by Chuck Dixon
“What’s the range?” Dwayne said. “Well…” Tauber said.
“Yeah, I know. You never got to test that,” Dwayne said. He stuck the transmitter into a pocket on the leg of his pants.
Tauber produced a box and held it out to the group.
“Biodegradable wristwatches,” he said. “Made of compostable paper. Good for about thirty days. You can keep me apprised of the relative time, so I can make my adjustments when I re-open the field in forty-eight hours.”
The watches were digital with a flat face on a broad band colored in stripes of green and tan. “Set them at zero,” Dwayne said as each man took a band.
The men stood strapping on the watches, adjusting packs and triple-checking the loads in their weapons and helping one another attach the line from each rifle to a belt-mounted battery pack.
“We’re ready, Doc,” Dwayne said and turned to the others. “Let’s take a walk.”
6
The Mission
A hot wind trilled through the guy wires of the steel tower as the noon sun beat down from a yellow sky. Low vibrations boomed from within the Q-hut that housed the reactor. Around the tower, the air filled with a frisson of static energy as a massive jolt of electricity ran from the reactor house, through shielded underground cables, to the pylons driven deep into the rock at the tower’s base. The air was alive, bristling with anticipation.
A million wriggling serpents of bluish light engulfed the shining ball atop the tower. Thick arcs of pure electromagnetic power reached for the ground and turned the sand to thin puddles of glass wherever they made contact. There was an audible hiss as molecules collided and superheated air rushed to fill the vacuum left by the discharge. Man-made thunder shook the ground for miles around. A sheet of brilliance that would be mistaken for heat lightning could be seen as far away as Tonopah.
Inside the largest Q-hut, Parviz and Quebat sat at consoles in their lead-walled, rubber-floored control room and adjusted the flow of rapidly multiplying power into the Tube chamber. They wore disposable Tyvek bunny suits and thick goggles. The flat screen monitors before them showed bar graphs spiking into the red. Other screens showed temperature, wattage, amperes, and reactor function. All wavering but within acceptable performance ranges.
Parviz spoke into a mike to the image of Dr. Tauber on one of his monitors. The image on the monitor was degraded by the free-floating power surge that engulfed the compound. It wafted and wavered but held firm enough for them to communicate.
“You have power, Doctor.” His English was Oxford-accented.
In the Tube chamber, the four ex-Rangers stood in single file at the bottom of the steel ramp that led into the tunnel of frozen coils. The vapor from the concentric rings was growing thicker. The steel ramp, walkway, and railings were coated with a layer of slush that dripped from the thrumming coils.
Tauber called to the men from the computer station. “I can hold the field for thirty minutes. If you don’t accomplish your mission in that time frame, you can either return or wait until I can re-open the field.”
“How close are we going to come to your sister’s team’s arrival?” Dwayne called back. He blew into his gloved hands. Damn, it was cold.
“Hard to say,” Tauber said. “I have to adjust the flow to the coils with the help of a modulation program. I’ll try to get you there within an hour of their arrival. But it could be as much as a day. I just can’t say.”
“Sounds more and more like a goat-fuck all the time,” Renzi said.
“Fire it up, Doc,” Dwayne said.
“It’s ready now,” Tauber said. “Anytime, gentlemen.”
Dwayne led them down the walkway into a dense fog of frozen air. Each man followed, footing uncertain on the slick steel grate.
Renzi was second. Then Smalls.
Chaz brought up the rear. And then they were gone.
DWAYNE WAS ON HIS hands and knees and bringing up everything he’d eaten that morning and the night before. He was wracked with chills and burning up all at the same time. His vision swam white and red. His mouth tasted like tin. There was a hammering pain inside the back of his skull.
He straightened up with eyes squeezed shut and shook his head from side to side. Still on his knees, he looked around for the others. They were each in varying stages of his own condition. Jimbo was bent over hawking up a stinking mess of bacon and oatmeal into the grass. Chaz stood bent, hands on knees and blowing out air in sharp exhales. There was puke all down the front of his brand new paper BDUs. Renzi lay on his back, making groaning noises and hissing through his clenched teeth.
