by Chuck Dixon
For an instant, they stared at one another. The man was five feet in height, with broad shoulders and a thick neck almost as broad across as his head. Thin legs and callous-covered feet. His upper body was corded muscle, and he was covered with filth that hid the true color of his skin. His dark matted hair hung in his face and down to his shoulders. There were shells and yellow stones braided into his hair in strands. He wore a necklace with similar decorations. His features were broad and flat, and his mouth opened in surprise to reveal blackened teeth filed to points. He wore no clothing except a hide belt about his narrow hips from which hung an “L” shaped bit of carved bone secured by a loop of twine. There was a spear with a six-foot haft stuck point first in the sand by him.
The man locked eyes with Dwayne—huge yellowish eyes. He dropped a sudden stream of greasy shit between his feet and grabbed for his spear with an animal growl.
Dwayne rushed three strides and drove the butt of his rifle between the man’s eyes. The blow lifted the lighter man off his bare feet. He fell to a motionless heap without a cry and into his own pile of stinking feces.
The others closed around to look at the thing lying in the sand. Dwayne’s blow had crushed the skull in the front. The black, broad set eyes stared up at nothing. Dwayne trained his weapon up the beach, but there was no movement. There was a second ridge of rock separating this section of sand from the next part of the beach. The source of the glow was still out of sight behind the natural jetty.
“Is he an Indian or what?” Renzi said.
“No Indian ever looked like that,” Jimbo said. “His nose is too flat. And the ears are small and low on the skull. And the eyes. Those are bigger than any human I’ve ever seen. They’re like animal eyes.”
“Maybe he’s an ugly Indian,” Renzi said. He wrinkled his nose and touched a boot toe to the leg of the corpse.
“Maybe he’s not human,” Chaz said. “At least, not as human as us. Look at those teeth.”
The slack mouth of the dead man revealed rows of long teeth coming to a point at the end. They were broad and stained dark, and there were just too damned many of them. The jawline protruded to contain them. The nose was wide, with thin nostrils that were more like slits.
“Whoever they are, they’re human enough to have set out a picket,” Dwayne said. “If Stinky here didn’t have the trots, it’d be me lying there with a spear in my belly.”
Jimbo crouched farther up the beach. “Trail picks up here.”
They moved at a trot toward the next ridge of rocks. A sandy trail led up to a saddle in the formation. Embers rose high into the air from the light source behind it. The smell of wood smoke stung their nostrils. They were close.
Dwayne signaled to the others with a hand flat and level to the ground. They dropped to their knees and crawled across the broad sand trail to take up positions in the porous rocks. The rocks would hide them. Anyone near that fire would have lost their night vision for sure. Chaz was by Dwayne as they crept through the dead brush between two upright spires of standing rock. Dwayne parted the dry brush and looked downhill.
The hillside was eroded away below them to make a near vertical drop of a hundred feet or more. It formed a wide natural bowl with one side open to the water. It was more clearly defined than the defile they saw from their vantage point atop the mesa back in The Now.
A bonfire roared down in the bowl. They could feel the heat of it on their faces from two hundred feet away. A big blaze feeding on logs stacked ten feet high. Glowing embers and white smoke were carried by the wind off the lake. The beach backed up on a cliff face and, in the center of it was a broad cave opening that was wide at the bottom, thinned at the top like an inverted “V,” and forty feet across. An enormous skull hung over the entrance at the top of the cave. An elephant. Had to be. Long, curved tusks jutted from the mouth and reflected the blaze. Firelight came from within the cave. Smoke drifted up through the rock above. A natural chimney.
All around the broad, flat area, were crude huts of stacked timbers and mud wattle arranged in no particular pattern. It looked like hundreds of hooches, but the dark beyond the firelight hid the full extent of the settlement. These hovels were roofed with bundles of reeds and decorated with bones and shells. Around the huts were untidy stacks of bones, shells, and kindling. Animal skins were stretched on crude tanning racks. Some of them were from pretty sizeable critters. There were curved tusks piled high. Some of the tusks looked like they were ten feet long, minimum.
