The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (67 page)

3

Olympus. Despite conjuring visions of opulence, white columns covered with gilded accents, everything is actually quite similar to Asgard. Brown and gray stone coated with thousands of years of grit, subterranean moss and the occasional blood stain, both purple and red. That’s not to say the massive halls, hewn from the inside of the mountain, aren’t impressive. The sheer size alone is stunning. But the place is dark, brooding and full of death’s scent.

It’s so dark, in fact, that Wright and Kat, whose eyes are not accustomed to the permeating darkness of the underground, can’t see well enough to walk. Wright keeps a hand on my shoulder and Kat keeps a hand on Em’s. It slows our progress, but that’s okay. We need to move in silence, anyway. Not that we’ve come across anyone.

While we’ve only just entered the outer halls of the citadel, Em expected to find hunter sentries at all the entrances to the underground city. But as we step past the fifty foot arch leading to the first of many grand hallways, there isn’t a soul in sight. In fact, even the mixture of human and Nephilim scents seems faint, like no one has been here in a week. A breeze tickles my neck, reminding me that the surface of this previously snow and ice covered mountain is now warm and lush. Could everyone be on the surface? Or perhaps the breeze is removing odors that would normally linger.

I decide to err on the side of caution and assume the latter.

“Where is everyone?” Kainda asks, though she sounds more disappointed than confused.

“There were a hell of a lot of those Nephilim on the surface,” Kat says. “They were everywhere.”

“But the hunters stationed here,” Kainda says. “They shouldn’t have left.”

“Maybe the old citadels are no longer important?” I ask as it occurs to me.

Kainda chews on this. With the surface open to them once again, the Nephilim might have no use for these ancient subterranean structures.

“How far are we from the surface?” Wright asks.

“About a half mile,” I tell him.

“Geez.” Wright shakes his head. “In that case, it’s possible they are on the surface, and near the surface. The outer fringe of this place was a beehive of activity when we first saw it. If they’re smart, and I think they are, they won’t fully abandon the underground bases. It’s just bad strategy. They could survive a nuclear assault down here. They’re just not guarding the lowest levels because, let’s be honest, who in their right mind would try to attack the Nephilim in the pitch black, a half mile underground.”

That’s an easy answer, “Nobody.”

Wright grins. “Which is why this is going to work. They’ll never expect it. Now let’s move.”

Em leads the way in and up. The first stairwell we reach spirals up to the next level, fifty feet above. The solid stone stairs are carved out of the wall, following the perfect curve. I’m not sure how the ancient Nephilim carved stone with such precision, but the more I see of it, the more I understand they had a hand in the creation of the ancient world’s religious wonders: the pyramids at Giza, Stonehenge, Pumapunku, Teotihuacán, Machu Pichu, Tiwanaku, Easter Island—there are similar structures all over the world. Most of the megaliths were built to worship the ancient gods, who I now know were the Nephilim posing as gods.

Glowing crystals embedded in the wall light the stairs running along it, and allow Kat and Wright to move without help. The outer stairs are four feet tall and equally deep—sized for Nephilim. But the stairs running up the inner edge of the spiral are human-sized, which makes the ascent bearable. Two fifty foot flights later, I’m starting to find this climb particularly unbearable. So when Em holds up her open hand, signaling for us to stop, I’m relieved.

I crouch and climb up to the top of the staircase where Em is ducking down. “What is it?” I ask.

She taps her nose.

I smell the air. People. Lots of them.

But they don’t smell like hunters. They smell afraid. That doesn’t mean there aren’t hunters nearby, using the heavy odor to mask their own.

“This is the prison level,” Em says. Pleading voices echo off the walls. “Sounds like the cells are full.”

“What will they do with them?” I ask. I can’t imagine what Nephilim would want with this many people. They don’t need any more hunters. And they don’t need to interrogate anyone. They know everything they need to know about the outside world, except where I am.

She shrugs, but Wright has an answer.

“They’re eating them,” he whispers. “Eating us. We saw the remains of a Nephilim barbeque in the jungle. The people being kept here are nothing more than cattle.”

