The Corps of Discovery Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3: A multiverse series of alternate history

by James S. Peet

  He now looked to see if the dying cat had been traveling in a pair or pack. The grass swayed as several unseen animals moved through it, parting it like a speedboat on a windy lake. Fortunately, the unseen creatures, likely Smilodons, were making their way away from Bill and the dying animal, so he relaxed.

  Hmm, I wonder what Smilodon tastes like, he thought. I’ve heard mountain lion was the preferred meat of mountain men like Jim Bridger. Think I’ll give it a try. Anything to break up the bison diet.

  Watching the still-thrashing cat, he thought, I think I’ll wait a bit. No sense wasting a real cartridge, when I can take him out with the peeder.

  It took a couple of hours before the bison were skinned. Bill had time to watch the dying Smilodon thrash its last, finally ceasing all motion. Once more, he had killed another animal. It wasn’t something he particularly enjoyed. You’d think I’d never killed anything before, he thought. Of course, his wife and unborn child would have been the creature’s meal if he hadn’t.

  When Meri and Karen finally returned to camp, each dragging a bison pelt, Bill had already gotten over his mild funk, mostly. Meri gave him a quick kiss and a brief, impassioned hug.

  “Thanks,” was all she said, before giving him another kiss, turning, and beginning the return journey to the remaining bison skins.

  Once more Bill assumed his position on the bluff. The dead, skinned bison were becoming the main attraction for the local scavengers. Swarms of vultures gathered overhead, and Bill noticed coyotes circling. He wasn’t too worried about either but still kept an eye on the ‘yotes. If they appeared nervous, then Bill figured he should be too, as something even more deadly than a coyote had to be out there. But the coyotes appeared calm, keeping their distance from the two women but dashing in to take bites from the fresh carcasses, then darting away to safety to swallow the bites. It became almost a comedy watching the small canines perform these feats of derring-do.

  Eventually, Karen and Meri returned to base with the last two pelts. But their day wasn’t done yet. Unlike the brain tanning they had done before, the preserving of these pelts was identical to the process Bill had performed on the wood bison back on the Ohio River.

  Bill wasn’t the only one flesh scraping; they all did, once the hides were staked out. Eventually, Bill dug out one of the leather sacks containing salt from the journey across the Atlantic. The three spread the salt on the insides of the pelts. Finally, the pelts were rolled up and leaned against the canoe, set to let the fluids drain and the salt work its wonders in drying out the skins.

  There was still plenty of daylight left, so Bill convinced Meri to join him in seeking out the Smilodon he’d shot.

  “Hey, don’t you want a break from bison stew for a bit?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not too thrilled about carrying another pelt back, as you can well imagine, oh great and mighty hunter,” she replied.

  “I’ll carry it back if you’ll carry my peeder.”

  That appeared to be the turning point for her. Grabbing her rifle, she joined him as he hobbled up the bluff to seek out the big cat.

  Bill had his rifle slung this time, peeder at the ready. The small cartridge was powerful enough to take out any of the scavengers and predators hanging around for an easy meal. And, if needed, I can put a bullet in the Smilodon’s brain, he thought as they walked toward the downed animal.

  Eventually, the two arrived at the Smilodon’s location. The animal was still alive, snarling as the couple approached. Both Explorers immediately raised their weapons, taking aim at the wounded animal.

  It soon became clear, though, that the animal had a broken back. While it could move its upper body, it could only drag its lifeless rear legs behind it. Nevertheless, it attempted to charge the two, dragging itself with its front legs, long claws digging into the deep soil.

  Bill, standing to Meri’s left, raised his left hand, indicating that she shouldn’t shoot. Taking careful aim with his peeder, Bill placed a shot into the cat’s left eye, killing it instantly.

  Lowering his rifle, Bill had a melancholy feeling wash over him, again. He hated killing, but he hated hurting thing worse. Both events transpired in one event to give him a feeling of complete remorse.

  Meri reached over and put a hand on his upper arm.

  “Hey, he was after me and our child. Don’t feel too bad. I’m glad you saved me.” She paused for a moment. “Again,” she added, softly.

