Your Mother Was a Neanderthal (4 page)

I tried to move but couldn’t. Something was weighing me down.

“You can hear, can’t you?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“So we’re not dead.”

“But it sure smells like something died,” said Fred.

I gave a sniff. It smelled like two or three things had died ... and taken their old sneakers off at the same time.

“Maybe we are dead,” said Sam. “Maybe this is what being dead is like—all dark and quiet and smelly.”

Fred and I thought about this for a few dark, quiet, and smelly moments. It was not a comforting thought.

“What’s that noise?” said Fred.

We strained to hear a faint murmuring sound.

“Sounds like human voices,” I said.

We listened again.

“It is human voices,” said Sam. He screamed,
“Help! Help! We’re not dead. Get us out of here!”

“Uh, Sam,” I said.

“Yes?”

“What if they’re not friendly people?”

“Oh, right. I didn’t think of that.”

“Too late,” said Fred’s voice. “Here they come, whoever they are.”

We held our breath and listened to the noises get louder and closer. Now it didn’t sound so much like human voices. Now it sounded more like animal noises.

“Sounds like monkeys,” said Sam. “Maybe it’s a band of wild apes. Maybe it’s a bunch of hungry cave bears. Maybe it’s—”

“Shhhh,”
I whispered. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

And at that very second, the smelly thing covering us was pulled back. Cool air and faint light washed over us. We found ourselves face to face with a big hairy ape.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!”
Sam, Fred, and I all screamed together.

The hairy ape jumped back.

Without the heavy cover on us, we found we could sit up and move again ... though not too swiftly. I still felt like I just stepped off a bad amusement park ride. Our eyes adjusted to the light. I looked around and figured we must have been knocked out all night. We were sitting in a dirt pit covered with a low roof made from a bunch of logs piled on a fallen tree. There was one hole in the roof where we must have fallen through, and another that looked like a small doorway near the ground.

A whole group of hairy ape-men with ragged animal skins tied on them surrounded us. They looked us over like we were monkeys in the zoo.

“Hey, they’re caveguys,” said Fred.

“The same guys we saw running from the girls’ fake dinosaur,” said Sam.

I looked at the scruffy bunch of guys. The biggest one. with the beard definitely looked familiar. He approached us cautiously, making noises that sounded like “Hoot, hoot.” He held out one gnarly hand, black with dirt.

I took his hand and shook it. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Hoot. My name is Joe. Sorry to drop in on your pit—er, house here.”

Dirty bits of hide and fur hung from sticks. Piles of dead leaves covered the dirt floor. And the whole place smelled like a combination of old socks, bad cheese, and public bathrooms. “Reminds me of your room, Fred.”

The bearded guy wiggled my hand and hooted again. The rest of his gang shuffled their feet in the dirt and hooted along.

“Hoot, hoot, to you too,” I said. “Oh, and these are my friends Fred and Sam.”

The big guy pointed to Fred and Sam. “Ug a ug.”

“Close enough,” I said.

The big guy put his hand on his chest and said, “Duh.”

“No kidding,” said Sam.

“Duh,” the caveguy repeated.

I said, “Duh. Okay, Duh. Too bad about your name, but thanks for letting us use your ... uh, place.” I looked around the pit again. It really was a pit.

“No chance these guys would have
The Book,”
said Fred.

“Boog?” said Duh.

“Yeah, a book. You know. A thing about this big.” Fred held out two hands pressed together. “With pages. A magic book.”

“Boog. Boog.” The leader, Duh motioned to one of the other men. He started digging under a pile of sticks and dirt in the back of the pit.

“I can’t believe it,” said Sam. “These guys live in a hole in the ground and they have
The Book?
Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”

The little guy found what he was looking for and brought it to Duh.

“You just never know with magic,” I said.

Duh took the animal skin wrap and handed it to me and smiled. “Boog.”

Joe, Sam, and I crowded around the package.

“Hello magic book. Good-bye Stone Age,” cheered Fred. “I never thought I could be this happy to get back to my math homework.”

I unwrapped the skin as fast as I could and held up a completely rotten, maggot-covered ... piece of meat.

Duh smiled and nodded. “Boog.” He took a bite, rubbed his stomach, and handed it to us again. “Boog.”

Fred, Sam, and I gagged and started crawling for fresh air through the hole in the low roof.

We hit the space between two logs at the same time and all tried to get out first. The caveguys grabbed us and pulled us back.

Duh pointed outside and shook his head, “Ug Caa.” He made a weird face with his teeth showing and his hands in front of him like claws. “Ug Caa.”

Fred made a funny gurgling noise. “Let me go or I’m going to Ug Caa all over you.”

Fred broke loose from the guy holding him and squeezed between the logs into the fresh air. Sam and I were just about to follow when we
heard Fred scream the loudest scream I’ve ever heard Fred scream.

