by R Magnusholm
Chapter 17
That Spark
Nightfall, Fleet Woods
John and Liz returned from the stream with a supply of water and blocked the entrance path as they did every evening. Rabbits nibbled grass within an arm’s reach, covering up the southern half of the clearing like a living carpet of gray fur. None hopped at the northern side, though. Maybe the flock of crows swooping and cawing around the charred tree had scared them. Did crows hunt bunnies? Perhaps in this world they did.
John and Liz sat on the log, cracking hazelnuts while watching the sunset.
He said, “Eating nuts before sleep keeps my teeth clean.”
“You always find something positive.”
“Hmm, you’re a pretty positive person yourself. A positivist.”
Liz froze, holding a nut kernel in front of her open mouth. She dropped it and slapped her forehead. “Positivist. Right.” A faraway look came into her eyes.
“Liz, what’s wrong?”
“I’m not a positivist, I’m an idiot.”
“Hey, I know it’s good to be self-critical, but—”
“Electrical detonators,” she exclaimed, her eyes reflecting the red of sunset. Tears began streaming down her face.
“You what?” he said slowly. He swallowed hard, his stomach clenching around a lead ball in its center. Liz had cracked under pressure. Broke like a hazelnut shell. He was marooned devil-knew-where with a gibbering lunatic.
She tittered like a witch. “The phone charger.”
“Huh?”
“I need your charger.”
“Where are you gonna plug it, Liz?”
“Please.”
“Let’s be rational.”
Her eyes were dancing. Perhaps she hadn’t cracked. Just ate the wrong type of mushroom. She’ll be fine in the morning, he hoped.
Liz took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then said in a much calmer tone, “When I was five or six, my daddy taught me how to make electrical detonators. Dreadfully boring, so I clean forgot all about it. Until this moment, that is. Dad used to say that a positivist person knows that connecting positive and negative terminals gives a spark.”
John’s face grew hot. He should have thought of it himself. He was an idiot too. They had two batteries and a charger that could be cannibalized for wires. They could’ve made fire on day one.
“Liz, your phone is a newer model, so let’s wreck mine. But first, let me take a last look at my wife and kids.”
“Put their pictures on an SD card and move them to my phone.”
John powered up his device and copied the images folder to the SD card. He lingered for a while, flipping through the family album, and his throat constricted. Liz’s phone battery would die too, and then their faces would live only in his heart. In time, the memories would fade, and when he died it’d be as if his wife and little Ben and Emily had never existed.
He tried to commit to memory every line, every pixel of their precious faces. But it was selfish to waste battery power on sentimental pursuits. The future of humanity might hinge on their making fire. He sniffed to clear his nose and shut the phone down.
With his trusted cutlery knife, he pried off the phone’s back panel. The battery lay encased in circuitry, soldered in. He wouldn’t be able to remove it without wrecking the device.
“Sorry, Siri,” he said and prized the battery out.
Next, he cut off a length of cable from the charger, parted the twin wire strands, and stripped the insulation from them.
He looked questioningly at Liz. “Now what?”
Liz took the cable from him. She placed a sliver of paper-thin birch bark between the naked wires, then put them into the bed of reed fluff tinder, itself within the pyramid of dry reed stems and matchstick-thin fir twigs. She held the battery in her left hand and pressed down one of the loose wire strands to the terminal with her thumb.
“Now, when I touch the second wire to the free terminal, the detonator should go boom. Obviously, since we’ve no flash powder, there’ll be no bang, but hopefully we’ll have ignition. Get ready to huff and puff.”
John cast a glance over the store of deadwood they had gathered. “Would this pile last the night?”
“It would last a week,” she said. “You need to get a couple of big logs smoldering, and they can go for hours without replenishing.”
The sun had set, and Jupiter and the Moon had risen. The crows that had been squabbling over something all evening finally calmed down. Peace and tranquility pervaded the land in its hour of quiet repose.
“Let’s try your detonator, Liz.”
“I’m scared it won’t work.”