This news is not surprising. Not at all. The Nephilim are cannibals. They eat anything and everything. But knowing that people, locked away in the Nephilim cells on this floor, are destined for the slaughter house is an offense that I can’t shirk off for the sake of the mission. This cannot stand.

“We will set them free,” I say.

My four comrades have four different reactions to what I’ve just said. Wright clearly agrees. Kat is skeptical. Em isn’t sure. And Kainda is offended, which bothers me. A lot.

“We will be exposed,” Kainda says. “
You
will be exposed.”

What I took for indifference to the plight of these people has been revealed to actually be concern for my welfare.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “The men in these cells are probably soldiers, yes?”

Wright nods. “Though I can’t say where they’re from. Not everyone here will be happy to see a bunch of Americans.”

“We’re not Americans,” I remind him. “
We
are Antarctican. And I’m fairly certain the soldiers in those cages now know the world has a common enemy.”

“Agreed,” Wright says.

I look at Kainda. She reluctantly nods.

I move to exit the stairwell. Kat stops me with a hand on my arm. “Wait.”

I turn around, not really interested in hearing another reason to abandon my fellow man, but ask, “What?”

“Guns first,” she says. “The prisoners will be guarded. They have to be. If things go south, I want a gun.”

“Go south?” Em says, not understanding the modern slang.

“Go wrong,” I say to her, then to Kat, “You’re right.” Back to Em. “Guns first.”

We move fast and silent. The solid stone makes moving silently fairly easy, but if we do make a sound, it will be amplified by the vaulted ceilings. Em stops by a human sized wooden door. It’s simple and unlocked. Not exactly the kind of place you would expect an arsenal to be kept, but Nephilim and hunters have no need for modern weapons, and there’s generally no one else around to take them. I suspect they are kept only to be studied and understood.

Em opens the door. The room is pitch black, but she steps inside. A moment later, I hear a click and the room blooms with yellow light. As I step inside, my eyes are drawn up to the electric glow. It’s one of the over-sized light bulbs, like the one I saw in the Asgard library, and like what can be seen in ancient Egyptian pictographs, such as those depicted at the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, in central Egypt.

When Kat curses in glee, I look at the rest of the room. Stone shelves are covered in black, metal weaponry. I see handguns, rifles, machine guns, knives, grenades and an assortment of gear I don’t recognize. While Kainda closes the door behind us, Wright and Kat fan out into the room, scouring the weapons like kids loosed in Toys “R” Us with a million-dollar gift certificate.

I join them, looking over the guns. “What should I look for?” I ask.

“Anything with a sound suppressor,” Wright says. “In these caves, our ears would be ruined by anything without one, and our position would be given away.”

“You mean like a silencer?” I ask. My knowledge of weapons is mostly based on what could be seen on daytime TV in the 80s.

“No such thing,” Wright says, “but, yeah, that’s the general idea.”

“In that case,” I say, heaving a heavy rifle off one of the stone shelves. “Will this do?”

Kat turns to me and her eyes light up. “Oh dear boy, you know the way to a woman’s heart.”

Kainda grumbles, but doesn’t say anything.

Kat takes the weapon from me, whispering its features, as she looks it over. “Sound suppressed FN FAL. Selective fire. Collapsible stock. Good. Should make it easier to carry underground.” She hefts it in her hands. “About ten pounds.” She ejects the magazine. “Standard NATO rounds. Thirty round magazine. This is good.” She holds up the straight magazine with a distinctly angled bottom. “Any more of these?”

“Three,” I say, holding up a brown leather satchel.

She takes the satchel, looks inside at the three fully loaded magazines, and grins. “Perfect.”

“I fail to see what this...weapon will be good for,” Kainda says.

It’s at that moment that the door opens and a Nephilim gatherer steps into the room. Gatherers are what most people know as “grays.” They’re widely considered to be alien in nature, which isn’t too far from the truth. They gather humans from the outside world, for hunters (like Em) or for genetic experimentation—the sort that led to me having six clones. The first is Xin, a half-human, half-seeker, who is now my ally. The second was a horrible little half-human, half-thinker creature that I killed in a subterranean laboratory. And then there is Luca, a six year old, fully human duplicate of me currently hiding underground with the other rebel hunters. There are three other clones I have yet to meet, but from what I’ve been told, by Aimee and Xin, I’d be better off not meeting them. Of course, Aimee said the same thing about Xin, and I would be dead without him.

