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May 2011 Main Page Snapshot Excerpt Part 8
Could Indians Have Destroyed One of the 13 Colonies? Exchange Sequel
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
This
is part of the third installment of my 2010 NaNoWrite novel where World
War II England gets an ISOT back to the stone age.
It's not much past the rought draft stage. As I've
done with the last two installments, I did a quick edit pass to tighten
and get rid of the worst typos. I reduced the word count by a exactly
6.5%. That's about one-third of my usual tightening. So this section
has a ways to go. It also needs fact-checking. Were there flying
squirrels in Eemian England? Apparently not. Did I
get the geography right? I studied an atlas, but I could easily have
screwed it up. Before this goes to a publisher or agent I'll do a lot
more checking.
Roy’s long night under the strange constellations ended as light pushed its way through his closed eyelids and into his consciousness, waking him just before the sun rose above the trees to the east. The Neanderthals were already up, combing the beach for stranded fish and other sea life. Jesse Walker jogged leisurely down the beach away from the cluster of soldiers, an activity that earned him puzzled stares from the Neanderthals. He ran until he was nearly out of sight, then turned and jogged back. He ended up back at the camp at sweaty but not even breathing hard. He grinned at Roy. "I have to stay in shape for boxing." Roy saw evidence of a pugilistic career in the man’s face: small, well-healed scars and a slight flattened look. "Are you any good?" "Regional champion back home," Jesse said. He went into a weird-looking drill that Roy figured was probably for agility, then dropped to the sand and did sets of fifty pushups. Yep. That’s why he’s with this bunch of rejects. A couple of Neanderthals still watched Jesse. One of them did a few awkward pushups before going back to foraging. The pile of scavenged metal got bigger as the Neanderthals found pieces washed ashore from other wrecks. The lieutenant strolled over, returned Roy's sloppy salute, and said. "At ease. Any idea what they want with that junk?" "Oh yeah. It's incredible riches to them if they're anything like Indians. Metal of any kind to people who haven’t had it is something they'll steal, kill, or even fight wars for. This little group is now as wealthy to others of their kind as you and I would be if we had all of the gold of Fort Knox in our greedy little hands." "A bunch of rusty nails and metal junk is that valuable to them, huh?" "Yep, and it'll get them all killed if they aren't careful, just like having that gold would get us killed." "If I had that gold I would hire a bunch of guys to protect it." "And I bet they would decide to take it for themselves. It doesn't pay to be too rich unless you want to spend your life protecting it, and there are laws and banks to help you with that." "Maybe, or maybe you're just a small time guy." "Well, that I am. I run my life the way I want to run it as much as I can, and don't want any part of running anybody else's life." "But here you are in the army, where someone plans every minute of your life, and the only way to rise in it is to tell other people what to do." Roy got up and rolled his sleeping bag. "Yep. It's a bad fit all the way around, but Uncle Sam needed me, and I might have volunteered if he hadn't drafted me. I'll do my part and get this over with, then go back to doing what I want." He paused. "That is, if there is a way to get back." "There is always a way of finding a bottle and a gutter." "Not around here, but back in Britain, yeah. You know there's a chance that whatever happened will reverse while we're over here and we'll end up the only real people in this world. Wouldn't that be the suds? The fifty odd of us, no women except Neanderthals. No booze. Run out of cigarettes in a couple of weeks and have to listen to everybody bellyache about that. Watch our friend Walker run up and down the beach every morning. That would be the life." Lieutenant Gilbert shook his head. "You have a knack of finding the lemon in the fruit bowl." "Life has a way of putting it there for me to find. Here’s another lemon for you. If we went back in time, what’s sitting where England was before we went back?" “I don’t know. You tell me.” “There’s no way of knowing. Maybe something from the future went where we should have been, sort of like an elevator. Or we could have swapped places.” “We went back a lot of years. I don’t know how many.” The lieutenant grinned. “Maybe we went back far enough they’re seeing Piltdown Man in their version of Britain.” The soldiers stowed their gear on the horses, with extra food and ammunition on the pack animals. The dogs sniffed clothes, apparently from the hostages or the Germans. They sniffed excitedly around the remnants of the boats, then up the shore. Jesse walked over the Roy, still not breathing hard. "It's a cold trail. With all of the rain I don't know if they'll pick it up." Roy shrugged and strolled over to the Neanderthal he nicknamed "Joe Mangini'. He did some preliminary work the night before on getting a Neanderthals to come along as a guide and interpreter. Joe seemed to understand what he was asking for, but held out for more in exchange. The Neanderthal walked up this morning and held up a short knife blade, apparently snapped off of a pocket knife and washed onto the shore. He held up two fingers and pointed to himself. Roy pretended to think about that. He turned to Lieutenant Gilbert. "Shake your head 'No' and then hold up one finger." The Neanderthal hesitated, then nodded 'Yes'. At least Roy thought that was what the head gesture meant to the Neanderthal. If not we're going to have one heck of a time communicating with them. The Neanderthals stood transfixed by the sight of dogs on leash trying to find a trail. Roy said, “We’re giving them big ideas here. We’ll need to keep a close watch on the dogs when we come back through. The horses too. Actually pretty much everything we have. If nails are Fort Knox to them, multiply that by fifty times for the dogs. Most of them will probably be dead in two weeks from fighting over what they already have there in that pile of nails.” “We’re not trying to hurt them,” the Lieutenant said. “And that doesn’t matter the slightest bit,” Roy said. “Just by being here we’ve changed their lives, and there is no going back for them. Whether they live or die, the world they grew up in is gone, and even if we go away and never come back, it’s gone for good.” *** The second thunderstorm rolled in. Lloyd looked apprehensively up at the trees towering above them. “You’re not supposed to stand under a tree in a thunderstorm.” “You’re not supposed to stand