A gasp of surprise from the men above her. Caroline opened her eyes. The ax man sank to his knees, eyes wide and jaw slack. The top of his head was missing above the brow line. One eye hung down his cheek on a slimy ribbon of tissue. He collapsed at her feet. A gout of dark blood and slimy brain matter spilled at her feet.
Caroline leaped up. She glanced behind her to see the grinning men were no longer looking down at her but at something over on the other bank of the gully.
“Caroline! Run!” Dwayne’s voice.
He was somewhere over the lip of the trench. She didn’t answer. She picked up the ax and took off running along the floor of the gully. The ax was heavy, but it felt weightless in her fist. This was a fresh surge of adrenaline, and she was flying between the dunes at a sprint. Two more pops sounded behind her. Dwayne was working that handgun of his and to hell with the anachronisms.
A leg went numb and collapsed under her. She fell sprawling to the sand. An agony rose from her calf and lanced up her leg to her groin. She tried to rise, but the pain was too great. She rolled to her back and saw the silhouettes of men above her on either side of the gully. The boys among them whirled some kind, of lines over their heads that thrummed in the air like angry insects.
Slings.
She knew from her reading that the unerring accuracy of these simple weapons was lethal. The next blow could easily fracture her skull or splinter ribs.
Caroline tossed aside the ax and held out open hands to her captors. One of the boys above slowed the rotation of his sling and clambered down the slope of sand to give her a kick in the ribs. He placed a sandaled foot on her chest and growled a warning while securing the loops of his sling to the thong about his waist; a simple length of twisted leather and a sack that she had never noticed while observing them. The boy’s companion laughed and called out for the others.
More men slid down the slope of the dune. Two grabbed at Caroline’s wrists. She kicked out hard them. A third slapped her face hard, and she tasted copper. Their size belied their strength. These were hard men, all muscle and gristle. They brought her to the sand quickly. She bucked and fought as they weighted down her arms, and one of them straddled her waist. Her struggles stopped when she felt the cool flat of a blade at her throat.
When they were satisfied that she was fully cowed, they hauled her to her feet. The largest of them shoved her up the wall of sand and over the peak of a dune. One of the men hefted the ax with a pleased smile absent of teeth.
The band of men followed the crest of the dune. A man helped Caroline stay upright with a grip like a vise on her arm. Her leg was in agony. It didn’t worsen when she put weight on it. The bone wasn’t broken, and she felt no blood. It would be a deep bruise at worst. For now, it was an intense muscle pain.
They stopped and Caroline looked down to see Dwayne lying face-down in brambles. There was blood matted on the back of his head and down his t-shirt. Caroline feared he was dead until she saw his back rising and falling with each breath.
His gun was nowhere in sight. Caroline felt relief and then felt bad about that.
She was sure then that they would both be murdered. Caroline began speaking in a stream of her uncertain Greek. The new ax man slapped her hard across the face, then spat orders at the others. The men grunted as they lifted Dwayne from the sand. An eye was swollen shut and blood ran from a gash across the bridge of his nose. It took six of them to carry him from the gully and back through the trees for the cove with the kids running ahead laughing and hooting.
33
Owned
Their arrival on the beach was met with heated discussion.
The work was halted on the hole being dug for the chest. Caroline was shoved to her knees. Dwayne was still unconscious and bound at wrists and ankles with thongs secured to carrying poles. The six men who carried him now dropped him to the sand with a relieved grunt. One of them scuffed his ribs with a kick then spat a wad of phlegm at him. Dwayne only groaned in answer to this. Curious boys bent to study him until shooed away by the ax wielder.
The men did not seem to resent that Dwayne had killed one of their own. Maybe they weren’t sure how the man with the ax died or Dwayne’s connection to it. The gun was nowhere near Dwayne where he fell, and none of the men was carrying it. It lay somewhere back in the dunes.
A furious guy wearing more clothes than the others, along with a brass-studded girdle and a short sword in a decorative sheath stormed up to them. Caroline assumed he was the man in charge.
This captain ordered Caroline lifted to her feet. She was as tall as he, and met him eye to eye without looking away. He rubbed the cloth of her jersey between his fingers. He tugged on the plastic buttons at the collar with some interest. He touched fingers to her hair and brought them back to sniff his fingertips. She fought the urge to flinch away. He spoke to the others as he did this and they only shrugged and mewled as they had no more answers than he did. He aimed his next remarks at Caroline,
