Hell Pig (Dawn of Mammals Book 3) Read online

  Jodi said, “There’s plenty of grass to weave into cordage.”

  The grass was too dry for that, Hannah thought, but she couldn’t move herself to speak the thought aloud. No matter. If they found water, they’d find wet enough grass, too.

  Bob said, “On to animals then. There are really big animals, the first rhinos. There’s this thing called the Uintathores robustum, which is the size of a hippo.”

  “Predator?” Ted asked.

  “No, a grazer, but you wouldn’t want it to sit on you. It weighs close to five thousand pounds. And there’s the brontothere, too, another fat grazer that might trample us.”

  “What are the predators, then?” Ted said.

  “There are a lot—and that’s just what we know of. There are hyaenodons, of various sizes, from ten pounds on up to a hundred. There are nimravids, though smaller than the ones we encountered before. Think more bobcat-sized than tiger-sized. And they don’t look very much like cats yet. There are packs of dogs, early dogs like hesperocyons, which will look closer to weasels to our eyes, I think, than dogs.”

  “Is there anything to eat? Animal-wise, I mean?” Ted asked.

  “Plenty. Oreodonts, eohippus, all sorts of deer-like critters,” Bob said.

  “No horses,” Jodi said, sounding miserable. “I couldn’t eat horses.”

  There was silence. Hannah knew they were all thinking of Garreth again, and his taming of the Paleocene horse he had named Traveller. And they were all thinking, she had no doubt, of Dixie’s cruelty to Garreth when it died.

  Memories like that erased any shame Hannah felt over hitting Dixie. And they just made her miss Garreth more.

  “Anyway,” Bob said, clearing his throat. “Once again, water is the trick to that. In a world this dry, animals will go to the water, at dawn and at dusk, and maybe all day long, to drink. It’s there we’ll hunt.”

  Rex said, “But so will the predators, right?”

  “Some of them,” Bob said. “So we need to find water and build a shelter and keep a fire going.”

  Hannah cleared her throat. “Wildfire risk.”

  “Sure,” said Bob. “It’s dry here, so we’ll be careful about that.”

  Hannah was relieved when she felt the attention of the others shift back to him. She really wanted to be alone, with no eyes on her, no judging stares, no looks of sadness.

  Bob went on. “We’ll have to build a fire ring carefully, and cut down all the fuel around it. We don’t want to set the world around us on fire, that’s for sure.”

  “So how do we find this water?” Dixie said the first words she had said in front of Hannah in twenty-four hours.

  Bob said, “I guess the hill your group saw is the best chance. Anyone else see anything that looked like a hopeful sign?”

  No one spoke up.

  “For now, let’s rest, then. We’ll get moving again late, about three.”

  “That means we sleep again without any shelter,” Claire said. “Is that safe?”

  “No,” Bob said. “We can light a fire if we find fuel, which might help drive off predators. But for one more night, at least, we are going to have to chance sleeping under the stars. So full watches again, two people at once.”

  For the next four hours, they sat still as the sun rose to zenith and beyond. The kids went out in pairs to relieve themselves, though not often, for no one had so much liquid left in their body that there was much left to urinate out. Hannah kept an eye on her hands, where she had tested the medicine bush. She thought the sage plant might be okay for flavoring, though it wouldn’t provide much in the way of calories and went ahead and tried it on her free hand. Her other hand had stopped being numb, but the effect had lasted a good while. Fifteen minutes, maybe, and then it faded out over an hour more.

  When she felt like talking again, she’d mention the plant to Bob. And she hadn’t told him much about the animals she had seen, either.

  At some level, she knew she had to get a grip on herself, to start functioning again, but she couldn’t. When her mind drifted, it drifted to Garreth’s last moments, and to her moments alone with his broken body on the shelf of rock. She tried to remember instead other scenes from his time with her. Taming the horse. When he’d had his feelings hurt by Dixie. Back in the saber tooth’s time, when he’d been as brave as any of them fighting off the animal. She tried to remember what he’d said about his family. He had two parents, still together, she thought, but she didn’t remember if he’d mentioned siblings or not. If they ever got back to modern times, she’d have to tell the parents.

