The Sentinel (23 page)

I laugh and let out a sad sob at the same time. I forgot I’d told Willem about that. He’s got a point, but I think the real lesson here is that Willem still has a chance to save his father and not live with this kind of regret. Before I can say as much, a high-pitched sound catches my attention. It fades in and out, as crashing waves and brisk wind occasionally wash it out.

“What is that?”

He listens and the sound repeats. It’s high-pitched, but not like a scream. There’s no emotion in it, but there is a warble. “Sounds like a monotone crow call.”

“Or a raven,” he says.

“Right.” That this sound could be the emotionless call of the mysterious raven makes me uncomfortable. I think I’d rather it sound crazed than robotic.

“But it sounds far away.”

“Doesn’t mean it won’t get closer. We should go,” I say, and then break into a jog. Willem falls in line behind me and our jog becomes a run, but not like before when desperation and fear fueled us. This time we’re fueled by hope. We can finally fight back, maybe survive, and maybe raise a little hell of our own.

33

A five foot drop catches me off guard. I manage to land on my feet, but then stumble and fall unceremoniously on my face. But it’s not the drop that stumbles me, it’s the ground upon which I land. It’s soft. I lift my head up and spit sandy grit from my mouth. A beach. I don’t remember there being a beach between where I met Willem and the spot Jackson was killed.

Willem jumps down next to me and helps me up. As he brushes the sand off my back, I see the mainland across the channel and realize what we’ve done.

“What’s that they say about the best laid plans of mice and men?” I ask.

“Go often askew,” he replies, and I think he’s actually quoting whatever poem that line comes from. He proves this theory correct when he continues. “And leave us nothing but grief and pain.”

“You can stop there, Mr. Sunshine,” I say, before pointing out the beach. “We overshot our target. This is the beach where—”

“The walruses,” he says, sounding stunned. “They’re gone.”

He’s right. There isn’t a single living thing left on the beach. There isn’t a single corpse, either, for that matter. The beach is empty. Curiosity pulls us further out on to the sand. Tall waves crest and crash to our right. The foamy water hisses as it slides up the sand and slips away, tinged pink.

Dark brown patches of sand stretch into the distance. Blood covers the beach. On the plus side, the beach is empty and launching our raft from here shouldn’t be much trouble. On the downside, it’s an awful reminder that the horrors we witnessed on this beach are real. A line of pink water traces the shoreline where the rising tide leaches the blood away, pulling it into the ocean.

A loud hiss snaps my attention out to the channel. A plume of steam. Whales. Taunting me again. Steam rises again, but this time it’s followed by a tall black dorsal fin.
Orcas
. No doubt drawn by the thousands of gallons of walrus blood seeping into the ocean. Seeing them in the water between here and the mainland feels like a dark harbinger. But despite being nicknamed killer whales, they’ve never killed and eaten a human in the wild. Sure, they freak out and chomp down on a Sea World trainer every now and again, but lock me up in a cell for no good reason and I’m liable to do the same. Instead of fearing the creatures, I feel fearful
for
them.

“Run,” I say to them. “Get out of here.”

“They’re safe in the water,” Willem says, watching as the pod moves through the channel, hunting.

I’m not sure I agree, but I don’t argue the point. Our safety needs to be first and foremost on our minds. Any lapse in focus could—

Speak of the devil
.

A distant bouncing ball of white appears on the beach. “Willem!” I shout before giving his sleeve an urgent yank and throwing myself back up the five foot wall.

He shouts some kind of Greenlandic curse behind me and then he’s got his hand on my ass, shoving me up faster. I turn around as he climbs up and yank him to the top.

Paying attention to my surroundings this time, I backtrack and quickly find the spot where Jackson met his fate for the first time. But I don’t spot the backpack.
It has to be here
, I think, as I begin searching behind the strewn boulders and loose fallen stones.

“Here!” Will shouts, holding up the backpack victoriously.

I kneel beside him and yank the pack open. Everything’s here. I take a blast cap and timer out of the Ziploc bag.

“What are you doing?” Willem asks. It’s clear he wants to run.

