by Chuck Dixon
The shaman tried to get past the old woman time and again, but she struck at him with a stone clenched in her fist. He waved his gourd stick and made dire threats or was perhaps only growling. She kicked ash and sand at him and spat on him over and over. After a long exchange that echoed and re-echoed off the cave wall, the shaman finally retreated, his huge dark eyes boring into Caroline’s until he was out of sight.
Old Mother crawled to Caroline on hands and knees and hugged her close. Caroline stiffened. The stinking, greasy witch cooed softly and rocked Caroline back and forth, stroking her hair.
Caroline was safe as long as Old Mother held her as precious, or until the bitch got hungry.
10
The Land Of Beer And Pretzels
Parviz and Quebat drove Renzi down to the urgent care center in Alamo. He was barely conscious and went easily. His only request was a cigarette, but there were no smokers here.
“You saw Caroline?” Tauber said again as Chaz stripped off the ragged and filthy BDUs and tossed them in a trash can by the row of sinks.
“We saw her,” Chaz said. “We couldn’t get to her.” He reached into a tiled stall and turned on the shower.
“What about Phillip and Miles?” Tauber said, voice rising.
“Look, Doc,” Chaz stepped into the stall shower under a near-scalding pins-and-needles stream. “Time is relative, as you kept telling us. I’ll tell you the whole damn story in full detail. Now, you can stand there admiring my fine black ass, or you can go fry me up some eggs and sausage and pour me a cold glass of milk as big as my head and give me a fistful of Tylenols, and then I’ll answer every one of your questions whether you like the answers or not.”
Chaz was wiping yolk from his plate with the corner of an English muffin, and the doc topped off the tumbler of milk. He was in clean, dry jeans and a work shirt, with sandals on his feet. He ached all over and his body was hungry for sleep, but there was no time for pain or rest.
“There are people there, Doc. Nasty little, mean fuckers. They killed the grad student, and we watched them kill Dr. Kemp. But your sister is still alive, and they’re treating her like some kind of Disney princess.”
He left out the cannibal aspect. No need for the doc to know that. Chaz needed the man focused and not running nightmare scenarios through his mind. Things would happen fast now. It was going to be a busy forty-eight hours.
“Where are Roenbach and Small?” Tauber poured himself some coffee and stirred it. “They’re alive and keeping watch,” Chaz said. “But all they have is a two-shot pocket pistol, a Buck knife, and my Zippo. I have to get back there as soon as you have the Tube up and running, and I can bring some heavier shit back with me.”
“Heavier?”
“Real ordnance, Doc. Not those damn rocket guns. Some real shit. SAWs and M4s and frags and body armor. If we’re gonna bring your sister out, we gotta kill our way to her.”
“But the indigenous population…” Tauber began.
“Fuck ’em.”
“But they’re an entirely unknown, extinct tribe of humans who arrived on the continent and thrived there tens of millennia before the first known Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait.”
“So maybe we’re the ones who made them extinct,” Chaz said and set the empty tumbler down. “You ever think of that?”
“Still, to exterminate…”
“You starting to lose your enthusiasm here, Doc? Trust me, one of these little fuckers wouldn’t mind exterminating you. Now, are you into the game or in the way?”
“Renzi won’t be any shape to go with you,
not in forty-eight hours.”
“I know,” Chaz said. He picked up a cell phone and touched the keys. “We have another recruit.”
Tauber was still stirring his coffee as Chaz listened to the ring tone.
Six rings. Seven. A click on the other end. “Hammond.”
“I’m done here,” Lee Hammond said and tossed to the desktop a laminated ID badge with the name Carter, Dolan J. next to an overexposed photo of himself scowling for the camera.
“This is kind of sudden,” the blonde behind the desk said. “You’ve got vacation coming, Dole.”
“Got a better offer,” Hammond said and pulled off the jacket with the White Horse Security Inc badge sewn on the sleeve. He folded it and put it on the desk by the badge.