  And what would she tell them? Everything? Of his terrible death? No, she wouldn’t. Nor would she mention stripping his body of clothes. She’d only talk of his bravery, and his decency, and say he had died a hero, which he had.

  He hadn’t been the one of them with the least fear. That was surely Ted, who jumped in before he thought, and seemed to have not much awareness of his own mortality. But for those of them who were more timid by nature—Nari, Zach, Rex—every time they fought, every time they hunted, it was an act of profound bravery. The more scared you were, the more brave you had to be to act in spite of the fear.

  Garreth had been brave. She realized she was crying again, and she really shouldn’t. It wasn’t bringing him back, and it was draining her body of water she didn’t have to spare. Stop it. It’s self-indulgence. She forced herself to silently add numbers again, to force her mind from the grief.

  The day was still warm when they broke down the blanket shelter and packed it away. Everyone took up their spears—and the one club—and walked together to the west.

  At dusk, they stopped in the lee of a hill to stay out of the dry wind that had picked up. All of them had gathered up what sticks and dried dung they had seen while walking. They built a small fire and set their night watch. Tired after last night’s sleepless hours and the hike, Hannah fell asleep quickly. She was woken up several hours later to take her watch.

  When she had built up the fire, a number of insects came to the light. She was surprised to see a bat swoop upon them for a meal. Before this moment, she had no idea bats had been on the earth for so long.

  In the distance, she heard a howl. A second answered it. The early dogs that Bob had mentioned? Or something else? They were a long ways off, whatever they were, but the sound was a reminder. Out there somewhere, animals with fangs and claws were hunting other animals.

  Human animals would make them as good a meal as any other.

  Chapter 3

  The instant the eastern sky began to show some color, Hannah rose and walked into the grass, feeling for dew. The thirst was terrible now. None of them had anything to drink yesterday and the walk through the dry world had cost them moisture. Her mouth felt tacky, her tongue swollen. Even a mouthful of dew soaked into the bandana would help.

  But though she got down on hands and knees and felt around carefully, in five different spots, there wasn’t a hint of moisture.

  They got moving quickly, to take advantage of the coolest hours of daylight and approached the top of the hill soon after 8:00. All ten of them stood and scanned in every direction. But there was no sign of water. Not a patch of green trees, not a line of blue, not a low-hanging fog.

  All they could see was dry grass, and another hill to the west, higher.

  Ted said, “I guess we should climb that one, too.”

  “Without water?” Dixie said.

  Her voice still set Hannah’s teeth on edge.

  Bob said, “Yes, without water. We need to find some, and I can’t think of any better way to do that than to find the highest land and spot some in the distance. Hannah? Any better ideas?”

  When the kids all turned to her, she felt herself shrinking back, not wanting their stares, or their expectations of her. She just wanted to be left alone.

  But it was not to be. They climbed down the slope of the hill, and Bob fell behind until he was walking alongside her. “Slow up,” he said. “I want to talk.�
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  Hannah did not. But she could think of no way to refuse that didn’t require talking.

  When Claire turned to glance at them and came to a stop, Bob waved her on ahead. She got the message, and she hurried to catch up to the main group.

  Bob, speaking softly enough that the conversation was private, said, “Hannah, you need to snap out of it.”

  Right. Like it was that easy. She shook her head.

  “I know you’re sad. I’m sad. We’re all sad. Garreth’s loss—” he shook his head and bit his lips, taking a moment before finishing “—his death is a terrible loss. Everyone feels it. And I know you feel it deeply because you feel responsible for it.”

  “I am responsible,” she said.

  “Because you emerged as our leader? I’m a leader too, you know. I tell those parents when their kids are in class with me, when they go on a field trip with me, that I’ll keep them safe. I failed. I failed Garreth, and I failed his parents, who as you can imagine from the person he was, are very nice people. They’ll be devastated. What you feel? That’s not one percentage of what they’ll feel. And I feel like crap, too.” His voice had risen, and he took a moment to calm himself with some deep breaths.

