by Max Brooks
By the time I slammed the hut’s door behind me, my broken body was nearly fixed.
Nearly.
With injuries still crying for help, I felt my hyper-healing peter out.
Food!
I reached into my backpack for some apples. Only one left, along with the animal remains. I scarfed down the apple, but it barely made a dent. Next, I reached for one of the whole chickens, and devoured it without pause or thought.
Had anyone ever warned me about the dangers of eating raw poultry? Even if they had, would it have made any difference now? I couldn’t think of anything beyond health. I was too desperate to stop the pain.
As soon as I swallowed the last bite of cold, rubbery meat, an eruption of nausea rose up from my churning stomach. I retched. I gagged. I could even see green bubbles floating up across my tearing eyes. I ran out onto the beach, trying to vomit out the infected muck.
But the world wouldn’t let me. For a horrible, dry-heaving eternity, I had to just stand there and take it.
And if being assaulted by my own digestive tract wasn’t bad enough, I found that the whole ordeal had barely helped me heal. “Insult to injury,” I groaned.
Still gagging from the memory, I sourly peeked into my pack. “Okay,” I told the rest of the animal parts. “I get it. You need to be cooked.”
Making fire had just gone from a possibility to a priority, but, as I mentioned before, I still had no idea how to do it. Wracking my brain for some remembered hint, I came up with the notion of rubbing two sticks together. If food poisoning can carry over to this world, I reasoned, why not this?
Why? Well, for starters, I couldn’t even put two sticks in my hands. I could hold one in the right, but not in the left. Anytime I put something in my left hand, it immediately went into one of the four small crafting corners.
“Great,” I huffed, then tried to keep going with one stick.
All I ended up burning was time.
I couldn’t rub the stick against anything. All I could do was hit. At one point I smashed a block of dirt out of the hut’s wall, letting in a lot more light, but also reminding me that the day was now halfway done. After resealing the hole with more dirt, I tried my last option: hitting the stick against a plank of wood. “Ugh,” I snorted as my stomach growled and my wounds seethed.
Like it or not, I’d have to take my chances with raw food. Passing over the other chicken, I warily eyed the steak. Was all uncooked meat unsafe or just the kind with feathers? What I wouldn’t give at this moment, I thought, for a licensed food safety inspector.
I lifted the meat up to my face, sniffing it like a dog. I tried to picture what beef had looked like in my world, under glass in bright, chilly supermarkets, or steaming on a plate with veggies and mashed potatoes. I thought I recalled that the inside of that steaming steak in my mind was still pink, which had to mean it wasn’t cooked all the way through.
That image caused another, powerful feeling to rise up from deep in my gut. It wasn’t nausea this time, it was sadness. Without meaning to, I’d reminded myself of how little I knew about myself.
Why couldn’t I picture anything past that steak on the plate? The table? The room? The faces of other people enjoying their dinner? Was I eating with my parents? My children? My friends? Was I eating all alone, like right now?
This line of thinking was leading down a deep dark hole, and so for sanity’s sake, I pulled my mind back to the here and now.
“Okay,” I told the slab of dead cow. “Please don’t make me wanna puke, okay?”
I won’t say the beef was better than the chicken; maybe a little tougher, with a rougher texture on the tongue. And it did have a tad more flavor. But what really mattered, of course, was that I didn’t get sick, and all of my wounds finished healing.
I still couldn’t believe this new superpower. Had I really almost been blown to bits barely a few minutes ago? How long would it have taken my world’s medicine to put the pieces back together? Hours in surgery, weeks in intensive care, and months—maybe even years—of physical therapy. Not to mention all the necessary resources, the bandages and casts and space-age machines, and the army of trained professionals to apply all those resources. And what about the money to pay those professionals? And what if I hadn’t had that money?
Even my painted-on clothes had miraculously sewn themselves back together. Looking down at my self-repaired shoes reminded me of a story of a man who had no shoes realizing how lucky he was when he saw a man with no feet.
