One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  The ax man’s brows knitted. He glanced up at his crewmates, and they only squatted and dumbly regarded Caroline. The one who laughed played fingers over his lips. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she was getting through to them.

  With a grunt, the ax man lifted the haft of his weapon over his head, and Caroline stumbled back in the crackling brambles until she came to the steep wall of the dune. The man stepped forward, ax raised. She lowered her head and closed her eyes tight for the blow.

  A pair of popping sounds from somewhere above. Caroline felt the splash of something hot over her face. There was no pain. She did not feel the blow of an ax.

  A gasp of surprise from the men above her. Caroline opened her eyes. The ax man sank to his knees, eyes wide and jaw slack. The top of his head was missing above the brow line. One eye hung down his cheek on a slimy ribbon of tissue. He collapsed at her feet. A gout of dark blood and slimy brain matter spilled at her feet.

  Caroline leapt up. She glanced behind her to see the grinning men were no longer looking down at her but at something over on the other bank of the gully.

  “Caroline! Run!” Dwayne’s voice.

  He was somewhere over the lip of the trench. She didn’t answer. She picked up the ax and took off running along the floor of the gully. The ax was heavy, but it felt weightless in her fist. This was a fresh surge of adrenaline, and she was flying between the dunes at a sprint. Two more pops sounded behind her. Dwayne was working that handgun of his and to hell with the anachronisms.

  A leg went numb and collapsed under her. She fell sprawling to the sand. An agony rose from her calf and lanced up her leg to her groin. She tried to rise, but the pain was too great. She rolled to her back and saw the silhouettes of men above her on either side of the gully. The boys among them whirled some kind, of lines over their heads that thrummed in the air like angry insects.

  Slings.

  She knew from her reading that the unerring accuracy of these simple weapons was lethal. The next blow could easily fracture her skull or splinter ribs.

  Caroline tossed aside the ax and held out open hands to her captors. One of the boys above slowed the rotation of his sling and clambered down the slope of sand to give her a kick in the ribs. He placed a sandaled foot on her chest and growled a warning while securing the loops of his sling to the thong about his waist; a simple length of twisted leather and a sack that she never noticed while observing them. The boy’s companion laughed and called out for the others.

  More men slid down the slope of the dune. Two grabbed at Caroline’s wrists. She kicked out hard them. A third slapped her face hard, and she tasted copper. Their size belied their strength. These were hard men, all muscle and gristle. They brought her to the sand quickly. She bucked and fought as they weighted down her arms, and one of them straddled her waist. Her struggles stopped when she felt the cool flat of a blade at her throat.

  When they were satisfied that she was fully cowed, they hauled her to her feet. The largest of them shoved her up the wall of sand and over the peak of a dune. One of the men hefted the ax with a pleased smile absent of teeth.

  The band of men followed the crest of the dune. A man helped Caroline stay upright with a grip like a vise on her arm. Her leg was in agony. It didn’t worsen when she put weight on it. The bone wasn’t broken, and she felt no blood. It would be a deep bruise at worst. For now, it was an intense muscle pain.

  They stopped and Caroline looked down to see Dwayne lying face-down in brambles. There was blood matted on the back of his head and down his t-shirt. Caroline feared he was dead until she saw his back rising and falling with each breath.

  His gun was nowhere in sight. Caroline felt relief and then felt bad about that.

  She was sure then that they would both be murdered. Caroline began speaking in a stream of her uncertain Greek. The new ax man slapped her hard across the face, then spat orders at the others. The men grunted as they lifted Dwayne from the sand. An eye was swollen shut and blood ran from a gash across the bridge of his nose. It took six of them to carry him from the gully and back through the trees for the cove with the kids running ahead laughing and hooting.

  33

  Owned

  THEIR ARRIVAL ON the beach was met with heated discussion.