In the light of the flames, figures moved. They were human, or like humans. The distance and the uncertain, flickering light hid any details. They walked upright, or mostly upright. They made a peculiar hopping motion that raised the hairs on the back of Dwayne’s neck.
There were smaller ones, children, running around. Small dogs yapped at their heels. Some of the figures used sticks to stoke the fire.
Dwayne and Chaz backed out ass-first from their hide. Renzi and Jimbo joined them in the shelter of the rocks.
“A goat-fuck,” Renzi said.
“And we’re the goats,” Chaz said.
“Quiet.” Dwayne had the transmitter out and keyed it. “Roenbach to Tauber. Mission time oh-one-twenty-two. We are at a half-ring formation of rock with a cave at its base. I’d say three klicks west/northwest from insertion point. The cave opening is on the north face of the escarpment. We found an encampment of humans. Roenbach out.”
“There weren’t supposed to be people,” Jimbo said. “The doc said there was no fossil record of people in Nevada in this age. Now there’s hundreds of them down there. Maybe more. A freakin’ town full of ’em.”
“Not any record anyone found,” Dwayne said. “That means the bones of whoever’s down there are probably lying out behind the compound waiting to be found. I read up on these Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists keep moving the arrival of humans in North America back all the time. They’re off by forty thousand years, turns out.”
“Told you they weren’t Indians,” Jimbo said. “Some kind of missing links or evolutionary dead end.”
Renzi pulled the curved piece of bone he’d taken from the dead man’s belt and inspected it. “It’s a woomera,” he said. “A tool for getting more loft out of a spear. I saw Aborigines use them in Australia.”
“On cable?” Chaz said.
“In Australia,” Renzi said. He held a middle finger up to Chaz.
“What’s our next move?” Chaz said.
The sound of a high, shrill, shrieking voice coming from the fire below decided that for them. It was someone shouting. Loud and clear. In English.
“For God’s sake! No!”
Dwayne clambered to the top of the rocks and looked down into the bowl.
A clutch of figures was moving at the opening of that cave. The voice, a female voice, was coming from that direction. Words lost on the wind but clearly English. Some of the figures moved away from the fire toward the cave. He pulled his pair of eco-friendly binoculars from his bag and trained them on the source of the voice.
Among the dark figures were two people who seemed to glow in the firelight in contrast to the darker figures crowded around them. The 10x binocs were weak but allowed Dwayne to pick out a naked man and woman in the midst of a growing gang of the camp’s inhabitants. They were taller than the skinnies massed around them. Humans. Real hundred-percent human beings.
The woman gleamed in the light. She was painted head to toe with some kind of lime wash that gave her a ghostly appearance. Her hair was stiff with lime, and there were necklaces strung with stones around her neck. Some of them glittered in the firelight. Her eyes appeared like two motionless black holes. Dwayne feared she’d been blinded, but a closer look revealed that her eyes were painted all around with some kind of black substance.
It was Caroline Tauber, and she was shouting in anger, not fear, and backing away with her fists raised for a fight. The man, Dr. Miles Kemp, was in the grip of a half-dozen of the dark men. He was more than a head taller th
an the tallest of them, but could not break away from them. They were placing some kind of lariat over his neck. Then another. Two of the squat figures yanked him toward the fire on leads. He fell, and they dragged him. He wrenched at the rope choking him and kicked the sand.
Caroline backed toward the cliff wall and aimed a kick at one of her captors. They seemed more amused than anything else. They danced around her, waving their arms and feinting leaps at her. One got too close. She drove the heel of her hand into his face, and the bastard fell hard. She stomped on him two or three times, and he folded up. The fun was over. Dozens of them rushed her at once and dragged her back into the cave, screaming. No weapons were raised, but no one struck her while an old, old woman shrieked and gestured at them.