  Bill shook his head as if awaking from a dream. “Yeah, I know. But, still…”

  The two watched the Smilodon for a few seconds, making sure it was really dead this time. Eventually, they began skinning it, both for the pelt and the meat. This took far less time than the bison had, and soon the two were headed back to camp.

  Bill decided to preserve the Smilodon’s pelt, wondering if it would be like a wolf’s hide. He had read that Native Americans used wolf fur around their winter parka hoods because the fur didn’t frost over with frozen condensation when one breathed out.

  They grilled the Smilodon meat over the fire on green sticks, angled and stuck into the ground.

  “Don’t expect this too often,” Meri said as she cooked the cat. “Too much valuable fat is lost in the fire, but I figure you guys deserve a break from stew for at least one meal.”

  Once cooked, Meri yanked the sticks from the grill and passed them out. As the three began gnawing on the meat, they could hear coyotes howling around the bison carcasses.

  Bill took a bite of what he considered to be one of the tastiest pieces of meat he had ever eaten. The noise of the nearby yipping coyotes no longer freaked him out or raised the hair on the back of his neck. Night had fallen; the sky was ablaze with stars. The moon, expected to be full, had yet to rise in the east.

  He turned back to the campfire and looked at his wife next to him. He was, once again, amazed by her beauty. The red glow from the fire emphasized her red hair, and despite the obvious exhaustion from the long journey, he could still see smile wrinkles at the edges of her blue eyes.

  Leaning over, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Not expecting such a relatively public display of affection from her rather reticent husband, her eyebrows rose up her forehead almost to her scalp. “That was unexpected,” she said, turning to him.

  “How about this, then?” He leaned over to kiss her on the lips, tasting the juice of her most recent bite of the Smilodon.

  While the kiss didn’t last long, it did enough to lighten the otherwise heavy mood that had settled over the small encampment, a mood that had been created by Bill.

  43

  By late October, they had made it more than 1,200 kilometers up the Missouri. Bill estimated they were at the current location of Sioux City, Iowa, Earth when they pulled in for the evening. As they got out of the canoe, he wondered if this was the same bluff where Lewis and Clark had lost their only member to death.

  Dragging the canoe up on shore, Bill thought, Man, it feels good to finally be able to walk without that stupid splint. The bone had finally healed enough that he could walk regularly, but he still needed more time to build up the lost muscle.

  For the past couple of days, Karen had been complaining about stomach pain, but they all figured it was just something she had drunk or eaten, and expected it to pass soon.

  It was only after camp was established and the wikiup set up that Karen suddenly vomited and collapsed to the ground, holding her belly. Meri rushed to her, placing the inside of her wrist on Karen’s forehead. “Christ, she’s burning up,” she said to Bill.

  Mere held Karen’s hair out of her face. “Where’s it hurt?”

  “Lower right abdomen,” Karen said through gritted teeth, then vomited again.

  “Crap. Sounds like where your appendix is. I’ll need you to lie down so I can check. Can you do that for me?”

  With Bill and Meri’s help, Karen was able to roll over and lie down. Meri undid her jacket, shirt, and pants, pulling her T-shirt up over the abdomen and her underpants partially
down. Despite all the time the three had spent naked in front of each other bathing, Meri still tried to preserve some of Karen’s dignity. Gently she began palpating Karen’s abdomen, eventually making it to the spot over her appendix. As soon as Meri applied slight pressure, Karen almost bolted upright, screaming in pain. Bill, at her head, caught her and gently lowered her back to the ground.

  With a grim look, Meri said, “Yep. Just as I thought. You’ve probably got appendicitis.”

  Karen nodded weakly. “Thought so,” she whispered. “What now?”

  Considering their location, over 2,000 kilometers from the Initial Point, but still without any hope of rescue, Bill figured Karen was a dead person talking. Looking at Meri, he raised his eyebrows.

  “We’ve got two choices,” she said: “hope you recover or I do an emergency appendectomy.”

  “What are the odds of recovery?” Karen whispered.

  “Straight answer? Zero to none.” Meri wasn’t known for hiding the truth or sugar-coating things, so her blunt assessment came as no surprise to the other two.

