by Chuck Dixon
“Neeta never mentioned any blue people, But, shit, I don’t know what the hell her people were like. I wasn’t looking for in-laws,” Rick said.
Jimbo took the drone case from Byrus’ back and had the little machine aloft above the trees inside of a minute. As it buzzed skyward, it scattered big grey birds from the branches of the surrounding sequoias. He piloted it north and flipped on the heat signature option to look for a lone figure moving generally north of their position. Hot orange blobs showed up in packs and bunches. Birds, mostly. Jimbo adjusted the filters to take in only larger animals.
“You see her?” Rick asked, standing up on his toes to peek over the Pima’s shoulder.
“It’s a big search area, and I only have so much battery life,” Jimbo said and jinked the drone east, closer to the lake shore.
A singular reddish blob appeared inland of the north shore. Jimbo switched to high definition and zoomed in. It was N’itha. She was armed with a skinny’s spear and moving up a trail toward the ridge of a hill.
“That’s ten klicks of broken country from here. How’d she make it that far in the time since she left?” Jimbo said.
“No way unless she cut across the lake,” Bat put in.
“Fuck me. I taught her to swim,” Rick said and left them to retrieve and repack the drone while he headed north along the edge of the marsh in a halting jog favoring his bad leg. The others rucked and followed.
They humped generally north using a divide in the range to reach the floor of a valley where they hoped to intercept N’itha. Their path took them dangerously close to a mammoth herd busily stripping limbs from a copse of the birch trees. Rick charged right through with the rest on his heels. He wasn’t veering even for a mass of feeding elephants.
N’itha was lightly burdened, and they were rucked up. She could move faster. The girl also had the advantage of being a local. As she neared her village, her surroundings would grow more familiar. Her course would be true while they would be looking to cut her trail.
Drenched with sweat and hurting, except for Byrus who looked as if he could run another forty miles non-stop, the trio took a break at a stream. Jimbo sent the drone aloft and found N’itha climbing a rocky slope, hopping from one ledge to another like she was ascending a staircase.
“She’s two klicks north and east and a thousand feet above us. Your lady is part mountain goat, Renzi,” Jimbo said.
“This sucks. We can see her but can’t reach her,” Renzi said, lowering his head into the cool stream.
“Check this out,” Jimbo said. He twiddled the controls, and the image of N’itha grew larger on the screen. Renzi stood close, watching the girl climb.
“What good’s that do us?” he said.
“There’s a speaker on the drone. I opened the line to it. Say something to her.”
“Hey, Neeta! Neeta, honey! Slow the hell down, honey!” Rick shouted at the screen.
The girl stopped on a ledge and looked right at the camera. Her look of astonishment turned to fury, and she shouted at them from the monitor. An unintelligible stream of words came out of the speaker on the controller. Jimbo thought he heard a few clear Anglo-Saxonisms salted in there. He put it down to a year spent only in the company of Renzi, whose mouth was famous even in the Rangers.
“Come on, baby. Don’t be like that. I need you, honey!” Rick said, edging toward whininess.
N’itha responded by picking up rocks and throwing them at the drone. Her aim was incredible. One rock soared close enough to momentarily obscure the image on the screen. She accompanied each rock with a shouted word. Both men leaned back as though the rocks might somehow come off the tablet screen and strike them. N’itha shrank to the size of a doll as Jimbo moved the drone up and out of range.
“This thing cost more than my last car, and she nearly totaled it with a rock,” Jimbo said.
“What was that word she was shouting? She said it over and over,” Bat said.
“It means ‘turtle dick.’ Apparently, it’s the worst thing you can call someone in her language.” Rick shrugged.
“That’s pretty bad in any language, bro,” Jimbo said.
They drank their fill from the stream. Jimbo brought the drone back and packed it away and back on Byrus’ shoulders. From the stream bed, they moved up the slope in the direction of where the girl was climbing toward the rocky ridge high above them to the north.