“Then we’ll try the bow-drill again. That spark was good.”
Chapter 18
Assault on Camp Bramble
Out of the thorny vines, past the bramble barrier, the huge cat crawled forward on its belly through the tall grass and ferns of the secluded meadow. The two-legged deer were making noises to each other, totally oblivious of his presence. They crouched over a pile of sticks, probably eating them. Interesting.
The cat knew of only one creature that gnawed wood. Beavers. He’d never caught one, but always wanted to. He had seen them by the river, and on one occasion, had tried to dig them out of their mound of soil and branches, but by the time he’d demolished it, the pesky critters had swum away. No matter. These two stick-eating beaver-deer won’t swim away. No water nearby.
Nothing would save them now. He’d take the buck first. Males were bigger and occasionally fought back. Besides, the buck was nearer.
The female was hunched over something, seemingly tense. Never mind, soon she’d be pretty relaxed, digesting in his stomach.
The clouds parted, and the two Eyes of the Night flooded the clearing with their light. Ears flattened, the cat froze, his head pressed to the ground. He waited.
The Eyes of the Night closed, and the cat inched closer to his prey. How strange the two-legged deer hadn’t smelled him yet. He was well within striking distance, but why bother leaping when he could crawl right up to the buck and bite off his head? Leaping was so much work. More summers than he could count had flown by, and his joints ached.
He sniffed the air and paused. Thunder? Where? How? The female deer was Thunder. No, no, no. Impossible. Thunder lived in the sky. It did not walk on legs. The cat started backing off.
Suddenly, the Terrible Thing that Burns burst forth in all its fury. The two deer whooped in delight.
An ambush! Run. Run.
The cat lost control of its bladder and fled. In two leaps, he cleared the meadow and plunged headfirst into the brambles. And there he stuck.
The deer, their front legs aflame, came after him. A hoof came whistling through the dark and cracked against his spine with a resounding thud. More hooves flew, and one tore up his ear. Hot blood flowed into his eyes. Another hoof found his ribs. A sharp pain flared. The cat thrashed wildly, and the agony in his chest spread. He knew the pain well. Once, he’d been gored by an auroch, but this was worse. The Terrible Thing that Burns was inside him now.
***
“Kill, Ki-i-i-ll!” John roared.
He rushed after the hated sabertooth thrashing in the brambles. Behind him, the flames leaped brightly from a pile of branches. Liz carried a bundle of flaming reeds in one hand and John’s spear in the other. He grabbed two rocks from his ammo pyramid.
John hurled a stone with all his might. From ten feet away, it was impossible to miss. The rock struck the beast between its shoulder-blades with a meaty thwack. The animal snarled and tried to whirl around, but its front paws became entangled in the thorny vines, so it only managed half a turn, staring at John over a muscled shoulder.
For one single heartbeat, their gazes locked. The tiger’s eyes glowed orange with reflected flames, utterly demonic, devoid of any expression. Unreadable. The eyes of a killer. Wickedly gleaming dagger-like teeth ringed its gaping maw. The left oversized fang was missing.
With a wild shout, John leaped closer and posted a rock into the sabertooth’s head. Right between the eyes.
A rock thrown by Liz whistled by his shoulder and hit the tiger in the ribs. She hurled the flaming bundle of reeds, which crashed to the ground, narrowly missing the animal’s head. Sparks flew into its snarling face. The beast jerked as if stung, turned away from them, and attempted to plunge deeper into the brambles. For some reason, it moved sluggishly.
John rushed to his munitions store and returned with more rocks. All the while, the animal made ineffectual efforts to get away, hissing and spitting like a steam engine with its safety valve busted.
A red mist descended over John’s vision. He pelted the enemy with rocks until his ammo was depleted. His chest heaving, he looked around for anything else to throw.
Liz wouldn’t pass him his spear. She kept repeating something about not spoiling the hide. That didn’t make sense. What hide?
He grabbed a log taller and heavier than himself and plunged into the brambles after the sabertooth. The beast glanced over its shoulder and roared ferociously. Its head was coated in blood, and one eye had been replaced with a blob of red pulp.