Dwayne stood on shaking legs, and the pain in his head began to fade away. His stomach settled, and the chills abated. He spat out a mouthful of bitter juice. He turned to look back the way they came. There was a cloud of cold mist clinging to the ground. The field was still open. For now.
It was late afternoon. Around four o’clock by Dwayne’s expert judgment of the bright yellow sun hanging in the west. He pressed his eyes shut once more and stood up straight for a look around.
They were roughly twenty feet beyond where the back wall of the Q-hut would stand a hundred thousand years from now. The mesa was still here and some of the same rock formations but there the similarity ended.
The slope up to the top of the mesa was now a long hill of loose rock scree sparsely covered in scrub pines gently moving in the breeze. It led down to a tree line with dense forest beyond. The trees thinned out as they reached the plateau top and the foliage changed to a thick wild grass studded with rock and stands of greasewood. The air was different, too. Thicker than the desert air. More humid. As he shook off the chill, Dwayne could feel the change in the air. It was rich with the smell of pine. Slightly cooler, too.
The only sign of animal life was the biggest damned butterflies Dwayne had ever seen. Bright yellow and dappled with red. They drifted from one feathery seed pod to another atop the tall grass stalks. Each was fully the size of Dwayne’s outstretched hand.
“That was a bitch!” Renzi said. He sat up and shoved his boonie hat back in place.
“Doc didn’t say nothing about that crazy shit,” Chaz said. He was stripping off gear harness to remove the vomit-foul tunic. He wore a paper fiber t-shirt underneath.
“He didn’t know,” Dwayne said. “There’s no after action report from the first trip through the Tube. That’s why we’re here, remember? You can complain when we get back.”
“Maybe the trip killed them,” Jimbo said.
Dwayne ignored that and stepped to the lip of an outcropping of shale. From the end of the rocky shelf, he looked down the slope to see a lake where the desert once was. Desert will be, he reminded himself. A spike of fresh pain behind his eyes. The lake was more like a sea or an inlet. It stretched away as far as he could see with broad beaches along its edge on either shore. It looked like low tide. Or maybe the water was receding, already turning to the bone dry bed it would be back in The Now.
The pine forest started about five hundred yards below them and covered a long slope right down to the water. Maybe two miles to the water. He couldn’t see a beach directly below their position. Maybe there wasn’t one, or maybe he just couldn’t see it from this angle. Maybe the woods ended in marshes. It narrowed the search area. Caroline, Kemp, and Phillip had to be between here and the water somewhere. Unless they went the other way toward higher ground. He knew enough about tracking to know that people in unknown territory tended to walk downhill.
Dwayne spat some more of the bile taste out of his mouth and dug out the transmitter. He pressed the send button.
“Roenbach to Tauber. Mission time zero plus five. We’re here, and it looks like the target area as you described it.”
“Tell him this ride sucks,” Renzi said. “Jimbo, can you pick up a trail?” Dwayne said. “Any sign?”
Jimbo wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and began to search the ground ahead. He waved a hand for the rest to stay where they were. Dwayne stepp
ed off the shale to stand by Chaz. Renzi got to his feet and spat.
“I never needed a smoke so bad in my life,” he said.
“Grass is matted down here,” Jimbo said. He stalked forward, eyes fixed on the grass. “They moved downhill into the trees. Three paths joining into one.”
Dwayne keyed the transmitter again.
“We’re following a trail that leads west down toward a lake. Will report progress. Roenbach out.”
“Should we risk calling out for them?” Chaz said.
“Not just yet. Jimbo, you’re point.”
Jimbo led the way, and the other three followed behind at twenty-foot intervals. They fell into the old routines of long-range patrol that had gotten them into and out of so many bad places intact so many times before. Jimbo studied the ground ahead and the others watched all about, weapons ready. There was cawing of birds coming from the trees below punctuated by louder squawks. Not sounds any of them recognized.