The day was wearing on. They needed to catch up before the sun fell, and the predators came out of their lairs to hunt.
31
History Lesson
“So, the dude has been a hologram all this time? We’ve been taking advice from a theme park attraction?” Dwayne said once they were back in their cabin.
“You’ll wake Stephen,” Caroline said. She was making a fresh pot of coffee just to have something to do with her still-shaking hands.
“Was he ever real?” Dwayne said.
“Part of the time he must have been. I remember that he interacted with the physical world back in Paris. Opening doors. Loading a pistol for me. Chaz saw him driving a car, for God’s sake. Though I’ve never seen him eat or drink anything.” She set two steaming mugs on a table and took a seat across from Dwayne.
“Spooky shit,” he said, idly pouring creamer into his mug until it was the consistency of milky mud.
“Remember Lynn Renzi told you about the time he visited her? He didn’t knock at the door or ring the bell. She remembered that he never touched anything. He was a projection then.”
“And in Paris at Christmas?”
“Probably then, too. He just came up to us out of nowhere and walked away when he was done speaking. I didn’t see where he went. Did you?” She pulled her laptop open and was tapping away as she spoke.
“Googling astral projection?” he asked.
“Googling Nanking and 1864,” she said, eyes on the screen.
“Another run for the gold. At least it’s closer to home timewise. It’s got to be easier than the last few ops, right?”
Caroline’s eyes grew wide, and she looked at her husband over the lid of the MacBook.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You really need to catch up on your Chinese history,” she said.
32
The Grave of the Sun People
N’itha was atop the mesa near her home. She recognized the yellow flowers growing everywhere. They would soon be heavy with seed; their stems bent under the weight. The seeds would be dried and stored in baskets. They were a favorite of the children who would eat them raw or as a paste ground by the women of the village. Her favorite was the balls made of honey and seeds that they made each year when the sun was at its lowest in the sky and the nights were longer.
She would not be alive to see that. She had seen her last winter in the company of her strange new mate. Her death awaited her in the valley beyond. She would surrender to the witch mother and die beneath her blade. She did not fear this end as much as she feared the grotesque attentions of Koto, the headman of her people and touched by the sun gods and bringer of the harvest. The girl crossed the field of flowers with a lighter heart. At least she knew the pleasure of having a loving mate who cared for her and was gentle and kind to her for the time they were together.
She’d defied the wishes of her father and the order of things as they had been since the time of her father’s father and his father and back and back to the first fathers and the fire that brought forth the world and all that was in it. And she would never regret that defiance. There was no way to know the day she fled her home valley that freedom and happiness lay ahead of her. She’d believed her immediate fate was to be mauled and eaten by some predator or die of thirst or hunger, her body reduced to scattered bones by the animals of the forest. And she’d accepted that rather than wed the loathsome Koto. Instead, she’d been found by Rikki and taken to his home where they found pleasure in each other’s company all through the summer until the birds of spring returned to tell her she
must go home.
Just as her lover must return to his home, his world. His people had come for him. She understood enough of their words to know that she was not welcome in that world. And she knew her Rikki enough to know that he would stay here with the flesh-eaters, in a place that was not his home, just to be with her. She could not deny him the wonders awaiting him in the place of his birth, and so she had left him. Destiny would not be denied, and she would be dead by the time he could find her again.
Clouds moved in swiftly to hide the sun turning afternoon to evening. Thunder dispelled the silence of the fields of flowers swaying all around her. Driving rain fell with a sudden fury that broke the stalks of flowers with an insistent sound that rose and fell with the wind.
N’itha kept on even though the ground beneath turned to slippery mud. She came to the mesa’s edge where the sudden rain swelled the washes with a torrent of muddy water. Following a ridge above a swampy swale, she came down into the woods above the cascade and was soon in the shelter of towering trees. Even through the downpour, she could smell the smoke of the village at the foot of the hillside.