“Be grateful for what you have,” I said, nodding to my restored limbs.
GRRRP, growled my empty stomach, reminding me that while I might be whole again, I was now mightily hungry.
“You’ll just have to wait,” I said, turning my nose up at the chicken and its egg—which, by the way, had somehow gone through the explosion without so much as a crack.
The seeds, which had caused this whole near-death experience, had also survived the creeper attack. I planted them in a row behind my first cultivated square, all the while hoping this wasn’t a giant waste of time.
As the last of the shoots rose from the cultivated earth, a sudden chill ran across my back. I looked up to see the sun just beginning to dip below the western edge of Disappointment Hill. One of these days, I thought, heading for the hut, I gotta figure out how long these days are.
I shivered again in the afternoon shade, confused at the sudden chill. Was the season changing? Had I not noticed the temperature drop at night? Neither of these hypotheses turned out to be true, but it’d be a while before I understood that I was suffering from the initial symptoms of starvation.
For a moment I considered climbing the hill to soak up some warming rays. From there, I might spot a few more elusive apple trees.
Another rippling shiver held me back, though, and this one came from fear. I’d been caught out in the open twice already. Not again. Tonight I’d get indoors well before the monsters came prowling. Today had driven home the need for a bombproof bunker. And I thought this was gonna be such a good day, I thought, shuffling gloomily back to my shack.
The light outside my door was just turning purple by the time I smashed out several more blocks of cobblestone. As on the previous evening, the darkness of the cave made for slow going. I knew in my head that darkness alone couldn’t hurt me. But try telling that to my heart. This fear wasn’t rational. It was primal.
At one point I thought about knocking out a square in the hut’s wooden roof to let in a patch of moonlight. Then I pictured that patch darkening with a zombie or creeper literally dropping in. Keep going, I told my picking arms. Dig it deeper, stronger, safer.
While I made some decent progress, the monotony of mining allowed my mind to wander. The empty darkness filled with shapeless threats.
I could feel the jitters taking over, and at this rate I’d be in full meltdown before dawn. “Take a break,” I finally said, “do some crafting, see if you can come up with some kind of weapon.” I laid two sticks in the center of my crafting table, and tried a few cobblestone combos. The now familiar shovel hovered before me, then the hoe, then the pickaxe. But then, after arranging three blocks in an L around the top of my sticks, I saw the image of an axe.
“Two in one,” I nodded, snatching the weapon from the air. “Maybe you’ll work on a tree and a zombie’s neck.”
It felt good to know I now had something to defend myself with, but even better to know that keeping my mind occupied was the best defense against the shakes.
And so I kept crafting instead of digging, and was soon very glad I did. I tried messing around with nothing but cobblestone, seeing if I could make a bombproof-rock version of my door. What I got, instead, was a plain gray box with two vertical slots in the front.
I figured it had to be another crafting aid, maybe an “instant upgrader” to make older tools into better ones. I placed a cobblestone in the upper slot and my old wooden pickaxe underneath it. Suddenly, the tool vanished in a blaze of orange an
d yellow flames. “Fi…!” I began, before bumping my head again.
I laughed, did a jump-free happy dance, then leaned into the face-warming glow.
“Fire.”
This was the final piece in the holy trinity of human evolution. Tool making, agriculture, and now a little piece of the sun! This is what had saved our ancestors from the coldest winters, what had protected them from the fiercest predators. I pictured a group of hairy, filthy, grateful cave dwellers huddled around its comforting glow, warming their hands and cooking their food.
Cooking!
This new device was a furnace, the bottom slot for fuel and the top for whatever needed heating. Sure enough, the cobblestone I’d put in the upper slot had now fused back into a solid monolith.
As the fire died, I reached carefully for the block, ready to drop it before I burned my hand. It didn’t. No need. One more quirk of this world was that items cooled the second they left the furnace. “Now for the big test,” I said, popping the last raw chicken into the top slot with a fresh plank of wood underneath. Once again, and without any means of ignition, the flames roared to life. The little shelter filled with the sounds and smells of popping grease. I grabbed the fully cooked bird even before the last of the fire burnt itself out. “Mmm,” I moaned between salty, moist mouthfuls. “Mmm-mmm-mmm.”
