Tuskers. Chapter 20

As always, remember this is a rough first chapter draft and be kind.

Chapter 20

When Pederson came to, the only thing that hurt was his little finger.  The air bag had exploded out the front window, and apparently also broken his smallest digit.

How did that happen? He wondered, dazed.

Somehow, he had ended up on the right side of the car.  He must have unlatched his seatbelt earlier, in some unconscious effort to get away.  He reached for the passenger door handle and winced at the pain.  He used his left hand instead and tumbled out onto the road.  He was disoriented for a moment, then got to his hands and knees.  Again a shooting pain in his finger made him cry out.

He staggered to his feet, this time tucking his finger away.  He reached into the cab.  The glove box opened at a slant, getting caught halfway down on the right side, but it was enough for Pederson to reach in with his left hand and pulled out the first aid kit.  He immobilized his finger, and immediately it stopped hurting as much, and he realized that half the pain was coming from the anticipation and now that it was safely wrapped his brain was relenting.

The second thing he looked for was his gun.  He’d had it on the seat next to him.  But search as he might, he couldn’t find it anywhere. 

The bow and arrow box was lying in the middle of the road, as if beckoning him.  He walked over and picked it up, and while he was at it, kicked the other items out of the road and over the side of the cliff, like a good citizen. 

Just in time, for as he was finishing up, he heard sirens approaching.  Two fire trucks came swerving around the corner, followed by a cop car.  The first truck slowed down, but he waved them on, and the fire trucks kept going.  The policeman stopped.

“You OK, Mr. Pederson?”

Pederson recognized Steve Altman, one of the few other citizens of the valley who also knew Pederson’s past.  He’d been a security guard in Silicon Valley.  He’d gotten in trouble once for falling asleep on the job and Pederson had gone to bat for him, saving his job.  So when the cop got a job locally, it hadn’t been hard to convince him to stay quiet.

“I’m good, Steve.  There is nothing you can do here.  I’ll call the tow truck.”

“You sure?”

Pederson nodded.  “What’s going on?”

“The Silverstein’s house is on fire,” Altman said.  “It sounds bad.”

“You better get going then.”

The policeman nodded and waved and accelerated away. 

It wasn’t until he was long gone before Pederson realized the other casualty of the wreck was his cellphone, which was broken right down the middle.

He calculated the distances.  He figured it was six miles to his house by road, and three miles overland.

He glanced back at the truck.  It was totaled.  Most of the supplies inside had survived.  If someone was desperate enough to steal them, they were welcome to have them.  The supplies had been overstock, really.  Just stuff he’d bought to fill his truck because he had the room and the money. 

He stepped to the side of the road.  There was a steep cliff, about fifty feet high, then a few rolling hills, and then the bottom of the valley. If he headed up the dry creek from there, it was smooth sailing to his place.

There was the outline of a deer trail to his left that he thought he could probably negotiate and he started that way.  Then at the last second, he turned around and grabbed the box with the bow and arrows.

It wasn’t an easy descent.  He was starting to feel his age.  His legs were getting wobbly.  His right hand was pretty useless in stabilizing him.  And the box was bulky.  Finally, he let the box slide the final few yards, and slid down on his butt.  He hit a rock on his tail bone on the way down, and gasped for breath for a few minutes, while the excruciating pain shot through his back.  He almost passed out.

The pain eventually passed, leaving a dull ache. 

He lay on his hip and opened the box.  Taking out the pieces one by one, and examining them.  He unfolded the instructions.  His engineer’s brain quickly made sense of them, and he was able to assemble to bow without much trouble. 

He stood up.

Stringing it was a bit harder, not because he didn’t know what to do but because of his diminishing energy and strength and his immobile finger. 

There were twelve arrows in the quiver, which he thought was pretty generous.  Everything had a high tech gleam to it, a pleasing design, and his Silicon Valley persona appreciated the beautiful functionality.  This wasn’t one of those high priced bullshit objects that was made just for looks and brand name bragging, this weapon was the real deal.  He could feel it.

He put an arrow on the string and tried pulling it back.  Oomph.  The pull was a little much.  He perused the instructions again, adjusted the bow, and was able to pull the string the second time.  But it was awkward.

He unwrapped the bandage around his right hand, almost crying out from the pain, and rewrapped it so that his first two fingers were free.  Now he could pull the bow much easier, and though it was tough to get full extension, he knew that the more powerful the pull, the more force the arrow would have, and the greater distance.

He took aim at what he gauged to be an eight-inch circumference fir tree about twenty feet away and let go the arrow.  He jerked it, and the arrow went flying far to the left.  He marked the location of the arrow and tried again.  This time, he released the arrow as if he was pulling the trigger of a gun. 

