“Stop!” I shout. “You don’t need to kill me!”
“Don’t listen to him, Em!” the man shouts.
“It’s us or him!”
“I don’t want to kill you,” I say with a grunt as an arrow forces me to twist around. A knife handle strikes my leg. For a moment I think I’ve been stabbed and take my eyes off of the hunters to look at the wound. I realize the distraction will probably cost me my life, but it doesn’t. Instead, the subtle downward shift of my head saves my life.
The arrow headed for my right eye grazes my forehead and pierces my hood instead, yanking it off my head.
But the sudden shift of my hood has removed my sunglasses as well. The bright sky and sun glaring off the snow blinds me. My eyes clench shut. I’m blind.
The girl shouts, “Father wait!” A knife flies toward me. I can hear it whipping through the air.
Father? Since when do father and daughter hunters work together?
I hear the twang of an arrow being shot.
The weapons will reach me simultaneously.
There is a loud crack in front of my face. I flinch away from it, wondering if I’ve been hit, but I haven’t yet felt the pain.
“Em, why?” the father says. I can hear him nocking another arrow, but he does not fire. “You cannot hesitate with their kind.”
“But that’s the problem,” she says, her voice devoid of the man’s German accent. I can hear her walking toward me. “He’s not their kind.” She stops next to me and whispers, “If you move I will bury my blade in your throat.” She takes hold of my hair and lifts it up. “He’s our kind.”
The man hustles toward me. “Don’t move. I’m too close to miss.”
“I’m not moving,” I say.
He stops above me. I can feel him looking at me. At my hair, but why?
“Show me your face,” he says.
I look up and try to open my eyes, but the brightness is unbearable.
“I do not recognize him, father,” Em says.
“What is your name?” the man asks.
“Solomon. Solomon Vincent.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was taken from here.” I point to the buried roof of Clark Station Two. “I stayed there. With my parents.”
“What kind of parents would bring a child here?” the man asks rhetorically. “When did this happen?”
“Time is different in the underground,” I say.
“The year,” he says.
“Nineteen eighty-eight.” Having answered, I can’t help but wonder, “How long has it been?”
“I’m asking the questions,” he says. “And if I do not like your answers, I will kill you.”
“Father…” Em says.
“Quiet, Em,” he replies. “We did not survive this long by entertaining guests.”
His attention shifts back to me. “Who took you? Who broke you?”
“Ninnis,” I say.
I hear the girl give a faint gasp.
“And your breeder? In the pit?”
“Gaia.”
Another gasp.
I feel the tip of the man’s arrow tickling my hair.
“And your master?”
I feel like the answer will be my death sentence, but giving another name might be just as bad. “Ull.”
“No…” The girl whispers.
“You speak lies,” the man says. “Ull would not lose another hunter. Certainly not one broken by Ninnis. It’s not possible.”
A single word repeats in my mind. Another. A puzzle begins to unravel in my mind. The man’s voice sounds old, but not quite as old as Ninnis. His daughter is young, but here that means little, especially because of the way the underworld modifies time. And he’s German. My mind flashes through pages of history books. Not a lot of people have come to Antarctica, and the majority of them have come in the past twenty years. In 1939, before World War Two, the Nazi’s sent a large expedition to Antarctica. Some speculate that they were looking for evidence of an ancient civilization. Atlantis even. Some think they built a secret base where many Nazis escaped after the war. No one really knows what they did, but several men were reported missing. I flash through their names and ages and pick the most likely candidate.
“Anything is possible, Tobias.”
He takes a step back, surprise disarming him for a moment.
“No one here knows my name,” he says.
“You came to Antarctica in nineteen thirty-nine with the Nazis. You were a pilot. Your plane crashed while mapping the interior. The two men serving with you were later discovered, dead. But your body was never found. Because you had been taken. And broken. And you became a hunter.” Images of Tobias handling the bow shift through my mind like a slideshow.
Another.
“Ull was your master, too. But you remembered yourself. You escaped with your daughter. And now you live on the surface, hiding from the hunters.”
I can hear nothing but the wind for a moment. Then a sound like a growl rises up, and he kicks me in the gut. “Breeder abomination!”
I roll to the side. The hood falls back over my head, bringing my sunglasses forward again. As I struggle to my hands and knees, I pull the sunglasses back over my eyes. I turn toward the man and see the unbridled rage in his eyes. He’s about to let that arrow blast through my head.
“Look at me,” I say. “I’m human. I’m not like Xin.”
Xin’s name makes the man sneer. I’m digging my own grave here. Luckily, Em comes to my rescue.
“But father, his hair.”
My hair…. My hair! The blond streak!
I sit upright. The arrow follows my head, but I’m not seeing it anymore. “Do you have it too?” I ask. “Is the red fading?”
My excitement disarms the man slightly. He lowers the arrow to my chest and looks back at Em as she removes her hood.
She’s pretty, but skinny. Her blue eyes blaze like her father’s. But it’s her hair that holds my attention. Much of it is deep red, like mine, but at least a quarter of it is light brown.
Innocence regained. Like me.
I turn to the man. “And you?”