Liz was shouting something, but he didn’t understand. Perhaps she was practicing Welsh. No matter.
“Nice night for a neck injury, asshole,” John yelled as he brought the log down. It thumped the tiger on the head with a dry thonk.
His legs gave way from exhaustion, and he collapsed. A rough-edged cobble he’d lobbed earlier dug painfully into his chest. He picked it up in both hands. It seemed impossibly heavy. How the hell had he managed to throw it one-handed?
Then all conscious thought fled.
Some unknown time later, he found himself straddling the sabertooth’s back, yelling incoherent obscenities. In his hands, he clutched the cobble, now slick with blood. The beast was still moving, so John brought the rock down. Hard.
“Let’s tenderize some meat!” he yelled. He lifted the heavy stone and smashed it down. Again and again.
The tiger continued to thrash and snarl. John continued to hit.
Hot sweat matted his hair and stung his eyes. A fine spray of blood flew in the air with each impact. “Have some ketchup with it.” He struck with the rock. His foe attempted to raise its head. John pushed it down into the foliage. “Eat your greens.”
The beast began jerking spasmodically, its breath rattling in its throat.
“Have more ketchup,” John muttered darkly. He tried to lift the stone, but it slipped from his numb hands. Like a rider shot off his horse, he pitched backward, twisting in the air, and landed on his face amid the crashed vines.
Liz grabbed him and turned him over. She kept repeating something about a heart attack.
“No, no, no!” she wailed.
John smiled weakly. His heart was a runaway train. Each of his limbs weighed a ton.
“Don’t you dare to die on me.” She shook him like a tree. “Don’t you dare.” She slapped his face, then hugged him fiercely.
“The tiger. The tiger?” he wheezed.
“Dead.”
“Huh?”
“It’s dead.”
“How?”
Tears streamed down her face. “Heart attack. Apoplexy. Beaten to death by a berserker in a pinstriped suit. What does it matter?”
Liz left, then rushed back with the plastic container. A thin trickle of icy water dribbled onto his face. He managed to gulp down some of it. Ah, what bliss.
“Tiger steaks for breakfast,” she declared, then broke into a howling fit of lunatic laughter.
“I thought you were vegetarian.”
She shrugged. “When in Rome . . .”
John staggered to his feet, tripped, and collapsed atop the dead beast. He wrapped his arms around its stout neck and promptly fell into an exhausted sleep.
He sensed someone shaking him—probably his mother—but his eyelids seemed gummed shut, so he told her to go away and file a health-and-safety report in triplicate. Then he sank deeper into the black pit of slumber.
From high above, the indifferent moon and Jupiter watched over the forest glade, bathing the miniature battlefield—fallen and survivors alike—in silver and gold. From the pile of blazing branches, smoke rose in lazy billows. Carried by a southerly wind, it drifted into the woods, coiling around trees and intermingling with tendrils of mist.
Liz stood over the sleeping John. Behind her, the dying flames threw shifting gold and russet gleams. Serrated shadows of ferns danced at her feet. Slowly, she shook her head, then turned and went to the fire. She laid two hefty logs side by side on the bed of coals and curled up in the warm flickering glow.
Chapter 19
General Buttnaked
Morning, Fleet Woods
In the murky predawn light, John awoke, itching all over. His cheek rested on a furry rug, draped over what must surely be a sofa arm. An exceptionally lumpy one at that. He shivered. Some muttonhead had switched off the heating and opened all the windows. And what a strange dream he had . . .
Groggily, he lifted his head and stared around. Someone’s back garden. Huge. Horribly overgrown. The pleasant smell of wood smoke drifted in the wind. He blinked. What a party. Except he couldn’t remember drinking beer or eating barbecue. His empty stomach rumbled. As he raised his hands to rub his eyes, he caught the coppery reek of blood.
In an instant, the last vestiges of sleep blew away like dusty cobwebs. He sprang to his feet and gazed at the dead tiger. The creature, as big as a horse, lay on its belly. Had he and Liz killed it with just rocks? Impossible . . .
