by Logan Jacobs
“Perhaps the stream is a bit over-fished in your world,” Emma suggested. She held her hand still, but the tips of her fingers wiggled back and forth underneath the surface of the stream. “I can only imagine how lovely it must be to lie out here on an emerald lawn during a warm summer’s day and angle to your heart’s delight-- ah, here’s a fine fat fellow. Ssh.”
A few of the gray shadows started to drift toward Emma’s fingers, but a big brown fish about a foot long had started to swim downstream toward us, and that seemed to be Emma’s target. The big brown fish darted toward Emma’s hand with the closest thing to purpose an animal with a brain that small was likely to have. It opened its pale, gaping mouth as it approached Emma’s thumb, but when the fish seemed like it was just about to gulp the dainty appendage down, the river around the fish flashed with a bright blue corona of light. A loud zapping sound filled the air, and water above Emma’s hand started to sizzle. The big brown fish splashed and jerked in the water for a moment before Emma’s fingers closed around its gleaming body.
“Got you!” Emma pulled the fish out of the water and waved it triumphantly above her head. “What a nice big fat trout we’ll have for supper.”
“That is so freaking cool,” I gasped. “You Westinghoused that trout!”
“I’m afraid it’s not cooked through, but it’s quite dead.” Emma pushed herself to a kneeling position and laid the trout down on the long grass next to her. “I’ll fry it up with some garlic scapes, and it will be absolutely delicious.”
“If you want to burn your tongue off with poisons, you can enjoy it yourself.” Fela shook her head. She patted Floppy on the trunk, and the little mammoth unfurled his long nose and let it hang down into the water as Fela stood and tossed her head back. Her auburn hair glinted with scarlet highlights in the orange light of the late afternoon sun. “I will catch my own fish, and I do not need lightning powers to do it.”
“Oh, are you going to use your spear?” Emma wiped her hand off on the grass. “I’ve read about Indians spear-fishing in streams, but I’ve never had to do it myself.”
“No, when I spear-fish I find a stick with two branches that come off the end.” Fela held up her index finger and middle finger in a V to demonstrate. “It is easier to keep hold of the fish that way.”
“Well, do show us your method, then.” Emma settled herself on the grass cross-legged next to her trout, smoothed her black skirt over her knees, and propped her chin up on her hands as she gazed at Fela.
Fela knelt down by the side of the river again, laid flat on her stomach, and positioned herself so that her arms and shoulders were sticking out over the stream. Her long, tawny legs splayed out in the long grass, and her skimpy leather skirt rode up over the enticing curves of her taut buttocks so that I could see the shadows of her muscular inner thighs and the patch of tawny, curled fur that laid beyond. She pushed her auburn hair back over her tufted ears, gripped the edge of the riverbank with her left hand, and stretched her right arm out above the water.
My mouth went dry, my palms got sweaty, and I shifted my weight from foot to foot as my jeans tightened a little. I had made three new friends today, none of whom were from the same branch of reality as me, and two of them were driving me a little crazy with lust on an hourly basis. I’d never been this turned on this easily by any of the girls I’d known back in my home dimension, and I wondered for a moment if the weirdness and isolation of the whole situation was making my hormones run wild. Maybe my brain had triggered some kind of instinctive “Last man on Earth so we have to repopulate the species” response in me, even though I’d only been away from my home dimension for a couple of days so far. Or maybe there was just something more enticing about Fela’s primal power and Emma’s demure grace than anything I’d ever seen in the girls I’d dated before. Maybe I’d just gotten as lucky as I thought I had and bumped into two of the most gorgeous women in the entire multiverse.
“The fish in this world do not have lightning powers, do they?” Fela asked. Her fingers skimmed the surface of the water. “I do not want to reach into the river and get fried by lightning.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Emma answered. “I’ve never been shocked by one myself. I suppose that since water conducts electricity, the fish might have been lightning-blessed, but I don’t know that it would be enough to harm you. They’re just little fish, after all. I don’t think they could do much more than sting you a bit.”
