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, thin 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 than 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
