Chapter 15

The snake was a small one by Reach standards.  That being said, it was still about fifteen feet in length from tip to fangs.  It was a strange sickly green in color and, somehow, it made the animal a little difficult to look at it.  The eye just seemed to sort of slip right past it if you weren’t careful.  Levi, however, was being very careful.

The snake lay marginally stretched out down the slight bank toward the aptly named Snake River; there was a reason for that name, after all.  Levi assumed that it was sunning itself or some other snake-like activity he didn’t know about.  It hadn’t moved for almost fifteen minutes but that meant little.  He knew that they were relatively fast thanks to recent experience within the last week.  It was never fun going from the hunter to the hunted but twice now he and Simon had been forced to run away from these snakes.  Unfortunately, they were the only reliable quick source of food that Levi knew was safe to eat.

That had been the major problem they had encountered when their food stock ran empty a few days previously.  There were plenty of plants to be found on the Reach and that number only increased as they grew closer to the river.  Sadly, neither Levi nor Simon had any clue as to whether or not any of it was edible.  They had dared a little experimentation two days ago when Abigail managed to rustle up a few tubers from some sort of plant Levi had never seen before.  After cleaning, skinning, and boiling the things, Simon had been volunteered to try them out.  Levi wasn’t sure if his diarrhea had cleared up yet.

And so they sat approximately fifty yards away on top of a small rise above the river.  The water spread out before them in a properly impressive way; it would look more like a lake if it wasn’t for the fact that it continued on in either direction off into the horizon.  Levi was lying prone on the ground, his leg already starting to throb.  It had been feeling better as the week had progressed and he had even managed to ditch the wooden crutch after a few days.  But it still bothered him to no end and by the end of each day, as the three settled down to sleep, he was completely and utterly exhausted.

Such things were far from his mind at that moment, however.  The barrel of the rifle stretched out from his vision, aiming carefully at the head of the large snake.  He knew – again from experience – that his shot would have to be perfect to fell the beast in a single blow.  The thing had a skull like a bloody steel bucket.  He took a few breaths, steadying himself and he felt the light wind play across his face.  He was going to get it this time, he was sure.

Simon hunched a few yards away, his pistol firmly in hand. After their previous “narrow” escapes – said as such because the snakes weren’t actually deadly, but they would bite you if you weren’t quick – they had learned that the best way to stop a charging snake was to simply shoot at it in quick succession until it got scared and turned away.  It wasted quite a bit of their precious ammo but it spared Levi’s leg and pretty much guaranteed they wouldn’t have a snake bite to tend to.

“Are you going to shoot the thing or what,” Simon whispered without taking his eyes from the creature.

“Shh.”

“Oh come on, the thing isn’t even moving anymore.  Probably died from boredom.”

Levi had discovered early on in their hunts together that Simon possessed the patience of a gnat.  This was an unfortunate trait to possess, as far as Levi was concerned, when hunting creatures that could often swallow you whole.  He had tried to point this out to his friend but to no real avail.  The man simply got agitated if he sat still for more than a few minutes.

“Will you shut up and let me do this?”  He didn’t like talking too much during the hunt, but the snake didn’t really seem to mind all that much, which was a pleasant change of events.

“Only if you do it within the next half decade or so.  Should I just go down there and shoot it myself?  You said the things aren’t poisonous, right?”

“They aren’t poisonous, no.  But their fangs area also a couple inches long and their bloody fast, as you well know.  So by all means, please saunter down there and get yourself bitten.  Not like Abigail’s got enough on her plate anyway.”

“Ah yes, your little German girlfriend.  Can’t forget to bring her up, can we?”

“Bloody hell,” Levi said, turning his head to look at Simon.  “What are you going on about now?”

“Just that all of our conversations turn into ‘Abigail this’ and ‘Abigail that’.”

“She’s my responsibility,” Levi snapped.  “So forgive me for caring a bit.”

“Well, watch out, then, ‘cause I’m thinking about stealing her away from you.”

“By all means, go right… wait, what?”

“She’s got a certain charm to her, you know?  I like that.”

“Uh-huh.  All the power to you, then.  I’m sure you two will have beautiful children, now can we please focus back on the task at hand?  Now…,” Levi paused, looking back down toward the river.  “Where did the snake go?”

“You lost a fifteen-foot-long snake?  That’s a little embarrassing, brother.”

“It’s your fault, now help me find it.”

Begrudgingly, Simon complied and they slowly made their way down to the river in hopes of spotting it.  Neither of them were even marginally good at tracking animals, but the groove the snake left in the sand was even easy enough for them to follow.  The snake had not, in fact, gone very far.  It was lying, unmoving yet again, just a little ways down the bank.  A few minutes later, Levi and Simon had once more positioned themselves in the proper location to take the shot.

