One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “Well, that’s not exactly accurate anymore, is it?” She smiled.

  “You need to forget about a unit patch, babe. This outfit is need-to-know,” Lee said, clambering up after Chaz.

  By late afternoon they were well into the mountain range along the selected trail. It turned out to be a dry wash with stunted pines growing close on either side. The climb up was an exhausting series of steps from one ledge of stone to another. The sky cleared, and the sun could reach them now. Each of the team had their own cloud of evaporating sweat rising off their clothes. Only Byrus seemed unaffected, hopping from rock to rock and barely breaking a sweat.

  Jimbo stopped and spat a pebble from his mouth. He hooked his thumbs in his ruck straps and lifted them off his shoulders for a few seconds of relief. He sniffed the air, taking a deep breath through his nose. He opened his mouth and let it out to take in a slow, shallow breath over his tongue to taste the air.

  “Water,” he said and pointed right into the trees.

  “We’ll follow your nose,” Lee said.

  The team moved into the trees where the shade provided some relief from the heat but not much. It was green and dark with a thick odor of rotting wood from the surrounding foliage. Their heads moved on swivels, on constant watch for movement of any kind.

  Bat was startled when a shadow separated itself from the immense bole of a sequoia. She hissed to the others and raised her rifle. The shadow rose on hind legs to a height of ten feet or more. It was covered in thick fur. Its massive body tapered to a narrow skull and teeth chomping lazily. It leaned on the bark of the tree and regarded her with gleaming dark eyes. Bat turned her gaze at a deep purring sound and saw that others of this same species were all around them quietly munching on fungus they stripped from the bark of the trees with foot -long claws and curved flat teeth.

  “Sloths. They’re not interested in us,” Jimbo said in a low voice. Byrus stood by him with eyes wide, whites showing all around.

  The giant creatures lost interest in the strangers and returned to feeding as the team moved by in single file.

  A twenty-minute hike brought them to a large pool at the base of a rock face fed by a spring. Creatures fled into the thick carpet of ferns on their approach. Bat spotted one before it vanished; a wingless bird about two feet in height. A ridge of iridescent blue feathers ran along its spine. They left three-toed tracks in the thick mud around the basin.

  Jimbo tested the water and announced it drinkable. Chaz knelt on a moss covered slab of rock at the edge and dunked his whole head in the ice cold pool. They ran it through a filter to refill their CamelBaks and reserve canteens. They drank their fill and topped off all the containers before departing.

  “Where are we, Zim?” Byrus asked as they returned to the trail. The Macedonian could not get his tongue around a soft “J” sound so “Zim” was the best he could do.

  “It’s called California. The other side of these mountains is Nevada. That’s where we’re going,” Jimbo said.

  “Not Tartarii?” Byrus said, his head turning and eyes sweeping the trees before and behind them.

  “No. Tartar-eye? What is that, Bruce?”

  “Land of dead men. Many chamaloph. Many zhulomiphica.” Byrus searched Jimbo’s eyes with fearful wonder.

  “You mean Tartarus. Like Hell. An evil place,” Jimbo said.

  Byrus nodded.

  “It’s not like that, Bruce. Everything is cool, okay?

  Fucking A, all right?” Jimbo clapped a hand to his neck.

  “Fucking A,” Byrus repeated without conviction.

  They regained the trail and continued their inland march.

  “Nothing like a day at the beach,” Boats said.

  “And no surfers. What beach you think this is?” Dwayne said.

  “Hermosa? Redondo? Wait long enough, and Brad Pitt will give you a million bucks for where you’re standing.” Boats shrugged out of his t-shirt and Molle vest.

  The SEAL was setting up the transmitter while Dwayne unpacked goods that they’d need including groundsheets and food packs. They found an open section of sand above a tidal pool with a clear field of view in all directions. Rollers were coming in with crowds of birds hopping and skittering in the shallows. It was a short walk to the concealed boat. They were well clear of high tide. It was as good a place to wait as any. With any luck, the field back to The Now would open, and they’d schedule an extraction.

