by Chuck Dixon
He brought it down with one shot to the head. Lee gutted it then laid it with head down the incline to bleed out. While he was at that, N’itha gathered berries and wild scallions, placing them in the boonie hat she used as an improvised bowl.
Lee sent her back up to the camp for Chaz. She must have understood because Chaz and Bat both came down to help bring breakfast up to their firebase. By Chaz’s guess, the beast dressed out to five hundred pounds even after gutting and chopping off the forelegs. They dragged it up using a line run around the antlers. It was sloppy work but got the job done, and soon caribou steaks were cooking over a fire Byrus prepared.
N’itha made a broth for Rick but he puked it up as soon she got it down him.
“He’s running a fever. We have to get it down. And that leg is looking nasty,” Chaz said, shaking his head.
Rick’s leg was swollen and red around the bad break that had healed all wrong five years back. The continued pressure had strained his leg and stirred up something that resulted in infection. If it hadn’t already eaten down to the bone, it would soon. Then there was nothing they could do for Ricky. His skin was paper-dry and hot to the touch, especially in the area around the swelling.
“Help me carry him to that spring, Lee,” Chaz said. “Jimbo, you put a fresh edge on a knife and sterilize it.”
They brought Rick down to the spring where ice cold water ran out of the rocks and into a shallow pool. N’itha came with them and waded into the water as they lowered him down, leaving only his face exposed. Rick fought them feebly. Chaz told him to stop being a pussy and let them save his life before dunking him under the surface. They pulled Rick up, sputtering.
When Chaz was satisfied that Rick’s temps were lowered a bit, they hauled him out and carried him back to camp. Jimbo had Lee’s clasp knife sharpened and ready. The tip glowed dull orange where he’d had it in the fire.
“I won’t lie to you. This is gonna hurt like a bitch,” Chaz said.
“Shame we went through the Jack Daniels already,” Rick croaked.
“You mean you went through the Jack, motherfucker. Hold his ass down,” Chaz said.
Byrus and Jimbo put their full weight on either of Renzi’s arms. Lee pressed his legs flat above the knees. N’itha grabbed Rick by the hair in both hands and held his head immobile. This was a whole world of tough love coming down, Chaz thought. He shoved the hot point of the knife up into the base of the swollen mass, creating a slit an inch wide and six inches deep on the outside the leg away from main arteries.
When Chaz withdrew the blade, watery pus exploded out in a stream. Ricky bucked and tossed, but the foursome holding him to the ground stayed firm. He renewed the fight when Chaz put pressure on the angry bulge in his leg. Thick, foul-smelling ichor jetted from the incision. Bat, standing by playing nurse, leapt out of the way of the nauseating spray. Chaz kept up the pressure until he saw bright red blood leaking from the cut.
Ricky was punchy from the pain and whispering curses at them all.
“Let it go, brother. Let it go,” Jimbo said.
As if obeying an order, Ricky slumped back into a deep sleep.
“We need to keep that as clean as we can. If this worked, his fever should crash. Bring him to the fire and let’s see if we can break it,” Chaz said.
Once they had him situated by the fire, N’itha left them to run down the slope into the hedge of bushes. She was wearing Chaz’s boonie hat once more.
“Maybe she went to hurl. I sure feel like it,” Bat said.
“Neeta’s got a stronger stomach than any of us; I’ll bet,” Chaz said.
She returned within the hour and sat by Renzi. The boonie hat was loaded with goodies. With a rounded stone, N’itha crushed the objects she’d found into a thick paste that she smeared on Rick’s leg all around the incision and over the whole infected area. Chaz dipped fingers in the mess and took a whiff.
“Honey and wild garlic. A natural antibiotic.” He nodded in approval.
“She can open one of those hippie holistic clinics back in The Now,” Jimbo said.
“So we’re really taking her back with us?” Chaz asked.
“I think, right now, we should worry about how we get our own asses back before we start making any other plans,” Lee said.
