Samantha Smart (22 page)

The team commenced harvesting as many samples of the plant as they could, placing them in the plastic containers The Professor had supplied them with for just such a purpose. They all felt a deep sense of relief as they collected the plants; perhaps their mission was not to be so difficult as all that. All that remained between them and home was a day’s trek through jungle and desert back to where they had arrived in this time. They gathered together around a last patch of the curious plant and optimistically clipped its leaves, stem and even its roots into a final container, smiling and chatting cheerfully with each other.

“I am
so
taking a bubble bath when I get home,” Brianna shared.

“That sounds really good,” Samantha thought out loud, her closed eyes and imagination transporting her back to the tub in her Brooklyn home.

“Ya know,” Marvin stopped to think for a moment. “I should’ve brought Flacko along. I think he would’ve really liked it here.”

“I think he would’ve liked it a little too much,” Suki offered.

“Yeah, he probably would’ve flown off into the jungle looking for other parrots or something,” Brianna agreed.

“No way, Jose!” Marvin defended his pet. “Flacko’s smarter than that. He’d come back. He’s loyal, too–way more loyal than a human friend.”

“I’m pretty loyal, I think,” Samantha shrugged. They were almost done collecting all the plant’s parts. They had to get all of them, including its long, veiny roots that stretched several feet outward under the water, because they weren’t sure exactly what part The Professor would need to extract the maximum amount of ‘antidote.’

“Yeah,” Marvin continued his rant on loyalty, “but how loyal are you, Samantha? I mean, one week you drink Coke, the next you drink Pepsi. One month you only want to listen to Heatwavvve
and the next it’s all Britney–”

The last word of Marvin’s sentence was eerily timed, as at once, they all looked up to find themselves surrounded by several small, brownish men who were pointing long, metal-tipped wooden sticks at them menacingly.

“
...
Spears,” Marvin concluded, swallowing hard.

*

Alpha Team
marched along through the swamp, hands bound behind their backs with tough, scratchy vines. The natives had, at least, apparently decided not to kill them immediately, which was a very good thing of course, though not all that comforting. They might indeed still be in for some gruesome deaths, worse even perhaps than spear-point. They seemed to have one thing going for them–the little, light-brown men were fascinated by the girls’ appearance. They had, possibly, only seen an Asian person once in one of their families’ histories, and had probably never
seen Caucasian people at all. The general feeling the girls got was that they might somehow be being regarded as ‘witches.’ The men kept them at a spear’s distance from themselves, except for one, who was much more covered in body and face paint than the others and who kept shaking some sort of powder at them. He seemed to be their witch-doctor or holy nan, someone with spiritual authority among these people. Whatever his function or intentions, the girls did their best to hold their breath and not inhale any of his strange jungle powder.

Marvin they almost totally ignored. He looked enough like one of them that he most likely wasn’t a warlock or a god, and it seemed that they probably perceived him to be a servant of the girls. As if it hadn’t been bad enough dealing with Brianna’s complaints, sleeping alone in a far corner of the tent and saving them all from snakes, he now had to suffer the disgrace of being viewed as ‘servant boy,’ even though he was at least two years older than any of them. There would have to be major payback for this, he decided, if they lived.

They marched for what seemed like hours, the marsh eventually turning back to jungle and the jungle in turn giving way to a sandy beach.
This,
Samantha recalled her geography lessons,
must be the Gulf Of Mexico.
It was indeed a vast body of water, stretching all the way to the horizon and displaying no farther shore. The group turned right at the shoreline, which was probably south, and continued along for at least another hour. Samantha guessed it was early afternoon when the shore began rising up into rocky cliffs, making their trek a more athletic one, and the team began to sweat as their feet found the difficult uphill trail.

