Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  Donning her shoes, Emily plucked a burning piece of wood from the fire and began to tentatively explore their shelter. JoJo didn’t want to go with her, nor did she want to be left alone, so she got her own makeshift torch and reluctantly tagged close behind.

  After a few yards Emily said, “I don’t want to go too far but I’ll sleep better if we know we’re not sharing this with anything with large sharp teeth.”

  The floor of the cave was fairly even and level. A few more paces and they were in an expanded chamber, its outer dimensions obscured by darkness.

  Emily saw something and stopped so abruptly that JoJo bumped into her. “Look!”

  She raised her burning branch and held it up to the limestone.

  Cave art.

  On a flat surface, just above eye level, was a panel of stencils of human hands done in red paint. Left hands and right hands, limestone-yellow centers with red ochre outlines. And near them, a single drawing in black, a simple and primitively drawn horse’s head.

  “Cave men were here,” Emily said.

  JoJo gripped Emily’s arm in fear. “How do you know they’re still not here?”

  “This was probably made thousands, tens of thousands of years ago.”

  “Maybe that’s what you’d expect on Earth, but, honey, we’re not on Earth anymore.”

  Emily was about to try and put JoJo’s fears at rest when she kicked something with her foot and bent down to see what it was.

  “Christ,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  She straightened and showed JoJo a stone bowl filled with ochre paint. She dipped a finger into it. “It’s still wet.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” JoJo said, but it was too late.

  They both heard it.

  Voices. Throaty and guttural, coming into the cave. The voices took on the quality of alarm and though Emily couldn’t make out any words, certainly not Germanic ones, she was certain the fresh fire had spooked the cave dwellers.

  She dragged JoJo further into the darkness.

  The voices came closer and now, with the cave dwellers between them and the fire, shadows, black and hulking, crept over the limestone walls.

  Unless they ran headlong into the abyss of the cave they’d be caught in a few moments. The only weapons they had were their burning sticks that were also the beacons that were going to lead the cave dwellers straight to them.

  JoJo was softly sobbing. This wasn’t going to end well.

  Suddenly, there was a full-throated shriek, more like an animal’s cry of pain than a man’s.

  A stocky figure staggered into the larger chamber and fell forward, a few feet from the women, an arrow lodged in his back through the smock-like covering of animal hide.

  Emily held out her burning stick to see his face. The man had tangled hair and a thick beard with full lips that silently moved. But what struck her most was his prominent brow crowned by bushy eyebrows. It hit her like a lightning bolt.

  Neanderthals.

  Other voices filled the night. Women’s voices, high-pitched, battle-like, in German mostly but Emily swore she made out some French and English too.

  At the mouth of the cave, Emily could hear thuds and groans. An arrow whistled past, missing them narrowly before clattering against stone. The battle raged for a few minutes then the guttural voices receded, replaced entirely by modern tongues.

  A woman called out in German, “Hello? Are you there? You can come out now. It is safe.”

  Emily and JoJo stepped around the wounded Neanderthal, whose hand was still making small, clutching motions, and walked toward the cave mouth where a group of women with bows and arrows and spears were standing around a second fallen Neanderthal.

  By the light of the fire, Emily saw they were a motley bunch, ranging from young to middle-aged, all with dirty, ragged clothes, animal-skin boots, and tied-back hair. The youngest one, perhaps in her twenties, had decorated her hair with feathers and wore a necklace of dried berries. She was the one who had called out in German.

  “Were you hurt?” she asked.

  “We’re all right,” Emily said.

  Another woman, short with a tough-as-nails demeanor, said in French, “You’re not German, are you?”

  “I’m Scottish,” Emily said.

  “I’m an American,” a tall woman said. Her arm was bleeding but she didn’t seem to take notice of it.

  JoJo stepped from behind Emily and told everyone she was French. A woman named Sylvie, sparked with excitement and said she was French too.

  “What’s with you?” the feather woman said to Emily, coming closer and sniffing her like a dog.

  “I don’t seem to be, well, dead.”

  “You don’t see that every day of the week,” the American said. “I’m Ann.”

  “Emily.”

  They went around the circle, giving their names. The German woman was Gertie. She told them they had been watching Emily and JoJo from the time they jumped off the ox cart to the time they entered the cave.

  “You picked the wrong cave,” a woman named Ingrid, said in German. “The ancient ones live here.”

  “So I see,” Emily said.

  Gertie was their leader. “We should not stay here,” she said. “They will come back. You wish to come with us?”

  Emily was quick to answer, “Yes, we’d like that very much, thank you.”

  There were nine women in the group. They protectively tucked Emily and JoJo into the middle of their column and forged the stream. They seemed to be able to see in the dark because, without any torches, Gertie led them on a half-hour march through a thick wood. It was all Emily could do to keep up with Ann in front of her. JoJo, behind her, groused about having to go so fast.

  When the column stopped, Emily and JoJo stood still in place while their rescuers busied themselves starting fires and lighting torches. When this was done Emily saw they were in a clearing in the forest near a large circular dwelling which had a pitched, conical roof, very much resembling the yurt Emily had built many summers past at a team-building retreat in Cumbria for the nascent MAAC project. Soon smoke began to rise through the opening in the roof and skins were parted to welcome her and JoJo inside.

