Dawn of Mammals (Book 4): Killer Pack

by Lou Cadle

  “Hannah!” Jodi said.

  “Sorry. Drifted off there.”

  “I said we have enough rocks.”

  “Right.”

  They kept exploring the woods in pairs, hoping to find something useful, while Bob cooked the rodent into a stew.

  Hannah, paired with Nari again, picked up a piece of fallen wood, hefted it, and tossed it back down.

  “What are you doing?” Nari picked up the log again. “It’s firewood.”

  “You’re right. I want to make a better splint for Zach before he goes out again tomorrow.”

  “What kind of wood do you want for that?”

  “Lightweight, for his comfort, but also not easily broken. I’m not sure if the combination of those two things is possible, to tell you the truth. I guess I’ll know the right one when I feel it.”

  Hannah was kicking over a sizeable log, to see if there were edible insects under it, when Nari let out a yip.

  Again, Hannah found her spear at the ready before she had a chance to think about preparing for attack. It was second nature now, as was turning in a circle every so often to look for the danger.

  But Nari wasn’t under attack. In fact, she laughed, obviously embarrassed, as Hannah turned back to face her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It surprised me.”

  “What surprised you?”

  “The flying squirrel. Or maybe not squirrel. Who knows what weird thing it might be. But I was looking up and caught sight of it up on a branch, starting to jump, and then it spread its arms and had these membranes, like bat wings. But no, they stretched all the way from front feet to back, so not like bat wings exactly. It sailed across a big gap between the trees.”

  “Glad it wasn’t worse,” Hannah said, letting her spear arm drop. “How big was it?”

  “Pretty much squirrel-sized. I’ve lost sight of it. Sorry I overreacted.”

  “I wish I’d seen it. I’ve never seen a flying squirrel, not even in our time.”

  “I know it wouldn’t hurt me. I mean, unless it decided to relieve itself right over my head, like a bird, and I’d survive that attack.”

  “We’ll have to ask Rex what the size limit is for a gliding animal like that. Maybe he’ll know.”

  “Or be able to work it out.”

  Hannah’s heartbeat had returned to normal. Again, her awareness of her heartbeat made her think of Bob and all the small stresses of the unfamiliar world, the multitude of things that sent the heart racing. There was no way to protect anyone against all of those frightening moments. But surely that had been true even when modern medicine was available. Didn’t heart patients in hospitals fall asleep and have nightmares from time to time? Not to mention relatives had to occasionally get in an argument with the heart patients. In a hospital, his environment could be controlled and safe, but the body still had to respond as the body would to stress.

  “What bad thing are you thinking of?” Nari said.

  “Reading my mind?”

  “You get a worried look sometimes.”

  Hannah told her.

  Nari nodded, her expression serious. “If we could be doing anything to make it easier for Mr. O’Brien, you’d tell us, wouldn’t you?”

  “Absolutely. But I can’t think of anything else.”

  “I could warn him about the flying squirrels so he wouldn’t be startled by them too.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Hannah said. “Let’s get back to our exploring.”

  They found another four of the nut trees, and even seven ripe nuts on the ground that the squirrels—flying or not—hadn’t yet found.

  “I hope these are edible,” Nari said. “I’d love a protein source that wasn’t meat.”

  “You still hate eating it?”

  “I do. I wish I’d had a twenty-pound sack of lentils with me when we were fossil-hunting.”

  “That’d be an odd thing to take along. The packs were heavy enough!”

  “I know. Just wishing for silly things.”

  “You’re not silly. I admire your vegetarianism.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It’s nice. And it’s pretty amazing you still feel like that after all the animals you’ve seen attack us.”

  “It’s just their nature. The animals’ I mean. People violence against people, I’m pretty judgmental about.”

  “So you must hate me for beating up Dixie, hmm?”

  “No. It shocked me. But I also understood where you were at the moment. I mean, it must have been awful, climbing down to see Garreth.”

  “It was.”

  “Do you still think of it?”

  “Yes,” Hannah said. “Though I have nightmares about it more often than I let myself think of it while I’m awake. I’ve learned not to dwell.”

  “I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

  “I really don’t want to lose anyone else, you know? I don’t know if I can take another set of nightmares piled on to the ones about M.J. and Garreth and Laina.”

  “Laina made her own choices.”

  “I know. I have the visual memory anyway. The colors of the timegate closing around her, and me standing there completely unsure of what to do.”

  “I’m glad you stayed with us. And maybe Laina was okay. Is okay, somewhere.”

  Alone? Hannah didn’t think it was likely a person could survive any of the worlds they had been in alone. Not for more than a month. Nothing had gone wrong here in a day. But eventually the dangers would catch up to you. Overtake you.

  End you.

  Chapter 17

  Everybody had returned from their exploration of the woods and was at the campfire. The smell of the stew made Hannah’s stomach growl in anticipation.

  But she forgot her hunger when she realized that Ted and Dixie hadn’t returned.

  “Where are they?” she asked, knowing that no one else would have the answer.

  “I’m sure they’re okay,” Claire said, though she frowned. “They’re our fastest two runners. And Ted is good in a fight. So if they did run across trouble, I’m sure they found a way out of it.”

