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Chapter 9

Raid


The Peterbilt


September 7, 1005 CE


Alyssa wasn’t sure what woke her up. At first, she had a muzzy sense that it was something happening in a weird dream she was having—which, as was usually true, she stopped remembering as soon as consciousness started returning. But then she bolted upright.

That was a scream she’d heard! Someone was screaming.

From the sounds coming from the bunk below her, she knew someone was already getting up. Probably Michael, who was a light sleeper, unlike herself and Melanie.

Less than two seconds later, one of Michael’s big hands was on her arm shaking her awake. “Something’s wrong!” he said urgently. “I need you to hand me the rifles—and a box of ammunition for each of them. Get moving, Alyssa.

Already sitting up, all she had to do was reach out to the gun racks and grab one of the rifles. That was Michael’s .30-06, which was always on the bottom rack. Once she handed that one to him, she reached for Melanie’s .308 and started fumbling for the ammunition boxes.

“Turn on the lights,” she hissed. “I can’t tell which box is which.”

The lights came on before she finished the second sentence. That must be Shane turning them on. She was a light sleeper like her father, and she was the one closest to the light switch. From the muffled sounds she was making, Melanie was still coming awake.

There was another scream from outside. Like the first scream, it sounded like a woman’s voice. There were words being screamed, though, it wasn’t just a terrified noise. Alyssa had no idea what they meant. Her knowledge of Kadlok was still very rudimentary.

Then she heard a man shouting. She recognized Hamadi’s voice, although she didn’t understand what he was saying either. But there was no mistaking the urgency and anger involved.

“I think we’re being attacked by somebody,” Michael said. By now he was in the passenger seat in the front of the cab, opening the glove compartment and taking out the Glock. He turned and handed the pistol to Alyssa.

“Stay here and guard the kids,” he said. They’d already discussed and agreed upon what they’d do in such an event. He and Melanie would exit the truck with their rifles while Alyssa stayed behind with the pistol. The problem they faced was that while Alyssa had shot a rifle on a firing range, she hadn’t done so in a long time and had never hunted at all. She was well coordinated and could undoubtedly have become a good shot with some practice—but they didn’t have enough ammunition for her to do that. So, she’d be the one to stay behind in the truck.

Before climbing out of the cab, Michael took the Desert Eagle out of the glove compartment. He’d jury-rigged a holster for it, which was nothing much fancier than a belt loop, since there hadn’t been a holster with the pistol in Mr. Dawes’ pickup.

After Michael exited the cab, Melanie followed him. They both used the passenger door since it was quicker to climb out of than the one on the driver’s side. Plus, the area they’d be in was less visible from the trail leading up from the river than the one on the other side of the truck.

Once they were gone, Alyssa moved forward and occupied the driver’s seat. She had a good view from there and, at short distances, could stay in touch with the Anderles using their cell phones. The Peterbilt was Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capable, tying all their phones into a local network.

There wasn’t much light, since the sun was just coming up. Still, using the binoculars, she could start to piece together what was happening.

The first thing that was obvious was that they were, indeed, under attack. She could see at least two dozen men coming up the slope. All of them held either bows or javelins, and had some sort of clubs attached to belts at their waists. And in case there was any doubt at all of their intentions, they all had war paint on their faces and most of them had painted their torsos as well. Their chests were protected by armor—it looked like bleached animal bones laced together—but the design of their war paint was still quite visible, especially on their bare arms. Black and red were the predominant colors, with either one or the other used as a solid band painted around the eyes, giving the impression that they were wearing masks.

And they were yelling. War cries, presumably.

Glancing to the side out of the window, Alyssa could see that Hamadi had rallied seven or eight men, which was about all the adult or teenage males who lived in the settlement next to the truck. The Kadlo had deliberately kept the population mostly women and children to allay whatever fears the Americans might have.

That had been considerate of them, but Alyssa now wished they hadn’t done it. Hamadi and the men with him were no better armed than their assailants, and there were a lot fewer of them. On their own, they didn’t have much of a chance.

She heard the first unmistakable flat crack of one of the American rifles.

So far as she could tell, that shot missed whoever the intended target had been. But there was another loud crack! that followed almost immediately, and a third crack! not more than a second later. Two of the men coming up the slope collapsed. One of them lay still; the other started sliding down the incline, dead or unconscious. Michael and Melanie were firing rounds designed for hunting, with no consideration given to the laws of war regulating the types of ammunition permitted. Alyssa didn’t want to think of the horrible wounds that had just been inflicted upon those two men.