The gatherer, whose hands hold a wooden box full of dog tags, stops in its tracks. Its oval, jet black eyes go wide with surprise. But it quickly recovers, and before anyone can act, a painful pressure fills my mind. Gatherers and seekers are telepathic. This is a well-known fact in UFO/alien folklore, but the skill isn’t just for communication. Gatherers can literally kill you with a thought.

It recognizes the three hunters in the room as the predominant threat and targets Kainda, Em and me first, dropping us to our knees. But this gatherer has made a mistake. I hear a sound, like a cough, repeat three times in rapid succession. A fraction of a second later, three neat holes form a triangle on the creature’s forehead.

The wooden box drops from the creature’s hands, landing at its feet with a loud
thunk
. The gatherer’s limp body starts to fall backward, out into the hallway, where the purple blood from its forehead is sure to leave a stain and a scent trail that will alert any hunters nearby.

But Wright moves quickly, snagging the gatherer’s wrist and pulling it inside the room. He drags the body to the back corner, while Kat silently closes the door. When Wright stands up from his body disposal duty, it’s as if nothing happened. There isn’t even a drop of blood on the floor.

Kainda grins. “I stand corrected.”

4

“What the hell is that?” Kat asks, standing over the body of the gatherer she’s just killed. Its large, black, almond shaped eyes are now lifeless. “Looks like something out of Close Encounters.”

“It’s a gatherer,” Em says.

“Close Encounters was based on them,” I say. I remember the movie more for its depiction of late seventies family life, but the aliens conjured by Steven Spielberg were actually Nephilim. As I look over the three, clean holes in its forehead, I can’t help but wonder aloud, “Is it dead?”

Everyone stiffens, even Kainda and Em. They don’t know either.

“I’ve never seen one killed,” Em admits.

“Nor I,” says Kainda.

“There’s no exit wounds,” Kat says. “So the bullets either bounced around inside the skull, turning the brain to pudding, or they fragmented on impact and, well, turned the brain to pudding. Plus, I aimed for the same spot where the big ones are vulnerable.”

But the gatherers are different from the warriors in every way except for their unnatural parentage. Who’s to say what they are capable of, if they have a weak spot or if they can heal. Certainly not any of us. It has purple blood like the warriors, but a warrior would have healed by now. I’ve suspected that only the warriors could heal rapidly, which enables them to rule the various tribes, but these lesser Nephilim could still heal, perhaps just more slowly.

“There is one way to end the debate,” Kainda says, lifting her hammer over the gatherer’s plump head.

“Wait!” I shout.

She holds her strike. I turn to Wright and Kat. “Do you have everything you need?”

Wright holds up a silenced pistol, and then turns around so I can see the silenced assault rifle slung over his back. Kat throws her beloved FAL over her shoulder and reveals that she has also found two sound suppressed handguns as well. She holds one out to me. “Sure you don’t want one?”

I hold up a hand. “Not a fan of guns.”

“And yet, you’re okay with your girlfriend bashing in a dead man’s head?”

“They’re
not
men,” I say with a touch of venom.

“What is girlfriend?” Kainda asks.

“Later,” I say. The classification of our relationship in modern terms might freak her out. It’s freaking me out. I would prefer to be just...us. Hunters. Together. It feels more natural just to
be
, without adding the social pressures of what is expected of girlfriends and boyfriends. Of course, Kainda is oblivious to those things, but I’m not.

“Suit yourself,” Kat says, before wrapping a dual holstered belt around her waist. She slips both weapons home. “I’m good.”

Kainda lifts her hammer again. She looks back at the group. “This could be...messy.”

We all step back. The hammer rises. Kainda’s muscles ripple as she tenses. Then she strikes.

In the fraction of a second that it takes the hammer to descend, I see a flicker of movement in the thing’s black eyes. Not dead. But then the hammer strikes and it is, without doubt, very, very dead.

