Mammoth (Dawn of Mammals Book 5) Read online

  “Nothing to be sorry about. In your shoes, I’d do the same. If I had a family I loved, I’d want to get back to them. Bob, with a wife and kids and grandkids? Of course he’s going with you.”

  “But you’ll be alone here.”

  “I’ll make new friends. Maybe not as good as you, and certainly I’ll never share anything like this experience with anyone else. But there are millions of people on the planet to befriend. You guys will be more alone, in a sense, with only nine of you.”

  “Okay,” Nari said. “I can tell I’m not going to talk you out of it.” She sounded miserable.

  “I’m sorry if it feels like I’m doing something mean to you. I’m more doing something for myself. It’s selfish, and maybe inexcusably so, but I feel it’s right. And you guys are all grown up now. You’ll be fine on your own.” That was not an empty reassurance. She believed they would be. It’d be better were their numbers doubled, but with better equipment, and if they could successfully steal a rifle and ammunition, the nine of them could make it.

  Hannah’s second trip to the city went more smoothly. She was getting to be an expert at it. Mrs. McCracken was happy to see her again and asked her first thing to climb up and get leaves out of the gutter. She’d come up with a long list of difficult jobs to do, ones she was physically incapable of, ones that hadn’t crossed her mind the first time, and Hannah was glad to help in exchange for a warm place to sleep every night and for healthy food. No task the woman chose for her came close to the effort or danger of the things she had been doing while time traveling.

  Every morning before hospital visiting hours, she went to the library and, while she could not find an herbal reference guide, she did find a home remedy book. Mostly it was nonsense, but there were a few useful tips, and those she wrote those down on paper she bummed from a librarian. She found a book on tanning and took more notes, writing until her paper was full. The next day when Mrs. McCracken sent her to the store and told her again to keep the small change, she bought a bound tablet of cheap paper with a nickel, and she spent every morning at the library, using a library pencil, combing the non-fiction shelves, and copying out useful information for the others. She found instructions for making a bow and copied those. One evening, doing laundry in lamplight, she found a dusty spool of string in the old lady’s basement that she asked if she could have. When her host asked why, Hannah couldn’t come up with an answer for a moment. Then one came to her. “I wanted to try macramé.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A craft where you tie knots to make things, like string bags for shopping. It was in a book at the library.” She wanted the string for the others to make bows, but she tried a few macramé knots while she and Mrs. McCracken listened to the radio a few nights later to demonstrate to her that she wanted the string for a craft.

  The radio was interesting. Mrs. McCracken liked variety shows like the Chase and Sanborn Hour. There were some bizarre acts on those shows, like people who imitated birdcalls or the sound of a train or city street. Obviously, a dancer or acrobat would be useless on a radio program. Hannah grew to enjoy the mystery and horror dramas.

  Bob continued to gain strength on the regimen of tranquilizers, covert aspirin, and oxygen. Hannah came to know the early morning nurse—a much friendlier person than her afternoon counterpart—enough to quiz her about nursing school. She learned enough to believe she could fake it, perhaps not at a big city hospital, but as a doctor’s assistant. The nurse also told her about nitroglycerin, how it was administered and when, and a bottle of that was the last thing she stole from the hospital so that Bob would have it as he traveled through time. She used a page from her dime-store tablet to total up what she’d stolen from the hospital. How she’d find out Bob’s hospital bill total, she wasn’t sure, but she planned to pay it at some point in the future when she had a job. It might not erase all the petty thieving she’d done, but it would make her feel a little less guilty about it.

  She attended Mass one Sunday with Mrs. McCracken and realized while she was zoning out to Latin chanting that she’d want to send the priest a donation later on too. She had no doubt she would have the spare money to do all this in time.

  She believed that because she had been reading the business pages of the newspaper. She had never invested in the stock market before, but she had a distinct advantage now in doing so. She knew the company names AT&T and IBM. There were aircraft companies too, and a war was coming that would make those stocks go up in value. She might be the only person in the nation who was 100% sure of the war being inevitable, but sure she was.