They moved into the shade of the tree line. There were clumps of broad-leafed ferns carpeting the forest floor. And the trunks of the trees were thick with fungi. There were enough broken or tramped down ferns to provide a trail. When that failed, there were places where the fungi were crumbled, like someone rested against a tree bole or touched a hand to the tree at shoulder-height. Jimbo was able to lead them swiftly down the slope on a pathway that curved steadily down and joined a gully formed by runoff from past rainstorms. It was dry as dust now. No recent rains. A good thing for the Rangers. Any sign they could find from Caroline Tauber and company would be useful. Dry ground was the perfect medium for tracking.
Long pine needles rained on Dwayne from above. He looked up to see small animals drifting from tree to tree above. They made no sound. Not even the thrum of wings.
“Bats?” Chaz narrowed his eyes and peered up.
“Squirrels,” Dwayne said.
They were red squirrels with long thin tails and white bellies. They glided from tree to tree on wing membranes stretched between their fore and hind legs. Without a sound, they soared across the open areas of sky between trees. They vanished into the thick boughs of pine.
“Has to be hundreds of ’em,” Renzi said. “Big fuckers,” Chaz said.
As quickly as they appeared, all the squirrels were gone. A snapping of foliage and a low grunting noise came through the trees from below. Something big was moving around in the deep, deep woods.
Fingers slid from trigger guards. Safeties snapped off. Guns up and trained toward the sounds from below. The unseen source of the noise snuffled somewhere close. It made a final bleating noise and then could be heard moving away. The sounds of its passage fading as it moved away down the slope to their left.
The men stayed still until the cawing of the unseen birds returned.
“Any idea what that was?” Chaz said. He lowered his weapon.
“The doc said that most of the animals here will be bigger versions of ones we know,” Dwayne said.
“My boy has picture books of prehistoric mammals,” Renzi said. “Wolves the size of bears. Bears the size of elephants.”
“Yeah, and real elephants,” Dwayne said. “Doc said there could be elephants.”
“What size are they in your boy’s book, Ricky?” Chaz said.
“I dunno. Fucking huge.” Renzi shrugged. Jimbo dropped to hands and knees again.
He ran fingers over the bed of brown needles that carpeted the ground. The ferns were thinning out.
“They came this way,” Jimbo said. “How long ago?” Dwayne said.
“Six hours or more,” Jimbo said. “But the trail’s gonna be hard to follow over these needles.”
Renzi spat again.
“Six hours or more?” Renzi said. “Even amateurs could be ten miles or more away from here by now. They could be anywhere.”
“I’d say, given the odds, the doc got us pretty damned close,” Chaz said.
“Look, the text said they had to hide,” Dwayne said. “We make our way downhill and look for likely hiding spots. They didn’t have time enough between their arrival and the text transmission to get very far from here.”
They found a likely hiding spot twenty minutes down the slope; a collection of rocks and deadfall forming a natural half-circle which would offer some concealment. They found the broken wreckage of a wave transmitter much like the one Dwayne carried. It lay next to a headless human torso wearing a Batman t-shirt.
“NO ANIMAL DID THIS,” Jimbo said. He squatted by the corpse. “Predators eat from the ass-end in. They don’t bite parts off and take ’em away. Not a lot of blood around. They took the head first and did the rest when he was dead.”
Dwayne crouched by him. Chaz and Renzi took positions just up the hill and scanned the trees all around for movement and sound.
Bugs had been at the torso. Giant, horned beetles. Ants the length of a thumb. Flies were gathered in a cloud over a sticky pool of black blood that collected where the head should be. There was blood spray on the rocks. The neck ended in a raw wound with the white ends of vertebrae showing in a mess. The arms were gone at the shoulder. The legs at the hips. “Something chopped off his extremities,”
Jimbo said. “A blade of some kind. Not very sharp. But sharp enough.”
“Not just one really huge critter taking big bites?” Dwayne said.
“No animal is this systematic,” Jimbo said, shaking his head. “Anything that big would have dragged him away whole. Anything smaller would have torn his guts free. The torso’s still intact. And you can see where a blade hit the thigh bone that’s left here. There’s angular chips out of it that a blade would make. Teeth make scrapes and splinters. It took about six chops to get through there.”
