The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (8 page)

10

I wake up confused, not because I don’t remember where I am—I know exactly where I am—but because the noise of the place is unfamiliar. I feel like I’m in a subway station and somewhere in the dark, there’s a train barreling toward me. Shaking metal. Screeching. A deep resonating rumble that chatters the teeth.

But there is no train. I’m in a bed. There’s a wool blanket pulled up to my chin, but it’s not itchy. The room is small and formed from four metal walls and a metal ceiling. I’ve seen bread boxes with more style. There are no windows. A desk with a lamp on top is next to the bed. The lamp is the room’s only source of light, glowing a dull yellow.

A rumble rolls across the ceiling, like a wave of energy has coursed through it. Fear twists my gut. Is this my fault? Has the ice broken? I jump out of bed, steadying myself on the desk. Stumbling toward the door, I notice I’m fully dressed. I’m not wearing a coat, but I’ve got on insulated pants, full body long johns, a turtleneck and a sweater. I twist the door handle and give it a pull. The door opens and I hear a gentle ring somewhere, but don’t bother trying to figure it out. I need to find out what’s...happening.

I stop in the hallway and listen. I hear nothing. No storm. No shrieking metal. No subway car. The world has gone silent.

The hallway is long and lined with doors on either side like a college dorm. I’m sure my parents are behind one of these doors, but don’t want to risk walking in on a half-dressed Collette or someone else I have yet to meet. I find my feet and walk down the hall, careful not to make any noise.

The hall opens up to a large room that is one part kitchen, one part lounge. Lights triggered by motion sensors illuminate the room. There’s a counter-top, sink and fridge to my left; a TV and two couches to my right. A laptop sits closed on a desk. There’s a door directly across from the hallway. I head toward it, not knowing what’s on the other side.

The door is heavy and thick, but swings open with little effort. The short hallway beyond is lined with jackets and snow gear hanging from hooks. Each set of clothing is labeled with a name. I see mine down near the end.

I pause in front of my jacket, knowing it’s not necessary, but consider wearing it anyway.

No
, I think,
it will just get in the way
.

Get in the way of what
?

The door leading outside opens just as easily as the first door. I step out into the night and am dazzled by the stars above me. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many, even in the back woods of Maine. But there is an aberration in the sky. One of the stars is moving. It grows closer and I can focus on it, seeing it for its true self—a snowflake lit by the light pouring from the hallway behind me. I’ve left the door open.

I turn to close the door and notice the sky behind me. There are no stars. Every pinpoint of light in the sky to the south has been blotted out by something massive.
The snowflake
, I think.

That’s when I hear it. A tiny
tick
, like a grain of sand falling on a tile floor. I close my eyes and hold my breath. A moment of silence passes before I hear it again.
Tick
. Then again.
Tick
,
tick
.

It’s the snow. I can hear each flake as it lands on the ice.

I smile at the magic of it, of my home, and know I won’t be sleeping for the rest of the night.
This is what I came for
, I think. I want to experience this new world and up until this moment, I haven’t really. I’ve made a fool of myself. I’ve been feared. Maybe even threatened. And I’ve freaked out almost everyone I’ve met. Not that everything has been all bad. I consider all the Clarks to be my friends. Dr. Clark is a confidant and mentor. Aimee is a friend and emotional support. And Mira, well she might be all of the above and something more. I’m not sure how teenage courtship is done, but since I’m the only teenage boy within a three thousand mile radius, I think my chances are pretty good. Probably won’t be this good ever again.

Carpe diem
,
Schwartz
, I think.
Carpe diem
.

I sense a presence behind me, but unlike so many other times in the past, I’m not frightened. I remember the jingling bell I heard. Dr. Clark no doubt rigged my door so the bell would sound when I left the room. Can’t have me walking around in the snow, can we?

I stand there, looking at the stars, waiting for him to give me a coat or tell me to go inside. But he does nothing.
Must be looking at the stars, too
, I think. This late at night, he must figure that no one will see me.

The tick, tick of the falling snow has picked up. “There’s a storm coming,” I say.

“You have no idea,” replies my visitor, but it’s not Dr. Clark. The voice is higher and wet.

I turn toward the voice, still not fearing it, then quickly realize I should. A flash of something red, hair maybe, and a streak of dirty flesh is all I see before something strikes me in the stomach and sends me sprawling back onto the ice. I climb to my knees, but the air has been knocked from my lungs. I suck in a breath, but all I manage is a wheeze.

The man laughs at me from the darkness. I can see the door ten feet away, but my attacker has disappeared into the night. I spin around, looking for him, knowing he’s going to attack again. But he’s invisible, he’s—behind me!

I duck low to the ground in a crouch, pivot around and lunge. I throw a punch that feels wild, but the solid impact I feel on my hand tells me I found my target. I see a large shape fall to the snow and pounce on it. One hand has a fist full of fabric, pulling the immobile form up. The other is raised high, ready to strike again.

I let out a roar that sounds something like an angry ape. Then I see her face.

Her
face.

Aimee’s face.

The hatch opens and Dr. Clark’s silhouette fills the space. “Aimee!” he shouts, jumping to her side. As he lifts her head in his hands, I see her face, swelling and bloody. He turns to me. “What happened?”

