THE SENTINEL (A Jane Harper Horror Novel)

by Robinson, Jeremy; Bishop, Jeremy

  Clinging to the stone tower, I pull myself up and tuck my handgun back into the waist of my pants. We’re surrounded by the tall stones. I think I see movement in the maze. Flashes of people. Of Draugar. But it could just be my spinning vision. I jump when Willem appears at my side and puts an arm around my back, supporting some of my weight.

  “Can you move?” he whispers, looking into the maze with eagerness in his eyes. He doesn’t want to run, I realize. He wants to find his father.

  I nod and say, “I’m fine. Go.”

  He lets go of my back, but despite my best efforts, my legs start to buckle. I claw at the stone, dragging my nails across the polished surface, trying to stay upright. My fall doesn’t stop until Willem catches me.

  He pulls me up close, squeezing me tight enough to hurt my ribs. He looks back into the stone labyrinth with sad eyes.

  “Leave me,” I say. “He’s your father.”

  “My father would never leave you,” he says. “Neither will I.”

  He’s right, I think. I can’t picture the old man ever leaving a damsel in distress, even if there was a chance Willem would die. These Greenlanders have honor in them, or perhaps sexism. Either way, Willem isn’t about to leave my side, or endanger my life.

  “Chase! Jakob!” I shout as loud as I can. “Get to the ruins! We’ll meet you there!”

  I hear a distant, indistinct reply from Chase, but nothing from Jakob. A flash of green weaving through the stones catches my attention. My shouting attracted some attention. “The green one’s coming.”

  We turn and hobble away, moving as quickly as we can, which isn’t very fast. I do my best to help, but every time I push off with my feet, I head in the wrong direction, betrayed by my distorted equilibrium. If not for the stones, the big Draugr would have probably caught us by now.

  Willem changes tactics and throws me over his shoulder. While this arrangement is very uncomfortable for me, we make much better time and soon get clear of the stone spires. The beach widens, but it’s now covered in large round boulders.

  This looks familiar, I think, though it’s hard to tell while being jostled up and down. I try to determine where we are, but my train of thought derails when the floppy-skinned Draugr emerges from the stone forest and locks his white eyes on mine. As he charges at us, I see that he carries a large, two-handed mallet shrouded with seaweed. I can’t imagine Willem fending this thing off with just the sword. I have the gun still, but can’t trust my aim. Not with my vision swimming.

  “He’s coming!” I shout, head turned down toward the sand.

  Willem tries to pick up the pace, but the surge only lasts a moment. I can feel him weakening under my weight. We’re not going to outrun that thing, I think. Then I see something that gives me an idea.

  “Willem, stop!”

  He slows and says, “What?” sounding incredulous.

  “Look,” I say, pushing off him. He puts me down. I’m still woozy, but the world isn’t spinning anymore. I stagger a few feet back and point out the trail of footprints in the sand. ‘This is the way we came. To get the Zodiac engine.”

  “So?”

  “So the other engine might still be there,” I say. “A one hundred horsepower blade could come in handy. At the very least, we might be able to hide in the boulders.

  He looks into the field of boulders, his eyes following the path of our footprints, then back up to the approaching Draugr.

  Every second of indecision allows the monster to get closer. As adrenaline begins to clear my mind, I remember that I’ve taken charge on more than one occasion thus far. I’m the fucking Raven, after all. I take Willem by the shirt and drag him toward the boulders and the possibility of a modern day weapon.

  We follow our footprints through the maze. If the parasites operating the Draugr’s body have as much intelligence as they seem to, it will have no trouble following our path, too.

  The crashing of waves signifies our arrival at the shore. The destroyed Zodiac has been washed ashore, its engine removed by Willem and I, and one of its two pontoons flattened. But the second mauled Zodiac is nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s gone!” Willem says, sounding defeated.

  I climb up a boulder and scan the area. I quickly spot the Zodiac and feel a glimmer of hope. It’s short-lived. The Zodiac shifts and I realize it’s not resting on the beach, it’s floating in a bed of seaweed, forty feet from shore. Out of reach.

