His face was frozen into a polite smile of insincere patience for so long, he worried his muscles would never relax and he’ll end up with this idiotic rictus forever.
The reason for his suffering was that Marike and Vikram, the two people who in Billy’s absence held their little tribe together, were the dumbest smart people he had ever met, and he had to cooperate with them, and at least appear to respect them.
Hashké hated working with smart idiots. He met more than a handful of those in the Army, and then even more working as a park ranger for a wildlife preserve. These were the people who had brilliant, perfectly optimized plans for anything and everything, except for making allowances for tiny little things like human error, Murphy’s Law, and random excrement hitting the turbine rotor at unfortunate moments.
Of the two in front of him, he hated Marike only a little bit. The gruff German Valkyrie kept all of them mostly fed, mostly warm, and usually safe, and enforced resource distribution with an iron fist, that only a veteran soup-kitchen head was capable of. But she was incapable of realizing that unlike her, the other tired and scared people had their psychological limits, and were not just inexhaustible Bavarian robots like she was. Her solution to the insufficient amount of food was to yell at Hashké and the other hunters to go out and hunt more, even though they had not truly slept for over seventy hours, and were almost delirious with exhaustion.
Vikram was even worse than her. To Hashké, he was like many of the officers and corporate managers he met. A creature that only saw humans as numbers, and was addicted to inhuman utilitarianism. When food ran low, Vikram simply declared that those who did not contribute to the group would have to fast until the situation changed. When dysentery ravaged their camp, and some people became too weak to eat or drink, let alone do useful work, Vikram asked Hashké to slit their throats discreetly, so that they would not suffer or waste resources. He nearly strangled the man in cold fury, before storming off.
And the worst part was, the bastard was right, because the people who caught gut fever that day, all perished anyway. If not for the risk of infection, he was sure Vikram would suggest cannibalizing the corpses to not let the precious calories go to waste.
“... to conclude,” Vikram droned on, “you need to take about a dozen of our best men and explore the upper plains behind the oxbow lake. As you know, from personal experience, this is the most likely place to find herds of large game.” Vikram must have noticed his smiling facade breaking, because he hastily added, “I know we are asking a lot of you and your men. But unless you bring back at least fifty kilograms of meat, we will have people lose the battle against hunger and the cold. I expect at least seven people to not make it to the end of the week.”
Hashké shrugged. “My boys and I had not slept for three days and had not eaten more than a handful of nuts and berries a day for more than that. We might very likely be the ones to not make it if you push us beyond our limits.”
Vikram gave him a thin smile and a pat on the shoulder that made his skin crawl.
“I know you manage, Hashké. You are the most capable man I know. Our lives depend on you. I know you will do your duty no matter what.”
'Gee, thanks for the pep talk', Hashké thought. 'I immediately feel fed and rested. Who knew that words of wisdom from middle management can replace actual caloric intake?'
Marike gave him a look that was more apologetic and pleading than Vikram’s arrogant dismissal, but it did not make his mood any better.
He simply nodded, turned around and left. He did not need to signal to his men to move. They all raised and followed him begrudgingly, groning with tiredness and slack-jawed from exhaustion, like a troop of zombies shuffling after their necromancer.
None of his men were hunters, not really. Teaching a person to hunt with a bow, spear, javelin or sling was hopelessly difficult, and practice cost them calories they could not afford to spend.
Instead, he came up with a simpler idea. He gathered a dozen of the most physically capable men, and gave them all long spears. They were not supposed to hunt with those, but walk in a tight formation and quite literally beat around the bush to flush game that he could snipe at with his spear-thrower. Even the biggest megafauna they encountered here, still fled from a dozen angry, shouting humans with nine-foot-long sticks. All Hashké needed was to wait until one of those animals ran past him, and whip his atlatl to put a javelin through it at near point-blank range.
