by Lou Cadle
She settled down to help Nari with making leather clothes. Nari had progressed from moccasins to tunics. She had punched holes with the dental pick around the arm openings of one tunic panel. “I’ll figure out sleeves later, but may as well leave the holes there to attach them,” Nari said.
Hannah was cutting out the second side along a charcoal line Nari had drawn with a burned stick. “Lots of odds and ends from cutting for a tunic.”
“We can make moccasins or gloves of them. No reason I can’t patch them together into something larger too. It wouldn’t be as warm, I suppose. Wind would sneak through the seams. But even a patchwork cape might keep one of us warm on a cold night.”
Bob had warned them that the next time jump might take them to a colder climate. “The ice age starts about three million years before our time,” he had said to Nari the other day. “But there were cold spells before then, so making warm outer clothes might be a good idea, in anticipation of it.”
Hannah thought back to peeling the jeans from Garreth’s dead body. Without those, Dixie’s legs would be uncovered now. The people who had worn jeans and heavy-duty khakis still had intact pants. The lighter-weight slacks that Nari had on were wearing badly. One knee poked out as she sat and punched holes in the leather.
“Here,” said Nari. “Kneel for a minute, please, and let me figure out what I need to do next.”
Hannah obediently got to her knees.
Nari pressed the tunic front—or back, as the things wouldn’t be at all fitted—to Hannah’s shoulders and said, “Raise your arms out straight to your sides. Okay. Drop them.” She adjusted her grip. “Try raising this arm overhead, your left. Okay, got it. Thanks.”
For most of the day they worked on the clothes. Others were weaving baskets and trying to come up with a woven water carrier that didn’t leak. So far, those experiments were all failures. Bob had suggested this morning that the hunters bring back the bladders of any animals they killed, along with the heart and liver. “They’re waterproof, after all. We’ll try adapting those. Don’t cut off any tubing, either, leading to or from them. We can tie those off with twine. Who knows? It might work.”
Late that afternoon, the hunters returned empty-handed, and for dinner they had to dig into their store of jerky. Claire told the hunters to plan to go out again the next day, and said the basket-weavers should put off their work for a day and instead move a quarter of the way around the lake and dig for clams there tomorrow morning.
Claire was established as the leader. Everyone had fallen into a routine. Bob was on the mend. Rex was healing in one ear and taking the hearing loss in the other with calm and grace. Except for the scant meals right now, and the fact that they were marooned in time, the day was pleasant.
But it wasn’t a pleasant night.
*
Hannah woke in the dead of night. The candles were still burning, but dimly. Some noise had woken her. An animal? No. She didn’t think so.
A crack sounded overhead.
What?
Hannah was still shaking off the fog of sleep when there was another crack, louder, and then, with a rustle, the roof fell.
Branches and tree limbs, grass and mud, accumulated dust, all came crashing down, fastest right at the center, exactly where Hannah slept.
She was blinded by debris. And there was screaming. She flailed her arms, trying to fight her way from the pile of stuff covering her head.
“Are you okay?”
“What’s happening?”
“I can’t see a thing.”
“Mr. O’Brien? Hannah?”
Hannah wiggled her hand up to her face and cleared her mouth. “I’m fine,” she called. She felt the weight of something heavy being lifted from her, and that allowed her to sit up, spitting out pine needles and dirt.
“What’s going on?” Jodi’s sleepy voice. “Zach, stop shaking me.”
“The roof fell,” Ted said. It was he who had lifted the debris off her.
“Why?” said Dixie. A good question.
The interior was dim. The candles had been snuffed out.
No. Something was burning. “Guys,” she said. “I think one of the candles might have set roof material alight. Let’s find it and put it out.”
“Where were they?” Claire said.
“We need light,” Ted said. “Any charge left in the phones? Flashlight?”
“My solar light should be charged,” Hannah said, “if you can find it without a light to find it with.”
“I’ll go start a fire in the hearth.” They had built a fireplace into the wall, opposite the main door, where they could keep a fire burning on cool or wet nights. Rex’s design, modified twice as he learned more, vented the smoke outside through a chimney.
“Wait,” Hannah said. “Make sure it’s clear of debris. We don’t want to set ourselves on fire in here.”
“Rex? Mr. O’Brien?” Claire said, from a different location than where she was a moment ago. Then she shouted, “Rex?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Thinking about why the roof fell. It was sturdy. It’s been up there for a month. Why now?”
Nari said, “Mr. O’Brien?”
Ted said, “He’s here. I have everything off him. Mr. O’Brien, are you okay?”
Bob coughed. “A little confused. What’s happening?”
Hannah sagged in relief at the sound of his voice. Everyone seemed to be accounted for. No major injuries.
While Ted explained to Bob what was going on, Hannah groped for her pack. At night, they left the packs and equipment they didn’t want to risk getting wet piled up in the center of the cabin. She felt around under the debris until she found a strap, pulled on it, groped it. No, not her pack. Dixie’s little one. The second try, she found hers.
Her solar flashlight was clipped there. During the day, she usually had it clipped to her belt loop to charge. She turned it on, and LED light flooded the room. She could hear the collective sigh of relief. Instantly, things seemed less chaotic, though the place was a mess. Only the edges of the cabin were clear. Everywhere else, pieces of the roof had fallen in.