55
The Eclipse
Rick Renzi was ready for travel after five days. His temp was normal, and he was taking solids and fluids again. He had a wasted look to him. None of them were looking very good after all their time in the field.
It wasn’t all rest for the team. Jimbo, with N’itha’s help, made them water skins from the bladders of a roebuck and a deer that Lee and Bat brought back. The wolf bite to the arm was troubling the Pima. He submitted to Chaz cleaning and cauterizing the bites. N’itha wrapped it in her honey and garlic poultice soaked into strips of cloth torn from Chaz’s t-shirt. She then crushed tree bark to powder and made a tea for Ricky and Jimbo.
“Homebrew aspirin,” Jimbo said, sipping the bitter mix.
“That’s my girl,” Rick said.
Byrus lashed up a new, sturdier travois to carry Rick. He did a rough job of tanning skins to make a bed stretched between the poles. After everyone complained of the stink, the Macedonian washed and tanned his wolf headpiece. They wanted him to toss it far away. But after Bat said it reminded her of Hercules, there was no convincing him. He stretched it on a frame and scrubbed it with sand and ash mixed with his own urine. When he was done drying and scraping the sinew from the ragged fur cape, it still smelled bad but in a different, more tolerable way.
Lee jerked strips of game meat in the sun for the trip back to the coast. Bat and N’itha found nuts, berries, apples, and scallions growing wild in the thicket around their camp. Chaz went along to watch for predators, human, pre-human, animal or otherwise. By day, they saw caribou, deer, sloths, a herd of Jimbo’s tiny porkers, and more different species of birds than they could count. The flooding of the river valley drove them out of the valley for drier ground. The higher elevation took the team above the worst of the biting insects.
Evening brought a pleasant breeze over the ridgeline that at least stirred the humid air a little. The wind also carried the sounds of monsters. Deep roars emerged from the surrounding dark. A chorus of howls from a thousand throats were lifted toward the Moon. Jimbo was recovered enough to take a rifle so the team could keep a pair on watch through the night. One sat overwatch at the highest point of the knobby hilltop. The other walked the perimeter.
They had only two night-vision arrays between them. Whoever stood watch wore them and scanned the surrounding slopes for any suspicious movement.
On the first night, Lee saw something out in the trees that looked at first like a bear but moved more like a dog. It came partway through the hedge of berry bushes and lay down on its belly. It watched the camp until close to dawn before moving off. It couldn’t make up its mind about the strange animals around the campfire any more than Lee could figure out what the hell it was. He asked Jimbo the next day.
The Pima shrugged. “Don’t know what you saw, bro. Fossil record’s not complete.”
Their fourth night, Jimbo had overwatch. A collection of ghostly images trotted between the trees gathering in greater and greater numbers, eyes glowing white, bodies silvery through the enhanced illumination of the NODs gear. Dire wolves. Probably the same pack he’d tangled with, now with a new alpha male in the lead. They moved silently in a clockwise pattern around the camp in, what they believed, was the sheltering dark behind the glow of the campfire. The pack was following Chaz on his perimeter watch, keeping to below the brow of the hilltop where the Ranger could not see them. He sure didn’t look like he could hear them loping along in a swirling column thirty yards from his position.
Jimbo sighted on the largest of the animals and put a round center mass. The big wolf went tumbling and kicking to the ground. The rest of the pack headed off in all directions. Chaz stopped in his tracks, whirling his gun about a
t the sudden crash of foliage being crushed beneath hundreds of the retreating paws.
The blast of the M4 cut the silence. The whole camp was up, weapons in hand.
“Wolves. They’re gone now,” Jimbo called out. No one got much sleep the rest of that night.
The morning of the sixth day they saddled up for home. They took turns pulling the travois carrying Rick who bitched about it endlessly.
“I can walk. Let me walk,” he whined. Chaz read him his orders.
“When we get on flat ground, I’m gonna pull you off that rig and make you walk. You’re gonna need to put weight on it. But there’s no damned way I’m risking you falling down on this rough ground, you broke-leg fucker.” Chaz kicked a pole of the travois.