“Less than her,” he says, and then raises his aim back to my head. “But more than you. How did you know those things about me?”
“I have a photographic memory,” I say.
“This does not explain how you knew my name.”
“It does,” I assure him. “I…I read a lot before coming here. Science. Literature. History. In the outside world, your mission to Antactica is now part of the history of Germany leading up to World War Two.”
His eyes widen. “A second world war? The Führer?”
“Invaded Poland. Then just about everywhere else in Europe.”
“How many this time?”
“Dead?”
He nods.
“The highest number I read was seventy-eight—”
“Thousand?” he says.
“Million.”
The arrow lowers as the number saps his desire to kill me.
“What are you talking about father?” Em asks.
“Do not tell her,” he says to me. “It will taint her innocence.”
His concern is noble, so I agree with a nod and get back to answering his original question. “I read about your expedition. There was mention of the plane crash. The names of the men on board. And the one that went missing.”
“Several other men went missing on that expedition,” he says.
“All here?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Just one other. The rest were claimed by the land.”
“I guessed at your name,” I say. “You look like a Tobias.”
He looks down at himself, hidden beneath layers of fabric. “You cannot see me.”
“Okay,” I say with a grin, “You sound like a Tobias.”
Em lets out a snort.
“And Ull? How did you know that he was my master?”
I point to the bow.
&nb
sp; “Ahh,” he says.
“Plus you kind of smell like him.”
Em laughs loudly now and despite clearly fighting it, Tobias smiles. The sight of his grin relaxes me and I allow myself a chuckle.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” he says. “That someone broken by Ninnis and subservient to Ull could manage to not only fight the mental bondage, but then also escape to the surface… You’re fast, I’ll grant you that. I’ve never seen someone dodge arrows like that. But escape, on your own, should have been impossible.”
“You did it.”
“We had help.”
A surge of hope fills me. Not only have I met two free hunters, but they also escaped with help! There might be others.
“So how did you do it?” he asks again, his smile gone. “How did you escape from Ull?”
My grin fades, too, as the memory returns.
“It was easy,” I say. “I killed him.” I look Tobias in the eyes and add, “I took his own arrow and buried it in his forehead.”
“Ull…is dead?”
“And buried,” I say. “At New Jericho.”
That last bit of information seems to confirm my story. Tobias suddenly roars with laughter. He falls to the snow, jubilant. Em and I watch him, half grinning, half concerned. Has the man gone mad? “I’m free,” he says as his hood falls from his head and frees his shoulder length, red hair.
He shouts again, this time raising a victorious fist into the air, “I’m free!” And as his daughter embraces him, joining in his laughter, I see something amazing. A shock of the man’s blood red hair turns brown.
Innocence reclaimed. I laugh with them.
19
I barely notice the five mile walk as I’m led to Tobias’s and Em’s hideout. We move in silence, vigilant against hunters—who might be looking for me, or for them. Despite the silence, my mind is alive with excitement. I have made friends. Allies. Skilled allies.
Of course, they don’t yet know who I am. Who I really am. And the evil that lives inside me. But I will tell them soon. They need to know that I’m not just an average escapee. Not telling them would put them in more danger than I care to consider. If I’m to shed any more of this blood red hair—like Tobias—I must embrace everything the Nephilim abhor. I’ve done a good job with forgiveness, mercy and love, but need to add honesty to the mix.
I’m so lost in my thoughts that I fail to notice the shifting view of the mountains to my left. I just keep my eyes on the ground, following Tobias. We’re walking along an old path, worn down by the occasional passage of modern man. The firm ice and treaded gouges left by numerous Sno-Cats ensure that we won’t leave any footprints behind. My eyes linger on the tread marks. There have been fifteen thousand, five hundred and twenty-one grooves. I didn’t mean to count them. I barely noticed I had. But when the number pops into my conscious thoughts, it snaps me from my reverie.
A sudden weakness sweeps through my body. I let out a grunt and fall to my knees.
Tobias is by my side in a flash. “Are you all right?”
I feel winded. Emotional. Desperately close to something. Something I have craved since I left Antarctica as a baby.
I’ve felt this intense draw once before. I look up and see the Sno-Cat tracks stretching toward the horizon.
“Is he okay?” Em asks.
I feel Tobias’s hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know,” he says.
“We’re there,” I say.
His hand pulls away.
“How…did you know?”
“This is home,” I say, looking to my left. Except for a shift in the white, snow-coated areas of the massive stone mountains, the view matches my memory perfectly.
“Solomon,” Em says. “This is our home, but how did you know?”
“I’ve been here before.”
Em turns to Tobias. “Is he the boy?”
“You dug in the ice,” Tobias says. “Until you bled. We watched from a distance. I had to recover the small portion of ceiling you uncovered.”
I nod briefly and take several deep breaths to steady myself. The emotional surge that caught me off guard is fading. I need to get harder, I think. If something like this happened at a crucial moment, I’d be dead. But how can I repel all things Nephilim while simultaneously becoming some kind of hard-hearted warrior? Isn’t that exactly what they are?
“Solomon.” Tobias’s voice sounds serious. He senses I’m holding something back and it has him on edge. “When you dug in the ice. That wasn’t your first time here, was it?”
