Old Mother sat back and looked on her work with satisfaction. She touched Caroline’s face gently. Caroline stiffened and willed herself not to recoil. For whatever reason, they were honoring her with special treatment. Stockholm Syndrome or not, Caroline was determined not to do anything to piss them off and get her and Miles chopped to bits like poor Phillip.
Miles had his wrists bound behind him and his feet placed on a log, where his ankles were tied with lines run through holes worked in the log. Caroline was bound the same way and left alone as Old Mother and her entourage departed for the daylight, leaving them alone in the golden glow of the fire reflecting off the half-ton of treasure lying ten feet away.
“Miles?” Caroline said in a croak. She worked her mouth and spat, the rank taste of the old crone’s fingers still on her tongue.
“Miles, can you hear me?”
Her answer was a wet sobbing. Miles had his head turned away from her.
“We’re going to get out of here,” Caroline said. “I don’t know how or who’s coming for us, but I know my brother won’t just leave us here. I texted him. He knows our situation.”
Miles may have answered her, or maybe it was only a wordless whine.
“Hang on, Miles,” she said to him in a voice flat and without a hint of anxiety.
Hang on, Caroline, she thought to herself.
She fought down a shiver.
The next morning, after the disastrous raid by the men sent by Morris Tauber, Old Mother came awake as the shaman strode into the cave.
The ancient crone blocked his path and shrieked at him. He shouted back and gestured and glared at Caroline, sitting helpless at the rear of the cave. His face was dark with rage even under the lime wash. His flesh was spattered with the still-drying blood of his tribesmen. Fresh blood trickled from a jagged cut to the outside of his thigh. The mouth of the cave was crowded with curious tribe members anxious to see this argument. Many of them bore scars and burns.
The shaman tried to get past the old woman time and again, but she struck at him with a stone clenched in her fist. He waved his gourd stick and made dire threats or was perhaps only growling. She kicked ash and sand at him and spat on him over and over. After a long exchange that echoed and re-echoed off the cave wall, the shaman finally retreated, his huge dark eyes boring into Caroline’s until he was out of sight.
Old Mother crawled to Caroline on hands and knees and hugged her close. Caroline stiffened. The stinking, greasy witch cooed softly and rocked Caroline back and forth, stroking her hair.
Caroline was safe as long as Old Mother held her as precious, or until the bitch got hungry.
10
The Land Of Beer And Pretzels
Parviz and Quebat drove Renzi down to the urgent care center in Alamo. He was barely conscious and went easily. His only request was a cigarette, but there were no smokers here.
“You saw Caroline?” Tauber said again as Chaz stripped off the ragged and filthy BDUs and tossed them in a trash can by the row of sinks.
“We saw her,” Chaz said. “We couldn’t get to her.” He reached into a tiled stall and turned on the shower.
“What about Phillip and Miles?” Tauber said, voice rising.
“Look, Doc,” Chaz stepped into the stall shower under a near-scalding pins-and-needles stream. “Time is relative, as you kept telling us. I’ll tell you the whole damn story in full detail. Now, you can stand there admiring my fine black ass, or you can go fry me up some eggs and sausage and pour me a cold glass of milk as big as my head and give me a fistful of Tylenols, and then I’ll answer every one of your questions whether you like the answers or not.”
Chaz was wiping yolk from his plate with the corner of an English muffin, and the doc topped off the tumbler of milk. He was in clean, dry jeans and a work shirt, with sandals on his feet. He ached all over and his body was hungry for sleep, but there was no time for pain or rest.
“There are people there, Doc. Nasty little, mean fuckers. They killed the grad student, and we watched them kill Dr. Kemp. But your sister is still alive, and they’re treating her like some kind of Disney princess.”
He left out the cannibal aspect. No need for the doc to know that. Chaz needed the man focused and not running nightmare scenarios through his mind. Things would happen fast now. It was going to be a busy forty-eight hours.
“Where are Roenbach and Small?” Tauber poured himself some coffee and stirred it. “They’re alive and keeping watch,” Chaz said. “But all they have is a two-shot pocket pistol, a Buck knife, and my Zippo. I have to get back there as soon as you have the Tube up and running, and I can bring some heavier shit back with me.”
“Heavier?”
“Real ordnance, Doc. Not those damn rocket guns. Some real shit. SAWs and M4s and frags and body armor. If we’re gonna bring your sister out, we gotta kill our way to her.”
“But the indigenous population…” Tauber began.
“Fuck ’em.”
“But they’re an entirely unknown, extinct tribe of humans who arrived on the continent and thrived there tens of millennia before the first known Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait.”
“So maybe we’re the ones who made them extinct,” Chaz said and set the empty tumbler down. “You ever think of that?”
“Still, to exterminate…”
“You starting to lose your enthusiasm here, Doc? Trust me, one of these little fuckers wouldn’t mind exterminating you. Now, are you into the game or in the way?”
“Renzi won’t be any shape to go with you,
not in