“I can live with being stung,” Fela sighed. She bent her head down to peer into the stream, her right hand hovered above the surface of the water, and her yellow eyes darted back and forth. Her fingers moved almost imperceptibly slowly toward the surface of the water for seconds that ticked on into minutes, and then the cat-girl swiped her hand violently through the surface of the stream. She splashed a huge gout of water toward her face and drenched the flowing auburn locks that hung around her shoulders, but when she raised her head she had a huge silver fish in her grinning, fanged mouth. The gorgeous cat-girl’s tail curled up behind her as she pushed herself up from the riverbank and sat up on her haunches, and I couldn’t help but laugh at how both adorable and fierce she looked with her bounty wiggling in her mouth.
“Oh, my goodness.” Emma’s hands went up to cover her rosebud mouth, but the corners of her eyes crinkled up around the edges, and I could tell by the way her shoulders shook that she was silently giggling.
“Nice going, Fela!” I cheered as I raised my fists over my head in a pose of triumph.
Trickles of bright red blood dripped down the fish’s silvery scales as Fela sank her pearly white fangs into its body. The fish flopped and thrashed between Fela’s lips, but the curves of her teeth had her catch hooked solidly into her mouth, and there was no getting away.
Fela raised her hands to her mouth and gripped the fish with both hands as its spasms weakened into the occasional twitch. Her slit-pupiled yellow-green eyes locked onto mine as she slowly crunched down into the fish’s body, and she maintained eye contact even while she pulled the fish away from her mouth and started to chew. Her petal-pink lips were stained red, a creamy white tendril of fish guts dangled down from her closed mouth and over her chin, and blood trickled from the corners of her lips toward the hollow of her tanned throat. She looked incredibly pleased with herself as she swallowed her mouthful of raw, living fish flesh.
A lightning bolt of electric arousal shot through my groin, my toes curled a little, and the blush that spread across my breastbone was so warm that I had to tug at the ribbed collar of my Omnicorp Consumer Products T-shirt to let in some air. I was literally getting hot under the collar watching Fela eat that raw fish. I’d never gotten so turned on by anything so gross in my life.
So fucking weird, but anything was possible with car-girls.
“This is my favorite way to eat a fish,” Fela said. She held her catch out toward me. “It is fresh from the water and does not have any poison on it. Would you like a bite?”
“Uh...” I stammered. No matter how sexy I found the cat-woman, I wasn’t in the mood for her makeshift sushi. “No, I think you should enjoy that yourself. You’ve walked a long way today and fought really hard, and you need the energy.”
“Yes, enjoy,” Emma murmured. Her wide blue eyes darted from Fela to me and back again, but the smile had disappeared from her lips.
“I will.” Fela shrugged, sat down against Floppy’s kneeling body, and bit into her fish again.
“Would you like me to catch you a fish, Dave?” Emma knelt on the bank of the river and swished her hand back and forth in the water. “Or have you got some other method of fishing you’d like to show us?”
“Well, I could tie a string to a stick and bait it with some fish guts, but I’d need a string and a hook,” I shrugged. “Other than that, I got nothing.”
“You have the gun,” Fela pointed out. Her mouth and chin were smeared with fish blood, and her cheek glittered with the remnants of the fish’s silvery scales. “I don’t t
hink any fish would stand a chance against that thing. Not after what I saw you do to those dogs.”
“Yeah, I would like it if you would not bring that up again,” I said, since the yelps of the dying dogs still echoed in my mind at the mention of the fight. I’d been so focused on saving Emma from the snarling beasts earlier that I’d barely had time to feel much of anything, but now that I could replay the gory incident in my brain I could feel a lump start to rise in my throat over the wide and startled eyes of those dogs. I tried to shove the memory of man’s best friend dying at the end of my gun out of my mind and focus on how I could impress Emma and Fela with my hunting prowess--that is, how I could find my own dinner. “Emma, besides feral dogs and wolverines, what’s the wildlife like around here? How is the hunting?”
“It’s fair, I suppose,” Emma said. “I’ve gotten rabbit and woodchuck for meat and both were nice enough. If you have a taste for fowl I’ve seen pheasant, quail, grouse...”