Her village.
The scent was different now. The smoke smelled old, corrupted. It was not the scent of a cook fire. The clean aroma of dried wood. There was no hint of meat roasting or vegetables frying. It was more of a stink, unpleasant and rank. It grew stronger the farther she went down the hillside toward her home.
She crouched in the trees and looked toward the village across the broad fields that in the seasons before had been planted with squash and beans. They were fallow now. The empty furrows filling with rainwater. The fields had been prepared but not yet planted. Something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
A white haze of smoke hung over the village. It shimmied and drifted low in the falling rain as though clutching the homes of her people in a ghostly embrace. She crept low across the muddy field, hidden by the shadowless gloom of the storm. She held the spear before her. Her eyes focused over the gleaming flint blade at the end. No sound rose from within the wall of woven branches that encircled her village as a protective fence to keep out predators.
The stench was stronger here. A nasty, noxious smoke of a guttering fire coming from within the fence line. As she approached, she saw that sections of the fence were torn aside or crushed low. No one had repaired them. She found her way through a gap to find a dead place.
No one greeted her. No one called out at her return. No dog barked. No child cried. The village was empty. The lanes between the huts were empty. Some of the huts had collapsed. Broken pots lay in the mud. A corral of piled stone had one wall shoved over. The goats penned within were gone. Most shocking was the state of the witch mother’s home. The building, the largest in the village, was a charred ruin. It was the only structure with more than one level. It once sat on pilings of stout timbers with ladders angled to allow access. The earth mother once stood upon the broad veranda floored with adzed and polished planks to address the people of the village. Inside the pole and thatch dwelling were many rooms in which the witch mother kept her secrets as well as the offerings of the people.
It was all gone now. The once grand palace of the witch and her son was a smoldering pyre. A few blackened poles remained, but the rest was a mess of cooling embers; the source of the pervasive stench. The lodge had burned bright and for a long time. These were the remains of a blaze many days old.
Something visited here only to destroy. Not just destroy but to take. There was not a single corpse in sight. No sign that anyone had ever lived here. Whatever force—man, god, demon or animal—that had done this left no trace of anyone who had called this place home. N’itha’s mother and father, siblings, and friends were all gone as though they never lived. All that remained were ruined huts and the vestige of an inferno. The only sound was the rain falling on the sodden ground in a susurrus whisper that sounded to her like voices.
Voices of the dead.
It was a place of death. And something else.
She turned to run, away from this place and back toward Rikki.
To warn him. To tell him to go home and to go alone. To leave her. To tell him that she brought doom to her own people.
As if to make their curse upon her more emphatic, the sky gods opened the heavens wide. The rain became a blinding, pelting torrent that turned the world to a sea of cloying muck. A flash of lightning lit the firmament from horizon to horizon, turning the scorched frames of the homes around her into the skeletal silhouettes of unknown animals.
33
The Other Men
The rain reached a near choking intensity. It drowned out every sound other than the constant beat of a billion tiny drums. Gusts of wind curved the downpour sideways in violent waves.
Jimbo lost sight of Byrus trotting ahead through a field of yellow flowers bending under the deluge crashing down all around them.
“Bruce!” he called.
Byrus trotted back, spear in hand, from the haze. “What’s ahead of us? Up ahead!” Jimbo shouted over the din.
“Trees! Many trees, baas!” Byrus pointed the way ahead through the monsoon.
Rick and Bat caught up. Rick was moving slower now. The badly healed break in his leg created a painful limp over time. He was not complaining, but there was a pinched look on his face that betrayed the pain he was suffering. Bat Jaffe hung back with him.
“There’s forest ahead!” Jimbo shouted and pointed.
“Thank God!” Bat yelled back.
They moved at the best speed they could manage across the slurry of mud and rain-crushed plants, and soon reached the shelter of the trees. The heat never abated despite the rainfall. A mist of evaporating water was rising from the forest floor even as the shower continued to trickle on them through the boughs high above. The wind died here. The sounds of the rain fell to a pattering murmur.
