Dawn of Mammals (Book 4): Killer Pack

by Lou Cadle

  “There’s an animal,” Claire yelled.

  “Dogs? I think I hear them. You both okay?”

  Ted’s voice replied. “One came at me, but it was a feint.”

  “Get down to the river. We’re right on the bank.”

  “We’re coming.”

  “We’re moving upstream toward you,” Hannah called.

  A growl—no, a pair of growls—sounded from further up the bank.

  “Uh-oh,” said Jodi.

  “We need to be with the others,” Hannah said. “Four of us, the river to our backs, we have a good chance of keeping them off.” As she spoke, she moved forward, placing her boots carefully because of the treacherous footing.

  Her back was to Jodi, but she heard it when the attack came: a muffled thump, and Jodi’s surprised sound. Then a splash.

  Hannah spun, spear raised. A dark low shape moved, and then it disappeared into the fog. “Jodi?”

  “I’m fine. It didn’t bite me. Just jumped on me.” She splashed around and cursed as she crawled toward the riverbank.

  Hannah moved closer. “Sure you’re okay?” She glanced around but saw nothing.

  “Couldn’t get up.” Jodi stood, using her club for balance. “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

  Hannah reached out to help her climb from the river.

  Jodi said, “Look out!”

  Hannah spun, drawing back her spear for a blow. But she saw nothing. “What?”

  “It came close but darted back into the fog.”

  “Let’s stay in the river. Maybe they don’t like water.” At the least, the dogs’ agility might be compromised by it.

  “But Claire and Ted.”

  “We’ll walk, but in the river.”

  “I’m taking my pack off too,” Jodi said. She did so and swung it up onto the river bank. “I don’t want it pulling me down if I end up underwater.”

  “Let’s go,” Hannah said.

  “We have to be close to them by now,” Jodi said. “Claire? Ted?”

  “Here,” said Ted.

  Hannah led Jodi further upstream, and then she could see movement in the fog. Her heart skipped a beat when she thought it might be a dog, but then she realized it was too high. Ted, waving his arms overhead. “We see you,” she said.

  The fog thinned for a moment, and she saw them both, Claire and Ted, standing back to back, spears up. In the cleared view, she saw something else too. A dog, crawling nearly on its belly, stalking them.

  “Dog!” she shouted. “To your left, Claire!”

  With a cold draft, the fog thickened again. She could still make out Ted, but not Claire or the dog beyond her. She glanced back to make sure Jodi was right behind her. “Hurry,” she said, and she splashed through the shallow edge of the river.

  They reached the others, and Hannah felt a fractional easing of tension. At least they were four together now. “You okay, Claire?”

  “Yeah. Have any idea how many of them there are?”

  “Could be one, for all I know,” Jodi said.

  “No, I heard two,” Hannah said. “Unless it was an acoustic trick of the fog.”

  “What should we do?” Claire said.

  Hannah said, “I think the water will slow them down, so I vote we stay in the river.”

  “For how long?” Ted said. “Until the fog clears?”

  “If we have to,” Hannah said.

  “What other choice do we have?” Jodi said.

  “Let’s set up in a semicircle in the water, about knee-deep. I want us touching,” Claire said. “Shoulder to shoulder. I’ll be on this end, Jodi you be on the other. Keep checking across the river, in case another attack comes from that way.”

  Hannah was between Ted and Jodi. They stood, not talking, for what seemed like many minutes, but Hannah knew it wasn’t. Fear slowed down time.

  After long minutes of nothing happening, she could feel the tension start to drain out of her body. It wasn’t that she wanted to let down her guard. It was that she couldn’t hold on to the state of total alertness for very long. Another lighter patch of fog moved past. Maybe it was breaking up.

  “Look,” said Ted. “Up by the trees.”

  Hannah could just make out the shapes of the treetops. Her gaze moved down to the trunks.

  And in front of that, there they were. A half-dozen dogs, standing, noses lifted, facing the humans.

  “Stay here or make for the trees and climb?” Claire said.