“I have never eaten any of those animals,” I admitted. “What about deer? There were tons of deer around here in my world, but that was also kind of because we’d killed off all the wolves and shit.”
“I’ve seen quite a few deer around here, but I’ve never been able to Westinghouse one successfully,” Emma said. “They’re too big for me. I do remember Papa bringing a few down with his hunting rifle. But I wouldn't suggest it unless you’re absolutely certain that you can bring it down in one shot. That’s how Papa got his rifle melted. He tried to shoot a bear and it didn’t take the first time. He and Mama nearly tired themselves out Westinghousing it together.”
“Think this would be enough?” I pulled my Glock out of its holster. I had taken down a ten-foot-tall sloth with it, but I’d also been close enough to shoot the sloth right in the eye socket.
“Mmm, no.” Emma shook her head. “Not for a head shot. It would charge at you and probably zap you quite badly. I wouldn't suggest it.”
“I don’t feel like dying that way,” I said. “You think we can get a deer to commit suicide? They run out in front of my car all the time, they’ve gotta have a death wish.”
“I’d rather you not joke about that in my company, if you don’t mind.” Emma pressed her lips together and stiffened her shoulders. The blue in her eyes deepened, her loose curls floated around her face, and her fingertips began to glow slightly. A faint buzz filled the air.
“Sensitive topic, sorry, won’t do it again.” I held up my hands, but I wasn’t sure if Emma knew that she was buzzing a little, so I added, “Please don’t zap me.”
“Oh, no. Of course not.” Emma nodded slowly. Her electric buzzing and blue glow faded, her eyes lightened to the color of the sky again, and her loose curls settled down into the soft ringlets that hung around her face. She didn’t speak again, and an eerie silence replaced the buzzing of her electrical aura.
In the quiet space that came between my breaths, I heard a faint but clear high-pitched clucking sound. I raised my index finger to my lips in a “keep quiet” gesture, then looked slowly around the little slice of woods that I could see.
The grass in front of me rustled, and my heart jumped into my throat as the memory of two terrifying chases through a pine forest flashed at the back of my brain, but whatever was coming through the grass toward us wasn’t nearly as big as anything that had pursued me before. The sound of clucking grew louder, and stripes of shiny greenish-black feathers showed through the leaves of overgrown grass that grew along the sides of the riverbank. A beaked blue face and red neck poked through the underbrush, bent down to the surface of the stream, and started to drink. Its skinny red neck bobbed up and down as it swallowed the river water.
I barely even breathed as I leveled my Glock at the wild turkey’s head. I knew I wasn’t a great shot, and the turkey’s head was pretty small, but it was only a couple of yards in front of me. As long as I kept my hand steady and the turkey didn’t move, I knew I could make the shot. I moved the pistol slowly so that the turkey's head was right in the center of the rectangular sight on top of the gun, then pulled the trigger.
The Glock’s report echoed through the trees as the clump of grass in front of me exploded in a fireworks display of glossy black feathers. The turkey’s headless body toppled out of the tall grass, splashed into the stream, and began to spin slowly in the current as the gory scraps of the bird’s head began to dissolve in a red cloud in the river.
“Fuck, yes!” I shouted, although I couldn't even hear myself with the way my ears were ringing. I holstered my Glock, splashed into the river, and grabbed the sodden body of the turkey before it could float away downstream. “I am the mighty hunter!”
Fela lifted one fist in a gesture of victory as she chewed on her raw fish. Next to her, Floppy raised his trunk up into the air and let out a celebratory trumpet.
“Oh, good show!” Emma gave me a polite round of applause with her hands held crosswise to each other at waist level. She tilted her head and smiled at me as I splashed back up onto the riverbank with the turkey in my hand. “Now that will really be a treat with the parsnips! It’s been ages since I’ve roasted a turkey. What a fine meal we will have, Dave!”
I felt a deep, primordial sense of satisfaction well up in my chest as I headed back to town with my hunting party and our kills.
