In the background, the Ariel-from-Before was running a constant commentary, begging to be heard above the growling shuffling beast that now skulked around inside his brain, knocking over the pillars that held up his sanity with ignorant abandon.
It was no use. Tiny feral workmen were erecting scaffolding in every structure of his body and mind, demolishing old pathways and constructing new ones. His former human thoughts did not travel comfortably in the savage new neural pathways being dug.
He felt like his human feet walked but only bear footprints were left in their wake.
Is this the merest hint of what Arrik feels every day? To be a being of pure rage and hunger, an appetite that can never be filled?
“Yes.”
The huge man gazed at him with his strange eyes. Ariel could feel the link between them, the spiritual bond but he had not realized that Arrik could hear his thoughts so clearly. When Ariel spoke his own voice felt weak and thin.
“Is that why you went under the ice? Was it to find peace?”
The huge head nodded. In his rumbling voice he spoke. His command of English was incredible. Ariel realized that all the weeks of television news and documentary during the time he was strapped down in the Proteus lab had seeped into his magical brain by osmosis. It felt like more than words though, Ariel was sure that Arrik was projecting his thoughts and intentions directly into his brain.
“When you realize that no matter how many men you kill, you only ever breed more enemies. Spilling blood does not make a man desire peace, but only more blood. No matter how many women you take, lust is not calmed. Instead each new woman you see it is as if she is an unexplored country. You can feast and drink of the world for centuries, as I have, but you wake every morning just as empty of belly.
I do not say sorry for being a creature of blood and violence. That is part of nature and so am I.”
Arrik shifted his massive frame and leaned in a little closer to Ariel.
“Your people were what made me turn away. I came through when you were only a young people. At first I thought you were little but food. After a few hundred lives of men it was interesting watching you build your cities. I glamoured you all and made you worship me as a god. I relished it. I am not like one of your philosophers that I met in Athens. I do not seek to understand the world. I live by my senses and my appetites, can you understand? Your priests brought me virgins each day for generations, sacrificed animals and men to my glory, made me golden thrones and idols and built temples in my honour. Then those early cities fell and greater kingdoms conquered. They cast me out as a pagan god, and for centuries I walked as an exile in the forests. I was alone and slowly my memory of who I was began to fade. Then the seeds of my treasured trees were stolen. I hunted and begged and bartered to find out where they had gone but I was of the old world and no one heard my plea. Then at my last I bartered my own blood with kings and champions, giving them victory in war on the condition they would also use their strength to return my treasure.”
Ariel saw the sadness and confusion in the old monster’s face.
“They betrayed you?”
Arrik nodded.
“Your people are filled with subtlety and lies. They use words as chains and weapons. To you I am strange, but I am as simple as a storm or a fire. I was too easily fooled. I grew tired to be the cause of blood spilled. When my treasure was returned to me I vowed I would harm no more. I knew that men would never rest while my power was in the world, so I slept the great sleep of the bear. I did not sleep deeply enough.”
Ariel huddled into himself and his shivering slowly began to subside. As he had suspected all along, this monster was not truly evil in the way Argent was. He was just a force of nature, a force that had slowly lost its hunger and bloodlust and desire.
Arrik did not want to be awake. As far as Ariel could see, the great bear did not want to be alive. He was tired and just wanted to sleep.
“Why did you give me this?”
Arrik shrugged.
“The men would not stop. They will not rest. They are hunting us already to take me back. I just want to go back under the ice. I will not allow them to use my blood to make their armies. And I will not allow them to use my trees as their doorways. I did not want to kill any more. I thought it would be good to hide my power. You were a good hiding place.”
Ariel shook his head and his voice had a broken edge.
“I’m a person not a hiding place. I can’t contain this, whatever it is that you have. It made me kill a man. I can’t live with that.”
“You must. Live with it or join me under the ice if you cannot. Do not feel the burden of guilt. You could not have fought that hunger.”
Ariel tried to stand up but he was too weak.
“I couldn’t fight it. I wanted it and that sickens me. But you need to take this back. It’s killing me and I can’t keep it from Argent, I’m no fighter.”
Arrik looked Ariel up and down and smiled.
“Exactly. A foolish man hides his gold in a vault. A clever one in a china vase.”
Ariel saw the primitive logic of the monster. He didn’t think anyone would believe that a god would choose him as a vessel of power.
“You must take it back.”
Arrik grunted.
“I will. When it is safe. We must still reclaim my box from the dead man. If we fail then the fire in your blood will burn you up and fade like mist into the clouds. The world will have nothing to fight over.”
Ariel sagged back down. His clothes were soaking and he was sure that hypothermia would set in soon. It must only be the warmth of Arrik’s power in his blood that was keeping him alive. His belly gnawed in hunger.
“I’m starving. If I don’t get some food soon then I won’t be much of a hiding place.”
Arrik licked his lips with his long tongue.
“It is nearly dawn. We should move on soon. I will go out and find us something to break the fast. Do you like fish?”
Ariel nodded.
“That depends on how it is prepared.”
Arrik frowned.
“It is never prepared. You have to take it by surprise.”
