The Sentinel (24 page)

Willem reaches the tall walls of the Viking ruins. He could throw himself over the top and save himself. But he stops, links his fingers and leans down. I’ve done enough outdoor group activities to know a ten finger boost when I see one. I focus on his hands. If I can leap and get a foot into his big hands, he’ll be able to use my momentum and launch me over the wall. And he shouldn’t have any trouble pulling his tall self over behind me.

But before I reach him, my cloak snaps tight around my neck. The sudden stop pulls me back off my feet like I’ve just been close-lined by Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. Struggling to catch my breath, I reach up and try to free myself from the cloak. Cold air be damned. But it’s being pulled too hard. I look up and see two of the undead dogs, now missing half their hair, yanking on the cloak with their jaws. Two more dogs are approaching. The fifth, limping mutt is still some distance off. And behind him, the dog-master strides confidently toward us.

I’m caught, but the dogs don’t seem any more intelligent than usual, as they mistake my clothing for a part of my body worth attacking. Of course, maybe they’ve been trained to keep prey alive so that their master can make the killing blow. Whatever the case, I need to be gone. Now.

I draw the Glock. Three rounds left. Five dogs. I can’t shoot them all, but I can take care of the two dragging me across the ground. I take aim upside down and squeeze off a round. The shot finds its mark on the dog’s forehead. Unlike the polar bear, the dog’s skull can’t stand up to a .45 round. The bullet shatters the old bone and pulverizes whatever brain is gel-protected inside. The dog twitches and falls. Its companion simply pulls harder as the other two approach.

I hear Willem shout the way people do when facing an angry dog. I don’t think it helps with living dogs any more than it does with living-dead dogs. “Their bones are weak,” I shout to him, taking aim at the second dog holding my cloak.

I pull the trigger and flinch at the sound of the gunshot. My ears ring and throb with pain. But the second dog is dead. Again. And I’m free. I launch to my feet as the other dogs arrive. One heads for Willem, the other for me. I take aim, but the dog weaves back and forth. This is my last shot. I need to make it count.

My back presses against the stone wall. I look down the sight like my father taught me. Both eyes open. Deep breath. Let it out. Squeeze the trigger gently and—

Something tight wraps around my chest, under my arms. It’s like an anaconda has me. I’m yanked off my feet. “Willem!” I shout as he kicks one of the dogs hard in the head. There’s a loud crack and the dog falls. Willem finishes the job by taking the thing’s head off with his sword. He turns to me, eyes wide, as I’m pulled up and over the wall.

“Jane!” I hear him shout, but I can’t see anything but the blue sky above as I fall inside the ruins.

I land on something soft and hear a very human sounding “Oof!” beneath me. The anaconda lets go and I roll away, bring my gun up and point it in Jakob’s face. “Jakob!” I shout in surprise, lowering the weapon. Chase is on the ground behind him. He must have been holding Jakob up when we all fell inside.

Willem shouts in pain outside the ruins. His voice is followed by the metallic ting of metal striking bone. Then his hands clasp the top of the wall and he hoists himself up and over.

There’s no greeting when he lands. No hug for his father. Willem sits up, unlaces his boot like it’s on fire and yanks it off. The boot lands next to me and I see a puncture in its top, just the right size for a canine tooth.

Willem’s sock comes off next. It, too, has a hole. He grips his bare foot and pulls it up. We crouch next to him, all looking for the same thing.

Blood.

But other than a pink divot, there is no wound. Willem sighs with relief.

Jakob falls to his knees next to Willem and presses his son’s head against his chest. “Thank God.”

“I’m fine, father,” Willem says, clearly not accustomed to his father’s affection. When Jakob doesn’t let go, Willem says something in Greenlandic. I have no idea what the words are, but they seem to placate the old man. He lets go and the conversation, now private thanks to the language barrier, continues quickly and ends with an embrace between father and son. And though I have no idea what either man has said, I’m moved to tears when I see both rugged-looking Viking men cry.

Chase shatters the moment with a whispered, “Everyone shut-up! Here it comes!”

Willem quickly turns his sock inside out before putting it back on his foot, and then shakes out the boot. Nothing but lint. No parasites. He puts the boot back on, ties the laces and waits in silence with the rest of us.