  The work was halted on the hole being dug for the chest. Caroline was shoved to her knees. Dwayne was still unconscious and bound at wrists and ankles with thongs secured to carrying poles. The six men who carried him now dropped him to the sand with a relieved grunt. One of them scuffed his ribs with a kick then spat a wad of phlegm at him. Dwayne only groaned in answer to this. Curious boys bent to study him until shooed away by the ax wielder.

  The men did not seem to resent that Dwayne had killed one of their own. Maybe they weren’t sure how the man with the ax died or Dwayne’s connection to it. The gun was nowhere near Dwayne where he fell, and none of the men was carrying it. It lay somewhere back in the dunes.

  A furious guy wearing more clothes than the others, along with a brass studded girdle and a short sword in a decorative sheath stormed up to them. Caroline assumed he was the man in charge.

  This captain ordered Caroline lifted to her feet. She was as tall as he, and met him eye to eye without looking away. He rubbed the cloth of her jersey between his fingers. He tugged on the plastic buttons at the collar with some interest. He touched fingers to her hair and brought them back to sniff his fingertips. She fought the urge to flinch away. He spoke to the others as he did this and they only shrugged and mewled as they had no more answers than he did. He aimed his next remarks at Caroline, and she could not follow a word of it. She tried some answers in halting Greek, but he only turned away from her.

  The captain poked a toe into Dwayne’s side and was rewarded with a moan. He pointed at the empty knife sheath on Dwayne’s belt. The man who’d confiscated the ax took Dwayne’s dagger from his waistband and handed it over to the captain who ran a hand over the gleaming blade. His hand came back bloody, and he seemed more pleased than pained.

  He gestured and barked, and two of the men turned Dwayne on his side. They fussed with the clasp to Dwayne’s belt until they had it loose. The captain was able to loop the belt around his waist twice and could make no sense of the plastic clasp. He finally simply tied a knot in the belt and sheathed his prize blade to hang over his crotch. This placed him in a better mood. The crew seemed relieved. He next tried on Dwayne’s sneakers, but they were far too big, and he impatiently tossed them aside.

  To Caroline, the only good news here was that the men who captured them did not find their hide atop the promontory or the hidden inflatable. Dwayne’s handgun was not on him, and none of the men had it. It must have fallen away unseen when Dwayne was struck with a slung stone. None of these men would have known to look for it. If they had any theories on how their comrade lost the top of his head, they were not exploring them.

  Despite the fear roiling her stomach, she took an inventory of the items that could only be classified as temporal pollution. The plastic buttons on their clothes. The zipper on her pants. The synthetic fabrics.

  Dwayne’s knife was the most problematic, as it would be prized by anyone who owned it. The tempered steel blade would survive the ages. She imagined an archeologist digging in a burial ground and finding Dwayne’s NRA t-shirt or her Manchester jersey. But both were cotton and could not survive two thousand years intact.

  The man who’d appropriated the ax spoke up. There was an argument with the captain. Both men spoke harshly with fingers stabbed in Caroline and Dwayne’s direction. She didn’t need to understand the language to know that their fates were being decided here and now. She couldn’t know who was arguing in their favor until the captain cuffed the other man hard enough to drop him on his ass. The captain shouted to the men standing around watching. Caroline was shoved toward the raft with Dwayne lifted from the sand and carried after her.

  She sat with a hand in Dwayne’s hair as the raft was dragged through the su
rf to the bireme. She looked back to see that the captain was once again directing the burial of the big iron-banded box. She noted the location. A hole was being excavated with mattocks and shovels at the base of the rock face. The formation was topped with a hump of rock in the vague shape of a turtle. Caroline recalled that rounded point of rock, more wind-worn but still shell-shaped, as part of the archipelago visible from Nisos Anaxos.

  She was urged up the wooden cleats and oarlocks in the hull and over the wale onto the deck. Dwayne was cut from the carrying post and awakened with a bucket of seawater thrown in his face. He came around groaning and dazed. They hauled him to his feet and pushed him to climb the hull with shouts and punches. Curious crewman lined the rails to watch. Some bore spears with long, gleaming blades.

