Bear Country - Chapter 1

Bear Country  -  Dale R. Cozort            

            The Exchange came without a sound.  A perfect sphere of The World eight miles wide replaced a sphere of Bear Country exactly the same size.  The two gigantic masses of air, land, and water swapped realities without a tremor, without the slightest grinding or rumble. Rockport Illinois now sat in Bear Country.  A piece of Bear Country of the same dimensions now sat in the middle of Illinois.
            In Rockport, Sharon Mack stood at her second floor window with her seven-year old daughter Allyssa.  She looked around the little house, at the worn furniture, the pictures on the walls, the videos and the entertainment center.  They had seemed so important two hours ago and an hour ago.  They didn’t seem worth staying to protect now.  But I worked so hard for what little I have.
            Outside her window, the hot June sun blazed directly overhead, through a perfect circle of clear, cloudless air brought over from The World.  Outside the circle, out in Bear Country, dark grey clouds moved quickly, ominously.  Thunder rumbled in the distance. The perfection of the circle lasted for no more than a couple of seconds as air from The World and Bear Country began to mix.
            A helicopter in green and brown camouflage paint flew over, headed into Bear Country.  The noise of the motor faded, and the town of Rockport went silent except for alarms inside Summit Foods.  A dog howled.
            Allyssa said, “Somebody left their dog.”
            Sharon nodded. “Maybe they work out of town and didn’t get back.  We only had three hours.  We should have gone.”
            Allyssa looked at Sharon’s binoculars enviously.  “Can I look?”
            “In a minute,” Sharon said.  She looked out at Bear Country through the binoculars.
             Allyssa asked, “Do you see anything?”
            “I see where Bear Country starts.  The line cuts through the middle of the strip mall parking lot.  I don’t see any animals out there though.  No mammoths or sabertooth tigers.  Take a look.”
            Sharon gave Allyssa the binoculars,  then jumped as Rockport’s radio station came back on the air over her battery-powered radio.  The DJ said, “This is WGNB.  We’re back on the air thanks to an emergency generator loaned to us by the US marine corp.  We’re your source for emergency information for the next week or two, until the Exchange reverses and we rejoin The World.  In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re now in another reality—totally isolated from the rest of humanity, except possibly for several hundred convicts who escaped when their maximum security prison went over in an Exchange two years ago.  I have a sudden need to use the bathroom.  How about you?”
            Sharon looked at Allyssa.  “I should have taken you somewhere outside the Exchange, somewhere safe.”
            The DJ continued.  “In case you aren’t scared enough already, I have primatologist Dave Hennings from Northwestern University with me to talk about Bear Country. Dave, I’ve heard Bear Country described as Ice Age North America on steroids.  Is that about right?”
            Sharon half-listened as the primatologist responded. She caught fragments of the broadcast as she looked out the window and worried. “—our listeners when and where the first Exchange happened?”
            “The first Exchange happened five years ago on New Zealand's North Island,” Dave said.  “That’s actually one of the best places it could have happened.  New Zealand is one of the most geographically isolated large land masses on earth, so the Bear Country animals weren't able to spread far, even though we didn't have a response ready.  Also, the Bear Country animals on New Zealand were harmless—flightless birds and primitive rat and mouse-sized mammals.  There have been over 200 Exchanges since then and we haven’t always been that lucky.”
            Allyssa asked, “Where are the glaciers?”
            Sharon shook her head.  “We didn’t go back in time to the ice age.  We went sideways into another timeline.  Animals like mammoths and sabertooth tigers survived in Bear Country.  They didn’t back in The World.  The climates are pretty much the same.”
            On the radio, Dave was saying, “--big mystery of Bear Country is what you call the weird stuff.  The bats are the weirdest, but around twenty percent of the large animals In Bear Country are in the wrong place.  There are kangaroos in North America.  There are monkeys from Africa in North and South America. The weird stuff’s been here millions of years though, so there’s nothing exactly like it in our time-line.  The extra competition gives Bear Country animals their edge.”
                “How did animals get from Africa and Australia to North America?”
            Dave laughed.  “That’s the million-dollar question.  It doesn’t seem possible since their continents are in the same places ours are.”
