Why do I feel like this? Am I dying? Did it poison me with something?
God he was warm. Despite all his time wandering in the sub-zero temperatures, his lack of food or shelter, he was absolutely burning up.
There was nothing they could do for him here in this bar, he knew that. Could he go to Ny-Alesund? There were enough scientists, doctors, and educated people there. Some first aid equipment. Surely there were antibiotics?
No he was sure that he was supposed to wait here for some friends to pick him up. People he trusted. He looked down at his wrist where the tiny glowing dot under his skin was still pulsing.
He was burning up, his forehead and cheeks glistening with feverish sweat. He knew he wasn’t thinking straight, but new compulsions were forming in his brain, like powerful suggestions from a cartoon angel on his shoulder.
All he could think about was food.
Ariel felt his intestines writhing like a sack full of snakes. His mouth tasted of copper, and the sweat was dripping from his nose. His gums were swollen and his jaw muscles ached. It reminded him of when he had mumps as a child, he could barely open his mouth. Most disturbingly, Ariel felt something moving in his brain. Perhaps it was the brain itself, a sick deep sea mollusc turning restlessly in its prison. It was a horrible feeling like the buttery tissue was undulating within his skull, reforming and restructuring behind his terrified eyes. Every time it happened he felt like his eyes were not his own, rolling up into his head or closing one at a time.
He looked up from the bar to the glass panelling behind the rows of bottles. He looked terrible. His face was fractured between two panels of glass, giving him an asymmetrical appearance. A man split in half. His skin had lost its entire colour, a dull waxen hue, almost artificial looking. It reminded him of the prosthetic face used in Terminator when Arnie plucked out his eye. It was almost believable as a human face, but not quite.
God, his teeth and gums ached. His fever was running higher and he was finding it hard to think straight. He turned around, a sudden wave of paranoia washing over him. Through his delirium, it seemed everyone in the pub had suddenly stopped what they were doing and sat quite still, staring at him in silence.
Why are you all looking at me? Can’t you see I’m sick?
Ariel shook his head, wiped his brow clear of sweat with shaking hand. No one was looking at him, apart from a concerned couple eating steak at the nearest table.
God that steak looks good. But my stomach feels so sick.
Ariel stood up from the bar and staggered with what seemed to others like drunkenness through the wooden tables and out towards the toilets at the rear of the pub.
Once inside the detergent smelling room, he passed a single man at the urinals, waited until he left (the man gave him a look as if he suspected Ariel was a homosexual) then shoved open the nearest cubicle and got down on his knees, vomiting loudly and violently into the blue tinged water of the toilet bowl. Again and again his stomach wretched, bringing up the chilli schnapps, which burned like acid. He coughed and shook, gripping the sides of the bowl. The energy bars and chocolate that had sustained him during his trek across the ice, the packets of army rations in silver foil that to his starving body had tasted like a home cooked roast dinner. All expelled from his body as undesirable.
After five full minutes he sat there on the cubicle floor, sticky mucous and vomit trailing down his stubbled chin, the rank smell of sick overpowering in his nostrils.
He sat breathing heavy, in a pool of piss and cigarette butts, his face resting on the cool graffiti’d door. His brain continued to squirm inside his head like a slug, the worms still wrestled in his guts. He felt as if he were a hollow man, not a single nutrient left in his body. And that vacuum had left a gnawing, overwhelming hunger. When he had first entered the pub, he remembered someone at one of the tables was cutting into a medium rare rib eye steak. He had watched as the blood had seeped out onto the white plate, how utterly exquisite it looked to his frozen half-starved body. His body was tensing and relaxing like a man receiving electric shock therapy.
Steak. Dear God I would kill for a juicy New York strip.
As he had not smoked since he was on board the Proteus, he was also craving a cigarette.
Dragging himself up off the piss stained floor, Ariel staggered out of the cubicle and into the corridor. Behind him was the goods entrance and fire escape. It was ajar and a wonderful scent was coming in from the cold dark outside.
What is that? It smells delicious. Yes, a smoke, let’s go out for a smoke, calm the nerves, think what to do next. Good idea.
