The Forever Engine (19 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

October 9, 1888, The Lim River valley, Serbia

We kept the fire going, built it up, and had no more trouble from the animals.

Others straggled in over the course of the next hour, more than I thought would have survived. We’d been the Tail-End Charlies, so most of the animals had concentrated on us at first. When we kicked their asses, the flock, or pack, or whatever, lost a lot of its enthusiasm for the hunt. Many of our survivors had thrown away their rifles and packs. Gordon was among those who came in, but he didn’t have anything to say at first. At least he still had his pack.

Gabrielle and I had matching bites on our left arms, and she had a slash in her left thigh. She had been wearing her long overcoat over her riding habit, so the teeth hardly broke the skin, but the long knifelike spur on the bird’s foot had sliced through her overcoat, skirt, riding breeches, and into her thigh. If not for all those layers, the wound might have killed or crippled her.

I made her take off the coat and black jacket, rolled up the blood-stained sleeve of her blouse, cleaned the wound with rubbing alcohol, and then wrapped it with a clean linen bandage, both from her own haversack. I did the same with her thigh, first cutting away that leg of her breeches up to the hip. The slash looked deep, but it wasn’t bleeding all that badly so I just bandaged it good and tight. I pulled off my coat, and she bandaged my arm. I made sure we cleaned all the wounds thoroughly; the last thing we needed out here was an infection.

“You got any antibiotic cream or powder in that first-aid kit?”

“I do not know what that is,” she answered.

“No, I was afraid of that.”

We had two animal carcasses close by the fire, and we looked them over. They were like the biggest wild turkeys, or maybe fighting cocks, you could imagine, probably seventy or eighty pounds each, but with much thicker, more muscular legs and broader feet. They didn’t have beaks so much as long, bony snouts lined with small, sharp teeth. Their heads were too big for birds, though, and featured a flaring transverse crest across the back of their skulls which reminded me of the hood of a triceratops, but in feathers.

Their forearms bore a pretty complete set of long feathers, but nowhere near enough for flight. The substantial and muscular forearms ended in grasping talons. Their main weapons were the long, knifelike spurs on their hind legs, the ones which almost got Gabrielle and sliced up one of the Marines badly. The giveaway, though, was the tail, long and thin and about a meter long, as long as the rest of the bird’s body.

Neither the Brits nor the Bavarians had ever seen anything remotely like them. I had. Sarah had gone through a dinosaur phase, and that meant
I’d
gone through a dinosaur phase. I’d taken her to the Field Museum for the opening of a new exhibit on the late Cretaceous period a few years back. It included the first reconstructions of
Velociraptor mongoliensis
after the fossil finds that established it was feathered. The ones in adventure films were featherless and always larger, about man-sized, I guess for dramatic effect, which was over twice as big as the real animals. These carcasses weren’t that big, but they were bigger than the
V. mongoliensis
Sarah and I had seen, and the heads looked different, shorter and wider. Maybe they were a related species, like
dromaeosaurus,
or maybe something I’d never seen—something nobody from my
time
had ever seen. Who cared? They were night predators, hunted in packs, and were plenty big enough for me.

The fire burned smoky from the damp wood, and the wind kept changing, blowing the smoke in our faces no matter where we sat. Gabrielle and I got our coats back on and sat together, shoulder to shoulder, near enough to the fire to catch its warmth but far enough the smoke wasn’t too bad. At least when the wind gusted around we had time to close our eyes and hold our breath.

We hadn’t had a real meal since morning, and once the raptors—I couldn’t help thinking of them that way—seemed done for the night, some of the men started eating. None of us considered roasting one of the dead animals, interestingly enough.

I took a tin of bully beef from my haversack and Gabrielle and I shared it, pulling strings of the greasy corned beef from the can with our fingers and spreading them on hardtack. It gave me an entirely new appreciation for MREs.

Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?

Somebody got a kettle going, and O’Mara came around with two tin cups of tea for us and knelt in the grass beside me. The tea was sweet with sugar and evaporated milk, almost overpowering the flavor of the tea itself, but it hit the spot all the same.

