Chapter 11

Near one million BC.

Kathy jumped to her feet, which startled Thad as much as the alarm did. “Wait, Kathy. Just take it easy,” he said as he reached to turn the volume down until it was barely audible, “I’ll put some more wood on the fire. Maybe that will change its mind.”

As he tossed three more branches on the already blazing fire, the alarm subtly changed pitch. After he activated the tiny five-centimeter screen, they watched a dot gradually move toward its center.

“It’s coming this way,” Kathy hissed as Thad picked up his rifle.

“Just be calm, Kathy. Just because something invaded our perimeter doesn’t mean it’s going to try to come in here and eat us.”

“Be calm,” she hissed. “I would have to be crazy to be calm at a time like this. I thought you said it wouldn’t come back after you shot at it,” she insisted crossly.

Thad sighed in exasperation. It never ceased to amaze him how people heard what they wanted to hear. “I said I thought it probably wouldn’t come back for a while,” he said, as he checked his rifle and made sure the safety was off.

“That’s the same thing,” she said as she stared at the opening in the cave.

“We don’t even know if it’s the same animal,” Thad tried to reason.

“Don’t talk to me in that condescending tone,” Kathy snapped.

Kessler and his ideas! If Millie had been with me, Thad reasoned, she would have been sitting at the back of the cave with her sights lined up on the opening, saying, “Here kitty, kitty. Nice kitty, Come to Mama,” or something similar. Now Kathy wants to argue. I will admit that she checked her weapon and is sitting beside me here in the back of the cave without my having to tell her.

When the mountain above the cave prevented the animal from easily going farther in that direction, it turned and began retracing its steps. Thad had started to hope that whatever was out there would go on its way, but now with its reversal, he suspected it would investigate the cave opening. The sensors didn’t register inanimate objects, so the rocks and cave were not represented on the tiny screen, but since each of the sensors had been placed roughly the same distance apart, it was easy to see that the animal was again approaching the entrance to their shelter. As the dot slowly moved toward the center of the screen, Thad positioned himself on one knee in a sort of half-crouch with his left elbow propped on his other knee, steadying the rifle. This provided a reasonably steady platform to shoot from while allowing quick movement should he need it. When it seemed certain the animal was almost at the entrance, the dot stopped completely and remained still.

Time passed, and Thad’s legs began to cramp. He quietly repositioned himself and waited. With his peripheral vision, he could see Kathy’s gun trembling in the flickering firelight.

“Why doesn’t it come in?” she whispered.

Thad sighed. “It’s waiting. The thing is smart.”

Time crept slowly onward. Thad hoped that Kathy didn’t think to ask if he knew how big the intruder was; she was upset enough already. The dot size on the screen represented a mass that would relate to something around seven hundred pounds — at least. Probably far larger than any male lion he had ever seen in a zoo. Maybe our luck will hold, and it won’t be able to pass through the opening to get in here.

Thad got up and tossed more wood on the fire, always keeping his rifle pointed toward the entrance. Maybe whatever was out there was afraid of the fire after all — he could always hope.

As the wood blazed up, he saw moisture glistening in Kathy’s eyes. She realized he had seen, and more statement of fact than question, said, “I made a fool of myself again, didn’t I?”

Thad started to deny it, but she cut him off. “It’s just that doing something like this is so different.” At Thad’s chuckle, she said with exasperation, “Well, it is. I’ve spent the last three years working with the AI, arranging meetings, lecturing Ops on information that I gathered for them, running errands for Mr. Kessler, and things of that nature. Then I get dumped a million years down-time with the worst case of nausea I’ve ever had in my life. Then I have to hike forever to end up hiding in a hole in a mountain, and now this thing sits outside waiting to eat me.”

“But...”

“And do I have the grace to do even some of it right?” she went on. “No, of course not. I puke all over myself. You have to carry my pack. Then I go to pieces as soon as there’s a little danger.”

The tears were flowing freely now, making marks in the dust on her cheeks — dust she had gotten while sweeping the cave. He didn’t know what to say. Kathy hadn’t reacted that poorly, everything considered, and he tried to tell her so, but if anything, it just increased the volume of tears. Still, she hadn’t even sniffed. The only way he could tell she was crying was by seeing the tears. He reached over and gently squeezed her arm.

“I would tell you it will get better, but neither of us really believes that.” Oddly enough, she acted as if that helped. He had always heard, and said often enough himself, that you could never understand women. Maybe that’s part of the challenge, he mused.

Time lumbered on. Kathy got up and put another branch on the fire. Thad noted that she kept her gun pointed toward the entrance while she did it. Good. He had already told her that the animal would be faster than she would expect. As she sat back down, she said, “I only put one piece of wood on. With some of our supply outside, we might not have enough in here to last until daylight, will we?”