When he suggested that plan for the first time, the other men laughed at it, unable to believe that a wiry, slight guy like him could throw a lightweight javelin hard enough to even kill a rabbit, let alone something bigger. For them, the atlatl was merely a weird child’s toy. The laughter stopped when he threw one through the neck of a swamp buffalo, killing it nearly instantly.
It was he who laughed last, in the privacy of his own head. Half of his team were educated men, yet not a single one of them understood that a spear-thrower was essentially a lever, and levers are tremendous force multipliers. ‘Give me a long enough lever, and I will move the world’, a wise man once said. An even wiser man took the lever and used it to propel a deadly stick at a big evil cow, and now the whole tribe could eat beef for a week.
It took them about a day and a half to finally reach the shores of the oxbow lake. It could have been faster, but they tried to circle around the swampy lowland, where the game was plentiful but small, and difficult to catch. Except for the rare beaver, and even rarer water buffalo, the swamp creatures were either smart, or nocturnal, or both.
The best scenario for them would be to flush some of the mysterious ungulates out of the tall grasses of the plains, and trap them against the risen slope that fell into the lake. Then either the boys could press on with their pikes and finish off the catch, preferably pushing it off the small cliff, or he would snipe it down with a carefully aimed shot.
The trek through the tall grass of the plains was unnerving. Except for the narrow paths stomped into the ground by the herds, the grass was as tall and thick as any cornfield he had ever seen, and it swayed with every little eddy of the wind, giving the impression that they were surrounded by unseen lurking predators at all times.
Or maybe they were, who knew? Hashké was an excellent hunter and tracker, but even he only had the mundane human senses of hearing and smell. If a pack of hyenas, a tiger, or another beast was stalking them, the best they could do was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and make enough angry noises to either make it flee or force it to fight on their terms.
This had worked for them more often than not. The first few days when he met this group, hyenas and wolves would snatch terrified people right from the middle of their camp. Two weeks later, when they all armed themselves and became sufficiently angry and starved, the tables had turned.
The next time a wolfpack started circling the edges of light cast by their fires, a crowd of twenty pissed-off humans stormed out, armed with spears, torches and heavy stones, to deliver payback. Two more men died that night, but all the wolves that failed to flee were brutally exterminated, and promptly eaten. He remembered watching half amazed, half horrified, as previously civilized men and women turned from prey into ravenous monsters and tore into dying wolves, gorging themselves on raw meat, the same way wolves would do to them not a few nights before. It was like a campfire story about skinwalkers, but in reverse.
The next morning, the whole tribe rushed forward to find the wolf den, where they finished the grisly job. They even stoned helpless wolf-cubs in the den, to Hashké’s moral revulsion.
A few weeks forward, his main concern was no longer prehistoric beasts in the darkness, but the far more trivial, if also far more deadly monsters, their names hunger, disease, and the worst of them all, the one beast to devour every other, winter. Even though he was born and raised in southern Utah, he knew perfectly well that winter this far north was essentially an apocalypse that decimated all living creatures, even those that evolved to deal with the cold.
A bunch of terrified, naked, half-starved survivors who lived hand-to-mouth and who had no means of stocking on food for the coming four or five months of snow? They were all dead, just not aware of it yet.
What was the point of risking his life now, to bring back a dead pony, deer, or even a buffalo, hell, even ten of them, if he would die with the rest of the tribe a few days after the first snow?
But he was an Army Ranger, and a park ranger, and finally, though he never cared all that much for his heritage, he was Navajo, and all three groups he belonged to cherished completely pointless, self-sacrificial bravery against impossible odds.
And the most ironic thing was, despite all the death, the cold, and the hunger, he enjoyed being in this world more than he ever enjoyed his life on Earth. The thought that he would surely die come winter filled him with sadness, but only because his time to explore this amazing new reality would be cut short. It was a land of terror, but also of wonder, and pristine beauty that thrummed at a string in his soul he never believed existed. Was he getting spiritual all of a sudden?
His philosophical explorations were cut short, when he felt something was not right about the wilderness around them.
