Claus: The Trilogy

by Tony Bertauski

  Jack twitched.

  The smile faltered.

  “You’re kind of dumb, aren’t you?” he said.

  Jack walked around him, studying his body. Nicholas remained still.

  “Claus has fattened you up,” Jack said. “It’s about time. You drag your wife and kid up here with silly little wolf furs and you expect to survive. You must have pea-brains. I’ll give you warmbloods credit, though.”

  Jack smacked him in the crotch.

  “You got balls.”

  Nicholas doubled over, resisting the urge to bang the munchkin on the blue dome.

  Jack looked around the room awhile. The workbench caught his eye. He slid over to where the toys – Jessica and Jon – were dangling their legs. Jack looked at them from a couple different angles.

  The grin returned.

  A little sharper, this time.

  He reached up – the fingernail almost black – and touched them.

  The legs stopped moving.

  “Where is Cane?” Jack looked under the bench. “You talk about stupid, there’s an elven that got in the wrong line when they were handing out brains. Am I right?”

  He poked the Jon figurine.

  “I got to hand it to the little weirdo, he can build a mean toy. No doubt about that.”

  “Who are you?” Nicholas asked.

  Jack turned. “I’m sorry, who are you talking to?”

  Nicholas wasn’t sure what he was getting at. They stared at each other. Jack raised his eyebrows. Are you forgetting something?

  “Your Excellency.” Nicholas ground his teeth.

  “Ooo… Excellency. I like that. Good twist, warmblood. You just scored a point with me. Good for you.”

  Jack began walking, not sliding, around the lab. The floor crackled with frost beneath each footstep.

  “I don’t really matter to you, warmblood.”

  Jack leisurely inspected various piles, occasionally picking up a piece and turning it over and around before replacing it. He took his time returning to the workbench.

  “To the elven, though, I’m just a little ole king, president, ruler.”

  Jack looked at Nicholas, giving him a moment to understand the royalty which he was addressing.

  “In other words, I’m AWESOME.”

  “My elven have lived in peace a long time, but they’re not so smart. They’re not like me; they like peace too much. Sometimes you’ve got to cut an infection out, cause a little pain, to make things right again. It’s a whole doctor thing; you probably don’t understand.”

  Jack crossed his arms.

  “Guess who the infection is.”

  Nicholas stared. Jack pointed at him and silently mouthed the words YOU ARE.

  The snowy scene caught Jack’s attention.

  Nicholas stepped back. The soles of his feet became biting cold as he neared. Jack dragged his finger across the surface. The three-dimensional video started over from the beginning. He watched the six-leggers approach.

  “Your lives are so short and insignificant,” Jack said, watching. “You’re like ameba.”

  Jack watched Jessica and Jon being rescued by the storm.

  The room cooled a few more degrees.

  “You’re worse than that. You have the potential to wreck this planet, wasting your little time polluting the world with your little monkey-mind thoughts and greed. Claus tries to tell me that you’ll evolve, you’ll get it. But he’s wrong.”

  Jack waved his hand through the image and it disappeared altogether. He turned to face Nicholas, his hands, once again, resting on his belly.

  “He’s wrong. And you’re dead. Together, you’re dead wrong. Do you like that?”

  Nicholas noticed the resemblance to Claus. A resemblance that was darker and colder. “What do you want with me?”

  “Nothing, really. Just use you to destroy the human race and save the planet, that’s all.” Jack raised an eyebrow. “In a way, you’ll be a redeemer, just like me. Only uglier. There’s nothing I can do about that, though. Sorry, ugly.”

  He investigated a few more items on the bench, picking them up and putting them down. He grabbed the cube that Claus stashed the metallic sphere inside and looked at it curiously. He ran his fingers along the edges, but the seams never appeared. Bored, he put it back.

  “Well, see you later.” Jack walked casually to a pile that was near the lounger. “You can go to sleep now, or whatever you’ve been doing down here. We’ll be vacuuming out your memories here pretty soon.”

  And then he started to walk around again as if he was done with Nicholas.

  “It won’t hurt. I don’t think.”

  “Just a second–”

  Anger sparked inside Nicholas and flushed in his cheeks, but was just as quickly extinguished with a spike of cold. He felt like an icicle.

  Jack smirked.

  He finished looking at his item of interest. Nicholas couldn’t move. He watched frosty veins spread across the floor. They crept beneath his feet, turning his ankles to marble.

  Jack continued snooping.

  An elven entered the room wearing a uniform similar to Jack’s. He touched the bands around Nicholas’s wrists and ankles. They lit up.

  Jack was in front of the toys again. Jessica and Jon had thawed. They were kicking their legs playfully again.

  “Take him to the lab. Claus is waiting for him.”

  The bands warmed on Nicholas’s flesh. They began to move, forcing him to take one step. Then another. A large, darkened outline appeared on the wall.

  Jack touched the silver figurines.

  Jessica and Jon crumbled like crushed ice.

  C L A U S

  17.

  Giant. For real.

  Jack saw pictures of warmbloods, but seeing the real deal was a whole ’nother experience.

