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Presents
Volume 5149a
OUCH!
or Lost in Pellucidar!
As told to Rick Johnson
by Judith Innes
(Alternate First-Person Version)
PART ONE
I woke up in the dark, on the hard ground, smelling the stink of ammonia. My mouth tasted of vomit or a cat's litter-box and I was nauseous and wanted to puke… and almost did but swallowed back the bile. My hand, laying on my belly, felt skin and a further, careful, exploration revealed that I was naked. I remembered that frat-party I went to, then nothing."Dammit!" I thought. "I've been drugged, date-raped and dumped in an alley." That was always a nightmare for women. Not that it made us any more careful for we still went on blind dates and got too drunk at the wrong kind of parties. Sometimes I wonder if we are as stupid as men think we are.
I felt down, carefully, yup, naked there too. But felt neither soreness, swelling nor irritation which was a really good sign… unless I was so drunk that I was a willing victim. But then, there should be something leaking for I hated condoms.. unless my rapists insisted to avoid DNA evidence. So I smelled my fingers and detected neither lube nor semen nor myself.
Ok, so I hadn't been raped… probably.
So why strip me naked and dump me in a dark alley or room that stank of a homeless person's bathroom?
I carefully rolled over and got to my knees, seeing a glow ahead. A door or window? No, a cave! The stink was batshit!
I started to move then felt a bag, a duffle of sorts. As my eyes became more accustomed to the dark, I could see more and saw that I was in a shallow cave, alone save for the duffle, and the sounds I heard were bats overhead.
So taking the duffle, I left the cave, bending over to exit for I was not a big girl, but neither was I a munchkin. Then I looked at the forest.
I was a city-girl! Like all girls I wanted a pony when I was a child but quickly outgrew that in favor of a bicycle, them later, a motorcycle. I was saving up for a Sportster, a Harley-Davidson, the world's most effective sex-toy, a 500# vibrator for me and a chick-magnet for the guys.
That's why I went to that party, my date had a Chopped-Hog and I'd do almost anything to bitch that bike! Almost anything. I wasn't a virgin but neither was I a slut to whore myself to some hairy guy just to ride on the back of a motorcycle no matter how much he pressed.
Still, what the hell was I doing here and how did I get here? And why?
I'd done things when drunk that I regretted. Every woman does and we swear never again... until the next time. So who did I piss off enough to strip me and dump me in a bat cave in the middle of the woods? And how far would I have to hike to find to a road or town?
There was a stream running down the cliff into a shallow pool, then on into the trees so I looked it over for leeches (been there, done that, screamed for hours to get them off me) then washed up in the warm water, rinsing my mouth (no ache in my jaw so ‘that’ didn't happen either) and then air dried as I looked at the bag. My hair went to below my shoulders and got in the way at times like this but if you have short hair, you have one hairstyle which is like wearing the same clothes every day. So I dealt with the bother of the length so I could change my style at a whim.
Who am I? My name is Judy. Judith Innes when I dress up. I'm a 5'7", green-eyed firebush redhead! That means that my hair is flaming red and yes, the carpet DOES match the drapes. I've got a decent body with just enough to show cleavage in the right bra but not enough to give me a backache like my older sister. And my fanatical obsession with wearing a good bra keeps the girls firm and high. Plus, like all redheads, my skin, being translucent, burns walking to the store. God gave me hair and a complexion to die for but forgot to protect me from the sun! I look good in jeans or dress and can turn heads given some time with the right make-up and dress. Here's a secret. Blondes have to be beautiful. Brunettes need to be built but a redhead only needs to be natural. And the redder our hair, the more men chase us. That's why I never bought more than the first drink and never went to a party alone. And I wonder if that is the reason for my situation? For as I said, I'm no innocent virgin but neither am I a slut. I've had my share of lovers, some long-term, some for a night, but at 22, I can still have fingers left over when I count my numbers and have said ‘no’ far more often than I say ’yes’..