  “They’re between us and the trees,” Ted said.

  “I meant go upstream further, or cross to the trees on the other side and climb.”

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” Hannah said. “And I don’t want to turn my back to them.”

  “Why aren’t they attacking?” Jodi said.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for something,” Claire said. “Don’t stop checking behind us, Jodi, across the river.”

  The fog moved again, so that a thicker patch of it hid the dogs once more.

  Hannah said, “I prefer it when I can see them.”

  Again, they all fell silent. Hannah strained to hear any movement from the dogs. Her eyes were watering from trying to see through the fog, and her mind kept misinterpreting what she was seeing, putting shapes into the fog where there were none.

  “Behind us,” Claire said. Hannah turned to look. Just then, the dogs by the trees padded down, the strike of their paws on the ground warning her.

  Behind her, across the river, a yelp sounded, an animal sound of pain.

  She had other things to worry about. A dog leapt through the air, aiming either at her or Ted, she wasn’t sure which, but the two of them moved as one with their spears. Hannah could feel Jodi move beside her but didn’t turn to look.

  Just as Ted’s longer reach drove the spear toward the animal’s head, it turned its head aside. Hannah tried to lunge that last little bit, to get her spear into flesh, but the dog was agile and fast. It landed and swerved out of the reach of both her and Ted’s spears.

  She spared a glance in Jodi’s direction, and the girl’s swing of her club had missed the animal coming for her.

  Claire shouted, “Don’t break formation. Ted, get back here. Shoulder to shoulder.”

  Behind her, Hannah heard another animal sound and couldn’t help but turn to look.

  She saw, in the fog over the river, something she hadn’t expected to see. A dog was splashing in the middle of the river. And over it stood a taller attacker.

  It took a moment for her brain to catch up. It wasn’t a taller animal. It was a human attacker.

  Chapter 24

  The four of them were together, shoulders touching. It wasn’t one of them.

  As Hannah watched, the figure moved almost as quickly as the dogs had and thrust a spear into the animal floundering in the middle of the river. For a long moment, the scene froze. Hannah realized the dog was being held under. Whatever its injuries, it would drown if it couldn’t break away.

  Her eyes flicked up to the person. Tall. Rex? Dixie? No, neither of them would have followed, surely.

  Laina? Could it possibly be? But no, this person was tall. So another person lost in time?

  “I don’t see the dogs now,” Ted said. “They darted in and left.”

  Claire was also aware of the scene in the river. She called, “Who is it?”

  The figure didn’t answer.

  Claire said, “Ted, Hannah, Jodi. You three stay right where you are.” She waded deeper into the river. “Who is it?”

  Hannah knew she should be watching for the dogs’ next attack, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the figure. It wore skins and hides, that much she could make out. It must have felt some difference in the dog, a cessation of struggle, for it wrenched the spear back. And then it waded toward them.

  “Stop,” Claire said.

  Ted’s neck was swiveled around now, and Jodi had turned completely. Hannah glanced back up toward the trees but saw no motion from the dogs.

  When she
turned back, the person had stopped in the river. In a voice she didn’t recognize, it said, “It’s me.”

  “Who?” Claire said.

  “Laina,” she said, and she walked out of the fog.

  Hannah’s eyes were refusing to match this person up to the Laina she had seen walk through the time gate six weeks ago.

  For starters, she was ten inches too tall. Leaner, tall, and wearing hides. For another thing, her face was weathered and a long scar ran down one cheek.

  For another thing—and this was giving Hannah’s brain a serious problem—this was not a teenager. This was a woman older than Hannah herself.

  “Laina?” Jodi said. “Is it really you?”

  Claire marched into the river to meet this stranger, this person who had once been their Laina. She lifted her hand, and Laina stepped back.

  “How long? Where have you been?”

  “Make sure the dog pack is gone,” said Laina. Her voice sounded not only deeper, and older, but slurred.

  Hannah wondered if her voice was damaged from an injury. Or maybe it was slurred simply from disuse.

  Hannah turned away from the—the apparition, nudged Ted, and said, “Let’s go up and check where the dogs were.”