He staggered to where she slept by the fire. Red coals glowed in the hollow space burned out between two logs laid side by side. For a while he stood, admiring the economical fire arrangement. Clever.
He pushed the logs closer together. A minute later, a tongue of flame appeared. The smoke poured out thicker and drifted over Liz. She coughed and awoke.
“Hi,” he said.
Her gaze wandered between the smoldering logs and his face. “Hot damn, I planned to look after the fire, but I slept like a log.”
“I slept like the dead.” He inclined his head to indicate the defeated sabertooth. “How about those tiger steaks?”
He scratched his leg, then his arm. Something bit him between his shoulder blades. A tiny pinprick. As he squirmed to scratch the hard-to-reach spot, he felt another bite on his stomach. Then chest.
“Have you ever skinned a large animal?” she inquired.
“Not even a small one.”
“We’ll have to skin and butcher it,” she said. “And you better keep away from me.”
“Huh?”
“You’re crawling with fleas.”
“Ugh . . .”
“If you lie down with tigers, you get up with fleas.”
“Me brave, me no flees. Ugh.”
“Yeah, I know. You were magnificent last night. Totally berserk.”
He shrugged modestly. His transformation from a mild-mannered office manager (who’d missed his sales targets three times) to a lean, mean killing machine had been frightfully rapid.
“I think I’ll go for a swim,” he said. “Drown the bloodsuckers. I’ve seen people on TV swimming outdoors in winter. And it’s only fall.”
“I’ll make a bonfire by the pool to save you from hypothermia.”
“Hypo-what? Us berserkers know no big words like that. Ugh.”
Liz climbed to her feet and twisted a bundle of reeds into a makeshift torch. She also picked up her canvas bag, which still held a few red-headed aspen boletes.
Ten minutes later, a small fire blazed on the bank. John waded into the pool up to his waist. His privates shrank and tried to retreat into his pelvis. Resolutely, he held his breath and dove in. Millions of icy needles lanced his skin. He came up for air, grinning. With every passing day, he was becoming tougher. The cold and hunger no longer bothered him as much as they had in the first couple of days.
He stripped off
his clothes. With hands numb from the cold, he swirled and squashed the soggy garments in the frigid water. To make sure the pesky fleas were killed, he weighed his clothes down with rocks, so they’d stay underwater.
John scrubbed himself all over with crushed grass and dove in for a rinse. Covered in gooseflesh, he scrambled up the bank. Liz passed him his spare shirt. In the Arsenal mug, she mixed a paste of ash and water and slathered it over his hair to discourage fleas from gaining hold there. He shivered violently. It must have been fifty, sixty degrees.
4
As the sun rose higher, he ran in circles around the bonfire until his muscles grew hot and his shivering subsided. His chest heaving, he dropped to the ground and soaked in the warmth of the fire.
“How long do I keep my clothes underwater?” he asked.
“Until the fleas drown.”
“And how long would that be?”
“No idea. But let’s have some breakfast first.”
She stuck half a dozen boletes on a green stick and held it over the fire. “Mushroom kebabs for breakfast. And hopefully tiger kebabs for dinner.”
While waiting for the mushrooms to cook, he gathered several rocks of varying sizes. It was about time he made a stone axe. He smashed the rocks together, hoping to split one into sharp flakes, but he couldn’t break them.
“You’ll need a stone mallet first,” Liz said.
John searched through a pile of driftwood until he found a suitable stick. One end of it had been gnawed off by a beaver; the other end had a knothole.
He tapped a rock into the knothole with another stone, hefted the crude tool, and whacked a rotting log, making a visible indent. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, scrunching his six-day stubble under his fingertips, the sound pleasant and comforting. “A tool like that can kill. I wish I had it yesterday.”
As the mushrooms began to sizzle, she turned the spit. “If we can fit a sharp stone into a stout stick, it’ll be an axe.”
“Ugh.”
“Cut the caveman act, Mr. Summers.”