The Last Hunter - Descent (Book 1 of the Antarktos Saga) (11 page)

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 build 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.

When he speaks I smell his breath, like rotten ground beef. But the smell doesn’t bother me nearly as much as his words, “Time to go home.”

The pain from the first blow to my head quadruples with the second. I’m dazed now, nearly unconscious. I feel pressure around my ankles and a scraping on my back. He’s dragging me. After a few moments, the sky above me begins to clear. The storm is easing. For a moment I can sees the stars overhead. But then the reality of my situation sets in—I’m being taken—and the night sky is blurred by my tears.

I hear my name being called in the distance. My father’s voice. Then my mother’s. Dr. Clark’s. Mira’s. They’re looking for me.

“Here,” I mumble.

Then the silhouette of my captor blots out the sky. I hear my name one more time, the voice as desperate as I feel. I open my mouth and fill my lungs to respond, but I never get the chance. I don’t feel the blow. I’m unconscious before the pain registers.

I awake—who knows how much later—and find myself underground.

Covered in blood and surrounded by bodies.

12

My foot rolls on a bone as I kick away from the bodies. There’s so many of them, I can’t make out what I’m seeing. It’s like someone decided to play a game of pick-up sticks with discarded bones. I fall backwards, landing on a lumpy mass. My hands are out, bracing against injury. Rubbery flesh breaks my fall, its coarse hair tickling between my fingers. I haven’t seen the body beneath me, but I know—somehow—that it’s dead.