The first thing we hear is sniffing. The one remaining dog searches for us. Then there are footfalls, big and heavy. The dog-hunter arrives. I can see his shadow moving past the cracks in the wall. When his gloved hand grasps the top of the wall, I tense and prepare to fight.

Again.

35

The shuffling and sniffing outside the wall continues for about thirty seconds. Then the dog-master pulls his hand away and we can hear the pair retreat. When the footsteps fade into the distance, everyone relaxes. But I’d like to know I’m not being outfoxed yet again, so I move to poke my head over the wall for a look-see.

“Don’t,” Chase says. “They seem to forget about you if they don’t see you for a while. If it sees you, it will come back.”

“You’re sure?” I ask. “They seem smarter than that.”

“Being smart and having a good memory are two different things,” he says.

I’m not sure I agree with his assessment, but I don’t want to risk being wrong. The cold stone of the floor in the ruins makes an uncomfortable seat, but I plop down like it’s a plush faux-leather recliner and sigh. The sun is warm on my face. The air is fresh with evaporating water. For a moment, one of the thousand knots screwed into my back loosens.

That’s when I open my eyes and see the life raft. It’s torn to shreds. I snap up. “What happened?” Our only way off this island has been destroyed.

“Not sure,” Chase says. “We found it this way.”

“How could they know?” I ask, raising my voice. “It’s fucking yellow plastic! They’re undead
Vikings
. How could they know it was a way off the island?”

“Maybe the bright color drew them to it?” Willem says.

“Or the smell of it,” Chase adds. “We did spend several nights inside. It must smell like us.”

I’m not sure how the Draugar could smell anything over their own stink, but it could make sense. There was just one problem. “Did you fix the wall?”

“What?” Chase says.

“The wall.” I point to the portion of the structure that once had a doorway, but was blocked up by Jakob and Alvin. “If they got inside, who fixed the wall?”

“The wall,” Jakob says, his voice grave, “was not ruined.”

“So there is a Draugr that can get inside and out again without a door.” I shake my head in exasperation. Chase takes it for chastisement.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s not our fault we—”

“We should have seen it,” Jakob says. “It’s the kind of mistake that costs lives. You are a first mate. You know such things to be true.”

“The Devil’s in the details,” Chase mutters.

“Indeed.” Jakob holds up a backpack. The familiar word SURVIVAL is scrawled across the back. “They did, however, leave us our food and water.”

Willem and I help ourselves to some fresh water, but we leave the few remaining snack bars for another time.

After twisting the cap back on a water bottle, I return it to the backpack and ask, “So how did you escape?”

“We ran, mostly,” Chase says.

“Our friend is being modest,” Jakob says.

Two things leap out at me. Jakob has just referred to Chase, the first mate of the ship that sank the
Bliksem
, as a friend. Second, since when is Chase modest?

“Saved my life,” Jakob says. “Twice.”

Chase makes a lazy attempt at hiding his proud grin. “I found him on the sand.”

“I twisted my ankle again,” Jakob explains.

“Anyway,” Chase says. Telling the tale of his heroics is probably a new experience for him. “Right after I help him up, one of them—a Draugr—finds us.”

“The blacksmith,” Jakob grumbles. “Still wore his tools around his waist.” He leans forward, reaches behind him and pulls out an iron headed mallet. It’s nowhere near as big as the one Floppy-Skin used, but the head looks dense, and heavy. It could do some serious damage and is easier to hold.

“So, Jakob starts waving his arms and shouting. I see he’s distracting the thing—”

At these words, Jakob frowns, but I keep quiet.

“The blacksmith goes after him. And he stands his ground. I’ve never seen anything like it. The thing loses track of me. I run up behind it, grab the hammer and just start whacking the shit out of it. I can hear it’s bones breaking. But it doesn’t stop. I give it a good hit in the leg, but there’s nothing solid there, or at least too much muscle covering the bone.”

Chase is really excited. He rubs his hands together quickly. I can picture him acting this way while in the heat of role playing battle.

“You guys were probably popular in school, right?” he asks, looking from me to Willem.

I started at a new school every two to three years of my life, so I was the perpetual new kid and rarely popular, but I doubt I was ever unpopular in the way Chase must have been, so I stay quiet.

