by Chuck Dixon
“To them it’s magic,” Chaz said.
“Whatever. If it helps them fight, we let them bring it,” Lee said.
Others carried more useful burdens. Ammo and explosives. Homer chose to hump Jimbo’s Model 70 rifle. The Pima had taken only his M4 along with him. Homer wore ammo belts for the sniper rifle around his shoulders, looking like a Mexican bandit. He was puffed up and as proud as an Eagle Scout. He was being allowed to handle something that belonged to his gods. Lee had removed the 30x scope and slipped it into a pouch on his Molle. Jimmy Smalls would be pissed enough that he let a monkey-ass motherfucker carry his rifle. But the scope was the real money.
They were a good four hours behind Jimbo and his party, which put them seven or more hours behind the native girl heading for who the fuck knew where. The gunfire provided a general direction. They started the climb up the hillside away from the lake shore and toward the long dark clouds and lowering black skies to the north.
“Hump it, you man-munching assholes,” Lee growled.
Encouragement wasn’t necessary. The gang of skinnies clambered up the hill on hands and feet. They handed up the Ma Deuce to one another over the rough patches. The pair of Rangers had to push hard to stay even with them. A hundred yards ahead, younger skinnies ran full out searching for scents like bloodhounds. They’d yip and hoot to be answered back by Homer, who had taken the role of war chief or top-kick sergeant for this sortie. He stood bandy-legged and growled orders to the others with a Marlboro clamped between corn-yellow teeth.
“He’s chain-smoking those butts, bro. What’s he going to do when the carton’s empty?” Chaz trundled up the thirty-degree incline with some effort.
Lee blew hard behind him, bathed in sweat. “Grow his own for all I care.”
They reached a ledge and took a breather. They’d come close to ten miles at a killing pace. Chaz sucked water from his straw. Lee broke out the salt tabs and protein bars. The skinnies kept on. Homer turned back above them to bark through a haze of blue smoke.
“Yeah. Yeah. We’re coming, you hairy fuck. See how your wind holds smoking four packs a day.” Lee waved a hand up at the gibbering skinny.
“That gunfire. You think they reached Neeta’s village?” Chaz said.
“Maybe. Could be Rick’s already got his girlfriend, and they’re on their way back.” Lee spat a stream of water into his hand and brushed it back through his hair.
“That’s more luck than even Jesus will allow.” Chaz smiled.
“And after all we did for him.” Lee stood and started up the hill after the last of the hominids climbing toward the crest.
The storm passed over them, spending its fury on its way south, borne on gale force winds. The miserable march took them over one ridge then another and across a river valley to the wall of a mesa.
It was full dark when Chaz and Lee trotted up to where some skinnies were howling with excitement within a dense forest of old growth redwoods. The skinnies hooted and sniffed and capered around in the dark woods. They retreated before a bright LED lamp that Chaz flipped on. He trained it over the ground, finding empty brass glittering on the wet needles. There were drag marks, too.
Homer sniffed at a sticky patch on the bark of a tree and grunted. Chaz put the light on it and touched the stain. There was a fresh gouge in the surface of the tree where something struck it hard enough to tear off the thick bark and expose green wood.
“Blood,” he said.
“There’s blood here too,” Lee said. “Bone fragments too. Must have been a lot if it’s still here with all that rain. They got off maybe a mag of ammo judging from the spent rounds.”
“And that’s all they left. The brass. None of their gear’s here.”
“Could be they fought their way through. Packed out of here themselves. Runnin’ and gunnin’.”
“We’d have heard that.”
“Yeah. We would.”
“Drag marks in the mud.” Chaz crouched and brushed the tracks in the spongey black ground with his fingers.
“More than our four. They took their own dead away, too.”
“Dead or prisoners?”
“That Indian doesn’t go that easy. Neither does Bat,” Lee said.
“We go on?” Chaz said standing.
“We go on. Rescue or payback, we go on.”