  At first she’d live as cheaply as possible—a boarding house for women sounded like the right choice—and save her income and invest every spare dime. By the time the war was over, she suspected that she could retire and live entirely off the income from her stock investments. Then she could do whatever she pleased. Attend graduate school, even if she were the only woman there. She’d faced off with saber-tooth nimravids and entelodonts, so she could certainly cope with a few sexist professors. She could do good works. Find a decent man and marry him. Anything was possible. And she had an advantage that no one else had. She knew what the future was going to bring, at least in broad strokes.

  Her own future, she couldn’t be sure of. But when she thought beyond her friends from the future, imagined herself living out a life here, she felt a sense of peace out there, waiting for her.

  She snuck Bob out of the hospital one morning before dawn, coming in the back door behind a hospital laundry worker. She had left a note for Mrs. McCracken, thanking her for her decency and for sharing her home. The work she had done for the lady had been a fair trade, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the woman trusting her enough in the first place, so as far as Hannah could see, she still owed the woman—not repayable in money perhaps, but a debt of gratitude.

  She could repay the hospital in cash, and she could donate to the church, but the kind old woman held one of those unrepayable debts. Hannah would only be able to repay in kind, by being nice to a person in trouble in the future, by reaching out a hand to help. She vowed to herself she would do that.

  She and Bob walked to the edge of the city and were hitchhiking soon after dawn. It was harder to get a ride with him by her side, but they finally did, shivering in the back of a pickup truck for fifteen miles. A second ride, inside a car this time, with a fellow in love with blowing his car horn over nothing, and they arrived at the small town, where in fifty years the younger Bob would be building his family a house.

  Checking the trash cans behind the diner got them lunch. She retrieved her hide cape from where she had stuffed it weeks ago and gave it to Bob to wear. They walked outside of town and spied a barn. The temperature was dropping rapidly this evening. Waiting, shivering until night fell and the farmhouse lights clicked off, they snuck into the barn to spend the night among the smells of horses and cows.

  Hours later, a sleeping Hannah heard a distant door slam, sat bolt upright, and shook Bob awake to get them out of there before the farmer arrived at the barn. An hour later, as they walked slowly under starlight, the stars began to fade. Day dawned.

  They found Rex and Ted where they’d promised to be, and Bob rode on the travois back to the others.

  The group was together again. But it was for the last time.

  Chapter 25

  Three days remained until the timegate arrived. Hannah helped them prepare for their trip. They had food—a deer had provided enough meat to smoke for the future, and Laina’s trapping had fed them every day. They had more small hides in the tanning process. They’d taken some cardboard from a trash pile in town, and Nari was incorporating it into a new, sturdier form of moccasin.

  Laina was aiming for a jump to before the ice ages. She consulted with Bob about the timing. They didn’t want to end up in a world devoid of game again.

  Hannah did whatever she was asked, and she made sure to have private time with every person, saying her las
t goodbyes, encouraging every one of them, making sure they knew how much she cared for them all. Ted asked again if she were angry at him, and she said no. “I hope neither of us lives to regret our decisions, is all.”

  She tried not to cry, but often she failed and let tears fall. At night around the campfire, she talked in ways to make them remember the good times, and the successes. The bad times, she pushed out of her mind.

  Except for one. And that was her attack on Dixie. When she had her moments alone with Dixie, hauling water from the creek, she apologized again. “I mean it this time. It was stupid and wrong and hurtful.” She had been so devastated by Garreth’s death, but it wasn’t an excuse. She had been in the wrong, and she knew it.

  “I believe you.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  They had to crack creek ice to fill the bottles, and every ten minutes they stopped and re-warmed their hands, which were freezing from being immersed in ice water. After a long silence in which they worked, Dixie said, “I’m sorry too.”

  “For what?”

  “For being mean to Garreth.”

