Hell Pig (Dawn of Mammals Book 3)

by Lou Cadle

  She shot up again, angling to the right, silently cursing the predators again when she saw them walk along the beach to stay close to her. While she hadn’t really believed her idea would work to get her safely out of the lake, she was still irked it was failing.

  Again she dropped to the bottom of the lake. Something moved past her nose, and another blast of adrenaline gave her next jump up more power. It probably had only been a fish or an eel. When she was up, sucking in her next breath, she looked around, trying to see what was in the water with her, but her own jump had roiled up the lake bottom, and she couldn’t see a thing beyond her own hands just under the surface, and them none too clearly.

  She sank down again, thinking there was no reason now to keep moving this direction. But when her boots settled down, she felt the unmistakable surface of a rock. It was coated with algae or something slippery, but there was definitely a hard surface protruding from the lake bottom. She let herself sink all the way down and began feeling with her hands. In one direction, there was a pile of slimy rocks. And they were getting bigger and bigger as she felt along. She swam over them, propelling herself with kicks at the lake bottom, letting her fingertips trail over the rocks.

  Finally, she found what she had been hoping for. A significantly bigger rock. Big enough to stand on? She pulled her feet up and felt with feet and hands, trying to find a flat spot on it. There wasn’t one, but her lungs were demanding another breath.

  She got her boots onto the rock and shot herself out of the water, and because of the extra height the rock gave her, she crested the surface all the way to her shoulders. Treading water as hard as she could, she was able to take two breaths this time, two long, blessed breaths. Once underwater, her feet began to slide on the rocks, but she made herself patiently hunt with her feet for a more secure place to put them.

  When one foot bumped up against an even taller rock, she sidled over and stepped up onto it. She could feel her head break the surface of the lake. Not far, but the water was lapping just under her hairline. She tilted her head back to see if she could breathe, but her mouth and nose were still a couple inches under the surface.

  All she needed was a rock three inches taller, and she could just stand there, safe from the hell pigs, safe from drowning, and breathe all she wanted. The next few minutes were frustrating, as she groped around underwater for a good flat rock and failed to find one.

  So she made a higher perch instead, formed of several rocks. Digging one of the bigger rocks she could feel out of the bed of the lake, she put it on the highest rock and tried to balance it there. It canted and slid down, though.

  Fine. She shot up for another breath and went down again, picking up smaller rocks, building up a platform for the second big rock. It took ten trips up and down, but finally, she had it. A place to stand.

  The balance was delicate, but she was standing, her chin at water line, able to breathe. Were it an ocean, it wouldn’t be high enough. The tiniest of swells would go up her nose. But it was a lake, and there was hardly any wind today, and all she had to do was not move very much.

  Just stand there and wait for the hell pigs to go away. She could do that all day long.

  Take that, you monsters!

  She was feeling pretty damned pleased with herself, when she saw movement to the far left. It was Ted, and Zach, and Jodi, coming out of the wood, spears and club in their hands.

  Chapter 18

  “Get away!” she screamed. “There are four hell pigs just over there. Get back!”

  Their heads were pivoting, and she realized they could hear her but had no idea where her voice was coming from.

  “Here!” she said, sticking a hand over her head and waving. “I’m safe!” But the last word turned into bubbles in water as she lost her balance and slipped under the surface. She thrust herself up again but as she did, she felt her carefully-constructed platform slide and collapse. Damn it.

  She shot herself up with leg power, and said, “Get away! Hell pigs! Don’t let them,” and then she was underwater again, unable to finish her warning. Time to rebuild the footing so she could make sure the kids got away.

  Really, she was surprised it had taken them so long, especially with Ted’s willingness to step into any trouble at all. And with Bob not up to fighting him, it was amazing they hadn’t shown up ten minutes ago.

  Had it been ten minutes she’d been in the water? Maybe not much longer than that, though it felt longer. She piled up her rocks again, trying to find the same delicate balance, but she was feeling the time pressure and kept fumbling them.

  She had to convince the kids to go away before one of the hell pigs caught sight of them and decided that three looked like a better meal than one. The thought gave her added strength, and she managed to yank a big rock out of the lakebed and pile it onto the tallest rock there. Turned on its side, it fit snugly against the big rock. She piled up the small rocks, balanced the flat rock on top—or a flat rock, for she may have grabbed a new one—and climbed up onto it.

  Stroking her hands in the water to keep her balance, she got onto it and stood up, carefully, so as not to send the thing tumbling down again. She cleared the water up to her neck this time. Blinking water out of her eyes, she saw the kids were still standing there.

  “Hell pigs. Four of them,” she yelled. “Over this way. You guys get back to the cabin.”

  “Are you okay?” Jodi yelled.

  “I’m totally fine. Just wet.”

  “Then come out!” Jodi said.

  “I can’t. If I move your way, they’ll follow me. They’re waiting for me.”

  Ted said, “Then we’ll chase them away!”

  “No!” she screamed. “It’s two tons of predators, Ted. You can’t take them. Be sensible, please.”

  “But you can’t stay there all night,” he yelled.

