One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “Where’d he go?” Chaz said.

  “And why did he leave the car?” Lee said.

  Chaz removed the keys from the ignition and popped the trunk. Spare tire and jack. Nothing else. The rest of the car was just as clean. There wasn’t even a rental agreement to be found. And it was rental. The keys were clipped on a bright yellow Budget key ring.

  Chaz drove the rental and Lee took the SUV. They stayed in contact through their burners with the setting on speaker. The rental had an astringent odor inside like someone had sprayed disinfectant inside.

  They each drove the road in either direction for two miles or more and saw no one. They drove back slower and checked the ground on either side of the road surface for any sign of human passage. It had rained yesterday, and the ground was soft. Still, there was no sign in the mud.

  “It’s like Jesus took him,” Chaz said.

  “I don’t think Jesus had anything to do with this,” Lee said.

  They met back at the curve where they found the rental. Chaz left the car along the guardrail with the keys in it. He swept pebbles of safety glass off the seat and got into the Explorer on the passenger side.

  “We going back to the farm?” Lee said.

  “No.”

  “What about your uncle?”

  “My cousin will take care of him. She lives over in Hadley. Lives to fuss over him. She’s on her way now.”

  “So, where are we gonna go?” Lee said.

  “You know where we have to go.” Chaz turned red-rimmed eyes to Lee.

  “Okay,” Lee said. “But when this over, you owe me a truck.”

  31

  Pirates of the Aegean

  THE SHIP MATCHED the brief description provided in the Praxus codex.

  It was a bireme, with two ranks of oars down either side. The prow was decorated with a snarling lion with claws raised to strike. It was hammered bronze above a long iron ram fashioned like a lion’s paw with talons extended. The yellow sail was tied up to the cross spar and weighted with a spar beneath. Two banks of oars worked steady, drawing the craft along at a swift pace. Water foamed over the ram as it lifted and fell.

  The ship arrived from the south and made its way around the headland of the largest portion of the island. It was bound for the deep water on the eastern face of the peninsula.

  As the craft entered the shallows, the oars on the top row lifted from the water and were drawn inboard. The pace of the remaining oars slowed then with the blades dipped into the water to raise foam wavelets and bring the boat drifting to a stop close into the broad beach between two of the rocky spires that formed the spine of the peninsula. An anchor plunged into the water from the stern. The line dragged, and the prow pulled around to bring the shallow draft vessel to rest parallel to the rows of breakers. A second anchor was dropped from the bow. The bireme sat in place rising and falling on the gentle swells.

  Dwayne and Caroline watched in silence from the shade of the hide. Dwayne through the 30x on Jimbo’s rifle and Caroline from the high-power binoculars set on a tripod. Caroline made inarticulate noises that made Dwayne look over at her.

  “This is so awesome,” she whispered with eyes glued to the binoculars.

  “Geek,” he said.

  “Isn’t this exciting? Aren’t you excited?”

  “Just remember we’re not watching the History Channel. We’re on the History Channel.”

  “Yeah. I know.” She put her eyes to the binoculars again.

  The temperature had fallen overnight. Caroline was in a set of Jimbo’s desert camos, with the cuffs rolled up and the waist cinched tight. The shirttail of her bulky Manchester United jersey hung almost to mid-thigh. Dwayne was in a black t-shirt with the NRA symbol on it and baggy swim trunks.

  Shouts and calls reached them over the water. The boat was too far away to make out words and would have done neither of them a bit of good anyway. It sounded like any other navy crew to Dwayne. Their SEAL buddy Boats would have been right at home down there bellowing in Amharic and obscenities.

  Through the scope, Dwayne could see the crew aboard the bireme setting up a block and tackle off the shoreward bulkhead. Men leapt into the azure water and paddled about. They were dark men with either shaved heads or manes of long braided hair. And all the swimmers were buck naked. Dwayne was struck by how skinny they were. There wasn’t an ounce of body fat visible on them, and their arms and shoulders were covered in skeins of stringy muscle. Many of them were marked with black tattoos on their arms and torsos. They were too far away for Dwayne to make out any details. Some of the swimmers were children—rail-thin young boys.

