Hell Pig (Dawn of Mammals Book 3) Read online

  HELL PIG

  Dawn of Mammals Book 3

  Lou Cadle

  Copyright © 2016 by Cadle-Sparks Books

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Also by Lou Cadle

  Chapter 1

  Hannah did not pay attention to how long she fell through the time gate. Her mind was too filled with the horror and grief about Garreth. And with guilt.

  At some level, she knew she should also feel guilty about punching Dixie, but she did not. She had never liked the girl, and now she liked her less. The only relief for her own guilt about Garreth—sweet Garreth!—was to focus on Dixie’s responsibility for it.

  She was first through the timegate and so first to land. She landed on a patch of lowlying bushes. It was twilight here, though it had been midmorning when they left the Paleocene. Quickly, she rolled off to leave room for the others.

  Just in time, for here came Zach, popping out of nowhere, two feet off the ground. He landed, scrambled back, and glanced over at her. His face was streaked with tears, too. Then Laina, who had correctly predicted the appearance of the timegate. Nari came next, the smallest of the teens. Then Jodi, with her cavewoman club. Ted, the athlete. Rex, the would-be astronomer. Claire, their fishing expert. Last of the kids was Dixie, her lip split and nose bleeding from Hannah’s punches. Finally came Bob O’Brien, the teacher who had brought a dozen teenagers on a school field trip that had ended up stranding them in the distant past. He was cradling the big clay cooking pot and held it up in the air as he landed, guaranteeing its survival.

  Eight children now, without Garreth. Hannah’s heart twisted in her chest. She turned her back on the rest and looked out over a field of dry grass, turned orange by a sunset.

  “Where are we?” Nari asked.

  “When are we?” Zach said.

  Bob said, “I’m not sure.”

  Laina said, “We’re in the same place, exactly. And twenty million years forward, give or take.”

  Jodi said, “Is this sunrise, or sunset?”

  Hannah knew it was sunset. She was looking straight west, at the setting sun. Despite there being few clouds, it cast an orange light all around it. Something in the air, then. Dust.

  It was definitely dry here, so that wouldn’t be a surprise. The month of living in a near-jungle had left her sticky or sweaty or oily all the time. Here, in only a few minutes, she could feel the moisture being drawn from her body.

  There was a gallon of water in her backpack. But important as it was, she couldn’t stir herself to care enough to make sure that all the water had arrived in this new epoch. Her mind, her heart were consumed by Garreth. If someone hadn’t brought her pack, and the precious water bottles, and she died from thirst, at least it would be relief from the horror and guilt she felt.

  She would forever see the picture she had seen from the top of the plateau, his body, crumpled and still, lying on the ledge of rocks. Then was the memory of her climb down the cliff and the horrible work of stripping his boots and jeans. They, along with part of his shirt she had cut free for bandage material, were in his pack. It was on her back now. She looked down at herself and could see the spot of drying brain matter on her shirt and some of his blood on the knees of her pants.

  I killed him. She hadn’t done so directly, but she had been their leader. She had watched him refuse to climb down to safety, to protect that useless little snot Dixie instead. She had watched, helpless, as the terror crane snatched him up in its beak and bit down.

  The sound of breaking bones was still clear in her memory. She feared it would never leave her. Why hadn’t she slipped off the cliff on her climb down to him? It would be so much easier to be dead, to not have to feel what she felt right now.

  Garreth had been, without a doubt, the best of them. Not the smartest, and not the strongest, but the kindest and most generous. Even the wild animal he had tamed knew that. It had died. Garreth had died.

  And before that, Chief Paleontologist M.J. Hill had died, in a battle Hannah had asked be fought.

  The job of leader had fallen to her when they had come through time, and she had taken it on, but look what it had brought them to. Two dead. A dozen serious injuries. Jodi had physical scars that would never heal. They all had emotional scars. Hannah had completely and utterly failed. She hated Dixie, yes, go ahead and use the word, for it was what she felt. But the hatred for the girl was nothing compared to the hatred Hannah felt toward herself.

  It’s your fault; it’s your fault. The words repeated in her mind. She sank down and sat, her head folded over her knees, and let the words batter her from the inside.

  Her outsides were battered, too, but it was no less than she deserved.

  They’d have been better off if I’d never have come.

  It was only then she realized that the voice telling her it was her fault was not her own. It was her mother’s. Her mind tried to drag her back, back almost twenty years, but she did not let it.

  She didn’t want to remember her childhood. She didn’t want to remember Garreth. She tried to blank her mind of all thought, all memory. Instead, she began counting, by sevens, forcing her mind into an activity that left it too busy to alight on any painful piece of the past, near past or distant past, either one.

  *

  “Hannah.”

  12873. 12880. 12887.

