Claus Trilogy (Boxed Set)

by Tony Bertauski

Something was breaking and tearing and… and…

  AGONY!

  And voices.

  There were voices.

  He heard them before he went to the bottom of a deep, black sleep.

  C L A U S

  40.

  Something shattered. There were sounds.

  Claus opened his eyes.

  It took several blinks to focus. Claus tapped his finger on the workbench – he felt like his insides had been replaced with sand – and pulled the halo off his head.

  And then the sounds made sense.

  “I will end you.” Jack stormed past Nicholas. “If you helped them escape, I will not end you slowly, either. It will be a very undesirable end to your life, brother.”

  Jack began vibrating and split into two. There was two of him.

  Claus rubbed his eyes. His face was like rubber.

  So heavy.

  “Why are you wearing the halo?” Jack asked.

  “What?”

  Jack took it from the workbench. “This. Why were you wearing this? The halo is only for draining memories. I’m no dummy, dummy.”

  Claus looked at the halo to Jack and back to the halo. Jack raised an eyebrow.

  “You have,” he said, frowning, “no idea what it takes to drain a warmblood.”

  “Because I’m too stupid, is that what you’re trying to say?” Jack said slyly. “Answer the question or I stick my finger in your ear.”

  “Which one, Janack? The one about aiding your enemy or the one about the halo? Which one are you burning to know first?”

  Jack frowned.

  He kind of forgot the first one.

  The halo bounced off the wall and skipped across the floor. “The first one, brother! You tell me what you had to do with the escape, and you tell me now. YOU TELL ME NOW!”

  “Nonsense,” Claus muttered.

  He hopped out of his seat and paced and stretched. The blood was flowing again, pushing the syrupy sensations from his body.

  “Tell me what happened,” Claus said, without looking back. “What escape are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play dumb, dummy! You know what escape I’m talking about!”

  “Janack! How am I supposed to know what you’re doing when I’m busy sucking the life out of this warmblood? Huh?” Claus pointed at Nicholas. There was a string of drool hanging from his lip. “You want me to destroy a warmblood AND follow you across the North Pole?”

  Good, good. Call him a warmblood. Like you don’t care about him.

  Jack stepped back.

  The fire that ignited in his belly way back when he saw the note and subsequently destroyed the valuable sleigh-tank (he shouldn’t have done that, now that he thought about it) had him convinced, he was absolutely positive, that his dear brother had helped them. He didn’t know how, he just knew that fathead had something to do with it.

  And then when he ordered them to be wiped out and found out that they’d lost track of the rebels, that his mother actually DITCHED THOSE FILTHY WARMBLOODS!

  There was fire in his belly.

  And his brother lit it.

  But now that fire was cooling. His brother was sucking the memories out of the warmblood, just like he told him to do. Like a good soldier.

  You have to remember what’s important in life.

  “All right, okay.” Jack walked his fingers up the warmblood’s leg like his pudgy little blue hand was dancing. “My bad. The rebels… you remember them, don’t you? Mother and her traitor friends, right?”

  Jack chuckled.

  Claus looked impatient.

  “Well, I sent the pets out to destroy them, you know, one of those tear them limb from limb missions? I’ve always wanted to do one of those. Anyway, guess what happened when my little furry six-leggers got there?”

  Jack’s eyes widened.

  “They weren’t there.”

  “Why would you destroy them?”

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” Jack had completely cooled. “It seems our mother decided to refuse my offer of peace. And now I want them all gone. Forever.”

  “You weren’t offering peace,” Claus said.

  “THEY DIDN’T KNOW THAT!”

  “Evidently, they did.”

  Jack drummed a beat on the lounger. Frost spiderwebbed over the material beneath Nicholas’s legs.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “I was going to let some of them survive, but that deal’s off the table. I don’t care if they want to hug and kiss my feet, they can suck it. All deals off. There’s just one problem. We’re only picking up one mind pattern.”

  Jack held up two fingers, then folded one down.

  “Not two.”

  Claus snuck a glance at Nicholas. Still drooling.

  “One of them likely died,” Claus said.

  “Probably.” Jack sighed, relishing a warm joy in his belly. “But we can still follow the one.”

  Claus waited. “Okay.”

  “Yeah. It appears that warmblood separated from the rebels.” Jack summed up what his army reported. They saw one reindeer (the red-nose one, the one that really hated Jack) and one really small sleigh.

  That was it.

  “You continue to underestimate Mother.”

  “Whatever. I’ll catch her soon. It’ll all be over with. Soon.”

  “Why don’t you just forget them? Just let them live in peace. They haven’t bothered us since leaving.”

  Claus said it carefully so as not to make it sound like he wanted him to forget, more like a suggestion. Something to make his life easier.

  “Um, hello.” Jack knocked on his own head. “My big dumb scientists are a bunch of dummies compared to them. And – AND – they want to stop me, so there’s that. You know.”

  “Why not give it up, Janack?”

  “You’re like talking to a wall, brother. A really stupid one. If you keep acting so stupid, I’ll get rid of you.” He held up his finger, reminding Claus what he could do with a single touch. “I could stick this up your nose, start with the worst brain-freeze you ever had.”