The view, however, became spectacular. The Gulf, if that was what it was, shone with an intense, magical blue in the powerful afternoon sun. Looking out on it from atop the cliffs was truly exhilarating, and a cool sea breeze began to ease their feelings of roasting. Though they were all quite frightened on some level they were also very excited to be in a beautiful, untouched place such as this one. There was nothing like this in New York City.

They had all been smart enough to keep their wrist-communicators switched off, so as not to alarm the natives. At least none of their possessions had been taken from them thus far, though most had been transferred to Marvin’s back in accordance with his apparent new role of porter. Samantha felt bad for him, but she couldn’t think of anything that she could do about it other than pray they would soon reach whatever destination these strange little men had in mind. On the other hand, she wasn’t at all sure if this was a good thing to wish for, as for all she knew they would all be cooked up and served for dinner upon arrival.

At a point where the seaside cliffs had at last leveled off they reached a place where a narrow pathway sloped steeply downward, looking as if it had actually been cut through the cliff with human hands. As they walked down it, straight rock walls rose up on either side of them, and they descended into a hollow which was situated at an elevation halfway between the cliff tops and sea level. In this hollow was built a most amazing little village, bustling with the activities of at least a hundred little people like the men who now marched them along at spear-point.

There were many thatched-roof houses, as well as a larger central building, and a stream of water ran through the village’s center as it cascaded down from its cliff-top origin through a sometimes shallow, sometimes deeply-cut channel that eventually poured out into the gulf below. A short strip of beach could be reached only by a path of winding stairs that had been cut into the rock alongside the narrow, multi-leveled waterfall. Samantha thought she could make out something out in the gulf just off the shore–some sort of stone edifice or wall–it was too far away to see in any detail.

Her attention snapped back to front-and-center as they entered the village, their group being met by other warrior-types while old men, women and children gathered to watch them pass. They were truly a curiosity, and the men with spears became very alert, guarding their prisoners as if they were some great treasure. The ‘witch doctor’ led them, somewhat ceremoniously, to the village’s large central building, which they entered. It was a single great room, at the far end of which sat a very important-looking man, bigger than most of his kind and adorned with gold, turquoise and multi-colored feathers. He was engaged in conversation with someone who looked to be a priest, possibly a man of the witch doctor’s order, though dressed to indicate a position of greater authority. Both stopped their conversation and looked up as the witch doctor entered, beckoning the party in and gesturing for them to stand before the elevated leader figure.

The ‘chief’ remained seated in his throne-like chair that was woven intricately from twisted, knotty tree branches, while the ‘priest’ kept standing, though he now faced the party and stared at them with a fascinated look on his face. The ‘chief’ spoke something to the ‘priest’ in a totally incomprehensible language, who in turn questioned the ‘witch doctor.’ The ‘witch doctor’ then exploded into what must have been a highly descriptive story, complete with illustrative hand gestures and body movements that recalled the day’s events. A long conversation then ensued between the three of them, mostly sounding like questions and answers. The prisoners’ eyes wandered about the room, not being able to understand the discussion that would probably determine their fate. There were many decorative items in this hall: Shields, spears, masks and the like. Samantha noted, somewhat uncomfortably, that they all bore a common symbol–a great fish, or–
well
, she thought,
it looks more like a shark than anything else.
Her mental exploration was ended abruptly, however, when an unexpected voice came from the building’s main entrance. It was a voice that turned all the blood in their veins to icewater, spoken in modern English but in no way comforting. Samantha’s heart practically stopped. It was Jordan Anderson–Jordan Slane.

“Well, well, well,” Jordan spoke smugly as he walked in, dressed more or less like the natives with only a sort of animal-skin skirt on. “If it isn’t my favorite group of fans, here, a millennium before I’ll even think about starting a band. Comfortable?”

Samantha fumed, half in livid anger that the person who had put her mother in a coma was standing in front of her, smirking, and half in disgust at herself for thinking about how good Jordan looked without a shirt on.

“Go choke on some coffee,” Marvin said defiantly. The men with spears instantly raised them to his chest, a couple of which poked him with their sharp tips.