  “Hannah!”

  Twelve thousand…. Damn, she’d lost her place.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder and shook her, lightly. “Hannah, you have to get yourself together.”

  She looked up. The sun had set, but she could see the face in a bluish light. Bob. Bob was holding her solar flashlight, and it was illuminating his face.

  “Bob,” she said.

  He handed her a twenty-ounce bottle of water. “Drink.”

  Obediently, she drank.

  “You with me?”

  She nodded. She didn’t want to be, but she was.

  “We’re setting up watches for the night. Not enough time to find a shelter. Or to build one, not that there’s anything to build with.”

  “How bad?” she said, her voice hardly a croak. She was dehydrated. She took another sip of water and capped the bottle.

  “How bad what?”

  “Danger?”

  “No idea. There wasn’t enough light to see much before the sun set. If Laina is right in her computations, we’re in the middle to upper Paleocene.”

  “Predators?” She knew Bob would know at least some of them.

  “There are lots. There has been plenty of time since the K/T extinction for mammals to expand, to fill every niche. You’ll have predators for the night, ones for the day. Pack hunters, solitary hunters. Lots and lots of predators.”

  “You know much about this time?”

  “A good
deal. The earliest fossils at the park start about forty million years ago, and they go up to about twenty-five. So the upper Paleocene and Oligocene are the times I do know something about.”

  Her brain was starting to work again. “Watches, you said? We’re setting watches?”

  “Pairs of people on ninety-minute watches.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re on the last watch. Give you time to get yourself together.”

  “Sure,” she said, not caring at all which assignment they gave her.

  “Come over to the group. We’re all bedded down here. Okay?”

  She shrugged.

  “Hannah. You need to get yourself together. Not just for your sake.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want to know how Dixie is?”

  She looked at him.

  “She’ll be okay, but her nose might be broken.”

  Hannah had broken at least one bone in her hand punching the girl, but she saw no reason to mention it. She saw no reason for anything, really.

  “We need to get up at dawn and work on shelter and water. If there’s dew, we should soak it up.”

  Hannah doubted there would be. It felt too dry for there to be a big dew harvest tomorrow. And who cared, anyway. They were all doomed. As the group got smaller, they’d be able to protect themselves less well. This next month, stuck here, they might well lose two people, not just one.

  If fate smiled on her, one of them would be her.

  “Come on. Snap out of it.”

  She nodded, though she didn’t feel capable of snapping herself out of anything. But when Bob offered a hand, she took it and stood.

  He led her over to the group, and she lay down at the edge of it. There were stars out. Unfamiliar stars—or, rather, as Bob had explained long ago, familiar stars but moved just enough that the patterns were unfamiliar.

  She could hear someone crying—not sobbing aloud, but the rough, broken sound of inhalations of someone who did not want anyone to hear them crying. It made more tears leak out of her eyes, too. She had let M.J. die. She had let Garreth die. And everyone was paying for it.

  Sleep did not come to her that night. When the memories of Garreth, and of his final moments on the plateau, plagued her so that she was afraid she might start screaming, she forced herself to replace them with other bad memories.

  Like the day her father had left. It had been a Saturday, and she had been engaged in watching cartoons. Her sister was there, but she tuned out her bizarre honking laugh noises, which came at the wrong places in the cartoons anyway. Her father had been up and down the stairs several times, but it had barely registered until she turned to see him carrying a stack of boxes.

  “Are you taking things down to the basement?” she had said.

  He spared a glance for her but said nothing, just walked through to the kitchen. She heard the door bang shut. When a commercial came on, she handed Milli the remote control, which she knew would keep her distracted for a few minutes, and went out to the kitchen.

  Through the screen door, she could see her father, putting boxes into the trunk of his car. There was a suitcase, too, the old blue hard one with scratches on it, sitting by the open back door. She watched him adjust the boxes, then close the trunk lid carefully, bending to watch it shut as it came down all the way. Then he hauled on the suitcase and swung it into the back seat. He turned to look at the kitchen door.

  Did he see or not? She heard her mother come into the kitchen. “I’m going to fix you girls a snack. Would you like that?”

  “Is Daddy taking a trip? For work?” He had once before.

  “Your father is a coward. He’s running away.”

  Hannah had known that her father wasn’t a coward. Even then, at eight, she had known that something else was wrong with him, something that made him sad. Really sad, with a hint, like flavoring, of something else. As an adult she had put a name to that: hopelessness. A man worn down, a man who had tried everything he could think of to do to fix things and who had failed repeatedly.

  That man looked at her through the screen door. Hannah had pushed through it, walking slowly, not wanting to go out, but not wanting to stay inside. It had been her father and her on one side, and her mother and Milli on the other. She had known that much, too.

  “Daddy?” she had said.