  It was basic and communal with hides and matted rushes on the floor and simple beds around the circumference, each one piled with fur bedding. There was a rig for a large iron cooking pot over the fire and a neat stack of wooden bowls and spoons laid out on a simple picnic-style table with benches.

  “This is our house,” Gertie said. “Are you hungry?”

  “We are very hungry,” Emily said. “Might we also have some water?”

  Skins of water were produced and one of their hosts, a Dutch woman, Lia, who seemed to be the chief cook, began reheating a rabbit stew. The lovely smell of meat and root vegetables began to fill the house. Sylvie, the French woman, showed Emily and JoJo the beds they would have, and in response to Emily’s question about there being more beds than people, said sadly that their numbers had diminished of late.

  When the stew was ready, all of them squeezed onto the benches and Emily and JoJo ate with wild abandon, stirring up laughter from the others.

  “Extremely hungry,” Emily mumbled between bites. “This is so good.”

  “We eat well enough,” Gertie said.

  When her stomach was full, Emily was able to start asking all the questions she’d been saving. Who were they? How did they come to live together? Why were there no men in a land where men outnumbered women so dramatically?

  The women left it to Gertie to answer. She explained that all of them were escapees. She had been the first one to come to these woods, escaping over a hundred years ago from the house of a nobleman from Köln. She had grown desperate from two centuries of rape and beatings and would have thrown herself from a window if that would have eased her suffering. One day she slipped her shackles because she had become that thin from starvation and managed to flee the walled estate. She foraged on her own
for many years before she found Ann wandering in the woods. One became two, and then two became four when Lia the Dutch woman and Ingrid, another German found them one day. The four of them learned to make weapons to protect themselves from the band of cavemen who shared the woods, and to hunt for food. Some forty years earlier, they watched as a wagon train passing through the woods stopped to fetch water from the stream. To their amazement the cargo was nine chained women, the property of a northern German slaver on his way to King Frederick’s castle in Marksburg. Gertie’s troop attacked with arrows and spears, released the women and tied the wounded men to trees where their flesh would be eaten by wild animals. The freed women still visited their piles of bones and sinews, watering them with urine, confident they were still experiencing some kind of eternal suffering.

  Over the years they had lost some of their number to illness or wounds and had placed them in a small house nearby, protected from beasts, where they could be garlanded with wildflowers and spend their eternities with a modicum of decorum and respect. As for the rest of them, they were a family, living together, hunting together, protecting one another. To Emily, what came to mind was a nunnery, a community of women, devoted to their common cause, but here there was no religion, no God. Their cause was simply survival with as much comfort and dignity as this hard world could offer.

  Some of the women chimed in with their own tales of woe, how they had condemned themselves to Hell by their actions in life. Gertie had murdered another woman in a drunken fight in an inn near Leipzig in 1766. Lia killed her husband in Amsterdam in 1844. Sylvie slit her cheating boyfriend’s throat in Paris in 1901. A few women chose to stay silent, including Ann, the American. JoJo joined in, happily telling her tale of dispatching johns in Mali, each slaying garnering a toast.

  It was Emily’s turn. She had wondered why they hadn’t pressed her sooner on how she had gotten there herself, and as she tried to explain about MAAC she realized they regarded her as an outsider, not because she wasn’t dead like them, but because she hadn’t done evil like them. They only perked up when she told them about her escape from Marksburg because no one had believed it was possible to escape from a fortress such as that. She told them of her desire to return to Brittania and asked for their help. Gertie would only say that she would think about it.

  It was time for bed. Spontaneously, the women played a game of musical chairs, rearranging the sleeping accommodations so that Sylvie could be next to JoJo and Ann would be beside Emily.

  Only then, sitting on her furs, did Ann quietly attend to her cut arm, washing away the dried blood with hot water and binding the wound with a strip of cloth. As was their custom, two of the women stayed awake to patrol the perimeter of the yurt. Inside, the torches were extinguished and the central fire was allowed to wane. Some women began to snore straight away. There was whispered French coming from the direction of JoJo and Sylvie. In the semi-darkness, Emily sensed Ann wanted to talk so she gave her the opening.

  “Where in America are you from?” she asked just above a whisper.

  “Chicago.”

  “When?”

  “I was born in 1911.”

  “May I ask how you wound up here?”

  “You mean here in Germania or here in Hell?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “But I will.”

  “That’s okay too.”

  “I killed a boy.”

  Emily held her breath, saying nothing.

  “I was twenty. I was at a party and got really drunk. I had an argument with my boyfriend and I took the keys to his car and drove away. God, I was so drunk. I didn’t see the kid until it was too late but I kept going because I was scared. Afterwards I read in the paper he was twelve, a paperboy. He had a sweet face. The police were looking for me. I pawned some jewelry, scraped together some cash and went to New York. From there I got the first steamer to Hamburg. I wanted to die but I didn’t want to be caught. I was too weak-willed to kill myself but I wanted to be punished and I found that punishment working in a brothel in Hamburg where the sailors went for pleasure. I got pregnant and died in childbirth. I got what I deserved.”