  He was weak, though. The warmblood was small-minded. His thoughts were all over the place. No matter the size, anything that can’t harness the mind is very small.

  Jack found it very satisfying to put a cold spark under the warmblood’s skin.

  WEAK!

  He had to hold back, really. Putting the hurt on that oaf would have been as easy as packing a snowball. Could’ve turned the warmblood into a Popsicle. But he needed him. He needed the warmblood – this Santa – alive for now.

  He needed him to carry back the plague.

  Warmbloods would adapt to climate change.

  See, that’s where Claus was wrong. Warmbloods were crafty. If Jack put the world back into an Ice Age – not if, but when – they would discover ways to survive. That’s what they did. They were good at it. And when they survived, they’d continue with their self-centered beastliness and produce more offspring and live longer until there were more and more and more of the warmblooded miscreants until THERE WAS NO MORE ROOM FOR AN ELVEN!

  They needed to be eradicated.

  End of story, case closed.

  Buh-bye.

  But Claus insisted on patience.

  They would need a backup of the warmblood. Just in case something failed, they would have another chance. After all, they couldn’t be sure when another warmblood would fall into their lap. And Jack was tired of waiting.

  My brother. So smart.

  Jack had to admit, he was right. He always thought Claus was trying to stick it to him (and he should, why not; Jack stuck it to him) but he was right. When you’re going to wipe out an entire species, you need to be patient, have a backup plan, that sort of thing.

  Soldiers entered the lab.

  They stood at the bench, waiting. Jack wiped the remains of the Jessica and Jon toys under the bench, where the idiot Cane could make another useless toy.

  “Search the place,” Jack said.

  They moved like their lives depended on it. Because they did.

  Just because my brother is right, doesn’t mean I trust him.

  C L A U S

  18.

  Nicholas walked like a robot.

  The hallway
was half his height; it was for elven, not warmbloods. He walked hunched over with his head near the floor.

  The guard slid in slow, short strides. Occasionally, they passed crossing tunnels or doorways to large rooms. Elven watched him march past. Some were holding coffee mugs, others whispering to each other.

  They all stopped to see the warmblood.

  Nicholas’s back was aching when they stopped. The bands had forced him to crawl through the doorway. The room inside was small, but the ceiling high enough to stand. The bands stopped tingling. Nicholas straightened up.

  There was a chair only a few feet away.

  He stepped back, bumping against the wall.

  So many shiny objects were around the chair. Things on poles and things with points. There were lights and discs and a large contraption hanging from the ceiling.

  “Have a seat.”

  Claus was fifteen feet away in a dim corner. His coat was on a hook.

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Just have a seat.”

  “No–”

  The bands yanked him onto the chair and forced him to lie back. When his head hit the pillow, the shiny instruments came to life. Whirring and flashing and pointing at his head.

  “This is wrong. You know it, Claus.”

  Claus checked a lighted panel on the wall. “My people, we’re good. You need to know that. We’re a good people. We’ve lived in peace for almost forty thousand years.”

  He came over to the chair. It lowered as he neared until Nicholas was level with his face. Claus showed no emotion as he flipped switches on the things surrounding Nicholas’s head.

  “We unlocked the secrets to aging almost twenty thousand years ago,” he said.

  Impossible.

  Claus stopped.

  “You still doubt? You think this is some dream and you’re about to wake up? None of this is magical. We are scientists. We decoded the human genome while humanity was still bashing each over the head with clubs. We corrected the accumulated errors in DNA that lead to aging and extended our lives for thousands of years by doing so, but we’ve always lived in balance with the planet. Do you know what humanity would do if they had the secret to aging?”

  “How is this my fault?”

  The tension around Claus’s eyes relaxed. He walked to the other side of the chair and checked the instruments.

  “You have such short lives and look at the messes you make.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  Claus slammed his fist on the armrest.

  “HE WOULD NOT BE THAT!”

  They stared at each other. Nicholas saw the pain, heard it.

  “You’re blaming us for Jack,” Nicholas said. “Like we created him.”

  “Of course not. He was born with a mutation, one that made him cold.”

  He meant cold in more ways than one.

  “But our people never would have followed him had humanity not been making a mess of the planet. They never would’ve embraced his maniacal ideas. He never would’ve seized power.” He flipped one final switch. “If not for you.”

  Claus let a deep breath escape his nostrils.

  He went over to the corner and returned with a needle and a vial. He swabbed the blue veins on the inside of Nicholas’s arm and drew blood into a syringe.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. But these are dark times. Hurt cannot be avoided.”

  Claus dropped three vials of blood into his pocket. He scraped skin from Nicholas’s forearm and put that sample in a vial, too. He went behind Nicholas and put a band around his head that painfully tightened enough to light sparks behind Nicholas’s eyes. Claus lowered the beastly machine that hung from the ceiling.

  “We’re stealing your memories, Santa. You’ll experience them one last time, but then we will own them.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Claus stepped back. “We’re building a new you.”

  The room seemed to flood with light.

  Nicholas was consumed by it. He went back to a time in his life.

  He relived his memories.

  For the last time.

  C L A U S

  19.