  “I’d happily stay here all night if it kept me alive,” she said, “but I won’t need to. They’re day hunters, not night hunters. I just have to outwait them.”

  Zach said, “Will they leave you alone at night?”

  “I’m sure of it,” she said, though she wasn’t. “They’ll lose interest. They’ll get hungry. They’ll spot some animal coming up for a twilight drink at the lake and go for it instead.”

  She saw one of the hell pigs moving, going back to the left towards where the kids were standing.

  “Damn it, it’s on the move. It’s hearing you. Shut up and just get back under cover.”

  Ted started to say something, but Jodi grabbed his arm. She pulled him toward the trees. Zach gave her a last wave and followed them.

  Hannah sighed in relief. She appreciated the thought, really. It was loyal and kind and brave of them to want to rescue her. But those animals weren’t anything to mess with.

  The one hell pig was still on the move. She hooted and splashed and made a fuss, trying to get it thinking of her again, not of the kids.

  It worked. The animal looked at her, and then looked around itself, maybe trying to remember what it had been doing before she interrupted it. So she splashed even harder, and it watched her for a minute, and then it turned and rejoined its mates.

  It took two hours for the hell pigs to give up on her and wander off. She waited until they had been gone another quarter hour, and then bounced her way to the left, back to shallower waters. When she could walk again, she trudged up the slope of the lake bottom and onto dry land.

  She stood there dripping for a moment, feeling the urge to just collapse, right there. But what she had told the kids applied to her, too. Get under cover, back behind the wall they had so carefully built, and be safe.

  Or safer, as safe as they could be from those things. She knew, having been closer to them today, that they could tear down the cabin walls if they put their minds to it. She just hoped their brains were so tiny the thought wouldn’t occur to them, that they’d see the wall as a cliff face, and leave it alone.

  The kids and she had to finish the cabin.


  No rest for the weary, then. Her footsteps squelched in her boots as she made her way back to the cabin.

  Everyone was there, and they all exclaimed in relief as she stepped into the clearing.

  “I’m fine. Wet, but fine,” she said. They demanded the story and she told it very briefly. She finished, “I’m more convinced that we have to finish this cabin now. By dusk tomorrow, it has to be up, and roofed, and ready. And when that’s done, instead of making the walls taller, I think that what we should do is make them thicker. Lay a second course of bricks around the first.”

  Bob said, “That’s good as insulation too. We could stuff it with grass.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “But now that those animals know we exist, now that they know our scent for sure, I want to do everything we can to protect ourselves from them. Someone at the kiln fire? Good. I’m going to make more bricks.” And she walked off to the last clay pit and set to work with renewed energy.

  She drove them hard—except Bob, of course—and by the end of the day, they had the entire structure of the roof lashed together. They ate supper. She took off her boots and set them upside-down as close to the fire to dry as she dared while she ate. She knew it wasn’t good for the leather, but it’d give them a good start on drying. She’d leave them out tonight and by morning, they might be dry.

  In the waning light of the day, all of them but Rex and Bob took up one of the uprights and hefted the roof structure into the air. It was heavy, and it was hard to keep it balanced and not putting more weight on a couple people, but they finally got it raised to the level of the top brick. Then inch by inch, they edged the posts toward the holes that had been cast into the bricks. Rex’s engineering had been top-quality. Only one hole was out of place, and he made quick work of that by carving a bigger hole into the brick with one of the dental picks.

  They all moved it the last half-inch, and it fell, with a thud, into place.

  “Not much of a roof right now,” Rex said, “But it’s a roof.”

  “Terrific job, everyone,” Hannah said. “Now let’s get inside and get some rest. We’ll finish it tomorrow.”

  She was the last one in, just after Ted. They pulled half the pine boughs and branches they’d collected to finish the roof into the smaller opening, and then set up the rest in a pile at the main door. Reaching forward and pulling the pile of stuff toward the door, they closed it off the best they could. If something made its way past that, they’d be cornered, she realized, and have a hard time getting out once the roof structure was in place.

  The thought kept her up for a few moments, trying to devise a solution. But physical exhaustion overcame her. Soon, she was lost in a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 19

  “We need ladders,” Rex said. “To do the roof.”

  They were all staring at the cabin, debating how to go about filling in the spaces of the roof with the boughs they’d collected. The roof structure had been so heavy, they hadn’t finished filling it in on the ground because it would have been impossible to lift.

  “We can stand on the top of the walls,” Ted said.

  Nari said, “I’d fall.”

  Dixie was shaking her head emphatically. Of course Dixie, with her fear of heights, wouldn’t want to climb up there either.

  “Will standing on the wall break it down?” Bob asked.

  Rex shook his head. “I don’t think so. If the weight of the roof isn’t going to, then why would the weight of a person?”

  Hannah said, “I have an idea for the entrance.” It had come to her while she slept.

  Rex said “What?”

  “I want to build another wall there, parallel to the cabin wall, but out a foot or eighteen inches from the door. Build it at least twice the length of the door opening, and fairly close. The idea is that we can squeeze past it, but only a small animal could get in. And also, if we need more heat, a fire right there would let heat be reflected back into the cabin.”

