Chapter 1: The First Whore's Lair
The world tore itself apart behind his eyelids. It wasn’t a sound, but a scream of unraveling physics, a sensation of every molecule in his body being combed through a cosmic sieve.Then, silence. A silence so thick and deep it pressed against his eardrums like wet wool.
C. Parker opened his eyes.The sterile white of his basement lab was gone. The hum of capacitors, the flicker of LED readouts—vanished. He was on his hands and knees, palms pressing into cool, gritty soil.The air hit him first. It was damp, organic, heavy with the scent of wet stone, woodsmoke, and something else—a musky, animal odor that was both foreign and deeply, instinctively familiar.He gagged, his glasses askew.
A glow pulsed against his retinas.Not electric light, but the shuddering, orange dance of flame. He pushed the glasses back onto his nose and looked up.
A cavern mouth stretched before him, a ragged tear in the side of a cliff. Inside, firelight licked the walls, painting leaping shadows that twisted and convulsed.The shadows had sources.Figures. Hulking, fur-draped shapes moved in the gloom, their voices a low, guttural rumble of grunts and snorts that formed a crude, percussive language.A wave of vertigo rocked him. The calculations had been perfect.The containment field, stable. The temporal coordinates, locked to the Pleistocene, a calculated gamble to witness hominid migration patterns.He had not accounted for the smell. The overwhelming, non-theoretical reality of it.
He staggered to his feet, his synthetic-fiber hiking clothes absurdly bright against the earth tones of the world.A sharp pain bit into his sole. He lifted his foot. A human femur, gnawed clean, lay half-buried in the dirt.Next to it, the shattered skull of a giant herbivore. This wasn’t a sterile dig site.This was a doorstep.
A different shadow detached itself from the others and filled the cave mouth.It was a man, if man was the word. He was a slab of muscle draped in poorly cured hides, his face a topography of scars and thick brow bone. In one hand, he held a hafted stone axe. In the other, the severed, bloody haunch of some large creature. His eyes, small and dark like a boar’s, fixed on Parker.He didn’t speak. He grunted, a sound of pure territorial inquiry, and hefted the axe.
Parker’s mind, his brilliant, theory-crammed mind, went blank.Every protocol, every planned greeting phrase, evaporated. He took a stumbling step back, his hands rising in what he hoped was a universal gesture of harmlessness.
The scarred man took a step forward, his nostrils flaring as he scented the stranger.
From deeper within the cave, a sound cut through the tension.It was a laugh.Low, rasping, and utterly confident. The scarred man paused, glancing over his shoulder.
On a wide, flat stone just inside the cave’s threshold, a woman reclined.The firelight worshipped her.
She was a vision of impossible, brutal abundance. Wild, flame-red hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back like a cascade of copper. Her body was a series of profound curves, a deliberate advertisement of fertility and survival in a starving age.Enormous, heavy breasts strained against a thin wrapping of soft fur. Her hips flared dramatically from a narrow waist, and her thighs, vast and powerful, were spread open against a pile of mixed pelts. A loincloth of fox hide did little to conceal the junction of them.A string of crude shell beads nestled in the deep valley of her cleavage.
Her face was sharp, intelligent. High cheekbones, a wide mouth with lips so full they seemed swollen, and eyes the color of forest moss. They held a knowing, a cynical amusement that seemed millennia ahead of its time.She was using a flint blade to pick at her teeth.She saw Parker staring. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled the blade from her mouth and let her gaze travel from his terrified face down to his vibrating legs and back up.Her knowing grin widened.She said something. A series of gruff, rounded syllables that meant nothing to Parker’s ears, but the tone was unmistakable: a mocking, playful challenge. She hooked a finger, greasy with marrow, and beckoned him closer.
The scarred man grunted again, this time at her, a note of clear protest in his voice.
Una—though Parker did not yet know her name—rolled her eyes, a shockingly modern gesture. She jerked her head towards the darkness of the cave, a clear dismissal.For a moment, the man with the axe stood his ground. Then, with a last, threatening glare at Parker, he turned and lumbered back into the cave, taking his meat with him.
Parker stood frozen, caught between the receding threat and the potent allure on the stone. His scientist’s mind finally rebooted, screaming observations.Homo sapiens sapiens. Pronounced sexual dimorphism.Evidence of social hierarchy.Ritual or trade-based interaction?
Una patted the space on the pelts beside her massive thigh. She then reached behind her and produced a fist-sized chunk of dark, cooked meat.It steamed gently in the cool air.She held it up, her eyebrows raised. Then, with her other hand, she pointed at the meat, then at herself, then slowly ran her palm over the spectacular swell of her hip.The message was crystalline.Translation wasn’t needed.
Nothing here was free.
“I… I have no…” Parker stammered, then uselessly patted his pockets. He had a multi-tool, a laser pointer, a high-energy protein bar in foil.He fumbled the bar out.“Trade? Barter?”
Her eyes locked onto the shiny silver wrapper.She tilted her head, intrigued. She pointed at it, then made the same explicit hip gesture.“No, it’s… it’s food. Sustenance.” He tore the wrapper open, breaking off a piece of the dense, beige block. He offered it.She sniffed the air, then leaned forward, her breasts shifting heavily with the movement. She took the proffered piece, her fingers brushing his. Her skin was surprisingly smooth, calloused only in specific places.She popped it in her mouth, chewed once, twice. Her face scrunched up in vivid disgust and she spat it onto the ground between her feet.
She laughed again, louder this time, a sound that drew glances from the others in the cave. She shook her head, as if pitying a child. Food, she declared with her entire demeanor, was not the issue. She held up the mammoth meat again, then pointed insistently at his clothes, his strange boots, finally back at herself.She wanted the wrapper. The shiny, crinkly, miraculous wrapper.Parker felt a hysterical laugh bubbling in his chest. He was forty-two years old, a pioneer of temporal physics, and he was about to trade his garbage to a prehistoric prostitute for a bite of mystery meat.He nodded, slowly.Her grin turned triumphant. She tossed the meat to him.He fumbled the catch, almost dropping it. It was greasy, warm, and smelled rich and wild.He took a hesitant bite. The flavor was overwhelming, intensely gamy and smoky.It was the most real thing he had ever tasted.
As he chewed, she held out her hand, wiggling her fingers.He handed over the empty protein bar wrapper. She took it with the reverence of a priestess accepting an idol. She rubbed it between her fingers, held it to the firelight to watch it shimmer, then tucked it carefully into a fold of her pelt bed.The transaction was complete.She looked at him, expectant. The invitation in her posture had not changed.The meat had been an appetizer. The main course was still on the table.Parker’s vertigo returned.This wasn’t observation.This was immersion. This was the raw, unvarnished calculus of survival, where flesh was both sustenance and currency, and his theories were as useful as ashes. He held the half-eaten mammoth haunch, the grease slick on his chin, and understood with a cold, clarifying shock that he was not a time traveler here.He was a resource.
And as he looked from Una’s patiently waiting, ruthless smile to the dark cave beyond, where the scarred man and others like him watched, he knew his supply of shiny things was very, very limited.