  The crew lowered a raft from davits set into the thick planking along the gunwale of the upper oar deck. The raft had some kind of cargo tied down with lines and netting. Dwayne could see that it was a box of some kind. It was the size of a chest of drawers and banded in broad iron straps. A large gang of men gripped the lines that ran through the blocks. From their strained effort, he could guess that the box was a heavy one. It was the treasure they came for. It had to be. He heard Caroline catch her breath.

  The men in the water steadied the raft as it settled in the water and climbed aboard to let loose the hauling lines. They used their hands as paddles while others remained in the water and kicked their feet with hands clinging to the seaward end of the raft. The incoming waves carried them toward shore, and they were soon out of sight around a brow of rock that jutted from the spire of rock at the foot of the peninsula.

  “We can’t see them,” Caroline said.

  “We know they’re taking the goodies to that beach,” Dwayne said.

  “Which is a good ten acres in area and will be under fifty feet of water two thousand years from now.”

  “I know. We’ll need a more accurate fix. We can go down after they’ve left.”

  “And who knows how long that will be? We need to see them bury it.”

  “I’ll get a better view,” Dwayne said. “But you have to stay put.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “I mean it,” he said.

  “What did I say?” she said.

  “All right,” Dwayne said. He snapped on a belt with his combat knife sheathed on it. He slung the digital camera around his neck and shoved his long-slide .45 auto into his waistband.

  “Don’t lose the camera or the gun,” she said. “We’re risking enough eco-chronal compromise here as it is.”

  “Eco-what? Did you make up that word or is it one of Morris’?” Dwayne said as he slipped from beneath the tarp.

  “It’s a good word,” she said and turned her eyes back to watch the action on the beach.

  Dwayne climbed down the rear of the slope. Near the base he crept behind a high dune, keeping the ridge and scrub pines between him and the bireme out in the water three football fields away. He found a dip in the dune wall and lay prone in the seagrass, using the telescoping lens of the camera to watch the beach. From his new angle, he could see around that spine of rock and had most of the beach in view.

  The box lay up on the sand where the swimmers dumped it. The netting still lay atop it. Some of the swimmers were wading back into the surf, dragging the empty raft bouncing high on the rollers. The water rose around them, and they piloted the raft back toward the anchored vessel, kicking up the foam with their legs.

  At the bireme, some men climbed down from the main deck and boarded the raft. These guys wore more clothes than the others but not by much. There were belted singlets like the kind Caroline thought he and Jimbo should wear. Some wore loincloths twisted around to barely cover their asses. A few had on sandals, and a couple wore girdles with weapons buckled on. Just daggers, from the look of them.

  The tallest guy had a wicked-looking ax resting over his shoulder on a long handle. Another had a short sword in a shiny brass sheath on his waist. The guy with the sword was remarkable because he wasn’t as thin as the others. A braided beard dappled with gray hung down to his round belly. He wore some kind,
of wristlets studded with metal or stones that caught the sunlight. Dwayne assumed the gut, the sword, and the accessories made him the captain, or maybe the boat’s owner. Back in The Now, this guy would just need to do a few sit-ups. But compared to the rest of his crew, he was fat.

  The raft was guided ashore by swimmers while the skipper stood aboard gesturing and shouting orders in a deep baritone. The passengers on the raft stepped off where the water was knee-deep. The swimmers went back to collect more passengers. This next crowd was a mix of nudists and guys wearing ragged loincloths. These guys dropped a heap of large brown bags onto the deck of the raft. The bags looked like empty leather body bags. They tossed a bundle of wooden staffs atop the pile. One of them issued a shrill whistle, and the swimmers powered them ashore.