            Sharon looked up at the sky.  “A nasty thunderstorm’s coming in from Bear Country.  A lot of wind too. What will happen when it hits the warmer air from The World?”
            Allyssa asked.  “Isn’t that what causes tornadoes?"
            "Great.  I brought my daughter into a world full of ice age animals, escaped convicts, and tornadoes.”  Sharon watched the storm clouds send tentacles of grey into the clear circle above them.
            On the radio, the DJ asked, “If you went out into Bear Country what would you be most afraid of?”
            Dave said, “Don’t go out there.  It’s against the law, not to mention a whole bunch of treaties.  And, of course, it’s just plain dumb.”
            “But what is the most dangerous animal in Bear Country?”
            Dave said, “Well, there are the bears.  There’s one the size of a Kodiak bear, but built for speed.  They’re dangerous.  And of course you have the 900 pound North American lions.  There are two types of sabertooth around; one of which routinely kills mammoths.  The biologists are trying to figure out how.  Then there are amber wolves, cheetahs, plus the tough plant-eaters like Mastodons and the big kangaroos.”
            “I don’t think of kangaroos as in the same danger class as sabertooths.”
            “These are.  Don’t mess with them,” Dave said.
            “There are a lot of things we don’t want to mess with in Bear Country.”
            Dave said. “That’s why we quarantine Exchange areas.  Bear Country animals are tougher than ours.  They would take over if they got loose in The World, especially the little seed-eater bats.  Think rabbits in Australia.”
            “So of those animals, which is the most dangerous?”
            “The most dangerous animals of Bear Country are actually none of the above,” Dave said.  “If you somehow get out there and see a pack of little green monkeys, do not approach them.  Do not threaten or harm any of them.”
            “So, dangerous kangaroos, dangerous monkeys, venomous bats—a lot of dangerous stuff out there.”
            Dave said, “Don’t count on anything being harmless out there.  Don’t count on anything being what it seems out there.”
            “I suppose you think we should know all of this.”
            Dave laughed.  “You aren’t biologists.  Why should you care?  Unless, of course, the place you live is in an Exchange.  What are the chances of that happening?”
            Sharon took the binoculars back and looked out into Bear Country.  Something small and green moved in her field of vision.  She focused in on it and saw a green monkey huddling in the grass looking miserable as rain pounded down on it.  As she watched, the monkey raised its head and seemed to look directly back at her with cold grey eyes.  Sharon abruptly lowered the binoculars and shivered. 
            “What?”
            “There’s a monkey out there.  It felt like he was looking right at me, right through my eyes into my head.  Just like—” She stopped, then looked down at Allyssa and continued, “Just like Sister West.”
            The doorbell rang just as the storm from Bear Country struck.  Sharon ran down and opened the door to find herself face-to-face with her ex-husband Darrel.  “What are you--”  She almost got her arm up in time to block the beer bottle he swung at her head, but not quite.

***

 
            Several hours later, Sharon stood at the top of a small hill and looked around her.  The landscape of this Bear Country version of Illinois appeared empty of people, almost untouched by human endeavors.  The ruts from the trucks she was tracking made an ugly, jarring exception to that, though the savanna grass was healing that wound frighteningly fast.
            “I shouldn’t have stopped,” she said aloud.  Stopping gave the pain a chance to flow in.  The physical pain from the bruise on her jaw and the rope burns on her wrists and ankles were bad enough, but she could push that out her mind, along with the stiffness from lying unconscious and tied up on a tile floor for hours.  She couldn’t push away the pain of knowing that Allyssa was with Darrel and with Sister West and her collection of loonies, undoubtedly terrified, undoubtedly crying her seven-year-old eyes out.
            A sudden motion made Sharon turn and move her hand toward her belt.  A green and yellow bat the size of a grasshopper jumped from a grass stem near her and fluttered away.  Sharon laughed nervously.  In the distance, hairy, elephant-like mastodons tested the breeze with their trunks.  Green monkeys scrambled between the bulky forms.  A ground squirrel stood absurdly upright next to its burrow and looked at her through the short grass.  The hot June sun of this early afternoon made her squint even through her sunglasses. 
