From the log of Lance Cpl. Juniper Jones
Security Detail II
Old man led engagement against seven aggressors. All killed. No injuries to our unit.
Easy to tell veterans of combat from the newcomers. Kaikane and Duarte walk around in a daze, trying to make sense of it all. Good luck with that. Kaikane scored his first two kills ever. Gives a man something to think about. Duarte’s smart enough to know her female presence probably instigated the whole shebang. Gives her something to think about. Something besides fucking in streams.
Gray Beard was cool as a cucumber the whole time. It was him who spotted the hunters in camp. He tooted on his flute to buy time, quickly tied up the bitch, told the pups to stay (they listened for the second time this week) and led the way as I followed him at a run down the ridge line. He warned the suckers twice. Then lowered the boom. I’ve been in some tough spots with some tough guys. He measures up to any of them.
We inventoried their gear, then dragged the bodies far away from camp. Kaikane and I have new flint knives in leather sheaths and leather-pouch blade kits. Duarte inherited a lightweight club topped by an egg-shaped obsidian head. A real bone breaker. Some of their spears were heavy enough to make decent bolts for the atlatl. Burned them in half. Now have seven strong bolts. Keep them in a quiver made from an attacker’s tunic.
The atlatl has potential to be a great weapon.
TRANSMISSION:
Duarte: “I’m glad all Cro-Magnon are not so warlike.”
Kaikane: “We had guys like that back in Hawaii. You know, gangs. They’d mob people all the time.”
Duarte: “What about you?”
Kaikane: “I took dirty lickings a few times. After a while they left me alone.”
Duarte: “You became their friend.”
Kaikane: No. You really want to know?”
Duarte: “Sure.”
Kaikane: “I was a wrestler, judo guy. They knew I would always mess at least one or two guys up before they got me pinned down, started kicking my ribs. One day, I’d had enough, lost my composure. I broke free, grabbed the gang leader in a chokehold and used my pointer finger to pop his left eye out of its socket. The eye was just dangling by a bunch of nerves, hanging there on his cheek. Everybody split.”
Duarte: “Ugh, that’s gross. If that was a gang where I came from, they would have shot you.”
Kaikane: “They couldn’t. We was family. Cousins.”
From the log of Paul Kaikane
Recreation Specialist
They poured into camp like a gang into an alley. Kicking over our stuff, rough-housing each other. The leader’s eyes never left mine. If he was trying to look intimidating, he was doing a pretty damn good job of it. Barrel-chested, he stood six feet tall and was dressed in wolf furs and leather leggings. Bare feet. His necklace alternated human fingers with clumps of hair that turned out to be scalps. I was squinting through the deer hide smoke, figuring out how to take on all seven, when Gray Beard’s flute stopped them in their tracks.
They twisted their heads back and forth, from the sound of the flute to Maria, drinking her in with yellowed eyes. Her hair was untied and gleaming in the morning sun. Olive skin unblemished by the scars and pox marks you see on other women. Thin waist, full breasts, she was “the prize.” A prize worth murder.
The two of us were caught in a kind of no-man’s land between our gear and the fire. One spear leaned against a tree just out of Maria’s reach. Mr. Meteorite never felt better in my hand.
And then the old guy walked right into the middle of that mob and set them straight. Told them we would kick their asses and invited them to leave. Jones is
back to fighting health, and at 250 pounds, he’s an intimidating presence. I could see the intruders kinda wilt as his dark eyes studied them for weaknesses. The leader was never going to back down.
Once the fight started, everything seemed to go in slow motion. Just like the old days in wrestling, or judo, or riding a 75-foot wave. It all slowed down. The completely different part was fighting to kill. There were no rules and no referees. We fought for our lives and those mangy skunks didn’t have a chance. By the time it was over, I was so pumped up I could have killed 20 more. But they were all dead.
Once the rage cooled, it was replaced with an adrenalin hangover. We cleaned up the camp and left as fast as we could, marching in silence toward a wall of gray clouds. Toward more sadness than I ever imagined.