  “I’m not scared of you, Janack.”

  “Oooooo… you’re so brave.” Jack turned rapidly. “Now get back to draining the memories out of this warmblood, why don’t you.”

  “I can’t, now that you’ve interrupted me.”

  “WELL, DO SOMETHING, I DON’T CARE WHAT!”

  Jack slapped a container on the ground on his way out. Claus heard him slap one of the guards.

  Claus couldn’t hold the smile in any longer.

  That couldn’t have worked any better.

  C L A U S

  41.

  The room was small. Jessica could cross it with three steps in any direction. There were no tunnels, no other rooms. Just this one.

  There wasn’t time for other rooms.

  Jessica was hydrating a meal the way Nog taught her. The food was freeze-dried. She was stirring water and pouring it into bowls. Back in the colony, food was grown in the lab. They had the ability to artificially make anything: asparagus, apricots, chicken. It had something to do with nutrient arger or agar (she couldn’t remember the word) and enzymes. It wasn’t real chicken but had the same taste, same texture.

  Nog could pull anything out of the bag. But not food. For some reason, they needed raw materials for that, so they were stuck with the freeze-dried stuff that tasted more like porridge.

  And they only had so much.

  They couldn’t go back to the colony for food. They couldn’t risk leading the pack back to them. As long as Jessica was alive and breathing and thinking, she would be on the run.

  Eventually, they would have to supplement with fish and game. But right now, they didn’t have time for that. They were too busy jumping to stay ahead of the pack.

  The pack. Don’t call them hunters.

  Nog’s big, bare feet slapped on the icy floor as he dropped through the entrance. He looked at the food congealing in bowls and waved the aroma into his nostrils, breath
ing deeply. He was faking it. There was no aroma.

  Jessica spooned food into two bowls and they sat down on beds, facing each other. They ate quietly.

  “How’s Rudy?” Jessica asked.

  “We’re running him hard. He’s jumped us every day for a week; that’s too much. He’s leaping back to the land to feed and rest, but he’s getting too little of both.”

  “Have one of the others take his place.”

  “Great idea,” Nog said, wiping his mouth. “If there was just someone to tell him that.”

  “He knows he’s tired.”

  “He’s also stubborn and he doesn’t understand anything I say. I can barely communicate with him. We need Tinsel.”

  Silence settled in the room.

  It was another reminder that the colony was somewhere else. It reminded them how lonely they would become. It reminded them that they wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever. The reindeer couldn’t jump every day, even if they were rotating. The longer Jessica was around, the weaker the herd would become. And eventually that would begin affecting the colony.

  Time was on Jack’s side.

  Nog cleaned up.

  As long as Jessica had known him, he’d never done anything in silence. Now he was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. No more chasing snowflakes with his tongue.

  Things got real.

  They were too busy the first couple days to think about what they were doing and where they were going, but now they had more time to think.

  Being alone with thoughts was not productive.

  They weighed heavily on Nog.

  Jessica woke from a nap.

  She bolted upright, ready to get to the surface, but Nog wasn’t putting things in the bag. He was sitting in the middle of the floor, staring at a square plate. Inside, there were images. It was mostly white, but Jessica recognized the view of the Arctic from above. She recognized the pack somewhere on the ice, moving in their direction. Nog would know when they were close enough that they needed to get on top of the ice and jump.

  They still had several hours.

  “Where did you meet Merry?”

  Nog had been lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling for an hour. Jessica hadn’t noticed him sleeping. He just lay there, staring. Thinking.

  She thought maybe he didn’t hear her.

  But then his whiskers rustled. Jessica saw the first hint of a smile around the corners of his eyes.

  “When an elven is born,” he said, “he or she is taken outside to be exposed to the elements. It initiates our blubber layers and prepares us for life in the Arctic. That’s why you often see children outside. Always playing.”

  Jessica realized there weren’t many children in the colony. Very few. Nog was still smiling, remembering. Perhaps it had been far too long since he’d thought about it.

  “I wasn’t very good at the winter games,” he continued. “Snowballs and ice sculpting and polar bearing.”

  “Polar bearing?”

  He chuckled. “It’s pounding two holes in the ice and swimming from one to the other.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “I guess. But that’s not the worst of it. We do it naked.”

  He laughed heartily. Perhaps he was remembering a bunch of naked elven teenagers running through the snow. Jessica laughed, too.

  “I was not very popular. I was bad at the games and wasn’t really smart enough to study science, so I was usually somewhere in the libraries or in my room, experimenting with stuff. But I still had to go to school and interact with the others. For the most part, everyone ignored me.”

  He was quiet. His eyes relaxed.

  “And then there was initiation day, the day before we finish school. It’s nothing official, just when everyone meets on the ice and plays games. I told you I wasn’t very good, so I was sneaking back inside through the back door when I ran into some of the popular elven. They thought it would be funny to make me polar bear. I didn’t.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “And then my queen in shining armor appeared,” he said, smiling again. “She told them to get stuffed.”

  “And did they?” Jessica asked, not sure what that meant.

