Chapter 5
Be Grateful for What You Have

I threw open my door just in time to see the last of the smoke dissolve. At my feet was another pile of rotten flesh…and no shovel. Whether it had burned with its owner or vanished according to some rule of this world, I couldn't say. I also couldn't waste a minute mourning its loss. This was going to be an awesome day, I could feel it. Last night I'd turned the corner on shelter, and now I was ready to kiss hunger goodbye.

Wooden hoe in hand, I carried the seeds out to a patch of dirt near the shore. Just like before, they jumped right into the freshly tilled soil. How long would it take before they ripened? No way to know. But if they did turn out to be edible, it'd make sense to plant a whole lot more.

Punching the other grass clumps turned up zilch so I decided to spend the morning scrounging. I climbed quickly up the slope of Disappointment Hill and trotted casually down to the central meadow. I wasn't worried about any more zombies this time. I knew the dawn had taken care of them. A good start to a good day, I thought, punching up the tall grass. It wasn't long before I'd cleared the whole field, and had three handfuls of seeds to show for it.

"Moo," came a call from the nearby woods, followed by a "baa" and two quick "cluckclucks."

"Hey, g'morning!" I waved to the animals. "You guys would not believe the night I just had."

Bounding happily over, I described my discovery of crafting, and gave a show-and-tell of my tools.

"Cool, eh?" I asked, expecting the usual disinterested glances. "No, I get it," I said, "you can just eat grass as is, but I gotta try replanting these."

I showed them the seeds. The cows and sheep shuffled away. The chickens didn't, though; their heads shot up with rapt attention.

I asked, "What do you want?"

They answered with enthusiastic clucking. "These?" I asked, showing them the seeds. "Are these what you—" I stopped just as a white, oval object popped out from behind one of the birds.

"An egg!" I shouted, switching out the seeds for the hand-sized ball. "Now this has to be real food, right?" I asked the chickens. "I mean, why else would this world let you lay an egg if I wasn't allowed to…"

I noticed the birds were waddling away. Why had they suddenly lost interest? "Hey, where ya goin'?" I asked. "Something I said?"

I looked away from the birds just in time to see the silent creature gliding between us. It was armless and legless, with a green mottled trunk and short stubby feet.

It all happened so fast. The crackling hiss, the smell of fireworks, the flashing vibrations as the creeping monster swelled like a balloon.

The explosion knocked me backward, lifting me off my feet. Eyes burning, ears ringing, I flew through the air, splashing into the waist-deep water of the lagoon. Waves of pain crashed over me: seared skin, cracked bones, pulled muscles torn from mangled joints. I tried to scream, but collapsed into hacking coughs as one lung fought to overcome its punctured partner.

I struggled to breathe, to move. I could feel the lagoon's waters pulling me forward, carrying me down. I blinked hard, clearing my vision, and stared at the blast crater I'd been washed into along with loose chunks of sand and earth. Something else swirled in the water around me: the gruesome evidence of death. A scrap of cowhide, a red slab of beef, two bright pink bird bodies, and a single white feather were all that was left of three poor animals.

As the wretched scraps flew into my pack, I clambered dizzily out of the crater. Dazed with shock, I stumbled back to the hill. Knees wobbled, thighs burned. I staggered over waves of pulsing pain. How could I outrun more of those creeping bombs? I glanced behind me, tripped, and crashed into the hard, bruising mass of a tree. The impact sent shock waves radiating through my injuries. Cracked lips opened for another scream, and this time they succeeded.

A long, deep, anguished howl exploded from both, not one, of my newly regenerating lungs. I was hyper-healing!

As walking became running, which became an all-out sprint, I could feel the bones fusing, the veins sealing. I could see my skin knitting together over rapidly rejuvenating tissue.

By the time I slammed the hut's door behind me, my broken body was nearly fixed.

Nearly.

With injuries still crying for help, I felt my hyper-healing peter out.

Food!