And here, naked, under the noon-day sun, I'd burn quickly and fry shortly after so I moved to the shade of the cliff and opened the bag. First was my leather purse on top. Since I was at a party, it was barely large enough for a lipstick, mascara, a very small compact, a folding brush and my ID and credit cards. I put the lipstick on to avoid chapping. I spent a lot of money on my make-up only because I was allergic to the store brands and that which they sold at the swap meets would make my skin swell like a balloon. Neither could I have any tats! The ink they used and the needles would ruin my skin and cause any of a hundred infections we redheads are condemned to suffer. Hell, even piercing my ears was a major medical event to keep the infection down until they healed. Fortunately, I wasn't a high-maintenance girl so rarely wore more than lipstick and mascara. And even then, mostly only lipstick. Then I brushed my hair to get rid of the tangles so it would dry easier.
When done, I looked further. Nope, no clothes at all. I hadn't seen any when I opened the bag but a more careful examination (I had done my lips and hair to delay the inevitable) showed nothing I could wear. No shoes either. What I did find were a few fake-antiques.
I was a history major so owned a collection of dust-collectors that mimicked the ancient tools. One round brass box was a compass. A round package was a brass telescope. There was a wood-covered mirror of polished brass. A spoon made of horn, a wooden fork, noggin (that is a bowl with a handle) plate and mug. Both noggin and mug hung from a netseke (a carved bead to hold them from my belt). Flint and steel and tender in a box. Fishing kit. String. Sewing kit (both ivory needles made for me by a friend in a bone case and steel needles). 15-minute hourglass (but no watch), almost everything had been purchased at the local Renaissance Fair. My professor told me that “if you want to study music, pick up a flute and learn to play. If you want to study dance, get on the floor and move. If you ant to study history, live like they did.” So I bought all these things and learned to spin and weave and sew and navigate and even to fletch arrows. And I also moved to the head of my class and the Dean's List while my fellows spent their time in the library and only guessed how they lived in the past. I even wrote a paper on the Longbow that earned me notice from the Dean.
Judy's kit
Fishing kit, Hanwei Dha, brass mirtror, carriage (long) bow,canvas quiver of
homemade arrows, flint & steel, sewing kit, knife, dinner fit, hunting and blunt arrows.So I could look good and find my way home and at times I was so glad my father wanted a boy. He told me once, “Jude, some women need a man to take care of them and as they got older, they find that the men they attract get worse and worse. So, child, learn to take care of yourself. Be as feminine as you want but you can't go hiking in heels and if that guy gets lost or tells you to ‘put-out-or-get-out’, you had better be able to get home on your own.” So I joined hiking and orienteering clubs, co-ed, of course, and learned to use all the gear that men take for granted. I could play the helpless girl easily and did so when I liked the boy or needed a flat tire changed, but if necessary, I could handle myself. I even killed my own roaches!
It was the stuff on the bottom that scared me. My Longbow, not really long 5' long when assembled and still made of Hickory and it had a 40 pound draw and was in its bag with a quiver of two dozen cedar arrows. Plus my fletching jig and a bag of feathers, nocks and points (both hunting and target and blunts). My bone-handle hunting knife (6" blade) and my folding pocket-knife. Plus, two Paul Chen Banshee Dha short-swords (wrappings replaced with leather as I had worn the rubber out). And a few other things.
Whomever dumped me here had also gone though my house and grabbed a bunch of my stuff. Not everything, for my Astrolabe was missing as was my portable sextant and Queen Anne Sundial. Nor was there a flashlight or candles or GPS, nor my cell-phone and they gave me a folding telescope instead of my modern binoculars. Everything was medieval or a reproduction of something medieval. It was as if they didn't want me to have anything modern. But then, they also didn't know the difference between my Tasco folding brass telescope and a real medieval telescope. Or maybe they didn't care though ‘though it looked like someone had filed off the brand names.
AND, they expected me to have to defend myself. The bow and knives were survival tools so I could hunt food but the Dha were combat weapons. They had been a gift from a boyfriend who taught me Escrima or Kali or whatever that martial art was that used two short sticks or short swords. It got him hot to win and he got even hotter when I won a bout. The sex was good so I didn't mind the pretend-rape after he had won a match. But as time went on, I made him earn the sex because as the initial passion faded, I found I needed more foreplay. Which is why he dumped me, I kept winning as often as did he and he didn't like being forced to give me sex like I was the man and he the girl. Sometimes I miss him though.