on a beach, the highest thing around in a lightning storm either,” the copilot said. “That leaves us screwed, now doesn’t it?” The radioman added, “You’re not supposed to be standing around gawking when you see German paratroopers coming out of the sky. I’m not quite sure what us air corp type people are supposed to do with the paratroopers.” “Either shoot them or run, I guess,” Lloyd said. They kept moving along an apparent game trail in the forest. The trees partly shielded them from the rain, but also collected up drops and sent them in cold, heavy globs down their backs and necks. “We’ll have to go back and bury them—the rest of the crew.” No one responded, and the silence grew. Lloyd thought of himself as a veteran airman, with seven missions under his belt, a couple of them over Berlin. He even had a war wound, a crease across one side of the front of his chest where a German machine gun round just missed killing him. He had seen crew members wounded, and he knew one of them had later died. That knowledge sat in the back of his mind though, there, but avoidable, deniable at least with the part of his brain that tried to cling to a normal life. The bodies in the plane were unavoidable, undeniable, still sitting or laying in their blood, still unburied, and part of his mind accused him of cowardice for leaving them there. He opened his mouth to suggest that they go back, but then closed it. Leaving was the right decision. Wind whipped through the trees and the lightning struck twice, close enough that they all jumped, though no one acknowledged it, or appeared to notice the others react. A cat, a little bigger than a housecat stalked them through the trees, slinking from one hiding place to another one and freezing whenever they looked toward it. The radioman whispered, "Looks like a real fierce critter, if it could bite above our ankles." Lloyd stifled a laugh. The forest muted the storm and channeled it, but the treetops shook and branches creaked high overhead. A long dead tree suddenly collapsed ahead of them, sending rotted chunks the size of a man's head hurtling down to carom off the forest floor and go end over end until they found a resting place. Lloyd dodged one as it tumbled to a stop just past him. "That's why you stay out of forests in a storm," the co-pilot said. "That and lightning." The storm continued into the evening, but subsided before it got dark. By this time they were deep in the forest, not going anywhere in particular. Lloyd tried not to think about their lack of a destination, or about where they were. Finally he said, "If we really screwed up this could be Morocco I suppose. We would have had to get it wrong from as far back as when we dropped the bomb-load, but if the instruments were fubared we could have angled across Spain and then across a stretch of the Mediterranean." The explanation sounded weak even to him. The co-pilot said, "We would all have had to screw up so many landmarks that it doesn't make sense. The flying time wouldn't work either." Lloyd nodded. "I know. I'm just trying to make sense of this. Some Mediterranean Island? Maybe we were going due south instead of west and ended up in the Balearics. Do they have hippos there?" "We're nowhere that should be possible," the copilot said. "We're in some whacked out place out of a dime novel." They walked on, just following the trail. The sun came out, reflected by leaves and branches above them. A plane buzzed overhead and they tried to spot it through the leaves. Abruptly they emerged into an open space the size of three or four football fields, and all simultaneously drew back into the woods. A couple dozen men in German army uniforms stood in one portion of the field, holding red flags the size of a man's torso and marking off an improvised landing site. A Ju52 transport plane bounced to a halt in the improvised field. German troops poured out of it, dozens if not hundreds. They unloaded jeeps and light anti-aircraft guns. Lloyd glanced at his companions. "Are there Nazis in dime novels?" Someone said, "They're a dime a dozen." Lloyd choked back a laugh and inched back deeper into the woods. He got his pistol out and made sure it was loaded, though the amount of armament he saw on the field made that a futile gesture. A half-track with a dozer blade rumbled out of the transport and immediately began scraping grass from the improvised landing field. Men with picks and shovels came along behind the truck, filling and leveling. "They're planning to stay," Lloyd whispered. "Which means we need to put miles between us and them." Half a dozen German fighter planes roared overhead, climbing fast. Lloyd followed their trajectory and spotted another plane so high in the sky that it was an unidentifiable fast-moving dot. Lloyd pointed it out. “It may be one of ours.” Whatever the plane was, it made a wide circle and headed off in the direction of France, with the German fighters in half-hearted pursuit. Lloyd stared at the dot until it disappeared. They crawled back into the woods and then followed the game trail, looking for a fork that would take them away from the German landing site. The woods outside the trail were overgrown with thicket of pale, sun-starved undergrowth and not Lloyd’s pick for traveling. On the other hand, the game trail was a known quantity to animals and any humans in the area, the first place predators or Germans would look. Lloyd looked back at their trail. He knew enough from his 'Indian' games back in Yamassee Crossing to easily spot their trail. He didn't know if the Germans would have anyone with comparable trailing skills, but if they did they could easily follow the three men, even without the added benefit of the confined trail. He led the others through a couple of simple ruses to slow down trackers. "Won't fool a real tracker, and wouldn't fool a dog, but it might help." The little cat was still trailing them, stalking from cover to cover, but keeping a good distance--about twenty yards--away from them. The radio guy picked up a stick and waved it at the cat, but Lloyd said, "Leave it be." "It's starting to get creepy, just stalking us back there." "Housecats do it all the time. It's probably just curious." "It acts like it has never seen people before." "I don't think it has." The words came out before Lloyd had a chance to think about them, but he realized they were true. He repeated, "I don't think it has. I don't think any of these animals have seen people before. Where are we? Where could we have gotten where animals have never seen a man before?" “Just hope they’ve seen women,” the copilot said. “If we’re going to end up in a dime novel there need to be women.
Posted on Jan 3, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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