  Hannah was grateful for the silence.

  Ahead, a black bird flew from her left to her right, dipping down, then flapping hard to get up again, then dipping. It spied a bush and made for it, settling down, making the branch bounce slowly.

  “So can you?” Bob asked.

  “Can I what?”

  “Hannah!” He spoke loudly enough that Claire’s head half-turned toward them again. “Can you get it together? We need your skills. We need you fully present. There are dangers here. We’re lucky we haven’t encountered any animals yet.”

  “I did.”

  “What? And you didn’t think to tell us?”

  She shrugged.

  “What were they?”

  She described the animals she had seen close up.

  “Maybe pantodonts,” he said. “But I’m not sure. They weren’t aggressive at all?”

  She shook her head. The bird she had noticed took off from the bush, flying on to the north, becoming a speck in the blue sky.

  “Okay, fine. Take the rest of the walk to be like this. But I expect you to snap yourself out of it by the time we settle down to rest for the hot part of the day. Figure out something useful to tell the group. Something about water or defense or shelter. They’re wearing down. Make them feel hope. Make them want to keep walking, despite their thirst, and tiredness, and grief. Got it?”

  She nodded. She understood what he was saying. But she feared she had run out of pep talks.

  Before noon, they stopped, and they set up the sunshades again. There were a few clouds gathering in the western sky, and it looked as if they might develop into rain clouds, in time.

  The way her tongue felt in her mouth, it had better not be much time. The thirst was beginning to take up more of her thoughts than her internal berating of herself, than her memories of Garreth, than the grief. Over the morning the thirst had grown from nagging to demanding to overwhelming.

  She said, after the shelter was set, “We need not to talk. Talking dries out our mouths even more. So just sit here, and we’ll wait for the heat to pass. Maybe the clouds will block the sun, if we’re lucky.”

  Bob leaned forward and shot her a dirty look. She could read his expression: “That’s it?”

  It was all she had in her.

  The clouds did build, and they covered the sun, and they were able to get going again by 2:00 that afternoon.

  The crest of the next hill drew closer and closer.

  Ted was ahead, no more than twenty yards from the hillcrest when the first animal came racing over and straight at him.

  Chapter 4

  The animal looked medium-sized at first. But as it swerved toward Ted, she realized it wasn’t. The creature had a long, long snout, and a humped back like a bison’s, and a darker patch of bristled fur that ran down its spine. It had hooves that pounded the dry grass, kicking up dust, and as it opened its mouth, she saw the rows of thick but sharp teeth.

  Definitely not a grazing animal.

  Had it gone for anyone but Ted, she feared she might have witnessed another death. But Ted was a terrific natural athlete, and as it bore down on him, he leapt to the side, hitting the ground and rolling up without a pause, his spear in his hands.

  “There are more!” he yelled. The kids had all frozen for a moment at the animal’s charge, and now they gripped their spears and made ready for a fight, some of them pairing up back to back, and some lunging for the creature, who was trying to slow for a turn, but it had so much momentum it kept on going.

  Nari seemed frozen in place. She had her spear gripped at port arms, but she didn’t move as the animal came toward her. Jodi took three fast steps and hauled back with her club and swung it at the animal’s head.

  The crack was loud, but it didn’t fell the animal. It kept moving, swerving away from Jodi only a few inches. From the other side, Rex grabbed Nari’s arm and yanked her, barely getting her out of the way of the charging monster.

  “Monster” did not seem much of an exaggeration as the thing came Hannah’s way. Not until it was this close had she noticed it had bizarre flanges on its neck, jutting bone that made its face even uglier than it had seemed from a distance. She made ready with her spear, but as it came at her, it decided to veer away. Maybe it feared another crack on the head like Jodi had given it.

  “Four!” called Zach. “There are four of them!”