  “Don’t push it, soldier. You’re busted up, remember?” Boats said.

  “I sit too long I’ll get stiff. Better to stay on the move,” Dwayne said. It had been a long, painful walk, but he wasn’t about to give in to it.

  “I hear you. You listen for any calls while I go to the boat. There’s a freshwater tank. We’ll need it.”

  “I can manage setting up some sun cover before you get back.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Boats said and set out along the sand for the dunes. He had his shotgun held easy in one hand, and both their CamelBaks slung over his shoulder.

  The SEAL climbed the slope of sand and down into the gully between two high dunes. Little birds of gray and white fluttered out of the grass. They kept up a chittering sound in protest at his passage and continued with tweets and trills, creating a vivid soundtrack all around. He followed the winding floor of the gully north until he came on the covered shape of the raft, undisturbed since they left it. He pried up a few pegs and lifted the camo cover. Some lizards slithered from inside to run away into the brush.

  Boats was filling the CamelBaks from the reserve fresh water tank on the side of the Titan when he sensed a change around him. The shotgun was in his fists before he realized it. His eyes scanned the ridgeline. He asked himself what was different.

  The birds.

  The birds were silent now.

  He dropped low and eyeballed the ridgelines on either side of the gully.

  A shape rose from the peak of the inland dune away to the south. Fifty yards. Maybe less.

  It was a big cat sliding cautiously into the gully. It was like the one Roenbach brought down but sleeker. It was shy of the half-ton weight of that monster but not by much. The thick tuft of white hair at the throat was missing on this one.

  A female.

  The mate of the cat they’d killed.

  Boats jerked upright, shotgun to his shoulder. He loosed a load of double-ought, but the creature was already on the move. Pump and pull. A rifled slug raised a gout of sand behind the tiger as it raced up the slope back the way it came. He chambered another round, but his target was slipping over the ridge and out of sight.

  The SEAL didn’t stop to see what the cat did next. He had to get out of this slot where he was blind in two directions. He slung the CamelBaks and climbed up over the seaward dune and down to open sand where he broke the land speed record for running backward while covering his own ass.

  Dwayne was up with his M4 at port and covering Boats’ six as he approached the camp by the tidal pool at a limping run.

  “I heard your shotgun,” Dwayne said.

  “That big cat you offed? He had a girlfriend, and she is a stone-cold bitch,” Boats said once his breath had returned.

  12

  Bad News

  “You need to see this, Morris,” Caroline Tauber said.

  Mo moved from his work station with a great deal of reluctance to look over his sister’s shoulder at one of those clickbait “news” websites on her monitor.

  “Seriously, Sis?” He sighed.

  “Look,” she demanded.

  He leaned closer, lowering his glasses to scan the text below a picture of a smiling kid in glasses and a hipster goatee holding up a slab of petrified dirt the size of a dinner plate.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  13

  Googled

  It was a slow news day.

  That’s the only reason the news outlets picked up a story more suited for the wackier of the tabloids.

  Lawrence Fonseca, a student at Ball St
ate University, claimed that a fossilized bird track in his collection had been altered in a rather amazing way. The tracks were of bird called a rhea mexicanus, a type of prehistoric ostrich common in the southwestern United States and throughout Central America in the Pleistocene period, and now long extinct.

  Larry found the perfectly preserved pair of tracks on the floor of a wash following a heavy rain. It was on a high school trip to California with a paleontology club he only joined because he was smitten with Felicia Danby, the club’s vice president. The over-sized chicken tracks caused a lot of excitement in the group and brought Larry a lot of attention. Felicia even let him get to third base in her tent that night.

  The admiration of the club fellows and Felicia’s affection for him faded once they got back to Evansville. All fame is fleeting he found out. No one really cared all that much about some zillion-year-old chicken prints. He had the flat square-ish section of limestone mounted in a shadow box display case. It went along with him to college where it sat on a shelf with his Ninja Turtles action figures and a signed Derek Jeter baseball. It was a conversation starter, but the conversations never went much further than “that’s cool.” After a while, Larry stopped pointing it out to visitors to his off-campus apartment on the second floor of a duplex on Winthrop Road.