  “Oh.” Hannah was surprised, but not as surprised as she would have been six weeks ago.

  “You know….” Dixie trailed off and looked away.

  “Mmm-hmm?” Hannah said.

  “I’ve been thinking about my kid a lot. A whole lot. I’ve hardly been doing anything else. And if he grew up and someone was as bitchy to him as I was to Garreth, I’d probably want to hit that person too.”

  Wow. Hannah knew Dixie was changing, but this seemed nearly a miracle. If this was what pregnancy had done to her, it might end up being a good outcome, not a bad one. She was afraid anything she might say to Dixie now would be the wrong thing, so she only made an agreeable noise.

  “And you know, I also think I was stupid to push Garreth away.”

  “Really? Why do you say that?”

  “Because of Ted. How he’s been about the pregnancy. I mean, he’s hot and everything. More popular back at school. More—glib, is that the word? A better line of bullshit.”

  “Yeah,” Hannah said. “He did have that.”

  “But he didn’t man up. Maybe that’s the wrong kind of guy to look for. Garreth would have manned up. A year ago, I’d have said different. It seemed back then Ted was more of a man, and Garreth was less of one. But maybe not.”

  Garreth would have probably died of delight had Dixie deigned to sleep with him, but assuming he’d have survived that shock, yes. “He probably would have been thrilled to hear you were pregnant.”

  “Wouldn’t have blamed me for it, at least. Maybe you’re right and he would have wanted to be a dad.”

  “He’d have made a great one.” The twinge of pain when she thought of Garreth wasn’t as bad as it had been. In time, she might be able to think of him without getting choked up at all. But God, she missed him. She wished with all her heart she’d been able to save him. “He’d have loved a child. He’d have even loved Ted’s child, I bet, if you’d have asked him to.”

  “Ted thinks of himself first. So do I. Or so I did. Do you think I can change?”

  “I think you’re changing already,” Hannah said.

  “Honestly?”

  “Oh yeah, honestly. I think if you want to be, you can be a great mother.” It could well be that the grown-up Dixie would be a person worth knowing. Maybe time travel had made her that. Maybe pregnancy. Maybe a combination of those and simply growing up. Teenagers always did grow up. Hannah knew that now.

  She wondered for the first time in her life if perhaps all those kids who had made her own adolescent life hell whenever she had been forced to drag her sister along had also grown up. Maybe not all, but surely some of them had. She wondered if she had made it back to a high school reunion if one or two might not have sought her out to apologize. If Dixie could talk like this, maybe that wasn’t impossible. The fantasy that they might have was every bit as much a comfort as if they actually had. No, more of a comfort. It didn’t require any awkward conversations. Just like that, Hannah forgave them.

  “I hope I can be a good mom. I don’t want to screw her up. Or him.”

  “If it’s important to you, then you’ll do it. You can do anything you put your mind to. You’re strong and you’re smart.” That had always been true of her, even when Hannah had hated her. She didn’t hate her now. She wished her the very best. It was a relief to let go of the last of the hate. She wanted to start life here anew. Maybe that’s why she was staying, in part. She could be a better Hannah here than she ever was in the 21st century.

  The last night, Ted and Laina went into town to steal a rifle and ammunition. They were back at dawn, rifle in hand, swearing they’d had no problem at all breaking in and stealing it. Claire checked it over and approved. Ted wanted to practice with it, but Claire told him to wait until they jumped. “I don’t want anyone to hear the shot and wonder where it’s coming from.”

  That morning, four hours before the timegate was set to arrive, almost everyone was there at the fire, packing up or repairing equipment. Laina was off collecting her traps and whatever they’d caught, and Rex had gone with her, but the others were all there. Claire was telling Dixie what she should carry.

  “No,” said Dixie.

  “What do you mean, no?” said Claire, sounding irritated.

  “I mean, you’ll have to find someone else to carry this stuff. I’m not going either.”

