The Last Hunter - Descent (Book 1 of the Antarktos Saga) (19 page)

I enter the temple court, walking through the massive gates feeling smaller than ever. And more exposed. I pause to get my bearings. I hold my breath and listen. A faint breeze is rolling over the temple from the lake. The air smells clean, like it does after a rainstorm. I see no hints of movement.
I am alone
, I think, which is good. Without my pack and climbing claws I am defenseless. In fact, I’d better find a weapon of some kind in this place. I will soon need to make a kill and eat.

As I round a black obelisk covered in circular symbols that look vaguely familiar, I come upon the most massive statue I can recall seeing.
It’s like the Colossus of Rhodes
, I think. But this giant isn’t standing guard over a harbor, or even looking out at the water. He sits atop a fallen obelisk, back rigid, head looking straight. I cannot see the face, only its back.

As I walk slowly closer, details resolve and something starts nagging at my subconscious. The statue has been painted in dull colors. Brown armor. Gray skin. Red hair covered by a Viking-esque helmet covered in what appear to be rows of upturned teeth that remind me of the dinosaur’s open jaws.

Red hair
.

When my subconscious finally breaks through, it’s screaming.

Who builds a statue on a
fallen
obelisk!

I stop.

This is no statue.

The red hair is not painted.

This giant...is alive.

I take a nervous step back. My footing is firm. My step silent. I pause before stepping again, sensing a shift in the breeze. It’s now at my back. At
his
back, too. The movement is so subtle I almost miss it. The giant’s head cocked to the side.

For a moment I think my presence has gone unnoticed, but then see a twitch in the mammoth man’s calf muscle. He is shifting his weight to stand. Once on his feet, the giant would stand nearly twenty-five feet tall and could cover the distance between us in four strides.

Though I feel a tinge of shame for running once again, I see no alternative, and put my feet to the stone. Silence pursues me, but I suspect the thing is simply playing with me, giving me a head start. A moment later, my suspicion proves correct as the first thundering footfall gives chase.

I don’t look back as I pass back beneath the gate. My eyes are on what’s in front of me. A small section of cave wall to my right is essentially a dead end. To my left are the four foot steps. Even if I manage to make it to the steps and vault down them without twisting an ankle, what would I do then? Swim like the world’s slowest minnow. The giant would pluck me from the water.

I head for the wall, hoping for a crack in its surface. The ground beneath me shakes. Unlike the large dinosaur, this giant is heavy and far from light-footed. As he gets closer, the vibrations nearly knock me forward.

As I near the wall, its details leap out. I see two large cracks, but both are five feet from the cave floor. Getting inside would take time. And I don’t have any time to spare. In fact, I think the giant is right behind me.

Then why hasn’t he squashed me or picked me up?
I wonder.

Not caring about the answer, I focus on the wall again and find my escape route. At the bottom of the wall is a horizontal crevice about a foot high and six feet wide. I can fit. And quickly.

A few feet from the wall, I dive forward and slide across the gritting stone floor. I ignore the pain as several wounds tear open on my chest and hands and pull myself into the wall. Just as my feet slide in behind me, a thunderous boom shakes the tunnel. I glance back to see the giant’s large, six-toed bare foot just behind me.

Was he trying to crush me? Or taunt me?

I pull myself deeper, caring more about escape than answers, but get my answer when the giant begins laughing. His voice is deep and rumbles through me. I can feel the pulsing laugh in my chest. It chases me into the darkness, stripping away my confidence and filling me with a fear that goes far beyond physical pain or death.

That thing...that man...was evil.

And I hope I’ll never see him again.

23

“You’re dead now,” I say to the small, arm-sized centipede. The thing had put up quite a fight, thrashing and trying to bite, but the rock in my hand proved too much for it in the end. I know now why the small dinosaur picked it for a meal—centipedes are stupid. It didn’t take too much effort to sneak up on the thing. If not for its hard shell, my first strike would have killed it. But its carapace was like a turtle shell and breaking through took four solid whacks.

Now the thing is leaking its white, cream cheese-like innards all over a boulder. The sight and smell of the thing makes me pause, but I haven’t eaten in days. I scoop some of the fleshy sludge up with my fingers. For a moment I wonder if it is poisonous.

No
, I think,
the dinosaur ate it
.

Holding my breath, I put my hand in my mouth and scrape the stuff off with my teeth. I swallow quickly and repeat the process. The centipede tastes as bad as I thought it would, but it’s settling nicely in my stomach. When I’m done I rinse the taste out of my mouth at a small spring I found. The caves are covered in small springs and finding water is rarely a problem anymore. Food is a different problem, because food here either runs away or tries to eat me.

But I won’t need to eat again for at least another day, so I take some time to explore. Keeping track of where I’ve been is simple. My perfect memory, at least back to when I first came here, has assembled a three dimensional map of every place I’ve been. Today I’m determined to fill in a gap. Then I’ll have a three cubic mile territory memorized.

What bothers me about this gap is that I’m not sure what’s there. I haven’t seen the dinosaurs again, so maybe they nest there. The giant, too. Anything could be there. I tell myself I’m likely to find nothing. There are many large and small tunnels leading out of my territory and creatures as big as those would need territories vastly larger. But still, I’m nervous about what I’ll find.

