The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (33 page)

18

If not for the wind acting as my instinctive guardian, I would be dead. The arrow coming for my head bends as the wind carries it up and just over my nose. But there is no time to think about how lucky I am, because two more knives and another arrow are coming my way.

A combination of quick movements and wind gusts keep the blades from striking their target, but each shot comes closer than the last. I will the wind to carry snow and obscure my attacker’s view, but I’m moving fast, and the gusts must continually change directions; only a few flakes shift on the ground.

“Aim wide!” the man shouts. “I’ll force him to you.”

At first I think they’ve made a mistake, announcing their intentions, but I quickly realize it doesn’t matter. She’s now throwing where I’m not, while he’s aiming where I am. No matter where I go, a blade awaits me.

I twist and spin Whipsnap in front of me. A knife blade is deflected, and an arrow dodged, but the hunters are running around me now, throwing and shooting from so many different directions that they’re impossible to keep track of.

Epsilon is a genius attack, I think, before the first blade—a knife—strikes my left arm. The sharp dagger slices through my coat and the top few layers of my skin. It’s a superficial wound, but I’m sure it’s the first of many.

“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 Antarctica 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.

“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.