  Nicholas is two, standing at the top of a staircase, wearing his father’s boots. It’s so far down, but – like most two-year-olds – he isn’t afraid. He takes a step and tumbles to the bottom.

  The nanny is fired.

  Nicholas is six years old.

  He sneaks out of the window on the top floor and climbs to the roof to slide down a downspout. He runs the alleys of Mora, Sweden – his birthplace. The people in town know the Santa name because his parents became wealthy manufacturing clocks, knives and sewing machines. They spend their time rubbing elbows with politicians and throwing fancy parties.

  None of that matters to a pack of kids.

  Nicholas ends up on the roof of the town’s theatre. He and his friends throw pebbles at the people exiting with their big dresses and fur coats and top hats. Everything is just fine until they see the buckets of water near the fire escape.

  Nicholas doesn’t hesitate.

  He pours three gallons of cold water on a man and woman just as they come out from under the red awning, dousing her feathery headdress and knocking the man’s hat into a puddle.

  They turn out to be Nicholas’s parents.

  The nanny is fired.

  The third nanny isn’t fired. She quits.

  His parents are in Stockholm to attend meetings (parties) for a week. Nicholas is twelve when he plans his escape. He slips out the back door and disappears into the nearby mountains.

  His parents had taken him out of school and had him privately tutored. Without his friends, he made less trouble and began day-tripping into the wilderness. He taught himself how to make a hook out of scrap metal and how to make a bow and arrow from a sapling and twine. He had created a shelter from branches and stones.

  The week he escapes is the greatest week of his life.

  He spends his days fishing and climbing, collecting berries and leaves. He has a book and sketches plants and wildlife. At night, he builds a fire and cooks what he catches, sleeping beneath a heavy blanket on a bed of leaves. He plans to go farther into the mountains and search for caves.

  The unknown begs to be discovered.

  His parents stop hiring nannies after that.

  Everything changes when Nicholas turns sixteen.

  “You’re a man,” his father says. “You’ll need to learn how to behave like one.”

  That means cutting his wild hair and wearing black pants and a jacket and getting throttled with a necktie. He dresses as he’s told, but he refuses to smile.

  “You’ll never find a girl, Nicholas,” his mother says, straightening his tie and pushing the corners of his mouth up. “You’ll need to smile.”

  He doesn’t.

  A formal ball is the last place he belongs.

  Nicholas shakes hands when he’s introduced. He says, “Yes, ma’am,” when he addresses the women wrapped in fox furs and says, “Yes, sir,” when he addresses the men puffing on long cigars. And when the night gets late, when the adults begin to slur words, he finds a dark corner and strips off the tie.

  Then he sees her.

  She’s heavyset, but not fat. Big-boned. Strong.

  She passes him with a tray. He notices the scabs on her knuckles, the bruises on her elbows.

  He watches her deliver the drinks and then clear empty dishes from one of the tables. He never takes his eyes off of her, except when she goes into the kitchen. The night flies by in the recesses of the ballroom as he moves around to find better spots to watch.

  She never rests. She’s polite. Beautiful.

  His heart is won and he doesn’t even know her name.

  It’s past midnight.

  She’s clearing a table only ten feet away from Nicholas. Her hair is brown and pulled back. She’s bent over the table, reaching for the empty plates. Nicholas could swear her eyes
are green.

  Two young men – older than Nicholas, but younger than most – stop to say something to her. Nicholas hears what the one says, the one with round glasses, who’s sloshing a glass of wine onto the tablecloth.

  He sees where the man put his hand.

  The waitress whirls on the drunken aristocrat and plants her scuffed knuckles on his chin. The man tumbles backwards, knocking people over. Glass breaks and people scream.

  No one has a chance to come out and fire the upstart girl. She’s already stripped off the apron and wads it into a ball. The aristocrat jumps up, wiping his lip and examining the blood on his fingers. He’s restrained by the guests.

  Nicholas jumps out of his seat. If the inebriated man thinks to strike a woman – one that Nicholas has been slobbering over or not – then he’s about to find out how mistaken he is. Nicholas steps in front of her, half-aware he has grabbed her arm. She twists out of his grip and shoves Nicholas away.

  “All of you rich spoiled brats should learn some manners.” And she fires the balled apron into Nicholas’s face.

  She marches out of the ballroom, slamming through the kitchen door. Nicholas watches.

  If he stayed, if he didn’t give chase, then he never would’ve found himself held prisoner by an ancient Nordic elven people.

  But he goes.

  He follows her through the kitchen and out the back door. Nicholas catches sight of her turning the corner at the end of the alley. His parents were going to be livid, but he would deal with that.

  If he didn’t follow her, he never would’ve seen her again.

  C L A U S

  20.

  Claus watched Santa smile.

  He was stealing something very sweet from him.

  They were just memories. Possessions. Santa was not his memories. Santa was something else. Memories were just recordings that molded his identity. The two were not the same thing.

  But we’re destroying him. I’m destroying a man. A good man.

  Claus could tell he was a good man from a brief glimpse of the memories as they were downloaded. He didn’t buy into possessions and wealth. He stood up for a woman with integrity and courage.