They moved north through the dark, reaching the ruined village lying still in the pearly glow of a quarter moon. It was twelve hours of hard pushing. The Rangers dropped where they were and were instantly asleep, trusting the near-men around them, like a pack of dogs, to wake them at any sign of trouble.
Their inner clocks woke them after an hour, and they were up and ready to go. Dawn was a few hours away. The skinnies rose around them, eager to get on the move—no sign that they’d slept themselves. They were on the hunt with their own personal gods and anxious to move on. The skinnies had fresh memories of the carnage these same men caused with the magical weapons. They were made bold by having this same power now on their side of the hunt.
And it was a hunt. War had no meaning to them.
Chaz handed out protein bars and candy that the skinnies took greedily and ate without taking the wrappers off. Homer crouched nearby, puffing a cigarette and watching the others eat breakfast.
Two young skinnies, Chaz named them Bart and Millhouse, came rushing into the dead village, whooping and shaking their heads to the north. They trotted away, running low, for the tribe to follow. The skinnies made off after them in a pack. Lee and Chaz rucked up to follow.
“Don’t they ever sleep?” Chaz said.
“Close your eyes around here, and something eats you,” Lee said, double-timing by his side.
“Come to think of it, that includes our current coalition. We could have woken up to be breakfast,” Chaz said grinning.
“I still trust them more than I ever did the ANA,” Lee said. A reference to the Afghan National Army. Both Rangers agreed that at least their present company had the excuse that they weren’t human.
The sun was cresting the range to the east when the Rangers caught up with the pack. They were arranged in a rough ring thwart a well-traveled forest trail of packed earth, grunting and snorting at one another. The circular impressions of elephant tracks marked the ground along with fresh, more recent, prints from bare and booted feet. This was a pathway down to water or between grazing lands. They couldn’t stay on it long.
Chaz broke through the huddle to see what they were yapping about. He picked up something glittering in the weak dawn light and held it up for Lee to see.
“This belongs to Bat, right?” Chaz said. A thin platinum chain dangled from his fingers weighted by a tiny Star of David in silver.
“Yeah. There’s no way she lost it. She left it as sign.”
“That means she’s alive.”
“She was when she left it.” Lee turned to where the indefatigable Bart and Millhouse were running back the way the column had come. They were yelping and hooting. Something had them excited. The Rangers brought up their rifles and scanned the surrounding woods for mammoths. Nothing moved in the trees around them except some green and white birds fluttering from branch to branch, sending down silvery showers of water trapped in the boughs they landed on.
Bart and Millhouse returned, supporting a stumbling figure between them.
N’itha.
She fell into Lee’s arms, succumbing at last from exhaustion.
35
The Skin Palace
They were force marched through the night, driven on by prods from the wicked stone clubs.
The blue men tied their wrists behind their backs using twisted leather thongs. A connecting loop was cinched about their necks, forcing them to walk upright or choke. It was a ligature meant to strangle. It restricted their movement and left them easily controlled. A child could pull on the thong and cut off their air supply.
Jimbo managed a rough count of twenty or more armed men closely escorting them. There were even
more in the surrounding woods and scouts running ahead. A dozen or more followed behind under the weight of the weapons and gear that they’d stripped from their four captives as well as the bodies of seven of their own killed back at the ambush. It was a platoon of as many as fifty men total that had overwhelmed them.
The skin of the men was dyed varying shades of blue, from azure to almost purple. It made it impossible to tell their race except that their eyes were dark and lacked an epicanthic fold making them Asian in appearance. The ones who were not entirely shaven had thick black hair matted atop their heads. None of them had facial hair, and the older among them showed the whitish effect of skin damage where hair had been burned away again and again over the years.
He placed their median age at about twenty or younger. Kids. But in this environment, they might consider thirty to be a senior citizen.
The tallest of them was five foot four. Most were a head shorter than that. They were thin with layers of ropey muscle from hard work. Their legs were thickly muscled and showed all the signs of lives spent moving across great distances at speed. Jimbo figured that unburdened by their captives; they’d be running this track at a sprint.