“It’s pissing down! Jesus!” Rick said, leaning against the thick bole of a tree to massage his aching leg.
“You gonna be able to go on?” Jimbo asked.
“Don’t ever ask me that,” Rick said, eyes hooded.
“Okay, then. Noted. The only good news? This will be slowing Neeta down too.”
Byrus raised his head and sniffed the air. He grunted to the others and pointed to his nose. Jimbo filled his nose and let it out over his tongue. He tasted the air as his grandfather once showed him.
“Wood smoke. And something else. Something fishy,” the Pima said.
“We’re near the settlement. What do we do if Neeta beats us there?” Bat asked.
“Then things get messy,” Rick said and pushed off from the tree to move on.
Jimbo adjusted his pack to set out. He felt Bat’s hand on his arm.
“Jimmy. A blue man,” she said, eyes wide.
Past her, he could see a man watching them boldly, standing in the open between two trees. He was naked but for the indigo dye that covered him from head to foot. In his fist, he held a peculiar cudgel: a round river stone secured to the end of a slightly curved wooden handle by shrunken leather bands. A killing tool. The man’s black eyes regarded them with only mild interest. Jimbo realized he’d raised his rifle out of pure instinct and was viewing the blue stranger over his front sights. He felt cold fingers touch his spine when he met the other man’s eyes.
He could tell by the confidence there that this man was not alone.
Bat’s rifle was up and moving to cover the surrounding gloom.
“Guys! Hold up” Jimbo bellowed.
Byrus called back wordlessly. Jimbo saw him fall, struck by one of the stone cudgels. They were a throwing weapon as well. The curved handle should have told him that.
Blue men, dozens of them, and then scores appeared from behind trees all around and rushed forward throwing the cudgels overhand. Jimbo and Bat backed against the massive trunk of a sequoia. Jimbo dropped one then two with controlled three round bursts. He could feel Bat against him covering the other face of the battle clock wi
th three round bursts.
A cudgel hit his rifle, then his arm. It went numb. The rifle dropped from his fingers as his hand went tingly then dead.
He pulled the Dan Wesson in a cross draw with his left hand. The big revolver boomed and lifted a blue fucker off his feet. A second shot turned another attacker’s head to a spray of red mist. He was swinging his head back and forth, trying to cover the full one-eighty with only one good eye.
Stone cudgels smashed into the tree behind them, showering broken bark. The blue men pressed in with greater numbers.
Bat yelped. Jimbo felt her pulled from his side. He turned with the hot revolver in his fist. A cudgel in the hands of a snarling indigo man, eyes wild under a shock of bright red hair, smashed his gun hand. Jimbo fired the revolver inches from the man’s skin. A hot shower of blood flew into his working eye, blinding him.
More strikes from bludgeons. Hands gripped him and dragged him down. They crushed him to the ground under their combined weight. His mouth and nose filled with the sharp fishy stink of them. He’d smelled them before he saw them.
Just like an Indian would, Jimmy Smalls thought as consciousness fled from him.
34
Hammond’s Heroes
“Ho,” Lee Hammond said, raising a fist.
“I heard it,” Chaz Raleigh said, stopping behind him.
Lee stood, head cocked. “That’s a mike-four. And another one.”
“And a forty-four mag,” Chaz said.
The sounds were rebounding off the hills rising above them. Dark clouds closed in over the top of the peaks. They were fast marching toward ugly weather.
The company was stopped on the beach at the lake shore opposite the cliff settlement. About fifty skinnies were with them. Adults mostly and a few male boys. They were armed only with spears and flint knives. But six of them were burdened with the big fifty caliber machine gun and tripod. Chaz had tried to explain that there was no ammo for the Ma Deuce, but the little brutes wouldn’t listen and shouldered the weapon and trudged on.