I reached into my backpack for some apples. Only one left, along with the animal remains. I scarfed down the apple, but it barely made a dent. Next, I reached for one of the whole chickens, and devoured it without pause or thought.

Had anyone ever warned me about the dangers of eating raw poultry? Even if they had, would it have made any difference now? I couldn't think of anything beyond health. I was too desperate to stop the pain.

As soon as I swallowed the last bite of cold, rubbery meat, an eruption of nausea rose up from my churning stomach. I retched. I gagged. I could even see green bubbles floating up across my tearing eyes. I ran out onto the beach, trying to vomit out the infected muck.

But the world wouldn't let me. For a horrible, dry-heaving eternity, I had to just stand there and take it.

And if being assaulted by my own digestive tract wasn't bad enough, I found that the whole ordeal had barely helped me heal. "Insult to injury," I groaned.

Still gagging from the memory, I sourly peeked into my pack. "Okay," I told the rest of the animal parts. "I get it. You need to be cooked."

Making fire had just gone from a possibility to a priority, but, as I mentioned before, I still had no idea how to do it. Wracking my brain for some remembered hint, I came up with the notion of rubbing two sticks together. If food poisoning can carry over to this world, I reasoned, why not this?

Why? Well, for starters, I couldn't even put two sticks in my hands. I could hold one in the right, but not in the left. Anytime I put something in my left hand, it immediately went into one of the four small crafting corners.

"Great," I huffed, then tried to keep going with one stick.

All I ended up burning was time.

I couldn't rub the stick against anything. All I could do was hit. At one point I smashed a block of dirt out of the hut's wall, letting in a lot more light, but also reminding me that the day was now halfway done. After resealing the hole with more dirt, I tried my last option: hitting the stick against a plank of wood. "Ugh," I snorted as my stomach growled and my wounds seethed.

Like it or not, I'd have to take my chances with raw food. Passing over the other chicken, I warily eyed the steak. Was all uncooked meat unsafe or just the kind with feathers? What I wouldn't give at this moment, I thought, for a licensed food safety inspector.

I lifted the meat up to my face, sniffing it like a dog. I tried to picture what beef had looked like in my world, under glass in bright, chilly supermarkets, or steaming on a plate with veggies and mashed potatoes. I thought I recalled that the inside of that steaming steak in my mind was still pink, which had to mean it wasn't cooked all the way through.

That image caused another, powerful feeling to rise up from deep in my gut. It wasn't nausea this time, it was sadness. Without meaning to, I'd reminded myself of how little I knew about myself.

Why couldn't I picture anything past that steak on the plate? The table? The room? The faces of other people enjoying their dinner? Was I eating with my parents? My children? My friends? Was I eating all alone, like right now?

This line of thinking was leading down a deep dark hole, and so for sanity's sake, I pulled my mind back to the here and now.

"Okay," I told the slab of dead cow. "Please don't make me wanna puke, okay?"

I won't say the beef was better than the chicken; maybe a little tougher, with a rougher texture on the tongue. And it did have a tad more flavor. But what really mattered, of course, was that I didn't get sick, and all of my wounds finished healing.

I still couldn't believe this new superpower. Had I really almost been blown to bits barely a few minutes ago? How long would it have taken my world's medicine to put the pieces back together? Hours in surgery, weeks in intensive care, and months—maybe even years—of physical therapy. Not to mention all the necessary resources, the bandages and casts and space-age machines, and the army of trained professionals to apply all those resources. And what about the money to pay those professionals? And what if I hadn't had that money?

Even my painted-on clothes had miraculously sewn themselves back together. Looking down at my self-repaired shoes reminded me of a story of a man who had no shoes realizing how lucky he was when he saw a man with no feet.

"Be grateful for what you have," I said, nodding to my restored limbs.

GRRRP, growled my empty stomach, reminding me that while I might be whole again, I was now mightily hungry.

"You'll just have to wait," I said, turning my nose up at the chicken and its egg—which, by the way, had somehow gone through the explosion without so much as a crack.