Kemp was on his hands and knees, being pulled like a dog on a leash toward the fire. The mob waiting there hooted, made cat-calls and slapped palms on their thighs. They were happy about something, and that couldn’t be good.
Dwayne ran sliding down the trail of soft sand and motioned for the other three to follow him.
They stayed as much to the shadows as the firelight would allow. Dwayne took lead and brought them from cover to cover at a trot. A steep pathway brought them down and around the edge of the depression where the dark was deepest.
The cries from below continued. They were recognizable as the voice of a man. It had to be Kemp. He was wailing and pleading hysterically. Jesus figured big in his pleading, but Jesus was a hundred thousand years away.
The other three closed up behind Dwayne. He gestured forward with closed fingers. They moved hunched over, duck-walking past the stacks of firewood, bone, ivory and the stinking skins stretched on wooden frames. Some of those stacks they passed were skulls. The skulls of creatures damned close to human. The four men had their rifles shouldered. From here on, their total focus was on whatever they saw over their gunsights. The world they could see was a kill zone.
FIGURES WERE CLUSTERED around Dr. Miles Kemp at the edge of the huge bonfire. The doctor’s naked white flesh made him stand out in the crowd of dark men and women bunched around him. He was secured by braided leather thongs tied around his neck like a collar and leash. His arms were gripped tight by the yammering figures that clustered all around. There were dark bruises on his arms and legs, and one eye was swollen shut where he’d been struck. The mob stood cackling and clapping their hands on their thighs as Kemp begged them to let him go. Some of the males, painted in stripes of white and red, blew on hunting horns made from the hollowed points of tusks. The children threw handfuls of sand. Kemp mewled in a keening ramble interrupted by convulsive sobs. One of the captors slapped Kemp’s belly to make the fat jiggle. This resulted in more hooting sounds from the crowd. Many of them held long spears tipped with stone blades like the one the shitter on the beach had. Others held clubs made of the long leg bone of some animal. These clubs had sharpened flint blades bound in a notch at one end with leather strips.
Kemp was brought to the ground by his captors. Adults and children sat on his arms and legs to hold him still. It was hard to tell male from female. All were emaciated, with stringy muscles over bony frames.
The close-packed mob parted to allow a figure to step closer to the struggling Kemp. This new arrival was painted head to toe in lime just as Caroline Tauber was. His body shone white in the light of the fire. He had a broad stripe of crimson painted over his eyes like a mask. He wore a tall headdress of feathers bound to his scalp with braids of hair dotted with those yellow stones. About his neck hung an amulet on a thong. It was crudely fashioned in the shape of a running animal of some species. The firelight caught it, and it gleamed as he moved.
The white-painted man crouched by the wriggling and pleading Kemp. The doctor flinched and stopped his begging, breathless, as the man touched the beard on his face. The painted man’s touch was gentle at first. Then he began roughly pulling at Kemp’s face. The feathered man tugged at the hairs as though to tear them from Kemp’s face. Kemp howled and wept. He was making sounds now but not words. There weren’t any more words for what he wanted to say.
Satisfied that the beard was permanently attached, the white-painted man released Kemp. He picked up a handful of cold ashes from near the fire and swiped them in a ragged line down Kemp’s chest from sternum to crotch so that a black line of soot bisected Kemp’s torso top to bottom. This brought a cooing sound from the crowd. They pressed closer and then backed away. It was a ritual they all knew well.
A new figure stepped into the firelight. This one was painted red over every bit of exposed flesh, some kind of clay smeared over every inch of him. He wore strands of necklaces made of what looked like finger bones around his throat. He was more thickly muscled than the others and wore his hair swept back and caked with tar or sap. His eyes were large black orbs and set wide. In his fist, he carried a stone ax with a broad head and sharply chiseled edge set in a thick wooden handle bound in leather strapping.
The ax man walked forward and planted a foot in the sand on either side of Kemp’s hips. He spat a thick stream of saliva onto Kemp’s belly then raised the ax over his head in both hands. The muscles of his shoulders bunched. His mouth spread in a grin filled with rows of pointed black teeth. His eyes opened wide with whites showing. The crowd around him took in a breath with a single loud gasp.