The ‘not right’ feeling was in no way any silly magical sixth sense bullshit that ignorant folks associated with the Native people. It was just plain well-developed survival instinct that allowed him to survive the worst FUBARed situations that he found himself in while in Iraq, and given his specific skillset, he was usually sent to ones that were already really bad. It was the weird tingling of the little hair on his neck, and his sphincter getting suddenly tighter than a virgin’s snatch. It was his body telling him that he was about to step into an IED, put his head into a sniper’s crosshairs, or in his second career, stumble into the loving embrace of a grizzly bear.
He felt exactly that at the very moment, and raised his fist to stop his guys. Little good that did, they kept on shuffling and chatting idly for several seconds before they froze in place as well.
“whatissit hoss?” said his unofficial second in command, a hulking Appalachian brute named Pete.
The thing was, Hashké was not sure. He just knew, from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head that they had walked into a trap. He scanned the seemingly endless sea of grass around them, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still…
“Not sure, Pete. Something’s giving me the creeps about this place. Lets haul ass boys. I want to have the lakeside slope against my back as soon as possible. Everybody, eyes open, spears up, brains on.”
They jogged forward, the long tips of their spears brushing against the grass on the sides of the narrow trail. Soon, the grass parted, revealing a deep ravine with a lazy oxbow lake at the bottom, and stretching towards the horizon as messy wetland. The wall of the ravine they stood upon was a completely vertical one, a good thirty-foot drop into the murky green water of indeterminate depth.
“What now?” another of his men, a grim-faced Frenchman with an unpronounceable name, whom they simply dubbed Ned for brevity, crouched next to Hashké and studied the water. “You want to chase animal to here, so it drop, drown?” Ned’s English was only marginally better than most of their crew, so he opted to use as few words as possible.
“Yeah. That is the plan. We could then tie it to several spears and float it all the way to the bend by the sandy hill, then only carry it upwards into the meadows. Beats dragging a thousand-pound buffalo or one of them horned ponies all the way through the fucking grassland.”
“There hyenas. Will be fight.” Ned said, with so little emotion, Hashké suspected the man’s ancestors must have really been Scandinavian, not truly French.
He shrugged. “Nah. We bloodied them bad when Billy had us storm their den the other week, and set it on fire. And we gutted like what, five of those fuckers already? Pack predators are vicious when hungry, but they are not suicidal idiots. Animals fear death and injury just as much as we do. They’ll leave us alone as long as we do not bother them.” He did not add ‘until winter hits, and they get just as hungry and desperate as we are’. Chances were, they'll freeze solid before the first hyena comes to investigate their camp.
“What we do?” Ned asked. Pete joined them, gnawing on a grass stalk. God only knows what kind of sustenance he could get from doing that, the grass here was as tough as rebar, and likely just as nutritious.
“The usual, I think. Pete will take the younger guys, circle for about a mile, clockwise, and start making a racket. Don’t spread too thin, but start a few fires, we have a good inbound wind. Ned, you do the same but backtrack a bit first and go counterclockwise. Go easy on the fires though, we do not want to set our trail back home ablaze, in case the whole idea of floating down the river does not pan out.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“You’d be stayin’ here ‘lone, hoss?” Pete frowned. He was the closest thing Hashké had for a friend in this world, or at least, they had a kind of unspoken, Working Class kinship that all those who persevere at the mercy of their superiors share. They had each other’s back since the first week.
“Yep. No need for one of you useless babies distracting me when I'm prepping the shot,” he flashed Pete a smile. “I’ll be fine. As long as what you flush out is not a goddamn wooly rhinoceros, I can handle it. And Pete, I'm sending you out with six guys, return with just as many.”
He turned to the other man. “Ned? Same goes for you. Half a dozen go, half a dozen return. Savvy? Also, I really had the worst hibbie-jibbies around the middle of the trail, back there where we paused. Something’s really fucky about that place. If you so much as see a ladybug looking at you funny, you boys go back, spears up, full fucking hedgehog on. We’ll manage well enough with one set of beaters. There’s either game in the grass or there is not. No need to take any risks.”