“So the doc’s research is off.” Dwayne stood up.
“Yeah,” Jimbo said. “There’s people in these woods.”
“Why’d they leave part of him?”
“Damned if I know.” Jimbo shrugged.
“What was his name?” Chaz said.
“Phillip something,” Dwayne said.
From the remains of Phillip Something, Jimbo could easily follow the trail. It looked to him like a dozen or more people with bare feet. There were long gouges in the ground that meant they were dragging two more figures. The captives were ambulatory but unwilling traveling companions. Caroline and Kemp.
“They alive, or did whoever took him drag away dead weight?” Chaz said. They were humping downhill in a tight diamond shape formation, six paces apart from each other. Defensive positions.
“Could be alive,” Jimbo said. “Looks like whoever’s dragging them is having a hard time of it here and there. You can see gouges in the dirt where needles have been kicked away. They’re not going easy.”
Jimbo crouched and studied the ground. “What else?” Dwayne said.
“Circular holes an inch or more across poked in the dirt either side of the trail. The captors were carrying spears or some other kind of poles. They used them to support their weight.”
“Sun’s goin’ down, Dwayne,” Renzi said. He was walking drag—watching their six o’clock. “We just gonna run right up on ’em?”
Dwayne held a hand up and hissed. All stopped. Guns up and eyes moving.
“Smell that?” he said.
“A wood fire,” Chad said. “Real faint. Far off.”
“A cook fire,” Renzi said.
They broke into a trot through the trees.
A half-mile along, the terrain leveled out a bit as the slope of the hill decreased to twenty degrees. The smell of wood smoke was stronger now, and they abandoned any kind of tracking and moved directly toward the source. It was getting dark in a hurry. The sun was sinking. Pools of deep shadow formed between the trees. They crossed a broad, well-used trail that ran across the slope laterally and wound down toward the water. The surface was trodden flat by many feet over a long time.
The new trail brought them down the slope and out on a narrow strip of sand and rock where the sea la
pped up in lazy rollers. A gentle susurration of surf and barely any chop to the water. The air was cooler coming off it. Renzi walked in ankle deep and stooped to cup his hand in the water.
“Salty,” Renzi said. He spat out the taste of it. “Not as much as sea water. But there’s salt.”
“That’s good,” Dwayne said. “That means we probably won’t run into anything coming down to take a drink.”
“Ain’t concerned with what comes down to the water,” Chaz said. “But what might come out of it is a different story. We should have brought the Renzi kid’s picture book with us.”
Renzi jogged out of the water and back to the sand.
The narrow beach ran along a rock face and curved to the west around to a flinty point that jutted out into the water. The jagged point of land was backlit by a yellow glow in the deepening gloom. Behind those rocks was a massive fire of some kind. It threw light far out onto the water creating golden highlights atop the wavelets.
“Here’s where they came out,” Jimbo said. A double row of drag marks and lots of footprints led along the tree line toward the light of the fire. It was plain enough sign for any of them to recognize.
“Single file,” Dwayne said. “Chaz, you’re walkin’ drag. Jimbo, on point.”
It was full-on dark when they reached the rocky outcropping. A glow rose from the other side of the collection of craggy, volcanic boulders. The campfire. A big one or more than one. Thick white smoke was carried by the wind off the water and into the boughs of the pines on the ridgeline above them.
To get around the rocky formation, they waded into the warm water. One hand to the wall to steady them and one hand training their weapons forward as they moved. Dwayne took the lead. The first turn brought them onto a new strip of beach nestled in a cleft in the formation. What looked like single ridge was a series of natural jetties of volcanic rock running out into the water. They all had experience with this kind of country. The ridges were what was left by flows of lava from an eruption sometime in the past. They spread like fingers into the water. As Dwayne rounded the first jetty of black rock and stepped out of the water. He found himself ten feet from a man squatting in the sand to take a dump.