Chapter 9

Though the Water of Life made it possible for us to forgo eating, it did not prevent us from eating. Therefore, I asked Jim to organize a massive fried chicken dinner for us in two days and to make sure that all of the feathers were saved. That was where I planned to get my bolt fletching. Adhesive would be easy to come by from a similar steak dinner supplied by the multitude of wild cattle wandering all around this section of Florida.

As expected, the machine shop in the mechanical engineering school supplied me with the tools I needed for making points for the bolts. A couple of the teenaged boys were interested in helping me with that job, so we spent three days making up a simple die for a leaf-shaped point to be made of sheet steel. There were still plenty of old cars around the campus, so we would be able to get all of the sheet steel we needed from them.

I had settled on a simple triangular point that could be made by bending a rectangle of sheet steel across a line from opposite diagonal corners. A recess for the shaft of the bolt could be formed at the same time the sheet steel was bent, so it would be easy to knock out dozens of points an hour. My idea was to slip the shaft of the bolt into the recess. That way the shaft could be pulled from the wound, leaving behind the steel point.

The bolt could be rebuilt by simply slipping another point over the end of the shaft. It would be so easy to make points that we could afford to leave the point buried in the flesh. If we had time and inclination, we could cut the point free, but that would not be necessary. We could make up thousands of points before we left Gainesville and simply take them with us.

Gainesville would be the perfect place to train my crossbowmen before we left to head north into South Carolina. Tentatively, I wanted 27 crossbowmen, and my initial plan was to have them all be women. The catch was going to be finding 27 women strong enough to cock the bow. At the moment, I was planning to use the cocking technique that depended on leg strength. Two hooks were worn on the belt that were slipped under the bowstring.

A foot was used to hold the front end of the crossbow down while the crossbowman stood up and used her leg strength to pull up the bowstring and bend the bow. Once she was standing, she could slip the bowstring over the retainer and slip the two hooks loose from the bowstring. The crossbow was now cocked and all one had to do was to drop the bolt into place, aim, and shoot. With a little practice, an aimed shot could be fired every 5-8 seconds. It could be done even faster with some experience.

Why was I choosing women for this job? I didn’t know for sure, I was just following a hunch. It was worth a try, and if it didn’t work, I could bring in men to learn the job.

It took about a week to get everything arranged. We set up a production line for manufacturing the points and the bolts as separate jobs. The idea was that any bolt shaft would match any point, and that was our aim. The first 100 we made all fit the criteria, so I was happy. We would keep at it until there was a need to change.

As an experiment, I had some shafts fletched with the feathers in line with the axis of the shaft and some fletched with the feathers at an angle to impart a spin to the bolt. I hoped that a spin-stabilized bolt would be more accurate, and I was going to set up an experiment to check that out.

Once everything was ready for the experiment, I clamped a crossbow in place in a fixture that would keep it from shifting even while it was being cocked. A target was set up 50 yards away, and I made some trial shots. I fired three bolts with inline fletching followed by three bolts with the inclined fletching. It was easy to see the latter bolts spin because of the sunlight glinting off the point.

Dammit, at 50 yards, there was no difference in the two kinds of fletching. I tried the test again with a different set of bolts and produced the same result. My conclusion was that we could stick with the conventional fletching because my idea was not worth the effort. Oh, well, win some-lose some. I figured that 50 yards was likely to be the limit of our shooting range in a fight, and anything that had not happened at 50 yards was not going to happen any sooner. Anyway, I scrapped the idea of the inclined fletching and told everybody to glue on the feathers the easy way. That did make the assembly of the bolts go a little faster, so it was an advantage.

We set up some targets at 10 yards and at 25 yards and had any woman who was interested take a try at shooting a crossbow. Once they had grasped the concept of the bolt dropping as it was fired, most of the women did pretty well. I picked the top 27 shooters to be the crossbowmen and started an intensive training campaign. The women were entirely adequate with the crossbow within three weeks, so I figured that we were ready to face demons. That was going to be the final test.

Everything was ready, so we packed up and headed north. We headed toward Jacksonville to pick up I 95. We would follow that all the way to Florence, SC. At this point, my plan was to turn west from Florence to head for Columbia and Greenville. Hopefully, by that time we would have recruited a large force and defeated a significant number of the demons. Well, we were going to give it a try.

We met a few demons on the way to Jacksonville, but not enough to engage in a decent battle. However, we did get a chance to try out the crossbows. They worked quite well, and we were able to recover about half of the points and 95% of the shafts. It was no fun cutting out the points or washing off the blood, but it was something that had to be done.

We did manage to interrupt a Pit Ceremony before we left Florida. Dammit, the slaughter had already started before we got there, but we were able to save over half of the human potential victims. That was 114 people, and everyone of them joined us. Fortunately, we had enough weapons for everybody, so that was not a problem.

This turned out to be not so much a battle as a slaughter of our own. For some reason we never could understand, the demons seemed to be mesmerized by the ceremony and never put up much of a fight. We found them sitting in a large amphitheater, and they hardly moved from the seats as we walked through them stabbing with our pikes and swinging our sabers.

The crossbowmen wiped out the demons down in the “pit” while everybody else went after the demons in the stands. The crossbowmen killed 39 demons in the pit while the rest of us took care of what I estimated to be on the order of 400-450 demons in the stands. Even with the boost from the Water of Life, we were still tired after we finished our work in the amphitheater. Not a single demon escaped us that day! We wondered if the reason that we had seen so few demons was because so many of them had come to witness the ceremony? Well, we would never know for sure.

We burned everything associated with the ceremony, including the demons we killed. I don’t know if that made any difference to the demons, but it sure made us humans feel better. That battle, such as it was, was enough to keep our spirits singing all the way to Florence.

We found the Florence depository and took all of the pikes, most of the swords, and a lot of the knives. There were no crossbows there, but we did not expect to find any, so we were not disappointed. We had been on the road for several weeks, and we needed a break. We found a large hotel in Florence that was in unusually good condition, so we moved in.

We now had 473 members of our army, and most of them were couples. There were still no children for various reasons, but we did have a reasonable collection of teenagers. They were treated as adults, and they acted as adults once they understood that no exceptions were going to be made for them just because of their age. Yes, none of these couples were formally married as existed in my dimension, but they were fully committed to each other. I saw no reason to mess up a good thing.