With a shake of my head, I say, “No.”
“Father,” Em says. “I don’t understand. This place has been buried for—” She gasps as something occurs to her.
She does that a lot, I think. Gasping. It’s kind of a funny habit for a hunter—an ex-hunter.
“You don’t think…” She crouches down in front of me, looking at my face, which is hidden behind a hood and sunglasses. “Are you him? Are you the baby?”
A thousand memories of this place, seen through the eyes of a baby, flash through my mind. Many of the memories involve the rusty ceiling as I lay on my back, but there are also smiling faces and cooing voices. My mother and father. Dr. Clark. Aimee. The emotions surge again, but I fight against them this time. If they start to see me as a blubbering, over-emotional nutcase, they might not trust me. And if they don’t trust me, they will never help me. I need allies, I remind myself. Pull it together.
At least they can’t see my face, so the effort I put into calming my voice and regaining my feet is hidden from them. “Yes,” I say. “I was born here. This…was my home.”
“It’s him,” Em says to her father, her voice a whisper. She digs into her coat, opening a pouch hidden within. She pulls out a small, white square. “It’s you.”
I take the paper from her hand and turn it over. It’s a photo of a baby. A boy, I think. The photo is a Polaroid, like the one I carry around. The baby has bright blue eyes, a one inch ring of fuzz around its head and a goofy smile. The rainbow-striped, afghan blanket the baby lays on catches my attention. I’ve had it since they day I was born. My mother made it. “This photo is of me.”
Tobias and Em look at each other. “Father, it’s him!”
He turns to me and says, “It’s a good thing we didn’t kill you.”
“Why, exactly, is that good thing?” I ask. I can think of several good reasons, but I’m a stranger to these people. Sure, they’ve been living in Clark Station One, and happened to find a photo of me, which is surprising, but I sense there is more going on here.
“You are the first and only son of Antarctica,” Em says.
“Stories of your birth have been told in the underworld for years,” Tobias says. “The Nephilim have been awaiting your return. We have been awaiting your return as well. I should have realized it was you that day, digging through the ice. How else could you have known about this place? I could have taken you then. Spared you the—”
I take a step back, my defenses coming up. “Taken me? You would have taken me, too? Are you no better than them?” I stab my finger downward.
“Solomon,” he says, a little bit of sadness creeping into his voice. “Had I found you first, you would have been spared the breaking. The three tests. I could have trained you myself. The corruption would have never turned your hair red.”
“But why take me at all?” I ask. “Why not protect me. Send me home? Warn the others?”
“Because,” Em says. “We need you here. It is a fate that could not be avoided.”
“I’ve known that since the day of your birth,” Tobias says.
“How?” I ask.
Tobias pulls his mask down so I can see his face. “Because I witnessed it. I saw the light. The power of your birth shattered the ice and buried this place beneath thirty feet of snow.” He steps closer. “Solomon, please trust that we mean you no harm. You are here now, and that is what is important.”
While I do not like the fact that this man
would have kidnapped me if given the chance, I do believe his motivation isn’t necessarily evil. And life with Tobias would have been better than my life underground, with Ninnis. I would still retain my innocence. Nephil would not reside within me. And Aimee would not have been taken captive.
Tobias reaches out a welcoming hand toward me. “Come. See your home again. There is someone who would very much like to meet you.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Luca. My son.” He flashes a grin. “You two have a lot in common. Come, follow me.”
He leads me to the entrance to Clark Station One, a tunnel some two hundred feet away from the building. The entrance is cleverly disguised by a snow covered hatch. The first fifty feet of the downward sloping tunnel is so small that we have to slide down on our bellies. After that, it levels out and is tall enough to stand in.
“A defensive bottleneck?” I ask. Any enemy foolish enough to enter the tunnel could be easily dispatched before their whole body exited the small hole.
“Yes, yes,” Tobias says with a dismissive wave of his hand. Then he’s walking quickly toward the gray outer door of Clark Station One, which I can see ahead.
“I can’t believe we didn’t recognize you right away,” Em says.
“From the baby photo?” I ask. “I’ve changed a lot since then.”
“Mm,” she says.
I absolutely hate it when someone rubs in the fact that they know something I don’t, especially when it relates to me. Always have. It makes me feel stupid. And angry. So I change the subject. “Is Em short for something?”
“Emilie,” she says. “With an I and an E at the end. Not a Y.”
“The German spelling,” I say.
She nods, and doesn’t seem all that interested in my questions. Her eyes, like her father’s, are glued to the door ahead of us.
“You don’t have his accent,” I say.
“An American teacher taught me how to speak English. I didn’t see my father much when I was young. I didn’t see him much at all, actually. Not until we escaped.”
“How did you escape?” I ask.
“Not now,” she says. “We’re here.”
We stop in front of the door. Tobias knocks two times, pauses and then knocks three times. The door opens from the inside and Tobias rushes inside. He bends over and scoops up a small body. “Solomon,” he says, turning toward me. “I’d like you to meet my son, Luca.”
The Last Hunter - Pursuit (Book 2 of the Antarktos Saga) Page 10