“We’re going to have to stop running eventually,” I say. “No time like the present, right?”

He doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t run either. While I try to figure out the explosives, he keeps an eye out behind us.

The blast caps and timers look to be made for each other and they snap together easily. I look for any other missing pieces, find none, and slide the pointy end of the blast cap into the C4. It feels too easy, but McAfee probably had these custom made. His crew is often lacking in the IQ department, and he had equipment special ordered so that monkeys could figure it out. Seems his theory applied to weapons grade explosives, too.

I look up and see Willem inching back toward the beach. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t see the bear,” he says. “I think it might have—”

The bear rises up over the five foot wall, standing on its hind legs and trying to find purchase with its forelimb claws. If it gets up now, we’re dead. But I can’t run. Not right away. The thing’s horrible condition freezes my gaze for a moment. Its face is ruined, peeled away from one side where a tusk must have penetrated and pulled the skin free. Half of its teeth are exposed along with a portion of cheekbone and forehead. The wounds I gave the bear are invisible now, masked by an array of large puncture wounds covering the rest of its body. It should be dead a hundred times over, but here it is, rising up to devour us.

My sense returns with a surge of adrenaline. “Willem!” He turns and runs toward me. Without a word between us, we charge up the hillside. Once we crest this hill, it’s a straight and clear slope down to the ruins. If we can take care of the bear, we should be able to grab our gear, return to the beach and head for the mainland inside of an hour.

“Did you figure it out?” Willem asks, looking at the backpack in my hand.

I show him my other hand and the brick of C4 it holds. “I think.”

“You think?”

“You want to give a try?” I say. My thighs begin to burn from the uphill run.

He looks at the brick and shakes his head. As his head turns to the side, his eyes widen. “Here it comes!”

The bear is below us and bounding over the rock strewn hillside like a monster truck over Matchbox Cars. I see one of its legs bend at a sick angle, no doubt broken during its battle with the walrus herd. The wound is severe, but it seems to only slow the bear a little—enough for us to reach the top.

The down-slope of the hill is mostly clear. We’ll be able to run quickly. The bear will run quicker. I pause at the top.

“What are you doing?” Willem shouts, frantic.

“Count,” I say. I’m out of breath. “Count how many seconds…until it reaches the top.”

He nods and nearly throws me over the edge.

My knees protest the pell-mell run. Each impact jars my body.

“Twenty-one seconds!” Willem shouts.

The bear is just twenty-one seconds behind us. It will decrease that distance as it comes down the hill. With shaky hands from fright, not to mention sprinting downhill, I set the timer.

Nineteen seconds.

I drop the brick of C4, and for the first time wonder just how big of a bang I’m going to get out of that brick. Something in me says it’s going to be big. “We need to find cover!” I shout.

Fifteen seconds.

“There!” Willem shouts, pointing to what looks like a drop off. But it’s not close and I can’t move any faster.

Ten seconds.

We’re not going to make it
, I think. I glance back and see the bear. It looks closer than I expected. I don’t see the brick of C4 anywhere. Did the bear already pass it?

Five seconds.

Pain lances up my arm, snapping my attention forward. Willem yanks me to the side and over the edge of a rise. We drop several feet and strike hard stone. Willem takes the brunt of the impact as I fall on top of him.

Two seconds.

“Cover your ears,” I shout.

I block my ears at the moment of detonation.

The sound hits me first, pulsing through my body and sucking the air from my lungs. Then a deep resonating rumble rolls through the earth beneath me. The shockwave will no doubt reach the other side of the island and send ripples out into the Arctic Ocean.

With the main force of the explosion past, I stand to my feet and help Willem up.

“Did we get it?” he asks.

Stones trickle down from above and fall into our hiding place. The bear’s head slides into view, staring down at us with dead, white eyes.

And then it falls.

We both jump back, startled, but relieved to find the bear is missing most of its body. I feel like I should say something, some kind of cool movie hero quote. But before I get a chance to come up with something witty, a grinding sound catches my attention. My first thought is that we started an avalanche, which seems likely now that I’m thinking about it.
Who sets off C4 on the side of a stone-strewn hill while standing at the bottom of it
? We’re lucky we didn’t bury ourselves.

