The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 20
Last One

T yler wasn’t falling anymore. Now he seemed to be floating in darkness, but floating didn’t come close to describing how uncomfortable he was. He was so dizzy that ordinarily he would have felt sick to his stomach-but he couldn’t find his stomach. It didn’t even seem like he had a body. It seemed as though he was only a brain floating in some jar of dark liquid, eyeless, voiceless, helpless.

But he was still cold-shockingly, shiveringly cold. No body, but still freezing-how unfair could things get?

Tyler tried to move and found he could feel his body a little, but it seemed impossibly distant, as though his head was a kite and the rest of him was a mile below him holding the string. He began to wonder if something really bad had happened to him. Was he unconscious? Crippled? Worse, was he dead?

A kind of angry strength surged through him at the thought. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t just going to accept it. Tyler Jenkins didn’t just let things happen to him-he made things happen. He exerted all the strength of his thoughts to push the darkness away, to go somewhere, to wake up, to do something.

Nothing happened.

He tried again and again. He thought of heroic things. He thought of terrible things and then told himself only he could stop them from happening. He thought of the people he loved-his mom, his dad, even Lucinda (yes, he supposed he really did love her, as much of a pain as she was sometimes)-but none of these thoughts did anything to change the terrible facts. There was nothing to push against. There was nothing to get away from. He was lost in complete emptiness, floating in unending black like a bubble in a tar pit.

Tyler cried, then, or at least he thought he did. It was hard to tell.

He didn’t know how long he’d been drifting helplessly when he realized for the first time that although he still could not tell up from down or left from right, the blackness no longer seemed like a single uniform thing. He could feel little differences that, if he had been in water, would have been changes in pressure, or colder or warmer currents. Some bits of the darkness seemed to be flowing over him, others to be flowing away. Some seemed more inviting, some less. But did it mean anything?

When he felt that warmer current again (he could just as accurately have called it “clearer” or “gentler” or even just “safer”) he first tried to follow it, but after considering for a moment he changed his direction, doing his best to reach out in the direction from which this new feeling came-better to be moving toward whatever caused that feeling of greater safety, he thought, than away from it. To his relief, he thought he could actually feel himself beginning to move, although not in any normal way.

Things were changing. He felt it-he was certain. As the currents of black washed over and through him, the different sensations began to seem so strong that he almost felt he could name them, although the words that floated up in his thoughts were obviously nonsense, things like greenward and whenwise, and once he even heard a voice in his head saying, “A half-turn toward yes, but on the nextward-facing side.” Still, he didn’t have to understand how it worked to use it-it was a bit like typing class. After you got the hang of how to do it, you didn’t even have to look down at your fingers on the keyboard anymore, you just watched the words appear on the screen in front of you. He was learning-that was what he was doing. He just didn’t know what exactly was being learned.

After a timeless time, Tyler began to see the changes he had at first only felt. Light was growing around him-not a single glow, but streaks and sparks, as though reality itself was starting up again, like a video game that had been stuck. Something drew him toward one of the smears of light, then a moment later the glare was all around him-and then he fell through.

Cold, was his first thought. He could feel ground under his feet, hear wind in his ears. But it’s still so cold!

His second thought was, Christmas. Because everything around him was white, white, white-the whole world was covered in snow. Trees, rocks, the side of a hill, all banked and drowned in white. A winter wilderness. The bitter wind even brought snow swirling up from the drifts on the ground, like puffs of smoke. Tyler wasn’t wearing anything but his ordinary clothes, nothing warmer than a sweatshirt to keep out this icy chill. His lost 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.

For a long moment he couldn’t see or feel anything except the beginnings of what it was going to be like to freeze to death here on the hillside. Then the girl took his hand in her own and the trace of warmth, instead of distracting him, reminded him of what he was looking for-home.

Something like a faint light in the distance almost startled him into opening his eyes, but it was not a light from the world around him, it was a light inside his thoughts. Tyler moved toward it, or it moved toward him. It wasn’t easy-other currents pushed and pulled at him, trying to tug him off the track, but he did his best to ignore them and to keep moving forward. The light became stronger, but whatever resisted him became stronger, too, until Tyler felt that he was trying to shove his way through water that was hardening into ice all around him.

Lucinda, he thought. She’ll get hurt if I’m not around. I have to get back. She needs me to help her be brave.

And he needed her, too, he realized, to remind him there were other ways to do things besides charging straight ahead.

The thought gave him an idea: Tyler changed his angle and found he could move toward the light not by fighting his way, but by slipping ahead through the areas of least resistance while remembering always what his final destination was. The light came closer-a light he could feel in his bones, so that he wondered if he was glowing from the inside out like an X-ray. He reached for it. He found it and stepped through.

It was only as the warmth rose all around him that he realized the girl from the winter world was still holding on to his hand.

Tyler opened his eyes. For a moment disappointment washed over him like a drowning tide. It was too dark to see anything, but he could feel rough stone under his hands. It was another cave, more rock and dirt. He wasn’t home-he hadn’t managed to do anything!

He crawled forward, pulling his flashlight out of his sweatshirt pocket and shining it over the rock walls. It seemed to be something like the bear cave. Then he saw a flat roof above him that looked too solid and smooth to be natural stone.

The girl had scrambled away from him, cowering from the light, obviously terrified.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s just a flashlight. See?”

“ Uhawa ganu dut? ” she asked, eyes wide with alarm.

“Huh? Can’t you understand me?” He shook his head. Why should things suddenly be any less weird on this farm?

The flashlight beam revealed the trapdoor in the flat ceiling above them, and Tyler finally realized where they were-in the silo, under the floor. He swept the light back across the cavern and saw that the silo had been built on top of a crevice in the ground, a great mouth of rock and dirt. He and the girl named Last One had just crawled out of it.

The Fault Line, he thought. Octavio Tinker’s Fault Line! This is it!

He clambered up the ladder bolted to the cavern wall next to the trapdoor, but the door was locked, and all his rattling and shaking couldn’t open it. They were trapped in a deserted building.

Oh well, he thought, then began to shout. “Hello! Help! Somebody help us!” He pounded on the trapdoor. “Ragnar? Mr. Walkwell? Somebody? Help!”

He had been calling for about five minutes when the trapdoor above him rattled and he heard the snap of the lock opening. The door lifted and fell back with an echoing thunk, then a bright beam of light came through the opening in the ceiling and swept the cavernous room, blinding Tyler for a moment. The cavegirl growled in fear. Tyler swung up his own light as if in self-defense and the light moved off him. A dark shape clambered down the ladder and dropped to the floor.

“Oh, Jenkins, you idiot,” said Colin Needle, shaking his head in gleeful disgust as he looked from Tyler to the cavegirl. “You just couldn’t mind your own business, could you? And now you’ve really messed up. You might as well go pack your bags.”