The attackers coming up the hill fired a volley of arrows—at Hamadi and his little group. If they’d seen Michael and Melanie off to the left by at least twenty yards, they hadn’t realized that they’d been the origin of whatever had struck down their two comrades.

All of the arrows except one failed to hit their targets because Hamadi had his men sheltering next to trees or on the back side of huts. The only injury inflicted was a shallow gash on the shoulder of . . . 

Achanu, she realized. What was a boy that young doing on a battlefield? Other than thinking himself immortal, like so many teenagers did.

There came another double cracking sound. Two more assailants folded instantly. Alyssa had never seen a real gunfight so she’d been expecting to see bodies sent flying by the high-power bullets, as they usually were in movies. But instead they were just cut down like grass by a scythe. Most of them fell forward, not backward.

By the time the attackers were able to notch new arrows, another volley was fired by Michael and Melanie. One more fell to the ground. The second shot hadn’t apparently hit anyone.

That was followed by a ragged volley of arrows fired by Hamadi and his men. Two of the attackers were struck, although only one of the wounds looked to be serious. That one penetrated a man’s chest just below the collarbone. He sagged, and then dropped to his knees, although he still kept a grip on his bow.

The injuries caused by the other two arrows seemed fairly minor, at least to Alyssa’s inexperienced eyes. Neither man dropped his bow and one of them even managed to nock an arrow and fire it at Hamadi’s men.

At Achanu, specifically. The boy had been so startled by his first arrow wound that he still hadn’t taken adequate shelter. Luckily, this second arrow fired at him missed—but not by more than a few inches.

Hamadi yelled something at him. Again, Alyssa’s rudimentary knowledge of Kadlo didn’t enable her to understand what he said, but the gist of it was clear enough from the context. Get behind shelter, you idiot!

A chorus of war cries brought Alyssa’s attention back to the band of assailants. She saw that many of them had now seized their war clubs and were charging toward . . . 

Michael and Melanie had to be their targets, although Alyssa couldn’t see them. Both fired again. One man dropped instantly, the other stumbled and clutched his left leg, from which blood was gushing. An artery, Alyssa wondered, though she didn’t know of any major artery on the thigh just above the knee. The femoral artery was higher up—or at least she thought it was. But her knowledge of anatomy was hardly that of an expert.

Despite the new casualties, the assailants kept coming. There were fewer of them, now—the Anderles’ gunfire had been withering at that close range.

Michael came into view coming forward of the truck.

What the hell is he doing?

Then she saw that he had the Desert Eagle held in his hands. Both hands, using a double grip.

His assailants weren’t more than ten yards away now!

Suddenly remembering the air horn, she reached up and yanked the lanyard down—and kept it down for several seconds.

It then occurred to her, a bit late, that she might have thrown off Michael’s aim. She probably had, in fact—she could see him hunch his shoulders. But however startled he might be, Michael was very familiar with the Peterbilt’s air horn, which his Neolithic opponents were not at all. If he was a little startled, they were stunned into immobility.

The Desert Eagle steadied and Michael started firing. He obviously wasn’t concerned with saving his ammunition, either. Boom—boom—boom—boom—

At that range, none of his shots missed. All but one hit center mass, and the one that didn’t shattered a man’s shoulder. He might survive, he might not—but either way he was out of the action.

Then Melanie came into view also, her face distorted in a grimace of rage and fear. She brought her rifle to her shoulder and fired. Another man went down. Alyssa could see the fountain of blood spraying out of his back where the bullet exited his body. He’d die almost instantly.

And then Hamadi and two veteran warriors arrived, with their own clubs in hand, and it was all over. The surviving attackers turned and ran back down the slope. Hamadi struck down one of them, who moved too slowly, with a blow to his head that probably caved in the back of his skull.

By then, the rest were out of range of any clubs—but not of Melanie’s rifle. She was so furious she shot one of them in the back.

“Hey, leave off, hon!” shouted Michael. “It’s all over and we need to save what’s left of our ammunition.”

Alyssa tried to count back from memory. Michael would have fired . . . six rounds from his rifle, she thought. Melanie about the same, or maybe one more. And Michael had used up about half the clip in the Desert Eagle.

Not too bad, all things considered. It had been a completely one-sided battle.

Which wasn’t quite over yet, she realized. The attacker who’d been struck by an arrow in his chest was still where he’d been, and still on his knees. His head was drooping forward and he seemed barely conscious.

Hamadi came up to him and raised his club. Alyssa hissed softly, assuming he was about to kill this man also with a blow to the head.