It was hard to distinguish one of their blue captors from another since they kept moving and milling around him. Jimbo noted raised welts in ordered rows on their backs and chests. Ritual scarification. It signified rank or number of kills. No way to be sure. There was definitely a pecking order. One of the taller bastards had a pair of yellow buck teeth that stuck out prominently from his mouth. He gave the orders and generally gave the air of being the main shot-caller. Jimbo tagged him “Bucky.” Another indication of his position was the layer of flab about his middle. He was the only one in the party above one percent body fat. That meant someone whose diet wasn’t restricted due to his station. A boss.
His second-in-command was a toady with a permanent sneer and a brush of black hair atop his head. This one took an unhealthy interest in Bat and trotted close to her whenever possible, staring at her with his tongue out, working up the nerve to cop a feel. Jimbo tagged him “Biff.”
And they all stank of fish. Fish that had gone bad. Like they bathed in kimchi. It came out worse the more they sweated. Jimbo realized the rain had covered the odor before. That was the only way these sushi-stinking fuckers had gotten the drop on him. Byrus had tried to warn him.
“Smells like pussy left out in the sun too long,” Rick said in a growl.
They were all alive and able to walk. Jimbo didn’t doubt for a moment that any of their party who’d been too injured to march would be brained by one of those clubs. Ricky was having the hardest time of it. Walking with his back straight was forcing him to put his full weight on his bad leg. He was obviously in pain and taking it out verbally on their captors. He kept up a constant commentary as he limped along. A caustic spew of the profane, vile, scatological and physically impossible that would make a drill instructor blush with embarrassment. His reward was a jab in the ribs with the end of a club.
Jimbo stayed close to Bat. He wasn’t sure what he could do to help her, trussed as he was. The leather bands were tightly wound and triple thick. They were strong and expertly knotted.
The blue men took a great interest in Bat, sniffing and sneaking stroking feels before returning to the march. Something prohibited them from going farther—even Biff. One happy aspect of this clusterfuck. As bad as their situation was, rape wasn’t an immediate worry for Bat.
Hell, Jimbo had been in the worst parts of the world back in The Now. If sexual assault was a danger for Bat, then it was a danger for them all. When things got this primeval, the only rule was that there were no rules. They’d be used and abused; however, their new masters demanded. That meant there were some hard, existential questions ahead in their near future.
Bat Jaffe marched like an automaton. Her expression was vacant, giving nothing away. Not fear or anxiety or anger. She’d withdrawn either out of some mental breakdown, or to reserve her emotional strength for what came next.
Byrus ran second place with Rick Renzi for emotional displays. He growled and snapped and glared at the blue men that were urging them along the invisible pathway north. But when he turned his gaze to Jimbo, there was a flash of terror in his eyes. As if to say, This is Tartarus, baas. We are in Hell.
One of the indigo bastards carried a hollowed-out horn slung by a strip of hide from his shoulder. It was about three feet long and twisted. From one of those giant bison they’d seen before—how many days ago Jimbo could not recall. As the sun came over the ridgeline, the guy with the horn raised it to his lips and blew a wavering note that rang off the rocks, and trees above them on either side. He would stop on the march now and then and send out a blast. On the fifth try, an answering peal reached them from somewhere ahead. Wherever they were going, their destination was only a mile or so before them.
The nearness of the end of the trail caused the blue men to push harder. They nudged the captives into a trot. Jimbo sent out a silent prayer that none of them would stumble. Their abductors would punish anyone who delayed them. Rick’s breathing was labored. He was having the hardest time of it. They’d come all this way to save their friend and might have ended up dooming him.
The path sloped downhill. The silver sheen of open water was visible through the trees, glints of pearlescent light reflected back at them from the early morning sun. The trees fell away to grassland and reeds. Jimbo could see a rock face rising in the distance, a wavering smear of gray in the heat haze already building under the early morning sun. Big white birds rose lazily upon their approach to settle deeper in the wetlands all around them.
