He soared up and over the bay. Up, up and up the limitless breeze bore him, until he settled into a stream of air barely thin enough to support his outspread wings. Cool blue sky rolled away beneath him, clouds like cotton balls in its depths. Above him a blue-black void seemed to beckon, bearing him off into a cobalt blue dream.

There was sensation only; no thought, no wonder, no worry, just a sense of un-being.

He woke diving into a distant sun that was no longer a star. His feathers were stripped from him by a force he could not describe, a force of some limitless weight. Naked of his feathers he plunged, blazing-black, the color of the force, until his outstretched wing bones lengthened and disintegrated. The pressure on his elongating skull was too much to bear—an infinity of agony—as his beak lengthened ahead of him until it bent with the curve of Time itself. Agony piled on agony until he burst into light that could not shine, collapsing into the irresistible liquid force which carried him away into everything.

He came to searing life as a man—no, a purposeful being, not some pathetic grasping ape; but an aggregate of information built by some unseen inner hand according to an ancient code…

The sky was a clear blue with a distant quality to it, that is, where the heavy slate-gray clouds did not obscure the sky itself. It was mid-afternoon but with the light of dawn. The world itself was softly lit thanks to the limitless white of the snow-colored plain on which he stood. Beneath him, not 30 paces off, the plain gave way to a vast shallow depression, down which meandered a distant sliver of a stream, around which clustered some stands of stunted trees. He felt as if he were in the same place, though his vision said different.

He grasped something in his left talon—the platinum hoop, seemingly dead now.

A faint warmth could be sensed above him, where a cloud-masked sun barely managed to warm the back of his bald head.

“Tina!”

His voice seemed to carry dully into the sky, not even comforting him with an echo.

“Some clothes would have been nice!”

He looked down and saw a ring of mud about three feet across, with him standing in the center of the not so cold mud. A light bulb went off in his head. He slid the hoop over his head but barely, resigned to be a platinum necklace-wearing dude for the duration of his stay, and began scooping handfuls of the body-temperature mud and painting himself from head to toe.

After what must have been an hour, based on the falling of the sun in the west over his mud-caked shoulder, he stood looking like a man of clay. Only the soles of his feet were cold, the permafrost below having already cooled his access area and beginning to seep the killing cold up into his bones.

He heard a sound that was part bull snort, part wolf howl, behind him. He turned to look over his mud-caked shoulder to the west and saw, with the outline of some distant indistinct snow-covered hills as a backdrop, a very large brown dog loping toward him.

He concentrated on the loping image and, when it passed a stunted pine about a half-mile away, and then paused to snort in an asking way again, he noticed it’s shoulders were bearlike but too high in the front, and that it had a bear’s face without the snout.

Pozer was running for the distant river before he even made the decision, as the chill that travelled up his spine from the realization that he was being rundown my a giant short-faced bear, an animal that was probably as fast as a horse, flooded his consciousness. The ironic things was, is that bear had always been his favorite prehistoric animal, because it was so darned fast, and Pozer had always been faster than any kid, even faster than the college basketball players that ran on the track. The Man in The Gray Suit had always told him to let them pass, so nobody would know he was special, and thereby bring worry to Mom about him going off to play with some ball team.

He was running so fast when he hit the rim of the depression that he found himself plunging out over a hillside that was deeper than he had realized. He was soon rolling over and over down a hundred yards of snow-covered slope. When he scrambled to his feet and looked back over his shoulder to the rim above, he felt the cold against his body, largely denuded of his protective mud by the roll in the snow. If the thing had made it to the rim this quickly he was toast.

He found himself sprinting flat out for a tree stand that was a half-mile distant, hoping with all of his pounding heart that being the fastest Polish kid in 21st Century America was going to be enough to stay ahead of that drooling rack of meat-munching canines. Being naked felt right, as he fairly glided across the grass depression, covered as it was by only about five inches of light powder.

He heard the wet muzzle-like wolf of the lumbering creature as it barreled down over the decline. He somehow ran faster, his knees pumping to his shoulders, his arms knifing the air, his piss stinging his muddy ankles and staining the snow behind him like a shameful trail left by some chicken-shit German kid so he wouldn’t get lost coming home from that old wart-nosed lady’s scary house in the woods.

To be continued in Out of Time #9: Munch and Me.