It was inordinately pleasing that he missed by only a few inches.

He sensed the gun analogy was the right one.  Pull the string, take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and release…

He tracked down the two arrows, put one back on the bowstring and the other in the quiver and started off.

***

 

It was only a few hundred yards along that he realized he’d made an enormous and avoidable mistake.  It was a hot Arizona afternoon and he was sweating profusely.  And getting thirstier with every step.

Like an idiot, he’d left gallons of bottled water in his truck.

He contemplated going back, but was pretty sure that he’d have a hard time making it up the cliff, certainly with the bow.  He wasn’t willing to relinquish the bow.  Better to stay on the flats and just make a beeline for his house and barn.  A couple more miles was all.  He should make it in less than an hour, even with the uneven terrain.

But he was slowing down.  Maybe two hours, he thought.

***

He sat on the side of the trail, his head down.  How long had he been sitting here?  Maybe it will take three hours to get home.

And unbidden came the thought, Maybe never.

Big Stanford engineer brain, Silicon Valley Master of the Universe.  Forgetting water.  What any dumb cow would have thought of first.

***

The pig probably did him a favor. 

Pederson’s thinking had been confused for a while.  He wasn’t even sure he was heading in the right direction anymore.  He found himself sitting in the dirt as often as he was stumbling around.

A single threatening grunt, and his brain focused instantly.  He saw that the sun had descended closer to the horizon.  It was past noon.

He stood up, threading the arrow with shaking hands.  Where had the grunt come from?  Then the pig did him another favor.  It grunted again, just ahead of him on the trail.

The pigs came around the turn and stopped, seemingly as surprised to see him as he was to see them.  There were four of them, but only one of them mattered.

Pederson recognized Himmler.  One of the smart ones.   One of the mutants, the one with the prissy little mustache.  The javelina examined him, his eyes taking in the bow as if he understood what it was.  He grunted, and the other pigs moved forward, surrounding Himmler, giving him cover and depriving Pederson of a clear shot.

Another grunt, which sounded to Pederson’s ear very much like a command, and the three pigs started forward.  But Pederson ignored them.  He was likely to get only one shot off, maybe two if he was lucky.  He wasn’t going to be able to kill them all.

But he had an instinct that he didn’t have to kill them all.  He only had to kill Himmler and the others would be just pigs, afraid of men, mostly harmless.

When the three attackers were half the distance, Pederson finally had a shot.  Himmler sensed what was happening too late and turned to run, but by doing so he turned sideways.  Pederson had been aiming for the chest, and was going to miss by a foot to the left, but by turning broadside, Himmler had made himself a bigger target.

The arrow thudded into his neck.

The pig squealed, and his scent glands released, filling the clearing with the stink of death.  It thrashed, turning over and over again, which only drove the arrow deeper.  It didn’t just slowly subside in movement, it stopped in mid-motion and collapsed.

The other three pigs had turned around.  They looked around as if confused, saw Pederson pulling a second arrow out his quiver, and they turned to run.

Pederson released the second arrow, knowing he’d probably missed, but angry enough to try.  To his amazement, he caught a retreating pig in the rear end and it tumbled head over heels and lay still. 

One less to worry about, Pederson thought.

He couldn’t dislodge the arrow from Himmler.  It had apparently embedded itself in bone.  He was able to draw the arrow out of the soft tissue of the second dead pig, though. 

He went on, his thirst forgotten for a moment, feeling pretty good about himself.  The mighty hunter.

That feeling only lasted until the next corner.  Waiting for him was another dozen pigs, and standing thirty feet back was a single pig, who regarded him with calculating eyes.   This one had hair hanging down past its mouth, like a Fu Manchu mustache.

Genghis, Pederson thought.

Then he thought, Shit.

He raised his bow, knowing it was hopeless.

The javelinas must have heard the whine of the motorcycle first, because they started milling about in panic, despite the commanding grunts of the mutant pig. 

Then Pederson heard it.  The motorcycle went whizzing past Genghis and bowled over a couple of the smaller javelinas, and roared up to Pederson’s side.  He stopped and grinned and through the dirt and grime, Pederson recognized Barry Hunter.

“Hop on, neighbor,” the man said.

Pederson had never felt so happy to see another person than at that moment.  He put the arrow in the quiver and climbed behind his rescuer, holding the bow with one hand and the grabbing Hunter around the waist with the other.

The motorcycle accelerated away, weaving dangerously for few moments, almost giving the pigs a chance to catch them.  Then the pigs were left behind, obscured by a cloud of dust.