  Rex was nodding. “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “And we need to build the chimney, get that side closed up, too,” she said. “You know the design for that yet, Rex?”

  He looked doubtful. “I have one design in mind. I don’t know if it will work. But we can always tear it down and try again if it puts smoke inside, which is what I’m worried about. We can build it to see. We just won’t mortar it to the walls. We need smaller bricks, though, like a quarter of the size of these.”

  “Sounds good. Okay. We have plenty of grass. I need someone to make another batch of bricks for the chimney. Who wants to volunteer?”

  “We have to eat,” Dixie said. “I’m starved.”

  Hannah didn’t want to stop, not even for that, but she knew they couldn’t work all day without food. “Okay. One cast of the net, a quick fish fry, then back to work. We can skip a second meal today if we need to. It won’t kill us. But the hell pigs could, if we don’t have protection from them.”

  “Or the snakes,” said Claire, her voice improving but still raspy. Whenever she spoke, her face betrayed the pain she still felt.

  Hannah’s door design had no way to keep out the constrictors, but she thought it best not to point that out. Even if they had a solid wooden door with a lock, a determined snake could still make its way through the boughs that would be their roof.

  They spent five more minutes listing what had to be done, the kids volunteered for tasks, and they went on their way. If they got ahead of the work later on, she’d let Claire fish for a couple hours so they could have a light supper.

  She was helping to weave thin green sapling branches into the upper walls with Nari. They hadn’t been at work twenty minutes when it began to rain. She hadn’t been outside of the trees, so she hadn’t noticed clouds gathering. The rain was audible before she felt it. But soon after she began to hear the patter of rain on the canopy, the clouds drifted over the sun, and the woods turned gloomy.

  The patter of rain became a drumming, and ten minutes later the first drops made their way through the leaves overhead.

  Bob, inside the cabin, working on more cordage, said. “We’re building a roof one day too late.”

  The temperature was dropping, too. “Are you doing okay?” she asked Bob.

  “Sure, fine. My chest doesn’t even hurt today.”

  “Great. I was thinking about hypothermia. We don’t have another change of clothes. I don’t want us going to bed with wet clothes.” It had been dry and warm enough yesterday that her clothes had dried before nightfall. Her boots were still damp, so she had left them off and was working barefoot.

  “Surely the rain won’t keep up all day,” Bob said.

  “No way of knowing,” she said.

  “I wonder if we’re entering a rainy season.”

  “What do you mean?” Nari asked.

  Bob explained. “Sometimes a region has a certain time of year that’s wet, and it’ll get most of its precipitation in just a month or two. The rest of the year, it’s dry.”

  “But how do things live if it doesn’t rain every few weeks?”

  “They adapt. Only plants that can cope with that survive. Like the grasses here. They probably go dormant during the dry season and green up quickly during the wet season. Some plants will appear out of nowhere, and flower, and die back down.”

  Hannah said, “I lived a summer in Arizona, working at a park. They have a wet season—the monsoon, they call it—and I think there was a thunderstorm a day for a solid month. Real downpours, too. Lightning, wind, and dangerous flash floods.”

  “Did it get colder?” Nari said. “It feels colder right now.”

  “Yeah, the sun was hidden, so it was cooler, but in Arizona, you don’t complain about that part.” She was worried about it cooling here, though. “I don’t know what to do about it right now, but if we can get a roof built today, we have protection from the rain tomorrow. If we stay dry, we’ll stay warmer, too.”

  “But we can’t stay inside all the time, hiding fro
m the rain,” Nari said. “For one thing, it’s too small. We’d be in each others’ faces.”

  “I’m running low on raw materials,” Bob said. “I can go out and—”

  “No.” Hannah said. “I know it’s hard to sit there, Bob, but I really don’t want risking another…incident.” She wasn’t calling it a heart attack, because she didn’t know that it had been one and had no way of knowing. That term would worry the kids more, but maybe she should be using it to worry Bob more.

  “I feel fine.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way. Give your recovery a few more days, and if you’re still feeling good, you can do light duty.” She had no intention of keeping that promise. She planned on putting him off, again and again, a few days at a time, until two or three days before the timegate’s reappearance, when she’d have them take a leisurely walk back to it. She hoped he’d be recovered by then.

  He’d have to be.

  Nari said, “I can go get more stuff for you, Mr. O’Brien. I just don’t know exactly what plants.”

  Hannah said, “My fault. I haven’t been keeping people up. We all need to know everything we’ve learned individually. Everyone should cast the net from time to time. Claire should give fishing lessons. We all need to know how to make bricks and clay bowls. We all need to practice making spears.”

  Just then, Ted came sprinting into the clearing. “Hey, everyone. Hannah, could we borrow the Mylar blankets?”

  “Sure. For what?”

  “We can’t cook the fish in the rain. So we’re going to hold them over the fire.”

  “Nari,” Hannah said, “Grab them out of my pack, please. It’s right over there. And go help. I assume four people are needed for holding on to two blankets.”

  “Okay,” Nari said.