  “Sure,” he said, but his body took a minute to drag focus away from Laina and obey the instructions.

  Hannah said, “Jodi?”

  “Okay,” she said, faintly. She was in shock. Hell, they all were. But they’d have to deal with Laina when the threat was neutralized. The three of them marched, shoulder to shoulder, to where they’d last seen the dogs.

  There was no sign of them but some trampled grass.

  They took a few minutes to walk around the area together, but there wasn’t a sign of them.

  “I don’t sense them, either,” said Hannah. “It feels like they’re gone.”

  “You can’t know that,” said Ted. “You have to quit being so mystical about this.”

  “No,” said Jodi. “I know what she means. They’re not here. Maybe I could smell them before and just didn’t know it. Mystical, or smell, or hearing, or whatever, something is telling me they’re gone.”

  “Let’s go back to Claire,” Hannah said. She had a million questions for Laina.

  When they reached the two women, all the questions she wanted to ask fled from Hannah’s mind. It was the sight of the girl, changed now. No longer a girl. No longer a young woman, really. Almost a middle-aged woman.

  She blurted out her first question, though it wasn’t the most important one. “How old are you?”

  Laina—Hannah had a hard time putting the name to this person—went still.

  Was she offended? Confused?

  But then she moved again, just a small move of her head, and Hannah realized she had only been thinking. “Thirty-three.”

  “You’ve been waiting for us that long?” Jodi said.

  Laina said, “It’s complicated.” The word didn’t come off her tongue easily.

  Thirty-three. So for half her life, she’d been alone. No wonder she couldn’t talk right. Unless she’d been talking to herself the whole time, she’d surely fallen out of the habit of speech.

  Hannah thought that, given the same situation, she’d have talked to herself all day long, to keep herself from going mad. But then, she would have gone mad anyway. Sixteen years alone?

  Was Laina mad? Horrible thought, but she was glad she had dared to ask it of herself. Was this someone they could trust?

  “You killed the dog,” Claire said.

  “The alpha,” Laina said. “He came up behind you. They won’t find a new alpha today.”

  “Will they attack again today?”

  “No,” Laina said, frowning.

  Hannah realized there was a tone in her voice, like “how could you not know that?”

  Made sense. With sixteen years in the Miocene, around the dogs, she’d know a lot more about them than Claire’s group knew. In fact, to survive alone, she had to know a lot about a good many things.

  Hannah said, “Nari’s injured. I’m worried about infection. Do you know of an antibiotic plant?”

  “Yes,” Laina said.

  A long silence descended. They were all too shocked to say much. “We have work to do,” Claire said at last. “Fishing. Water.”

  “After the fog, I will show you the plant,” Laina said.

  Hannah said, “I’m sure you have a lot to show us.”

  Laina said nothing to that. “I’ll be back,” she said, “when the fog is gone.” And she walked off, back across the river.

  Jodi said, “Wait!”

  But Laina didn’t wait. She kept walking and disappeared into the fog.

  “What the hell?” Ted said. “Laina!” he shouted.

  “Let her go,” Hannah said.

  “But,” he said. And he turned to glare at her. “Don’t tell me what to do.” He splashed into the river, obviously meaning to follow Laina.

  “Stop, Ted,” Claire said. “I mean it.”

  “What is wrong with you two?”

  Claire said, “Try to imagine how hard this is for her. Sixteen years without seeing another person. Who knows what went through her head? She probably thought she’d die alone here. And now she finds us?”

  Jodi said, “I wonder why it took her so long to find us. If it’d had been me, I’d have camped out at the timegate every month.”

  “I don’t know that she knows when the timegate will spill people out,” Hannah said. “She knows when it’ll appear and can be used. But maybe on the other end, she hasn’t figured out the pattern. I mean, how could she? It’s not as if things came through all the time.”

  “Still,” Jodi said.

  “I’m surprised she made it,” Hannah said. “Imagine, surviving entirely alone. With the dogs and who knows what other predators.”

