Dawn of Mammals (Book 4): Killer Pack

by Lou Cadle

  “When there’s a retarded kid in the family, of necessity, she or he gets the lion’s share of attention. I understand why now, but when you’re six or eight, you don’t understand why. You only know that you aren’t getting your share. Nowhere near it. And my mother was so over-the-top about my sister, unbalanced, really, my father left. He wasn’t getting his share of attention either, I’m sure, and her weirdness about my sister was hard to take. I never hated him for leaving. I never failed to understand it. Even as a little kid, I got it, I really did. I’d have driven off too if I could have. No matter what the movies tell you, a retarded sister is a burden, not a gift. I had to take her places I didn’t want to, and it screwed up my social life. Particularly as I entered junior high. That was the worst. The girls like Dixie were the worst of the worst.”

  “I’m sure any adults around—”

  She cut him off. “Adults aren’t always around to correct language or behavior. I was in a terrible position. I wanted to protect my sister from teasing. I knew her condition wasn’t her fault. But at the same time I also wanted to be normal, and be accepted, and have friends. She didn’t always know she was being bullied. I knew we both were. The more I was told to drag her along, the more socially isolated I was. Only a few kids were outright cruel, but they almost all avoided us. The ones who were attracted to it at first learned quickly enough that it wasn’t like a TV show, and even their fake niceness wore away and eventually they avoided me too. And I don’t blame them, either. She was loud. And clumsy. And said strange things. And her laugh was obnoxious. She had a temper you couldn’t predict. And so on.”

  “Didn’t you have anyone to help you? A grandparent? Teachers?”

  “No. And too many adults were stuck in this ‘isn’t she special and aren’t you blessed’ mindset. It was against the rules for me to say how I really felt. It still is. I can tell you don’t really want to hear it either. I was alone in the whole world as a child and nobody wanted to hear how I felt about it. I did not feel she was a blessing. I felt she was a curse. On me, my mother, and my father. She was a burden on the world, someone who could never give anything of note to anyone. Sure, she could be sweet sometimes when I was in elementary school, but mostly she wasn’t. She was spoiled and clueless and less pleasant to be around with every passing year. More demanding, and eventually she often hit me hard enough to leave bruises. But my mother wouldn’t let me so much as pin her hands to stop her. She didn’t understand ‘no,’ and my mother never reinforced it anyway. She thought saying ‘no’ would stifle her recovery from her condition.” She had been looking off into the distance and now glanced at him again to see how he was taking it. “And you don’t want to hear that any more than they did, do you? You all want the Hollywood movie. Not the truth. And so I felt guilty as a kid too, terribly guilty, because I couldn’t give adults the...the familiar narrative they wanted. I had a miserable adolescence until I grew old enough to refuse my mother’s orders and left the house alone, rather than with her in tow. Excuse me.” She went to turn the bird, and she took her time at it, making herself calm down. Anxiety was a drug racing through her bloodstream.

  When she returned to Bob’s side, calmer, he was looking contemplative. She sat quietly and let him digest her story further.

  “How’s your sister now? Your mother?”

  “I’m not sure. I send them a Christmas card and gift every year, but I don’t get mail in return.” She didn’t explain she sent the gift via an intermediary eight hundred miles away from her, and that her mother had no idea where she was, not even the state. She didn’t mention she had legally changed her last name at age 23 to be harder to find. She lived in terror of her mother finding her and demanding she return and take care of the both of them. “I already did my bit,” she had told a therapist in her senior year of college. The therapist said, “Yes, you have,” and the gentle sympathy of it had made her cry for three solid hours. The therapist had let her stay in her office to do it while she saw her other clients, checking in on her every hour to make sure she was okay. The same therapist gave her permission to move on in her life, to decide what she was willing to do and do no more than that, be guilted into no more than what she truly, in her heart of hearts, wanted to do for her relatives.

  Bob cleared his throat. “So you never really had a parent.”