The grinding continues as I search for its source. I find it closer than expected when a loose stone falls free and lands at my feet, revealing a black gap. What first looked like the remnants of some ancient rockslide now looks like a rock wall. Built by human hands.

Something on the fallen rock catches my attention. I pick up and inspect the surface. There’s a rune. I show it to Willem.

“The dog hunter,” he says, reading the rune.

“They hunted dogs?”

“No,” he says. “A hunter who used dogs. To track. To kill. This is a corpse door.”

The stones shift and collapse, opening a hole big enough to drive a truck through.

From what I understand, the corpse door is the last line of defense against a Draugr, and we’ve just opened it. As a deep growl echoes from somewhere behind the door, we back away, and then run, neither one of us wanting to think about what we might have just set free.

34

We make it to the base of the hill before hearing anything behind us, but when a howl rolls down the hill, I nearly fall on my face. The chorus of five ragged canine voices is one of the most horrible sounds I’ve ever heard. It’s so awful, I can’t help it; I turn back and look.

I wish I hadn’t.

There’s a human Draugr standing in front of the cave. He’s short, but wide, and powerful looking. His face is peeled back like Torstein’s, and a skull cap rests on his head, covering an explosion of gray hair. He’s dressed in fluffy, tan furs, which seem to be disintegrating in the breeze, spewing clouds of fur into the air like milkweed in the fall. There’s no hammer, or sword, or axe or any other man made weapon to speak of. Instead, he holds five taut leashes.

The undead dogs strain against their bonds, eyes locked on the only moving prey in site—Willem and me. They’re hard to see because their tan fur matches the skins the human Draugr wears. But I can see their permanently bared teeth quite clearly. Each dog looks to be about fifty pounds, and while they’re withered from the dry Arctic air, they’re no doubt stronger than they were in life. Like the furs of the human Draugr, the dogs’ fluffy tan fur billows and spins around them, caught up by the wind.

“Elkhounds,” Willem says. “They’ve been popular hunting dogs of Norsemen for seven thousand years.”

“Then let’s get going while we’ve still got a head start,” I say. “We can hold them off inside the ruins.”

“No.” Willem looks to the ruins. “If my father made it there, I don’t want to lead the Draugr straight to him.”

“I hate to break it to you,” I say, “but we just rang the world’s loudest dinner bell. Every Draugr on the island is probably headed this way.”

Our moment of indecision is interrupted by a deep laugh, like a dry Jabba the Hut from
Star Wars
. The dog-master raises the gloved hand holding the leashes. His fingers open. The leashes fall to the ground. There is a moment of confusion as the dogs continue to strain against the leashes, but there’s nothing holding them back. Are they free or did the master step forward? A single angry sounding grunt, barked from the dog-master’s mouth, clears their minds and sends the pack sprinting toward us.

I turn and run for the ruins. Not only do I disagree with Willem on this point, but there is nowhere else to go. Willem seems to have come to the same conclusion, because he’s right next to me, running for all he’s worth.

Or is he?

He’s in good shape and has longer legs. He should be leaving me in the dust.

“Don’t wait for me!” I shout.

“I’m not going to leave you!”

Son-of-a
— “If you get there first, you can be ready to help me over the top.” I glance back. The cloak whips out behind me as I run, making it hard to see, and no doubt slowing me down. My instincts say to cut it loose and run faster, but I’ll freeze without it. The cloak drops for a moment and give me a clear view. The five dogs reach the flat plain. One of them trips and spills into a heap. It rolls to its feet, but now runs on just three legs.

The canine bones have become brittle
.

My logic must make sense to Willem because he pulls ahead of me. I know I suggested it, but being left behind like this is a horrible feeling. What’s that people say about surviving a bear attack? You just need to be faster than the other guy. That probably applies to undead hunting dogs, too. And I’m the slow one.

I can hear the clack of ancient claws on the stone ground behind me, growing louder by the moment.