He flew across the ember pierced sky soaring on the great updrafts of energized air that billowed heavenward from the comet’s impact. His avatar pushed on below, matching his stride to that of the wolf-pack that matched his will to action. The world below was one tumbling migration of disoriented living things after the other, all steaming south, funneling into the southeastern watershed. The irony was that winter had just ended—and now it would be coming again, a years’ long twilight that would end the lives of entire kinds, spelling an end to the Two-legged makers of one particular sort of spear point, that ironically had already spelled the end of more than a few of Four-legged kind.

He shivered inside even as an earthbound ember seared his wing, for this fallout spewed from the gaping wound in the world might spell the end for some of flyer kind as well

Their muzzles had been wetted in the flesh of men—not his though, he ate only of the bison. Those two out-runners had been smoking the beast’s meat when their world went up in ash. There back trail was but two days old and led down to the river line depression, where their kin would even now be readying for departure south as soon as these two and whichever other out-runners had been tackling late winter game made it in. When death rained down from the north, every thinking thing that did not have a burrowing option on this side of the continental divide would head for the Georgia Plain.

Eventually, having outrun the blight, if that were possible, they would arrive, footsore and starving, in the territory of an enemy. These people were as good as dead; their genetic trace fated to wane under this ashen ember-scorched sky, and finally die out over the long cold years to come. There northern kin had no doubt been immediately obliterated. He was a time jumper, tasked with zero impact genetic harvesting. In the eyes of his handlers a doomed population was a ripe fruit, and he the bargain basement discount immigrant harvester.

It was noon. At this pace they would hit the river camp at about midnight. He had never been there, had never lain eyes on the sad slow river and its sheltering trees. He had seen it with his mind’s eye. For, as the spearman died, his last thoughts flew to his loved ones, a squat broad-faced woman and their two children, a teetering toddler of a one year old and a precocious girl, both red of hair like their father, living in a hide shelter between a cluster of maple trees, not far from a huge black oak that soaked up the water from the river bottom. The man had been glad that his family was at the extreme southern margin of their range, across which dread enemies dwelled. The spearman was mercifully not privy to his thoughts, for Pozer could only receive from mute-minded humans. His ability to send was limited to his few articulate-minded handlers and the canines he was designed to empathize with.

He heard them all about; their panting, their loping paws cutting the turf. He smelled them too through the ashen ember-streaked fog, their muzzles wet with human blood and their bellies full with the flesh of a bison.

Posie did not like the yucky smell of this junky woods; with its mucky creek water, swampy depressions, and trash all about, from shopping carts to car parts, to the myriad bottles discarded by whoever dwelt here. Tina waited back at the car in the Moose Lodge parking lot two miles off, a half mile from these nasty woods.

Posie was armed for his little raid with a pair of heavy upholstery shears—upholstery obviously being a lady’s concern as his new Mother had been so adamant that the answer to his question about the nature of this tool was none of his concern. He knew well how to use scissors from his days of paper and glue crafts with Mom—I miss Mom!

Tina informed him that there was a camp of homeless people and that he was to cut locks of hair from each adult male individual in it. This was the purpose of the scissors. He was also armed with a baggie of zip-ties for binding the locks. He was soon circling the muddy ground where a high spot of this sunken woods which did not get flooded, provided a place to pitch tents of the makeshift variety, often made of blue tarps of the kind used for covering boats and vehicles, and of just plan dirty plastic.

He was creeping up on the place, seeing some heads moving around and hearing a pot and pan clang together, when he smelled something bad and heard a grunt. He followed his ears and nose with his eyes and saw the top of a big black man’s head piled with dirty matted dreadlocks. The man was squatting down behind a pile of trash going to the bathroom. Posie was up on his toes padding in silently. The man did not see him until he was beside his heavy knee. Looking like he had seen his killer the man’s eyes bugged out as words caught in his throat. Posie’s hand darted out with the shears, but rather than stab the man he cut off a big lock of greasy matted hair and snagged it with his other hand as the man staggered in his squat position and fell back into his own mess.