After a few miles winding east on the ancient trail, Gray Beard took a quick left turn and led us up a scree of jumbled rocks. Feeling our way through fog and drizzling rain, we topped out on a hidden pass in the mountains. Cresting at about 5,000 feet, we headed down a narrow set of switchbacks to the camp of Gray Beard’s daughter. No dogs to challenge our arrival. No fire. The place seemed deserted.
“Oh, my gosh,” Maria gasped beside me. She pointed to shallow grave at the edge of the camp where animals had halfway uncovered the corpse of a wasted little boy. The vermin had emptied his body cavity, but not bothered with his arms, pencil-thin and thrown up above his head in frozen horror.
Gray Beard tooted his flute and called out. No one emerged from the caves that fronted a cold fire pit. The camp was, by far, the most elaborate we had seen. I set my pack down on an plank table and took it all in–the stone hearth and oven, wooden benches and tables, meat smoking and leather curing racks, flagstone paths, flowering bushes, coils of rope slung over pegs pounded into trees.
Gray Beard was frantic with worry. He ducked into the largest cave and let out a mournful wail. As we hurried to investigate, he shuffled out with a grim face. Using sign language and a few words, he gave Jones and me stern orders.
“Find a mother pig and kill it. We passed one on the trail. You didn’t see her, but she’s there. Under the broken pine. Do not gut her. Bring back whole. Quickly! Go now.”
Dark was setting in. Thick clouds meant there would be no moon to hunt by. Jones and I dug the helmets out of our packs and put them on. It had been more than a month since I had worn mine. It was funky to see all the data screens blaze to life in the visor. We each called up night vision and set off back up the switchbacks. I fought the urge to tear the thing off my head and throw it as far as I could.
Back when we discussed what effect we would have on Gray Beard, we never considered what effect he would have on us. We have been so immersed in the native lifestyle, the modern helmet’s beeps and data screens spooked me. Just think something and, bam, it’s there on your readouts. Time, barometric pressure, temperature, whatever, it made my skin crawl.
“Are you OK?” Jones asked. The way his kinky hair and beard stuck out from under the helmet took the edge off my swirling feelings. Imagine a thimble shoved down over a dandelion.
TRANSMISSION:
Jones: “Weird wearing this helmet.”
Kaikane: “Know what you mean. I don’t know how Maria does it.”
Jones: “She’s taking oral notes all the time. Wants to look at shit. Let’s get this done.”
Kaikane: “You see that kid, the one that was buried? What kind of place did the old man bring us to?”
Jones: “Seen towns like this before. War time. Smells like death.”
From the log of Paul Kaikane
Recreation Specialist
We found the pig where Gray Beard said she would be. Jones put an atlatl bolt in her ear and we used his rope to drag her back to camp, leaving a passel of squealing piglets behind. When Gray Beard first gave Jones the rope, it seemed almost an afterthought. No big deal. We have put the coil of braided seal skin to work many times since leaving Bear Camp, using it to cross streams, climb steep banks, as a clothesline and as a lash to carry wood and game.
The old man did an amazing thing when we pulled the 300-pound pig to a stop beside the fire he had built in the center pit. Using one of his longest cutting flints, he carefully slit open the pig’s belly to cut out her milk sac, intact with nipples and all. Maria told us later ho
w he gently coaxed the milk into the mouths of the camp’s starving survivors.
She stopped on her way between caves to say there were two badly injured adult males, eight gaunt women, six of whom may survive, and two sickly children. She had no explanations how the clan came to be so messed up. Fleas and ticks infest the caves. Rats and mice dart everywhere.
Gray Beard emerged to cut the liver and some lengths of intestine out of the pig as the first drops of rain began hissing down into the fire.
“Cook this pig,” he said before hustling back to the big cave.
The fire pit was outfitted with a frame and long pole for spitting big game. Jones and I finished gutting the sow and scraped as much wiry black hair off her as we could with our new flints before running the pole up through her butt and out her mouth. We lashed her tight with strips of hide we found hanging from a tree, then muscled the pole up onto the two forked stumps on opposite sides of the fire.