But I’m speechless. I can’t fathom how to explain what happened, or why. I stand there, as frozen as the ice beneath my feet and for the first time since setting foot on Antarctica, I feel cold. Not my skin. My heart.

Dr. Clark’s eyes drift from mine to my clenched fist. He squints at it for a moment and then his eyes are wide and full of fear. He scoops Aimee up and carries her inside without saying another word. When he’s gone I look at my fist. It’s covered in blood.

Aimee’s blood.

11

“What happened?”

I’ve been asked that question twenty-two times by five different people in the past ten minutes. I suppose they keep asking because I have yet to give a good answer. I’m in shock, but mostly I’m worried sick. I just cold-clocked the person who welcomed me into this world with a smile.

The first thing I did after coming back inside was wash the blood off my hand. It wasn’t a matter of erasing the evidence. I had no intention of denying the truth...but I didn’t fully know the truth, either. Someone was out there. Someone attacked me. But telling them that—well, it will just make me look crazy.

Crazier
.

Aimee is lying on a cot in the living area. Dr. Clark and my mother are tending to her. The rest of the crew stands around waiting like sentinels. Mira kneels by her mother’s side, her eyes wet and closed.
Is she praying
? I wonder. My father stands behind me, hands on my shoulders, but I’m not sure if he’s comforting me or restraining me.

Aimee moans and blinks for a moment, but doesn’t regain consciousness. Dr. Clark looks back at me, his face a mix of anger, sympathy and fear. As the rest of the eyes turn toward me I know the question is going to come again. “
What
happened?”

The tone of his voice tells me I better answer this time.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be sorry,” Dr. Clark says. “Be honest.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

He gives me a long hard stare. “I believe you.”

Some of my tension dissolves with those three words. I’m not sure why I assumed they would all treat me like some kind of untrustworthy criminal. They know me.

I take a deep breath and then spill my emotional guts. “There was someone else out there.”

Dr. Clark looks skeptical and I know why. He saw the blood on my hand and is wondering if I’m trying cast the blame on someone else. “I’m not saying I didn’t do this, I did.”

Collette gasps.

“But I didn’t know it was Aimee.” The next words are hard to say because even I know they sound ridiculous. “I was attacked.”

“In the middle of the Antarctic night?” Collette asks, her voice steeped in a thick tea of doubt. “Were any of you outside tonight?” she asks the crew.

The universal answer to this question is, “no,” of course. Even I know that, and I tell them so. “It wasn’t any of you.”

“Then who?” someone asks.

I meet Dr. Clark’s eyes once again. He seems to understand something unusual happened outside. For a moment, I think he’s trying to tell me not to speak, but write his expression off to confusion. “It was a man,” I say. “I think he had red hair. Long red hair. Maybe closer to maroon. And...and I’m not sure he was wearing clothes.”

“What a piece of work,” Collette says before letting out a laugh that lets me know she’s not buying a word of this. But I don’t care about what she thinks. I need Dr. Clark to believe me. I need Mira to believe me. And my parents. I can feel my father’s grip on my shoulders tightening. His anger is building with the ridiculousness of my story.

“I’m telling the truth,” I say, surprised that I’m standing up to the tank-sized woman. “Someone was out there. He punched me. Knocked me down. I thought Aimee was him.”

“Solomon...” the doubt in my father’s voice stings with betrayal. How could he believe I did this?

I try to shrug away from my father, but he holds me tight. “I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

“Could’a fooled me,” Collette says. “She’s out for the count. Might have a concussion.”

“Is that true?” I say, a rising panic making me sick to my stomach.

“Most likely,” Dr. Clark says.

Before the interrogation can continue, the roof rumbles. I instantly remember the sounds I heard upon waking. I’d assumed it was part of a waking dream, but I’ve been awake for too long for that to be the case again. I know for sure when I see everyone in the room look up.

One of the crew, a man I haven’t met, dashes to the laptop. I can’t see the screen, but I’m sure he’s checking the weather. My suspicions are confirmed a moment later. “Holy hell. Wind speed is up to seventy miles per hour!”

The roof shakes again. Louder this time. “Eighty miles per hour!”

My dad takes his hands off my shoulders and enters the hallway leading outside. I hear the second door open a moment later and then quickly close. He returns a moment later, covered in snow.

“It’s a whiteout,” he says. “I couldn’t see more than a foot.”

“Where’d this come from?” someone asks. “There was nothing on the weather report.”

Dr. Clark and I share a glance. We’re both wondering the same thing. Is this my fault?

“This is Antarctica, folks,” Dr. Clark says. “This is the kind of thing we expect to happen.”

The roof shakes so hard I wonder if it’s going tear away.

“One forty!” shouts the man at the laptop.

Collette looks whiter than usual, her eyes locked on the roof. “This place wasn’t built to hold up to sustained winds of this force. If this keeps up we’ll—”

The lights go out.

Someone whispers, “Oh God.”

“What happened?”

While the panicked discussion continues, I listen. Beyond the voices and rumbling wind, something is different. It’s not a new sound. It’s a missing sound. “The generator is off,” I say. I’d heard the rumble of the generator when I woke and recognized the sound from our time in Willy Town.