  Before I can curse our bad luck, a flash of green catches my eye. The Draugr is here! And Willem hasn’t seen it yet.

  Fear flashes in my eyes, alerting Willem to the danger, but the hammer is already arcing toward his head. Without thought, I replicate Willem’s earlier dive-tackle rescue. I manage to knock the hammer off course—it smashes a six-inch deep divot into the sand instead of Willem’s head—but I don’t land atop the giant and smash his brains. I bounce off the large, strong body. I reach out and grasp hold of something soft and pliable, hoping to bring the thing down with me and give Willem a chance to finish it off.

  I feel a brief tug as the fabric goes taut, but I keep falling. A loud tearing sound fills the air. I fall in a heap on the sand, covered by a blanket of soft, slimy—oh god. A triangle of hair covers the center of the sheet, and to the side…a nipple. I’ve peeled the skin right off it!

  I kick out from under the blanket of skin, more disgusted than afraid, and wish I’d stayed hidden beneath it. The Draugr turns to face me, its insides revealed. There are ancient strands of muscle covered in some kind of oozing film. I see organs, shrunken, but still there, and pulsing with the motion of thousands of white larvae-like parasites. I’ve heard that in the future, people will have colonies of nanite robots living in our bodies, destroying viruses, curing cancer and modifying our genetic code. This looks like a natural version of that symbiosis, except the nanobots are controlling body and mind, and have an insatiable drive to propagate the species.

  Scrambling backwards, my hand hits something rubbery and pliable. My mind still on the hideous skin, I shriek and yank my hand away. But there’s nothing to fear this time. It’s the Zodiac’s inflated pontoon. I push myself over it, glad to have something between me and the Draugr, even if it is an insignificant obstacle.

  There’s a flurry of excited movement inside the Draugr’s exposed interior and the ancient man lifts the massive hammer, clutched in both hands, over his head. I nearly vomit when the thing’s flaccid bingo arms undulate like two limp jellyfish. Movement above brings my gaze back to the hammer. The weapon has a long reach and at this range, it’ll have no trouble striking my legs.

  The hammer descends, then swings wildly off course. My mind registers what happened just a moment later. Willem’s sword has cut through the Draugr’s upper arm, severing it. The hammer swings right, missing my leg. But the severed arm, no longer controlled, loses its grip on the hammer and flings toward me. I cover my head just in time as the limb strikes me hard and bounces away.

  I flinch away from the severed limb, looking for parasites that aren’t there.

  The Draugr spins around, swinging the hammer in a wide arc that could knock a man’s head clean off. Willem ducks the blow and swings out with his sword. To my surprise, the Draugr actually goes on the defensive, taking a step back, right onto the Zodiac’s pontoon.

  The weight of the Draugr compresses the pontoon, but the strong material bounces back and rolls beneath the dead man’s foot. He falls back hard, slamming onto the sand. Had he been a living man, there would have been a shout of surprise followed by an oof as the wind left his lungs. But the only sign that the Draugr is caught off guard is that it drops the giant hammer.

  I dive to the side to avoid the falling behemoth, but can’t avoid being sprayed by sand kicked up by his fall.

  “Shoot it!” Willem shouts. He looks winded. Maybe injured.

  And he’s right. The thing is at my mercy. But I’ve only got three rounds left. Better to save them when there’s another option. As the thing struggles to
sit up with just one arm and barely any stomach muscles to speak of, I pick up the hammer. The thing weighs a ton and for a moment, I think I won’t be able to swing it.

  The Draugr sits up, but can’t figure out how to stand with the Zodiac pontoon beneath its legs.

  How could something smart enough to set a trap get confused by a pontoon? I wonder. But I don’t spend any time wondering about it. This thing’s eternal lifespan is about to be cut short. I hoist the hammer up onto my shoulder. The weight of it nearly pulls me over backwards, but I spread my feet apart, regain my balance and swing the hammer like a little kid at a “test your strength” carnival game.