Chapter 13
“It’s been ages since I’ve had a proper turkey dinner with all the trimmings.” Emma pressed her left hand to the iron stove, where a huge pot of steaming water crackled with the trademark blue bolts of the black-haired girl’s electricity. She gripped the dead turkey’s feet in her right hand and swirled its carcass around in the hot water. “Well, not all of the trimmings. But I’ve got some cranberries to go with the parsnips, and a few stalks of Brussels sprouts left...”
“That sounds fucking amazing,” I sighed as I chopped up more parsnips on the wooden table. I’d never liked Brussels sprouts that much, but Sol hadn’t been kidding about the effects of the MRE, and a bunch of fresh vegetables sounded really good to me right now. I was also looking forward to eating more of Emma’s cooking, since the pickles and apples had been so tasty.
“I won’t even add garlic or onion, Fela,” Emma said. “I’d like you to be able to eat it. Is there anything else you don’t like the taste of, besides honey?”
“I do not eat many roots, but I will try them and see if I like them.” Fela eyed the chopped-up parsnips. She leaned against the wall next to the small window so that she could keep an eye on Floppy as he placidly shoved more leaves into his mouth. The cat-woman had picked up a few flat gray stones she’d found in the road and slid them under the leather thongs wrapped around her arms, and she removed a stone and studied it in the waning light as she spoke. “I do not dislike honey, I just do not understand its appeal. You have to get stung by thousands of bees to get it, it’s sticky and you can never get it out of your fur, and it tastes like nothing.”
“You can’t taste sweet things?” I asked. “That would explain those berries. They were really, really sour.”
“Oh, honey has plenty of other uses besides tasting sweet,” Emma said. “It’s good for a quick boost of vitality if you take a spoon or two, it helps preserve things, and it will help cuts if you’ve got nothing else around. Maybe you’ll like the cranberries, Fela, they're quite sour.”
“I do not enjoy sour tastes for their own sake,” Fela said. She laid the stone in the small pile she’d made on the table. “My folk eat plants because we know it keeps us healthy. Sour plants help keep us strong and alert, so maybe your cranberries will be like the berries I took from my old territory. Which are now gone forever.”
“I’m really sorry I ate those,” I muttered.
“I was not asking you to apologize again,” Fela said. “I saw some plants near the river that looked like the berry vines from my mother’s world. I would like to go back there tomorrow and take some pieces of the vine to plant.”
“If you’re talking about the black raspberries
, I’ve got some in my garden.” Emma pulled the turkey’s carcass out of the pot of boiling water and slapped it onto the freshly cleaned wooden counter next to the sink. “That’s the skin off. Now all I’ve got to do is butcher it and it will be ready to roast. I think I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, if you don’t mind. It just doesn’t taste the same if you Westinghouse them through.”
“I am looking forward to finding out just what you mean by all this cooking and roasting and frying stuff,” Fela said. “I know you are heating it up so that you can eat it, but I do not understand why.”
“It kills the germs and makes the food more palatable,” I said. “Wait, do either of you know what germs are? Little tiny animals too small for you to see that can make you sick?”
“Like parasites?” Fela rolled her bright yellow eyes. “They happen. I do not have any of the signs that make me think I have one, if you are worried.”
“I’ve read Pasteur, yes.” Emma went over to the sink, turned on the tap, and started to wash her hands with the yellow cake of soap. “And Mama taught me how to keep a clean house, regardless. Anyway, Fela, heating up food to the right temperature makes it digestible for us and helps keep it from spoiling. I suppose that your own stomach may be made of sterner stuff, but we humans are rather used to having most of our meat cooked.”
“You humans seem very delicate,” Fela observed.
“Well, we took over most of the world, so...” I shrugged.
“How?” Fela blinked. “I do not mean to insult humans, Dave Meyer and Emma Newbold, but I do not understand how a species that cannot even eat their meat where they kill it survived for so long.”
“My Mama used to say that every moment we survived on this earth was an act of providence from the Lord above, and that we should be thankful for it instead of questioning it.” Emma went over to the cupboard and took out a huge knife. “And I suppose that if there are really so many different histories out there, it’s a matter of luck, isn’t it? I wonder if we’ll stumble upon many places where the world has been taken over by, oh, lobsters, or lizards, or llamas.”