  Through the camera, Dwayne could see the skipper standing and bossing the gang that dragged the box over the sand. They hauled on lines secured to the net that enshrouded the box. It looked damned heavy, and it was taking twenty of the skinny bastards just to make it budge. The captain shouted and slapped the shoulder of the ax carrier who dropped his ax and joined the gang pulling the box further up onto the beach, leaving a deep furrow in the sand behind them.

  The crew with the empty luggage reached the shore and disembarked. They ran poles through loops on the brown bags and lifted them to their shoulders. The bags were animal skins from a big animal. A pig or hog, Dwayne guessed. The skins were tanned and sewn together and now resembled giant deflated footballs more than luggage. What were they for?

  The tallest guy had his ax back in his fist and joined the three six-man crews carrying the pig skins. He waved the ax and the two crews marched over the sand toward the base of the peninsula, the empty skins swinging beneath the carrying poles. A few kids ran ahead, laughing and grab-assing the way kids do.

  Dwayne glassed the skipper and strongbox with the camera lens. He fingered the dial to max zoom. The skipper was drinking from a bota he had slung from his neck. He didn’t offer any to the dragging crew who were seated and lying on the sand around the big box. The captain replaced the plug on the bota and called to the naked swimmers trudging from the surf. They joined the others, and now more than thirty guys were dragging and pushing the box over the yielding sand toward the rocks.

  It looked like it was going to take a while, so Dwayne shifted the camera to follow the pigskin crew. He was surprised to see they were moving across the hump at the base of the spit of sand peninsula and out of sight beneath the rock spire of the hide. They were coming onto the beach of the sheltered cove.

  Dwayne realized that the pigskins were water bladders. They were heading for the fresh water at Jimbo’s spring. It wasn’t a game trail the Pima followed to the fresh-water pool. It was a well-worn footpath to a watering hole probably known to all those who sailed the Cyclades.

  And the trail would carry the men close past the hide where Caroline was concealed.

  32

  Prey

  CAROLINE HEARD VOICES coming closer. Laughing voices. Young voices. The men who crossed the beach toward the promontory had moved out of her sight below the rock ledge with the kids running before them. They carried water skins. They were climbing the same trail from the beach that she and Dwayne had been using. They would notice the alien sneaker prints pressed fresh in the sand. They would know someone else was on the island.

  She looked around in panic at the rifle, the plastic equipment tub, the transmitter, and other electronics. They left anachronistic artifacts behind on their last trip, but this was different. One hundred millennia swallowed up the food wrappers and spent rifle casings and even the heavy machine gun they found along with Renzi’s remains.

  But 240 BC was practically the day before yesterday in the age of man. They had written language and the beginnings of science. The twenty-first-century items in the hide would create a disaster if found by these men and taken to learned men in Greece or Persia or Egypt. The technologies and materials would be enough to cause a disruption in the forward march of man’s advancement even if no one in this time could understand what they were looking at. There would still be an impact of some kind on future events that would certainly prove disastrous. The simple concept of a threaded screw could rock this world.

  She had to lead them away. She had no idea where Dwayne was or what he would do. Her only thought was the overpowering urge to protect the chronal environment. She pulled her deck shoes and socks off and crawled from under the camo tarp to run up the trail.

  A shout rose behind her. The high shrill call of a child. They saw her. She pelted along the trail as it leveled out between low pines. At an opening in the brush, she hooked left and moved at a crouch under the low branches.

  She’d been chilled before but now ran with sweat under the BDUs. With a little luck, she would be able to draw the pursuing men far from the hide. After that there were plenty of places, she could conceal herself. If her luck held out, they’d tire of hunting for her and leave without finding the hide or the inflatable boat.

  Who was she kidding? They were here to bury a chest of treasure that was still a legend two thousand years from now. They would stay until they’d found Caroline and killed both her and Dwayne even if it took months. It’s not like they had to be anywhere.