Both men nodded at him in wordless agreement, and promptly led their teams away. The rest of the men did not share their grim conviction and followed them just as wide-eyed and strung up as on their first day. Goddamned civilians.
Hashké had a very bad feeling about this.
But he had even worse feelings about starvation.
He walked back and forth along the edge of the cliff, looking for the best place to position himself. There was only a narrow clearing between the edge and the sea of grass spreading before him. It looked like herds of hoofed animals, heavy ones, would often travel along the shore of the lake, and trample the grass into a dead stubble. It was barely wide enough for him to take a single shot with the atlatl, but not enough to load a second javelin in time before the flushed animal reached either him, or the drop. He had to make the first shot count, or, knowing his luck, the creature would spend its last seconds of life goring him.
He barely had time to cherish that little nugget of grim soldier’s humor, when he heard something crash through the grass. He raised the spear thrower, and froze in anticipation.
A cow-sized saiga burst out. Hashké’s eyes soaked in all the details, delaying the javelin’s release. The antelope was powerfully built, with curved horns and immense shoulders, not unlike a buffalo. Its snout ended in a trunk-like nose, which would look funny, if it was not currently leaking foamy blood. It staggered a dozen steps, reached the edge, and halted there. It looked at Hashké with the maddened, glassy eyes of a creature seconds away from bleeding to death.
He aimed carefully, taking his time. There was no point in rushing, the animal was barely standing anyway. A quick overhand throw, a quiet thud, and the antelope collapsed with a javelin through its ribcage, a clean, merciful shot that managed to reach the heart.
He approached it carefully, with a bone dagger in hand, to finish the job. He did not need to bother. The saiga was dead, or at least, completely paralyzed with shock. He reached to pull out the javelin and his eyes grew wide.
Right behind the animal’s muscular hump, was another weapon embedded deeply in its flesh. It took all his strength to pull it out. It was a broken tip of a spear that had been stuck in the antelope with enough force to pierce the thick shoulder blade, go through a lung, and crack the ribs on the opposite side. It was a miracle that the animal had enough life in it to limp out of the grass.
Then he saw the spearhead, and the little hair on his neck raised again.
It was a giant stone leaf, longer than his palm, expertly knapped out of chert, with precision that he never saw among any of their people. This was not the work of a desperate survivor, or even a modern hobbyist who just happened to know how to make stone tools before ending up in this world. This was a spearhead just as good, if not better than the ones he saw at a museum, made by his own ancestors.
Whoever made this, was a real fucking caveman, not a pale imitation like his fellow survivors were.
He did not have time to marvel at it. The eerie feeling he had before returned, magnified.
And then came the screams.
He had seen enough combat in his life to instinctively tell what a particular wordless scream meant. The ‘Im terrified out of my wits’ scream was much different from the ‘im terrified but also enraged’ shout that he heard men utter right before doing something very reckless. And then there was the unforgettable shriek of ‘I can see my own intestines on the ground, oh God, somebody help me’ which haunted your dreams forever after, regardless of whether it was your friend that shrieked or a baddie you just shot in the gut.
He heard a mixture of all three types, and then some. He almost shouted back, on sheer empathic reflex, but his training kicked in and he held his teeth shut. Whatever was going on there, bringing attention to himself would do him no good. And there was no benefit in calling his men back, since the danger was almost certainly between them and him.
He loaded another javelin, and quickly stalked in the direction where Ned’s team was supposed to be. The rising smoke suggested that Pete and his men already started the fires, so at the very least they had a buffer between them and whatever lurked in the grass.
Halfway there, he heard a whistle, and cracked a thin smile. A while ago he established a rule, that they were to signal their position to each other by whistling a simple tune, a sound that no other animal made, and that at least indicated they were not running in mindless panic.
He whistled back and crept towards the sound. He saw Ned crouched in the grass, spear up, with five men forming a small circle, their backs pressed against each other. There was blood on the ground.