“Captain Hodge isn’t going to be happy.”
“When is Captain Hodge ever happy?”
“What about your benefits?” the blonde said and watched him unbuckle the gun belt around his waist. “Insurance, retirement. You qualify for dental next month.”
“Don’t need them,” Hammond said as he placed the gun belt by the folded jacket. He slipped the Colt Python from the clamshell holster, flipped the cylinder out, and dropped the six fat rounds into his palm. He placed the rounds atop the folded jacket. “Company’s ammo. The Colt’s mine.”
“We’re gonna miss you, Dole,” the blonde said and came around the desk.
“Yeah,” he said and pulled his own leather jacket from a steel rack bolted on the office wall.
“We were just getting to know each other,” she said and leaned back on the desk, long legs crossed, skirt riding up to heaven. She tilted her head and smiled crookedly.
“Darling,” Hammond said as he turned and opened the office door. “I think you know just about everything there is to know about me.”
Chaz stepped off the jet to find Hammond waiting for him on the tarmac, standing by a battered Jeep Cherokee spotted with primer. It was a small county airport outside Rexford, Idaho, one strip, one hangar, nothing but flat fields of soybeans all around, and the Rockies way off on the horizon. The crew deplaned and went into the airport’s mini-lounge to await Chaz’s return.
Chaz threw a Nike bag into the rear seat of the Jeep and Hammond drove them away on a two-lane blacktop that ran straight as a string through miles of soy.
“You leave a job for this?” Chaz said after a while.
“Security,” Hammond said. “A wind farm.”
“They need that much security?”
“Naw. The crazies are only pissed at the nuke plants. Mostly shooing away campers.”
“So, it was quiet then?”
“Not really,” Hammond said, eyes on the road. “Those windmills are noisy as hell.”
Hammond pulled onto the gravel lot of a mom-and-pop truck stop off 20 and they found a booth.
“You need some heavy ordnance, bro,” Hammond said after the waitress left coffee and a carafe.
“And your services, if you’re up for it,” Chaz said.
“Domestic or foreign?” Hammond said. “That make a difference?”
“Not for the kind of money you’re talking about.
It’s two days, and you never leave the country,” Chaz said.
“And you’re on a tight schedule.”
“We need to be guns-up and on post in thirty-six hours.”
“Let’s go shopping.” Hammond whistled for the waitress and made a circle motion over the coffee carafe. “We need this to go, darling.”
The strip mall sat as dead as an ancient burial ground at the back of an acre of cracked asphalt. Three cars sat at a faded old KFC by the road. There was a boarded-up Olive Garden. The strip of stores was anchored by a shut-down discount store on one end and a shut-down supermarket on the other. The only occupied stores were a Chinese take-out and a place called simply Guns/Pawn that sat next to the shuttered Sav-A-Lot Market.
“You vouch for this guy?” Chaz said.
“I dealt with him a few times,” Hammond said. “He didn’t screw me over, and he doesn’t talk.”
“It’s just, I mean, he’s set up shop in a strip mall.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“I guess,” Chaz said. They drove past empty shopping cart corrals.
“You need this stuff in a hurry,” Hammond said. “That doesn’t leave a lot of options. Hurry means risk, and hurry m
eans money. Live with it, Raleigh.”
Hammond pulled around the back and parked by a military-model Hummer finished in real tree camo. He knocked at the heavy metal door set in the back wall. Chaz held the Nike bag under his arm.
The rusting door creaked open to reveal a metal bar-lock and slap bolts top and bottom. The wall around it would come down before this door ever fell. A heavyset guy with biker tats met them with an open smile. He had an automatic in a pancake holster in the shadow of his spreading gut. His t-shirt read TAX THIS! with an arrow pointing toward his crotch.
“Meet Wall,” Hammond said. Wall held a hand out.
“You are?” Wall smiled, revealing two missing upper front teeth. The butt of an unfiltered Camel dangled from his lip.