            “If you didn’t stop and look around something might sneak up on you.”  The calm but unfamiliar voice came from not more than a yard away.  It sent her hand streaking toward her belt, where the pistol had been.  She finished turning toward the sound of the voice, acutely aware of her empty hand and empty belt.
            The man was tall, well over six feet, and strongly built.  He had a dark smooth tan and blond hair slightly disarranged by the wind.  His dress pants and shirt showed no signs of wrinkles or stains.  He appeared cool in spite of the heat of the June day.  The man smiled sheepishly, showing white, even teeth set in his square jaw.  “Rather childish of me to sneak up on you and take your gun.  You looked like you were out to kill someone, though, and I didn’t want it to be me.”
            Sharon closed her eyes.  “I don’t need a comic book hero to step in and bail me out.  I don’t need to start hallucinating.  I can handle this.”
            The tall man stepped toward her.  “You’ll need your gun.  My name is Leo and I’m quite real, but if you need a hero, I’m afraid I can’t help.”
            “How did you sneak up on me?  There was no place to hide.  And how did you get my gun without me feeling it?”
            “Sorry.  That's sort of like a magician and his secrets.”
            “What are you doing out here?”
            Leo smiled.  “Yes.  What are we doing wandering around in another timeline?  Risky, isn’t it?  We could get eaten by a sabertooth tiger, or we could stay too long and be stranded.  Tomorrow or the next day, or two weeks from now, the Exchange will reverse itself.  Rockport will disappear.  It’s like getting off on the wrong floor and having the elevator door shut behind you, except that the elevator will never come back.  That would leave just you and me in this entire world.  Well, not quite.  Just you and me, and whoever made the ruts.”
            “Like Adam and Eve.”  Sharon intended that to come out sarcastically, but she heard a tinge of wistfulness in her voice and she cringed.  She hastily added, “The elevator does come back.  There have been a couple of hundred Exchanges so far.” 
            “But they never happen twice in the same place and they rarely happen close to one another.  As to Adam and Eve, I’m sure you have someone back in The World to play Adam.”  Leo handed her back her pistol and walked off along the ruts Sharon had been following.  “Of course there have been enough Exchanges that an Adam might not be impossible to find over here.  That prison did come back with the guards murdered and the prisoners missing.”
            Sharon hesitated for a second, and then followed him.  “No Adam back at home.  I’ve trusted the wrong people too often, including one of the convicts that turned up missing.  I’m trying to break that habit.    Which reminds me, you still haven’t told me what you’re doing out here.”
            “Nor have you told me what you are doing out here, and on foot.  You haven’t even given me a name.”
          “Sharon.  Sharon Mack.  I started out in a jeep.  I hit a stump and broke the radiator.”
         “But you kept going on foot,” Leo said.  “Determined.  Or lost.  I'm guessing determined.  Well, Sharon Mack, I think you are trying to catch up with someone who stole something important from you.  Money?  Jewelry?  A car?  What is important enough for you risk your life out here?”
            “How do you—”
            “Know that?  You have a bruise on your jaw, probably from a club of some sort.”
            “Beer bottle.”
          “Ah.  And you have rope marks on your wrists,” Leo said.  “Someone clubbed you, tied you up and robbed you of something, but what?  Money would be worthless here.  Food would be worth its weight in gold here, but there is plenty in Rockport.  They took a person dear to you, a husband or a child.”
            “My daughter.  My seven-year-old daughter.”
            Leo stopped abruptly.  “And one of the people who made these ruts took her?”
            “My ex-husband, Darrel.”
            “And why did he do that?”
            Sharon turned so that the tall man couldn’t see the tears on her cheeks.  “He joined a cult.”
            “A cult?  Sister West and her crew?” 
            Sharon nodded.  “I heard that a bunch of their leaders got arrested for kidnapping and murder a few years ago.”
            “I heard about something like that.”
            “I think they plan to stay over here,” Sharon said.
            Leo nodded.  “That wouldn’t surprise me.  It would be a tough life if you weren’t prepared though.  What will you do if you catch up with Sister West and company?”