  Until a girl, he met in his Organizational Principles of Business class promised to come over and make him a spaghetti dinner. Larry went into a flurry of dusting and vacuuming and general cleaning in preparation for her arrival. Mostly the tidying amounted to stowing all of his unsightly shit in Rubbermaids down in the chicken-wire “locker” in the basement that came with the apartment. Removing his collectibles from the Ikea shelf in order to dust it, he came across the shadow box containing the pair of primordial bird tracks.

  Only it was different now.

  Overtop of the millennia-old tracks was the unmistakable imprint of a waffle-stomper boot sole. He could even clearly read part of the company logo preserved in the prehistoric mud. He Googled “boots, hiking, brands” and identified it as a women’s boot made by Vasque. Size eight.

  Larry did what any millennial does when confronted by the confounding or the discovery of anything of even mild passing interest. He took a picture of it and put it on Facebook. His friends’ responses predictably ranged from “WTF?” to “What have u bin smokin?” But the post was re-posted over and over until it reached the section of the internet community fascinated with Big Foot and Area 51. A bored reader at Associated Press picked it up, and the next day a local TV station came and put Larry on the air holding up his amazing find mixed in with B-roll lifted from Jurassic Park. It was all enough to get him laid a couple of times, and his curiosity ended there.

  He forgot all about it until his phone rang at two in the morning.

  “Lawrence Fonseca?” A woman’s voice.

  “Yeah. I’m kind of busy.” He was cramming for a final in accounting.

  “I wanted to talk to you about what happened to you last week.”

  He panicked. Was this about Angela or what’s-her-name, the spaghetti making girl? Was this an angry mom?

  “The fossil. The one you claim changed overnight. I wanted to speak to you about it. I represent a foundation with an interest in that area of study.”

  “Oh, okay.” Larry sighed in relief.

  The woman on the other end of the line, who Larry decided sounded way sexy now that he knew she wasn’t a pissed off parent, asked about where he’d found the fossil originally. He told her generally. It was at the south end of a park in the San Gabriels four summers ago. She asked details about the original bird prints and the new boot print. She asked if it had been tested in any way, such as carbon dating.

  “Naw. I just put it up on Facebook. Talked to some TV people. No one asked to look at it like that,” he said.

  “I’d like to do extensive tests on it to prove its authenticity.”

  “Oh, it’s authentic, all right. I thought some of my friends were fuh—fooling with me. But, trust me, none of them are smart enough to fake something like this.”

  “I’ll be sending a representative to see you in the morning. Will you be home?”

  “I don’t have classes until afternoon but, hold on; you want to take the fossil?”

  “To study, yes.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. I don’t want to just give it away like that,” Larry said.

  “Oh, we’re prepared to buy the specimen from you,” the cool sexy voice said.

  “Yeah? How much?”

  “What do you owe on your student loan?”

  “That much?”

  “Will our representative see you in the morning?”

  “Bet your ass, lady,” Larry said, grinning.

  The line went dead.

  14

  The Circle of Fire and Blood

  “I can handle this part on my own, Dwayne,” Boats said.

  “What am I supposed to do? Sit here shitting my pants until the cat comes back?” Dwayne took overwatch.

  He perched atop a dune with his M4 charged and a scope attached. Below him, Boats worked at cutting away scrub pines and dragging them back to their camp. It was part of the strategy they’d worked out together. They agreed that the sabretooth was not going to let them go. As long as she stayed on the stalk, they couldn’t move the raft down to the surf. They were in her hunting ground now. If they were ever leaving this beach, the she-cat had to die first.