  The two captives were taken below down a rough wooden ladder through an opening in the center deck. Boards ran stem to stern to make a middle passage of smooth-worn wood. The areas along the port and starboard faces were open to the first oar deck below.

  Caroline could see more men illumined by the streams of light that came in through the open oar locks. They watched silently as the prisoners were brought below and down past the two rowing decks and into a hold. The floor of the hold was filled to a depth with sand ballast. Rows of amphorae cast to a pointed base were secured in the sand. There were wooden cages containing chickens and pigs tied to the bulkhead with rope, along with baskets of all sizes. And everywhere hung bundles of strung garlic cloves and dried peppers.

  The entire ship and its crew reeked of garlic. It was one of the things that Caroline noticed when the shock of their encounter began to wear off. Their breath, their sweat, and even their clothes, when they wore them, gave off a stench of garlic that almost covered the rank stink of unwashed bodies and pig feces.

  She also noted how many of these men were missing fingers. All of them had deep rope burns, fresh as well as scarred over remnants, on their hands and forearms. It came from being a sailor, she supposed. She was surprised that none of the men showed signs of flogging. A ship powered by galley slaves, yet not one of them had a back crossed with whip marks.

  She was also surprised at the number of children on board, all boys as far as she could discern. Caroline didn’t really know much about children. To her best guess, the boys seemed to be between six and twelve to older. And they were everywhere chattering and pointing.

  Down in the dark hold, Caroline was shoved to the sand which she noticed was speckled with rat droppings. Her right wrist was snapped into iron manacles with a three-foot length of chain secured to a rusting ringbolt set in the hull. They attempted to bind Dwayne the same way, but the cuffs would not close around his wrists. Instead, they bound his hands behind him with hemp rope and ran that through another ringbolt set on the hull strake next to Caroline’s.

  They left them there. All but one man who seated himself on the sand well outside their reach. He sat with a sword across his knees and eyed them with mild curiosity. Caroline sensed he was waiting on someone as well as serving to guard over them.

  There were so many other ways common to this era that they could have used to restrain her and Dwayne—severed hamstrings or slashed Achilles’ tendon or even blinding. Caroline was grateful for this small blessing of simply being bound and shared it with Dwayne.

  “Glass half full,” she said to herself.

  “Of shit,” Dwayne managed, his throat clotted with bloody phlegm.

  “The gun?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?” Dwayne said and hawked to spit.

  “I’m such a geek.” She blushed. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  “I don’t think I’m concussed. Of course, that could be the concussion talking. You know, we plan, and we plan, but it always comes down to some fucker with a rock.”

  “You’re lucky it was a rock. They molded lead pellets for their slings that could punch through armor.”

  “Thanks for the history lesson, but it’s not helping me stay awake. Should we be talking in front of him?” He nodded toward the swordsman watching them and winced at the effort.

  “No one will understand our language for another thousand or so years, and probably not even then,” she said. “Now, what about the gun?”

  “I don’t know. I lost it when I got hit. It’s still lying out there. Don’t worry about that.”

  “I have to worry about it. As an anachronistic artifact, it’s significant. If it were found in the future, it would throw the world out of kilter. If it were found now, it would create a—”

  Dwayne cut her off.

  “Fuck that! Fuck all of that! We found a fucking city of man-eating Stone Age ape-men living in Nevada, and no archeologist found a trace of them. I think we can count on my Kimber staying in the cosmic lost-and-found for fucking ever.”

  “How’s your head?” she asked.

  “I’ll get by. Just hurts like shit. Sorry. Any idea why they haven’t killed us yet?”

  “Curiosity? Fear? Maybe both.”

  “Fear?”

  “You blew that guy’s head off. They didn’t look for the gun, so they have no idea how you did that.”

  “I got two more before one of them David-and-Goliathed my ass.”