But, no. He did strike him—struck him very hard—but the blow was to his right shoulder. That knocked him over and probably knocked him unconscious, but it wouldn’t have killed him.

She was a little surprised by that display of mercy. Then, seeing the pitiless way Hamadi was gazing down at the man, realized that she was probably misreading his intentions. He’d want the man to talk once he regained consciousness—and Alyssa doubted very much that Hamadi was going to read him his Miranda rights.

Michael and Melanie were now back at the cab door. Michael opened it and handed his rifle up to Shane, who’d moved from the lower bunk to the passenger seat at some point during the fracas.

“Be careful, Shane,” he said. “The barrel might still be hot. Hold it by the stock.”

She took the rifle and brought it up, slapping the barrel with her hand as she did so. “Yeah, it’s pretty toasty. What do you want me to do with it?”

“For the moment, just lay it down on the floor behind you.” He raised Melanie’s rifle, now. “Do the same with this one, when you’re ready. And then”—gingerly, he held up the Desert Eagle—“just put this back in the glove compartment.”

While she was handling that, Michael turned back to his wife. “How are you doing, hon?”

She leaned against him, with her head on his shoulder and her arms around him. Her face, always pale, was now almost as white as a sheet. She shivered a little. “I don’t know. Right now, I just feel numb. But I think there’s something chattering in the back of my brain. I doubt if I’ll get much sleep tonight.”

“Probably not. I barely slept at all, the first time I was in a firefight in Afghanistan. And the second time wasn’t much better. Combat’s stressful under any conditions, but it’s a lot worse—especially when it’s all over—when you know for sure you killed someone.”

She looked up at him. “You never talk about that. Did you . . . I mean . . . ”

“Kill anyone? Yeah. Two men that I know of, for sure. It was a pure bitch. The worst of it was that one of them was a kid. Couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old.” He shivered himself, very briefly. “And I wasn’t much older than he was at the time.”

He started to add something, but Hamadi came around the front of the truck. He still had his war club in his hand, but he wasn’t being threatening.

Quite the opposite, Alyssa thought. He was looking at the Anderle couple as if he were seeing . . . well, not ghosts. But it had probably crashed home on him that people who lived inside a huge demon and seemed to control it had to be demonic themselves. They’d done most of the killing in the brief battle—which had been more like a massacre.

Alyssa tried to estimate how long that clash had lasted. It had seemed like a long time, but looking back she realized that from the first shot being fired to Melanie shooting one of the fleeing men, not more than . . . 

Jesus H. Christ. Two minutes? Not even that, maybe. And in that short period of time Michael and Melanie had killed . . . how many of the assailants? She couldn’t remember exactly. Eight, ten or more, and another they’d badly wounded.

She looked forward through the windshield, trying to find that wounded man. She spotted him almost at once. He was lying prone, his left shoulder soaked with blood. But the blood wasn’t gushing so it couldn’t have hit an artery and—

And . . . nothing. His skull was also coated with blood, which had also stopped flowing. She realized that Hamadi—maybe someone else—had finished him off with a club strike. Probably because with that terrible a shoulder wound he wasn’t going to be able to talk very soon, so the Neolithic version of triage had been applied.

Now she was shivering, and wasn’t sure if she could stop.

Hamadi said something to Michael which Alyssa didn’t understand. From the blank expression on his face, it was clear that Michael didn’t comprehend the words either.

“He wants to know if either of you were hurt, Dad,” said Shane.

Michael shook his head. One thing they’d managed to establish was that head gestures meant the same thing to people of both cultures. A nod was positive and a lateral shake was negative.

Hamadi gazed at Michael for another few seconds, his face impassive. Then he flipped his war club around to seize it by the knob at the business end. The weapon seemed to have been carved from some sort of hardwood, probably a branch.

He extended the club to Michael, handle first. After a moment’s hesitation, Michael grasped it and held it up. It was nicely balanced, which surprised him a little. Once again he had the lesson that Alyssa emphasized so often driven home to him. The technology of the natives might be limited, but it was not crude. Within whatever range they’d come to understand something, they were very adept at it. Their minds were just as capable as those of people from the twenty-first century, they just didn’t have as great a knowledge of the universe and how it worked.

Yet.

Acting on impulse, he repeated Hamadi’s action—flipped the club around so that he was holding it by the knob, and held the handle out for Hamadi to take it back.

The native chief grunted faintly, took the club and smiled. Michael knew he’d instinctively done the right thing. What had been a friendly living arrangement was now something more solid and durable. Call it an understanding, even an alliance.