  “If the appendix ruptures, you’ve got twenty-four to seventy-two hours.”

  “Well, shit. Looks like you get to play a real-life Doctor McDoyle,” Karen said, then gritted her teeth through another spasm of pain.

  “Doctor McDoyle?” Meri asked, confused.

  “Old television series from the ‘60s,” Bill said. “Star Venture.”

  “Ah.” Meri nodded, clearly remembering Karen’s fascination with classic television shows.

  “Okay, let’s get cracking,” Meri went on. “Get a tarp out so we can put Karen on it and off this dirt. I’ll get a first aid kit.”

  Bill spread the tarp on the ground next to Karen while Meri retrieved the first aid kit from Karen’s pack. The kit contained more than just a couple of bandages and some pain relievers; it was a mini-medical kit designed to allow Explorers in the field to perform rudimentary operations, such as advanced wound treatment and basic surgery. While some of the material was disposable, such as the dressings and pain relievers, the actual surgical equipment was not. It was kept in sterile packaging until needed, and future uses required sterilization through immersing in boiling water or holding over an open flame (nothing anyone wanted to repeat more than once).

  Bill and Meri gently moved Karen onto the tarp, and Meri began laying out the equipment and supplies she’d need for the procedure. As she did, she spoke softly to Karen. “First things first, we’re gonna have to remove your clothes away from the surgery site. Then we’ll sterilize the area and give you two injections. The first is gonna be morphine, followed by a local over the surgery site. We don’t have means of giving you general anesthesia, so this is the best we can do. It should work.”

  On that last sentence, Bill raised his eyebrows again.

  Meri returned his look and shrugged.

  The morphine syrette was a needle with a squeeze tube containing a bit less than 40 milligrams of the drug. One applied it by injecting the patient and squeezing the tube, forcing the liquid into the body. It reminded Bill of a tube of Superglue or a mini-tube of toothpaste with a needle. His first-aid instructor in survival training told them that the syrette the Corps used was, for all intents and purposes, identical to those in U.S. military first aid kits during World War II.

  Bill looked up at the clear sky. At least it’s not raining, and the wind’s not blowing up a storm, he thought.

  Using care, the two removed Karen’s clothing, draping her jacket over most of her upper body and her pants over her legs, leaving only her mid-section exposed. Meri swabbed Karen’s leg with betadine, took the morphine syrette, and jabbed it into the recently cleaned skin. It only took a second for her to squeeze the tube between thumb and index finger, pushing the morphine into Karen’s thigh muscle. Unlike in the movies, the morphine didn’t kick in immediately. In about twenty minutes, it took effect, and Karen’s face and body relaxed.

  “You still got your lighter?” Meri asked Bill.

  “Yeah.” He pulled the orange lighter from his pants pocket and held it out.

  “Keep it ready, and get your survival knife out, too. I’ll probably want to cauterize the wound as I’m cutting in, just to prevent bleeding. Swab down and glove up.” Meri tossed Bill an unopened alcohol swab packet and a sterile set of gloves in their sterile wrapping. “And come sit next to me. I’ll need you to hand me the instruments as I need them.”

  Bill promptly moved to squat next to his wife.

  After the two were gloved up, Meri handed Bill another syrette, this one containing lidocaine.

  “Get that ready and hand it to me when I ask for it.”

  She opened the small plastic bottle of betadine and poured the sterilizing liquid over a cotton swab. Handing the bottle and cap to Bill, she then painted the betadine-soaked swab all over the area around the lower abdomen, then tossed the used swab and wrapping to the other side of Karen. Bill capped the bottle and set it down on the sterile pad.

  Holding out her hand to Bill, she said, “Lidocaine.”

  Bill removed the cap and handed the syrette to Meri, who carefully jabbed the needle into the injection site, then squeezed, forcing the numbing agent into the flesh.

  “There, that oughta prevent her from feeling some of this in a couple of minutes.” She unwrapped a sterile pad and laid it on the tarp between her and Bill, then opened several other packages containing the instruments necessary for the surgery, along with gauze pads and dressings. Finally, the equipment was laid out and they were ready to operate.