“Simon,” Levi said casually.

“Yeah?”

“If you talk within the next five minutes, I will shoot you.”

“Right…”

Luckily Simon didn’t make a sound, which meant that Levi didn’t have to make the difficult decision of where, exactly, to shoot his friend.  Instead, it allowed him to concentrate on the snake’s head once more.  Checking his sights, he inhaled deeply and held it.  With the calm precision of an expert marksman – even though he wasn’t one – Levi squeezed the trigger and let the bullet fly.  With a slight jerk and a disconcerting splattering noise, the snake lulled to its side, decidedly dead.  Simon let out a cheer and Levi smiled as he slowly hauled himself up off the ground.

“Excellent shooting, you sniper you,” Simon said, smiling.  “I couldn’t have done it any better myself.”

“Of course not, that’s why I have the rifle,” Levi replied, slapping his friend on the back.  “Now the only question is how are we going to get the thing back to camp?  It probably weighs quite a bit, wouldn’t you think?”

“Oh, probably.  But that won’t stop two great Hunters like ourselves, will it?”

It took them over an hour and a half to drag and roll the thing back to their little camp a short distance upriver.  Simon had been struck by the brilliant idea of cutting the thing’s head off, which produced a grisly trail as the snake’s stumped head moved back and forth.  It also caused the two men to get blood all over them, which Simon thought only added to the atmosphere.  Levi just thought it made him sticky.

They had been on the riverbank for three whole days, now, and their camp was starting to look a little more like an actual camp rather than three blankets on the grass.  They had a dedicated fire pit and latrine – which was rather far away; it was hard to find a place of privacy on the open plains – and even a lidded hole in which they kept their food.  That last had been Simon’s idea and he was rather proud of it.  They had even managed to erect two small tents out of the blankets and spare brush scavenged from the area.  Levi questioned their usefulness in the case of rain – which they had thankfully not had to deal with – but they were the best that could be done on short notice.

Abigail sat by the fire, poking it idly with a stick as they crested the small rise.  Standing, she simply watched them as they came, hands on her hips.  Levi couldn’t help but compare the pose to that of a mother watching her two children coming in from playing in the mud.  As if to mirror his thoughts, Simon raised his hand and waved.

“Hello, mother.  Look what we’ve found!”

A slight smile played across Abigail’s lips.

“That’s very good, boys, very good.  Bring that up here and maybe we’ll actually get a decent meal today.  How does that sound?”

It took longer than Levi would have liked to skin and prepare the snake and even longer to cook the thing.  It had taken the two men longer than they normally would have admitted to secure food.  As such, they had almost completely exhausted their previous stores, including a small bird of some kind and a few wild carrots.  But now they had enough food to actually last a few days and they could focus on their next order of business: the building of a raft.

“We still don’t have any way to cut or lash the reeds,” Simon pointed out when Levi brought up the subject.  “We’re going to need this thing to work for quite a while so it can’t be a pile of junk.  We’re looking at another week, in the least, I think.  Rope-making alone will take a few days.”

“If we just lashed a bundle together and floated along behind it that could cut out some of the time.”

“I’d not going to go dangling myself in that river for an entire day which, I will remind you, is about how long the trip is going to take.  Maybe longer.”

“Oh, come on.  It’s not the Amazon.  There’s isn’t anything that’s going to just swim up and eat you or anything.  The most dangerous thing would probably be the current and as long as we stay relatively close to the banks, we’ll be fine there too.”

“Unfortunate as it is to admit, I believe I agree with Simon,” Abigail said.  “We’re going to be on the water for a while and we will get tired if we’re just floating along with some logs.  Also, we have equipment to take with us and no effective way to waterproof it.  A full-fledged raft is much more logical.”

“I just… I don’t want to leave them there for longer than they have to.”

The three of them each lowered their head slightly, slipping back into reality.  It was easy out here on the plains, struggling for food, roughing it in tents, to forget why they were in that situation in the first place.  It was easy to forget what they were trying to do.  Levi had vowed early on not to let himself do that.

“Be that as it may,” Simon said in a more consolatory tone, “I think the raft is the best bet.  If need be, it may even be used as a means of escape.  Doesn’t the river also run down past that research station?”

“It does, yeah.  But that would be a rather long trip.  Maybe a week, if the currents are good.  And given the way we catch food,” Levi said with a smile, trying to lighten the mood a little, “we wouldn’t make it three days.”