  Hannah said, “I’ll go look for them.”

  “No,” Claire said. “You’ll sit right here and eat stew with the rest of us. Someone, get out the spoons and bowls, okay?”

  Hannah said, “There’s some daylight left to follow them.”

  “Not much,” Claire said. “We’ll give it an hour in the morning, give them time to get back if they had to hole up somewhere in the night, and then we’ll all go in that direction. I’m not going to risk having you get lost too, Hannah.”

  Hannah’s feelings were confused. She had been a little shocked that Claire said no to her, and that she had said it so forcefully. But then on the heels of that, she had been proud of Claire for showing strong leadership. Hannah realized that feeling frustrated at being ordered around was something everyone else here had lived with while she was doing the ordering. It was her first time having the feeling here—an unfamiliar and not at all a pleasant experience.

  She pushed down her lower instincts, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. You’re in charge,” and sat on the ground, watching Nari pass out bowls.

  Bob ladled soup into their bowls with a carved ladle Hannah had made with her stone knife. Hannah thought as she watched him how the ladle was a sign of civilization, just as the bowls and spoons were.

  “Remember the first month,” she said, trying to get her mind off worrying about Dixie and Ted, “when we ate everything with our fingers? We’ve gone from being savages to having etiquette again.”

  Everyone was too busy eating—or worrying—to answer her, so she dug into her stew as well. Then she realized why no one had paused in eating to answer her. The rodent meat was fantastic. It was tender from the stewing process and cooked to perfection. But it was also the best-tasting meat she’d had here—or in any epoch.

  Zach gave up on using his spoon wrong-handed and drank from the bowl. When he finished first, he said, “We have
to hunt more of these.”

  Jodi nodded. When she finished eating, she said, “I’ll stand right over their burrows and wait.”

  Everyone had something complimentary to say. Hannah praised Bob’s cooking skill.

  “I didn’t do a thing differently. I think it really is the animal itself,” he said.

  They left enough for two bowls in case Dixie and Ted returned before dark, but when they didn’t, Claire had them draw lots to see who would finish the stew. Zach and Bob won, and when Zach offered to share his with Jodi, she shook her head. “Nope, you won fair and square.”

  Zach didn’t argue long.

  When night had almost fallen, Claire took Hannah out to the edge of the woods, the direction Dixie and Ted had gone, and looked out over the landscape. “See them?”

  “No. You?”

  Claire shook her head. “I hope they’re okay.”

  “We’ll know tomorrow.”

  “Or we won’t,” Claire said. “Wouldn’t that be awful, losing two people and never knowing what had become of them?”

  “It was awful,” Hannah said. “With Laina.”

  Claire said, “There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Let’s get some sleep so we can be ready to go less than an hour after dawn tomorrow.”

  With nights being thirteen hours long, there was more than enough time to sleep. Hannah obediently climbed into her debris hut, but as soon as Nari had fallen asleep, she used her flashlight to find her way back to the fire and sat there alone, feeding the fire and listening for voices that told her the missing two might be returning.

  At eleven by her watch, she gave it up and went back to sleep.

  Nari rolled over and said, “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t leave the woods, did you?”

  “No. Claire said not to, so I sat by the fire.”

  Nari yawned. “We’ll find them.”

  “I know,” Hannah said. She made herself relax and think of something pleasant. Hiking through a field of wildflowers that never ended. A carpet of blues and pinks and lavenders. A perfect sunny day, but cool. Early autumn in the mountains. And her, alone, but entirely safe. No predators. A warm home to return to. Just walking for pleasure.

  Nari shook her awake what seemed like five minutes later. “It’s dawn,” she said. “See you at the fire.”

  Hannah crawled from the hut into the dim light of dawn making its way through the canopy. She relieved herself and made her way back to the fire. Everyone was up except Jodi.

  At Claire’s instruction, they shared out the two bottles of water they had set aside for Dixie and Ted, leaving a couple inches in one for Jodi.

  “I’ll wake her up,” Zach said.

  “That’s okay,” Claire said. “Let her sleep a little while longer. I don’t plan on leaving for another hour. What’s the time, Hannah?”

  Hannah checked and said, “Seven-twenty.”

  “Okay, we go at eight-twenty.”

  “I wish I could help,” Bob said.

  “You can help,” Claire said. “You stay here in case they come back from a different direction than the one we take.”

  Hannah said, “I could stay with Bob if you want me to.”

  “No, you’re our first aid expert,” Claire said. “We need you. Someone else could stay, but if we have three pairs, that’s best. That way, if we come to a place where the landscape splits somehow, so that they might have gone in different directions, we can try three different routes. Bob, I’m sorry, but if someone stays with you, it means we’re limited to two groups.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter. I’m fine alone.”

  “Find a tree you can climb, okay? I’ll feel better about leaving anyone alone if there’s an escape route for you to take,” Claire said. “We need to gear up soon. And take all the water bottles Zach and Jodi had. We need more water.”

  Hannah was already prepared to go. So she stayed with Bob while the others geared up and Claire woke Jodi and got her moving.

  Bob said, “I feel like such a drain.”

