The Farmer - Day 1

  The man in the swimsuit fled across the blank white void, and the dinosaur followed.

  They say you need to start a story with a hook. Well, how’s this for a hook? I’ve plagiarised one of the great opening lines in modern fiction. I’ve given you strangeness to unravel. Why is the man running in a swimsuit? What is this strange Matrix loading-area white blankness all about? And, if all of that wasn’t enough, I’ve got Velociraptor chasing him down. Velociraptor à la Jurassic Park and not à la chicken-sized historical accuracy. Hmm… maybe it’s a Utahraptor. Who cares? This guy is fucked!

  He sprinted across the expanse. His breathing was ragged. Panic assaulted him from every turn. His head snapped left and right, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible reality he had been thrust into. Yeah, you’d think the blood-thirsty synergy of sharp teeth and ancient history that snapped at his heels would be enough to keep him in the moment, but the dude had a lot of information to take in.

  He glanced at the floor beneath him, his bare feet squeaking on the floor like linoleum. But this particular sheet of linoleum stretched in every direction like infinity. The whole world seemed to be a strange blank white tableau. It wasn’t the world he had woken to this morning. This morning he had woken to 400-thread-count cotton and the blaring of his smartphone.

  I mean, as much as he was disoriented by the sudden strangeness of his surroundings, the gnashing jaws of the beast that raced behind him was clearly the most important thing in his universe.

  Still… it was strange the way he cast his head left and right, tilting his braincase, as though he was listening for something, trying to find something.

  The whiteness wasn’t entirely endless and void. In the far, far distance seemed to be the vague rise of earth and the unnatural straightness of walls. But that was far away and hardly of concern to a man who was mostly concerned with not becoming a meal to a creature that should have been long extinct.

  He pulled a veritable Usain Bolt, pounding feet and pushing with everything he had. But still the beast closed the gap. He couldn’t spare the time to look behind him, couldn’t spare the momentum, but he could hear the clawed feet pounding, hear them getting closer.

  The far-distant land formation, like something that might be glimpsed on the horizon from the deck of a ship, vague and uncertain, was not the only feature in the landscape. Before him, torturously close, rose an island of earth and vegetation. The shiny whiteness stretched everywhere. The protrusion of the earth and grass and trees was bizarre. Like rocks on the shore, small protuberances jutted out of the white. Little lumps of earth, ragged and topped with grass, no bigger than a man’s torso. Further on, the jutting landforms were large, as big as a sedan. Beyond that cluster of lumps and bumps was a rise of earth, loomed over by 20-foot trees and bursting with grass and bushes. Who could say what he hoped to achieve by reaching them? Any port in a storm, I guess. It looked like he was aiming to be shredded into Mongolian beef on dirt instead of blank whiteness, which seemed to be a minute distinction.

  Still, he raced for the earth as though it was sanctuary. His face was a torn mask of torment. Even as he ran, his lungs burning, pumping like the bellows of the most panicked forge in history, he managed to gasp a question. “Who’s there?”

  The beast behind him faltered, seeming to prepare to leap at him, then deciding that the delicious walking sausage was moving too fast, and resumed its pounding chase. It didn’t need to rush. The meal was secure. It was considerate of the little package of flesh to be moving towards shelter for the imminent meal anyway.

  Oh, but the man’s face was anguish. There was the agony of the damned. There was the sorrow of a life unlived, of the regrets of the things undone. His expression was a tangle of existential horror.

  He seemed to notice the bracer on his wrist, startled by it. It was a cylinder of what seemed to be stone, that reached from just above his left elbow to the wrist of the same arm. He didn’t have time to inspect it thoroughly, what with a living, breathing dinosaur only yards behind him, but he saw dimly glowing marbles embedded in its surface. It wouldn’t take a genius to see that the bracelet was alien and new to him.

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  He sprinted, reaching the first lumps of grass-crowned dirt, stumbling over and around them. The raptor was less impeded by them, and it closed the gap, slowing slightly as it calculated how to put the morsel down and make a meal of this strange hairless meat morsel.

