by Chuck Dixon
The battery life on the drone was low. Jimbo didn’t want to risk losing it and so called it back. The solar panels hanging off his ruck would need the rest of the day to restore the extra battery secured in his pack. And that was if the sun stayed out the rest of the day. The sky was clouding up to the north.
“It’s like an all-year monsoon season here,” Jimbo said, restoring the drone to its protective case.
“Between the rain and the sweat I don’t think I’ll ever get dry again,” Bat said. She took off her hat to slap away flies.
“Bruce has the right idea,” Chaz said, pointing.
The Macedonian squatted in the mud in his colorful shorts and mirrored shades. He looked like a hipster Tarzan.
Crouched on the bank of a pool, Byrus slapped handfuls of mud on his arms and legs. The others joined him and coated any open skin area with the cooling mud. It brought relief from the biting insects until it dried and flaked off.
The following day, the dry bed broadened into what was the delta area where the river joined the alluvial lake. The narrow stream ran along the center of acres of sucking mud. The team found a narrow trail along the foot of a granite cliff face. They stayed on that until it widened and led along an incline into deep pine woods. Sunlight off water led them through the trees to a ledge above the lake.
“It’s not the same as the last time we were here. The surface level’s lower,” Chaz said.
“It’s those damned beavers,” Jimbo said.
“Those damned beavers and their damned dam,” Bat said, but only Byrus found it funny.
“Dam dam,” he chuckled.
The sun was dropping, and the shadows between the trees grew blacker. They decided they were worn out for the day and made camp on the ledge. Byrus built the fire as usual. Jimbo and Chaz sat down where they were and were instantly asleep against their packs.
“Care for a swim?” Lee said.
“You read my mind.” Bat stripped off her sodden t-shirt and ran ahead of him down a game trail toward the beach. A bank of shale and sand led down to the water’s edge.
Lee and Bat stripped off the rest of their clothes and laid their rifles atop a flat dry rock then, naked, raced one another for the water. It was wet, but that’s all the relief it offered; the water temperature was the same as the air. It felt like a lukewarm bath. They waded to a place where the water was to their armpits. Lee snagged one of Bat’s wrists and pulled her to him. They kissed and touched a while until interrupted by the bark of some unknown animals invisible in the trees above them.
“Look, this is all very romantic but…” Bat said, her cheek on his chest.
“Yeah. I’d feel better closer to the rifles myself.” Lee released her.
Wading back through the still water they saw two figures crouched in the shallows, bent to drink. The pair straightened and then stood upright on two legs, shoulders hunched. The setting sun glinted off large discus eyes under heavy brows. Yellowed fangs were bared in protruding jaws. They silently followed with their eyes as Lee and Bat walked easily from the water to the rock where the rifles lay. The Ranger and the commando ran the last few strides to snatch up the M4s and swing the sights to where the pair of hominids had been crouched a second before. All that remained were eddying ripples from where the pair of watchers left the water’s edge to disappear into the trees.
“You know those guys?” Bat said breathlessly.
“I’ve met a few of their cousins,” Lee said.
“That means we’re getting close.”
“Yeah. Sure does. Closer to what, I’m not sure.”
They dressed in a hurry and hustled back to the light of the campfire now glowing atop the ledge.
21
The Blue Man
The drone buzzed the lake at five hundred feet.
The lake had decreased in volume since they’d last been here. Broad flood plains lay exposed, and all around new growth trees encroached where once there was open water. Dropping lower, the drone found what was left of proto-human settlements. They were collections of collapsed huts in roughly circular patterns around the remains of communal cook fires. The sites were overgrown with weeds. Totems made of bones leaned crookedly or had fallen to the ground.
The rain went from a light mist to a driving downpour on a stiff thirty-knot wind. Jimbo brought the drone back to base. Bat Jaffe and Lee Hammond sat under the shelter of a tarp strung between trees and reviewed the video on a tablet.
“It looks like an extinction event,” Bat said.
“There were thousands of the little bastards when we were here before,” Lee said.
“Did the receding of the lake cause this?” she said.
“We caused it. We were the extinction event,” Lee said.
“We offed hundreds of their males getting out of here,” Chaz said from where he was helping Jimbo pack up the drone.
“And you think your friend is still alive here somewhere?” Bat said.
“The fossil record does not lie. His bones were in the cave where we found the golden idol. The bones of an old man,” Lee said.
“High-def video doesn’t lie either. Keep watching,” Jimbo said, moving over to join them.
From the camera point-of-view, the drone swept over the treetops until it reached a broad bay formed in the shadow of sloping ground that rose at a severe grade to the top of a mesa. At the foot of the bay was a sheer cliff face. Huts were collected at the base of the rock, only this time they were standing and clear of growth. Columns of smoke rose from fires. Small figures could be seen moving.
“Look there. On the beach. Freeze it.” Jimbo touched the screen to zoom the image in. White stones were arranged in a pattern on the black shale sand. They spelled out in letters ten feet in height:
R L T W
“Rangers Lead The Way,” Jimbo said, grinning.