The head implodes under the weight of Kainda’s strike. But there is no splatter of purple blood. The head, which is roughly the size of a watermelon, is also somewhat similar to the fruit on the inside. Where there should have been a brain, there is only a thick, purple gelatinous substance, like jelly donut filling.

“It has no brain,” Wright notes.

“Or blood,” Kat adds. “Not really.”

I turn to them. “Like I said.
Not
a man.”

“Doesn’t smell like a man, either,” Wright says.

While the gatherer might not be oozing gallons of blood, its jellied insides have a strong odor. Wright gathers some shotgun shells, pries them open and dowses the ruined cranium with gunpowder. The strong chemical smell quickly masks the scent of gatherer gore.

Kainda covers her nose, finding the modern odor more offensive than the insides of a dead Nephilim. “What is that smell?”

“Cordite,” I say.

“Not quite,” Wright says. “Cordite isn’t used in modern weapons. This is basically wood chips soaked in nitroglycerin and coated with graphite. Bigger bang for less buck and a much stronger odor.”

“Huh,” I say, feeling awkward. It’s not often that someone knows something I don’t. But I was never very interested in modern weapons before coming to Antarctica. My knowledge of the subject is limited to what’s in textbooks.

Armed and satisfied that the gatherer is now fully dead, we sneak back into the hallway. After closing the door to the armory behind us, I pause and sniff the air. There’s just a hint of the gatherer’s scent. But someone would have to walk right by the door to pick it up. And since the hall is still devoid of life, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

We quickly backtrack to the steps and then turn down the hallway leading to the cellblock. The scent of humanity is thick in the air, but the prisoners’ voices have faded to nothing.
Are they all dead?
I wonder. Have they been taken away? It doesn’t seem possible. We were in the armory for just ten minutes.

As we reach the end of the hall and peek around the corner into the cellblock, I have my answer. The prisoners are terrified. A single Nephilim warrior wanders down the massive hallway, bending down before each cell, looking at the men contained within.

The twenty-five foot giant wears a chrome helmet that resembles a goat’s head, with twin curling horns. His cape is coated with white fur and...there’s something different about his legs. While the other warriors I’ve seen thus far were human like in appearance—if you ignore their height, dual rows of sharp teeth, six fingers and toes and demonic eyes—this one has hoofed feet and hairy, goat-like legs. Tucked into his belt is something that looks like a flute. The weapon in his hands resembles a shepherd’s crook, but the hooked end is flattened and sharpened like a scythe, and the other end of the weapon’s staff holds a barbed tip.

From his appearance and our location, I have no trouble guessing the identity of this monster. “Pan,” I whisper. He’s nearly three hundred feet off, but Nephilim have exceptional hearing.

“You’ve met him?” Em quietly asks.

I shake my head, no. “But I recognize him. From the outside world’s mythology. What I don’t understand, is why a warrior is guarding prisoners? Where are the hunters?”

“Looking for us,” Kainda whispers. “And Pan does not guard prisoners, he watches over his
flock
. These men are food. He is selecting them for a meal.”

Voice’s rise in panic, bringing my gaze back to Pan. The long hallway is lined by barred, twenty-foot square cells, each jam packed with soldiers from the outside world. I see a variety of different uniforms and hear a number of languages, most of which are not English. But they’re all afraid. As well they should be.

Pan opens one of the barred cell doors and reaches inside. The men swarm away from the oversized, six fingered hand like shoaling fish fleeing a pod of whales. One of the men is caught and pulled from the cage. He kicks and punches bravely, shouting at the giant in what I think is Russian.

The Nephilim shepherd just laughs at the man, his voice a booming chuckle that smacks of Jabba the Hut’s, “Huu huu huuu.” When the sharpened end of the crook comes up, I realize what’s about to happen.
He’s going to decapitate the man!

I stand and step into view, shouting, “Stop!”

“Solomon,” someone hisses, but I’m not sure who because my heart races as Pan’s cold gaze turns on me. Then he laughs again, “Huu huu huuu,” and licks his lips. Apparently, I look delicious.