“What happened?”
“Something come. Take Dev.” Ned said matter of factly, his face impassive as ever. Dev was the youngest of them, a bright-eyed boy from Delhi who joined their hunting party at Vikram’s suggestion.
“Not something! Someone!” Another man, a hairy Latino guy, who’s name he kept forgetting, mouthed through clenched teeth. “It was human! Traitors! Fucking Pete and his team. They want to kill us, so there are fewer mouths to feed.”
Ned smacked the man up the head, hard enough to rattle teeth. “Shut up Jorge. Stupid idiot. This is not true. Pete is good man.”
“I'm serious!” Jorge would not give up. “I saw it myself. Dev was right behind me, and someone grabbed him! I saw a human hand! And they cut him!”
Ned was about to smack the man again, but a look from Hashké stopped him.
“It was a human, guys, but not one of ours. I just found a spearhead that sure as hell ain't one we made. We got hostiles, bipedal ones.” Hashké got up, and patted Ned on the back. “We’re movin’. Full hedgehog boys, and follow me.”
“We go, find Dev?” Ned asked, probably more to the benefit of the rest of the boys than his own. He knew the truth.
“We’re going to rendezvous with Pete, and only then search for Dev.” Hashké lied. He knew that whatever, or rather, whoever grabbed the boy, had no reason to keep him alive. But the boys needed to believe they had each other’s back and that he would not abandon one of them, or they would end up running for their lives in mindless despair.
They set forth, ignoring the animal trail and cutting straight towards the distant wisps of smoke from the fires Pete’s group set. Ned took the point, whacking the tall grass in front of him to make a path. The rest followed him, bunched up. Hashké followed last, loaded atlatl in one hand, and Dev’s spear in the other.
He left enough of a distance between him and the rest of the group that whoever stalked them would go for him first.
If they did, they would be briefly, and terminally surprised. He was not a powerful-looking man. Barely average height, and more sinew than muscle. The boyish face did not help making him look intimidating. All the same, this was the face that a lot of men saw only a glimpse of, before their vision permanently faded to black.
They had not traveled halfway, when they heard a noise of something crashing through the grasses. Hashké could see the tops of the stalks swaying as something ran at them, then veered past them.
“No!” he shouted, seeing Ned and two other men raise their spears to throw them at the incoming unknown. A face flashed through the stalks, mouth agape, eyes rolling white with fear.
“Stay!” he gestured at them and chased after the apparition. He caught the man in about forty steps.
“”Stop-” he tried to shout, but the man suddenly turned around and stabbed a spear at him, shrieking hoarsely. He batted the spear point away, slammed into the man, and kneeled him in the stomach. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to take the wind out of him.
It stopped the noise, but Hashké muffled the man’s mouth just in case.
“Shut the fuck up, Lee.” He held him down, and looked back to where Lee came from. “Something… someone chased you?”
Lee nodded, shaking. Only now Hashké saw that the man was covered in bright, pinkish blood, but not wounded in any apparent way. Whatever happened back there, must have put him next to someone else’s ruptured artery.
“Get up. Spear up. Follow me.” Lee rose, leaning on him as if drunk. Adrenaline crash.
“Hashké!” there was a shout from Ned’s group. “Someone’s in there! They need help!”
He ran towards the group, towing stupefied Lee.
“Hold your ground! Fuck!” He reached them just in time to see two of his men break away from the rest and run into the grass towards some indistinct sounds of distress. “Get back you idiots! Ned! Stop them!”
“Someone need help!” Ned gestured where the men ran. “Listen!”
Hashké paused and focused. There was a distant, muffled sound of moaning, as if someone in great pain was wailing for help, reduced to just agonized vowels.
“Eeell! Eeeeeellhh! Ashhhh eeeeh! Aaasheeeeh!” Someone was calling for help. Calling his name!