I strung the bow, hung the knives and swords from my hip (they had provided a belt that tied, no buckle) and shoved everything else into the cloth back-pack another friend had brought back from Guatemala. Then I noted north via compass (having to wait for the needle to stop waving around because modern compasses were filled with oil to slow that wiggle), looked over the scenery with the telescope and paused… I wanted a landmark and there were none! As I scanned the horizon, the horizon failed to materialize. The trees kept going on and on until they faded into the distance.
I tied an arrow to a branch and lay my telescope along it to steady the thing, then kept looking up until the trees vanished so far away that even my 6x scope failed to see them. Then I tied the arrow at that point and looked at it.
I've gone hiking enough to know that you see the closer trees and nothing behind but the sky overhead. Or if you are on a cliff, you see the trees getting smaller and lower in the distance until the horizon appears. But you look DOWN! I calculated the angle and at 45 degrees UP, the trees were still going on. I had taken enough orienteering and survival classes to know that this wasn't right! Plus all my hiking trips with men, women and both had given me enough experience to know that this was impossible.
So, I set another arrow into the ground, made certain it was upright by using my notebook (a gift from another admirer who brought it back from Indonesia, hand bound of some weird local paper) as a square and saw the shadow was gone. Or rather the shadow was exactly under the arrow as if it were noon.
Then I flipped the hourglass and wrote down everything to this point. I turned the glass four times so an hour passed, me still naked, sitting on the empty duffle in the shade as I wrote and after that hour, the shadow had not moved a single inch! The sun was frozen overhead. It was as if I were in a gigantic bowel with a spotlight overhead shining down.
I give up! I turned myself off for awhile and just stared without thinking. Daddy? Help. Meanwhile, the dinosaurs walked by forever….
“Beautiful, aren't they?”I screamed and jumped behind the tree trunk I had been using as a sighting post. The little man looked exactly like a garden gnome down to the pointed hat. “What the hell are you!” I managed to whisper.
“I am your spirit guide,” he said with some pride. Then, “that tree isn't big enough to hide you.” The gnome was staring at my tits! Then lower. “Don't you shave?” I did, but only my legs and pits.
“The hell you are!” I snapped. “I'm no new-age freak! And I'm a redhead! My skin down there is too sensitive for that. So stop staring!”
Sighing, the little man explained, “Jude, you are crazy! This incident has pushed you over the edge. So, you have gone insane. I'm just a figment of your imagination. Now you have to decide if you are going to remain insane or return to normality and survive before something eats you.. and not in that good way either that you have those dreams about.”
“It was the gay-until-may thing at college. I'm over that.” Then hesitated and asked, “I'm crazy?”
He laughed. “You are talking to a garden gnome. Remember the one your father bought you when you were five? You stuck it in your flower garden and believed that it would always protect you and help you. You even gave it cookies until you grew up.”
“Togglebots! I haven't seen you since Carl ran you o..ver….. What the hell! I'm so scared, Togglebots! What happened? Did those frat boys put something in the punch?”
“How should I know. Jude, I'm not real. BUT, you can talk to me as if I were.”
“I don't understand.”
“You know the answers. You are just afraid to consider them. The Earth is Hollow and you are inside. Someone sent you here for a reason and gave you the gear you need to survive here.”
“Who and why?”
Togglebots shrugged and replied, “How should I know. I'm not real, just your unconscious. But you are. You know this is real. And you know where you are. Remember your grandfather talking about his brother David?”
“Yeah, crazy Uncle David. Ran the family into poverty with all those get rich mining schemes. Grandpa said that he invested in some kind of mechanical mining machine and vanished for ten years looking for gold or silver. Then showed up in Morocco long enough to ask grandpa to wire him money for clothes and guns and such, then he vanished again. What Uncle David needed with a thousand miles of telegraph wire we never learned. Maybe he wanted to run a telegraph business from Morocco to Capetown. He came back twenty years later but didn't look a year older than when he left and told some strange story that grandpa laughed at.”
“Stories about,” he prompted.
“…dinosaurs…” I whispered, looking at the herd that happily munched on the trees in the distance. ‘the earth was hollow and he was inside… Togglebots! It's true! Great Uncle David Innes DID discover the hollow earth! He… but wait! How did I get here?”
“Hell if I know. What do you remember?’
“That frat party. They gave me a beer bong to chug. I puked all over myself and went to the bathroom to wash up. Someone came in. I pushed him away. Told him I wasn't in the mood for sex and… nothing.”
