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29.
Hot sand crumbled between his toes and warmed his bones.
He’d fashioned a hat of skin and feathers to shield himself from the blinding sun in a powder-blue sky. He wore a stone knife in his belt and carried a bow and arrows. He thought it ironic that mankind had begun in the stone age and was now ending its days in the same manner.
As he walked on the beach, Alex kept a wary eye on several rippers that shadowed him from just across a sliver of fast-running tidal water in the bay. There were plenty of smaller mammals, but this was the top of the food chain, except for himself. They were a species that had not existed in human times. A typical adult weighed 120 pounds. It was thickly furry, brown, with claws like those of a bear on which it loped when excited or hungry. It had a smallish cat-like head with curling dirty-yellow tusks like a boar’s.
Here on the beach, a family of rippers trundled hungrily, a short distance beyond his reach, and he beyond theirs. He could smell their rank odor and hear eager snorts from dripping, glistening black nostrils. Their dark gaze followed him with hateful interest.
Alex had determined they would not rule his life. He kept his deadly bow handy. His arrowheads were coated with fecal matter that would cause massive infection and death upon the slightest wound. If they took him down, they would not go easily themselves. Every so often as the weeks and months dragged by, and these tormentors kept after him looking for their opening, he’d loosen a well-placed arrow that might connect with a thigh or neck. Then he’d take perverse pleasure over the next few days in watching the animal sicken and die in pain while its pals circled around it waiting for a meal.
Alex was lucky that day and bagged a gleaming golden sea bass with copper and silver scales that might have been manufactured by the finest of watchmakers—but this was nature at work, the master artisan.
He laughed as he splashed through warm ankle-deep water. The rippers were afraid of saltwater and stayed on their side of the sandbank as he made his way home to his own beach and then to the cliffs above it where he made his home. It would be good eating tonight and for days to come. He could already imagine how the fish would smell as it slowly roasted, and how its crackling skin would taste.
At that moment, a faint shadow briefly dimmed the sky.
Startled, he looked up. He stared across the wide bay with its rippling tidal waters. Before he saw anything, he heard an odd sound—a brief rumble and sizzle like a burning thing streaking through the air, like the rattle of a lightning bolt, echoing from horizon to horizon.
The rippers too were startled. They cringed, looking over their shoulders and then loping away into the bushes above the beach.
A chrome streak, like a fine silver or glass thread, appeared and instantly vanished into a forest across the bay two miles distant. He watched for any signs of fire or smoke, but none came. Nor was there an explosion. Alex had never seen anything like this before. Was it a natural phenomenon? Everything he’d found in the world turned out to be an illusion created by cruel nature—like a stone surface that resembled a road but turned out to have been made by glaciers advancing and retreating during the ice ages following the extinction of mankind, or like a distant skyline that turned out to be a rock formation after he’d hiked for days to get there at great peril to his life, or like a figure waving to him from a distant hill that turned out to be a sheet of moss caught in a tree and fluttering in the wind.
The sky was bright as ever, and a fine thread of vapor quickly dissipated, drifting away in the powder-blue sky.
He sighed, resuming his trek home. It meant another dangerous expedition to investigate, of course—he couldn’t pass up even the faintest hope of finding another human being alive somehow. Already, he was planning his journey: perhaps by raft this time, to avoid the predators on land. A quick trip up the beach, into the woods—it would probably turn out to have been a fist-sized meteorite, another dead end, another disappointment—and he’d make his way back to the only safety he knew.
He replayed the image of the streaking object over and over in his mind, down to the sizzling sound and the odd ozone smell. Did it have anything to do with that other mystery he’d so often pondered on moonlit nights: the unnatural-looking smudge that hung frozen in space beside the Moon? He resolved to find out as soon as possible.
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