  “Even more reason to kill us. But they seemed more annoyed at carrying you than the fact that you killed three of their crew. They think we’ve got some bad mojo. Killing us could bring a curse down on them or maybe they think we have powerful friends.” She rolled her eyes upward.

  “The gods smile on us? With our string of luck? That’s a laugh.”

  Caroline pulled up a pant leg to examine her calf. An angry black bruise was forming where the slung rock struck her.

  “They hit you?” Dwayne said.

  “Brought me down with a stone.”

  “They do anything else? I mean like—”

  “Rape me? No. I guess the reputation of horny sailors is overrated.”

  “Or they don’t know you’re a woman.” Dwayne cast a glance at their guard, but he was engrossed in vigorously picking his nose.

  “Say again?” Caroline said.

  “Those baggy BDUs and that football sweater hide all your goodies. Your hair is cut short. That’s probably not the fashion for the ladies these days. And you’ve got dried blood all over your face.”

  She touched her face with her fingers. They came back with a dark gummy mess smeared on them.

  “You’ve looked better, trust me. They probably think you’re a boy,” Dwayne said.

  “They’d rape me just the same.”

  “Probably. But they have boys on board for that. They find out you’re a girl, and that changes the equation. Let’s keep your gender to ourselves as long as we can.”

  Their guard eventually lost all interest in them and fell asleep on the filthy sand.

  Dwayne tested the rope bonds. The guys that tied him up were sailors. They knew their knots. With enough time, he could loosen the ring bolt from the hull. He couldn’t turn his head enough to see it. But it probably was a match for the one Caroline was chained to. A wrought iron cleat secured to a rib beam by thick wooden pegs. The wood that he could feel with his fingers was wet. Maybe it was rotten.

  Caroline was curled on the sand, sound asleep in a post-adrenaline crash.

  If he could get them both free while the boat was still anchored, they had a chance. Once this tub took off, they’d be lost forever. Dwayne braced his legs and applied some outward pressure to the ropes. He only managed to twist the ropes into his wrists enough to draw blood.

  He tried rocking the cleat back and forth and feeling back to the heads of the wooden pegs to see if he could work them loose with his fingers. Between the pain in his head and the gentle rocking of the boat, he was lulled into closing his eyes, and then time slipped away from him.

  34

  The Diviner’s Boy

  CAROLINE CAME AWAKE in the dark. She felt rather than saw Dwayne by her. He was snoring noisily. There were voices comin
g through the decking above. The sounds of shuffling feet descended the planks into the hold. She kicked a foot out to awaken Dwayne. He sat up with a grunt.

  A young boy, probably twelve or so, was in the lead. He wore a skirt and sandals and a faded wool tunic that looked several sizes too large on him and was belted with a length of cording. He held a lit oil lamp in one hand and a basket under his other arm.

  Following behind him was an old man with long white hair and a scraggly beard. The old man wore a patched and faded robe cinched about him with rope. There was a hemp sack slung around his bony shoulders. He descended the steps cautiously, placing both of his bare feet on a step before proceeding to the next and reaching for any available handhold. His back was bent nearly double. Untreated scoliosis, Caroline guessed.

  The boy spoke to the sleeping guard who got to his feet and climbed the steps to leave them alone. The boy set the oil lamp down in the sand and knelt before the captives well beyond the reach of either of them. He pushed the basket forward across the sand. Caroline strained the length of chain to reach it and pulled it toward her.

  It contained food along with a clay jar of water. She set the basket between her and Dwayne. She had to hold the food to his mouth so he could eat. They shared dried figs, salted fish flavored with, what else, garlic, and some kind of cheese that stank like hell, but they ate every crumb. They washed it all down with clean water that probably came from Jimbo’s spring.

  All the while, the boy sat speaking softly to the old man, who remained silently studying the strangers. The old man rummaged in the woven hemp bag and pulled out an amber stone the size of a silver dollar. He held this stone up to his eye as though studying the captives through it and made clucking noises with his tongue.