            Sharon sighed.  “I don’t know.  If I get a chance I’ll grab my daughter and bring her back.  If they’re guarding her too well, I’ll go back and get help.  They stationed Marines in Rockport to protect the town during the Exchange.”
            Leo nodded.  “Do the Marines know your daughter is missing?”
            “Yes.”
            “Then why aren’t you in a jeep with a bunch of Marines.”
          “Because I got the run-around from them,” Sharon said.  “I think something in Bear Country has them spooked.”
           Leo nodded.  “A lot of their high tech gadgets don’t work here.  No Global Positioning Satellites.  No calling in air strikes.”
            “And there are no weather satellites.  A storm caught them right after the Exchange and knocked out a bunch of their equipment.”
            “So you came alone,” Leo said.  “That’s very brave of you.  A little girl shouldn’t be taken from her mother.  Maybe we should have a talk with this Darrel person.”
            “Oh, I intend to do more than talk.”
            “And how do you intend to keep from ending up the same way as last time?”
            “Next time he won’t sucker-punch me with a beer bottle,” Sharon said.  “I almost blocked it.  I would have, but I didn’t expect him to have the guts to try anything.  He knows I have a black belt.”
            Leo stopped and smiled down at her.  “A martial artist.  How interesting.  You’re a tough lady, too.  Most people would be in a hospital getting checked for a concussion.  I suppose you could have taken your gun back any time you wanted to.”  He turned and walked faster.
            Sharon had to hurry to catch up.  “That’s not something I’d try unless I had to.”
            Leo scanned the horizon.  “I hear something.  Sounds like horses.”
            “Are there any over here?”
            “Yeah, the old North American kind that died out at the end of the ice ages back in The World.  They’re close.  They must be in some kind of little dip that’s hiding them from us.”
            Sharon could hear the hoof-beats too now.  A dozen men on horseback abruptly appeared over a low hill in front of them.  Sharon looked at the men dressed in tattered remnants of orange prison uniforms and said, “So much for Adam and Eve.  Looks like some of the convicts survived.”
            Leo looked worried.  “I’m sure they’d all be happy to be Adam to your Eve.  I hope you know how to use that gun.”
            “I hope so too,” Sharon said.  “If they try anything they’ll come up missing body parts.  That part I’d enjoy, at least today.”
            The convicts rode up, deploying in a semi-circle.  One of them said, “What do we have here?  A couple of strays from the flock?”
            One of them looked at Leo, turned pale under the dirt on his face, and talked quietly to his neighbors.  Sharon caught a fragment of the reply, “…don’t care who he is.  I haven’t seen a woman in two years.”  She reached down and eased her pistol out of her belt.
            A small, balding convict spurred his horse toward her.  The man was armed only with a spear.  The other convicts stayed where they were.  Sharon raised the pistol.  She aimed at the center of the man’s chest and thumbed the hammer back.  She hesitated, with the sight wavering slightly around her aim point.  The convict grinned and kept coming.  Sharon fired.  The pistol jerked against her hand, and the crack of the bullet echoed in the suddenly still landscape.
            Sharon thumbed the hammer back again.  A red stain blossomed on the man’s shirt, just over his stomach, and the convict fell off his horse.  The horse ran off, dragging him.  Sharon saw the man’s head bounce as it hit a large rock.  She shuddered, the anger draining out of her.  The semi-circle of convicts dissolved into chaos as horses bucked and tried to bite their riders.  One convict fell off his horse, which promptly kicked him in the chest with both hind feet and ran off.  The convict did not get up.
            The remaining convicts got their horses under control.  One of them looked at Leo.  “Don’t imagine you’d think about selling the girl?”
            “No.”
            Sharon looked at her tall companion.  She surprised a strange, intent look in his eyes.  It faded as she watched.
            “Okay.  Let us get what’s left of Joe and collect the horse that ran off and we’ll be on our way.”
            “Fair enough.”
            The convicts rode off with the injured or dying men slung over their makeshift saddles.  Sharon watched them go.  “What just happened?”
            Leo shrugged.  “Maybe you scared them off.  You’ve obviously practiced with that thing.  Only three of them had guns and they may have been out of ammunition.”
            “I don’t think that was it,” Sharon said.