“Son of a bitch,” Lee said under his breath.
Knowing they were close to the end of the trail acted like a restorative to the team. They picked up the pace along a game trail through the trees above the coastline around the lake. They walked single file with three paces between them, and Byrus was literally the point of the spear.
“Renzi is going to shit when he sees us,” Chaz said.
“Or he’s going to be pissed at us for leaving him back here this long,” Lee said.
“He never expected to see us again. As far as he understood the rules,” Jimbo said.
“Remind me again of the rules,” Bat said from where she walked drag.
“Originally,” Jimbo said, “the Taubers couldn’t open a field farther back in the past than their last field. So each new opening had to be closer to the present. Each new opening closed a door on going back any farther.”
“And that’s not true anymore?”
“Not since Samuel dropped some new knowledge on them. The transit field has a localized effect. So long as we could manifest outside the zone of the last field opening in this era, we could punch a hole through the barrier created by our last transits. Get all that?” Jimbo turned to glance back at her.
“I think so. And Samuel is the son of the guy we’re here to rescue. His grown son from the future,” Bat said.
“Yep.”
“I must be nuts because this is all making total sense to me,” she said.
“Welcome to our world,” Chaz called back.
Bat hiked on as she considered that, eyes on the men ahead of her when not sweeping the trees for movement and sound. This place, this time, and the fact that she was in this impossible place thousands of centuries before her own birth should be unsettling. It should be turning her head inside out. Instead, she found it somehow reassuring. It was a new dimension in her reality and further proof of the wonders of creation. Sure, it was a pair of rebel scientists who made this journey possible by breaking all the rules. But it was God who made the rules so that they could be broken. Bat Jaffe was buoyed in spirit by this proof that all was possible even if she couldn’t get h
er head around it all.
A movement, no a change, off to her right made her swing her rifle up.
Over her sights, she saw a figure standing upright and still by the bole of redwood fifty paces above the trail.
A man, an actual man, coated head to toe in blue. He stood, naked but for a cloth tied around his waist, and watched her expressionless with dark eyes. Bat stood fixing her sights center mass on the silent man. He parted his lips to reveal jagged teeth stained black. It was not a smile. It was the leer of a predator.
Bat’s eyes left the blue man long enough to glance at Jimbo, at the back of the line of march, receding away from her down the trail. She began to speak. She turned eyes back to the target.
The blue man was gone.
She swung the rifle left and right. The hillside above was empty of men, blue or otherwise. She lowered the rifle and rejoined the Rangers at a trot.
Bat didn’t say anything to the others. She wasn’t sure they’d believe her. She wasn’t sure what she saw herself.
22
Shanghaied
“Morris! I’m so sorry I haven’t called. Dwayne is in recovery after surgery, and I haven’t had time to call you on the Raj.”
“I’m not on the Raj, Caroline.”
“Things taking longer in Indiana than you thought?”
“I’m in China.”
“Excuse me?”
“Shanghai, to be precise. I’m a guest here at Dex-Tan Marine Fabrications.”
“A guest? What the hell, Mo?”
“Someone else had an interest in that fossilized footprint. We got outbid, and they got me in the deal.”
“Harnesh?”
“A competitor. He has a lot of compromising data he picked up along with a lot of data retrieved in a major hack on Gallant. Mr. Taan knows all about the Tube and our experimentations with it. He’s got us boxed in.”
“To what purpose, Mo?”
“Well, refreshingly, he only wants to increase his bottom line. He’s not looking to change the world.”
“Are you free to talk?”
“I’m free to do anything but leave. They have me in a very nice executive suite here. We can talk freely. There’s not a lot they don’t already know about us. And seeing as they have us at a disadvantage already, there’s no need for further secrecy.”
“You’re not in any danger?”
“Unless you include being bored to death.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t crank it up, Mo.”
“I’m aware of that. Mr. Taan has made his wishes and conditions plain.”
“If I ever want to see my brother again, they want the Tube.”
“Only for a little while, Sis. A one-off deal, as Mr. Taan phrases it.”
“They all say that. What does he want from us?” Morris Tauber laid out in detail the demands that Mr. Taan was making of them.
“Holy shit,” she said after breaking the connection.
23
The Altar of Ma
“You have that feeling?” Chaz said.
“I’ve had it all afternoon,” Jimbo said.
It wasn’t anything they could see or hear. The sense that they were being followed and watched was unmistakable. It intensified as they neared the location of the cliff settlement. And there was the smell; a tang of something in the air.
They stopped in a quad with backs to one another. Byrus stood apart in a crouch, spear in his fists and head raised to sniff the air.
“Are we sure these assholes won’t kill us before we reach Rick?” Lee said, eyes darting left and right in a search for targets.
“Or kill him? Have you thought of that?” Bat said.
“They’ve been holding him prisoner this long. Could they be saving him as a hostage?” Chaz said.
Jimbo shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on them having their shit together to that degree.”
“Ambush?” Lee said.