“Maybe that person wasn't interested in sex but in you.”
“Why me? To send me here?”
“Why not?”
“Because Uncle David never had any kids…”
“None that you know of.”
“Granddad had five sons. I have a dozen cousins who are older than me and most of them are boys and half were in the Army. It's not like I was the sole heir. Hell, I have sisters and a brother who are older than I am. I am so far down the list that even if Uncle David hadn't spent all the family money, I'd never inherit anything.”
“But,” Togglebots insisted, “You can survive here and none of your other relatives can.”
I laughed at that, “So just because I was taught how… to… DAD! You KNEW!” then I woke up.
The raptor stood on the edge of the cliff and hissed at me. It looked a lot like the one in the Jurassic Park movies, only a lot scarier because this one was real and not CGI. I'm a history major, not a dinosaur freak so I know t-rex and raptor and veggiesaurus but not much else. But this one had teeth and a claw on each foot that could rip me apart. Even though it was only the size of a turkey, it looked scary!
I moved away and it jumped.
I grabbed the Dha's and pulled but they stuck. Damn safety locks. Then I jerked hard and the lock came free and I swing and rolled then came to my feet and cut again and the thing died, twitching. I didn't even care that I was covered in its blood, still naked. I was just happy to be alive. “Togglebots, you were right about everything but one thing. I am not crazy and you were just a dream. But thank you for helping me dig around my subconscious.”
Then my stomach tried to empty again and I puked over the edge of the rise.
Later, after another bath, I dragged the carcass away from the cave and butchered it, remembering how daddy had taken us hunting and taught us how to hunt and gut with a bow and knife. I cut dry grass and wood and used the flint and steel to start a fire, cutting my char-cloth in half to conserve my resources. Then I smoked most of the carcass as I cooked the rest.
Maybe it was the feathers but Raptor tastes like chicken!
Finally, I cut the duffle into a bikini, top and bottom. I wanted support, not bouncing as I ran away. The duffle wasn't heavy canvas so I could sew it with little difficulty and as mom had made certain I took Home Ec in high school, I did a decent job. Clothed, even in a canvas bikini, I felt better about myself. I'd always turned down the nude-beach invites, not because I was a prude, but because, well, clothes make the man as they say and naked, I would be just another animal. I had finally decided that the sun wouldn't burn me so decided to look the part. Besides, I wanted to save most of the canvas for other things.
The survival classes dad insisted I take teach that you need only something to cut with and some means to make fire. Everything else was gravy. Maybe for the Army or a survival freak but I'd rather have an elephant gun and an air mattress or better yet, my idea of roughing it was a motel without room service. But I quickly realized that those survival classes taught you to stay in one place until someone rescued you. All the stuff they crammed down my brain was to keep me put. Make snares, a hut, and so on until the search party arrived. So I did!
Needs: we need shelter, food, security. I made a big bundle of grass, set it on fire and pushed it into the cave. It didn't take long for the smoke to drive out the bats and the bugs. I added more to burn out the stink and dry the guano so I could clean it out enough to sleep in. Then I used to Dha to carve a branch into a flat shovel and cleaned the cave until I was satisfied. More grass and the rest of my duffle made a mattress and I moved in.
The shadow of the arrow never moved.
I woke up to more hissing and stabbed with my pointed stick until the raptors left, me screaming in terror and they dragging the one dead as they ran. I glanced out and saw two eating their dead while the rest of the pack tore apart the ones I wounded. It was time to build a fence for a door. I am NOT an adrenaline junkie! I don't live for the challenge and did all that wilderness stuff only because I knew that in a couple days, I'd have a hot shower and clean sheets in a soft bed. I even dumped one bf because he wanted to hike the Great Divide from Mexico to Canada. A weekend is fun, a week is tolerable, anything more was for the dykes I used to date in college when I was in my hard-core feminist stage.
Over the days(?) I leveled the floor of the cave with rocks and dirt, weaving mats from grass for rugs. I also made baskets and searched for anything I could eat: grains, vegetables, fruits. The movies had people eating meat but a strict meat diet causes gout and who knows what else. But those were guys who'd drink from a toilet if they didn't have a woman to insist the lid stay down, so I wanted more. I had the occasional thought of going exploring to find a way home but quashed that when a wolf the size of a horse treed me. Hunger drove him away but I was starving by then myself, eating whatever I could find in that tree and licking the leaves after it rained. So I remained in my cave and screamed to the forest, “You BASTARDS! You dumped me here so you had damn well better tell me why or take me back home!”