“Nonsense.  We are the Great Hunters of Franklin Reach, Conquerors of the Beast!”  Simon stood up, his chest swelling.  “There exists no creature upon this world that we cannot slay… given enough time, preparation, and equipment.”

Abigail and Levi chuckled at that.

“You may not be the best, but you’re better than me,” Abigail said, grinning.  “We’d have starved a week ago if it wasn’t for you.”

“What are you talking about, love?  You’re the one who finds all the interesting veggies.”  Simon rubbed his stomach at the memory.  “Some have been better than others, granted, but still.”

“Let’s call it a collective effort, shall we,” Levi asked.

“Sounds good,” Simon nodded.

For the remainder of that day, they simply sat around the fire and talked about nothing in particular.  Nobody wanted to approach the topic of actual construction methods for the raft again because it was a hard subject.  Simon’s saber and a knife Abigail had found were well enough for preparing food but they weren’t going to do much against the tree-like reeds.  This was only the first of many problems, though.  Simon optimistically put the cast-off date at a week away but Levi was sure it would be closer to two.  He tried not to think about what Quincy, Hank, and the other men were going through.

 

ge

 

“I really don’t think this is going to work,” Simon said.  “I mean, I thought we had advanced past this sort of thing by now.”

“Just shut up and chop, will you?  They’re not likely to fall down by you yelling at them.”  Levi shook his head and whipped the sweat from his brow.

“Boys, play nice,” Abigail said as she carefully tore smaller, more realistic reeds into strips.

“Yes, love,” Simon said sardonically.

Simon and Levi continued to swing their axes as the reed’s base.  The idea for the tool had struck Levi two days ago while trying to figure out a way to cut the tree-reeds down.  He had recalled seeing in a museum a sharpened rock tied to a simple shaft of wood and remembered how the tour guide had gone on and on about how advanced and useful the tool was for ancient Men.  Well, he figured if it was good enough for cavemen it would be good enough for them.  Unfortunately, it had taken almost the entire day to figure out how to secure the rock to the stick snuggly.  It seemed like a rather simple procedure, which Simon pointed out ad nauseam, but a little difficult to execute in practice.  He had finally figured it out, though, and made one for Simon, as well.

Levi quickly came to realize that what was efficient and useful for cavemen was something slightly different for them.  The chopping was laboriously slow and tiring work, with the men often requiring breaks after only a few minutes.  The wood was hard to begin with – something else Simon liked to point out in his own defense – but this was compounded by the fact that the rocks occasionally chipped and, in Levi’s case, completely shattered.  He had then needed to spend another couple hours preparing and attaching another rock before work could continue.

So in two days they had managed to cut all of one reed down.  It was a rather underwhelming achievement but there was little they could do about that.  And Levi knew that they would probably have to go hunting again tomorrow or the day after in order to stock up on food.  He decided then that this survivor stuff was rather boring and he had little taste for it.

“Why don’t you all take a break, have some water?”

“Yes, a good idea,” Simon said, panting.  “My arms are about to fall off.”

They gather around over where Abigail sat, continuing to strip reeds.  They passed the water tin back and forth, drinking greedily.  Levi was sore all over, his leg especially, but the surprisingly cool water helped a bit.

“So what do you think my men are doing right now,” Simon asked offhandedly, obviously wanting to spoil the mood even more.

“Honestly?  They’re working in a sap mine.”  Levi took another drink of water.  “It’ll be grueling work but none of them will die from it, probably.  More than likely they’re working 18 hour shifts or something enjoyable like that extracting and refining the fuel.  There’s one good side to this, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.  We’ll know where they are, and they should all be there together.”

“That will make our daring little rescue a little more feasible, I suppose,” Simon nodded.  “But I don’t know how long my men would stand for that sort of thing.  I can just see a few of those crazy fellows trying to lead a little rebellion.”

“Let’s hope for their sakes that they don’t,” Levi said gravely.

“Yeah…”

“Do you think they will have Quincy and Hank working there as well,” Abigail asked.

“Hank, definitely.  Quincy, though… he’s rather old for that sort of work.  But he’s a machinist, something that all pirate crews look for desperately.  Ironic as it sounds, he’s probably enjoying himself working on busted up machines all day long.”

That brought a light smile to Abigail’s face.

“Yes, he definitely likes his machines, doesn’t he?”

“Sorry to interrupt, folks, but I thought you may like to know that there’s an airship moving roughly this way,” Simon said rather matter-of-factly.

Turning about, Levi spotted it quickly.  Rather than panic, though, he simply observed.  Roughly surrounded by the giant reeds, they were relatively safe where they were and it was unlikely that they’re camp upriver would be spotted.  Levi glanced over at Simon, who had picked up the scope and was looking off toward the airship.