“I think we’re in for a lot of dickering, in the weeks ahead,” said Alyssa.

Melanie smiled. “Ya think?”

Michael nodded. “And I figure we’ll start with proposing an actual sewer system. Things are starting to get a little stinky around here. That one toilet we set up downstream was okay for half a dozen people but it’s not up to handling . . . How many people are living here now? About fifty?”

“About that,” said Alyssa. She eyed Hamadi thoughtfully for a moment. “And I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t start expanding rapidly.”

Melanie frowned. “Hey, wait a damn minute! Michael and I have listened to a lot of time travel stories. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, Robert Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer, L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall—the list goes on and on.”

“Don’t forget the granddaddy of them all, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” tossed in Michael.

“And I don’t remember where a single one of those stories,” Melanie continued, “not one, even mentioned toilets, much less dwelling on the gross details.”

Alyssa chuckled. “Melanie, what part of the word ‘fiction’ are you having the most trouble with?”

“Very funny. Dammit, it’s not fair.”


Jabir


September 8, 1005 CE


To Hamadi, the raid wasn’t just a surprise. It was a shock. And there was no way such a raid would have happened without the concurrence of the Hocha priesthood. Raids didn’t attack villages. They attacked hunting parties, and it was rare that many men were involved. It was usually fewer than five. But not this time. They’d killed—well, mostly the demon people had killed—eighteen and the rest had run off, so at least twenty-four had attacked, and perhaps as many as thirty. That was a large enough raid to start a clan war.

And if this had been the days before the new priesthood, that’s exactly what would be happening. The Kadlo would be gathering its forces to attack the Gruda in response. A part of Hamadi wanted to be doing just that. But the other chiefs wouldn’t go along, not with Hocha sitting there on its mounds with its city guard ready to punish any clan that attacked another without its consent.

On the other hand, the raiders had all come from one village, the village of Pasire on the west side of the Talak River. Scouts were out even now, tracing them back to the Agla River, where they must have landed their canoes. There would be some empty canoes heading back down the Agla to the Talak. It was a safe bet that the raiders would tow them back; a dugout was an expensive piece of equipment.

And if Hocha had sanctioned this raid, there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t sanction more. Not that the Pasire would be taking part. Not after losing eighteen warriors. And it would take some time. But how much?

Hamadi consulted with the other elders of the village and came up with a plan. They would turn the camp of the demon people into a fort. That, after all, was at least half the purpose of the mounds in Hocha. They talked it out and set Gada to work on the design of a fort. He’d learned more of the demon people’s ways than the rest of them had.


Kadlo Mound, Hocha


September 14, 1005 CE


Roshan waved Lomhar in. Lomhar was a senior chief from another Kadlo village. “Did you hear the news about the attack on Camp Peterbilt?”

“Yes.” Lomhar grinned a rather feral grin until he saw Roshan’s expression. “What is it?”

“The Gruda are very upset and Ho-Chag Kotep is furious.” Ho-Chag Kotep was the high priest of Hocha, in effect the Priest King of Hocha and indirectly of all the river people.

“They attacked us!” Lomhar was clearly incensed even though he wasn’t from Jabir.

“I know, Lomhar,” Roshan said. “I’m from Jabir and Hamadi is my cousin. The fact that they were attacking just makes it worse, as they see it. The Gruda raided one of our villages. To do that, they had to have at least the tacit consent, but more probably the active pushing of Ho-Chag Kotep. The reason was to take us down a notch and to prove that the demon people’s magic isn’t all that strong after all.”

Roshan rubbed his face then continued. “Instead, Pasire lost a lot of warriors and they can’t even complain to the priest of Hocha that we broke the peace because they were the ones attacking.”

“Oh,” Lomhar said. “They want revenge.”

Roshan nodded. “And they can’t get it directly. Lomhar, I have a source in the priesthood. They are going to choose your daughter for the sacrifice.” He watched as the blood drained from Lomhar’s face. They were colleagues, not really friends, but he hated to see the man’s face look like that. Hated it so much that he suggested the unthinkable. “Take her away, Lomhar. Get her out of Hocha, away from the priests.”

Now Lomhar looked at Roshan in shock. Refusing to provide the sacrifice demanded could cause the destruction of a clan, and the girl would end up sacrificed anyway. “If I take her to Kallabi, they will just send a canoe.”

“Don’t take her to Kallabi or any of our villages. Not even Jabir. Take her to Camp Peterbilt. From what I am told, they are building a fort there because of the attack.”


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