They were met by other blue men trotting through the rushes to join the returning party. There were whoops and hollers. The welcoming committee did a quick study of the prizes their comrades had found. One of them risked a feel of Bat’s breasts. His hand was knocked away by a blow from Bucky’s club. The snap of a bone in the groper’s forearm could be heard even over the barking laughter of the others at his misfortune. The man pulled his wounded arm back and hugged it to him, his face paling under the dark dye.
The combined group headed off into the tall grass to a place where it thinned to a beach of sand and shale. It was the shore of a lake surrounded by thick marsh. The indigo men led their charges toward the foot of an earthen causeway that led across the bulrushes and open water toward that curtain of raised ground Jimbo had seen earlier. The causeway looked to be a natural formation of land, a finger of earth cutting across the marshland. It had been packed down to form a roadway. Further on it showed signs of having been filled in by hands other than Mother Nature’s. It became more uniform in width. Four meters across. Along either bank of the passageway were the remains of stout baskets woven with sticks and filled with rocks and earth to create temporary dikes to allow the construction of the raised path. Engineering in the prehistoric age.
Jimbo could see more details of something at the end of the path. A humped structure of some kind was growing against the backdrop of the cliff face of red stone glowing rusty orange in the sunlight spreading to shrink the shadows from the ridges to the east. Atop the structure something gleamed dully, catching rays of light that created dancing speckles of white and yellow.
When the causeway broadened and he could take it all in, Jimbo slowed his step at the sight of what lay before him. The end of a stone hammer prodded his lower back, and he picked up the pace once more.
On a broad island or perhaps a beach at the base of the cliffs was a tall fence, constructed of timber posts with woven thorn branches strung between. The fence ran around the blue men’s village. He could see the rooftops of thatched structures over the top of this barricade.
Beyond that was a much larger construction that towered over the rest. It was built of redwood timbers and covered over in a skein of skins stretched over a framework of what looked like the boles of saplings. It was designed like a Plains Indian’s wickiup but on a massive scale. Th
e entire structure looked like it covered several acres. The skins were from some of the larger beasts of the region, stretched and tanned with fur or wool remaining on the hides. Tall poles were set around the circumference of the structure with objects set atop them. It reminded Jimbo of flag poles set around a football stadium. Except each pole was topped with the bleached skull of an animal. He recognized bear, bison, tiger, and elephant.
These were a fearsome people. They’d found success in a hostile world. They dominated every species they came across, utilizing only their will and their toughness, wits and those deadly stone hammers. Those doomed species that fell under those hammers included their fellow man. Dangling from the posts that formed the barricade wall were the skeletal remains of human beings. As they marched closer to the entry gates, Jimbo noted that the bones were cleverly kept intact using leather thongs securing them where tendons once connected the limbs. The remains all had one common trait. They were all headless.
Nothing in the history books recorded anything like this. According to the experts, these blue men shouldn’t be here.
North and South America were devoid of any human life, let alone highly organized societies using tools, agriculture, and basic engineering skills. Of course, there was nothing about cannibal monkey men or hot topless chicks either. Recorded history covered less than two percent of mankind’s estimated million-plus years on this planet. That’s a lot of guessing and goshing. Any damn thing could have happened in the hundreds of millennia before the Sumerians first scratched the names of their gods on some rocks.
They passed under the arch above the entry gate, fashioned from a pair of massive mammoth tusks, in the center of a mass of their captors and comrades. The blue warriors all held their stone bludgeons aloft and joined in unison in a sound that started in their bellies as a low hum and rose to a deafening sustained howl. They were answered by crowds of people emerging from between huts made of thatch and timber posts separated by narrow lanes. In some of these lanes, the carcasses of fish hung to dry. Impossibly big bass, catfish, muskellunge, and carp. Everywhere the bones of fish were heaped in messy piles.