“What do you see?”

“I see an airship.  Give me a second.”  Simon slowly twisted the device in his hands to bring his target into better focus.  He continued to just stand there for a time before speaking again.  “Well, it’s not a pirate ship.”

“How do you know that,” Levi asked, curious.

“Because it has your company’s symbol plastered all over it and no self-respecting pirate would fly with that,” Simon said, grinning.

“It’s a Hannan ship,” Levi said, standing.

“Definitely.  One of your bigger gunships, by the look.  My but it is intimidating, isn’t it?  Good grief, your company just has too much money.”

“Here, let me take a look.”

Sure enough, it was one of Hannan’s destroyers; probably a Barracuda by the look of it.  They were ships designed to put out as much damage as possible as quickly as possible and they took their job seriously.  The company didn’t really have many of them, but you really didn’t need a bunch unless you wanted to go to war with another country.  Levi assumed that Hannan was stepping up its patrols in the area in order to keep the air route to their precious North Mine secure.  Finally, a stroke of luck.

“Okay, so how do we get its attention,” Simon asked.

“I’d recommend a fire,” Abigail said, finally standing, a sad look upon her face.  “Unfortunately, these reed strips I’ve spent the past few days making would make excellent kindling.”

“Heh, we won’t just throw away your hard work.  But you’re right; a fire is a good idea.”

“Right,” Simon agreed, nodding.

He then walked over to the small fire they kept burning – so they didn’t have to start a new one every day – and stuck a dried branch in it.  After a few seconds, the stick lit and Simon calmly walked over to the nearest reed and leaned the stick against the trunk.  It took a few minutes, but the entire reed was suddenly a giant column of fire, throwing black smoke up into the air.

“Brilliantly done,” Levi said sarcastically, quickly grabbing their stuff to protect it from the falling, flaming ash.  “Let’s just start a forest fire so that they’re sure to see us.  Not like a normal signal fire wouldn’t do.”

“I know, I’m pretty much a genius.  Whoa!”  He had to quickly leap out of the way of a falling chunk of reed.  It slammed into the ground and exploded, throwing sparks into the air.  “Alright, I’m getting out from underneath these the things now.”

The watched the airship anxiously for a time, occasionally looking before them to make sure the fire wasn’t spreading too terribly.  After what seemed like an eternity, Simon finally noticed that the airship had made a course correction and was now heading straight for them.  Relief flooded through Levi as the shadow of the giant ship enveloped him.  Assaulting a pirate base with a raft, had he been serious?  This is what he needed to get the job done.

A short time later, a small runner slipped from the deck and made its way down to the ground.  It, too, was emblazoned with the Hannan seal and was completely covered in a royal blue paint.  Levi would’ve probably marveled more at the thing’s beauty if he wasn’t so tired.  With little hesitation, the runner’s side door slid open and a number of men jumped out.  Startled, Levi blinked and looked again.  Coming his way was a short, stocky man wearing nothing but skin and fur, though he looked a bit cleaner than the last time Levi had seen him.

“Well look at that there,” the man said in his crusty voice.  “If it isn’t Levi Wyman.  You lookin’ a bit lost.”

“Ba… umm… Barnabas?”

“Ah you remember me.  I’m flattered.  And who do we have here?  I’m Barnabas Hennessey, pleased to meet ya.”  He extended his stout hand to Simon and Abigail, who, in turn, introduced themselves.  “Did you folks know that you were missin’?  It’s true, that’s the word down about Meadowshire.”

“Barnabas, I… what are you doing here?”

“Remember how I was sayin’ about takin’ me a vacation down in Cairn?  Well, I done did that.  Been almost two weeks since we last talked, if you’ll recall.  They won’t let me go on vacation forever, you know.  I was headin’ back up to North Mine when I bumped into this little Philly here and they said they’d give me a lift.  Isn’t she a beauty?”

 “She most definitely is.  You have no idea how glad we are to see you.”

“Oh come now,” Barnabas said, his grin widening.  “I can probably guess pretty good.  Now come you on, let’s get you aboard.”

 They quickly gathered up their meager belongings and boarded the comfortably nice runner.  With a slight shudder, the ship lifted off the ground and Levi could feel a weight lifting from his shoulders, as well.  The Iron Dove had been a good ship, a fantastic ship, but in a fight it simply couldn’t compare to the Barracuda they were about to land on.  Here, finally, he would be able to strike back a little instead of simply react.  As the runner started to settle upon the deck of the airship, Levi simply exhaled and placed his hat upon his head.