“One of my lot’s still missin’,” O’Mara said. “Don’t know about the Fritzes. Don’t think their sergeant has done a count.”

“Okay. Thanks for keeping me up to date, but you need to make a report to Captain Gordon.”

O’Mara looked over toward Gordon, standing by himself at the edge of the light circle, and spat.

“Corporal, things are going to get worse here. I’m betting they’re going to get lots worse. Undercutting Gordon might give you some personal satisfaction, but it won’t keep your men alive.”

“The men’ll follow you, sir.”

“Well, thank you for saying that, but the Bavarians won’t, and we need them. All that keeps them here are their orders to work with Gordon.”

O’Mara thought that over, chewed on it like a piece of gristle he was reluctant to swallow, but eventually he nodded.

“As you say, sir. You want me to talk to the Fritz sergeant?”

“No, I will. He outranks you. He probably won’t take an ass-chewing from you all that well.”

That got a smile from him. He rose and walked across the firelit circle to Gordon, came to attention, saluted, and gave a report I could see but not hear. I looked around the circle until I located Melzer.

“I’ll be back,” I told Gabi.

I walked over to him. He and a knot of his men smoked their clay pipes and cast sour, resentful looks across the fire at Gordon.

“Can we talk?” I said as soon as I faced him.

“Talk here,” he answered, his jaw thrust out farther than normal.

“How many men did you lose?”

“Too
verdammt
many, thanks to your officer.”

The three other Bavarians with him nodded and murmured their agreement.

“How many?”

He hesitated, then looked at his companions.

“
Heinrich ging unten,”
one of them said.

“Gerhard auch,”
said another.

“Nein, ist Gerhard hier,”
Melzer answered.
“Wo ist Burkhardt?”

“Corporal O’Mara has already taken roll and reported to Captain Gordon,” I said. “He is a good noncommissioned officer who remembers his duty.”

“Duty to him?” Melzer said, gesturing across the fire to Gordon.

“Duty to his men. Captain Gordon said to run to the trees and take cover. O’Mara did that, kept his men together, and in the trees found the brush and wood for this fire. He followed Captain Gordon’s orders and his men lived, except one who lost his head and kept running.

“Where did you rally your men,
Feldwebel
? Where did you stop them from running? The
Bayerisch
Garde Schützen
, routed by a flock of poultry!”

The three men with Melzer shifted uncomfortably and exchanged looks, but Melzer remained motionless, his eyes avoiding mine.

“Do your head count. Find out how many of your men are alive, how many still have their rifles, how many are injured and how severely. Make your report to Captain Gordon. Do it now.”

I turned and walked away, but after a few steps Melzer’s hand on my arm stopped me. He nodded toward the darkness, and I followed him a couple steps so we were out of earshot of the others.

“You speak to me this way in front of my men?” he hissed.

“I gave you the chance to talk in private and you wouldn’t, so go fuck yourself. Next time keep your nerve, do your job, keep your men alive. Or I’ll find someone who can.”

I rejoined Gabrielle, watched Melzer do his head count and make his report, but it wasn’t long before Gordon drifted over to us. I was tired of talking, but this was one conversation that couldn’t wait.

We stepped away from the fire. He didn’t say anything at first. I guess he wasn’t really sure where to start.

“I panicked,” he finally said,

“Yeah, no shit. Don’t do that again.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“It’s easy to say and hard to do. So what? Someone promise you ‘easy’ when you put on a uniform?”

I leaned in close and spoke quietly to make sure no one at the fire would hear my words.

“Get those NCOs under control and remind them who’s in charge. You’ve got to get out ahead of them mentally and stay there, tell them what to do next before they think of it.

“You screwed up today. I dragged enough brush over your trail they’ll wait and see what you do next, but this is it, Gordon. One more screwup and you will never get them back and this expedition is down to me trying to make it through the mountains on my own.”