Light, heat, and now cooked food. “You know,” I said, tossing a few more planks into the furnace, “this turned out to be a really good day.”
The chicken was delectable, but it wasn’t completely filling. “Your turn,” I told the egg, to which the egg could have answered “that’s what you think.”
Ever heard that expression, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs?” Well, here’s this world’s version: “You can’t make an omelet.”
You can’t fit the egg into the furnace. You can’t crack it into a bowl. You can’t even step on it; so much for walking on eggshells. As a last resort, I tried tossing it in the air to hit it with a stick. But before I could swing, the incredible, inedible egg flew across the room, hit the wall, and disintegrated like a clump of tall grass.
“Great,” I grumbled, just as my fire winked out.
Darkness returned, along with all my irrational fears. Peering into the furnace’s lower slot, I saw I still had a few more untouched planks of wood. Why weren’t they burning? Did the furnace only work when it had something to heat? Shivering with cold and nerves, I rifled through my belt and pack for something else to burn. The first thing I grabbed happened to be a block of sand.
Thankfully, the furnace accepted my offering, giving me light, heat, and a few seconds later, a whole new modern convenience. I should have known what I was making. Back in my world, it was everywhere; every building, every home, every vehicle, even over people’s eyes to help them see better. It was one of the most vital components of human civilization and I’d had no idea how it was made. Not until I pulled the smooth, clear block from the furnace did I realize that heating sand got you glass.
“Dolt,” I murmured, punching out a hole in the wall and replacing it with the transparent cube. “Did you ever ask where anything comes from?”
What an amazing thing a window is. It gives you the freedom to see the outside world, but the security of knowing that world couldn’t come in. At least, that’s what I hoped. In zombie stories back home, didn’t people always board up the windows at the first sight of the living dead? Would I have to do that when my own cuboid corpses showed up?
For now, I couldn’t hear any ghouls, and I couldn’t see any through my new, south-facing window.
That’s when I realized I’d placed it on the wrong side. My garden, the only thing worth looking at, was north of my hut. I started punching the glass, expecting it to pop out and hover like all the other blocks. Instead, it shattered like the egg.
“Oops,” I said. “No problem, I got a whole beach worth of sand right outside.” If I’d been more cautious or timid, or even just a little more patient, I might have made the smart choice and waited for the dawn.
But did I?
The night had gone so well. I’d been racking up so many wins. Fire, cooked food, and now glass for windows. For the first time since landing, I felt fully in control of my situation. I was becoming overconfident, and that’s what got me into trouble.
I’ll just make a torch, I thought, holding a stick up to the furnace. Monsters gotta be afraid of fire.
When the stick refused to catch, I should’ve taken it as a sign to stop and think.
But did I?
The glow from the cabin’s gotta be enough to keep everything away, I reasoned, sauntering out to the moonlit shore. Shovel in hand, trying to whistle through my thin, flat lips, I couldn’t wait to make all kinds of cocky mistakes.
And I made a ton.
Instead of digging right outside my door, I chose a spot halfway up the beach. Instead of gathering a few cubes and dashing back, I just kept going until I’d dug myself into a hole. Instead of keeping my eyes and ears open—long after the fire died in my cabin, I might add—I fantasized about all the cool things I could build with this glass. A skylight, or wraparound windows, or maybe even a greenhouse if I dug up enough sand.
“Sssp.” A sharp, rasping hiss yanked me out of my nighttime daydream. I froze, looking up.
“Sssp!” came the sound again, gripping my gut with recalled terror. It was the same rasp I’d heard that first night in the forest, when I’d seen those terrible eyes.
And here they were again, passing right over me: a cluster of small glowing rubies embedded in a black, cow-sized, eight-legged beast.