“Mister Cash,” Chaz said.
Wall laughed with a wet rumble deep in his chest. Emphysema or worse.
“Well, shit. You’re always welcome, Mister Cash!” He pulled the door aside and let them by.
The back room was typical pawn. Some dirt bikes. Shelves of appliances and musical instruments. Chaz glanced through the door to the front room, where there were rows of lighted show counters loaded with watches, rings, necklaces, handguns, and knives. The walls were lined with rifles and shotguns chained into racks. The front windows and door had heavy iron bars set in them. A rail-thin woman in a t-shirt and jeans sat smoking in a register cage, watching a small TV monitor. She wore a snubby revolver in a clip-on holster in the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back.
“Goin’ in the back, Jolinda,” Wall called.
“Uh-huh,” she sang back, never taking her eyes from the TV. One of those courtroom shows where low-rent dickheads made fools of themselves in front of a studio audience, arguing over shit only they cared about.
Wall led them to where an area rug embroidered with a portrait of Bruce Lee posed to whup ass hung from a line. Wall pulled the rug aside to reveal a concealed doorway chipped out of the cinderblock firewall. He worked the locks with a big ring of keys chained to his belt and swung the door in. A fluorescent light flickered on, and they were in the large walk-in freezer of the shuttered supermarket next door. The door leading out to the market’s stockroom was blocked by a pair of heavy wooden bars chained in place.
“I own the whole strip,” Wall said with a damp chuckle. “’Cept the Chinese place. That dude is a stone holdout.”
Instead of sides of beef and boxes of frozen poultry, the freezer contained crates piled high on pallets in even rows. There was several million dollars in government ordnance here, American and foreign. High-end stuff. The room smelled of Cosmoline and gun oil. Smelt like home.
“Hammond said you were looking to outfit four men for a long-range op?” Wall leaned back on a stack of crates and lit a new Camel with the old one.
“Got a grocery list,” Chaz said. “I want four M4s. Bushmaster frames if you have ’em. Five thousand rounds of .223.
“In mags or cartons?”
“Cartons. We’ll load our own mags. And we’ll need 30-round mags. Eighty of them, minimum.”
Wall stuck out his lower lip and nodded. “Got drum mags if you want ’em.”
“Drums aren’t worth shit.”
“No problem. What else?”
“A SAW and a thousand rounds. A dozen box mags. Spare barrel. Make it two spare barrels.”
“I got an FN Minimi in primo. Got a Chinese type 88 but I’m guessing you’re not interested in economizing.”
“You’re right,” Chaz nodded. “It’s our asses on the line. I want reliable. We’ll take the Minimi.”
“Got you covered. What else is on that list?”
“Frags. HE. Some smoke grenades. Four sets of body armor. And NODs.”
“You need sidearms?” Wall began walking through the rows of crates. “Got some sweet Sigs.”
“We’re covered on that. We have a long gun and shotguns. From you, we need the government-issue stuff.”
“How about a Ma Deuce?” Wall patted a wooden crate eight feet in length stenciled M-2, .50 CAL.
Chaz and Hammond exchanged a look that set Wall on a bout of laughing that turned to a spasm of coughing that almost brought the old biker to his knees.
An hour later they were wheels up, the Gulfstream a ton heavier and Chaz’s Nike bag a quarter-million lighter. They dropped down at a private field just west of Coyote Springs ninety minutes later and drove the two hours to the compound pulling a rusting horse trailer behind the doc’s Land Rover. Just two cowboys headed home through the high country.
11
Camp Nowhen
The edge of the escarpment jutted well clear of the lip of the mesa and had a good view of the skinnies’ village below. It formed a natural redoubt, surrounded on three sides by steep walls that would make for a difficult approach. A game trail wound down from behind the position, concealed by brush and berry bushes on either side. Access back to the field site was an easy, level thirty minute hike to the east. It was the perfect hide and perfect observation post.