  He had gotten to his knees and held out his arms, and she had run to him. He had cried then, cried on her shoulder, and she had been afraid. He didn’t cry. He never cried. Her mother cried. She cried. Milli cried. But Daddy never did. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.”

  “What’s wrong?” she had asked.

  He had pushed her away to look at her with his wet eyes. “I have to go. I know you won’t understand, but I can’t. I just can’t stay here. I’m so unhappy. I know it’s selfish, but….” And he had shaken his head. “I’m selfish. Your mom is right about that. But I have to go.”

  “You’re coming back, though.”

  She knew the answer before she asked, but his shake of his head still tore at her. “Take me.”

  “I can’t. I can’t, honey.”

  “I don’t want to be alone,” she said.

  Years later, she appreciated that he hadn’t said, “You won’t be alone,” or “You have your mom and sister.” He hadn’t lied to her. He knew he was leaving her alone—or worse than alone. He simply looked miserable as he nodded.

  Then he kissed her forehead and stood up, and he got in the car. He had driven away. She had stood on the sidewalk, watching the car stop at the end of the block. It made a left-hand turn and disappeared. Long after the car had gone, she had stood on the sidewalk, watching, hoping against hope she’d see it again.

  But she never had. It had been six years before she had seen her father again, and by then he had a different car. And a different wife. And a new kid, a three-year-old boy, who had replaced Hannah. He had approached her outside of school one afternoon and had taken her for a drive. A month later, on a Saturday, he had brought his family into town and she had met them. She could see he was happy. But there had been no room for Hannah in that happy little family. She had walked out on them in the middle of lunch, pretending to need to use the restroom, and hitchhiked to the mall and spent the rest of the day there, at the dollar theater, watching a movie she’d seen before.

  Lying here now, in the Eocene night, listening to the distant, unfamiliar sounds of animals hunting for prey, she still wondered why he had bothered to come back at all. She hadn’t seen him again, not ever, though she had received cards and generous checks on her high school and university graduation. She had cashed them, as it helped buy her freedom.

  Chapter 2

  Hannah was on last watch, so she sat, back to back with Jodi, as the day dawned.

  Birds began to call out when the sky was still gray. They weren’t singing like songbirds yet, not exactly, but more like crows and hawks. She hoped all the giant predator birds were gone. If not, she’d make it her mission to hunt them to extinction, for the part the terror crane had played in Garreth’s death.

  The kids had been restless all night. She hadn’t slept a wink, so she had heard more than one sniffling, more than one tossing and turning. She knew she should be doing something to help them, but her own pain was too great. It was impossible to even feel empathy for their sadness, much less begin to address it.

  She was not looking forward to full light and the first time she had to meet Dixie’s eyes. Their relationship had never been easy. Now, with Hannah having slapped and punched her and yelled God knows what into her face, it was going to be broken. And she should feel terrible about that, and she would, as soon as she got done feeling terrible about Garreth. There just wasn’t room in her heart yet to feel anything about Dixie, beyond a vague desire to avoid her.

  When it was light enough, she put her tool belt back on and looked around. She spotted her own backpack and went over to check on it. The big bottles of water were in there, one empty, one two-thir
ds empty. Her first aid kit had been taken out and repacked badly. Both of the last alcohol wipes were gone, used on Dixie or someone else who had been hurt when they tried to fight off the terror crane.

  So be it. She knew they wouldn’t last forever. The elastic bandage was bloodstained and starting to get that stretched-out look. Even once all the elastic was spent, it would still wrap a twisted ankle or knee. She had some butterfly strips left, a few Band-Aids, half a tube of antibiotic cream, tweezers, tiny scissors, moleskins, one little packet of aspirin, and the one needle they had, for stitching wounds and clothes both. It was dull and bent into a curve.

  She repacked the paltry first-aid supplies to her own satisfaction, made sure her bandana was still in there—it was, though it was looking pretty worn and faded after a month’s use as a water filter. Jodi stood up and silently handed her the solar flashlight, which she had held on to for their shared watch period, having flipped it on only once to check out a soft noise in the grass. Hannah nodded her thanks and clipped it on her pack.

  Jodi whispered, “I need to pee.”

  Hannah nodded. She had trained them to go in pairs or trios, with one person watching for danger at all times. She and Jodi went out to beyond the patch of bushes and, one at a time, the other keeping watch, they relieved themselves.

  She took a minute to look at her damaged hand. She had felt bones snapping when she had been punching Dixie. One of her fingers was crooked. She grabbed the knuckle and pulled slowly and steadily. It hurt, but no more than she deserved. Holding the hand up, she decided she had the bones as aligned as she could get them, absent x-ray machines. She’d splint it later, with a dental pick or two to add structure until she could find a piece of wood.