  “So I guess if we tried to hit the same time, and we’re only sixteen years off, that’s good news,” Claire said.

  Jodi said, “What do you mean?”

  “It means if she can get us back to within sixteen years of when we started, we can see our families again. They might be just giving birth to us, but we can be there.”

  “Right,” Jodi said. “I wish she wouldn’t have gone off. There’s so much to ask her.”

  “Maybe she’s not far,” Hannah said. More quietly she said, “She could be listening to us right now.”

  Claire said. “We have work to do. Fish to catch, first of all.”

  “I dropped my pack,” Jodi said.

  Ted said, “Why the hell did you do that?”

  Jodi said, “What has crawled up your butt lately, Ted?”

  “Whoa,” Claire said.

  Hannah was happy to see that whatever had soured Ted’s mood lately wasn’t entirely about her. She said, “Jodi, I’ll go with you to get your gear and mine. I think we’re safe enough to stay in pairs.”

  “Right, whatever,” Jodi said, giving Ted a shake of her head.

  They backtracked downstream and found Jodi’s pack.

  “Now we find my backpack. And my clothes,” Hannah said.

  It was easy enough to trace her path back. At one point, paw prints crossed it. She peered around again, but had that same strong feeling that the dogs were gone. Scent or something more mysterious, she didn’t know the reason for her feeling, but she trusted it as much as she did Laina’s comment about the pack being leaderless now.

  She put her tunic back on and shouldered the backpack. They tracked back to Claire and Ted. Ted was obviously pouting. Hannah wondered what had gone on in their absence. And she wondered the same thing that Jodi had asked him. What had put him in such an argumentative state? They all had bad days, but Ted’s mood was typically more level than most. He never got weepy or depressed. He never complained. Perhaps he’d simply had enough. After four and a half months of cheerfully soldiering on, he’d reached his limit. She could understand that.

  “I’m sure the fish are long gone from here,” he sai
d. “What with all the noise.”

  Claire said, “Probably. Still, let’s set up the net here. We’ll go upstream to throw in lines.”

  They stretched the net across the stream, lashed it to trees on either side, and made sure the weighted ends were settled on the bottom of the river. Claire drove a stick into the bank where the net was and shored it up with a pile of round pebbles. It’d make it easy to find, even in the fog.

  They walked downstream until Claire stopped them with a raised hand. She took out her fishing gear.

  Ted said, “I want to look for nuts.” He turned and marched off into the fog.

  Hannah exchanged a look with Jodi, who shook her head in exasperation. “I’ll go with him,” Hannah said, and she trotted off to catch up to Ted.

  They scoured the nearest patch of woods for nuts or fruits. All they saw were acorns. They’d found some of those before and tried to leech them, cook them, pound them into flour, but this world’s acorns were too bitter for humans to consume and gave everyone who tried them diarrhea. Either they were inedible or their cooks hadn’t come up with the right way to prepare them for human consumption.

  Ted climbed a tree at the edge of the woods. Hannah didn’t comment. In his mood, it seemed safer not to speak to him at all. Maybe climbing trees would work out some of his frustration. She wondered if maybe he’d fought with someone else in the group. But no one else was showing any signs of ill temper.

  She pressed her back to the tree and kept an eye out for danger.

  The fog kept most of the animals hidden, or perhaps they were hunkered down until it passed. Even the birds were all quiet, roosting perhaps, waiting until the air cleared. She wondered if it was impossible to fly, if the water accumulated on their wings and changed their aerodynamics.

  She realized she was thinking about such things to avoid thinking about Laina.

  Hannah still harbored anger at the girl who had stepped through the timegate alone six weeks ago, without discussion, without warning. But that girl was gone, as gone as if she’d died. Being angry at this Laina who was Hannah’s own age—or a year older—was impossible. It’d be like getting angry at someone for something their grandmother had done as a teen.

  She had so many questions for her. But they’d have to wait until Laina had grown comfortable with human company again. There were at least two weeks until the next timegate appearance. Before then, they needed the answers about time travel that only Laina had.