Fatalis

The visitor crawls on her belly through the thorny underbrush of the African veldt.

Overhead, a younger sun blazes. Its rays, two million years stronger, are absorbed by her waveshift™ invisibility veil, and re-emitted as discrete packets of infra-red, safely outside the range of human sight. The slight energy imbalance causes heat to accumulate, forcing her to lie in a putrid bath of her own sweat, but she keeps the veil activated. The principle of non-interference takes up a whole semester of the University of Stuttgart’s chrono-archaeology degree, and the visitor was top of her class.

Edging forward, she peels away the final layer of yellowing foliage to reveal a small clearing beneath a rocky overhang. Her breath catches in her throat, heart forgetting a beat. A relieved smile splits the sheen of sweat behind her facial cover.

She counts eleven of them, sitting in a rough circle at the base of the overhang. By their height and gently sloped brows, she knows that these are Homo erectus; the hardy hominid that paved the way for the rise of sapiens.

The visitor scans the group, mentally logging their number, sex, approximate age, and distinguishing characteristics, noting with pleasure that these are the erectus she seeks. Finally, and most importantly, she observes that despite the stone implements and crudely-decorated animal skin clothing, there is no dark stain on the overhang; no white smear of ash in the baked earth. These early explorers, for all their nascent ingenuity, have yet to master the one crucial tool that will allow them, and later sapiens, to rampage unchecked across a virgin Earth.

They have no fire.

The visitor’s blood pumps noisily in her ears. Shifting uncomfortably on the rough ground, she blinks sweat from her brow. She’s been here before. Tomorrow this very group will be picking softened roots from the coals of the first flames ever tamed by life on Earth. After ten years of searching, all she has to do now is sit tight, and she will witness the harnessing of fire, ensuring her name is footnoted in every chrono-archaeological textbook to come. She fiddles nervously with the latch on the holster of her last resort.

Hours pass. The sun dips below the cliff-face, finally affording the visitor a modicum of thermal relief. The shadows grow long on the veldt. In the clearing, most of the group huddle together beneath the cliff-face, seeking the comfort and protection of the warm volcanic rock.

A single erectus remains in the clearing; a child of about three years. He stumbles about on thick, hairy legs, swatting curiously at lightning bugs with a three-pronged stick. The visitor is struck by the joy on the child’s simple face. The emotion seems so pure, transcendent almost. It reminds her, painfully, of another child. A child separated from this one by an ocean and two million years. A child she once loved, raised, and cherished. A child she lost. A single tear streaks the visitor’s cheek as she watches, and remembers.

A murmur of unease emerges from the group. The visitor snaps to attention. She listens as low pitched grunts of affection turn into piercing cries of a different, yet equally timeless emotion: terror.

Fearful eyes peer out from the shivering huddle of primates. They look past the child, who still plays in the foreground, and into the underbrush—directly at the visitor. For a moment, she is convinced her veil has malfunctioned, but the status symbols on her HUD read green.

Then she sees the beast.

It pads calmly into the clearing, about two meters to her left, moving with a breed of carefree arrogance that only comes attached to three-hundred kilograms of feline muscle. Drool soaks a pair of mouth-mounted biological machetes, dripping from each razor-tip, leaving a trail to mark the passage of one of evolution’s nightmares; a predator that rose to fill the niche left empty by the tyrannosaurs. Smilodon fatalis: the saber-toothed tiger.

Panic flares. The visitor’s hand shoots reflexively to her last resort, but she stops herself just in time. The beast hasn’t noticed her. For the moment at least, fatalis has its eye on a sweeter, more delicate meat.

Finally noticing the consternation from its family, the child looks down and sees the approaching tiger. But there is no cry of fear, no wail or flood of tears. Instead, he grins at his soon-to-be devourer, letting out a joyful squeak. Raising his tiny stick, the child waves it about in a wordless, but clear message. Come and play with me!

Fatalis seems only too happy to oblige. The tiger picks up the pace as it closes in on what must be its easiest dinner of the week. Its eyes are bright with hunger, and trained like laser-sights on the tiny hominid.

A single warlike shout rises from the group. One of the older males charges forward, spear in hand. He grunts, releasing the weapon, putting his entire body behind the throw like an olympic javelin competitor. His aim is true. The spear catches fatalis square in the shoulder, stone tip disappearing into a boulder of mottled brawn. Blood dribbles from the wound. Fatalis stumbles to a knee.

Silence falls.

The visitor’s heart leaps. The child might have a chance—but only if he runs now. Run to your family, little one! For heaven’s sake, run!

Then comes a low growl, like a landslide deep within the earth, or an approaching avalanche. Regaining its feet, Fatalis opens its mouth, bottom jaw extending grotesquely to free those infamous canines. Reaching back, it clamps the spear between its teeth and bites down. Splinters fly. The shaft drops to the ground like a discarded toothpick, leaving only a few inches of wood protruding from the bloody fur.

Rearing back on its stunted hind-legs, fatalis unleashes a roar that renders the visitor temporarily deaf. A few small rocks tumble down the cliff-face, crashing into the group of hominids as they pile closer together. The thrower seems frozen in place. He shivers as yellowish liquid pools between his feet.

The tiger takes one step toward him. It’s enough to bring him to his senses. Turning, he scrambles on all fours back to the group, burrowing into the mass of bodies like a baby rat fighting to reach its mother’s teat.

With a dismissive snort, the tiger returns its attention to the child. Still the boy does not flee.