Here I sit, keeping watch on the pig in the middle of the night, turning it when the leather lashings start to smolder. The clouds broke a while ago, leaving behind a sky filled with stars. Tall peaks rise above us on three sides to close in this end of the long, narrow valley. Maria sleeps nearby, exhausted from trying to help the sick and wounded. She and Gray Beard amputated one of the hunter’s legs by torch light. Poor son of a bitch was too weak to scream. Maria’s face went white, but she never faltered as she used the point of her knife to work the leg free at the ball joint of the man’s hip. Jones and I stood by with red-hot flints to cauterize the wound when she finished.
Gray Beard’s daughter is one of the living. Revived by milk and strips of liver, she rallied long enough to give her father a rundown on how things became so screwed up for her husband’s clan. A bull mammoth had wandered up the valley and either couldn’t find its way out or didn’t want to. The mammoth was messing with the clan’s berry and grape harvests, and ranging way too close to camp, so the men tried to kill it.
They set their trap in the traditional grounds and attempted to drive the old bull into it with fire. They underestimated the mammoth. The beast had spent its long life dodging little men and their blazes. It doubled back, braved the flames and attacked. Of the eight men who set out to slay the bull, four were killed outright and two died later from their wounds. The two who lived were badly wounded. They survived by playing possum as the rampaging giant trounced the life out of their brothers and fathers.
That was more than a month ago. The women rallied to keep the camp functioning, working from dawn to well past dusk to finish the chores and collect the food needed to hold them through the coming winter. Then a pack of wolves appeared from nowhere to kill two children, eat three tame pigs and clean out the dogs. The women managed to drive the wolves away just as a sickness swept through camp. Maria says it sounds like bad meat or bugs in the water. The whole clan was consumed in a puking, shitting illness with no end. The fire went out in a heavy rainstorm four days ago and the daughter said that was what finally convinced her to give up. She didn’t have the energy to feed herself, let alone a whole camp.
I get the feeling we’re going to be here for a while.
CHAPTER NINE
TRANSMISSION:
Bolzano: “You have no way to prove it.”
Amacapane: “I’m tellin’ ya Sal, he knew the fire was gonna spread. Had to. Black Eyes says they were just a couple hills over when it started. Lorenzo probably seen ’em coming, knew he was gonna lose.”
Bolzano: “He seemed shocked by its sudden immensity.”
Amacapane: “Let me ask you something, you stupid idiot. Say Lorenzo was hired to protect some rich fucker standing on that side of the river, do you think he might’ve noticed how dry the fields were and how hard the wind was blowing before he built his fire? You think he’d take note of shit like that? Guy’s a cold-blooded killer. Told us so.”
Bolzano: “He also admitted he is not afraid to work in broad strokes. I’m not disagreeing that it is possible, just pointing out he will deny it. How is the clan doing?”
Amacapane: “They’re tired, footsore. Lost a few dogs and one kid along the way. Pimples says the swamp was brutal, that’s where the little girl drowned. Two Handfuls’ daughter. Once they cleared the lowlands, he said they were making good time. ’Til they were surrounded by fire. Fucking Lorenzo, I’m gonna kill him!”
Bolzano: “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how did they survive? Some of their clothes were singed, hair burned. It must have been close.”
Amacapane: “Fat Head and Pimples seen the smoke, knew right away they were in a poor spot. They turned the clan around, started everyone quartering north toward the river. They never made it to the Loire, no time. Flames chased them over two hills, finally trapped them down at the bottom of a ravine. There was a mountain stream. They dove into a pool that didn’t have any trees around, rode the fire out. Lorenzo’s gonna pay, I tell ya. He’s gonna pay.”
Bolzano: “May I remind you it was my crew which took the brunt of the casualties.”
Amacapane: “That was a bad scene on the river. You walking around with your bare ass hanging out, I’m still shook up.”
Bolzano: “Fricasseed dogs and shrieking people didn’t put you off any?”
Amacapane: “Nah, I’m getting used to that stuff. You been in the fire zone yet?”
Bolzano: “I’ve walked a short distance, not far. It has been frantic, tending to these poor folk. I have, however, seen some of the prizes that have wandered in with the clans. Tusks, antlers, those sorts of things.”