            Leo smiled.  “Then what do you think did happen?”
            “I don’t know.  Who are you?”
            “Leo.”
            “That’s not enough.”
            “No, it probably isn’t.  By the way, you just shot a man.  You may have killed him.  How does that make you feel?”  Leo looked down at her intently.
            Sharon shook her head.  “I haven’t had a chance to think about it yet.  I had to see him as just another target, so I did.”  She turned away, and then was abruptly nauseous.  With strong, callused hands Leo gently pushed her head down between her knees.  After a couple of moments she felt good enough to stand up again.  She automatically replaced the spent cartridge in the pistol.  “I’m sorry.  I have to stay strong.”
            “That’s fine.  That’s a healthy response.  Taking a life is not a trivial thing.”
            “Darrel—”
            “You won’t kill him,” Leo said.  “It won’t come to that.  Come with me.  I think our luck’s about to improve.”
            Leo walked off at a right angle from the ruts they had been following.  Sharon watched him for a couple of seconds. “Where are you going?”
            “Looks to me like one of Sister West’s trucks broke down and they pushed it this way to try to hide it.  I’m a pretty good mechanic.  I may be able to get it going.”
            Sharon looked at the ground.  “I don’t see anything.”
            Leo nodded.  “They tried to hide the trail.  I almost missed it myself.”
            They walked several hundred yards before Sharon spotted the truck.  It was in a small valley, with branches piled over it.  Leo went over, opened the hood and looked around, then did something with a couple of wires.  The truck started.  He looked up at Sharon.  “Battery wire worked loose with all of the jarring from going cross-country.  Looks like they did custom work on the suspension to make that stronger, but one little wire did them in.”  He wiped his hands on some grass, then opened the passenger door and bowed.  “Your carriage awaits you.”
            Sharon shook her head and climbed in.  Leo drove back to the ruts they had been following and swung onto the trail.  Sharon scanned the horizon in front of her, then relaxed a little.  She pushed the pain to the back of her mind and watched the little dramas of life around her.  A tiny brown bat landed on the rearview mirror.  It looked at its reflection in the mirror, raised its wings, hissed a tiny hiss, and then flew away.  A bird swooped down at the little bat.  Sharon didn’t see whether or not the bat got away.  Half a dozen birds were flying near the truck, swooping down and snapping up insects and small bats disturbed by its passage.
            Sharon sniffed.  “I smell gas or exhaust.”
         Leo grinned.  “Nothing out of the ordinary.  You just spent a couple of hours without smelling any kind of pollution.  It reset your sensitivity.  I bet the engine sounds louder too.  You haven’t been hearing man-made noises lately either.”
            They drove on for nearly an hour. The truck crested a hill and nearly ran down a large cat-like animal as it fed on a buffalo calf.  The animal backed off, showing fangs as long as hunting knives.  The sabertooth cat made an impressive-looking charge toward the truck but stopped before it made contact.  Leo slowed down but kept edging forward.  The sabertooth backed off, then circled around the truck once they were past its prey.  It stood growling at them, then went back to feeding.
            Sharon looked over at Leo.  “Thanks for the carriage ride.  I wouldn’t have wanted to meet that thing on foot.”
            He grinned.  “Happy to be of service.”  The grin didn’t fade when Sharon pulled out a pistol.
            “Too bad it has to end now, before you drive me right into Sister West’s compound and deliver me to them.”
            Leo chuckled.  “I didn’t think I could quite pull that off.  I knew the truck bit was a little too obvious, but I didn’t want to spend the night walking out here.  I took the precaution of switching guns with you while you were climbing into the truck.  The one you have now is empty.  Yours was a revolver.  This one isn't.”
            Sharon glanced down at the unfamiliar weapon.  She shifted her aim point to a couple of inches away from his left ear and pulled the trigger.  The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.  Sharon looked at the gun, then at Leo.  All of the anger, frustration, and pain of the day was in her voice.  “I don’t care if you’re six-foot-four, outweigh me two to one and have my gun.  If the mind-games don’t stop right now, I’m going to tear off one of your arms and beat you with it.  Who are you?”
            Leo nodded.  “Okay, I deserved that.  My name’s Leo West.”