The leader of the party, a man older than the rest and distinguished by a hood made of feathers and bone draped over his head, sniffed at the hand like a dog might and straightened to regard Phillip with narrowed eyes. He wore the hollow horn of some animal about his shoulder, suspended on a leather thong.
Caroline stood up the slope close by Miles and watched in silent fascination. These were proto-men; higher primates with as much physical resemblance to apes as they had to man. They used tools and wore rudimentary clothing. But their large eyes and pronounced teeth meant they were far from human. And if her calculations were on the mark and they were at 100,000 BC and change, these were not ancestors of modern man. Rather they were a failed evolutionary experiment that died out long before the first Paleo-Indians crossed over from Asia.
She realized that this was a paleozoological discovery of the century. Back in The Now she could lead a team to this valley and direct them to the strata they would need to uncover to find evidence of this lost race of hominids. Only she could never do that. The Tauber Tube was a technology the world could never know about.
Phillip thrust his hand out closer, and the leader took his wrist in a firm grip. Phillip smiled and pumped the leader’s hand. The leader showed his teeth, black and filed to points, in what Phillip mistook as a smile. Phillip showed his own perfectly capped and whitened teeth in response. The little man’s grip was surprisingly strong, and he increased the pressure on Phillip’s wrist. He’d mistaken Phillip’s shake and the baring of teeth for an attempt to escape and pulled hard to bring the young man stumbling toward him. Phillip fell to his knees.
Another hunter lifted a club weighted with a round stone and struck Phillip on the side of the head. As Caroline and Miles backed away, Phillip fell hard to the ground and was surrounded by the hunters who drove the butts of their spears down on him to stop him from rising.
Caroline was the first to turn and run back up the hill with Miles close behind her. She heard a grunt and a crash as Miles fell rolling into the brush but didn’t stop her headlong flight. She raced for the top of the mesa, muttering a prayer that the field was still open. She had no thought beyond that but fleeing; to put this danger far behind her and find the safety of her own time and place and never, ever leave there again.
There were sounds and barked exchanges of hunters from the brush to either side of her joined by long blasts from horns. They were cutting her off, getting ahead of her. She’d never make the mesa top. Even if she could reach it, the window for the field to be open could have passed by now. She’d be on coverless open grassland with nowhere to hide.
Ducking into some thick underbrush, she followed a cleft in the hillside made by run-off from rainstorms in the past. The gully carried her down the hill but offered concealment behind its high banks to either side. She made herself move slowly and cautiously. Her pursuers grew quiet as well. She could hear them exchanging hushed words, and the brittle snaps of pine twigs reached her ears. They had her trapped and were only being as quiet as they needed to be before the final rush.
With a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, Caroline realized that she would not escape.
The hunters had her ringed and were closing in from all sides. Her mouth and throat were painfully dry. She tried to control her breathing to stay quiet as long as she could. She fumbled in a cargo pocket at the front of her vest and pulled out her wave transmitter. Thumbing it on, she tried to enter words into the tiny keyboard with shaking hands.
HUNTING HORNS MUST HIDE
At least, that’s what she thought she’d texted. What came through was:
HNTGHRNS MST HDE
The brush around her was parted by spear points, and rough, calloused hands dragged her from her hiding place.
THEY LED HER AND Miles down to the beach, their hands bound with thongs and pulled by leashes tied around their throats. Miles was sobbing and could not stop himself. Caroline was numb with fear and dread. Behind them, two hunters pulled a travois across the sand bearing a cargo of Phillip’s head, legs, and arms covered in a swirling haze of flies. They’d left the torso behind. Miles told her later that he witnessed the dismemberment. They held him so he couldn’t turn away. Phillip was alive but unconscious as they chopped at him with obsidian head axes. The lead hunter poked the torso that remained with a stick, jabbing at the yellow Batman symbol and speaking in a low voice. None of them would touch the shirt to remove it even when the leader slashed at them with the stick and snarled orders. They finally left it behind.
Batman was bad mojo to them.
At the village, the entire tribe came from their huts and fires to gather around Caroline and Miles. The settlement was a messy expanse of huts that roughly followed the shoreline. It looked like it could house thousands. The squatty hominids cooed in wonder and barked with a sound Caroline later came to recognize as laughter. They poked at their unwilling guests with sticks and fingers, and the children dared one another to rush forward and brush hands across their clothing and skin. The children were shooed away