  “You poor thing.”

  “No, you’re the poor thing. You’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”

  Emily went quiet.

  “I hope you get home,” Ann said, reaching her arm out.

  Emily touched her fingers and soon they were both asleep.

  The forest was quiet early in the morning. Emily stripped naked and washed herself beside a trough of water, splashing herself wide-awake with a bucket. Breakfast was some kind of gruel, the grain stolen during a raid at a village some distance away.

  JoJo sat on a log near Sylvie, continuing their non-stop banter in French. Though JoJo was tall and statuesque and Sylvie was a pint-sized fireplug, they seemed to share a wicked sense of humor, tearing each other up with jokes and wisecracks.

  Gertie sat beside Emily and ate her porridge in silence for a time before saying, “I have decided to help you.”

  Emily felt like crying. “Thank you.”

  “I cannot risk everyone. Lia and I will take you to the coast. She knows the lowlands. I do not know how you will manage to sneak onto a ship across the channel. That will be up to you.”

  “When?”

  “We will leave at dusk. The others will accompany us a short distance, just to make sure the cavemen will not attack. They will only roam so far. Then we will travel by night and sleep during the day. At night we only need to fear the rovers.”

  Emily listened in horror as Gertie told her about these ghouls.

  She spent the day wandering around the camp, watching the women perform their routine. Some made arrows, some left for a hunt and returned with small game, some cleaned utensils and prepared for the evening meal. They ate together in the late afternoon and when evening came, the entire troop of women set off into the woods to see Gertie, Lia and Emily off to the coast. Soon the wind picked up and the trees began to rustle and creak.

  JoJo separated from Sylvie to walk beside Emily.

  “Hello, stranger,” Emily said.

  JoJo laughed. “Sorry about that. I’ve got a new best friend, I guess.”

  “I’m glad for you.”

  They walked for a while before JoJo asked, “Do you think you’ll make it?”

  “I don’t know but I have to try.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you too. Will you be all right?”

  JoJo smiled. “I think I’ll be good with them.”

  “I think so too.”

  “If it wasn’t for you I’d be a plaything for some German fucks.”

  “We made a good team.”

  Gertie halted the column and insisted everyone be silent. Emily could see she was cupping her ear. After several minutes, she started moving again, declaring a false alarm. Only the wind, she said.

  They emerged from the forest onto a narrow path, perhaps, Emily thought, the same one they’d travelled on with the ox cart the day before. Gertie passed the word that they’d keep to the path until they were past the cavemen’s hunting range. The Neanderthals tended to avoid the path, unless they were in hot pursuit of a kill.

  It was almost dark, the forest on each side of the path solidifying into black, solid masses. The wind heaved wildly. Emily clutched her new skin jacket, given to her as a collective gift from the women, and began closing it with its hooks.

  Ann was sandwiched between her and JoJo now, three-abreast on the path. She touched the jacket. “Do you like it?” she asked Emily.

  “I do. It cheats the wind nicely.”

  “I made it, you know. I’m a terrible hunter, I can’t cook very well but I can make clothes.”

  “Well, you’re very good at it.”

  “It’s been fun speaking English with you, a treat. I hope you get back to your people.”

  E
mily was concentrating on the last hook when she heard them.

  Horse hooves, coming fast.

  Everyone heard them, but because of the noisy dance between the wind and the trees, they heard them too late.

  A gunshot rang out, followed immediately by a masculine shout in German to ceasefire.

  The bulk of the women scattered in terror into the woods on either side of the trail, but Emily and JoJo were slower to react, paralyzed by the sight of Ann lying face down in front of them, the back of her head a mass of blood.

  Gertie and Lia held their ground, nocking arrows and letting them fly.

  The horses kept coming.

  Gertie yelled at Emily and JoJo to run for it.

  JoJo was able to move but Emily could not; her feet were rooted to the path in fear. A huge horse was coming at her so fast that all rational thought evaporated. She looked down at Ann then up at the horse. She heard Gertie and JoJo screaming at her, but they seemed very far away. It was dreamlike but the horse seemed to approach in slow motion, then sped up and was suddenly upon her.

  An arm reached out and scooped her into the air and onto a saddle, her belly thrust painfully on the pommel. The horse reared but the rider held on tightly.

  The rider, a powerfully built German soldier, turned the horse.

  Emily lifted her head and saw JoJo running back from the woods toward them.

  “No, go back!” Emily screamed.

  “No …”

  “Go back. Please! Stay free!”

  The horse was already galloping toward the direction it came from and Emily became aware, as she shifted her body, trying to get the pommel out of her gut, that she was amidst a pack of horses and riders. In fear and pain she threw up her supper, coating the rider’s right leg in vomit. He cursed at her and gave her a hard slap on the rump as if she were a disobedient child.

  They rode swiftly for at least two miles before the reins were tugged and the horse slowed to a trot. There were bright lights, the same lights she had seen before on another dark night, and there, sitting in the back seat of the boxy steam car was the odious little man in wire-rimmed glasses.