’s right,” I said. “We need to talk. Put down your spear and I’ll put down my thunder maker. Got it?”
The beautiful woman bit her lower lip, glanced at her pet wooly mammoth, and then nodded, but she still stepped away another yard or so.
I held up my left hand with my palm facing out, leaned back across the bench seat while I slowly reached across my body with my right hand so that the cat-woman could see what I was doing, placed the Glock on the dashboard right above the steering wheel, and leaned forward again so that I was sitting upright in the passenger seat. I lifted my hand away, twisted my body back so that I was facing the cat-woman, and held both my hands up with my palms toward her so she could see that I wasn’t holding any other weapon.
For now.
The cat-woman narrowed her eyes, but she lowered the tip of her spear, took a few steps backward, and then crouched down slowly. She didn’t look away from me even for a moment as she set the spear carefully on the ground and straightened up.
“Will you come out of your strange cave now?” she called.
“Not yet.” I shook my head, then made a “come here” motion with my right hand. “Come a little closer so we don’t have to shout at each other.”
The cat-woman narrowed her eyes as she peered at me, but her tail curled up behind her and her black-tipped cat ears pricked up, so I hoped that her curiosity had really gotten the better of her anger for the moment. She nodded at Floppy and then crept closer to my window until almost all I could see of her was her gorgeous face, her slender neck, and the full, round breasts that bulged from under her brown leather bikini top.
“Is this better?” she asked.
I leaned forward and took a look at the spear that laid behind her, watched as her tail curled up, and then glanced over at Floppy. The mammoth swung its trunk idly as it kept its big brown eyes fixed on its mistress, so I decided that I was probably safe from being rampaged at for the moment unless I pissed off the cat-woman again
.
“Yeah, it’s much better,” I told her, although now I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to focus on the depths of those brilliant yellow eyes or the tempting, sweat-dewed depths of her cleavage. I also couldn’t remember whether you were supposed to look into cats’ eyes to establish dominance, or whether that was trust, or whether that applied to dogs instead of cats. I hadn’t exactly had any pets growing up except for the odd bug I’d catch and keep in a jar until they died, so I hadn’t had a whole lot of first-hand experience with cats. I decided to watch her eyes and her ears, since it seemed like I’d be able to tell the most about her mood from them anyway, and if it was some kind of faux pas to stare into someone’s eyes in cat-person culture I’d deal with it during the conversation. “Okay, go ahead with your questions. One at a time, though.”
The cat-woman tilted her head to the side, glanced around again, then looked back at me.
“What are you?” she asked. “What do I call you?”
“Huh,” I muttered under my breath. “I thought you’d ask where the hell we were instead of my name, but that’s cool.”
“I saw your lips move, but I did not hear you through this magic stone,” the cat-girl said as she tapped on the glass. “Speak again.”
“Oh, shit, sorry,” I cleared my throat and spoke louder. Uhhh. Sooo… Good question to start on,” I said. “I’m a human. Uh, people call me Dave. Dave Meyer. How about you? Um, what are you?”
“Have you never seen one of my kind before?” The cat-woman furrowed her brow again. “I am Fela. My sisters call me Smallfang. My pride is Pride Blacktail.”
“Why do they call you ‘Smallfang?’”
“Because… my… fangs are small?” The woman narrowed her eyes, tilted her head to the side, and pointed at her teeth. She obviously seemed confused by my obvious question.
Obviously.
“Uhh, right,” I tried not to laugh and just cleared my throat again. “That makes sense.”
“What does Dave Meyer mean, and what is a human?”
“Dave is what people call me, and I guess my pride is Pride Meyer.”
“Dave Meyer,” the cat-woman growled. Even though she had been pointing a spear at me just a few seconds ago, my name sounded sexier than it ever had in her sensuous, husky voice. “And ‘human?’”
“I don’t really know how to explain what a human is,” I said, “it’s just my species. Um, do you want me to call you Smallfang, or is Fela okay?”
“No, you may call me Fela for now,” she said, and then she gestured to the woolly mammoth. “And I call him Floppy. He does what I tell him to.”
“He’s really cute,” I said. I waved to Floppy, but he just glared at me with those big expressive brown eyes. “Did you tame him yourself? Is he full-grown, or what?”
“Floppy has been mine since I was a kitten,” Fela boasted. She turned her head toward Floppy, closed her eyes for about a second before she opened them again, and then turned her head back to me. “We were born in the same spring. I do not think he will grow any larger. He’s small for his kind, but he fills my heart with love. He will not attack you unless I tell him to. Now, Dave Meyer, where are we?”
Now that I was pretty sure the cat-woman wasn’t going to immediately attack me, I took a chance to look around more. I couldn’t quite tell if the trees were exactly the same as they had been at Sol’s place in my original universe, but they looked enough like the same kinds of trees that it was a possibility. I couldn’t see the trail that led from the lab to the Airstream, but when I twisted my head around to look out the back window I did see a weather-beaten barn with half of its roof caved in where Sol’s garage had been.
This clearly wasn’t my world, but at least it was a little bit closer than Fela’s had been.
“That’s a little harder to explain,” I said. How was I even supposed to start explaining the concept of parallel universes to someone whose race hadn’t gotten past stone tools yet? I wracked my brain for a place to start and hoped that the Universal Translation pill I’d taken would be up to the job.