  Long pause. “Uh, no. They didn’t like being told by a girl what to do. One of them actually pushed her down.”

  He stopped talking.

  “Well? Then what?”

  “Oh,” he said, like he forgot he’d been talking out loud. “I dropped this invention I’d been working on that seals the sole scales and makes them slippery. They were slipping and sliding while we got away.” He shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “The knight in shining armor.”

  He just smiled.

  “We had a child.”

  Nog had been lying quietly with his eyes closed for so long that Jessica thought he’d finally fallen asleep. But that was all he said, almost like he didn’t realize he’d said it out loud. Or maybe he was talking in his sleep.

  “What was your child’s name?”

  “Neyda.”

  He told her – in between pauses – what a beautiful elven she was. Face like a cherub. She was beautiful like her mother. She got her brain like her father and mother combined. She was good at all the games and science. He didn’t say if he let her go polar bearing.

  Jessica never heard of an elven named Neyda. And it was the first time Nog or Merry ever mentioned it. She let him enjoy the memory.

  “We’re not perfect, Jessica,” he said. “We cured the effects of aging, but sometimes the body just doesn’t do what we want it to do. We still belong to nature. All things come to an end.”

  Smile, fading.

  Jessica didn’t ask.

  And then Nog finally offered, “She died when she was three hundred forty.”

  Three hundred forty? Years old?

  Suddenly the absurdity of time hit Jessica on the funny bone. Here was this beautiful, sweet elven lamenting his child dying when she was only 340 years old.

  She clamped her hand over her mouth, but the laughter pushed between her fingers. She used her other hand to keep that from happening again. But then Nog let out a low rumble.

  “Heh-heh-heh-heh,” he went. “Three hundred forty,” he said, recognizing what Jessica was thinking.

  And then it was out.

  Laughter blew Jessica’s hands off her lips. Nog bellowed deeply and loudly.

  The room was filled with bubbling joy. Tears streamed down their cheeks and they wiped them off and spilled more and laughed more. And when Nog fell off his bed, it just got worse.

  It went on and on.

  “We can’t keep running,” Jessica said.

  After the laughter, there was room for the truth. Their escape was not sustainable. It would come to an end, sooner or later.

  Jessica looked at Nog. She didn’t have to say what she was thinking. He could tell that she was tired of running. And they couldn’t go back to the colony.

  That left only one thing.

  “If we’re going to fight, we need to quiet that mind of yours,” Nog said.

  C L A U S

  42.

  Tinsel brushed the snow off her head.

  The reindeer were hungrier than usual. They were gobbling up her snacks like wild animals that hadn’t seen food all winter. They had been jumping the colony on one-week intervals for a month. She started rotating them with Rudy so he wouldn’t be doing the daily jumps with Jessica and Nog.

  The colony’s living conditions were smaller than she ever remembered them. Maybe half the size. They needed to conserve resources.

  Tinsel thought it was more than that.

  It was hard to enjoy yourself when you knew Jessica and Nog were out there all alone. Bubbling joy was absent from the tunnels.

  It was work, work, work.

  And that was fine with Tinsel. She didn’t want to be socializing, anyway.

  Since the science lab was smaller, they didn’t need her.

  When she wasn’
t feeding, she was in the medical room.

  Medical was at the edge of the tunnels.

  The first few beds were filled with the elderly and sick. Mr. Pappas was almost nine thousand years old. His blubber content was decreasing and they didn’t know why, so they kept him in a special bed to maintain his body temperature. Then there was Ms. Sanzsan with the fragile bones. Mr. Crepell with the swollen tongue, and Ms. Mandatt with the bad eyes.

  Tinsel said good morning to the ones that were awake. She didn’t slide through the room. That was too fast for them to see. She walked the old-fashioned way, nice and slow, even though she was impatient to shove off for the very back of the room where a box sat in the corner.

  Tinsel leaned over the window.

  It had gathered frost over a week ago and she could no longer see inside. Sometimes, if she rubbed the glass, she thought she could see Jon’s face. It was round and pale and still.

  “He’s doing just fine,” the doctor said, sliding to the other side of the box.

  “Have you checked the vitals? I mean, I could check them, if you need some help.”

  “Maybe later. Right now, Mr. Crepell needs help swallowing his food. Could you assist him with that?”

  Tinsel nodded. She would’ve asked the doctor when the box would be opened, but she already knew the answer.

  Soon, was all the doctor would say. We’ll open it soon.

  C L A U S

  43.

  Nicholas awoke in Claus’s lab. His head was heavy.

  It was like he’d been hit with a shovel and his brains replaced with a bundle of lead.

  He swung his legs to the floor, grateful for the high ceiling. He stretched his back and thumped the side of his head like he had water in his ears.

  Clickity-clack. Snap.

  Cane was under the workbench.

  There was something on the floor, covered with a small blanket. Cane held the corners and, like a showman, uncovered his latest work of art.

  It was a miniature replica of a blue-skinned elven.

  The Jack-toy wore a dark jacket and had blue lips and blackish fingernails. Cane patted the toy on the head and then swatted it on the fanny.