  The hammer finds its mark atop the Draugr’s skull and although there’s no ringing bell, there is a sickening, wet crunch. When I pull the hammer away and drop it onto the beach, I see the damage I’ve done. The Draugr’s head has been compressed down, into its body, like a turtle retreating into its shell. The top of its skull is cracked open. Gouts of white, writhing worms wriggle out. I step away from the mess, a sinister grin on my face, and say, “Give the girl a prize.”

  But when I look to Willem, I see my celebration is premature. Despite the Draugr’s demise, he looks terrified as he looks over my head at a distant peak. I don’t see anything there when I look, so I ask, “What is it? What did you see?”

  “I—I don’t know,” he says. “I saw something up there. Something big. Watching us. It looked—” He shakes his head like he can’t believe what he’s about to say. His eyes look disturbed as he speaks again. “It looked like a raven. I think… I think I just saw Muninn.”

  32

  “I think…we’ve gone…far enough,” I say, while trying to catch my breath. After our encounter with the hammer wielding, loose skinned Draugr and Willem’s sighting of “the Raven”, about which Torstein carved the warning, we fled. I’ve never run so far, so fast in my life. I felt like a kid again, running up the creaky basement stairs, certain that something would jump out and attack me at any moment. The difference is that now, my fear of monsters is justified.

  Willem slows, but doesn’t stop. “We should keep moving.”

  “This is an island,” I say. “If we keep moving, we’re going end up where we began.”

  This stops him in his tracks. He rubs his forehead and I can tell he feels stupid. “Sorry,” he says. “I just—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say, resting my hands on my knees. My cloak feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. I take it off and place it on the sand.

  “Wow,” Willem says, looking at me.

  For crying out loud, I think. My sweater is form fitting, I know, but we’re running for our lives and he can’t help commenting on the view. “Willem,” I say, ready to deliver a verbal beat down, but when I see his eyes, I notice he’s not looking at my chest; he’s looking at my back.

  “What is it?” I ask, my voice changing tone in an instant as I picture a swarm of those maggot things crawling over my back, burrowing through my flesh.

  “You’re steaming,” he says.

  I glance over my shoulder and see a swirling curtain of steam rising. Warm sweat, meet cold air, and its friend dehydration. I find some snow in the shadow of a rock, and shovel a handful into my mouth. It’s slushy but drinkable. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was until this moment. I scoop up another handful and drink it down. “You should have some,” I tell Willem. “Keep hydrated or—”

  Sudden pain pulses behind my eyes. I stagger back, placing my hands on my head. Willem dashes to my side, holding me, and says, “What’s wrong? Did they get you?”

  Despite the pain and circumstances, I let out a laugh and say. “Brain freeze.”

  “Brain freeze?” Apparently, he’s never heard the American term describing the sudden sharp headache that can occur with eating frozen food.

  “From the snow,” I explain.

  “Ohh,” he says. “Push your tongue against the roof of your mouth.”

  I do, and the pain subsides. When it does, I notice he’s still holding me. I glance down at his arms, and then up into his eyes. “Thanks.”

  There’s a moment there. A connection. The kind teenagers first experience at summer camp or behind bleachers, or someplace else equally non-romantic. It’s that thing that makes you cramp up inside and sucks your breath away. It’s kind of a painful experience, actually, but in our minds, or maybe our hearts, we know it means something. It’s typically less intense when experienced as an adult, but this hits me hard. Maybe its exhaustion, or adrenaline, or fear, but this is intense. And uncomfortable.

  I push against his arms and whatever spell that bound him in that pose breaks. He steps back looking sheepish.

  But my stomach doesn’t recover from the moment. Twisting pain grips my cold gut. It’s my stomach, I realize. Drinking the ice water has awoken my appetite.

  While Willem helps himself to a snowy drink, I take out the protein bar stashed in my pocket, tear off the wrapper and break it in half. I give one half to Willem and scarf down the rest. Tastes like cocoa powder sprinkled cardboard, but I can feel the vitamin fortified snack delivering an energy boost to my system already.

  “Shouldn’t we save some?” Willem asks.

  I reply through a mouthful of food. “Rationing works when you’re waiting for rescue. Not so much when you’re being chased. If we crash before getting off this island, they’ll catch us. We need to stay strong.”

