Monsters (7 page)

After an hour, they reached the old raised highway with its slabs of concrete slowly separating with each winter. The slabs had once been continuous, with just the narrowest of gaps between them, but over the decades the ground had shifted, moving the slabs on various angles, allowing grasses to spring up between them. Occasionally, the rusted hulk of a car or truck sat to one side, or off in the ditch, a casual reminder of a long, lost world that seemed more of a fairy tale than a past reality.

Bruce climbed up first, using a rope ladder to mount the huge horse. He reached down, helping Jane climb with her injured arm. She sat behind him with her arms resting gently on his hips. She didn't have to, the saddle was large enough for several people, with leather hand-holds spaced on either side, but he had no complaints.

“There was a time,” she said, pausing for a second, distracting herself with some other thought and he wondered what she was going to say.

“A time?” Bruce asked, curious about the past.

“There was a time when horses were small enough to fit through a doorway.”

“Really?” he replied, trying to get his head around the concept.

“Our horses are closer to the elephants of old, both in terms of their size and their nature. They can gallop a few hundred yards, but once they would run for miles and miles.”

“What’s an elephant?” asked Bruce, unsure what that creature was.

“I'll show you some pictures. But they were big, lumbering beasts, with tusks like a wild boar, only their tusks extended out in a curve over ten feet long. They were like spears on either side of their heads. And they had a nose that was anywhere up to fifteen feet long. Imagine that, a nose with the dexterity of a hand, a trunk as thick as your leg that could pluck a single blade of grass. Elephants used their noses to pull on branches and pick fruit.”

Bruce laughed. Such an animal was preposterous, unimaginable, like the fabled Griffin, the lion with eagle's wings.

“Surely, you're making this up?” he said. “Next you'll be telling me that dragons are real, flying through the air and breathing fire.”

“Oh, but they are. Or at least they were. They were called pterosaurs, and they lived hundreds of millions of years ago. There was one with a wingspan of 36 feet.”

“So these things were bigger than a bat?”

“Easily twice the size.”

“And they breathed fire like a dragon?” asked Bruce, incredulous, looking up at the sky, trying to imagine a bird with such a broad wingspan.

“Oh, no. Silly,” Jane replied. “But these were the real monsters, far more dangerous than anything we see today.”

“Oh, I don't know about that. I once saw an eagle carry off a farmer. The poor man screamed, but there was nothing we could do for him. The monster took him up high, probably over a hundred feet in the air, and then just dropped him, watching him plummet to the ground. Then it swooped down and carried off the bloody mess that had once been alive. I've seen them do the same thing with goats. And I've heard of bats that have taken women and children in the still of night. Were pterosaurs as fierce?”

“Probably,” Jane said. “But there were no humans around when pterosaurs flew the skies. They ate fish, I think. But I'm not sure.”

“No humans?” Bruce asked. “How is that possible? Where were the humans?”

“We didn't exist. We hadn't evolved yet,” Jane replied. “Back then, there were no birds, no horses, no men. I know it's hard to imagine, but science has shown us that all the life we see came from a few simple forms billions of years ago, slowly branching into different plants and animals.”

Such a concept was mind boggling.

Bruce said, “It's no wonder people are scared of you.”

Jane laughed, saying, “And why is that?”

“You speak of science, but it is as though you speak of witchcraft,” Bruce replied.

“Oh, it's not witchcraft,” Jane said. “It's reality. The problem is, we're fooled by our own eyes.”

“How so?” Bruce asked.

“Ever see a full moon rising over the forest?” Jane asked. "Looks bigger than when it's high in the sky, right?"

Bruce nodded.

Jane said, “If you get a bit of stick and measure what you see at arm's length, you'll find the moon is always the same size, but our eyes fool us into thinking it's bigger.

The villagers are scared of science, but science keeps us from being a fool.”

“I'll have to try that,” Bruce replied, surprised by the notion.

They rode on for a few minutes in silence as Bruce marveled at the realization that there had once been monsters even bigger than those they faced.

“So if elephants were once as big as horses,” he asked. “How big are elephants now?”