“No, and I didn’t bring any spare charges for the lights. I didn’t plan to use them much, and I was trying to conserve on weight,” he admonished himself. “You’re not the only one who makes mistakes. I thought the wood would easily last, but it burns faster than I anticipated. No matter, we still have our lantern.”

To her consternation, Kathy heard herself ask, “Can’t we just go outside and shoot whatever is out there?”

“Sure. But it wants us to come out. As a matter of fact, that’s precisely what it wants. That hole is small, and the front walls are slightly offset with one side farther out than the other. As big as it appears to be on the monitor, the animal would have to sort of worm its way through to get inside. I think it can get in, but it can’t jump in. If we were to step outside the entrance, we’d be on its turf, and this thing probably has reflexes that make ours look like we’re walking in molasses. We could go out shooting and probably kill it, but when we round that rock face, we’ll be right in its lap.

“We could fire out the entrance a few times, and it might leave. But it came back last time; chances are it would again. At least, this way, we know where it is. It has to come in to get us, and it can’t do that quickly. We have an advantage in addition to our modern weapons. My father used to tell me never to play the other man’s game. I think I could paraphrase that and apply it to our buddy outside. No thanks. We’ll wait in here.”

Kathy grinned and said, “What’s molasses?”

“Uh ... just an expression I picked up down-time. I don’t really know. But you get the idea.”

The monitor showed the intruder to be in the same place, probably just a few feet to the right of the entrance. Thad and Kathy had sat with little change in their position for hours, weapons in hand. They had talked for a while since the animal obviously knew they were in the cave. Conversation had eventually waned, though. Now, they just waited.

Kathy had hoped that the animal would leave, but Thad knew better. This was almost certainly a predator, probably the animal he had shot at earlier. It wanted food and was waiting until one of them stepped out the entrance or until they slept.

Thad had turned the wall lantern off to conserve its battery. Later, they watched the last remnants of the fire slowly consume itself. If there were any night sounds in the forest, the thick rock walls muffled them. Stillness reigned absolute, seeming to have a presence of its own. Even the fire had stopped crackling, and there was only the soft glow of the dying embers — still, the animal did not move.

Thad vowed he would never venture into prehistoric times without the picket equipment; it would have been a nasty shock to step out of the cave for more wood right now. And that might well have happened without the tiny monitor and the sensors. Of course, there was equipment that would have shown the animal and everything around them, but this provided what they had to have, didn’t take up much room in a pack and also had minimal weight.

Then, just before daybreak, they heard a noise when hide scraped on rock as the animal forced its way through the opening. They switched their headlamps on, the intense beams reflecting off a sleek body that was already halfway inside. Kathy saw the green laser dot from Thad’s rifle center on the animal’s head and the red dot of her pistol bouncing all around on the animal. Thad’s first shot was fired as the animal thrashed violently, trying to free itself from the narrow entrance and lunge at them. Kathy’s first shot and Thad’s second went off simultaneously. She had forced herself to wait, with her mind almost gibbering, while she got the dot on the animal’s chest. Only then had she pulled the trigger. She knew that Thad expected her to miss — would not even be considering her weapon as help against the animal. He would fire first and accurately. He is so damnably efficient. I can’t beat him, can’t even match him, but I will not miss, she had vowed to herself, even as the fear reached an almost unbelievable level.

Her ears rebelled at the intense sound reverberating in the confined space, but she now understood, intimately, why Thad had insisted on a laser/particle beam weapon; anything less and they would be dead or dying now — and shortly, the animal would have been eating them. Her eyes focused on what was left of the mangled mass that was once the animal’s head, and with her ears ringing and the smell of blood and burned flesh strong in the cave, she turned aside, gagging. When she had mastered the reflex, she was proud that she hadn’t thrown up and embarrassed herself even more. Even more important, she had fired her weapon. Fired and hit, although she knew that hitting wasn’t much of an accomplishment at such short range. Nor did it bother her that Thad’s rifle had probably, no ... definitely, she thought, been the actual killing instrument. But she had been so badly frightened that she had worried she would embarrass herself yet again, this time by freezing up when the animal charged. But she hadn’t, and of that, she was incredibly proud.

She struggled shakily to her feet and started toward the beast, not because she actually wanted to, but to try to overcome her fear. Thad’s hand shot out and roughly grabbed her arm. “No!” he said in tones that were harsher than he’d intended. “Wait a few minutes,” he said, his voice less harsh. “Oh, it’s obviously dead, all right, but you never touch an animal that big immediately after you’ve shot it. You might find out there’s just enough life left in it to take yours.”

“Is it the same kind of animal that almost killed you before?” she asked with a voice that quivered from the adrenaline in her bloodstream. She tried to hide her shaking hands as she replaced her weapon in the odd holster that seemed to cradle the gun as if it were its baby.

“I thought it was going to be, but no, it isn’t,” Thad said, turning the light away from Kathy. “It isn’t as big, either.”