Spider!
Before I could run, move, or think, it’d jumped into the hole with me. Snapping jaws tore at my chest. I toppled backward, dropping my shovel. The spider pounced. I dodged. It spun for another strike as I scrambled frantically out of the pit.
“Sssp!” Scratching legs behind me, coming up fast.
My axe…back in the cabin…too far!
“Sssp!” A bite on the leg…pain…fear…
I reached into my belt for something, anything…sand. Nothing but sand!
Maybe if I could lay a roof, if I could trap it underground…I reached the top, the spider at my heels. I turned, hit it with a block of sand, then placed that block at the hole’s edge. But the sand didn’t stick. It fell. “Ssssp!” hissed the predator as the tan cube crashed onto its head.
I placed another falling block, then another, and another. The spider hissed angrily, pinned under more and more debris. I didn’t know if I was doing any harm, I just wanted to keep it buried long enough to escape. The spider rasped. I kept going. It flashed red. I kept going. The nightmare hunter gave one final, enraged hiss, then poofed away in a puff of white smoke.
For a moment I watched in disbelief, panting as my wounds healed, my stomach growled, and my brain absorbed a new realization: Too much confidence can be as dangerous as having none at all.
Vibrating with adrenaline, I looked hastily around for more creatures. Nothing stirred on the beach, hill, or sea. I rushed back down into the pit to get my shovel, and on the way out felt something hop into my pack. I didn’t know what it was till I’d gotten safely back to my cabin and thrown the remaining sand blocks into the fire.
The spider had left me a going away present, a short, sticky string of silk. I examined the strand for a few seconds, trying to think of some use for it, when the last plank in the furnace burned out.
“Ah nuts,” I griped, and reached into the storage chest for more wood. I noticed there weren’t too many planks left, not compared to all the worthless saplings stored next to them. And then I hit on what I thought was a brilliant idea.
I slid the dozen or so green mini-trees into the furnace and they promptly blazed to life. Way to stretch your resources, I thought with a self-congratulatory smile. I thought I was being so clever. I had no idea I was creating nothing short of an environmental tragedy that would come back to haunt me later. Tha
t night, as the little green saplings crackled brightly, I couldn’t have been more chuffed.
“Mission accomplished,” I said, hoisting my stone-tipped pickaxe. The addition of light allowed me to start thinking about how I wanted the finished room to look. Given my height, and the space I’d need for modern conveniences—crafting table, storage chest, and furnace—I imagined a seven-by-seven-block area with a raised ceiling for hopping victory dances. And I felt like doing that dance tonight.
My emotional roller coaster took another dive, however, when the furnace fizzled after little more than a minute. “So soon?” I grumbled, seeing that the saplings were all gone. There’d been so many and they’d lasted maybe a third as long as wood. Good riddance, I thought, tossing in the rest of the planks.
I can cut down more trees tomorrow, I thought. Right now what I need is light.
The key word here was “need.” I’d already started this evening with an overwhelming fear of the dark, but now, between the giant spider attack and my discovery of fire, I couldn’t let the night back in.
What happened next was nothing short of a race; a tense, sweaty frenzy to keep my shelter illuminated. At first I thought I was doing all right, until the last of the sand melted into glass.
Cobblestone, I thought, going back to the first material I’d used to discover fire. I didn’t care that the end result was the exact material I was now trying to clear away. It was the process that kept me warm and safe. But I’d only just gotten back to work when the last of the planks died out.
“More wood!” I hissed, looking over at the hut’s plank-and-slab ceiling.
Hastily walling off the bunker from the shack, I started chopping up the latter’s wooden roof. I tried not to think about what would happen if a creature found me so exposed. I needed more fuel, more light!
What I really needed was to snap out of my funk and remember the mantra about panic drowning thought, as well as a new one that applies to all the others: It’s not wisdom that counts, but wisdom under pressure. Stoking the furnace’s bottom slot, I rushed to pick more cobblestone for the top. I had to keep the balance going.