Exiting the door, Ariel was bathed in the cold night air of Longyearbyen. The snow had stopped, the wind had calmed and the temperature was bearable. He was standing in an alleyway next to a small skip containing the pub’s refuse. One of the protruding bin bags was burst and a pack of raw, squashed misshapen quarter pounder burgers was spilling out. The contents of an ashtray had spilled over them and stuck to the rotten meat like seasoning. A couple of used tissues had also stuck to the meat, the tissue paper freezing quickly like rose-petal garnish. It must have been put out only in the last few minutes, because the ground flesh was not frozen yet. It still glistened with blood. Obviously it had been thrown out because it was on the turn; a fine fuzz of white mould had grown across some of the mangled meat.
Ariel stared at it, salivating. He wiped the remaining vomit from his chin and stepped closer to the bin. He wondered if primitive hunter gatherers with an ailment, while running through the forest, would instinctively have known which herbs and berries to pick and eat. He knew that whenever he had a cold he craved citrus fruit. Why should this be any different?
The sweat that was still lashing from his face quickly cooled in the night air, making Ariel shiver violently. His brain squirmed inside his skull, making his eyes roll back white in his head. His eyelids fluttered and when they reopened, the only thing that was visible was white sclera, as if his pupils had rolled right around to get a good look at his misbehaving brain and stayed there.
He stepped forward, hands out in front like a blind man, feeling for something to hold on to. Then, as if his eyes had been pinpricked, two tiny black dots appeared in the centre of each sclera.
New pupils.
He blinked twice, like a new born creature seeing the world for the first time. He felt his metamorphosing brain twist and breathe inside his head, then extend forward stalks filled with nerves, grasping onto the backs of these moon-like orbs, opening windows in its skull prison. It felt like fingers trying to poke his eyes out from the back. Ariel saw the world in a way he never had before, but all the detail and beauty was lost on him. He could see the vapours of rot rising off the bloodied burger meat in front of him, could see the tiny tendrils of fuzzy mould spreading over it like a winter coat. He walked forward, stood staring at it for a moment. The drool was running free down his chin now, dripping in long greasy strands onto the black plastic bin bag.
A horrible gluttonous sound issued from Ariel’s throat, somewhere between a swallowing and retching. Then he buried his head in the burst bin liner, taking in as much of the rotting flesh as possible. He was barely chewing, just gulping it all down, frozen tissues, mould, cigarette ash and all. His hand steadied himself on the side of the metal skip and there he feasted. He started to feel better as soon as the meat reached his stomach, his strength returning, fever subsiding, guts stopped writhing inside him.
The Flesh was so good.
Ariel paid no attention as the Norwegian cook came out of the back door next to him to smoke a cigarette. Despite his obvious shock and disgust, the young blonde man slowly lit a cannabis cigarette anyway, peering at Ariel as if he were performing some bizarre circus act.
The young man said something to Ariel in Norwegian, waited for a response, and then tried English.
“Hey man, you ok, what you doing?”
Ariel stopped eating for a moment, raised his head. His mouth and chin were coated with blood
and flecks of rotten meat. The young man took a single step back, took a drag of his cigarette and shook his head. It was obvious Ariel’s eyes were wrong. Perhaps the young man wondered if he was he was blind?
“Friend, we don’t so much have homeless people in Longyearbyen. It’s ok. I can make you food. A real burger, cooked even. That stuff’s bad, will make you ill.”
Ariel stopped munching. A lump of half chewed raw bin-burger drop from his slack jaw. When he spoke his mouth was thick with blood.
“I’m already slightly ill it seems.” Ariel kept his head down, facing his feast. “Hey friend, could I trouble you for a cigarette?”
The cook laughed nervously. “Why not pal, nothing like a smoke after a good meal eh?”
Ariel stood up and walked, head bowed over to the cook. His hands were covered in raw meat and dirt, so with slightly shaking hand the young man took a Marlboro from a soft pack and held it up to Ariel’s bloodied lips. Ariel burped loudly as he sucked the cigarette end into his mouth. Blood soaked into the paper filter tip.