The reason it had fallen dawned on her just as Rex said it. “Ash. It collected up there and caved it in.”
Bob said, “It’s rock, after all. Flakes of pumice, pretty much.”
Rex was moving around the cabin, apologizing as he stepped over people. She realized he was checking all the uprights of the walls.
She said, “Are they okay, Rex?”
“What?”
Louder, she said, “Are they okay? The supports?”
“Yeah. We can rebuild the roof.”
Claire said, “We don’t have that much time left here. Maybe it’s not worth the effort. But let’s table that for the moment and get the place cleaned up.”
Hannah found one of the pinesap candles. As she pulled it out, it flared to life again. She pulled her sleeve down over her hand and patted all around it, making sure that there were no bits of roof smoldering.
Ted said. “Can I have the flashlight? I’ll hook it up there.” He pointed to where a branch was canted down into the airspace of the cabin.
Hannah handed it over and took hold of a large branch that had once been the roof, and pulled it toward the door. With all of them working together to clear the cabin, there was something of a traffic jam. Claire finally sent half of them outside to the entrance. Hannah stayed with the group that carried debris to the door, where the other group hauled it away from the cabin. In a half-hour, the cabin was mostly cleared. Volcanic ash had been wafted into the air from the effort, and her throat was dry and scratchy with it.
By the time she stepped out of the cabin, someone had lit a small campfire. They all gathered around it in an age-old human act. Probably hardwired into us. Then she realized they were prefiguring the hardwiring by forty million years or so, and once again experienced that sense of strangeness, of temporal and logical dislocation.
They were not supposed to be here. They we
re a violation of the laws of nature.
But then, the timegate was a thing of nature, wasn’t it? She hoped. Because the alternative, that some malevolent alien power or something had put it there, was a worse thought.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. They had enough problems without her inventing timegate-building evil aliens.
She came out of her weird line of thought to hear a discussion about rebuilding the roof.
“What if it rains every day again?” Dixie said. “I don’t mind working on the roof. I’d rather sleep dry.”
Hannah took note of the young woman’s volunteering for work. Maybe she was changing.
“The rainy season might be on the wane,” Claire said. We’ve only had two showers in five days now, right?”
“Rex,” Bob said, raising his voice to be heard. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Three days,” Rex said, with assurance. “We know what we’re doing now. We have made plenty of rope. If four people hunt or clam, and the rest of us build a roof, three days, max.”
“We do need to send out hunters,” Claire said.
“Agreed,” Rex said. “It’s why I calculated it that way. If they find something the first morning, we may be able to get it done in two days, but no promises.”
“What time is it, Hannah?” Claire asked.
Hannah tilted her wrist so that the light of the campfire illuminated her watch. “Three thirty-six. Sunrise is about seven o’clock now.”
“So we should try and get more sleep if we can,” Claire said. “If any of you decide to stay awake, keep the conversation quiet, please.” She turned for the cabin.
Hannah waited a moment for the group to start dispersing and then tapped Bob on the shoulder. “You okay?”
“What? Oh, yeah.”
“No chest pain?”
“Only the dull ache I seem to have most of the time now.”
“I was worried when you weren’t up quickly.”
“I honestly thought I was having a nightmare. I was waiting to wake up from it. Then when I felt Ted’s hand, I realized I already had.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re okay.”
Claire called from inside the cabin, “Would some tall person get the flashlight turned off please?”
Ted trotted away to do that. Hannah said, “I need my sleep too. Coming, Bob?”
“Yeah. If we had a pot of coffee, I’d stay up. But otherwise, I’ll be dragging by noon.”
*
The roof got rebuilt, hunters found meat, and before she knew it, they were packing up for the trip back to the timegate. Tempers frayed as they prepared. Some of the anxiety was about where they would end up. Some of it was about Laina.
It wasn’t that everyone had forgotten about her. It was that the work of each day, and the challenges of each day, were enough to distract them. And fretting about something out of their control was a waste of energy. In a way, they’d all become like Buddhists, living in the moment. It was easy—too easy—to forget the traumas of the past. It was useless to worry about the future. But, useless or not, now they were worried.
“We have to find her,” said Nari over dinner the next to last evening at the cabin. “Or how will we get back to our own time? No one else knows anything about the timegate.”
Claire said, “Unless you do, Rex.”
“Not enough,” he said. He had taken to turning his head slightly so that his good ear was pointed at the speaker. Hannah almost never saw his face from the front any more. “She was the expert. And I wouldn’t want the responsibility of guessing.”
“I wish I’d talked more with her,” Bob said. “And that reminds me. Anyone who is the only expert on anything needs to share it with at least one other person. Think on that, everyone. Comb through your mind. If you’ve figured out a good shortcut, and use it but never thought to mention it, mention it next time. Losing a person is terrible, of course. We’d grieve your loss. Be devastated by it. But at this point, losing the knowledge and skill you carry around in your skull is equally as devastating, in a different way. It makes us all less likely to survive. Whatever mistake I made by not quizzing Laina more about her knowledge, I don’t want to make again.”