All that happened was that a veggiesaurus, the ones that looked like Dino on the old Flintstones cartoon, only bigger than a house, glanced at me then returned to eating.
I had no idea of time. The shadow under my arrow never moved. Then I started to cramp and panicked as I searched for clean moss. I'm pretty regular though there was that one time I skipped a couple months and was terrified that I was pregnant, but even more terrified to pee on that stick for fear of seeing a ‘+’ appear. And when I did a lot of hard exercise, I tended to be late and light but mostly I am regular enough to count. 15 days then here so 28 – 15 = 13! I had been here two weeks! Dammit! The raptors remained outside my cave for the entire five days and nothing I did could make them leave. They just killed and ate the ones I wounded but never left. I even tried tying the used moss to an old arrow and shooting that through my door hoping they would follow it, didn't work. Unless I could figure something out, I was going to go stir-crazy being trapped for five days every month.
I sang every song I remembered. I played tic-tac-toe with myself. I stretched my food and water to the limit. But mostly I cursed whomever had put me here.
Canteen made by Judy in PellucidarWhen they left, the first thing I did was wash up! Then I ate everything I could find, then I started to hollow bamboo into pipes to run from the waterfall to my cave so I'd always have clean water. The pipes leaked so I sealed them with boiled-down pine resin and ashes which mostly worked. With a second pipe running from the cave and the shell of something that looked like a giant armadillo with a spiked tail for a sink, I figured I was safe from thirst.
I wanted to make a big fence but didn't have a shovel and the ground was too hard for the one I had carved and using an antler for a pick didn't work either. So I built a wall of rocks wishing I had studied Roman history instead of Medieval and Renaissance. At least that would tell me how to make cement.
One good thing is that the feathers I got from the raptor arms helped me to fletch more arrows though I was unable to make more arrowheads. I had no idea of what wild flint looked like, much less how to chip it. The stone I had with my flint-and-steel kit was already chipped to shape so I worked hard to recover my arrows. I never did learn to forge steel though I had once talked to a couple blacksmiths for a term paper.
Take-down “Carriage bow” aka Longbow with canvas quiver of cedar arrows.
One day, while hunting with a blunt (I hunted rabbits and ground birds because I was terrified that an arrow would make the bigger game angry, and that deer I saw had antlers that were easily a dozen feet across) I heard a scream like a steam engine.
Instantly I was up the tree, having learned to be a very good climber over the weeks. I watched the trees and brush crashing in a zig-zag which told me something, then a man carrying a spear and wearing fur ran by. He was changing direction, seeking the most difficult terrain when he tripped over an exposed root. Before he could get up, this giant raptor that hopped like a kangaroo pushed through the trees and grabbed his feet, lifting the cave-man off the ground. The caveman screamed and stabbed at the giant raptor all the while it was eating him from the feet up.
Well, it lifted the caveman, swung him into the air, then opened and gulped and in two bites, the caveman was inside and the giant-raptor hopped away.
I stayed in that tree for hours, terrified to even upchuck until hunger forced me down. My brother would have done something stupid like face the monster. But then, I'm not big enough or strong enough to get into a bar-fight so felt hiding and running to be the better path to survival.
The ground was covered with his blood and the flies that were feeding off the blood but I managed to search and collected his stone knife, spear and a bag filled with a bunch of junk. Arrowheads, bits of antler and leather, flint and some other rock and stuff I hadn't seen since that wilderness survival weekend I attended, and hated.
I gathered everything that looked useful and went home, trying to keep my dinner inside. But there were people here. Cave people who were ugly as sin but still people and that gave me mixed feelings. I wanted company and staying alive would be easier surrounded by cavemen who knew how to survive here but their reaction to ‘hello’ would probably be to hit me on the head with a club and drag me away to breed monkey-kids until I died from RH-incompatability or, being a redhead, complications with childbirth or just some stupid infection because the guy butt-fucked his boyfriend or a wild pig and didn't wash before he did me. So now I had to worry about that too.