The young cook flicked his lighter and held it up to Ariel’s mouth. Without thinking, Ariel recoiled from the flame. Some deep part of his reforming brain did not like the fire. Not at all.
Taking control of his mind, Ariel closed his eyes and leaned forward, the tobacco crackling into life and allowing him to take a deep lungful of silvery smoke.
He suddenly felt so much better. The raw meat had given him sustenance and assuaged his symptoms. The young cook re-lit up his own smoke, the end of a thin cannabis joint. Ariel now realized why he was taking all this so calmly. This young man was habitually stoned.
“Hey pal, you can’t live like this here, not in this cold, it’s not London yes? You’re British? Maybe I can get you some coffee. Something else? Maybe you still hungry?”
Ariel took a deep draw, instinctively careful to avert his strange eyes from the young man. He could still smell raw meat, better and fresher than the stuff from the skip. Glancing up, he quickly realized what he smelt.
“You know what, now that you mention it, I am still hungry.”
The young Norwegian laughed uncomfortably as Ariel stared at his neck. Then Ariel raised his eyes from the shadows to allow the man to see his strange all white eyes with their pin prick pupils. The man started to back off from him. He reached out for the fire exit door that led back into the pub, but Ariel slammed it shut before he could pass through.
Then he pounced.
The weight of the impact took both of them awkwardly off their feet and into the snow. The Chef’s hands slapped feebly at Ariel’s back, his legs kicking out into the snow.
“Get off me! What the fuck man!”
Ariel sank his teeth into the stubbled cheek of the young man. He pulled with all his strength and found the skin surprisingly elastic. The chef was forced into an expression like a surprised fish caught on a hook. He screamed as his left cheek stretched, stretched, then finally gave in a wet tear, giving him a bloody perma-grin on one side of his face. Ariel threw his head back and swallowed the stolen medallion of man in three odd throaty gulps, like a seal swallowing a fish. The young man actually didn’t cry out at first, but just looked at Ariel with a mixture of shock and outrage. Then as the realization dawned on him that this tramp was going to continue eating him, the struggle really began.
In the ensuing fight, the young man’s pale torso had been exposed beneath his check chef shirt, and Ariel could not resist the temptation of that expanse of soft white belly, like a freshly baked loaf dusted in flour. He gnawed and burrowed, scraping incisors past subcutaneous adipose tissue until he got to the diaphragm, a delicious treat like a thinly stretched expanse of bacon.
The young man batted and flapped his hands at Ariel’s sweat drenched head, but Ariel barely noticed, he was lost in world of flesh, breathing in the blood.
In that reverie, Ariel saw shapes and portents in the innards of his meal, like a soothsayer of old divining the future from entrails.
Through the red mist he saw great predators skulking through the forests of the ancient world. He saw some early variant of man, kneeling before these creatures, building a shrine of skulls to their new Bear-Gods. He saw great battles, thousands strong, with Vikings fighting alongside giant bears. He saw some of these men, the wildest ones, drinking the blood of these bears from wooden bowls, kneeling at the feet of an altar where the bears sat surveying them. As if they were the Kings.
All this he saw in a fluid sanguine dream as he feasted and spluttered inside the stomach of the young chef, whose hands were now just shaking and reaching up, as if he imagined some holy saviour stood looking down over Ariel’s shoulder.
Then it was over and all the lights came on in Ariel’s brain all at once.
Suddenly Ariel threw himself backwards against the metal skip. As if he had woken from some nightmare, his head darted in all directions, trying to take in his bearings. His own human eyes had returned, rolled back around inside his head to look out at the carnage.
In front of him was a dying man, horribly mutilated.
My God he’s looking at me!
Ariel balked as he saw a young man in the snow, his eyelids fluttering, looking at him with fear and desperation.
Ariel reached out a hand to help, to stem the flow of blood and administer some kind of first aid.
“Don’t worry you’ll be ok, we’ll get you some help. I’ll help you.”
Ariel froze when he noticed his own fingers. Caked in blood and dripping with gore,
His hand seemed swollen, like the paw of some huge creature, and his fingers had developed an extra phalange. From each new segment protruded a bony claw, three inches long and curved like a scimitar.