  “And smart,” Willem adds. “We fell into their trap like a bunch of stupid animals.”

  “Speaking of stupid,” I say, “I know they’re not really zombies, so we shouldn’t expect them to be totally brain dead, and they’re not really vampires, so they’re not playing chess in some castle, either. But these things have been in the ground for hundreds of years. How do they still have brains sharp enough to lay traps?”

  “Or use weapons,” Willem says.

  “Right.”

  “I’m not sure,” he says. “But maybe it has something to do with that slime inside the body. Did you see it? Inside the last one when, you know—”

  The memory of the peeled sheet of skin falling on top of me returns and sours my stomach for a moment. “I remember.”

  “It looked like the organs, the important ones anyway, had been coated in the stuff. Maybe it protects them. Keeps them from aging normally. If they do the same thing to the brain, maybe they’re still functioning at a higher level.”

  “You don’t think they’re still aware? Still human in there somewhere? Can you imagine that kind of hell? Being a prisoner in your own mind forever? Having your memory and knowledge hijacked, but your will trapped? It must be hell.”

  Willem pauses, chewing the last bite of his bar. My imagination has soured what little flavor it had. He forces it down with a grimace. “We need to get back to the ruins. If my father and Chase survived—”

  I realize that I’ve made him even more worried. We won’t be able to leave this island if we don’t find Jakob, and if he’s already one of them… “He’ll make it,” I say with as much conviction as I can muster. We both know I’m talking about his father.

  Willem shakes his head. “He was injured.”

  “He’s tougher than both of us,” I say. “Now shut up about it and let’s figure out where we are.”

  After another drink of slush, the cold starts to sting my back. The air is warm today, but the breeze rolling in off the ocean is frigid and saps the warmth from my body. I sling my cloak back on and hide my head beneath the hood. Mental note, grow hair out for next Arctic trip. Scratch that, fuck the Arctic. Go to the Bahamas.

  I take a long look at our surroundings. Something about it looks familiar. “This isn’t far from where I landed with Jenny and Peach.” Mentioning the pair makes me cringe with survivor’s guilt. They made it off that damn boat. Why couldn’t that have been enough? Why did we have to land on this freak-show island and not the mainland?

  Pushing my regrets aside, I point to an area where the stone hi
llside slopes right down to the beach instead of ending in a drop off. “I think that’s where I first left the beach.” I check the area and find depressions in the loose stone that could have been made by boots. “This is the place.”

  I point up to the hill rising high above us. “I first saw the ruins from up there. Felt so far away, then. The backside of this hill is steep, though. Would make for a hard walk, but it’s doable.” I point down the beach. “That way is south, where we met.”

  “We know the way to the ruins from there,” he says. “We could make good time.”

  He’s right, but there’s one thing he hasn’t remembered yet. “But…this stretch of beach is where we first encountered the polar bear. Then again, with you. Not much further beyond that is where the bear killed—or whatever—Jackson and McAfee.”

  “And the walruses,” he adds.

  “Right,” I say. “So I think it’s safe to assume that living, or undead, the bear patrols this coast line.”

  “Or it’s just running laps,” he points out.

  “Or maybe the walruses took care of it in the end.” I know its hopeful thinking, which I’m loath to do. I prefer realism. But things are so unreal, I think a little hope will do us some good. Willem seems to disagree.

  “I doubt it,” he says. “Not planning on seeing the bear again could be dangerous.”

  “Okay Captain Greenland,” I say, “What do you plan to do about the Draugr polar bear that is stronger and faster than you, not to mention the fact that it has lots of sharp teeth, and claws, and the only way to kill it is by destroying its brain, which, by the way, is protected by a thick skull that already deflected a perfect .45 caliber shot.” I catch my breath, hands on hips, and wait for an answer I know he doesn’t have.

  “We could blow it up,” he says.

  The ridiculousness of his statement makes me laugh. “Blow it up? How are we going to do that, McGyver? You have some household chemicals I don’t know about? Maybe a bottle of hairspray and a microwave? That seems to work well in the mo—”