A short hissing sound was followed by another.
Then the red painted man’s head popped loudly, throwing his blood and brains in a spray over the anxious mob.
Jimbo and Renzi followed their first aimed shots with covering fire from atop a heaped stack of firewood. They fired at the dude with the feather hat right after the ax man, but the white-painted bastard leapt out of sight. The shots went wide. They swept the mob around Kemp with rapid fire. Bodies fell or stumbled away. The rocket projectiles made wounds similar to a rifled slug from a 12-gauge. It lifted targets clean off their feet. Blood and bone sprayed everywhere. One bastard went sailing straight into the bonfire. He lay convulsing in the blaze and cooked. The explosive rounds were even more devastating and sent showers of hot shrapnel into the screaming mass.
Dwayne trotted toward the fire with Chaz on his heels. They picked off a few spearmen between them and Kemp. Dogs barked and showed teeth. Dwayne put a round through one that sent it spinning away in two pieces. The dogs backed down with a series of long high squeals. They vanished across the sand and into the dark.
Unlike the mutts, the blood-spattered mob was restless but not moving away. They bared teeth and swayed from foot to foot like animals before a charge.
“What’s wrong with the skinnies?” Chaz said. “They should be scared shitless by now.” Chaz reverted without a thought to the term “skinnies”; the generic term for foreign hostiles who were invariably thinner and shorter than US troops.
“Well, they’re not,” Dwayne said. He let go with a triple burst at the spearmen massed around Kemp. The slow discharge followed by the rapid trajectory of the missiles took some getting used to.
Some of the skinnies still stood on Kemp’s arms and legs to keep the doctor pressed to the ground. Even as fire from the four rifles brought them down, they were replaced by others screaming defiance and showing filed teeth. They weren’t going to give away their prize that easy.
The spearmen pulled at the hooked bits of carved bone they all wore on their belts and fixed the butt end of their spears to carved notches at the crook of the devices.
With the spears resting in the bone crooks, the men began to throw them in an underhand lob with all their weight behind it. Dwayne and Chaz threw themselves to the sand as spears whistled by close above them. They each took turns firing long volleys from the prone position as the other reloaded. The clutch of spear throwers wouldn’t give up their prisoner and stayed in a phalanx no matter how many fell. Kemp howled as bodies fell on him in a heap. Some men with clubs and spears were moving away from the fire to flank Dwayne and Chaz.
“The guns are too damn quiet!” Chaz said.
He turned on his side and drilled a few of the circling men. The others ran out of sight behind the cover of a hut. “We need us some noise! Some fucking noise!”
Dwayne rolled on his back and called out. “Renzi!”
A satchel charge sailed over the heads of the spearmen with none of them noticing. The clutch of enraged skinnies was solely focused on Dwayne and Chaz. The Semtex bundle exploded in the middle of the bonfire with a force that sent burning logs spinning end over end in all directions. The fire spread across the ground and ignited dozens in the shrieking crowd. Blazing logs crashed into huts and set them afire. This was finally enough to throw the spearmen off their game, but not before one drove the stone head of his spear deep into Kemp’s gut. Kemp convulsed with an animal howl. A triple-tap from Dwayne sent the bastard with the spear flying away, ripped open like a piñata.
A second satchel charge landed on the other side of the fire and shook the ground when it went off. The crowd of hooting spearmen and their kin backed away into the dark making low moans of what Dwayne hoped was terror.
Jimbo joined them at a run as Dwayne and Chaz reached Kemp. The man was in bad shape. The broken end of the spear nailed him to the ground through the gut. He was wide-eyed and gasping. Blood sprayed from his mouth with each panicked breath.
They made to move him, and he screamed. “He’s not going to make it,” Chaz said.
“And we’re down to our last magazines.”
Dwayne dropped down next to Kemp. He put his face close to the other man’s.