“Try.” Fela’s eyes narrowed again. “Or at least tell me how far away you’ve taken me from where we were.”
“That’s not much easier,” I groaned. “Alright, this might be a little hard for you to understand, so stay with me here. We haven’t moved anywhere at all--”
“Then why are all the trees different?” Fela interrupted.
“Slow down, I’m trying to explain.” I held my hands up again, tried to remember the precise wording of Sol’s poetic explanation, and decided to wing it with the best capsule summary I could. “So every time something happens, like every time you make a decision, another world pops up where that thing didn’t happen--”
“So this is my fault?” Fela asked. “Some decision I didn’t make?”
“No, it’s not your fault,” I assured her, “I’m just using it as an example, See, you can’t get to these worlds normally, but the thing I’m in lets you do that. We’re in another one of those worlds where, uh... stuff just didn’t happen the way it did in your world, and it probably didn’t happen a long time ago.”
“What didn’t happen a long time ago?” Fela frowned.
“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “But whatever it was, it made our worlds look a lot different.”
I hadn’t really taken the time to think about what might have happened in Fela’s world that had filled it with hills, pine trees, and saber-toothed tiger people, but the sight of the small woolly mammoth standing patiently at the cat-woman’s command sparked a hint of recognition in my brain. I knew that the gentle hills around Farmington had been formed when glaciers rolled over the peninsula thousands of years ago, so maybe in Fela’s world the Ice Age had gone differently. Maybe that was why I was looking at a gorgeous saber-toothed cat woman and her pet woolly mammoth instead of another human. Maybe the Ice Age had lasted much longer, my human ancestors had died out, and the big animals that had roamed the frozen tundra had just evolved into the giant carnivorous sloths, bear-men, cat-people, and other fauna that I’d seen there.
“And this is your world?” Fela glanced around at the trees again. “Did you bring me here on purpose? Was this to punish me for chasing you, Dave Meyer?”
“No, and no, and no.” I shook my head and hoped that the gesture would translate to Fela’s frame of reference. “This looks a little bit more like my world than yours did, but I’m pretty sure it’s not mine. I didn’t bring you here on purpose, and I didn’t even come here on purpose. I’m not an evil shaman or whatever it was you said-- I’m not doing this on my own, and I can only control it a little. I need to be back inside the circle of dirt when the thing I’m sitting in moves to another world, or else I’ll be stuck.”
“Then it’s your cave that moves to other worlds?” Fela asked. She clacked her fingers on the glass again. “How? And what is it made of? This looks like ice and it’s hard like ice, but it’s not cold. Is it magic?”
“It’s my… cave, yeah,” I agreed, since it seemed simpler to just use her words than to try to explain the concept of a car and why I was sitting in one that wasn’t able to move. “The stuff you’re tapping on is made out of glass, which I think is made out of melted sand, and the stuff you can’t see through is metal, which is made out of, um... other kinds of melted rocks, I guess. I’m not really sure.”
Fela reached up with both hands, and a second later I could hear her claws ring against the metal top of the car.
“It’s hard, too,” she said. “And a pile of melted sand and rock can move you to different worlds? How? This is very strange, Dave Meyer.”
Damn, every time she purred my name I felt a little shiver of pleasure go down my spine.
“Dave Meyer?” she asked, and then I realized that I’d been staring into her beautiful eyes instead of answering her question
“I honestly have no idea,” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t build the thing myself, my father did.”
; It felt a little weird to refer to Sol as my father out loud, but it also felt good to just say the words, and to be able to refer to myself as someone who had a real father instead of an anonymous man who’d been out of the picture before I was even born.
“Can you take me back to my homeworld, then?” Fela asked. “Or can he?”
“He’s-- he’s not here,” I stammered. Even though I could refer to Sol as my father, I just didn’t have the stomach to say that he was dead out loud yet. “And I can sort of control how long it stays in each world, but that’s it. I can’t control where it goes next or anything like that. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Fela’s eyes narrowed, and her tail started to lash behind her. “You ate all my seeds, you tried to kill my ears with your thunder maker, you dragged me to another world along with your strange cave and your bitter-smelling dirt, and you’re just sorry?”
“What else do you want from me?” I sighed. “Listen, lady, I’m sorry I ate your seeds, and I’m sorry you got all mixed up in this. I really am. But there’s only so much I can do about all of that right now, okay?”
“But there is something?” Fela’s eyes widened.
“Look, we’re both in the same kind of trouble right now,” I sighed. “I want to go home, too. But I don’t know how to get back to my own world, let alone yours. I’m honestly just hoping I eventually run across a world where I can find someone to help me fix the part of this cave that lets me control where I’m going. When that happens, I’ll be happy to send you right back home, but until then I’m pretty sure we’re both stuck just drifting around in different worlds. Together.”
Fela stared at me for a long moment, and the intensity of that bright green stare made my breath catch in my throat even though I was sitting still in the safety of Honest Abe’s tattered leather-lined embrace. She blinked quickly a few times, her shoulders slumped, and she lowered her hands.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated softly. I raised my right hand and pressed it to the window. “I’m sorry you’re so far from everything you know. If it’s any consolation, I know exactly how you feel. How you’re going to feel. I’m feeling the same thing right now. I have been for the last two days, and I don’t know if it’s going to get any better.”