“I’ve never been in the field before,” he said. “I feel . . . I can’t explain it, exactly, but—”

“Look,” I interrupted, “back in my own time, when I was still in uniform, sometimes I’d get assigned young soldiers, first time away from home, first time they weren’t the center of attention, the center of the universe. They’d try explaining how they felt about it all, and as their squad leader I would counsel them. Know what I’d say?
‘Just do your job, kid.’

“Maybe you had a bad childhood—overprotective mother, overbearing father, whatever. I don’t care. I don’t care about your mother or your father or how you felt when your pet frog died when you were five years old. They aren’t here. You are.

“So just suck it up and do your job.”

When I got back to the fire, Gabrielle was curled up and sleeping on the ground, her head cushioned on her rolled ground cover and blanket. I unrolled my own ground cover and spread it behind her, then picked her up gently in my arms and slid her onto it, laid down behind her, and spread my blanket over us. Half of the group was snoring by then, the rest looking as if they were wind-up toys running down even as I watched. Fear and exertion take it out of you, burn up every ounce of go-juice you’ve got before you even realize it, and leave you dull-witted and heavy-limbed.

Just before sleep closed my own eyes like the curtain after the final act of a play, I heard Gordon come back into the light. He rousted O’Mara and Melzer and had them post sentries.

Good.

I slept a dreamless sleep. I almost always did. I can hardly recall the last time I had a dream I remembered, other than that dream I had of Gabrielle the night in Munich. People who experience combat are supposed to have all sorts of tortured, violent dreams. I knew a few guys who did and a lot more who just didn’t talk about it, so I have no way of knowing. When I first got home from Afghanistan, I had some pretty nasty dreams, but not about what actually happened. They were sexual dreams, very vivid, and very violent. Just having had them made me ashamed, made me wonder what sort of creep I really was. Those dreams went away after a while.

A few years later I used to have a dream where I was in bed and Joanne was beside me, asleep, still alive. Joanne was my late wife, Sarah’s mother. Nothing happened in the dream. I’d just be in bed and Joanne was beside me. When I woke up, she wasn’t there. I’d touch the bed where she had been, just to make sure she hadn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom or start breakfast, thinking maybe all the rest of it was the dream. But the bed was always cold. I only had that dream a few times, at least that I remember.

After a while I stopped dreaming altogether, or at least stopped remembering my dreams.

Some people think dreams are a window to your future. If so, I didn’t have a future. Either that or the window was closed pretty damned tight. Personally, I don’t think dreams mean anything, which is probably why I don’t remember them.

Gabrielle and I woke in the predawn twilight. The fire was lower, but the sentries had fed it during the night, kept it alive. I don’t know which of us woke first, but both knew by the change in breathing of the other that we were awake. Gabrielle rolled over and faced me, eyes only inches from mine. Her face was streaked with dirt and wood smoke, her hair loose and tangled, and she frowned slightly in concentration, searching my eyes for something, I don’t know what. I’m not sure she knew.

“Are you thinking about your daughter?” she asked after a while.

“No. I was thinking about a different little girl.”

“Tell me about her.”

“She was an orphan. She was physically awkward when she was young, not very good at sports or games, and the other girls always chose her last for teams. She felt like an outsider—unloved and unneeded. She wanted friends but did not make them easily, didn’t ever really understand the ease the other girls felt with each other. It was as if everyone else had been told a secret withheld from her. Or perhaps she hadn’t been paying attention at the right time, when everyone else learned it.

“Her best friend was a doll, or maybe a stuffed animal, I’m not sure which.”

“A doll,” she said quietly.

“She found it much easier to bond with the doll than with other children. She could imagine the doll loving and understanding her, while the other children did not.

“The other girls resented the order and discipline of the convent, but she liked it. She liked its predictable, unchanging routine. She thought the nuns would value her more for that.”

“They did not,” she whispered.

“No. Maybe that’s why she left. Leaving the orderly routine of the convent must have been unimaginably hard, the hardest thing she ever did, but she did it. She had determination and courage. She grew into a beautiful, intelligent young woman, and as she did, her physical awkwardness disappeared. But she never felt as if she belonged. Even in the company of others, she was always alone.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, but I saw no other sign of emotion in her face. She wiped her eyes and sniffed.