The huge man swiped a hand through the air as if scooping up a salmon. Ariel just sighed and sank back down on his haunches. He tried to get a little warmth from their meagre fire as Arrik strode out into the blizzard as if it were a balmy June afternoon.
36
Kruger unzipped his tent and strode out into the snow buck naked except for a pair of sturdy hiking boots.
He snorted deeply then voided a gobbet of thick phlegm onto the mossy rocks, scratching his sun bronzed arse at the same time. He struck a match on an ancient rock as he passed, planted a cigarette between his lips, and took in a deep lungful of the Stuyvesant Red King Size. Then he stretched his arms out wide and farted long and loud, before he walked out to the edge of the precipice and pissed over the cliff. His piss turned to a fine yellowish mist after a few metres and drifted down like pungent dew onto the river far below.
In thick South African brogue he shouted over his shoulder, the cigarette bobbing in his mouth like a dog’s tail.
“Plenty of fucking Salmon down there bru. Drinking my rusty piss. Hey Simons? Open your fucking eyes.”
Another man’s frizzy haired head popped out of the tent and placed his hand right in the phlegm that still oozed down the rock, and then proceeded to shake it free in gooey lumps.
“Kruger. You’re disgusting. What is this? Is this what your insides look like? How are you alive? And what are you talking about, we’re not hunting fish?”
Kruger shook the dregs from his cock then took the cigarette from his mouth, pointing it at the other man for emphasis as he spoke. His cock flapped between his legs as he walked up uncomfortably close to Simons. Kruger never held respect for personal space. A couple of drops of errant piss fell on Simon’s boots.
“Because, my city dwelling friend, where there is an abundance of Salmon and Reindeer, there
is an abundance of Bears. Maybe our Bear. This fucking monster your boss hired me to kill. Now get dressed and get a fire going, I need my coffee before I hunt your big fella, yeah.”
“I am not your maid Kruger. This is a Chromium Project mess and it’s our job to clean it up, you’re just here for the ride.”
Despite his protestations, Simons dragged himself out of the tent and got to work on the embers of the previous night’s campfire. Soon the coffee pot was steaming and giving off that rich odour that always smells so much better in the cold outdoors.
Simons was the deputy head of security aboard the Proteus. He had insisted on accompanying Kruger during the hunt and make sure he stayed on mission. Kruger dismissed him from the outset. It was obvious to the old hunter as soon as he shook Simon’s soft hand that he was an administrator with no real experience in the field. It was also clear that he had used his clout within the organization to railroad his way onto this mission. He clearly felt embarrassed that his in house teams had been completely ineffectual against the creature and that he had been supplanted in the hunt for it by a stranger. He was exactly the kind of supervisor Kruger had always despised, arriving into a company at middle management level, having backstabbed and schmoozed his way up in an organization rather than graft. His type of person was always promoted to their level of incompetence and ended up in command of pragmatic and capable men that were easily his superior. Kruger knew it was a pissing contest but so far Simons had done nothing more than dribble down his leg.
Kruger had dressed and sat on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the breath-taking vista of snowy tundra below, the wide river rushing through it like a winding silver road.
He finished his third “Stuyve” of the morning and threw the butt away, breathing the smoke from his nose like a grizzled old dragon. Kruger has smoked sixty of them since he was a young boy, and the smell of ancient nicotine was deeply ingrained in every deep line of his leathery face. He was one of those to whom smoking was an integral part of their respiratory system, every breath either took in or expelled a stream of silvery death. A deep brown stinking tar soaked into his every cell. To the eternal frustration of Simons, a marathon runner who had completed both New York and Toronto last year, Kruger was always ahead of him on every hike and was never out of breath. Simons knew that the game hunter was one of those hellishly annoying bastards who would live to be a hundred with no bodily complaints despite a lifetime of abuse. That was one of the reasons Simons hated him. One of many.
Kruger patiently viewed the river below. He saw three or four large white bears paddling about hunting for salmon and Svalbard island reindeer. Kruger knew there were around 10,000 reindeer living on Norway's Svalbard Islands. The Reindeer had lived in the Svalbard Islands long before the islands became separated from the mainland during the last ice age. His thinking was to follow the food source. No matter how magical this monster was that he had been sent to capture, Kruger had learned enough about it to know that whether it required food or not it would relish the hunt.
He brought his binoculars up and observed the bears. None of them was the creature they were after.
Kruger shifted uncomfortably in his thick cold weather gear. He hated these clothes but they were a necessity. He was one of those Afrikaners who despite a deep affinity with natural environment and genius for survival that was born into him from his father, remained stubbornly opposed to dressing for anywhere other than rural South Africa. He had spent cold snowy Decembers in Scotland in a pair of battered khaki shorts and trekking sandals. He never shivered or complained, he just smoked himself warm.
Then he saw it. Far down below, a huge shape skulking out of a rocky valley and into the shallow river, drawn to the stragglers from the reindeer herd who were stumbling in the icy shallow water. The other bears present let out a few half-hearted growls of protest but the size difference was so pronounced that they made no attempt to challenge their claim to the food resource. They just lowered their heads in submission and prowled off further down the river.