The seeds, which had caused this whole near-death experience, had also survived the creeper attack. I planted them in a row behind my first cultivated square, all the while hoping this wasn't a giant waste of time.

As the last of the shoots rose from the cultivated earth, a sudden chill ran across my back. I looked up to see the sun just beginning to dip below the western edge of Disappointment Hill. One of these days, I thought, heading for the hut, I gotta figure out how long these days are.

I shivered again in the afternoon shade, confused at the sudden chill. Was the season changing? Had I not noticed the temperature drop at night? Neither of these hypotheses turned out to be true, but it'd be a while before I understood that I was suffering from the initial symptoms of starvation.

For a moment I considered climbing the hill to soak up some warming rays. From there, I might spot a few more elusive apple trees.

Another rippling shiver held me back, though, and this one came from fear. I'd been caught out in the open twice already. Not again. Tonight I'd get indoors well before the monsters came prowling. Today had driven home the need for a bombproof bunker. And I thought this was gonna be such a good day, I thought, shuffling gloomily back to my shack.

The light outside my door was just turning purple by the time I smashed out several more blocks of cobblestone. As on the previous evening, the darkness of the cave made for slow going. I knew in my head that darkness alone couldn't hurt me. But try telling that to my heart. This fear wasn't rational. It was primal.

At one point I thought about knocking out a square in the hut's wooden roof to let in a patch of moonlight. Then I pictured that patch darkening with a zombie or creeper literally dropping in. Keep going, I told my picking arms. Dig it deeper, stronger, safer.

While I made some decent progress, the monotony of mining allowed my mind to wander. The empty darkness filled with shapeless threats.

I could feel the jitters taking over, and at this rate I'd be in full meltdown before dawn. "Take a break," I finally said, "do some crafting, see if you can come up with some kind of weapon." I laid two sticks in the center of my crafting table, and tried a few cobblestone combos. The now familiar shovel hovered before me, then the hoe, then the pickaxe. But then, after arranging three blocks in an L around the top of my sticks, I saw the image of an axe.

"Two in one," I nodded, snatching the weapon from the air. "Maybe you'll work on a tree and a zombie's neck."

It felt good to know I now had something to defend myself with, but even better to know that keeping my mind occupied was the best defense against the shakes.

And so I kept crafting instead of digging, and was soon very glad I did. I tried messing around with nothing but cobblestone, seeing if I could make a bombproof-rock version of my door. What I got, instead, was a plain gray box with two vertical slots in the front.

I figured it had to be another crafting aid, maybe an "instant upgrader" to make older tools into better ones. I placed a cobblestone in the upper slot and my old wooden pickaxe underneath it. Suddenly, the tool vanished in a blaze of orange and yellow flames. "Fi…!" I began, before bumping my head again.

I laughed, did a jump-free happy dance, then leaned into the face-warming glow.

"Fire."

This was the final piece in the holy trinity of human evolution. Tool making, agriculture, and now a little piece of the sun! This is what had saved our ancestors from the coldest winters, what had protected them from the fiercest predators. I pictured a group of hairy, filthy, grateful cave dwellers huddled around its comforting glow, warming their hands and cooking their food.

Cooking!

This new device was a furnace, the bottom slot for fuel and the top for whatever needed heating. Sure enough, the cobblestone I'd put in the upper slot had now fused back into a solid monolith.

As the fire died, I reached carefully for the block, ready to drop it before I burned my hand. It didn't. No need. One more quirk of this world was that items cooled the second they left the furnace. "Now for the big test," I said, popping the last raw chicken into the top slot with a fresh plank of wood underneath. Once again, and without any means of ignition, the flames roared to life. The little shelter filled with the sounds and smells of popping grease. I grabbed the fully cooked bird even before the last of the fire burnt itself out. "Mmm," I moaned between salty, moist mouthfuls. "Mmm-mmm-mmm."

Light, heat, and now cooked food. "You know," I said, tossing a few more planks into the furnace, "this turned out to be a really good day."