Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Chapter 16

Looking down, Gabriel saw one pair of women break off and go to work on the downed bird, efficiently gutting it, cutting it into manageable chunks, and wrapping the butchered pieces in stiff brown barkcloth. One of the women spent a moment combing through the contents of the butchered bird’s stomach; Gabriel glanced away when he realized one of the discolored lumps he was looking at was the back of Nils’s head.

The rest of the women split into two groups, one surrounding the tree where Gabriel, Velda and Rue crouched, the other going across the way to the tree Millie had climbed.

One woman bent down and picked up Gabriel’s fallen Colt, examining it with great curiosity. Another began to gather up the scattered packs and bundles, poking at their contents as if the packs, too, were entrails to be sorted through.

“What should we do?” Velda whispered.

“Well,” Gabriel replied. “They don’t look overtly hostile.”

“They’ve got spears and clubs,” Rue said. “How much more overt do you get?”

“They saved our lives,” Gabriel reminded her. After a moment, he said, “I’m going down.”

He lowered himself slowly, avoiding any sudden movements. When he reached the bottom the women crowded in closer, spears in hand. They didn’t raise the weapons, however. Rather, they reached out to touch him with their free hands, their palms and fingers traveling over his face and body without any trace of shyness.

“Hello,” he said. “Thank you for what you did. We are very grateful.” He tried this out in several languages—English, French, Chinese, Russian—but he didn’t see the faintest glimmer of comprehension. Throughout, the women continued reaching out to touch, to probe, as though trying to figure out just what sort of creature he might be. “Ladies, if I might—”

One of them said something to him in a melodic, unfamiliar language and took him by the wrist, started pulling him toward the road. He limped after her, one foot clad only in a thermal sock. He saw his fallen boot resting at the base of a nearby tree and broke away to get it. “If you’ll excuse me—”

Two of the women raised their spears in his path, crossing them in front of his face. “My boot,” Gabriel said. “For my foot. Over there.” He pointed, first at the boot, then at his foot, and then at the boot again. They didn’t seem to understand the words, but his gestures were clear enough and finally the women raised their spears and let him through. The boot was slimy with the bird’s foul-smelling saliva. When he sat down to pull it on, the women resumed their exploration of his body, one of them tugging at his hair as he bent forward, another lifting the collar of his shirt to peer inside.

Gabriel stood again and—as gently as he could—disengaged from the probing hands.

He looked back at the tree where Velda and Rue still sat, hidden among the branches. “Well, I don’t think they want to hurt us,” Gabriel said.

“That’s good enough for me,” Millie said, and he dropped down from his tree with a crash. The huntresses who’d been waiting at the base of the tree drew closer in a tight circle around him and began subjecting him to much the same scrutiny that Gabriel had endured.

“All right,” Rue said. “Let ’em pick over me. Just as long as they get us to that plane.”

But when she climbed down with Velda close behind, Gabriel realized just how wrong he was about the mysterious huntresses. Rue and Velda were instantly surrounded by spear points. One of the blonde women snaked a bronzed arm around Rue’s throat and pressed the blade of a stone knife up under her chin.

“Don’t!” Gabriel cried, palms out. “Wait…”

Another blonde grabbed Gabriel’s wrists. He shook off her grip, but the woman with the knife at Rue’s throat pressed it harder against her skin, drawing blood. She said something in the melodic tongue, which suddenly didn’t sound very friendly at all.

The one who’d grabbed at his wrists seized them again, and this time Gabriel let her. He felt his hands being bound tightly behind his back and the empty holster being unbuckled from around his waist. He could have resisted, could have fought—but not with a knife at Rue’s throat. He saw that Millie, too, was being bound, with a double length of thick rope at his wrists and ankles. They tied Gabriel’s ankles as well, and then roped his to Millie’s, linking them like members of a chain gang. Velda and Rue were bound together in a similar fashion, after which the women gathered up the meat and the scattered gear and then prodded their captives at spear point to urge them forward along the path.

“Not overtly hostile,” Rue grumbled under her breath, and the woman beside her gave her a jab in the shoulder with the tip of her spear.

“Things could be worse,” Gabriel said.

“How do you figure that?” Millie said.

“They could’ve killed us already,” Gabriel said. “They must want us alive for some reason.” Then he got a jab in the shoulder himself and shut up.

Gabriel could smell wood smoke. A pulsing beat of distant drums seemed to beckon them onward as they padded before their silent captors through the humid jungle. Clearly they were heading for some kind of encampment or village. Gabriel tried to crane his neck backward to make sure Velda and Rue were all right, but his own personal guard, a tall, leggy specimen with her hair pulled back in a tight, beaded knot, used the flat of her spear’s blade to turn his face back to the trail ahead. Again, Gabriel took some comfort from the gesture. She might have used the point.

Several minutes later, they took a right-hand fork in the path and shortly arrived at a clearing in the jungle. The clearing was filled with round, thatched huts arranged around a single larger structure at the center that towered over the others. Its woven bark walls and high, slanting roof were extensively decorated with pictograms and colorful patterns of dots not unlike native Australian art. Surrounding the massive triangular door was an arch composed of skulls. The one at the peak clearly came from the same species of massive bird that had attacked the team. Also included were several toothy, long-jawed Tasmanian tiger skulls, a pair from what looked to be some kind of crocodile, and most disturbingly, a number of human skulls. The drumming stopped as they stepped into the clearing.