  Hannah made sure the animal was still moving away from the group before turning to see what was happening behind her. Zach was just finishing spearing one of them in the flank. It kept running and snatched the spear out of Zach’s hands, and kept going, not slowed at all, but now sporting what looked like a second tail.

  The next two decided to bypass the group, swerving off toward the north, just under the crest of the hill on this side.

  Hannah had just begun to relax, willing her pounding heart to slow, when over the hill, came the biggest animal she had ever seen outside of a zoo.

  “Uintathere,” yelled Bob. “It’s not a hunter.”

  Who the hell cared if it was a hunter or not? It was the size of an elephant, or bigger, and she could feel the ground shake as it ran after the fleeing—whatever they were. Humpy-flangy things.

  This creature was no more lovely than they. Uglier, if that was possible. It had six—no, eight—horns on its head. Tiny eyes. Otherwise, it looked very much like a hippo, but the head design was out of some nightmare. It was the kind of thing the really weird boy in junior high would draw in his notebook, seeing how many different kinds of horns he could stick on one head.

  The horns were all blunt, but still, with the force of that mass behind them, they could easily crush the skull of any of the kids.

  “Stay away from it!” she yelled.

  “No shit!” said Jodi.

  The kids were scrambling around to the left, out of the way of the animals. Ted had reached the crest of the hill.

  He turned around and said, “It has a baby. I mean, it’s a big baby, but that must be the mom.”

  “Stay away from it!” Hannah had a horrible image of the kids, curious, getting between a raging half-ton mother and its young. “Everybody, run that way!” She pointed and began trotting to the south herself, hoping to set a good example.

  The angry mother seemed to be satisfied it had driven off the hunting group of four animals, and it wheeled. It charged at the kids, and Hannah swung around, speeding up, running to cut it off, but with no idea at all what she could do to help when she got there. Get trampled to death, she supposed. She could feel each of the big animal’s footfalls in her body, rattling her leg bones.

  But when it saw they were all moving away but Hannah—and pretty darned fast, too—it seemed to be satisfied with one feint. It went back over the crest of the hill.

 
; Ted was still up there, though he had backpedaled well to the south. “It’s sniffing the baby, making sure it’s okay.”

  Dixie ran up the slope to join him. “It’s almost cute,” she said, “in a hideous sort of way.”

  Ted said, “To them, we’re probably ugly.”

  “You, maybe,” Dixie said, with a theatrical, disdainful look down Ted’s tall form.

  Ted wasn’t Garreth, though. He was a good-looking kid who knew it, and Dixie’s disdain touched him not at all. He just gave her a grin and loped back to join the others.

  Hannah waved them to keep going south. She wanted to get away from both the big ugly animal and the small ugly animals.

  “Wow, so you knew about that big one, Mr. O’Brien?” Zach said. “And everybody keep an eye out for a good tall sapling. I need a new spear.”

  “I knew about both of them,” Bob said. “I forgot to mention the others.”

  “They’re hunters, then? Predators?” asked Claire.

  “The smaller ones are, and good scavengers, too, we think. Those are called entelodonts.”

  “ ‘Dont’ is tooth, I get that,” said Rex. “What’s the other part mean?”

  “Perfect. Or complete.”

  “Perfect-tooth,” said Rex. “So, like, the most efficient predator ever?”

  “Maybe not the most,” Bob said. “But close.”

  “I can’t memorize all these names,” Jodi said. “Especially not if we’re going to change entire ecosystems every four weeks. Do they have nicknames?”

  Bob said, “Not the uintatheres, not that I know of. But the entelodonts, yeah.”

  Jodi said, “What’s the nickname?”

  “Terminator pig,” Bob said. “Or hell pig.”

  “Hell pig,” said Jodi. “That’s just terrific.”

  Chapter 5

  Hannah had crossed the line of the group to meet with Ted up at the crest of the hill. She looked back to the north, on both sides. The hell pigs were nowhere to be seen. The uin—whatever (Jodi was right, they needed a nickname) and her young were slowly making their way down the hill to the west.