I was sunning myself, now that I realized that I wouldn't burn under the inner sun, I found I enjoyed the warmth on my bare skin when I felt something watching me. Looking up with a start, after grabbing my new-found spear I saw a veggiesaurus staring at me. The things looked like a snake threaded through an elephant but it was exactly like the one in the Jurassic Park movie so I knew they were harmless. Then it saw my garden and moved to it.
I was more angry than scared because I had spent dozens of trips hauling dirt and dino-shit up to fill any depression with enough soil to hold anything that looked eatable. And I wasn't about to let those things eat my carefully transplanted garden.
So instead of screaming and running away like I usually do, I hit the thing on the head. Repeatedly! Eventually it realized that I was pounding it and turned back to me. It actually looked hurt and I could swear it was crying as it turned away to rejoin the herd.
Over time, I realized that although there were a bunch of different dinosaurs around, they were like dogs, one dog with dozens of breeds. Like the veggiesaurs, for example, I saw three kinds.
There was the gas-station one which was maybe 80’ long and had longer back legs. Then there was another one that was bigger only because its front legs were bigger so it was taller. Then there was the skinny one which was longer but thinner. But all were safe unless they stepped on me.
Now the raptors were as similar and as different. There was the normal raptor that was like the movies but had feathers on its head and arms and was the size of a big turkey. Then there were the chicken-raptors that I thought were birds until I killed one with a blunt. Those were covered with feathers but didn't have wings, but feathered arms and teeth but no beak. And then there were the roo-raptors that were maybe 30’ long and looked like the one in the movie but it was thinner and hopped like a kangaroo and had actual arms with claws. Those were dangerous but not as bad as the movie-raptors. And this is why…..
I was walking through the veggiesaur herd, which I could do if I went slow and carefully. They would look down at me and then ignore me until I got too close to the babies. Then, without warning, they started to honk and mill around and then all the babies were pushed to the middle where I was. The adults made a circle facing out and stomped and shook and I knew something was going down.
Then I saw between their legs, a pack of roo-raptors circling the herd. Occasionally one would charge the herd but be driven back because the veggies had a big claw on their front feet and they'd rear up and claw at the roos. Finally one of the younger adults panicked and pushed through the ring of adults and took off running. I couldn't blame him as I wanted to do the same thing.
Instantly the roos ignored the herd and took off after the loner, one managing to take a chunk out of his thigh. But that bite cost the roo as it was dragged then went rolling to lay still as the rest of the pack chased the limping veggie. The stunned roo managed to stand up, shook himself and looking around, chased after his pack. Another roo managed to rip a chunk out of the other leg and the veggie went down. The roos just jumped for his neck and tore his throat out and there was a lot of throat on that monster. The front part finally died and the roos started to eat, but the hind part of the veggie kept trying to get up and when it shook its leg or tail, a roo would be attracted by the movement and attack it until the rear part was finally dead too.
Then the veggie herd settled down and moved off in another direction, ignoring the feeding roos and their dead prey.
So the big roo-raptors were pack animals that followed the veggiesaur herd! But what about that one that ate the caveman? I discovered that later when I was hunting and killed a chicken-roo with a blunt. A blunt is an arrow with no head, it has a big knob on the end and kills small game by impact so you don't get blood all over the place. And here, spilt blood attracted things that wanted to eat me.
Well, I picked the chicken-roo up and found that I was next to that swampy area that I avoided because of the leeches. They were three feet long and creeped me out so much I had nightmares about the things. One of the roos waded ashore after swimming across the swamp, those things were great swimmers when I always thought the veggies were aquatic and the roos were land-dwellers. The Veggies mostly avoided water unless they were thirsty but the roos would play in the water like dogs.
That roo was covered with 3’ leeches and man was that disgusting. But he settled down and the baby roos swarmed all over him, eating the leeches off his hide. I was moving back, slowly, hoping they didn't see me when luck was on my side for once. One of the smaller males went up to a female (I hope she was a girl but I wasn't about to lift their tail to check) and grabbed her by the neck. That roo had two huge dicks! Two of them! And he shoved her tail aside and rammed one in and started to hump her like crazy, his other dick waving in the air as she screamed. I couldn't tell what that meant as I'm pretty quiet in bed myself. You learn to be when your parents are in the next room.