“He’s right,” Collette says.

“Where is it?” I ask. “Can we get to it?”

“Backside of this building, between here and the lab. Has its own little hut. But no one can go out there right now. Between the snow and wind, you’d wind up frozen and lost in a matter of minutes.”

The discussion continues, but within the hushed cacophony of frightened voices I hear the only one that I want to.

“Merrill,” Aimee says.

“I’m here,” Dr. Clark says. “The power is out.”

“Merrill,” she repeats. “He was telling the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Solomon.” Her voice is harder to hear as I sneak away in the dark, but I hear my guilt cleared as I enter the hallway. “There was someone else out there.”

A flashlight blinks on.

“Hey, stop!” a voice shouts out.

But they’re too late to stop me. I’m already outside. I slam the outer hatch shut and walk into the storm. I hear the door open behind me. I’m only ten feet away, but I’m invisible. Through the howling wind I hear my father’s shouting voice. I’d like to stop and chew him out for not believing me, for not trusting me, with anything. But there’s no time. Without the generator there is no electricity, but there is also no heat. Within the hour those people inside will be popsicles.

I lift my bare hands up to my face where I can see them. The snow melts on contact as it hits me. I can feel the pressure of the wind, the sting of the whipping snowflakes, but not the cold. Having everyone I love freeze to death would be bad enough, but having to stay out here, waiting for rescue with their corpses...who could endure such a thing?

Tracing a hand along the outer wall of the bunk house I move to the back of the building. The snow is already half way to my knees. If it keeps up, Clark Station Two might be buried. I stop in my tracks. This is my fault. The station is going to be buried, just like the first one was! I double my effort, slogging through the snow. If we need to dig ourselves out in the morning, I want the heat running for as long as possible. Maybe we can make the metal building hot enough to melt the snow gathering on it?

I reach the end of the building and follow the wall around to the back. The building containing the generator must be nearby, but I can’t see a thing. I follow the back wall, scouring the area for any hints. That’s when I notice a stub of black just above the snow-line. I brush away the snow, finding a wire that leads down to the ice. After digging for a minute I find that it leads straight out and away from the bunk house.

I still can’t see it. I pause, recalling the stories of people getting lost in the snow, of death and limb amputation. But those people could feel the cold. I can’t. I could probably wait out the storm in a swimsuit and be no worse for wear.

I strike out into the snow, aiming myself along an imaginary line. Ten feet from the bunk house, I realize the wire could have turned in a different direction. I could be going the wrong way. If I don’t find it within thirty feet I’ll turn around and follow my foot prints back. But a quick glance back reveals my foot prints have been filled with snow or swept away by the wind.

There’s no turning back, I decide, and continue forward.

A clang rings out as I run into something solid. I hold my head with one hand and reach out with the other. It’s a metal wall covered with snow. If I hadn’t run into it, I would have never seen it. I follow the wall and find the door latched shut, but not locked.

I fumble around in the dark, looking for the generator. What I’ll do when I find it, I have no idea. I’m sure I can figure it out, but blindness will make the task more difficult. As I graze my hand across the wall, it strikes a hard, plastic, cylindrical object. My mind flashes with recognition as it falls to the floor. I bend down, searching for the flashlight. It’s at my feet, and happily, still works.

The beam is dim, but it’s enough to light the generator. Two things strike me right away. It’s unplugged from the circuit board that distributes the power to all the buildings at Clark Station Two. And the power is switched to “off.”

This was no accident caused by the storm.

The red haired man. He’s still here. He drew me out.

With my heart hammering, I focus on the task at hand. I go to work on the circuit breakers, turning them all off. The plug goes in next. Then I turn to the generator. It’s been running a while so it’s probably already primed. I switch it to “on” and give the cord a solid yank. The engine roars to life, healthy and strong. Then I’m back at the circuit breakers. The main goes on first, then one switch at a time, slowly restoring power to the system.

The last switch belongs to the generator shed itself. When I flip the switch the interior lights up so bright that I squint. With my eyes half closed, I barely make out the figure leaping out from behind the generator. He’s definitely naked, or close to it. His hair is red. His eyes, like mine, are squinted tight as if the light hurts, but he seems to have no trouble moving because he hits me a second later.

The snow outside breaks my fall, but once again I have trouble catching my breath. I expect him to press the attack, but he vanishes into the storm again.

Or has he? I sense something to my side and look for it. All I see is a wall of snow. But there’s a voice hidden in there. “We’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

For some reason, I don’t doubt or question what he says. “Who are you?”

“I’m who you will become.”

A blow to the side of my head sends me sprawling. I think about the pain and how much it must have hurt Aimee when I hit her. I roll over and try to sit up, but I’m pinned. I can’t see him, but I know the man is straddling my waist. His face resolves from the snow. His skin is white, whiter than mine if that’s possible, and opaque. Blue veins pulse just beneath the surface. His eyes are wide now, and dark. Nearly black. His smile reveals shattered and rotting teeth. I can’t see his body. It’s blocked by snow and the unnatural blood red dreadlocks dangling from his head.