  “I was clean and clothed and fed. So I know I was better off than some who don’t even have that. But no, I didn’t, not in any emotional sense.” The therapist in college had been the closest thing to a parent—to an ideal, loving parent—that she’d ever had. She wrote the therapist a note once every few years to let her know she was still well and still grateful. She used her real address on that.

  “Such a sad story.”

  “There are sadder, I know. And the older I am, the more sympathy I have for my mother. I suppose you could even say I’ve forgiven her. But that does not mean I want to engage with her, not ever again.”

  “So who is missing you back home?”

  “No one yet. I have two close friends. Coworkers. A hiking group. But is it September yet? Or will it be? What if we manage to get back and it’s six years before we left? They won’t have a chance to miss me. It’s not like the situation between you and your family anyway. Friends would recover from my disappearing without a word. Your wife and sons would mourn forever.”

  They sat in silence for a time, until she remembered she had a bird to cook. She tested its doneness by wiggling a leg. It still needed more time, and the skin was golden brown. She spread the coals thinner to lower the temperature. It looked pitifully small now, without feathers, shrunk from the cooking. But it’d keep them alive for another day.

  Chapter 5

  As they waited for the bird to finish cooking, she asked him about his family while growing up to distract him from her own story. “I grew up in eastern Washington State,” he said. “In a town, not on a ranch. But my grandparents on one side owned a grass farm.”

  “That sounds like the setup to a bad joke,” she teased him.

  He smiled. “For the seed. Grass seed has to come from somewhere, right? Before it comes in plastic sacks at Walmart.” He swept his arm around in a semi-circle. “The whole world is a grass farm now.”

  “I wonder if there’s Kentucky blue grass right now in what would be Kentucky.”

  “Sorry, but that species is European,” he said.

  “Bust my favorite myths, why don’t you,” she said. “So big family, small?”

  She listened to him talk about his childhood for another twenty minutes. When his voice grew weary, she checked the bird again. It was done. She scanned for predators, but the smell of the cooking meat hadn’t drawn any. The thing was, she had realized one day a few weeks back, the predators didn’t understand the smell of cooked meat at all. Blood, yeah. She had been at more risk while carrying the creodont she’d killed a few days back. Until humans had come along, invented fire and taught animals what cooked meat smelled like, it would have been a mystery smell to them, or a smell of danger, for millions upon millions of years.

  She draped the bird, skewer and all, over a log to cool and then worked at the fire, banking the coals to try and make what fuel they had last longer.

  By the time the bird was cool enough to touch, Bob had drifted into sleep. She debated herself over waking him but decided he’d do well to have a warm meal, so she shook his shoulder gently.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to drop off.”

  “You need the rest. I hated to wake you, but dinner is ready.”

  “Thanks. I guess it’s not enough for two meals?”

  “We should eat all the meat now,” she said. The safest place for food was in their bellies anyway. There, it was safe from decay and insects. And from predators.

  “Not many clouds yet today.”

  “They’ll build, I’m sure.”

  They ate together in silence for a time. “I still miss salt,” Bob said.

  Sh
e had finally grown used to not having any. “Better for our hearts without, I suppose.”

  “But I bet if we found a salt supply, you’d use it again.”

  “Absolutely I would.”

  “Hmm. Here, you can have the leg bone from this side.”

  “I’ll crack it open for you.”

  “Nah, that’s okay. You can have the marrow if you’re willing to work for it.”

  “Your appetite okay?”

  “It is. I’m just tired.”

  “Finish your half, and sleep then.”

  He did finish, in silence. “Thanks for cooking. And hunting,” he said, sleepily, as he lay down and closed his eyes.

  She plucked the two uprights from either side of the fire and used them and the Mylar blanket to create a sunshade over Bob’s head. She stuck the bird bones in a plastic bag. Tomorrow, if she couldn’t find food, she’d make broth of them, using the technique of dropping heated rocks into a bowl of water, and give it all to Bob. If her hunt was less successful tomorrow, she could live a day without food, easily. But she didn’t want to stress his body any more than she had to.

