The seelo was dead now. The Chindesaurus was ripping long strips of meat off of it, eating in the dark desert under a cloud of ash, a monster enjoying a prehistoric afternoon picnic in the shadow of a volcanic eruption that might be the opening act in an extinction event.
Sam kept digging.
A dark cloud drifted past and behind it a giant croc emerged, as if conjured by magic, its footsteps silenced by the sand. The Chindesaurus barely had time to turn its head before it was ripped off by the massive jaws of the croc. The prey didn’t even have time to scream.
The croc tossed the severed head aside, scooped the body up with its mouth, and slipped back into the black clouds.
Sam’s heart skipped a beat. For a long moment, he didn’t move. He simply stared at the place where the giant croc had disappeared.
In a world where giant creatures battled to the death, it was good to be small.
Sam resumed digging until the shallow pit was deep enough for him to lie down in. He reached back and covered his legs and lower body in the sand. The gash on his back hurt like crazy, but there was nothing he could do about it. He sensed that it was infected. It needed to be addressed soon. Like so many small problems in life, it would fester and become a real issue. Maybe he could find some sort of natural antiseptic, perhaps some sap from the large trees in the forest. He could certainly cauterize the wound. But that all assumed he didn’t get eaten in the desert.
It was a big assumption.
For a long while, Sam lay in his sand pit, only his arms and head exposed, waiting, watching the desert.
With each passing minute, the cloud of smoke and ash pushed down to the ground, filling the air. Sam pulled his tank top up to cover his mouth, but his body still wanted to cough. He resisted. That small sound would paint a target on him, bringing predators across the haze.
In the dense smoke, he heard the volcano belching out more eruptions, far smaller than the first two.
In the seconds after each one, Sam heard the pattering of rocks landing in the sand.
Every eruption stirred a few of the dinosaurs and reptiles, inciting them to move across the sand, perhaps back to the forest or the swamp, where they thought they might find safety.
It made sense—if death was falling from the sky, getting to shelter was wise. But the motion was their downfall. Through the cloud of smoke, Sam heard screeches as the animals fought each other or were caught by the giant crocs. The brutal killings were hidden in the darkness, and Sam was thankful for that.
There was something about the smoke around him and being buried in the sand that made Sam reflect on his life. Or maybe it was facing death, but for whatever reason, he saw his life then as it truly was. To him, there were two clearly defined epochs. The time before: when he and Sarah were young and hopeful, with two kids and their life ahead of them. And the time after. After she passed. After Absolom was invented. In those long years, it had felt as though the universe tilted, and he couldn’t get his footing. In those years, he felt buried by the events of his life, shrouded in smoke from the wreckage of the loss, waiting for the next eruption, for a burning hot rock to fall on him, or life’s next monster to maul him out of earthly existence.
Lying there in the sand, in this prehistoric time, he finally did what he couldn’t do in his own time: he faced the fact that he had been mentally stuck. In a way, even before Absolom sent him to this place, he had been lost in time. He knew that now. He had been trapped in the past, never moving forward with his life. That was the reason he could never really commit to Nora.
In the after epoch, he had sort of floated through life, reacting, trying not to get hurt again. Even before Absolom, he had been a prisoner of time.
He vowed that if he ever got home, he would start a third era of his existence. He would love again with his whole heart. He would engage with friends and family, knowing life was full of pain and that was simply the way it was.
He had heard of people going out into the wilderness to search for the meaning of life. Before that moment, he had thought that was nonsense. Now, he saw it. There was no single meaning of life—there was only the meaning of your life. For Sam, that meaning came from understanding the past and how it impacted his thinking—and mastering it. That was the key to his future.
And he sensed that, in a practical way, he held the key to getting back to that future in his pocket. The pins. They were made by Absolom Sciences. Sent here for some reason. It had to be related to him, to rescuing him.
He reached down, through the sand, and took out the six metal pins he had collected. In the darkness, he saw something he had missed in the light of day: a red LED that glowed at the end of each pin.