The visitor cannot pull her eyes away, though in her mind she is beside a hospital bed, holding a fragile little hand as a beast of a different, but just as unstoppable nature prepares to strike. She was helpless then, and she is helpless now.

About two meters out from its quarry, fatalis crouches, preparing for the killing pounce, stubby tail flicking dangerously from side to side. It tenses, ready to release in an ecstasy of flight, and blood, and feasting.

Then a shrill cry pierces the silence. The beast staggers, looking around in confusion as a neat circle of charred flesh appears on its side, flowed by another, and another.

It takes the visitor a moment to realize she’s holding the last resort out in front of her, finger tight on the trigger of the small microwave weapon. It takes her another to realize the cry is coming from her own throat, from deep within her bowels, from back across the ages to her own future past. Horrified, she cuts it short, dropping the weapon. The gravity of what’s she’s done begins to seep in. She’s broken the solemn covenant that each chrono-archaeologist must take; she’s interfered with the past, and in doing so, she’s endangered the future.

Fatalis, of course, knows none of this. It knows only pain, confusion, and threat. In modern mammals, these emotions would trigger a fight or flight decision. But for Smilodon fatalis, apex predator, ruler of the veldt for five thousand centuries, no such decision could ever exist.

Snarling, it spins around, scanning the surrounding scrubland for its presumed assailant.

The visitor lies still as a corpse, hoping the beast cannot hear her heart wage thunderous war against her ribcage.
Fatalis lifts its nose to the air, closing its eyes, flaring its nostrils, drinking in the cool evening breeze. A breeze, the visitor realizes, that blows from where she lies directly toward the enraged tiger. Quietly, she reaches again for the last resort.

Not quietly enough.

Fatalis opens its eyes. Though the visitor knows it is impossible, she could swear they are focused on her.
The tiger leaps, covering the distance to her position in under a second—barely enough time to grab the pistol and squeeze off a single shot—point-blanc into the murderous face of the oncoming beast. Blinded and whimpering, it barrels past her into the underbrush.

The visitor chooses flight.

She races across the clearing, bundling the child over her shoulder and depositing him in the waiting arms of his hysterical mother. What the group must think is happening, she can only imagine. She wonders if she has just started some sort of cult, but she doesn’t stay to find out.

Tearing away through the scrubland, she mentally toggles the emergency extraction icon on her HUD. A timer starts, giving her forty seconds until the rift portal is stable enough to return her to her own time. The heat build-up inside the veil becomes unbearable. She stops to catch her breath. Slumping against a tree, she comes to a sitting position on a protruding root, vision blurring from the exertion, the sweat, and now from the tears that salt her cheeks.

The twilight shadows seem to shift and morph as daylight fades. Above the distant hilltops, a faint, but familiar sickle of stars twinkles into view. Leo, she realizes with a weary smile. The big cat rises.

Thirty seconds.

The visitor’s heart pounds in her ears. Second by second, it slows, quieting as she regains control. Darkness reaches down from the heavens and covers her like a blanket. Elation begins to rise atop a flood of endorphins. Salvation is at hand. I’m going home!

Twenty seconds.

Something is wrong. Her heart beats louder, and faster. She can feel it in the earth, reverberating through the bark of the tree against her back. Thudthud, thudthud, THUDTHUD.

Too late, she understands. It’s not her heart that pounds; it’s footsteps—quadrupedal footsteps racing in the dark. Racing closer.

Fifteen seconds.

Dimly, the visitor remembers modern housecats have a wider range of vision than their owners. Cold sick rises in her throat. She chokes it back down.

Ten seconds.

Ahead, the bushes part and a shadow hurtles toward her, an unstoppable meteor of flesh, bone and murderous vengeance. A single damaged feline eye glints madly above a pair of thirty-centimeter canines that glow like crescent moons.

The visitor watches as if in a dream. Almost as an afterthought, she raises her last resort, squeezing hopelessly even as the shadow leaps and descends upon her, jaws wide, claws extended.

The tiger is dead by the time it crashes into her—brain boiled by the close-range concentration of microwave fire—but its weight alone is enough to cave in her sternum, driving jagged fragments of smashed ribs through her heart. A single saber-tooth pierces the visitor’s neck, severing the carotid artery and filling the inside of the veil with heavy spurts of sticky warmth. The pistol is jammed beneath the beast. Still firing uselessly, it bores a tunnel through muscle and bone and blazes on into the veldt, setting the dry scrubland alight. Aromatic smoke carries on the wind.

A calm falls over the visitor. Strangely there is no pain, though she feels her thoughts slow as sensation gradually retreats from her extremities. So this is what it is like to die.

Five seconds.

Her vision fades to a long, narrow tunnel, not unlike the rift portal that will soon carry her lifeless body back to the present. But this, she knows, is a different kind of passage. Darkness pours in from all sides, and the visitor clings to a vision of dancing firelight—her last tenuous link to the world of the living.

She forces herself to remember the face of her child. She craves that one small comfort before she joins him in the afterlife. But the memories slip from her, flowing outward like rain from a rocky hillside. Frustration wells, then subsides as she sees something moving through the flames. It’s the small erectus she saved. He’s tottering towards her, heavy-set features determined and solemn. His eyes shine, not with the light of the moon or stars, but with a deeper, brighter spark.

The last thing the visitor sees is a burning branch, held high and torch-like in the child’s tiny hand.