Simons crunched across the frozen gravelly ground behind him, slurping coffee and yawning. “Kruger, I think we’ve run out of corned beef. I’ve been looking at our supplies and it looks like we’ve only got enough for a couple of days. What if we don’t find it? What do we go back and tell Mr Argent?”
Kruger raised a flat hand and signalled it downwards. Simons was no hunter but he knew it meant shut the fuck up.
The Stuyve bobbing in Kruger’s mouth beneath the binoculars had almost burned down to a stub. He was a man who got the very last tar soaked drag out of every death-stick.
“I’ve never seen a Bear that size before, not in all my days’ bru. That’s your escaped experiment down there Simons. Big ugly fucker like me yeah? See him, taking all those juicy salmon and eying up those reindeer?”
Simons lay down on the ledge, looked through his own binoculars. “I see him. That’s it, that’s the man-eating bastard that killed half our crew. Can you get a shot from here?”
Kruger made some indistinct guttural noises, and then spat the cigarette butt out onto the rock.
“Ja, I reckon so.”
Kruger found his comfort against the mossy dip in the rocky outcrop then lined his eyes up to the sight on his hunting rifle. He followed the movement of the bear, honed in on its natural rhythm and cadence. Behind him Kruger heard Simons huffing impatiently. He focussed through the sight. The bear was huge, almost twice the size of the polar bears it had scared off. It looked prehistoric. Through the rifle scope it was apparent to Kruger that it bore only a passing resemblance to a modern age Bear.
“For fuck sake Kruger take the shot. I won’t have this thing getting away again.”
Kruger sighed. “Keep your fucking hair on Jew boy, and find your patience.”
Simons stood for a moment in shocked, silent fury.
“Look Kruger, I don’t know what waterfront bar Dr Argent found you in, or why he feels that when we have our own specialist Bleak Teams that we need your so called expertise, but you need to remember that although you’re a contractor you work for us, for the Chromium Project, and as far as you are concerned, directly for me. You do as I tell you or you will find yourself unpaid and right back wherever we found you.”
Kruger rolled over, and sat up grinning at Simons.
“From what I saw on the ship, your security teams were a snack to this thing, so why don’t you just sit back and let the professionals handle this. Somebody told me your young nephew was on one of those security teams. You reckon that pile of shit down there on the rocks could be him? I see the family resemblance.”
Simons could not listen to this relic of apartheid any longer. He threw himself at Kruger, delivering an amateur looking right haymaker to the man’s jaw.
Kruger rose and subdued Simons in one swift motion, pinning his arm behind his back, forcing it upwards until Simons squealed in pain.
“Now now, Simons, don’t go getting all Jack Torrance on me just because we’ve spent a few days in the wild huh?”
Kruger held Simons fast, got his lips up close to his ear, his long black moustache tickling Simon’s cheek. He addressed him softly, like a lover.
“Fucking bears, Simons. Tracked them and killed them all my life, wonderful creatures. The bear’s entire structure is suited for strength and power. Polar bears can scoop a five hundred pound seal right out the fucking water, you know that?”
Kruger scooped his hand in front of Simons, then grabbed his balls and squeezed.
“Black bear claws are long and curved, for stripping bark. Grizzly’s long and straight, for digging, Polar’s curved and pointed for gripping ice and prey. Like slippery seals.”
Simons struggled but Kruger just closed his hand tighter until the smaller man stopped moving and winced in pain.
“Now when a bear attacks a human, it fights just like it would another bear. Rises up on hind legs and tries to disarm that enemy by biting and holding on to the lower jaw.
They attack the face with teeth and claws, crushing the skull at the same time. People who survive these attacks usually lose eyes, noses and cheeks. They love eating cheeks. Like little pork chops. Your young nephew have chubby cheeks as a baby Simons?”
Simons attempted to spit in Kruger’s face but he was held tight in a wiry grip.
“Fuck you. I hope you get cancer you old fuck. Strutting about like you’re Allan fucking Quartermain.”
Kruger grinned at him and squeezed Simons jaw in his hand, digging in to the pressure point known as the mandibular angle. Simons gritted his teeth in pain.
“Most fatal bear attacks though, head gets crushed like a boiled egg. That’s the sheer strength of these bastards. Face usually ripped straight off, left looking like a tailor’s dummy. The power Simons. Fifteen hundred pounds, ten feet tall on hind legs. Ancient people used to worship them, make shrines to them, afraid to even say their name. That’s just a normal bear. This thing, this thing you’ve been toying with in your labs is a whole new ball game. I don’t even know if bullets will slow it down.”
Simons struggled for a few more seconds, but realized he was going nowhere. This wiry man had a grip like a python. He sighed and sagged in the tall man’s grip.
“What’s your point Kruger?”
“My point is, don’t tell me when to pull my fucking trigger. No matter how much you hate it, how much you want it dead, you better respect it.”
“Ok , I respect it, I respect nature in all its glory. Now let. Me. Go.”
Kruger loosed his grip and Simons dropped to his knees. He was sobbing in pain and shame.
“Are you going to shoot it or not?”
Kruger resumed his position on the outcrop, shouldered his rifle and peered through the sights.
I’m honestly not sure.
The Last Line Series One Page 28