Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

“Biggest damn turkey I ever seen,” Millie said.

“I owe you one,” Gabriel said.

“Only fair, boss. I’ve owed you, plenty of times.” Millie didn’t seem to be noticeably the worse for wear; he wasn’t even breathing hard. But Gabriel had seen the force with which he’d been smashed against the tree and he knew the big man had to be hurting.

“Come on,” Millie said. “Let’s go get the girls out of the tree.”

Gabriel nodded, but he stepped toward the ravine instead. “Let’s just make sure it’s—”

With a roar, the huge beaked head sprang up over the edge of the ravine, like the world’s biggest jack-in-the-box.

Millie swore softly. Gabriel gripped his now empty pistol, silently calculating the time it would take the bird to climb back up to the path versus the time it would take him to reach his bundle and the pocket containing more bullets. It didn’t look good.

“Boys,” Rue shouted from her perch up the nearby eucalyptus. “Get your asses up here now !”

They ran. Seconds later the creature was back on the trail and thundering after them. Gabriel leapt up into the lower branches of the eucalyptus, while Millie chose a sturdier specimen on the other side of the path. The bird snapped at Gabriel, catching his left boot and pulling it off his foot. The unfamiliar object did not strike the creature as edible and it spit the boot off to one side, shaking its head with a strangely human expression of distaste. Luckily, this gave Gabriel enough time to make it up from one tree branch to the next until he was beside Velda and well above the bird’s reach.

“Thank god,” she said, clutching Gabriel’s arm. “I thought…”

“I’m sorry about Nils,” Gabriel said.

Down below, the bird stretched its neck, beak snapping, but it could not reach them. It ducked its head, scratched at the dirt and turned away, shaking its dusty feathers.

“That’s right,” Gabriel muttered. “Go away.”

The bird didn’t go away—but for the moment, at least, it seemed stymied.

Rue, who was squatting on a branch several feet above them, called out suddenly. “Hey!” She pointed away to the west. “Gabriel, can you see that?”

“Don’t tell me it’s another one,” Gabriel said, and he followed the line of Rue’s pointing finger to a gap in the foliage some distance off. At the far edge of the gap, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, was a large humped green shape almost completely obscured by vines and brush. Not another bird, that was for sure. It looked like…metal?

“What is it?” Gabriel asked, squinting.

“Tell me that’s not a propeller,” Rue said.

In the shadow of the green metal Gabriel spotted a large, paddle like blade.

“No, that’s a propeller, all right,” Gabriel said.

“Which means a plane,” Rue said, gleefully. “And that means a way out of here.”

“But then…other people besides my father must have been here before us,” Velda said.

“A long time ago,” Gabriel said. “Judging by how old that propeller looks.”

“I wonder what happened to them?” Velda said.

As if in answer to the question the giant bird suddenly reared up again and slammed its head into the trunk of the tree. Unprepared for the jolt, Gabriel swayed and nearly fell off the branch, the Colt slipping from his grasp and tumbling to the ground. The bird pulled back and slammed into the tree again, and then a third time. With each blow, Gabriel could hear the trunk creak and splinter. The bird pulled back and looked up at them. Gabriel could’ve sworn he saw a malevolent smugness in its eyes, as if the creature knew it was only a matter of time before dinner would be served.

Once more, the bird smashed the tree, and this time the branch Velda had chosen for her perch snapped, sending her slipping and clutching at branches far too weak to support her weight. She smashed through the branches, plummeting toward the bird’s gaping beak.

Gabriel cried out wordlessly and sprang forward, laying his body out flat on his own sturdy tree limb and reaching down to grab Velda’s forearm as she fell.

He caught her. She hung from his hand with her feet dangling, swinging like a tempting lure just inches above the gore-drenched beak below.

“Gabriel!” Velda cried. “Gabriel, I’m slipping!”

Gabriel tightened his grip further, feeling his fingertips sink bruisingly into her flesh, but her arm was slick with sweat and she was slipping, her arm sliding down along Gabriel’s like someone trying to slip out of a pair of handcuffs. In another second, he’d lose her, unless he grabbed hold with his other hand—but he couldn’t do that without letting go of his grip on the tree, in which case they’d both fall. Unless he could hold onto the limb with his legs alone—

Suddenly the bird let out a bloodcurdling scream as a spear flew out of the thick underbrush and stabbed deep into one of its eyes.

Gabriel looked back the way the spear had come. To his amazement, a young woman burst from a cluster of thick ferns. A second and a third, and then a half dozen more.

Each woman carried a spear, except for the first, who’d already thrown hers. They looked alike as sisters, each with dirty blonde hair and pale blue eyes, each tawny and young, nubile, their deeply tanned, honeycolored skin and lithe bodies glossy with sweat from the exertion of the hunt. They were dressed, if you could call it that, in scraps of black-and-tan-striped fur that had previously clothed a Tasmanian tiger less lucky than the brood Gabriel’s team had so recently encountered.

While Gabriel hooked his legs around the branch and used both hands to haul Velda back up to safety, the hunters leapt onto the floundering beast, jabbing it with spears and beating it with stone clubs. Gabriel watched speechless as the huge bird finally collapsed, shuddered and died.

With the beast slain at their feet, the women’s eyes all turned upward, toward the three people in the tree.

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—”