Dwayne glassed the village and, for the hundredth time, cursed the weak ten-power binoculars they’d packed along. But they brought him close enough to see some of the activity below. The day was clear and visibility good. Many of the huts were just black stains on the sand now. Others were knocked flat by concussion from the satchel charges. The skinnies were stripping the burnt hooches for useable materials. The women and children of the tribe carried scorched logs and branches and placed them in a pile either for burning or to build new huts.
The males had already gathered up the dead in the day and a half it took Dwayne and Jimbo to make their way around the lake and up to this vantage point. Dwayne could see no wounded, and that meant that anyone who survived the fight with injuries had been executed or left to bleed out. Dwayne counted forty-six bodies laid out in the sand, and the men worked over them as though they were game. He recognized the motions, even if he could see little detail. Each corpse was strung up on a gibbet by the ankles to empty their veins. They were gutting the corpses and skinning them before carving meat from the bones. The skins were stretched on a line like some horrible load of laundry strung out to dry. The guts and bones were left in a pile for the dogs to fight over. Some of the innards, hearts and livers probably, were thrown into baskets woven from reeds and carried away by the women. A toddler no more than three rushed up and snatched what had to be a liver from a basket and evaded swats from the men. The little one ran off to gnaw at the dripping slab in the shelter of a ruined hut like it was a slice of birthday cake.
Dwayne had seen his share of horrors but he had to move the lenses away from that sight.
The rockface above the cave was speckled with the black shapes of carrion birds, big turkey buzzards squatting on every available rock and ledge. More and more arrived throughout the day. Now and then one of the big-winged birds would dare to swoop down and snatch a discarded bit of flesh from the pile. Children of the tribe would laugh and throw rocks at the vultures as they soared back up the cliff with long strings of flesh dangling from their beaks.
The hide was a good four hundred yards from and above the village, but the stink of that butcher’s heap still reached him. Dwayne couldn’t see but he could imagine the clouds of flies and God knew what other prehistoric pests that were probably hovering over the camp.
He returned the binoculars to his main area of attention, the cave opening. Caroline was not visible. If she lived, they were keeping her inside the cave. The only skinnies allowed entry were women who carried meat and water inside but did not stay. The dude painted all in white with the wild headdress, the one who lorded over Kemp’s execution, was never far from the cave opening but did not enter. He was a chief or witch doctor. No way to be sure. Once, a bent-over old woman came from the cave and threw rocks at him, and he moved away. Dwayne had no idea what any of that meant but had a gut feeling it was a good thing.
And good things had a way of coming to an end.
Dwayn
e wanted to get closer, but there was no safe or defensible location nearer the village. And the settlement was more extensive than they realized the night they showed up. It stretched to the west along the beach far from the bonfire that they had incorrectly assumed was at the center of the village. The huts around the black fire pit were burnt or blown down but there were many more still intact in a sprawling section of the village that ran all the way to the opposite wall of the bowl.
He figured there were four hundred adult males minimum in camp, along with three or four times that many women and kids who would fight as well. He guessed that was a complete count since there was no need for any hunting parties to be out with all the available meat around. It didn’t appear they’d sent anyone out to look for the strangers who attacked them. But there was no way to be sure of that. Maybe he was right and the skinnies assumed the Rangers had drowned. If they couldn’t swim themselves, they’d naturally think that the strange visitors could not either.
The Rangers had underestimated the skinnies in their first encounter by assuming they’d scatter at the first blast. Judging from the piles of tusks, the skinnies hunted the big mastodons that almost made Dwayne and the others lose their mud. The skinnies might be cruel, man-eating assholes, but what they weren’t was cowards. They had the reckless courage of mad dogs. It was going to be a fight to get Caroline out of the cave and away.
A low whistle from the brush came behind him. Dwayne dropped the binoculars and picked up one of the spears he made earlier in the morning. Just straight tree limbs sharpened on one end with the clasp knife.