Mormons caught by medievals, scheduled for veggie market whipping. "We wanted to offer them a better future." Modern authorities will not interfere. "They knew the risks"
There are dinosaurs in the jungle beneath me, although I've never seen them. Perhaps they don't like the sound of traffic. The big cats don't mind, they sometimes hunt by the tarred road that separates the modern from the prehistoric era. I'd never seen any big cats either, not until the other day when a lion nearly got me. I would have died had it not been for Gordito, a hunter gatherer who killed the hungry beast just as it was about to sink its teeth into me.
Right now, I don't even have to close my eyes to feel the lion's breath on my skin, the paralyzing shock, the rational part of my brain too slow to catch on. The full scale panic of being trapped beneath my scooter with a 200kg predator over me lingers in my body. The memory is unreal yet excruciatingly vivid, like a nightmare that keeps on haunting me long after I've woken up. In my otherwise so orderly world these kinds of things simply don't happen. My little bubble has been shattered, the illusion broken, and it feels like the murky depths of the real world might swallow me whole if I blink.
The attack would have been easier to ignore if I didn't live just by the border road. Thankfully, I'm high up in the air, on the 14th floor. My balcony is like a VIP suite in a theatre where there's only lush, still greenness on the stage, but plenty of things happen behind the scenes. I feel safe here, in my apartment. It's when I step outside that my pulse races.
So far, I've mostly stayed at home because of the road rash and claw wounds, but I will need to get myself from A to B sooner or later. Walking is obviously out of the question, there's no public transport, and using taxis gets expensive. Occasionally, horse carriages come along, but there's no guarantee that the coachman will let you hop on; he might demand a bucket of oats instead of the bunch of carrots you brought as payment, and then you're left standing there, wondering when the next carriage might appear. My scooter has served me well, but until I take it to a mechanic who can make it go faster, it's hard to escape the feeling of being a sitting duck.
Curious about my savior, I've looked him up. Tried to, anyways, there are only so many relevant hits to "hunter gatherer hammer throwing god". I found a video clip where he rants about his way of life. Among other things, he says that those who criticize him for waiting hours on end to slay an animal instead of just going to the supermarket assume they can do so without dying. Prior to the lion attack, I would have found it ridiculous. Now I think it's the wisest thing I've ever heard. It's one of the reasons I want to ask him for survival lessons. Whether he'll agree to it is a different matter. He looked at me like I was an idiot when I asked how I could make it up to him for saving my life.
"I don't need anything from you."
But of course, I'd insisted. "There must be something I can do. Clean water?"
Wrong thing to suggest. Standing next to him, trembling and bleeding, I felt really dumb. He'd just killed a lion by throwing a hammer with the surgical precision of a laser beam. Someone who can do that knows how to get by in this world within worlds.
"Ok, well if you change your mind let me know. How can I contact you?" I'd asked him. "Phone, smoke signals, note at the veggie market notice board, writings in the sand,…?" As soon as I said "phone" I felt even more dumb. Given his bare chest and long cloth-wrap for trousers, I'd be surprised if he owns one.
He'd just stared at me, but differently, as if he revealed to me who, or perhaps what he really is: a primordial predator from the same era as the animal he'd just killed. The look in his eyes scared the shit out of me.
"I'm sorry," I'd hurried to say. "I just want to help. You saved my life. I owe you. Let me make it up to you!"
"I'll be here one week from now. At this time." He gave the sky a quick glance and disappeared noiselessly into the woods.
Humbling. I'd had to check my phone for date and exact time. I'm glad I didn't do that in front of him, as I would have earned a head shake and another "are you stupid?" look. For all my modern era technical know-how, I guess I am stupid, the very least lost when it comes to self defense.
The other reason I want to ask Gordito for survival lessons is that I'm wanted by the medievals. Someone has drawn me badly on a leaf with the text "Wanted. Compensation for head" and hung it up in the veggie market, on the medieval notice board. I had a bout of arrhythmia when I first saw it, but since I'm always wearing disguises whenever I'm there, I'm hoping I won't be beheaded just yet. What does bother me, however, is that the medievals caught on to me so quickly. When I got the gig to spy on them to expose their territory expansion plans, I thought it'd be a walk in the park. I've been careful, so they shouldn't know who I am, and yet they do. I tell myself I'm being overly paranoid, but I can't get rid of the nagging suspicion that someone has outed me.