  “You aren’t a drain. You’re crucial to us. If all you did was sit here and eat bon-bons, you’d still be important.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a bon-bon.”

  “Your cardiologist would probably ban them from your diet anyway.”

  “You cruel woman,” Bob said, managing a smile. “I hope Ted and Dixie are okay.”

  “I think Claire is right in that they’re as likely as any of us to be able to manage a threat well. And if it was your magic touch that made that stew so good, I’m happy to see you assigned cooking duties. Totally selfish, I know.”

  “It was good, wasn’t it?”

  “Delicious.”

  “You all going to hunt out there today?”

  “I doubt it. Maybe if the opportunity presents itself. And if we find Dixie and Ted soon.”

  “We’re out of food.”

  “I know. My belly won’t let me forget.”

  “We need to find another lake, I think.”

  “Or river. A river would be preferable for me, as long as there are plenty of fish in it.”

  Claire came back, pack stuffed full. “I’m bringing fishing gear. If we find them, and there’s water nearby, might as well sit down and fish for a few hours. And I told Rex to pack the net too.”

  One by one, the others joined them at the fire.

  Claire said, “Okay, the time, Hannah?”

  “Eight-fifteen,” Hannah said.

  “Good. Thanks for tending the fire, Bob.”

  Nari said, “I ate half of one of those nuts last night. I’m fine. So maybe you could roast some? Please.”

  “Will do. Be careful, all of you.”

  They marched single-file through the woods until they emerged into the bright morning light.

  Zach pointed. “They went that way.”

  The land seemed flat in that direction, though by shading her eyes and looking to the horizon, Hannah could tell it was sloping down gradually.

  They took off at a brisk pace, Claire in the lead. Hannah took the rear position, and every five minutes spun around to make sure they hadn’t picked up a stalking animal. The grass wasn’t high. She didn’t know if it was the nature of the grass—if it only grew to eight inches and no higher—or if something like a herd of oreodonts came along periodically to mow it down. If so, they’d have a food source if they found where they were grazing now.

  “I’m seeing some dung,” Zach said.

  “I think I just stepped in some,” Jodi said.

  “Fresh?”

  “Not very. A week old or more.”

  Hannah saw it too when she passed the spot where Zach had been. She knelt and poked at it with her spear tip. Definitely grass eater dung. But as she looked all around, focusing in the distance, she saw no sign of the animals that had dropped it here.

  They had been hiking another twenty minutes—by her watch it was almost 9:30—when Rex called out, “I see them!”

  A wave of relief stopped Hannah in her tracks. She hadn’t realized how tense she had been until the feeling left her.

  Claire said, “Okay, we can slow down a bit.” They had been moving pretty fast until then.

  It took another half-hour to bridge the distance between the two groups. Hannah hung back for the first five minutes as everyone talked at once.

  “Okay, okay,” Claire finally said. “Let’s all sit down and you two tell us what happened.”

  “I can use a rest,” Dixie said.

  “We got in a little trouble,” Ted said at the same time.

  “Go on,” Claire said. “What kind of trouble?”

  “We tried to drive off some animals from a kill. And they were mean.”

  “And fast,” Dixie said.

  “They treed us.”

  “I hate heights,” Dixie said.

  “They had no fear of us,” Ted said. “I mean, some of the animals seem to be afraid of us just because we’re so different
, I think. Nothing else walks on two feet, to start with. And then we get noisy and aggressive, and that works on others. But these things?”

  “What were they?” Claire asked.

  “Wolves or something,” Dixie said.

  “Yeah, close enough,” Ted said. “They were organized too. Like wolves, or more like an army unit. When we got too close, two of them stood guard over the meat along with a pup, and three peeled off to drive us away.”

  “Worked on me,” Dixie said. “I think I set a personal sprint record.”

  “Yeah, they’re fast,” Ted said. “Wicked fast. Really. Don’t mess with them.”

  “What color? Describe them,” Claire said.

  “Brown, pretty much. No stripes or spots or anything. Fangs. Quiet.”

  Dixie said, “Except when they’re snarling.”

  Ted said, “We were lucky to have a tree so close, or one of us—or both of us—would be dead.”

  Dixie said again, “I hate heights.”

  “Less than you hate dying,” Ted said. “And the other thing was, one of them stayed right there, like it was guarding us. You could have sworn it had instructions. It kept looking at the others, and at some point it knew it was okay to leave. It pivoted, ran away from our tree, and ate while two of the biggest ones patrolled around the meat. And then they lay down right there.”

  “We were stuck,” Dixie said. “For hours and hours.”

  “Yeah, for a while,” Ted said. “Maybe more than an hour. I thought we’d have to spend the night up there.”

  “No way,” Dixie said.

  “But they finally left, and when the scavengers swooped in—birds, mostly—we climbed down and chased the scavengers off for long enough to grab some food.”

  “Raw meat,” Dixie said. “That’s what dinner was for us.”

  “Better than nothing,” Ted pointed out. “By that time, the sun was almost gone, so we spent the rest of the light finding the safest place we could to sleep.”

  “I didn’t sleep,” said Dixie. “I was too scared.”

  Claire said, “Sounds like you did the best you could.”