The entire population of the village, it seemed, came rushing out to marvel at them. Or more specifically at Gabriel and Millie. Rue and Velda were kept at the rear of the line and were utterly ignored other than by the huntresses standing guard beside them. All the town’s inhabitants, though, clustered around Gabriel and Millie, jostling each other for a closer look. Strangely, they all seemed to be female, most ranging in age from what looked like their twenties to their fifties. There were also a handful of younger women, in their late teens perhaps, as well as two very old women who, though thinner and taller than most Australian aborigines, had similar facial features: dark eyes, dark skin imprinted with a variety of faded blue tattoos. Several of the older women had brown or reddish hair, but the younger ones more or less all fit the profile of the hunting party: blonde hair, blue eyes; full lips, proud noses; lithe builds, with long, muscular legs. Of the approximately two dozen women in the village, there was only one girl who looked preadolescent, a skinny child of eight or nine. Clearly their geographic isolation had resulted in severe inbreeding, and apparently not much breeding at all in the past decade. But then, Gabriel wondered, how could they be breeding at all? Where were the men?

One of the brown-haired women gave a command and the hunting party split in two. One half led Rue and Velda away toward the nearest hut while the other urged Gabriel and Millie around to the opposite side.

“I don’t like this,” Millie said.

“Try to keep an open mind,” Gabriel said, but he looked back at Velda’s retreating figure with more than a little anxiety.

Their destination proved to be a small domed hut on the edge of the jungle, far from all the rest of the buildings. An anatomically detailed pictograph above the doorway made it clear that they were being taken to the men’s quarters. Which at least answered one question: at least now they knew there were men’s quarters. The tanned tiger-skin flap covering the door was lifted and the guards used their spears to prod the two of them into entering.

Once inside, Gabriel’s nose was assaulted by a uniquely awful odor. Like a combination of burnt hair and rusted metal and bile. It was dark inside the hut except for a small, guttering fire in a shallow pit ringed by smooth river stones. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the gloom but when they did, he realized they were not alone.

Several figures were huddled on the far side of the hut. At first glance, Gabriel took them for children because of their size but once he’d gone up to them and looked more closely he realized that they were adults. All male and all suffering from some kind of wasting disease. They’d lost almost all their hair; few had more than a tooth or two in their withered jaws; and their bodies were shrunken and emaciated, like puppets built from sticks and paper. Their heads lolled on weak, scrawny necks and their sunken eyes peered at Gabriel and Millie hopelessly. A white-haired woman was squatting beside one of them and spooning some kind of steaming mush into his mouth.

“Jesus,” Millie whispered. “What the hell is wrong with them?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel replied.

“I sure hope it’s not contagious,” Millie said.

The old woman looked up at them, then set down her mush and picked up her sickly patient like he was made of feathers. She carried him into an area in the back, behind a woven partition, and then proceeded to do the same, one by one, with each of her other apathetic charges until Gabriel and Millie were alone by the fire.

The old woman departed without a word, leaving Millie and Gabriel to contemplate their situation.

Gabriel twisted his bound wrists, but found to his dismay that the slightest movement caused the rough bark rope to cinch tighter. It might be possible, though extremely difficult, for them to run with their hands tied and their ankles bound together—but how could they make it past the armed guards? And what about Rue and Velda?

“So,” Millie said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t,” Gabriel replied. “Not yet. I was prepared to find all sorts of things up here—but not this.”

“Well, while you’re re-preparing,” Millie said, “maybe we can find something sharp to use on these ropes. Maybe in that basket over there…?”

“Worth a try,” Gabriel said. “Ready?”

“Right,” Millie said.

Together they moved across the room, taking only the tiny steps allowed by the rope that bound their ankles. They staggered together and apart, struggling to synch their steps so as to put the least amount of tension on the rope between them. It took them the better part of five minutes to make it to the lidded oval basket on the far side of the room.

“On three,” Gabriel said. “One, two…”

They dropped to their knees in unison. Gabriel leaned in and used an elbow to knock the lid off the basket.

Inside, there was a strange assortment of items. A pocket-sized Russian/English dictionary. A rusted compass. A tiny, battered doll with matted hair. A silver pocket watch with Hebrew letters engraved on the case.

“If we needed any more proof that we’re not the first outsiders to stumble across this place,” Gabriel said, “I think we just found it.”

“Well, then, how come word’s never gotten out?” Millie asked.

The two of them looked down at the heap of trinkets and neither spoke. They both knew the answer to Mil-lie’s question; it was obvious. Clearly the people who’d found this place before them hadn’t made it out alive. Gabriel thought of the human skulls decorating the doorway to the building at the center of the village and felt a shudder course through him. He had to get the team out of this situation, and soon.

Millie rotated so he was facing away from the basket and bent backward, allowing his bound hands to reach the pile of objects. Gabriel watched as he dug through it. “Couldn’t one of them have been carrying a Swiss Army Knife? A nail file, at least?”

“Nothing?” Gabriel said.

Millie came back upright, an object clutched in his hands—the pocket watch. Gabriel saw that the letters engraved on the case were a chai, the Hebrew word for life.

“This one’s metal, at least. Maybe with the edge…”

Millie pressed the catch on the side with one thumbnail while Gabriel strained to bring his arms into reach. But Gabriel stopped straining when the cover of the watch swung open and he saw the black-and-white photograph on the inside. It showed a bearded man embracing a little girl with wild hair and a big smile. Gabriel knew that smile.

“It’s Velda,” Gabriel said. “This must have been her father’s.”

Gabriel bent as close as possible to read the faded handwriting at the bottom of the photo.

Happy 65^th (the age when other fathers retire…) Love, Velda

Gabriel told Millie what it said.

“Think he might still be alive?” Millie asked.

“If he were,” Gabriel said, “I think he’d be in here with us.”

Gabriel reached out to take the watch from Millie. Velda needed to see this—it might be as close as they’d get to fulfilling the purpose of their mission. Before he was able to slip it into one of the pouch like pockets of his thermal briefs, though, the hide over the hut’s entrance rose noisily and two young women appeared. He palmed the watch shut and closed his fist around it.