“You’d make a great doctor. In a Mexican prison,” Rick carped.
“We came all this way for your sorry ass. We’re bringing you home, so we have something to show for this godforsaken trip,” Chaz said.
“Might have more than Ricky to show, brother. You check out the roof of that big hooch back in Blue City?” Lee said, walking behind.
“I saw it. Solid gold.”
“I say we find that place back in The Now and maybe dig around a little. That’s a few million just lying around to be found.”
“That rock face is probably still there. We know the rough position. Thirty-plus klicks almost dead north of Cannibal Lake.”
“Part of that’s mine,” Renzi piped up.
“Consider it a wedding present,” Chaz said, grinning.
Four days brought them along the highlands around the great marsh which was mostly drained now. Out of the high ground, they hiked down onto the broad grassy veldt. Renzi rose from his portable bed and walked part of the day, using a stick Byrus found him for support. Chaz ordered him back onto the travois before he overdid it. Renzi didn’t argue. He looked done in.
Their easy progress over the level ground was halted out on the grasslands by an enormous herd of the long-horned bison of the type they’d encountered on their way inland. The herd stretched from horizon to horizon and as deep as the eye could see. Each was two tons of pure meanness on the hoof. A brain the size of a human fist programmed for fear or rage and nothing in between those two extremes. The San Gabriels were just a grayish smear far to the west. Three days march at their current speed.
“We could try and walk around it,” Lee offered.
“Would add days to the trip,” Jimbo said. “And if they shifted in the direction of our detour we could be all the way to Tijuana before we found a way around.”
“And we’re sure as shit not marching through them,” Chaz confirmed for them all.
“A stampede and we’d be part of the fossil record,” Jimbo said. “A shift in weather could move them on. I say we give them a day and see if they clear out.”
They made camp on a hummock of ground thick with birch trees and waited the herd out.
Jimbo sat first watch that evening, the rifle across his knees. Chaz sat by him, both watching the sun drop behind the distant range.
“Hard to believe this was ever like this. Even harder to believe that it all ends. There’ll be highways and gas stations and supermarkets out where those buffalo roam,” Jimbo said.
“Sounds like you’ll miss it,” Chaz said.
“No. Like I said before, no horses. None you can ride. I’m glad I saw it. Just a little sad, you know, bro? This was the world once. Then it passes. Someday we’ll pass. Time is a bitch.”
“Yeah, bro. But we’ve got time by the ass, remember?”
“Do we?” Jimbo asked.
Chaz left his friend alone. When the Pima got weird like this, it was time to be somewhere else.
The following day weather came in from the north. A hard, pelting rain backed by black thunderheads that ripped the sky apart in ribbons of blinding light. The herd began moving as the barometer dropped. By afternoon, they were trotting by at speed in a vain attempt to stay ahead of the stormfront. The bison passed by hour after hour, with no end of them in sight. They raised a cloud of dust behind that swirled into the sky until the rain came and beat it down.
It was getting dark by the time the last of the herd, calves and old cows, made their way past. These were pursued by predators. Big cats brought down the old and lame left to straggle behind the main body of the herd. The cats lay down near their kills after filling their bellies. There were dozens of slaughtered carcasses in view all surrounded by sabretooth monsters.
“Shit. The buffalo were bad. These are worse,” Lee said.
“Good thing they have something to eat besides us,” Bat said.
“We can’t hike by night anyway. Too many predators. The cats will probably move on by morning. We’ll head out then,” Jimbo said.
“Make fire. Big fire,” Byrus said, eyes locked on what he was certain were demons out of his own legends.
Lee was on watch that evening with Bat. The weather cleared up, the storm blowing away south left a cloudless sky. In a world without electric lighting, the dark created a dense canopy of stars above. A full moon rose over the grass tops waving in the night wind. It was easy to forget the mankillers lying sated and asleep not a hundred meters from their hill camp.
“I’ve never seen the moon so big,” Bat said, laying back with the rifle across her belly.