Ariel touched his lips, felt the congealing blood there like day-old gravy.
He had done this! He had just killed this man, but he had no true memory of the act, just a fever dream.
Pure hunger and bloodlust had descended on him, shoving the human inside him into some dusty corner of his mind to sulk.
Ariel looked around him, realized where he was and the predicament he was in, and then started to sob uncontrollably, rocking back and forth on his haunches. It didn’t matter if he could find a way back to the England or not, he was fucked.
Then he looked up and to his horror saw a man standing in the shadows of the alley, staring at him. He wore a thick black coat with fur lined hood pulled up over his head.
The man was huge, well over six feet tall and massively built. He looked like Jon Pol Sigmarsson, the World’s Strongest Man champion Ariel remembered from childhood television. He had white blonde hair and ice blue eyes that shone out from beneath the shadows of his hood.
Ariel raised his hands in a placatory gesture, having no idea where to start explaining the corpse at his feet. He shook his head, as if to convey his lack of responsibility. He knew all reason had left him, despite the fullness of his belly his fever was still burning him up. He was delirious. As he stared at the iceberg of a man, he wasn’t even completely sure if he was real or just the product of his fever dream. The man was too big, too muscular to be real.
Then the man strode over to him and crouched down next to the corpse of the young pub chef. Ariel was shivering and shaking. He didn’t know how to explain all this to what his addled brain assumed was a local fisherman, to make him understand. There he was, sat amongst bin bags next to a corpse outside a Norwegian pub. With wavering voice he spoke to the stranger.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I think I did this. I have some kind of rabies. I’m a scientist and I’ve been exposed to something. An infection from an animal. You shouldn’t come close to me, I don’t know if this thing is contagious. I need to be quarantined, do you understand? Speak English? Just don’t come near me, I could infect you too.”
The huge man pulled back his hood to reveal a scalp pitted with dents and scars beneath his oddly coarse white-blond hair. The icy blue eyes peered at him from beneath a heavy br
ow-bone, evaluating him.
Then, never taking his eyes from Ariel, he pointed his thick index finger and plunged it into the open guts of the young chef. Ariel watched in horror as the man removed his finger, dripping with viscera, and licked it clean with a tongue that was far, far too long. Like a dragon testing a cake mix.
When he spoke his voice was so deep that Ariel was sure the metal he leant on was vibrating.
“Too late for me to catch, little man. Much, much year too late.”
Ariel opened his mouth and was about to scream, but the man placed a huge hand across his mouth. Ariel noticed that the fingernails were thick and dark, in contrast with his pale skin.
Like Polar bear claws.
It suddenly became very apparent to Ariel who this man was.
34
The Helicopters drew in towards the stricken ship, angry wasps to a carcass.
A crusting of frost clung to the cold steel of the hull, and across the ship, yellow lights flickered from windows as the power surged.
Kruger leaned out of the open door of the helicopter, taking in the freezing air, the chopping of the rotors, the feel of the snow on his exposed skin like shards of glass.
Not for much longer, he thought.
The decades of toil had taken what was owed them. Years of flesh-blackening cold or reddening heat, his stomach a cathedral of hunger or dry sponge of thirst. His aging body was a sculpture of scar tissue, tight and numb and threatening to tear every time he coughed.
He thought of the hundreds of nights in casinos all over the world, from Vegas to Macau, frittering away the MoD’s insulting remuneration for his service. It was pathetic that he had to enter these dens of chance just to bump up his meagre pay and build a pension for himself. It was pathetic that the government considered a sense of pride and honour as payment enough. Kruger snorted behind the mask that covered his mouth. That sort of abstract notion was just a way to get people to do dirty jobs for no money. The risks his masters had asked him to take, the horrors they had casually sent him to face, only to leave him out in the cold when his body started to wear down. No cushy desk job or Whitehall advisory position for him, he lacked the diplomacy skills. Unlike Usher, who was every inch the officer when he needed to be, or that suave middle-man pencil pusher Isaac Marlowe, Kruger knew he looked ridiculous in a suit, a scarred and gangling pseudo gentleman from Gangs of New York.
The Last Line Series One Page 26