Then the biggest roo I ever saw burst out of the trees and screamed like a steam-engine. The raper-roo jumped off that female so fast he came all over the grass! Then he crouched and hissed and made all these submissive ‘I’m sorry’ sounds but the big Alpha wasn't having any of it and he charged the smaller male who turned and ran, Big Daddy was right behind until Big Daddy took a chunk of Rape-boy’s tail. Then Big Daddy slowed and returned to the pack, rose up really high and screamed so loud it hurt my ears.
Then he went to the female, grabbed her by the neck and raped the living shit out of her. She took it without a sound and when he was done shuddering, he let her go, moved to the shade of a tree, settled down and was snoring within a minute. Typical man! The female just lay there then began to groom the blood off her neck by licking her arms and wiping where she was bleeding. Anything that came near got snapped at. Well, I couldn't blame her for being so testy.
So, Big Daddy was the alpha male who ruled the pack which was his wives, daughters and sons. Rape-boy was his son who had finally reached puberty and decided to get a piece of ass until Big Daddy drove him away just like a pack of wolves. So the Roo-Packs followed the Veggie-Herds in the plains but the maturing boys were driven out to hunt solo, usually in the forests until they could steal enough females to create his own pack. The girls stayed to join Big-Daddy’s harem.
Later I found that sometimes the banished males would pack together into homosexual packs until they managed to form their own packs with stolen females. Or drive away the alpha-male of an existing pack. Somehow knowing this made them seem less strange but far more dangerous.
I was taking notes of all this in the notebook thinking that I could get a job as a consultant in Hollywood when I got back. History majors tend to work at jobs where you say ‘can I super-size that for you’ a lot so about the time I was kidnapped(?) I was seriously kicking myself for not listening to my father who told me to find a Degree that would make me money. Like Computer Engineering. Dad was always working on that radio of his. He had an old out-of-print book by some guy named Gridley and read about some radio-wave that was separate from the rest of the band, one that crossed space and passed through solid rock. He hoped that if he could perfect the radio, he could make a fortune on the thing, maybe sell it to NASA or the cell-phone people who could talk through the Earth instead of renting satellite time and ….
Daddy! He knew! He never laughed at the stories about Great Uncle David Innes. But he never actually believed them either. So why did he insist on turning me into this person who could live here? And why me? I had cousins who would love this life. I really wanted a warm bed and right now would marry that geek who helped dad with that radio and followed me around because he'd have a job that made money. Hell, I'd even be faithful to him if I could never again go into a park or forest ever again.
How did Daddy know? Uncle David died before Dad was born. No, that's not true. Uncle David VANISHED before dad was born. Did Uncle David return again? Uncle David returned after ten years the first time and looked exactly the same. He returned another twenty years later and looked only a couple years older. Gone Thirty years and aging maybe a year or two? Could he have come back again? Did dad meet him? And why me? Why the hell was I chosen to come here? HOW did I get here and more importantly, how do I get back? I was thinking about this, dropping the occasional tear on the paper when I heard the scream!
Imagine a steam engine and a lion and a flock of angry geese and you'll have some idea of a hunting roo-raptor. I always felt sorry for whatever it was chasing but consoled myself with the ‘better them’ thought. Still I strung my bow and hid behind some big rocks close to my cave. I didn't like them that close to my home.
Dammit! Another cave-man. This place was becoming troglodyte-central. Yes I know what troglodyte means. I'm not stupid! However this one wasn't the usual cave-man. For one thing, he looked human, or modern and not like the ape-man I saw before. Yes, he wore animal skins but his were better made than the last and consisted of a vest and shorts and shoes. But he was carrying a rifle! It looked like a hunting rifle but he was too far away to be certain, and he was running for his life as the roo-raptor hopped after him. Had the roo not gotten stuck in the forest the caveman probably would be dinner. Then I did something stupid!
I jumped up and screamed, “Over here! Here!” waving my bow as he turned for my cave. I ran to the steps to show him the way then drew an arrow and waited.
Roo-raptors looked like a long-armed T-Rex like in the movies but here, they didn't run, they hopped like a kangaroo and that man wasn't able to outrun it so I did another stupid thing.
To be continued…...
Weapons Photos and Family Tree sketch by Rick Johnson
