“Damn Trel,” I said with awe. “You are so smart.”
“I am a genius,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve told you many times. Of course, I don’t quite know how we would effectively build these pipes. We will need a lot of them and the check valves. I can have the filters figured out in a few days, but getting the water from the river to our camp will be much harder. I haven’t even talked about making the pump. It needs to be made out of metal, or I need to figure out how to make a clay that can take a lot of pressure. That is the only way it will work.”
“But there is a way?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Then we’ll figure it out. I have faith in us.”
“I do too.” Trel smiled at me, and for half a moment I forgot about the horse-sized raptors butchering brontos only three miles away from us.
“Is there anything we can take from the shore here that will allow you to make the filter when you return?” Sheela asked pragmatically, and Trel and I blinked as we looked away from each other.
“Ohh, grab some of those larger leaves growing out of the water on the shore.” Trel pointed at what looked like lily pads, only they were the size of my chest. “Then put some of the larger sand inside of three of them. Bah, I’m excited about the idea so I’ll help you collect some.”
The spider-woman leapt down from Bob’s back and then frantically began scooping up sand from the shore of the river. Sheela and Kacerie grabbed more of the lily pads, but I stayed on top of Bob and gave another glance around the river shore. The trikes didn’t seem to be alarmed by anything, but I still wanted to be able to race away if we needed to, and the new breed of super raptors was making me paranoid.
“I need some finer sand,” Trel said as she held up her leaf. “Sheela, have you seen any sand better than this? The stuff at the lake was actually coarser, so that’s not going to work.”
“The ocean to our west or south has fine sand,” the cat-woman replied. “I journeyed there once. It is about six miles away.”
“I can make a trip and grab some,” I said. “As soon as the walls are built.”
“Hmmm, you and your walls,” Trel said.
“Uhhh. Didn’t you just see those raptors butcher two giant dinosaurs? We need walls right fucking now.”
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “Alright. I suppose this will be the best I can do for now. Let’s take it back to the camp, and I’ll puzzle through it for a few hours. Then we’ll burn the logs and start on the wall tomorrow.”
“Alright,” I said. “Everyone mount up and let’s get back home.”
Trel climbed up Bob’s back easily, and then Sheela and Kacerie jumped on Hope. We rode home beside the massive fallen redwood and cut between the ferns. I realized that the forest of super tall trees was actually a blessing. Yeah, our valley was protected by hills on all four sides, but anyone standing on the south, east, and west peaks wouldn’t be able to see our camp clearing because of the redwoods. The north side was the only place where we were really exposed, but it also meant that we’d have a good location for a guard station one day.
We made it back to our camp without a problem, and Galmine untied the door so we could all enter. My head was still killing me, but there was plenty of work to be done, and I couldn’t afford to take any more time off. Trel and Galmine busied themselves with a new water filter funnel design, so I had to figure out what the rest of the team was going to do.
The pair of dead carnos by the work site needed to be moved, so I made Bob and Sonny work together to roll them around our camp and to the far west side of the clearing. It took them about an hour to do, but the commands I sent to them were making my head throb, so I didn’t want to risk ordering them to work quicker.
The sun was getting low in the sky by the time I got the second pair of carno corpses pushed over to the west side, and my brain felt like it had rolled around in sandpaper. I really wanted to sleep, but Sheela and Kacerie had started setting up the clay on the logs inside our wall, and I wanted to assist them.
“You need to rest,” Sheela said as I dropped down from the ladder and grabbed the adze.
“I’ll be fine, we need to get it all ready to go so we can hit it as soon as the sun--” the words caught in my throat as I caught sight of something in the air to our north. The sun was casting an orange glow to the sky, and a thick plume of smoke was visible on the other side of the hill.
“Ahh, shit,” I said, and both Kacerie and Sheela turned.
“It looks far away,” Sheela said.
“It’s a fire?” Kacerie asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, and it felt like my shoulders were each carrying a hundred pounds.
“Isn’t that jungle over there?” the pink-haired woman asked. “How is jungle burning?”
Sheela and I glanced at each other, and then I turned to Kacerie. “There are other survivors, and we think they might be attacking each other.”
“Shit,” Kacerie said as her blue eyes widened. “What do we do?”
“We need to build the wall,” I said as I brought my fingers up to rub my temples.
“But if they are using fire, can’t they burn through our wall? Do you know who these people are? Do you know why they are attacking each other?” Her voice sounded a bit frantic, but I could understand her concerns.
“We can only do what we can do,” I said as I returned my eyes to the distant plume of smoke. “We’ll build our wall, we’ll build our defenses, and we’ll try to save others that come. Eventually, we are going to have a run in with another tribe. I’m just hoping it will lead to peace.”
“But… what if it doesn’t? What if they attack us?” she asked.
“I’m willing to live and let live,” I said, “and I’ll strive to cooperate with others, but if they attack us, then we’ll kill them.”
Chapter 15
I slept like a dead man that night. I told my friends to wake me up for my shift, or at least in between shifts so I could instruct the trikes to keep watch, but morning seemed to arrive the second Galmine wrapped her warm arms around me. In fact, when I woke up, everyone else was out of the hut working already.
We needed to take down another sixty trees, but we also had to begin pushing the prepared vertical logs into the ground. The night of full rest did wonders for my headache, so I was able to command the parasaurs to dig out and push down the trees, while the trikes worked to help lift up and steady the logs we had already cut and drilled with our fire technique. Their horns worked perfectly as support beams, and I figured out a great way to hold the heavy logs vertically so that Trel could drive her dowels through the holes we’d burnt out.
In some ways, our new method that used dowels instead of cordage was way easier. The dowels were simpler to pass up to Trel when she was standing on the top of the logs, and we didn’t experience any actual rope breakage from strands accidentally wound incorrectly. While Trel hammered the top dowels into the holes with a hardened log, I did the same to the bottom pieces with my own makeshift hammer. We quickly had ten logs erected, and I realized we were moving much faster than I had thought.
While Trel and I worked on the wall, Sheela and Kacerie chopped the fire lines in the trees that the parasaurs brought down. It meant that our two teams were working some three hundred yards or so apart, but I sent one of the trikes over to them as protection since Trel and I only needed two to help with our wall.
The whole day we worked, we kept our eyes on the distant smoke to the north.
I’d resisted the urge to ride Bob up the hill and see what was going on. I knew what I would see: the jungle on fire in the distance and little evidence of any real danger close to us. I knew the sight wouldn’t do anything to alleviate my fears, so I had to focus on the only task which would, and that was building the improved wall.