I squeeze through a tight space and for a moment think I’ve got myself stuck again, but then I’m through and sporting a new scrape on my chest. I ignore the sting and dripping blood as I arrive in a wider, inclined tunnel. It’s tall enough to stand in, maybe eight feet tall and four wide. My mind fills in the holes in my mental map. If the tunnel carries on in either direction as straight as it appears to, then one side would reach the large river tunnel and the other would reach the surface.

But I can’t just assume this. I need to make sure. So I take the tunnel left, looking for branches along the way. I find none, but thirty minutes later I reach the river. After a quick drink, I backtrack up the tunnel. An hour later, I reach the surface. The entrance to the tunnel is blocked from view by a stone jutting out from the mountain. I step out of the tunnel and find the outside as dark as the inside. It’s night. And it’s snowing. I crouch in the snow half way up the mountain. It’s peaceful out here. I sense that nothing will try to eat me here, and the snow—I eat some—tickles my tongue as it melts. I listen to the tick, tick of snowflakes landing and wonder where I’ve heard the sound before. I have no memory of it, but ticking doesn’t strike me as something new, just something I enjoy.

My stomach isn’t rumbling yet, but I know it will be soon. So I head back into the tunnel, destination: river. I hope to find something more significant to eat than a centipede, but I also have no weapon, so something that couldn’t make a meal of me would also be spectacular.

As I walk down the tunnel, taking note of the tiny fragments of glimmering stone that help me see, I try to create stone weapons in my mind. How would cave men do it? I’ll need a stick. Some rope. And a sharp stone.
A stick on its own might do the job
, I think.
Well, not against a
—

A white square—its whiteness and perfect edges completely foreign in the underground—catches my attention. It’s in the middle of the tunnel floor.

How did I not see this before?
I wonder.

I don’t know, but here it is.

I crouch down to the flat thing. What is it?

Before picking it up, I smell it. There are traces of something I can’t place, but have smelled before. I taste it. The same. I place my finger against it and yank it away.

I laugh at my ridiculousness. I’m acting like an ape who discovered fire. I know this is from the outside world, and I know in my core that it is harmless, but something about it has me on edge. As I reach for it I think I would rather be facing down a dinosaur. My cowardice before a piece of paper makes me angry. I snatch it up and turn it around.

It’s an image. Two faces have been captured.
A photograph
, I think.
A Polaroid
. I can remember facts about the process of taking photos, of film and development, but nothing beyond that. No real memories. Just information. And the two people in the image are strangers to me.

There is a girl. Dark skin. Light hair. Her head is leaning on a boy’s shoulder, his hair as light as hers, though much straighter. And his skin is as white as hers is brown. Both are smiling. Happy. But the bared teeth make me feel like the pair want to eat me. Like they want to tear me apart.

I don’t like this image.

I turn it back over, unable to look at it again. I want to destroy it, but find myself unable to do so.
I can fling it outside
, I think.
Let the wind take it away
. I step toward the cave exit again and stop. It feels wrong for some reason. Despite my loathing of the image, my gut says it could be important later on.

So I save it.

Not on my person. That would be unbearable.

I find a thin crack and insert the picture. When it’s almost all the way in, I tap it with my finger and it disappears into the space. I peer in after it. I’ll need a stick or something thin to pry it out later on.

I stand back. No one will ever know it’s there. For a moment I wonder if I’ll remember where it is, but make a mental note on my map. If I need this image again, I’ll know where it is.

Until then I make a silent vow to avoid this tunnel and the photo that scares me more than being eaten alive.

24

I’ve adopted a new system of time. Who’s to say whether or not it coincides with the twenty-four hour days on the surface? I doubt it, but I have noticed I have regular periods of sleep followed by regular periods of being awake. I suppose I could count out the minutes and translate this into hours, but trying to force time underground to make sense in terms of the above-ground world will only distract me. So I judge days by my waking and sleeping now. But how long is a day really? For all I know it could be a week. It doesn’t matter anymore.

According to my new calendar, I’ve been on my own for a month. It’s been twenty days since I found and hid the photo. And in that time I have hunted and been hunted. I have killed and nearly been killed. But, as Ninnis taught me, I have survived.

I have a new weapon. At its core is a staff of very flexible wood. It’s old, and I’m not sure how it got down here, but it bends like a fishing pole, so it follows me through the tightest squeezes, but it’s rigid enough to make a good thrusting spear. At one end—the spear end—I have attached a sharpened bone from a dinosaur skeleton. I had hoped to use one of its teeth, but the skull was missing. On the other end—the mace end—is a baseball-sized stone. It’s not intimidating to look at, but it’s solid, and dense. I fashioned the weapon after realizing there are two types of creatures in the underground. Those that you need to stab. And those that you need to bludgeon.

In addition to the weapon, which I have dubbed
Whipsnap
, I now have a thirty-foot rope created from the skins of several different prey creatures. After skinning the creatures, I dried the skins and then cut them into thin strips, which I then braided together. The line can stretch and hold my weight, even after a deadfall. I learned this the hard way, but now I know.