The woods were rich with game. All around them, Jimbo could hear hooves crashing away into the underbrush on their approach. A few times, he spotted tiny deer in the second between their ears perking up and their rumps bounding away into the lattice of tree boles and tanglefoot. He heard the high yipping barks of foxes in the distance. Black squirrels leaped from branches overhead, sending down a silent rain of needles.
A knot of partridges with orange crests atop their heads exploded out of a copse of scrub before them. Two of the freed slaves they’d picked up brought down a few birds with thrown stones. They grinned as they plucked the birds clean while they walked along. Jimbo was impressed. The two men downed five birds inside of a span of less than two seconds. No one back on the reservation could have done that well, not even Jimbo. And he’d brought home dinner stunned by thrown rocks many times growing up.
James Smalls was once again filled with the feeling of being truly alive in a place and time not his own. The men running with him were as different from him in culture as it was possible to be, yet he felt an affinity with them. For all the miracles and comforts of the twenty-first century, he could never feel the freedom there that these men felt. Earlier today, they were slaves. Here, only a few hours later, their separate fates were waiting to be discovered. A man could reinvent himself here if he had the nerve and the will.
Back in The Now, most men were on a path set for them before they were born. He’d left the rez and gone to war and survived. For what? To work a job where some shithead with a gun could take him out during a routine traffic stop? Or live to retire at fifty-five and wait until cancer took him? Even his missions into the past were only brief respites from a life that felt like it was already planned for him. Coming back from prehistoric Nevada and the ancient Aegean had left him with a longing for a world that no longer existed, a world where a man was challenged every day by forces beyond his control. There was no conserving risk in the places he’d seen. You went balls-out every minute and fuck the consequences.
Maybe he was crazy. Most men would be reduced to PTSD cases by the shit he’d been through since Dwayne asked him to join Team Tauber. Jimbo found that instead, it gave him peace. It made everything seem more real. Every breath he took was like an invigorating drug washing his lungs and heart and brain clean. It wasn’t just thrill-junkie euphoria either. That was the kind of thing Lee Hammond lived for. Maybe, he thought, it’s like I belong here in the past. Maybe it was in his blood. He was just a red-skinned savage deep down inside and little more than a century from the last time his people lived the old way. Well, if that was it, then he could get behind that. There might be one of these times he’d just stay behind to make his own history.
Bat, trotting behind him, said something. Jimmy Smalls came out of his own thoughts. “Yeah?” he said, stopping.
“We need to think about resting these guys,” Bat said again.
“Past time we took a look at Boats’ condition, too,” he said.
The sun had sunk low over the hills now. They’d moved out of the tree line to a lower elevation of a broken country of ridgelines marching in descending order to the coastal plain. Jimbo waved the stretcher-bearers to halt and lower their passenger. The other tag-alongs stopped as well.
“I’m going to run ahead to Lee and let him know,” Jimbo said and pointed up a slope to a grassy peak atop a hillock. “How about you move the unit up to where we can keep watch on our six from that high ground?” Bat nodded and spoke to the few men she knew understood Hebrew.
They made camp on the slope of the hillside below the peak. Hammond took a prone position at the crest to watch the ground around them. It was a nasty badlands that terraced away down to the coast three days hard march from their current position. The land here was riven with shallow gullies that could hide an army in its shadows. These furrows could also hide their unit from sight so long as they found ones they could follow westerly. They’d take a short break and move on to increase their lead on any pursuing force.
Bat and Chaz tended to Boats. The SEAL’s skin was hot to the touch, the wound area inflated and angry-looking. Boats was in and out of consciousness. Bat managed to get some water into him while Chaz strapped a Mylar blanket over him. They shot him up with a new infusion of antibiotics and antipyretics close to the wound site. Now it was up to time, the power of prayer and the sailor’s dogged will to live.
Jimmy Smalls was handing out protein bars after showing the tag-alongs how to peel off the wrappers. He rationed out water from their shrinking supply. He shot a half-second stream from his CamelBak into the open mouths of the men around him. They’d need to find water soon. He’d take over point from Hammond when they resumed their march and sniff out a tank or an open spring.
The little militia began