Amacapane: “Anybody show you human objects yet?”
Bolzano: “No, what do you have?”
Amacapane: “A few odds and ends, jewelry, carved ivory, flint knives. We keep it all together. I’ll tell Pimples to show you later. Quite a few people out there in the brush. Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. Nearby. More than we ever thought.”
Bolzano: “You must show me what you have found.”
Amacapane: “Some of them are burned to charcoal like the animals, black lumps. Others must have been taken by the smoke and heat. Aside from the smell, those ones’ kits and belongings are in OK shape.”
Bolzano: “What prompted you to look for artifacts?”
Amacapane: “We saw Lorenzo and his Tattoos combing through what was left of a burned-out camp a few kilometers from here, up past the lake. I saw he was collecting native shit, got the idea I might want to get some nice things for myself. You’ve seen it, these people do like to trade.”
Bolzano: “Will you participate in Lorenzo’s religious holiday, his Fete de Inferno?”
Amacapane: “He knows my price. I hunt with the pistol, or it is no deal. If we can agree on that, I don’t mind waving my arms around, glowing. Truthfully, I’m looking forward to putting the jumpsuit back on. It’s been cold at night.”
Bolzano: “He is aware that I support your request. If Lorenzo lives up to his word, I have agreed to sing a pair of arias, though I only have one in mind so far, Prokofiev’s ‘The Fiery Angel.’ It is all I have found which is appropriate.”
Amacapane: “You’ll think of something. My Green Turtles are gonna take a pass on the baptism tomorrow. How about your crew?”
Bolzano: “I fear it will be an all-Tattoo affair.”
From the log of Cpl. Salvatore Bolzano
Firefighter II
(English translation)
Lorenzo’s fire disappeared over the horizon this afternoon in a long, low cloud of smoke. For five days, our eyes have followed the expansive brushfire’s steady march to the north and east. The winds continue to blow from the southwest, as they have for the past week, unvarying except for one brief turnaround five days ago, a disastrous reversal which Lorenzo insists was the “wrath of God.”
Though now out of sight, the fire is never far from anyone’s mind. We know firsthand what sort of death and destruction the blaze must be visiting upon those poor souls and animals over the horizon. What a painful way to die.
My sorrowful little crew has been decimated. Of the 18 souls who arrived at the river’s edge to win the race, only four men and one woman survive–Tomon, Gertie, the two homosexual percussionists and a one-eyed, stuttering man I’ve renamed “Flounder.” They are all relatively healthy. I think we’re done burying people. For now.
Fever claimed the final two casualties last night. It was a mercy. They had been begging for death since we pulled them from the river. Scorched from their bodies were large swaths of skin as well as parts of lips, eyelids, ears and fingers. Tomon refused to surrender. With Gertie’s help, he concocted healing ointments and administered doses of crushed bark and toadstools he said would lessen their pain. The healers didn’t call a halt to their valiant efforts until the victims had expelled their final breaths.
The totality of the loss weighs heavily on the survivors. They meander about in an aimless daze, nursing their wounds and eating only what food we place in front of them.
What I find most frustrating is Lorenzo’s utter lack of contrition. The sergeant treats my people’s injuries as if they were somehow deserved. He takes no responsibility for the people’s pain and suffering. Nor does he acknowledge his fire has killed untold numbers of hominids and animals, and nearly claimed the lives of Andre’s Green Turtles. He deflects guilt by claiming it is all “God’s Will.”
Whatever the hell that is.
The two main clans arrived the day after Lorenzo set his “signal” fire. I was dragging a half-burned pine through a haze of smoke and morning fog down the bank to our makeshift hospital’s fire pit, when Wallunda warbled out a war cry to call her Tattoos to the finish line. Her clan was following the eastern rim of the river canyon so intently it nearly passed us by. Muddy, bedraggled, untouched by the flames, the pack dropped down the bank in great jumps, bounding past me in a chorus of aggressive whoops and grunts. The Tattoos arrived about four hours ahead of the Green Turtles.
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