  For three more days they lived like that. No predator found them, and no easy food, like a grazing herd of oreodonts, came near. She fed them next off an abandoned kill she came across two mornings after they’d eaten the bird, chasing off other scavengers from a pile of bones. She left the big leg bones—too big to put in any bowl she had with her—and took smaller bones, scarred with the predator’s tooth marks, and with meat left on them, back to Bob.

  Water became a problem. It rained, but not as much as she wished. They each had what amounted to a glass of water per day, plus the soup she had made of the bones and some wild garlic she found. By the end of the third day, they were both uncomfortably thirsty.

  “Maybe it’ll rain tonight,” he said as he settled down for the night. She had taken to napping herself in the day and staying up after nightfall as long as she could manage, feeding the fire with the remaining fuel right before she fell asleep. But from near midnight to dawn, they kept no watch. She would have wished for a third person to share watches, but she was glad one of the others wasn’t also out here, suffering from too little water, short rations, and having no protection from the rain when it did come.

  It was in those hours alone in the dark, sitting, keeping watch, that she had her darkest thoughts. Memories from childhood. The worst memory from childhood, right after her father left. Her mother screamed at her one day when her sister had gotten into the refrigerator and pulled out food and had strewn it all over, leaving a floor smeared with jam and cabinets squirted with ketchup.

  “It’s your fault!” her mother had said.

  Hannah had denied it, even while she helped put the unbroken jars back in their places.

  “That your sister isn’t right! You did that to her. You pushed her off a chair once when you were four. It’s your fault she’s not right in the head!”

  Hannah, at that age, had known no better, and she had lived with the guilt. A few years later, she had begun to doubt the accusation. As a preteen, she had found out what her sister’s condition was called and looked it up at the library on the then-new internet. It was 100% a genetic problem. Four-year-old Hannah could not have possibly done a thing to her sister to make her what she was. Even knowing the truth, a vague sense of guilt hung on for years more.

  When she had asked the therapist why her mother would have told her such a lie, the therapist said, probably because she blamed herself and was looking for a way to offload some guilt. When babies aren’t born right, the mother often blames herself. And when Hannah had said it was unforgivable of her mother to say what she had, a cruelty no one should aim at a little girl, the therapist had not disagreed.

  Old news. Old pain. That was supplanted by the memory of Garreth’s death. The horror and helplessness she had felt when Laina stepped alone through the timegate. Sleep was a release from the bad memories, and daylight was a charm against the thoughts—or at least against them churning around and around as they did in the night when she stood watch alone.

  The next morning, she woke before Bob and gathered what dew she was able with her shirt before the sun had a chance to dry it. It didn’t amount to much, not even a half-bottle, but it would keep Bob alive another day. She’d tell him she’d drunk her fill before he was awake. She sucked the remaining moisture from her shirt before putting it back on, so as not to make that a total lie.

  Once he was awake and alert, she left on another hunting trip. She wished she could find some ripe berries. They’d serve as both food and water.

  But she had no luck. No game, nothing to scavenge, no fruit bushes that hadn’t been entirely stripped of fruit. She stayed out until noon, but she didn’t want to leave Bob alone much longer than that. He usually slept for an hour or two in the afternoon, and she didn’t want him alone then. So, reluctantly, she turned back to their campsite with nothing more than firewood.

  When she drew within sight of it, she started when she saw something moving there. For a split second, she thought it was a tall animal, and fear for Bob closed her throat, but then the shape resolved into human figures. Two people. They’d come back a couple days early.

  Chapter 6

  Ted and Rex had both come. Ted ran the last quarter-mile to meet her. “We made it in less than two days. So there’s food and water, still, to share.”

  “It’s nice to see you,” she said. And it was. “Is everyone okay?”