“It’s the dense air. Acts like a lens and magnifies the moon. I’ve seen it on jungle ops around the equator,” Lee said.
“Shut up, Hammond.”
“Yeah. It’s romantic, I guess.”
“Too late, mood spoiler,” she said, but Bat was smiling at him.
He sat by her, and they both watched the moon. It was probably the only constant in all their travels together and apart. They could look up and see the same moon that had been there for billions of years and would be there when they returned to their own time, perpetual and unchanged. Lee was about to say something to that effect when Bat sat up suddenly.
“The moon,” she said.
“Yeah. I was just going to say that.”
“What is that crossing the moon?”
Lee squinted up. Against the moon’s opalescent surface was a black oblong shape that grew in size as they stared at it. It was something moving through the sky in their general direction.
As it grew nearer, they could hear the unmistakable purr of motors.
56
“Is It Tomorrow or Just the End of Time?”
Lee roused the camp. “Get more wood on that fire!”
Byrus dragged branches and logs to the campfire with Chaz’s help. The blaze grew bright and high.
“It’s my blimp! That was my idea!” Chaz was shouting.
“It’s some kind of airship. How do we know it’s friendly?” Jimbo stood looking up at the elongated egg shape as it moved away from the moon’s glow on a northerly course away from them.
“Who else would be flying a goddamn zeppelin around here?” Lee called, tossing a stout log to the center of the pyre. Glowing embers exploded upward.
“That Harnesh guy? He has his own manifestation tubes, remember? The last radio transmission was pretty damn cryptic. Maybe they ran into trouble up in The Now,” Jimbo said.
“All I know is that I’m looking at something that doesn’t belong here. We don’t belong here. And those cats are going to take an interest in us soon. I’ll play the odds that Dwayne and that crazy SEAL are flying that thing.” Lee walked from the glare of the fire.
He fired controlled bursts from his rifle into the air. Tracers streamed, drawing long contrails of light against the dark. Bat joined him, sending another flurry of tracers upward.
“Shit,” Chaz said. The blimp was still moving away for a destination farther inland. The motor sounds faded in the distance.
“Wait. What’s happening to it?” Bat said. The shape of the flying object was changing.
“It’s turning. Adjusting course.” Jimbo had his 30x to his remaining eye.
“Turning back?”
Chaz said.
“Looks like it,” Jimbo said, eye on the distant object turning from a ball-shape to an ovoid and back to a ball as it changed direction back toward them in a graceful one-eighty. The sound of the motors rose in volume as it neared.
“It’s got to be Dwayne and Boats,” Chaz said, eyes on the black blob against the stars growing larger.
“If it’s not we’re fucked,” Jimbo said.
“We’re already fucked. Those cats know we’re here now,” Lee said. Eyes glowed white in the gloom outside the towering blaze of their signal fire. The beasts were closer now. Myriad points of reflected light arrayed in a deadly constellation all around them.
The team withdrew to stand about the fire. The pairs of watching eyes came no nearer but grew in number until scores of sabretooths closed around them in an invisible ring. Then the tigers were visible in a sudden cone of light trained on the peak of the hill from above. Brilliant lights suspended below the hovering airship turned the surrounding ten acres to high noon in an instant. The lights exposed a nightmare vision. The entire pride of fanged horrors was exposed by the intense illumination from above. The beasts looked upward into the light, roaring in defiance. Their deafening bellows rumbled over the team.
Bat felt the sound of their rage in her chest. The M4 shook in her hands where she struggled to hold it trained on a big male leaping up on hind legs to claw at the air in an attempt to spend his fury on the source of the blinding light. She wondered how many rounds remained in the final magazine now in the rifle.
The airship’s engines flared above them in a rising whine. The sound was joined by a piercing squeal following by a rhythmic thumping of seismic levels booming down from above in an inescapable sonic wave. As one, the cats spun on their back legs and vanished into the encircling dark.
Rick Renzi held a hand clapped to one ear.