Sober looks were on most faces, contemplative looks on others. Hannah thought that Nari might have never thought of herself as valuable to a group, as carrying skill or knowledge so valuable that its loss would harm others. But Bob was 100% correct. Nari had gone from a shy girl, a hanger-on of Dixie, to an independent young woman and a valuable member of a community, a growing expert in making clothes from hide. Next month, if Bob was right about the weather, and as their clothes began to tatter more, her expertise would be more important still to them.
Even Dixie seemed—well, not all that valuable. She had no great expertise that they relied on, though her excellent vision came in handy at times. But she was less of a drain these days. Between her nastiness to Garreth, his death, Nari’s desertion of her, and Hannah’s abdication, her edges had been softened. Perhaps Claire’s leadership was helping, too. Dixie’s disruptive influence had once felt like a hurricane to Hannah, but it was now nothing more than an occasional foul breeze. And having no leadership role, Hannah was able to steer clear of her ill wind much of the time.
Ted’s recklessness was the same, but it hadn’t killed him yet. Rex’s hearing loss didn’t stop him from functioning as the group’s inventor and engineer. Zach and Jodi were being responsible about sex. Claire was a good leader—though she looked stressed out, now that Hannah thought about it. Bob was weak, but no one resented adjusting for him. Even the planned slower walk to the timegate to allow for Bob’s limitations had been accepted matter-of-factly.
All things considered, everything was going well. And maybe that was why everyone was on edge. The jump through time would mean changes, new dangers, new stress. A loss of the cabin, the physical home that they’d shared for over a month. The loss of routines. Hannah started thinking of everything that might go wrong—dropping into a world without water, or a cold world, or a terribly hot one—and could feel the creeping anxiety build in herself.
Deal with it as it comes.
Good advice. Easy to give, but much harder to take.
Chapter 12
A few tears were shed when they left the cabin.
“I wonder how long it will take to fall apart,” Rex said.
“Nature reclaims everything,” Bob told him, clapping him on the shoulder. “Not your fault.”
“No, I know.” Rex let out a sigh.
Bob said he felt good enough to walk to begin. Hannah, in her role as head medic, planned to keep an eye on him and get him into the travois as soon as he grew pale or stressed or slowed down.
Ted was carrying little beyond a spear. His job would be to haul Bob when it came time. When Bob could walk, Ted was responsible for their self-defense. Claire had told him to stay unencumbered so he could move quickly in an emergency.
They were rationing water carefully. The animal bladders the hunters had retrieved had slow leaks. They bundled them up in a Mylar blanket, and that kept them from leaking the water onto the ground. Whenever they stopped, they carefully poured the leakage off the blanket and drank that first. Nari was working on a hide carrier for a few of them, and felt confident she could make it work, but she hadn’t gotten it perfected by the time to leave. So they were hoping for at least one good rain.
But not, Hannah hoped, another lightning storm.
On day three, they had some luck. One of the trees that they had passed before that had nothing but small green fruit had, in the month, ripened into a pale orange-pink. The lower branches were picked clean of the fruit, but ripe fruit still hung in the upper branches. Ted swung himself up and tossed down fruit the size of apricots. Everyone who had room added several to their basket or pack. Hannah volunteered to test it, and by nightfall she was able to say it seemed safe to eat. It was tart, but juicy.
By morning, her digestive sy
stem had told her it was safe to swallow, and everyone had a breakfast of fruit, about five per person. It satisfied their thirst too, and Nari was thrilled to be able to eat a vegetarian breakfast for a change.
The afternoon before the timegate’s arrival, they arrived at the spot in a light rain. They worked all day at refilling the water bottles.
“Everything is going great,” Claire said.
“You planned well,” Hannah told her.
“Bob’s looking a bit pale.”
It had stressed him, the trip. He had pushed himself too hard, and it had taken the will of all of the rest of them to keep him from walking at all the past two days. He was grumpy over being “ganged up on,” as he called it. As far as Hannah was concerned, grumpy but alive was far better than the alternative. She worried that the grumpiness was another sign of his exhaustion. For the first time, she wondered if the timegate trip itself might be too much for him. Not that they had another choice.
After the water bottles were full, they were all on edge, waiting for the gate. Ted asked Claire if he could take a hunting party out.
“Not too far,” she said. “And back by nightfall.”
The four who volunteered left, and Nari pulled out her sewing, and Bob fell asleep. The tension ratcheted down a good deal as a result.
Claire said, “Hannah, would you talk with me?”
“Sure,” Hannah replied.
They walked away from the group, not out of sight, but out of earshot. Claire said, “Am I doing anything wrong? As the elected leader, I mean?”
Hannah was surprised at the question. “No, not at all. Why do you ask?”
“It feels like everybody’s unhappy and it’s all slipping out of my control.”
“Well, it’s not all within your control. People are who they are. They’ll have good days and bad days. We’re all on edge because everything is about to change. And despite our problems, the last three weeks have been relatively calm. Next that might not be true. You can take credit for things going well, but the rest is not your fault.”
“I feel like I should be able to fix it somehow. Like there are words—the right words—that I could say. But I don’t know them.”