“We’ll do our best, Doc,” Chaz said.
“And if we can’t pack the gear back, we know where it is, right?” Hammond said. “We just go out and dig up what’s left of it, and no one’s the wiser.”
“Yes,” Tauber said in a low voice. “Theoretically, anyway.”
13
One Night In Bedrock
A thick, drifting funk lay over the skinnies’ village. Smoke from smoldering fires left untended was heavy on the ground. There was a greasy tang to it, like ribs left too long on the grill.
The skinnies slept where they fell, sated and logy after a feast on the flesh of their own villagers. Even the dogs were passed out, gorged on tripe. A fresh stack of bones lay by the makeshift abattoir. There were long strips of meat strung up out of reach of the dogs, jerky for later. Skins were stretched on lines. The victims were expertly flayed. The translucent leather of their hides looked like kites made of parchment, the forms of humans grotesquely defined. The cut-out eyes and mouths were frozen in an eternal expression of woe. Fat still dripped from the skins that were left to be scraped the following morning.
Heavy cloud cover hid the sliver of the moon from view. The only available light was a reddish glow of fires through the suffocating haze that clung around the huts.
Dwayne moved out of the deeper shadows of the trees with a spear in his fists. He’d hardened the point by searing it in the embers of Jimbo’s cookfire. Twenty paces behind, Jimbo covered the drag with an arrow ready in his bow and a quiver filled with twenty more shafts slung from his belt. They’d painted their hands and faces and any other exposed skin black with ash from their fire.
They used the rubbish piles of bones and the tanning racks for cover to move closer to the cave mouth. The last couple hundred feet or so was wide open with no cover. Only luck would carry them over that ground without being seen by a skinny or one of their mutts.
Dwayne crouched by a bone pile. It was swarming with ants and beetles. He looked down to see the skull of what looked like a five-year-old child, its face still in place on the front of the white bone shell and staring from eyeless sockets. The kids were just as murderous as their parents, and he recalled the storm of stones flung at them with punishing accuracy by little bastards just like this one. But still; it was a child, one of their own. And they’d skinned and fed on it.
Lying low and motionless and feeling insects crawling over his exposed flesh, Dwayne peered around the pile. The white-painted witch doctor was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d given up his stakeout of the cave. He might be in the village sleeping it off, his belly jammed with meat. Or he could just as well be keeping a vigil from concealment.
A bright, flickering glow came from within the cave. It would throw Dwayne into silhouette as he moved closer and throw his shadow down the incline and over the huts.
He turned back to where he knew Jimbo was kneeling, unseen, in the dark behind him.
“Fuck it,” he hissed. “Goin’ in.”
“All the way,” came a hushed reply from the dark.
Caroline Tauber was aching over every inch of her body. She shifted to find a comfortable position, but only found new agonies. Her fingers were numb and her legs tingly where they were bound to the heavy timber. Her ass ached from hours of pressing on the hard cave floor, and her skin itched fiercely from the lime drying on every inch of her body in the stifling cave.
Old Mother slept fitfully by the fire and, as exhausted as she was, Caroline could not join her. Sleep wouldn’t come, and when it did, she awakened seconds later from either physical discomfort or flashes of memory. Phillip screaming as they held him down, the horrible gurgling sound as the aborigine brought the heavy ax down again and again, Kemp’s keening pleas for mercy, the probing hands of the gaggle of crones, the expression of fierce rage on the face of the little shaman.
She was weak from hunger, and certainly severely dehydrated. Old Mother offered her strips of rare meat dripping with grease, and she turned her head from it. She’d never be that hungry. At least, she told herself that. The only water she had was from a gourd ladle offered by Old Mother. It was brackish and smelled musty, but it cooled her throat.
Back in college at Chicago, she’d dated a cute anthropology major and read some books he recommended. She knew that this was a typical primitive Neolithic culture, a matriarchal society run by a head female who held mystic powers over the tribe. There would be hunting chiefs and war chiefs but for anything beyond that Old Mother called the shots. The world as it was when the chicks were in charge. The arrival of Caroline and the others was seen as Something Big, and so she was placed under the care of the matriarch. Phillip and Miles were just meat.
So what made Caroline special beyond her gender? What were they saving her for? Possibly a harvest festival or, she looked at the grotesque golden fertility statue and shuddered, a fertility rite. Was she to be a holiday meal, or married off to a tribe member?
She contemplated those unpleasant possibilities as she gazed into the flickering fire and, without expecting to, dropped into a deep sleep.
Caroline awakened to find a hand pressed tight to her mouth and another clamped to the back of her head.
A hunched figure blocked the light from the guttering fire.
“Caroline Tauber,” the figure said in an urgent whisper. “I am here to get you out of here. Your brother—”
She didn’t hear any more because, over the whispering man’s shoulder,