  Bill could tell Meri was scared, but he wasn’t sure what to do.

  “You ever done this before?” he finally asked, glancing down at Karen, who was off on her own little medicated world.

  “You mean an actual appendectomy? Well, not really, but we did practice it on dummies in our field medicine class at Uni. But, I guess there’s a first time for everything,” she said with a weak smile.

  The two of them walked through the procedure, with Meri making sure Bill understood his role as the surgical assistant. “That means when I ask for something, you either do it or hand it to me immediately,” she stressed.

  Finally, it was time to operate.

  Taking a deep breath, Meri said, “Okay, let’s do this,” and picked up the scalpel.

  Carefully she made an eight-centimeter incision in Karen’s abdomen at the point where Karen had felt the most discomfort during Meri’s palpations. Blood welled from the incision. Karen didn’t even flinch.

  “Retractor,” Meri said, holding out her hand. Bill placed the long end of the L-shaped instrument in her hand. Meri gently pushed the short leg of the instrument into the incision to slowly pull the skin closest to the navel up toward the sternum. “Hold that in place,” she told Bill. He grasped the long end of the instrument and did so.

  “Lidocaine,” she said again. Bill handed the tube to her and she injected the freshly exposed layer of muscle. She handed the tube back to Bill.

  Meri cut through the exposed muscle tissue, and once again said, “Retractor.”

  Using his free hand, he handed her the other retractor. With only two retractors, Bill suspected it was going to be a game of switch as Meri cut through each muscle layer, applying a fresh dose of lidocaine, until she entered the abdominal cavity. He was right. Each new cut was perpendicular to the prior cut. As she made the second cut, Meri tersely said, “You don’t want all the cuts going the same way, as it might lead to further complications.” While Bill held onto one retractor, Meri would hold onto the other while using the scalpel to slice open Karen’s abdomen.

  After the last cut, Meri placed the scalpel on the sterile pad, then inserted her forefinger into the incision. Feeling around, for what Bill thought was hours but was probably mere seconds, Meri muttered, “Gotcha, you little bastard.”

  Bill watched in morbid fascination as Meri wriggled a worm-like appendage out of the open wound. It was dark and inflamed, but to Bill’s unprofe
ssional eye, it didn’t look ruptured.

  “Hand me the surgical thread then take over my retractor.”

  Bill passed over the thread and, trying to keep his arms out her way, grabbed the second retractor and kept the wound open.

  Meri took some thread and wrapped it around the base of the appendix, then did a second wrapping just above the first, separated by mere millimeters. As she tied off the second wrapping, she explained that the process was ligating, designed to cut off the flow of blood, much like a miniature tourniquet.

  “Now we cut and cauterize. As soon as I’ve cut the bad boy, we’ll need to heat up your knife and cauterize the wound. That means I’ll hold the knife and you use your portable flamethrower to heat it. Got that?”

  “Yep,” Bill said. Sweat was beading on his forehead despite the cool temperature. Meri’s forehead was also covered with a fine sheen of perspiration.

  “And don’t let go of your retractor,” she cautioned. Bill grunted.

  Bill picked up the lighter and flicked it open, ready to heat up the knife.

  “Okay. Here goes.” Meri picked up a small pair of surgical scissors and deftly cut the appendix between the two ligatures. Setting the scissors down, she picked up the knife and held it for Bill as he torched the tip on one side. As soon as the metal started turning orange, Meri pulled the knife away from the lighter and pressed it down on the exposed cut portion of the appendix. The wound sizzled and a waft of smoke drifted up. Bill almost gagged at the smell of burning flesh, but didn’t let go of his retractor.

  Looking closely at the cauterized wound, Meri said, “Looks good. Let’s close her up.”

  The next several minutes were spent with Bill holding the retractors while Meri closed up each incision with neat rows of surgical thread. When it came time to close up the first incision, Meri worked hard to make it as good as possible.

  “Don’t want her embarrassed to wear a bikini,” she muttered, while Bill sat back on his heels and wiped the sweat out of his eyes.