He did not dare to move a muscle, and squashed every instinct to run towards the call. Something was terribly, terribly not right about this. Each and every body hair he had stood on end, as if he touched a live wire. His conscious human mind was telling him to run after his friends. His infinitely wiser mammalian brain threw all possible alarms instead, welding his feet in place and filling his bowels with ice.
“This is a fucking trap. On me.” He crept forward, tense like a coiled spring. The remaining men hugged his back, holding their spears with trembling hands. Lee had not stopped gibbering under his breath, his sounds of panic infinitely more human sounding that the eerie cry for help they moved towards.
"Eeeellllhhh! Ashhhh ehhh!" the creepy call sounded again, seemingly directionless. They walked only several dozen steps before they stepped onto a patch of crushed grass coated in crimson. The men who chased into the grass right before them vanished, leaving only red smears, as if something smashed into them and dragged them away.
The inhuman wailing stopped, filling the air with oppressive silence. They held their breaths. Even Lee shut up and tensed, his fingernails digging into Hashke's shoulder.
Hashké almost managed to react in time.
A sudden blur burst from the wall of stalks, slamming into them like a wrecking ball. All of them toppled like bowling pins. He turned a tumble into a shoulder roll, and rose again, atlatl raised.
He froze, his shocked conscious mind for once overriding his combat instincts. A brutal-looking, muscular… thing stood among the bowled-over bodies. It held its massive foot on Lee's neck, and held another man skewered on a spear, the stone head going straight through the man's sternum and back, the severed spine sticking out between the shoulder blades. The thing looked at Hashke, cocked its head like a dog, and cooed softly. It almost sounded like a nonchalant, singalong question, as if the monster was confused with his combative stance. As if all of this was just an amusing misunderstanding.
This time he did manage to react in time.
Not fooled by the distraction, he whipped his entire body sideways, twisting at the hip, and shot the atlatl forward with as much force as his entire body could generate. A five-foot-long javelin, fire-hardened and tipped with a shard of chert, flew true. Only as his eyes aligned with his subconscious reaction, did he see the other creature that crept towards him with a stone axe raised. This creature now sported a wooden shaft going through its chest. It croaked, coughed, did a few drunk steps sideways and toppled onto the ground.
Nobody moved for three heartbeats. Then the first monster roared in rage, a deep, rumbling sound that shook his intestines, and flung the dead man at him. The body somersaulted through the air and nearly hit him, forcing him to duck. Which was a blessing in disguise, the move allowed him to see two more creatures stalking toward his men.
"Run!" he shouted. The men shook off their stupor and burst forward. All except for Lee, being stomped into the ground, and Ned, the unshakably stoic, brave Frenchman who leaped at the creature and stabbed a spear into its massive shoulder. It screamed again, in annoyance more than pain, and slugged Ned with a wild haymaker that cracked the man's elbow, leaving the arm to hang limply.
Hashke frantically searched the ground for the two remaining javelins he lost tumbling.
He found one, but it was too close for a throw. Grabbing the javelin like a spear, he lunged at the monster, aiming at its throat. It slammed his weapon aside, and tried to envelop him in a bear hug that he knew would be just as deadly as if a real bear caught him.
Lee, the half-choked, terrified coward, chose that moment to find his courage. Weaponless, he could not possibly injure the monster's powerful legs, but there was an easier target in his reach. To Hashke's amazement, Lee reared up and slammed a fist into the monster's loincloth-clad crotch.
The ape-man fell to its knees with a gasp, but almost immediately sought revenge, grabbing Lee's head in a two-handed grip and wrenching it sideways with a wet snap.
Hashke wasted not a single breath mourning his killed friend, but opted for instant vengeance, ramming the tip of the javelin into the monster's neck.
"Ned, go!" he pulled the man up. "I'm right behind you!"
Two more ape-things were almost upon them. Without thinking, he raised the empty spear thrower and whipped it at the coming creatures with a roar of his own. They immediately ducked to the ground, wisened up to the deadliness of his weapon, but not knowing it was unloaded.
He tore the javelin out of the throat of the kneeling ape-man and chased after Ned.