  It was instinct that drove him. He needed to escape it. His blood howled in his veins with the need to reach the trees, though there was little good they could do him.

  Tears of panic and fear glistened at the edges of his eyes.

  Then he saw it.

  It was madness that he should even consider this a refuge, or a hope, but when he saw the shovel his pace exploded and he drove forward.

  The raptor, for all of its calculated malice, could not perceive the shovel as anything at all. It wasn’t a tool-using creature. It only had eyes for the tantalizing juicy flesh that contorted before it.

  The shovel leaned against the trunk of a tree, its blade mostly lost in the stringy grass that sprouted from the ground. The hapless man raced to it, stretching his body forward, jeopardizing his footing.

  He was nothing but anguish, fear and desperation.

  He reached for the shovel too soon, stumbling as his feet transferred from shining whiteness to moist, yielding earth. He fell forward. He was beyond caring about bumps and bruises. He was beyond wondering if this would work. All he had was the skeleton of thought and the understanding that his time would be extinguished if the beast caught him.

  For its part, the dinosaur had no argument with his plan. It certainly wanted to leap and descend on him. Its teeth yearned to make strips of his flesh. The hooked claws of its feet thirsted to drink the blood of his soft pink flesh.

  The raptor leapt, going airborne, its huge muscled legs coiled back, the hooked claws pointed outwards.

  The man’s stumble took him to the dirt. The sensation of the dewy grass struck him. It was possibly the last thing he would ever feel. That cool, lush, nearly decadent sensory explosion of each cold blade stroking his mostly naked skin as he rolled forward.

  His hands found the handle of the shovel. It was rough, old, well used. He dragged at it, pulling it into his hands, the blunt curved edge of the blade gleaming dully as it rose from the depths of the long grass.

  It was a matter of moments. Not a heartbeat. Not even that.

  The raptor fell on him.

  He rolled onto his back, dragging the shovel with him. He felt the rounded end of the handle find the yielding certainty of the earth beneath him. He sensed the end of the handle pressing into the softness of the clay and making itself secure.

  Teeth bared, terrible claws exposed, the beast soared to him, promising murder and desecration.

  He lifted, a pathetic pleading sob coughing forth. He lifted the shovel, pointing the blade towards the descending monster, keeping the end of the haft buried in the firmness of the earth.

  It was a shovel. It most certainly wasn’t a spear. The edge of the blade wasn’t even pointed. It was rounded and so, so blunt from long use.

  But what else could he do?

  It was doomed. At best, such a weapon, and it was a tool, not a weapon, might deliver an inconvenient scrape to the beast.

  As the dinosaur met the thrusting shovel, something happened. One of the marbles buried in the stone band around the man’s arm seemed to pulse. He only had eyes for the embodiment of death, of muscles, scales, teeth and claws. He couldn’t see that this marble pulsed a dull, grey pulse of light. Like an ember shining through a dusting of ash. But it flashed, most definitely. And the man saw it flashing on his wrist, bewildered by the distinct symbol of a shovel that showed itself on the surface of the orb.

  He was confused by the way his flailing, shaking grip suddenly became iron. In the clarity that one only finds in the crystal certainty of near death, he thought the edge of the shovel suddenly seemed to gleam with a razor sharpness.

  The impact of the beast was like an earthquake dropped from the sky. It shuddered through his hands, threatening to break the deathly grip he held on the handle. It pulsed through the earth, and from the earth it vibrated through his back.

  The coiled muscle and bone of the raptor exploded as the head of the shovel buried itself there, exploding through the flesh, wreaking terrible damage, scoring through to erupt on the other side.

  The head of the shovel gouged out his heart and lungs. If it hadn’t, he would have died anyway.

  Moments later he found himself gasping, buried under the inert corpse of the monster.

  He started to weep with relief, fear, panic and confusion.

  Warm blood gushed down the handle of the shovel, bathing him, reminding him he was alive.

  Somehow, he had survived. It was a momentary relief. Yes, the sudden terror and certain doom had passed.

  But now he was a man alone, in a landscape that defied reality, and he only had more questions to answer.