Posie was off and running through the camp as the man screamed behind him. He caught a pony tail guy tending a trash fire and snipped his nasty pony tail. He then darted between a shopping cart framed shelter and a pile of bottles and under a shelter half where a big smelly bearded man slept. Posie took half of his braided beard and was off, the camp now roused and cussing. Things were thrown at him. Threats were made.

Posie shoved his locks into his pants pocket, not bothering with the ties until after out of enemy territory. Then came a skinny cussing man crashing through the thicket of weeds with a shovel, trying to club Posie in the head. Posie stabbed him in the groin with the shears, and then, as the man bent in agony, clipped one of his dirty blonde locks.

They were coming after him now, ones he had clipped and ones he had not, with rocks and bottles and sticks. It was on now. He shoved the shears into his belt and came out into the clearing between them with the shovel, laying about; smashing noses, chopping toes, whacking knees, gonging heads, cleaving into groins and behind knees, and even kicking a set of false teeth out of a dirty man’s mouth by using the shovel as a vaulting pole.

Eventually he stood in a camp full of prone figures, bleeding, moaning, cussing and crying, except for one man who had remained laying in his lounge chair, a tattooed man who had a shaved and tattooed head.

As Posie bent to cut locks of hair from those who had not yet given them up, the bald man in the chair snorted, “Well I’ll be Goddamned if it ain’t Dan frickin Boone taking Injun scalps! What are you taking from me boy?”

Posie looked up to the lounging man who was grinning from ear-to-ear and answered, “I’ll take your belt Mister, to tie all of these to.”

The man stood up and flexed and stretched dangerously—a very dangerous man it was plain to see. He then slid his belt from the jean loops about his lithe waist and declared, as he drew a pen from his shirt pocket and signed the back of the belt, “Charlie Wallace boy—tell the world you took his belt.”

Posie stood to receive the tossed trophy and glanced around. Noting that he had no more hair to clip and that the men were coming back to their powers, he began backing up and said, “A pleasure Mister Charlie Wallace, and it was Posie Senski, of all of eight years old that took your belt.”

The man lit up a strangely shaped cigarette that looked the same on either end, and then smoked it in a greedy way. As he hacked and coughed and Posie made his way off back into the marshy section so that the big dreadlocked bear of a man would not get him from where he was creeping up from the dry side, the man who had named himself declared, “You hear that boys, eight year old Posie Senski just caught you all in a dress sucking dick in a back alley! Now get on up the road with your bad self boy, before old Blue here gets his wrist rocket out of his cluster fuck of a backpack!”

The man’s sardonic laughter followed Posie through the woods until it become like the caw of a crow, which he supposed it was. Posie did not feel bad about Mister Charlie Wallace’s belt, for somehow he was confident that the big cat of a man would not finish the day without a belt to hold up his long-legged pants.

When Posie emerged from the woods with his unwashed trophies, all tied with zip-ties to that honorable belt, he saw his new Mother there standing by her car speaking with one older police officer while two younger police men polished her car with fancy rags which must have come from this woman’s trunk, for no man would have car washing towels that were so pink and fuzzy…

The ground was ruggedly broken at this point, within close scent of the river. They surged around the mounds and wind-felled trees, around the piles of mammoth bones and tusks. In one hand was a spear the other hand the knife-like splinter from the lightning struck tree.

As they ran snout to hip by his side he thought over and over again, Kill, feed, spare the young. Kill, feed, spare the young…

And so it was when they burst from the looming shadows into the fire lit camp. A man rose with spear in hand to receive Pozer’s spear through his throat. A woman that was by his side had her head gripped in one pair of slathering jaws even as two other sets of teeth ripped each an arm from her toppling spurting body.

The lurid tones cast by their own firelight illuminated the nightmare of a passing race, as, one by one, they fell dead and dying and rent where they lay, where they rose, where they fought, and while they fled.

This is my purpose?

If it is, then what am I—why should I even go on living past this gash in Time?

Figure that out after you avoid this ugly bastard’s swing of the axe!

This concludes the last online installment of Out of Time. The story will be concluded in The Last Pawn: Out of Time #19, to be released as a print novel in March 2015.