flashlight was lying in the snow beside him, as out of place as he was. He bent and picked it up. Already he was trembling so hard he could barely stand.
Where am I? How’d I get here? Oh, man-I’m gonna freeze to death!
A moment later two brown shapes tumbled out of the hill in front of him. One of them was huge, but both of them were covered in fur. A cave, Tyler abruptly realized-they had come out of a cave, the big one attacking and the small one falling backward. Now the big shape was up on its hind legs, claws and teeth flashing. It was some kind of bear, and the small, huddled, doomed creature on the ground was a person in fur clothing, lying unmoving in the icy flakes.
Whoever the poor guy was, he was going to die, that was obvious. The bear was bigger than anything Tyler had ever seen, taller than a polar bear but dark. It had dropped down onto four legs now and was closing the distance between itself and the still figure. The bear had started out cautiously but had clearly decided its downed enemy posed no danger.
Freezing, shivering, a hundred yards away, Tyler suddenly realized he was about to watch a human being die. He scrabbled in the snow with numb hands, trying to find a rock, but the snow was too deep. He began taking hopping steps down the deep snow of the hillside, waving his arms and shouting.
“H-Hey! No! L-L-Leave him alone! H-H-Hey!”
The bear stopped. Tyler took another couple of awkward steps before he realized what he’d just done.
“Oh, c-crap,” he said.
With a fresh new meal in sight, this one with its fur already removed, the bear reared up and waved its claws. It ducked its head, opened its huge, fanged muzzle, and roared, a sound so loud and deep that it shook snow from some of the trees. It was at least twice Tyler’s height and looked as impossibly large and deadly as a T. rex.
I’m gonna die, he thought. And I don’t even know how this happened
…
There was a flurry of movement at the bear’s feet as the small shape there rolled over and bent, then for a moment actually seemed to be trying to tackle the monstrous animal. The bear took a step back and doubled over, its growl rising to a bizarre coughing snarl as it nipped at its own belly where the long handle of a spear was now wagging, the head sunk deep in the bear’s guts. The monster took a step toward the fur-covered figure in front of it, still snarling, and swiped with its massive paws, but the human threw himself to the side and the strike narrowly missed. The bear hesitated for a moment but blood was already spattering the snow beneath it. It dropped to all fours and lurched away unsteadily down the hillside toward the trees, staining the snow with its blood as it went. As soon as it disappeared from sight, the fur-clad warrior got to his feet again and looked to Tyler, who was standing knee-deep in the snow, dumbfounded, shivering even harder as he realized how close he had come to getting eaten.
“The Great One would have killed me,” the spear wielder said in a tone of dull wonder, his voice surprisingly high-pitched, as if he was no more than Tyler’s own age. What showed of his face in the crude fur hood was bloody. “Where do you come from?”
Tyler tried to say something, although he had a feeling that the words California and Standard Valley wouldn’t mean much here, but his teeth were chattering so hard he couldn’t talk. He wasn’t cold any longer, though, he suddenly realized. In fact, he felt surprisingly warm. He took a step forward and then decided that he must have walked into a sudden blizzard, because suddenly everything was white and his mouth was full of snow.
He only dimly felt it as the hooded stranger pulled his face out of the snow and began to drag him back toward the cave.
Tyler was lying on the floor beside the tiniest, most pathetic fire he had ever seen, three skinny sticks and a wad of damp grass. He was cold again, miserably so, his body racked by shivers so strong he thought they might break his bones. The man he had saved was crouched nearby, wiping blood from his face with a handful of snow. The features that began to appear from beneath the smears of red were smaller and younger than Tyler had expected, although it was still hard to tell because of the remaining mud and blood.
The stranger looked at him with a mixture of mistrust and pity. “Who are you? Why did you risk your life for me? Why do you wear such strange skins? Are you from the Ghost Lands?”
That sounded vaguely familiar, but Tyler was too busy shaking himself to pieces to try to answer any of it. The caveman, if that was what he was, watched him for a moment, then pulled Tyler into a sitting position, tugged him back against his own chest, then untied the rawhide laces of the rough jacket or poncho he was wearing. When he had it undone and opened, he cradled Tyler against his body like a child and then closed the thick hide garment around them both.
After a few moments Tyler began to warm up, just enough so that he could feel the sting of returning feeling down his spine. He pulled his hands up and tucked them into his armpits to get warm. They began to tingle and smart too. After a few more moments Tyler realized from contours of the bare skin he could feel pressing against his back that it was not a caveman in whose lifesaving embrace he was being warmed and who had just stabbed a stone-headed spear into the biggest bear Tyler could ever imagine. It was a cave woman. A girl, even.
“Do you have a name?” Tyler asked her. Now that he didn’t feel quite so much like he was going to die, the weirdness of the whole adventure had begun to overwhelm him. How had he ended up here? Where was he, anyway? Somewhere on present-day Earth, or back in time, like in a movie? And why could he understand this girl’s speech? He could hear the harsh, unfamiliar words she spoke even as the meaning of what she said bloomed in his head.
“Nothing as strange as ‘Ty-ler,’ ” she told him. “They called me Last One because I was the youngest, but they are all dead now. I suppose I am Last One for real.” From the sadness of what she said he would have expected at least a tear, but although claw marks on her forehead and cheeks still dribbled blood, she had the hard, secretive face Tyler had seen on some of the men waiting at the Veteran’s Hospital bus stop back home, the mark of a difficult and frightening life.
Back home. How was he going to get home?
“You saved me,” Last One said. “The Great One would have killed me for trying to take his cave. I was only looking for someplace to get warm and I was careless. I should have smelled his fresh stink.”
“I have to go,” Tyler said, struggling to his feet. “My family
… my sister.” He shook his head. “I have to go back.” But how would he get there? He had stepped out of thin air, it seemed.
“You will die if you go outside,” she told him. “It will be dark soon and the bear is not dead. If he lives, he will be back. One like him took all my family. I do not know what we did to anger the Great Ones so.” Her matted hair fell in her face as she looked at Tyler’s thin clothes, his soaked athletic shoes. “He is not the only hunter, either. And your skins will not keep you warm out there, I think.”
“But I have to go.” He didn’t doubt anything she said, but with returning feeling in his hands and feet he was also swept by a tremendous, aching loneliness. Whether he had actually somehow traveled back in time to the ice age or this was some even stranger place, he couldn’t stand to think he might be stuck here. If he waited through the night he might not be able to find the spot where he had arrived. “I have to go,” he said again.
She sighed. It was weird to hear such a modern sound of frustration here in this place. “Then I will come with you, because otherwise you will be dead before morning.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“My life is yours now.” She said it as simply as if she was talking about the weather. “The Great One would have taken me, otherwise.”
He had been right, Tyler decided as he tottered out into the cold wind with the girl beside him. Although he was already starting to shiver badly, he could still see traces of his deep footprints coming down the hill, traces that would be gone by morning. Not that it helped him much-the prints simply stopped at a point halfway up the slope-but even that was something.
He halted where the footprints began. There was nothing here but cold air and snow, but he closed his eyes tightly and tried to ignore the wind, his own trembling body, and the idea that the wounded, angry bear might be back at any moment. What had led him to this cold world? A feeling, a trace of something he couldn’t explain. What could take him back? Something similar, he hoped.