F
red dove back inside like a bullet. A split second later something large, furry, and mad crashed into the logs behind him. Dirt and dead leaves showered down on us. A huge paw with wicked long claws shot between the logs. and swiped the air. Everyone dove for the ground. Through the cracks and holes between the logs I could see fangs, claws, and a cat as big as a small bus.

The gigantic cat swatted at the roof logs and roared its disappointment at missing a meal. More dirt and dead leaves rained down on us. And then, with one log-creaking bounce, the cat jumped and was gone.

Duh uncovered his head. “Caa.”

“Cat?” said Fred. “That was no cat. Why didn’t you tell me there was a monster with fangs out there?”

“Most likely a saber-toothed cave cat,” said Sam.

“Thank you once again, Mr. Superior Brainpower. I feel so much better now that I know the name of the thing that almost ate me for breakfast. Now do you have any bright ideas on how to get us out of this jam?”

Sam looked at the raggedy bunch of cavemen crouched in the dirt around us. “Okay, let’s look at this logically.” He picked up a stick and drew a dot and a letter in the dirt. “We are at point A, a hole in the ground with a bunch of guys with no weapons, no tools, and quite possibly no brains.”

The cavemen looked at Sam’s drawing and hooted.

“We would like to get to point B.” He drew another dot and labeled it
B.
“Joe’s room in New York.”

Duh and the rest of the cavemen looked closely at the marks in the dirt.

“But the only way to get to B is go past C, a rather large killer cat, into D, the cave, to find E, the cave painting.” Sam ended with a wild flourish of dots, lines, a triangle-headed cat, an arc for the cave, and three stick figures for the painting.

“Do you follow?”

The caveguys studied Sam’s drawings and nodded and grunted to themselves.

“But how do we do that?” asked Fred.

“How do we do that?” said Sam, tapping his head with his stick. “How?
Hmmmm.
Now that’s a whole different question. Magic, I guess.”

Sam and Fred turned to me.

“I’ve still got my straw,” I said, hopefully.

“Would you forget that stupid straw trick. We need some big magic,” said Fred. “Why didn’t you learn spells to make us invisible, or gigantic, or able to blast fire out of our eyes, or something useful like that?”

“I didn’t think we’d need any magic if we kept The Book with us.”

We all stared at Sam’s drawing again, looking from A to B, worrying about C and D, wondering how we would ever find E.

“Now I really wish we had some weapons,” said Fred. “One blast of an Uzi would turn that monster into a scaredy-cat.”

Sam looked up. “As Archimedes once said—Eureka.”

“We’re going to make machine guns?” I said.

“No. We’re going to scare the cat,” said Sam.

“With what? Your good looks?” said Fred.

Sam pretended not to hear. “With the one thing man has power over, that the animal does not.” Sam stood up and paused for effect. “Fire.”

“Hey, yeah,” said Fred. “That always works in those Tarzan movies.”

“But where do we get the fire?” I said. “We lost our matches. And I think these guys eat everything raw.”

Fred gagged. “Don’t mention eating again.”

Sam broke his stick and began rubbing the two pieces together. “We’ll invent fire.” He rubbed and rubbed. The cavemen watched closely. The sticks got warm. I took over and rubbed. The sticks stayed warm. Fred grabbed the sticks and rubbed. The cavemen hooted. Fred rubbed. The cavemen hooted. Fred rubbed harder. The cavemen hooted. Fred rubber harder. And then ... the sticks broke.

Fred fell over backward. “This is never going to work. Joe, you must remember some magic.”

One of the cavemen picked up the sticks and tried rubbing them together.

I thought about magic to scare the cat. I thought about my straw trick and suddenly had an idea. “How about this,” I said, pulling out the straw.

Fred rolled over. “If you show that straw one more time I’m going to take it and personally shove it—”

I took a jagged piece of rock from the ground and used it to cut one end of the straw in a V. I put it to my lips and blew a blast on my new straw horn. The caveguys’ eyes bugged out.

I wrapped the fur cover around me and danced around, waving my arms and honking the straw. The caveguys dove for the ground again.

“Now that’s how you scare a cat,” said Sam.

I threw off the fur, and cut the straw into three pieces and made a point at the end of each piece. “That’s how
we
scare a cat,” I said, handing Fred and Sam a straw.

“What do you mean we?” asked Sam.

“I mean three heads and three straws are better than one.”

Fred grabbed the fur and wrapped it around the three of us.

“Do we really want to do this?” said Sam. “Maybe we should think this through.”

Fred stuck two branching sticks behind our heads and said, “Horns.”

The cavemen stayed frozen on the ground, looking at us in bug-eyed amazement. Duh stared at us and touched the fur with one careful finger. Fred blew a blast on his straw. Duh jumped five feet.

“Okay, you guys,” said Fred. “This is it. We have to charge out there and look like the meanest two-horned, three-headed beast on earth.”

We shuffled up to the opening at one end of the pit where the roof met the ground. “And blow your horn like your life depends on it,” I said.