  “Yup. Claire has us all at work. And wait until you see what Rex invented.”

  “Can’t wait.” She found herself smiling easily for the first time in days. It was a relief to know everyone was okay. And it was a further relief to share the burden of worrying about Bob. Which was a little nuts, wasn’t it? It was not as if her worrying kept him alive. Still, she could feel a burden lift off her.

  Rex and Bob were kneeling together, bent over something.

  “C’mon and see,” Ted said, jogging ahead.

  Hannah hurried after him, wanting to see what was up.

  “So anyway, that’s how I did it,” Rex said.

  “Pretty darned cool,” Bob said. He glanced her way. “Hey, look at this thing.”

  The thing was a travois of sorts, but it was wheeled. Two wooden wheels, and an axle, and a wood frame lashed together with cordage. A cart. A wheelbarrow?

  “We’ve been calling it the Bob-sled, as a joke. My first design had your head down,” Rex said, “but Jodi pointed out that you’d have a headache in no time.”

  “Not to mention running over rocks might hurt a person,” said Bob, touching the crown of his head.

  “So I had to change it around a bit because of balance.”

  Ted said, “Zach was the guinea pig.”

  “Everybody helped,” said Rex. “Especially with grinding down the wheels to make them round.”

  “And it’s easy enough to lift for two people,” Ted said. “And strong enough to hold me, though it’s designed for a shorter person.”

  Rex said, “So we can get you back. Maybe three days’ travel, depending on how far you can walk.”

  “Three days if nothing goes wrong,” Ted said.

  “Though we might have to stop for a half-day to hunt,” Rex said.

  Hannah had forgotten the energy the kids—no, the young people—had. Their enthusiasm was a treat. “So you’re going to wheel Bob back, that’s the plan?”

  “Yeah. It works really well, even through long grass.”

  “Good job, Rex.” She thought it would be a terribly bumpy ride for Bob, and maybe three days’ journey was a little optimistic, but she said nothing that would dim their enthusiasm.

  “Anyway, we should go,” Ted said.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “Bob’s packed. How ‘bout you?”

  “I need to pack what’s at the campfire. The empty bowl. Some rope.”

  She organized her gear whil
e they loaded Bob into the wheeled travois and tested it.

  “I feel like luggage being wheeled through an airport,” he said good-naturedly.

  Hannah was surprised he was taking this okay. He hadn’t wanted to be treated like an invalid when his chest pains had begun a few weeks ago. But maybe with the second incident—heart attack or angina or whatever it was—and maybe with several more days to get used to the idea, he was coming to terms with it. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t giving the others any trouble about their plan.

  And so they took off across the hills, all of them walking at first, until Bob said it was time to try his cool new ride. They kept up a steady pace as clouds darkened overhead. They went on without stopping until the rains started. “Let’s collect water while we have a chance,” Hannah said, as the rain grew heavier.

  “This thing is slipping on the wet grass too,” Ted said, struggling to keep the travois from tipping over.

  “That decides it,” Bob said, as Ted’s efforts failed and he was tipped onto the grass, unhurt. “Let’s get to collecting water.”

  The young men had brought back the second Mylar blanket and a large bowl, and these were all set out for the collecting of rainwater.

  The sky drew darker, and thunder began its slow crescendo.

  Bob said, “Everybody, stay low. Don’t want to get hit by lightning.”

  They were near the bottom of a hill, which was safer than the crest. It also made it easier to collect water, once the Mylar was laid out correctly, with one spot on the low side punched down into a spout so that the water ran out in a stream. She filled bottle after bottle.

  The rain came down even heavier, and they were all drenched within moments.

  “Getting my clothes washed,” yelled Ted. They had to yell to be heard over the sound of the rain.

  A loud thunderclap made her start.

  “It’s coming closer,” Bob said. “Everybody, stay crouched, on your feet. Both feet touching.”

  “Why?” said Rex.