  Boats chopped and dragged double time, making brush piles on the sand around their camp. The sun was dropping. They needed everything in place before dark. No one knew the hunting habits of these cats. They were extinct long before any written language was created. No one had recorded observing them in the wild. The Ranger and the SEAL would be learning as they went along. But it was a good guess that this animal hunted like other big cats.

  By night.

  They needed to contact the Raj and get home. The clock was ticking. Dwayne would never let Boats know, but his ribs hurt like hell. It hurt every time he drew in a breath. He’d be no good in a protracted fight. And he’d seen enough battlefield rib injuries turn to pneumonia to not kid himself about his chances if he didn’t get some help pretty soon. The bandages were holding him in place, and he had his Molle vest cinched as tight as he could stand it. But he knew he needed more extensive medical attention. The sooner they killed this cat and got the raft deployed; the sooner they could radio back at the first field opening.

  His eyes swept the dunes for movement. A flurry of birds rose in a rush from between dunes. Dwayne trained the rifle their way, focusing through the scope on the ridgeline. The birds flew honking overhead to drop in a group to the shallow water of the tidal pool. No movement from the deepening shadows in the gulfs between the sand peaks. The tops of the thick brush swayed. That could have been the evening wind building off the Pacific.

  Dwayne turned at a low whistle. A new spear of pain shot up into his armpit. He swallowed it down. Boats stood at the foot of the dune with the shotgun in his fists. The SEAL nodded toward the camp and raised the pump gun to cover him as he came down from his perch. They both backed toward the camp, eyes locked on the dunes for any motion in the growing shadows. The sea was swirling copper and cream under the lowering sun behind them, throwing their shadows long on the sand.

  Boats had six stacks of brush and dry sea grass spaced around their camp. As it grew darker, they lit them using splashes of tequila from the SEAL’s ever-present flask. The fires threw off little light but lots of greasy smoke. That was the idea.

  “You don’t mind being bait?” Boats said.

  Dwayne stood in the center of the circle of smoldering piles. “It’s me she wants. It’s my scent she followed.”

  “Then let’s go hunting,” Boats said and slid the night-vision gear down over his eyes. He was wearing the full array of four lenses that made him look like a big bearded bug. He backed away toward the surf and the outer dark.

  “Uh hu
h,” Dwayne said and fixed his own binocular NODs lenses down.

  The dark and the smoke were both wiped away as filtered through the lenses. A digitized image area showed him the world in high-contrast monochrome. The dunes looked like ranks of drifted snow now. He turned back and forth, panning and scanning. Tiny eyes glowed like pinholes in the greater wash of glare. Some kind of nocturnal feeders. Dozens of them. Prehistoric possums curious about the new scent on the beach.

  Dwayne’s hands were slick on the grips of the shotgun. He blinked sweat from his eyes. Even the night wind off the water did nothing to relieve the cloying humidity. Jesus, it was hot here. The sand beneath his feet was cooling, but the air was so damned thick. Breathing was like drawing air through a straw. He forced himself to breathe shallowly to keep the view through the lenses steady.

  The plan was simple. The fires would provide enough light to throw off the she-tiger’s night vision and the smoke would interfere with her sense of smell. The NODs should allow them to see her before she saw them. And they’d need every foot of distance that advantage could provide them. The male that collided with Dwayne was half a football field away when he came into view. It was only pure dumb luck that let Dwayne nail the bastard. That kind of luck was scarce.

  The pairs of eyes dotting the shadows at the foot of the dunes vanished in an instant.

  The possums were on the move all at once.

  A gray shape topped a dune far to his right. It dropped away into a gully and appeared again crossing a hummock still to his right but closer in. He trained the front bead of the Mariner on the next closest ridge of sand where the shape might reappear. It surprised him by flashing over the dune just left of his aiming point. It was the cat all right. Less bulky than the one he’d killed like Boats described. That probably meant the she-cat was faster. He recalled from nature specials he’d watched as a kid that the female was often the more skilled hunter. One row of dunes separated them. When she came out on the open sand, she’d be less than a hundred yards from where he stood.