“I don't know,” Jane replied. “Elephants were around six tons in weight, but once there were dinosaurs, monsters over a hundred feet long, over a hundred tons in weight, so I guess elephants could be the monsters among monsters of our day.”

“Where are they?” asked Bruce. “Why don't we see these elephants?”

“They're native to a land across the sea. A continent called Africa.”

“I'd like to go to Africa some day.”

Jane laughed, saying, “It's over a thousand miles away across the ocean.”

“We could build a boat.”

“Sure. We could build a boat,” Jane said, still laughing.

“No?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “It's just too far.”

“But once, they could get there?”

“Yes, once they could. But not now. Too much has changed. Too much has been lost. See these highways? Once they powered the nation, allowing metal carts to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles in a day. They called them cars. They had engines, powered by the decayed remnants of life from hundreds of millions of years ago.”

“I'd heard that,” Bruce said. “But I thought it was a myth.”

“Oh, it's no myth. As fantastic as it seems, it is our day that is the surprise, not theirs. It is our day that should have never happened. We should have continued on to new heights. We should not have been humbled by the elements.”

“It all seems so fantastic, like a made-up story,” Bruce said, being honest. “I mean, it sounds like the fairy-tales my mother would tell me before I fell asleep.”

Jane sat back, taking a sip of water from an old wineskin.

“Oh, it's real all right,” she replied. “Reading will open new worlds for you, worlds that defy the imagination.”

They rode along for hours, chatting idly as the miles passed, their brute horse shuffling on relentlessly. They stopped for a light lunch, allowing the horse to drink from a stream. Bruce was taken by Jane's confidence. He was sure other women were just as confident, but he'd never noticed this trait in anyone else before. They talked about their families and their backgrounds growing up, but Bruce didn't mention Jonathan's death. That wound was still raw.

By late afternoon, they approached the outskirts of an abandoned city. Looking down into the valley, seeing the wreckage of the buildings in the distance, Bruce became nervous. Cities were dangerous, the haunt of monsters. It was ironic that the habitat of man should become the refuge of animals.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Do you want to read?” Jane asked in reply.

“Yes, but ...”

They stopped, tying the horse up in the crumbling brick ruins of a broad, low building well shy of the city. Jane said the surrounding brick walls had once marked the inside of a vast, sprawling factory, its roof long since having rotted away. Sunlight streamed in around them. Trees had sprung up, forming a sheltered garden accessible only through a metal door set on a series of large steel rollers. Unlike the road, the concrete slab within the factory was mostly buried in dirt and organic debris. Grass grew on the lumpy, irregular ground. Leaves lay scattered across what little was left of the sparse factory floor.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked as they dismounted.

“I've been here many times before,” Jane said, reassuring Bruce the horse would be fine. He wasn't so sure, but learning to read was his idea, and he felt he had to follow through with it.

“Take off your clothes,” she said, gathering together a bunch of grubby leaves and loose bark. The prevailing wind had caused the copper-colored autumn leaves to pile up waist-deep against the wall.

“What?” he asked.

Jane pulled off her shoes, followed by her pants, saying, “We need to mask our smell.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Otherwise the animals will smell you long before you see them.”

Bruce mumbled something, but even he wasn't sure quite what he said.

“What are you afraid of?” Jane asked, pulling off her top. She grabbed a handful of leaves and began scrubbing her bare skin, rubbing them across her belly and around her groin. She raised her arms, rubbing leaves under her armpits before rustling her dirty hands through her hair.

Sheepishly, Bruce removed his boots. He averted his eyes, surprised both by her brashness and his modesty.

“Come on,” she said, throwing a bunch of orange and yellow leaves at him, laughing as they fluttered around him. “What's your problem? Haven't you ever seen a naked woman?”

“No,” Bruce replied, turning to one side as he took his shirt off. “Not like this.”

“Really?” Jane said, her surprise hanging in the air. “Well, you have now.”

She reached out with a handful of leaves, rubbing them in his hair.

“Stop that,” he said, wrestling with his pants as he staggered to one side.