  Caroline had spent time working up her cardio after the events in Nevada. She spent hours on a treadmill and stair machine and took runs with Dwayne. For all that training, her breath was coming in gasps after running only a few hundred yards. She couldn’t swallow. Her throat was closing, and her heart rate sped up. It wasn’t the exertion. It was panic. She was recalling the traumatic events that happened only a few months and a thousand centuries ago. Here she was, once again, on the run from savage men who would kill her without a second’s pause. She was running and hiding and letting fear take her over.

  Fuck fear, she decided. She slowed her pace. She stopped and sucked in a lungful of air. She held it in to listen. Not a sound but the cry of gulls far away over the water. Her visibility was less than twenty feet around her through the dense evergreen foliage. Nothing moved between the branches.

  Dwayne told her the secret to hunting was movement. You didn’t strain to look at detail. You relaxed your eyes, took it all in, and looked for changes. A shadow. The quiver of a branch. A subtle difference in light. Predator or prey, the rules were the same.

  There it was. The space between two tree boles was darkened for a half second by a passing shadow. Her ears picked up a mutter. A foot crunched on the floor of needles away to her right.

  She stooped low and parted the branches before her. She moved on downslope to the southern side of the island. The voices and sounds of passage stayed behind her. Whispers and hisses. The creak of leather.

  The trees grew mature and the undergrowth thinner as she reached the center of the island. She followed along a brow of rock, keeping it between her and the thinning tree line. The angle of decline increased. It was harder to keep her footing on the loose shale here. A snatch of voice rose behind her. They weren’t being quiet now. They’d seen her. She broke into a run. Shouts rose. She slid now, volcanic rock tearing the tough cloth of her BDU pants.

  A boy stood on a ledge of black rock and raised his head to howl like a dog. Howls and yelps answered him. It was a game to them. They were children enjoying a chase.

  She regretted abandoning her deck shoes. The soles of her feet were bleeding. Each step brought new pain. The rock turned to sand as the ground leveled toward the far beach. She ignored the pain in her soles and bolted for the shelter of the high dunes.

  The gullies between the dunes were choked with brambles. She struggled to make progress. She stumbled to a halt. Standing in her path on the floor of the gully was a child. The boy was naked and perhaps eight years old or younger. He regarded her calmly with eyes shaded by a thick bush of jet-black, hair. The little brat threw his head back and let out a wolf’s call. Answering calls came from somewhere over the top of the gully.


  Branches snapped as she pulled herself up a wall of sand to put the next rank of dune between her and the calls of the men and boys growing closer behind her. As she reached the peak of the dune, a shadow fell across her. Caroline clutched at the sliding sand and looked up to see the man with the ax staring down at her.

  He was panting, his breath whistled through the gaps in black teeth clenched in a feral grin. His beard was black and matted. His hands looked outsized as they were covered in thick layers of horny callus. His nut-brown skin was covered in a complex network of black tattoos in stripes and diamonds and circles.

  Caroline let herself slip down the dune wall. The ax man followed her with a wide gait to keep his footing on the shifting surface. He was moving deliberately, using the long haft of the ax to steady himself. His prey was trapped. There was no need for hurry now. He barked out words that Caroline realized were not for her.

  From atop the dune on the opposite side of the gully, more men and boys appeared. Each one had a dagger in a brass or leather sheath. Even the naked ones wore a blade suspended from a thong about their waist. All the men were bearded with braided hair worn loose or tied up atop their heads. They spoke to one another. One of them laughed as he pointed at Caroline. Her appearance was both amusing and confounding them.

  The ax man reached for her, and she stepped away from him, deeper into the brambles. He growled in frustration and shook the head of his ax at her. She locked her eyes on his. They were black orbs without an ounce of anything in them that Caroline could recognize as pity or compassion. She was once again at the mercy of cruel fate and cruel men, and it was pissing her off.

  She aimed an irritated string of Greek at him. She knew her pronunciation was probably wretched, but this bearded bastard might be able to pick out a few words. Caroline told him that her father was a wealthy merchant and would pay for her freedom. She warned him and his motherless companions not to harm her, or they would not see any silver for her return. They would hang and have their guts pulled out as food for birds and rats.