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, with 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 stack of firewood. They fired at the dude with the feather hat right after the axman, but the white-painted bastard leaped out of sight, and the shots went wide. They