“Why?” she asked, playfully tossing leaves above him. They fell down around him like golden snowflakes. “What are you going to do about it,
naked man?
”

Oh, how those words struck at him. He wasn't that much of a prude, but the context surprised him, taking him off guard. He'd slept with a woman once, a prostitute, just before his troop marched on Bracken Ridge, but in the dark of the tavern he'd seen nothing as flamboyant, as proud and defiant as Jane standing there naked.

She laughed. To his surprise, he didn't feel ashamed or embarrassed by her. He was embarrassed by himself, but Jane lightened the air around him. Her laughter was playful, warm and inviting, not intimidating. He could laugh at himself, he decided, and chuckled as he rubbed handfuls of leaves over his body. Turning away from her, he raised his arms, rubbing dirty leaves up under his armpits, only to feel her hand slap his backside playfully as she said, “You missed a spot. Right there.”

Now it was his turn. He picked up a large handful of leaves and tossed them over her, watching as they fell like confetti around her.

“That's the spirit,” she cried, looking down his body and getting her first good look at him naked. “I see the squirrels have buried their nuts and gone into hibernation for the winter.”

“What?” Bruce replied, a little confused. He looked down and realized the cold had caused his penis to look small and stunted.

“You are outrageous,” he cried, barreling into her playfully and tackling her. Bruce was mindful of Jane's arm and tried not to get too carried away in the moment and end up hurting her. The two of them fell into the knee-deep pile of leaves, disappearing into a poof of red, yellow, ocher and brown. Leaves flew around them as they rolled naked, laughing. Jane tickled him, and he felt helpless, calling out for mercy, trying to tickle her back, but his tickling didn't seem to bother her. She just laughed playfully.

“Oh,” she cried, as his body pressed against her. “I see someone's woken up before spring.” And Bruce was overcome with a sense of embarrassment at how his body reacted to hers.

He rolled away, kicking up more leaves and sat there waist deep in the soft, autumn leaves, staring at her.

Jane's smile was intoxicating. He wanted to dive back over to her but thought better of it. She was older. She wasn't as old as his father, but she was roughly as old as his sister, and that was hard to shake from his mind. He'd like to have taken things further, but the timing didn't seem right, and he was worried she'd reject him. Jane was larger than life, and that intimidated Bruce, at least, she intimidated him when he was naked. He felt silly sitting there among the leaves.

“Come on,” she said, getting to her feet, grabbing her clothes and rubbing leaves inside them. She tossed his trousers over to him as he sat sheepishly in the leaves.

They covered the last two miles on foot. Jane was surprisingly nimble. She'd let her hair down, allowing it to blow in the breeze. They jogged alongside crumbling walls, over bridges and through the outskirts of a suburb. Most of the houses had been decimated by the fury of summer storms, but a few still stood.

Bruce wanted to hang back as they moved deeper into the town, unsure of the territory. He had his bow and a quiver of arrows over his shoulder. He would have had his sword strapped to his side, but Jane said they needed to keep noise to a minimum, so he held it wrapped in a cloth as he ran along. Jane carried nothing more than her backpack and a long wooden staff.

Bruce felt uneasy, as though a wild dog or a bear would jump out at them at any moment. Wolves tended to stick to the hills, but dogs had been known to claim towns as their territory, using the grid of streets to mark their ground.

The collapsed buildings and fallen street lamp posts provided wild cats with a chaotic hunting ground, with plenty of room to stalk their prey. Whereas dogs would normally announce their presence from afar, barking and charging, providing just enough time to shoot off a couple of arrows, the big cats preferred an ambush. The arrows Bruce carried wouldn't kill either a cat or a dog, but they'd give them cause for thought. Wounds weakened animals, making them easy prey for others, leaving them open to infection, and the dogs seemed to sense that. Just a few arrows would normally deter a dog. Bears were another matter altogether.

Jane knew exactly where she was going, that was obvious. She led him across fallen rooftops, through rusting chain fences, past buildings that had collapsed in the street and cast their bricks in all directions. She paused behind the rusted hulk of various cars and buses, darting over the debris in the road, her hearing finely attuned to the slightest rustle in the trees lining the streets. Bruce kept pace with her, focusing more on her than where they were heading, trusting her judgment.