“Not from our experience. These skinnies are closer to animals than they are to us. They see us; they attack us. For some reason, they’re hanging back,” Jimbo said.
“Are you sure it’s the same bunch as the ones we saw by the water?” Bat said.
“Who else would it be? We’re only a few klicks from Bedrock. We’re in the cannibals’ neighborhood,” Lee said.
“Just saying,” Bat answered. She had not told them about the blue man. She still wasn’t convinced that the man wasn’t a result of exhaustion and shadows.
“Nothing to it but to do it,” Jimbo said and motioned for Byrus to lead the way. The others followed.
“No one’s home,” Jimbo said, lowering his scopes.
The team was concealed in the brush along a tree line, deep in the shadows where they couldn’t be seen. The settlement lay below. The sloppy ring of thatch huts around the smoldering black stain of a community cook fire. Not so long ago, they’d seen a man murdered there, then butchered like a hog by a mob of man-eating savages. Now it looked abandoned. Nothing moved but for a few of the runty breed of mean ass dogs, the skinnies kept as pets. Not a single proto-human was in sight.
This was the place where they’d found Caroline Tauber held captive on their first operation back through the Tube to another time. The sheer cliff face rose at the back of the settlement with the cave where Caroline had been held prisoner. The cave where they’d found a fortune in gold artifacts. The cave that was Richard Renzi’s grave and could be again if their mission failed.
There was a new addition to the scene. A cairn of stones piled six feet high in a rough pyramid. At its peak sat an artifact of rusting steel.
“The Ma Deuce. You see it?” Chaz said. “Damn,” Lee said, eye to the scope in his hand.
The heavy .50 caliber machine gun rested on its tripod at the summit of the cairn. It was orange with rust.
“It’s a shrine,” Jimbo said.
“What the hell’s been going on here?” Chaz breathed.
A movement down in the village. A single figure limped from the collection of huts and waved a hand overhead. A few of the dogs trotted alongside the man.
“You pussies going to hide up there all day?”
Rick Renzi folded his arms and waited for his brother Rangers to reach him.
“What the fuck? I thought you guys couldn’t come back,” Rick Renzi said, grinning once the man-hugs and back-pounding were over. Rick was tanned and muscled. His hair was grown down his back, and he was sporting some serious choppy sideburns. Except for what looked like a badly healed break to his leg, the prehistoric past had been good to him. He wore a kind of leg brace of leather bound with thongs around his bare calf. He had on forest camo BDUs sliced into cut-offs, and his desert issue combat boots now held together with straps of skin. The cut-offs were faded and patched with leather. A holstered .45 hung from a belt around his waist.
Bat and Byrus stood apart. They were not included in this very close circle of friendship and because they wanted to keep an eye on their surroundings. This all seemed alien to them.
“You know science. Always changing. One day an ice age and the next it’s global warming.” Chaz grinned back.
“You can take me back, right?” Rick said, searching their faces.
“Sure. If you’re up for a week-long hike. We even brought a taste of home,” Lee said and rooted in his pack to produce two items. A fifth of Jack Daniels and two cartons of Marlboros.
“Don’t need the smokes. I’ve had plenty of time to quit. But you better believe we’ll crack this Jack, bro.” Rick accepted the gifts.
“What’s your situation here, Renzi?” Chaz said, looking around him at the empty settlement.
“Well, I finally found a job that suits me. I’m a god!” Rick said, exploding into his signature braying laugh.
“Where’s your followers?” Jimbo said.
“They’re shy. Can’t blame them after what happened last time guys looking like you showed up. They’ll come out when I tell them it’s safe.”
“T
hey’ve been taking care of you all this time?” Chaz said.
“You wouldn’t believe it. Look, I’ll tell you all about it. You can catch me up on what’s been happening. But first, I want you to meet my wife.” Rick had a new grin at the way the others exchanged astonished glances.
24
Long Distance
“Ranger Zulu to Ocean Raj. Are you reading us, Ocean Raj.”
“Five by five.”
“Can we talk in clear?”
“We’re on a unique frequency, Jimbo. No one’s listening in.”
“That you, Dwayne? You recovered?”
“Been back a week my time. Ribs are mending. Concussion cleared up. What’s another bruise on my brain, right? What’s your location?”
“Cannibal Lake. Bedrock. Mission accomplished. We found Renzi.”
“Holy shit. That’s great. What’s the sit-rep?”
“Well, he’s still a raging asshole. Otherwise, he’s fine. Lording it over the man-eating motherfuckers like a dollar-store Caesar. We’re taking some downtime and moving out tomorrow.”
“Listen up, Jimbo. I need you guys to double-time it to extraction. We have a situation of our own here.”
“Thought you guys could dial the calendar any way you like. What’s the rush on your end?”
“I’ll fill you in when you get back. You have enough on your plate. Just no side trips, all right?”
“Straight as an arrow back to the beach, Dwayne.”
“Godspeed, brother. Ocean Raj out.”
“Ranger Zulu out.”
25