  Chapter 26

  There was stunned silence. And instead of the typical burst of overlapping voices, it remained a stunned silence for a good long time.

  “Are you sure?” Bob said. “You know what this means?”

  “I know that by the next jump forward, I’ll be five months pregnant. Running away from an animal attack might be impossible. I know that if that jump doesn’t work, or the next, if it gets us someplace worse than this, I’ll be having my baby alone. And it’ll be vulnerable, and cold, and there won’t be a doctor if it gets sick, not even Hannah because she’s staying here. I’m sure Nari would do whatever she could, and if you watched your boys being born, Bob, you might be able to help a little, but it might not be enough.”

  Hannah had an eye on Ted, who seemed entirely uninterested in this development. She wished she could read his mind. She read his silence instead. He didn’t say, “Not your baby, ours.” He didn’t say, “Then I’ll stay too.” Nor did he breathe a deep sigh of relief. Whatever he was feeling, he was keeping it well hidden.

  Or maybe he wasn’t feeling a thing.

  “You’re sure?” Claire said to Dixie.

  “I am. I’ve been thinking about it since we found out we were in this century. And when Hannah said she was staying, I was pretty sure then I’d stay too.”

  “All right, then,” Claire said. “Anybody have anything else to say?” She too glanced at Ted, who had returned to his packing. “Then let’s get Dixie’s stuff redistributed. Who can carry more?”

  Bob asked Dixie to have a private conversation, and the two of them walked off beyond earshot. Hannah continued to do what she could to help them prepare, thinking the whole time of what this news meant.

  Hannah realized, almost amused by it, that of course she’d offer to help Dixie. As hard as being a single parent was in the 21st century, in this time it’d be even harder. Feeding a child, childcare, all that would be nearly impossible without a family support system of some sort. Unless Dixie gave the baby up for adoption—and Hannah was willing to bet she would not—she’d be in a pretty dire situation. Hannah could help make it far less dire.

  Four months ago, she’d have never considered reaching a hand out to Dixie, offering to help her. But now? Now was different. She was different. Dixie was different. The circumstances had changed.

  Later, after Dixie’s gear was redistributed among the rest, Bob pulled Hannah aside and said, “She seems resolved to do this.”

  “I’ll help her if she wants.”

  “Will you? She’s no
t your favorite person.”

  “She’s not my least favorite person I’ve ever met. Not anymore. She’s changing. She’s growing up. Don’t worry about her. Or about me.”

  “I will, of course.”

  And Hannah would worry about him. That’s what caring for people did to you. “Did she give you a message to take to her family?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure how I’ll explain it. Or if I’ll ever get the chance to try.”

  “Laina is smart. She’ll probably get you there in time.” She smiled at that phrase. “If not right on the date, close to it.”

  “I might not have the time to get there if I have another heart attack. I’m already a burden on them. Might be a worse one still in coming months, and it could take us months to hit the right date.”

  “No, you aren’t a burden. They care for you. Probably ‘love’ isn’t too big a word to use. They don’t resent your being a little slower, a little older.”

  “A lot older.”

  “And Nari has aspirin and nitro pills, so you’re taken care of there. And laudanum if your pain gets too intense. But if you’re saying you want to stay here too, of course I’d love to have you. You and me and Dixie, we’d make a weird family, but that could work.”

  He shook his head. “I have to get home. I hope it doesn’t take another thirteen years to get there. I don’t think I’ll make it that long. Not without a pacemaker or bypass surgery.”

  “I hope you make it in a single pair of jumps. But you might not. Don’t overdo, and you’ll make it back to your family.”

  “I hope.”

  “I think you will. You know, part of the reason I decided to stay is that I’d like to live the prime years of my life doing something other than timegating. It’s selfish of me, I know.”

  “No, I don’t think it is. I was shocked at first, but it’s your life and your choice, and I respect you for it.”

  “Now I have a chance to make up for some of the selfishness. With Dixie.”