“Now, now,” Jordan smiled. “I believe they think you’re a slave here, Marvin.” The party looked shocked for a moment that Jordan knew his name. “Oh, yes,” their enemy went on as if sensing their unspoken question, “I know your name,
Marvin.
And yes, I do remember our coffee incident from 1931. Strange,” he scratched his chin and momentarily stared at the high ceiling. “Isn’t it just
bizarre
that here, in nine hundred and twenty-four A.D., I should
remember
something from 1931?

“Yes, I know all your names,” he continued, walking by each of them as he spoke. “Suki–lovely girl, you are, though I fear your father will be underwater once we’ve worked this all out. Tokyo’s one of the first to go, as I recall. Brianna–that was a clever little trick you pulled at the Heatwavvve
show, though it won’t do you any good, I’m afraid. Samantha–,” his gaze settled on the skinny Brooklynite. “My first and favorite time-traveler. But you’ve always sort of... admired me, haven’t you?”

“Pig,” Samantha spat, shocking everyone in the room. “Whatever you’re trying to do, it won’t work.”

“Won’t it?” Jordan smiled, raising an eyebrow. He looked around at the prisoners and then broke into a grin. “Would you like to know what you’ve been fighting against? Hmmm? Oh, come on, I know you’re a curious lot.” He surveyed their faces but no one responded. “Very well,” he said. “Since you are about to die anyway, in the distant past, I’ll tell you.

“My father, Vassily Slane, is the last in a long line of... well, beings, shall we say, who’ve evolved, unknown to mankind, from sharks.
I, too, share these incredible genes with my father, but my mother was a human woman. My father planned this, engineered me, actually, so that I might walk amongst men in their world of land and air. As a result, I can assume many shapes.” He grinned and stopped his pacing in front of Brianna. Suddenly, his head and shoulders began a grotesque, hardly-believable transformation, his flesh bubbling and changing color, until the entire top half of his body had morphed into that of a shark’s. The natives, all but the chief, fell instantly to the ground in worship, the warrior-types shaking in fear. The members of
Alpha Team
felt equally shaky, though they stood their ground.

“The little natives think I am a manifestation of their god,” Jordan laughed, his features snapping suddenly back to normal. “In fact, this is not far from the truth. The shark-god these people worship is one of my oldest ancestors–they call him
Vasche.
It is he whom my father and I are descended from, and it is to him that you will be ritually sacrificed at dawn tomorrow.”

Samantha’s mind was racing. They had determined that the Slanes could not physically interact with people or things from other time periods, but these natives could obviously see and hear Jordan, even if they couldn’t touch him. It had also been proven through their experiences in 1931 that their enemies
could
physically affect other non-natives of a timeline, i.e. Alpha Team,
or perhaps anyone from the same time as them–and Marvin had proven that Alpha Team could physically affect Jordan.

The ‘Brooklyn Bandit,’ as he sometimes called himself, was at this moment already thinking along the same lines. The warriors surrounding him were all still on the ground in some semblance of terrified worship, leaving him free to discreetly struggle at freeing his hands from the coarse vines that bound them. It had taken a little while, but he had managed to work one hand free and was silently unwrapping the other. When at last this, too was free he felt inside one of the many bags still strapped to his back. In under a minute he had located one of the stun-guns and wrapped his fingers firmly around it.

“Unfortunately,” Jordan went on, “you have already caused some trouble. Even though you will die here and now, you were sent here from the future, or, I suppose, what to us is the present. Before you were sent here, however, you did disrupt our 1931 operation
already.
Now, we could send someone else back to that time after we kill you here, but you would now still already be there to stop us because you
were
there–or
will be
there, in what is
your
past, though to these natives it would be the distant future. It’s all very confusing, isn’t it?” Jordan grinned. “Let us just say that you
are
there to stop us, so now we must find another way to achieve our goal.”