Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

The sandwiches were wonderful. Trent wolfed his first one in about six bites, then forced himself to make the second one last until Donna was done with hers. She wasn’t wasting any time, either, so it wasn’t a great hardship. Neither of them spoke more than “Mmmff, good!” until the sandwiches were gone.

There were no ants. Trent kept waiting for little creatures to crawl up onto the blanket and go for the bread crumbs, but he only saw a couple of brown stick-like things about an inch long, and those just crossed the blanket on their long, spindly legs and kept going. There were no flies or mosquitoes, either. The air was just the right temperature, and the ground was soft under the blanket; perfect conditions for a nap, except Trent couldn’t bring himself to let down his guard yet.

There was plenty of work to do anyway. They were definitely sleeping inside the camper until they were sure it was safe outside, which meant he had to repair the table that the tire had smashed, because that folded down level with the seats to make their bed. And there was the helmet question. What could he use to make helmets? He supposed he could cut up a tool box or something for the sheet metal and hammer it into some kind of hat, but he didn’t really want to ruin a perfectly good tool box unless he had to. He wished he’d thought to bring some extra diamond plate along, but when you’re coming down under a parachute, you don’t want a whole lot of unnecessary weight. He hadn’t brought welding equipment for the same reason.

He had a saw. Maybe he could cut down a tree and hollow out a chunk of log for a helmet. And he could split a log and hollow the halves for shoulder-guards. Maybe saw one into boards for chest and back protection, like those advertising sandwich boards that people wore on street corners.

He laughed out loud at the image. The thing would weigh a ton.

“What’s funny?” Donna asked.

He told her what he’d been thinking, and she laughed, too, but not at that. “There’s helmets lying around all over the place,” she said. “Most of ’em are full of slo-mos, but I’ll bet we could find a couple of empty shells without too much searching.”

He tilted his head back and gazed up into the branches of the tree. “Good grief, what else am I missin’?”

She leaned forward and kissed him. “Nothing you can’t solve the hard way, I’m sure.”

“I guess that’s a compliment.”

“That’s how I meant it.”

“Well, then, that’s okay.”

He stood up and looked out at the meadow. There were several slo-mos out there, but he couldn’t tell a dead one from a live one without going out and tipping them over. So he shouldered his rifle and walked out into the open, keeping a weather eye out for cupids while he walked up to each slo-mo in turn, tipped it over, and waited to see if it tried to right itself.

One of them flipped much more easily than the others, and when it did, a lizard-like creature about the size of a hamster scuttled out of it and made a beeline for Trent’s boot. He jumped back and kicked at it, and it changed course for a clump of bushes a few dozen yards away, zigzagging like a soldier storming a gun emplacement all the way.

The slo-mo shell was empty. The bottom was half chewed away, and the inside was just a hollow cavity. The walls were about a quarter of an inch thick, and hard as bone. Definitely hard enough to stop an arrow, and probably bullets, too. Trent tried to bust out the rest of the underside, but it just flexed in his hands. He would have to take a hammer to it, and probably a file to smooth off the rough edges. The domed part was too big to fit comfortably on a human head, but with a little padding he supposed it would work okay.

He tried to find a second one, but everything else in the meadow was still alive, except for several rocks that turned out to actually just be rocks. He went over to the bank and looked down into the creekbed, but that was so full of round rocks that he would have to go down and turn them all over just to see which ones were real and which weren’t.

He carried the empty one back to the camper. Might as well see if he could make one work before he hunted up another.

“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s just about the perfect shape for a helmet already. You’ve got to wonder how come.”

“Form follows function,” said Donna, holstering her pistol. She had been keeping watch on the sky while he was out in the open. “It’s basically the same shape as a turtle shell, too.”

“No it’s not. Turtle shells are a lot flatter.”

“Tortoise shells, then. Land turtles. They’re tall and round like this.”

“That’s true.” He got his tool box out of the camper and started chipping away what was left of the bottom, using a hammer at first, then busting off pieces with pliers when he got closer to the rim. The inside was smooth and dry, with little grooves crisscrossing it where muscles had been attached. There was still no indication of a mouth hole or an anus, and the shell definitely didn’t open up to let the inhabitant stick its head out, which made Trent wonder if these things even had heads. Maybe they were just mobile stomachs, like starfish.

Once he chipped away the last of the flat bottom, he stuffed a towel inside and tried it on. It came down over his eyes until he adjusted the towel, and then it bumped into his back at the base of his neck. That might not be such a bad thing, actually. Firemen’s hats did that.

“What do you think?” he asked Donna.

“You look like a little kid with his dad’s army helmet,” she said, laughing. “But it looks like it should work.”

“Good. A little shoulder protection, and I think we’ll be in business. Let’s see if we can find another one.”

Keeping an eye out for cupids, he scrambled down the creek bank and stalled poking around among the rocks there. Most of them were just rocks, but there was a gravel bar at the tail of a bend in the stream where a bunch of driftwood had collected, and there were a couple of helmet-shaped rocks in among the branches. One was definitely a slo-mo; it was upside down and he could see the flat underside.

It had a hole chewed in the bottom, too. He nudged it with the barrel of his rifle, but nothing leaped out of it, so he tipped it over and a bunch of brown water poured out the hole.

“Eeew,” Donna said. “You’re wearing that one.”

“Okay.” He swished it around in the pool, filling and emptying it until the water came out clean. The stream was cold; evidently it was runoff from snowmelt higher up in the mountains. That was too bad for bathing, but encouraging in terms of predators and parasites. On Earth, at least, cold-water streams had a lot fewer nasties in them than warm ones. It would also make a good place to chill his beer, once he made sure nothing would run off with it.

He carried the shell back up the bank and set to work on it with the hammer and pliers until he’d chipped away all but the curved upper half. There were still some stringy ends of tendons attached to it, so he scraped those away with his pocket knife, then went back to the stream to wash it out again. While he was down there he hauled out a six-inch log from the driftwood pile that looked like it would make good shoulder guards and dragged it up to their campsite.

While he set to work on the log with a saw, Donna went into the camper and started cleaning up the mess in there. She came out with the ripped-up parachute and asked, “What do you want to do with this, anyway?”

“Keep it,” he said automatically. He didn’t want to throw anything out, not with civilization a million light-years away and maybe forever. The sections that had been weakened by sap were probably useless, but there were still big pieces of cloth that weren’t. It would never make a parachute again, but if he and Donna were truly stuck here, they might wind up wearing it before they learned to skin and tan hides.