“Of course you were. So, when someone is walking, you can kick their leg, just as they pick it up off the ground. It shifts the foot behind the leg and wham, instant trip. I had the technique used on me on more than a few occasions, but had never really tried it. But the concept is simple. So when the Draugr closed in and picked up its foot, I kicked that son-of-a-bitch as hard as I could.” Chase laughs. “Fell flat on his face, right at Jakob’s feet.”

“He helped carry my weight all the way here,” Jakob says.

“You didn’t kill it?” I ask. “When it was on the ground?”

Chase’s proud smile fades some. “I wasn’t really thinking too well at that point.”

“The boy did well,” Jakob says.

Willem claps Chase on the shoulder and nods in acknowledgment of a job well done. “Thank you.”

“So what are we up against, then?” I ask. I doubt we’re going to have long to figure things out, so the more time we spend preparing, and not telling stories, the better off we’ll be. That doesn’t mean I don’t think we’re going to die, just that I’d like to give the fight an old fashioned Alamo try.

“Torstein,” Jakob says with disdain.

“The blacksmith,” Chase says. He looks at me and adds, “Sorry.”

“The dog-master,” I say. “And his last limpy dog."

“What about the big guy with seaweed, and the hammer?” Chase asks.

“Dead,” I say.

Chase looks impressed, but then says, “Why didn’t you keep the hammer?”

I’m about to tell him to sit on Torstein’s horn and rotate, but he sees my flash of anger, holds up his hands and says, “Just messing with you. Geez, Jane.”

My anger hasn’t completely faded when I say, “Oh yeah, I blew the polar bear into shish kabob sized chunks, too.”

Chase looks startled, like he was just finding this out, but he’s really just remembering. “We heard that!”

“And felt it,” Jakob says.

“You found Jackson’s pack?” Chase asks.

I pull out the backpack and open it up revealing five bricks of C4 and the bag of timers and blast caps.

“Holy shit,” Chase says. “Five bricks and four Draugar. We might actually stand a chance.”

“Five,” Willem says.

Chase turns to him. “What?”

“Five Draugar.”

“You saw another?” Jakob asks.

Willem’s mouth twitches. He doesn’t want to say it. So I do.

I drop the bomb fast and blunt. “Muninn.”

Jakob’s eyes go wide. “You saw the raven?”

Willem nods. “For just a moment. It watched us from a hilltop.”

“We haven’t seen it since,” I say. Sensing a rapid decline in morale, I add, “Look, raven or not, it can be killed. It can be destroyed. These Draugr aren’t supernatural. They’re a highly evolved parasite that can be squashed under our boots. The raven is probably just one of the original Draugar they chased to this island.”

“Draugar don’t run away,” Jakob says.

I roll my eyes. “Fine. That’s not the point. The point is, this thing is not supernatural. It’s not Odin’s pet. It’s alive, or used to be, and if Torstein and his merry band of hunters had C4, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because the raven would have been blown to bits six hundred years ago.”

Jakob smiles when I finish my rant. He nudges Willem. “We have our own Raven.”

Ugh.

“You have my blessing to marry this one,” the old man adds with a chuckle.

Double ugh.

The joke was meant as a jab at me, I know, but when Willem doesn’t exactly decline his father’s blessing, my cheeks get hot.

Chase doesn’t like the new direction of the conversation, either. “What do we have for weapons? Aside from the C4?” He pulls out a knife and puts it down.

For some reason, the appearance of a new knife strikes me as odd. “Where did you get that?”

“Back pocket,” Chase says and then shrugs. “I like knives.”

I sometimes wonder if Chase is a few screws loose from being a serial killer, but then, having a serial killer on the team might not be a bad thing. I draw the Glock and put it down. “One round left.”

Jakob places his hammer down.

Willem adds the sword.

“Not much,” Chase says.

“Oh!” says Jakob. He leans back and drags the now useless Zodiac engine into the weapons cache.

Willem smiles at his father, and then me, who suggested the very same thing not too long ago. “Peas in a pod.”

“So aside from one bullet, and the C4, this fight will be up close and personal, which works in their favor. So let’s plan on finishing this with the C4 from a distance. If they can set a trap, so can we,” Chase says.

I’m about to protest Chase taking charge, but then remember that this is his thing. He’s good at strategizing. It’s the implementation of that strategy where he lacks ability. But he did save Jakob, so maybe he’s changing…finding his spine. It would be nice to have him not bolt at the first sign of danger for a change. “So what’s the plan?”