Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

by Gabriel Hunt

  Gabriel hadn’t met too many people that size, and as far as he knew there was only one in this village at the moment. He bent his knees, braced himself against one wall, and did his best to cushion Millie’s fall, taking some of the impact against his chest and letting the big man roll off onto the ground in a heap.

  Nursing his bruised ribs, Gabriel went to where Millie lay, sprawled on his side, moaning softly. He still wore the kilt like get up but it was now quite disheveled, several of the barkcloth slats missing, and the paint on his body was smeared and mostly rubbed away. Gabriel could see one of the feathered knockout darts protruding from Millie’s neck just below his right ear.

  “Millie,” Gabriel said, pulling the dart out and tossing it aside. He rubbed the big man’s wrists and slapped his cheeks. “Millie, are you all right?”

  No response. At least he was breathing normally and seemed uninjured beyond the various scrapes and bruises sustained on the way down—but there would be no waking him until the drug wore off.

  It took the better part of an hour for this to happen, and when it did Gabriel was clinging to the wall some eight feet off the ground, desperately trying for a higher handhold and failing to secure one. He heard a groan from below and let go, dropping to the ground.

  Millie groaned again, turning his head from side to side. He moved his hands to touch his neck, feeling for the now absent dart. Then finally his eyelids slowly peeled open, his blurry gaze struggling to focus on Gabriel.

  “Christ,” Millie said. “I thought…”

  He made a move to roll over and let out a roar of pain. When he rolled, he revealed the leg that had previously been folded beneath him. His ankle was turned at an angle that it wasn’t meant to go.

  “Don’t move,” Gabriel said. “Your ankle’s broken.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Millie said. He was starting to sweat profusely, his face pale. “Damn it, I go to sleep in the arms of three beautiful women and I wake up with you and a broken leg. What the hell happened?”

  Gabriel quickly filled Millie in on everything that had taken place from the moment they had been separated.

  “Their new queen?” Millie said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Wish I were,” Gabriel said. “Here, sit up.” He helped Millie to a sitting position, leaning against one wall of the pit. He reached for the waistband of Millie’s kilt.

  “Whoa, slow down there, boss,” Millie said. “Just because we’re in this hole together with time to kill—”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Gabriel said. “There’s nothing else down here to splint your ankle with, and we’re not getting out of here if you can’t walk.”

  “Why can’t we use your kilt?”

  “Yours is bigger,” Gabriel said.

  “Well, as long as you admit it,” Millie said, forcing a pained smile. “All right, boss. Do what you’ve got to do.”

  Gabriel untied the big man’s kilt, layered the stiff strips of barkcloth on either side of the fractured bone, and cinched the leather waistband tightly around them. Millie grimaced as he pulled the knots snug. “How’s that?”

  Millie tested it, gingerly at first and then with more confidence—though he leaned heavily on Gabriel’s shoulder as he did. “Bad. I won’t be clog dancing for a while. But I should be able to hold myself upright.”

  “That’s something, anyway,” Gabriel said, looking around once more. He thought about the offhand comment he’d made the first time they’d been down here, about standing on Millie’s shoulders. Between them they totaled nearly thirteen feet; with his arms outstretched over his head, call it fourteen and a bit. Add the eight feet of free-climbing he’d managed at his most successful and you only got to twenty-two feet—close, but still well short of the top. And that was assuming Millie’s splinted ankle could support not only the big man’s own weight but Gabriel’s hundred eighty pounds on top of it.

  Fine. If they couldn’t go up, how about down? Gabriel bent to the task of inspecting the ground at the bottom of the pit, peering closely at every crevice and declivity in the dirt.

  “What in god’s name are you doing?”

  “Wasting precious time,” Gabriel said as he completed the survey. He stood up and worked the circulation back into his cramped thighs. “But I had to try. Last time I needed to get out of an underground trap, there was a secret tunnel with a hidden entrance you could barely see unless you knew it was there.”

  “Boss, if you’re looking for a tunnel down here, you don’t need to go searching so hard,” Millie said. “There’s one right there.” And he pointed toward the drainage hole.

  Gabriel looked at it. The opening was much too narrow for either man to fit through—but Millie was right, there was presumably a tunnel of some sort behind it. The villagers would sluice water down into the pit to wash away blood that had collected, along with other detritus, and the water had to come out somewhere, maybe in the stream they’d seen near the waterfall.

  Could the channel behind this opening be wider than the opening itself? If they’d had to dig it without modern boring tools, it would have been easier to make it wider—specifically, the width of the person doing the digging—rather than narrower.

  He bent to look at the space where the stone they’d knocked out used to be. On the other side he didn’t see more stone, he just saw blackness.

  “I don’t suppose you could kick out any more of those stones,” Gabriel said.

  “Not with this foot,” Millie said, slapping one thigh. “But with the other…? I could give it the old college try.”

  He lay on his back, taking all pressure off his broken ankle, then aimed the tough, calloused sole of his other foot at the wall. He slammed it home. The first kick didn’t do much—but by the time he’d dealt out a half dozen thunderous blows, another stone was coming loose. Gabriel dug around its edges with his fingers and pried the heavy block of stone free. He laid it on the ground.

  “More,” he said.

  In all, they managed to remove four stones before Millie let his leg drop and lay back, exhausted. “I’m shot,” he said. “That enough?”

  The hole was wider now—just wide enough, Gabriel thought, to admit his broad shoulders. No way Millie could fit, but one person would be enough. If he made it out, he could come back for Millie. “I’m going in,” Gabriel said.

  “You sure?”

  “Didn’t we go over that already?” Gabriel said. He squeezed into the opening before Millie could respond.

  Inside, it was dark, except for the slight glow of bioluminescent moss faintly outlining the walls. It was narrow, too, the stone ceiling no more than two feet above the damp dirt floor. And it looked like it got narrower as it went—the people who’d dug it had presumably been young women, not six-foot-tall men. But maybe if he hunched down and was willing to lose a bit of skin on his shoulders—

  He cocked his head. There was a low scrabbling sound coming from the darkness in front of him, like the scratching of claws. Animals of some sort—scavengers, perhaps. Then he heard a louder sound: a thumping, as of a paw, or perhaps a tail, batting against the ground.

  He reached ahead of him with one hand, sweeping it back and forth along the dirt. He felt the air stir as something darted out of the path of his arm.

  His fingers brushed along something hard lying half-buried in the ground. A bone? He grabbed it, wrenched it out of the dirt—and as he did, he felt a pair of sharp teeth sink into the flesh of his arm.

  He swung the arm up and against the tunnel wall beside him, heard a squeal as the animal released its hold and dropped off. But the clattering of claws was louder now, and it sounded like it was all around him, as though the animals were somehow emerging from the walls of the tunnel itself. A furry flank slammed against the side of his face and he felt sharp claws scrape across his cheek. Another animal leapt over his shoulder and bit down hard on the back of his neck.

  “Millie! Get me out of he—” His open mouth was suddenly filled with wa
rm and greasy fur. He felt it wriggling back and forth and realized the narrow squirming thing probing inside his mouth was an animal’s head. He bit down hard and spat the thing out just as he felt a pair of strong hands clamp down on his ankles and forcefully pull him out of the tunnel.

  He emerged into the light with Millie on his knees beside him. The big man hauled two of the animals off his back and slammed their heads together, then threw them aside. Gabriel himself took care of the one clinging to his throat, knocking it off with the thing in his hand—which did turn out to be a bone: a scraped-clean femur that looked distressingly human.

  Gabriel swept the bone along his chest and legs, knocking more of the animals to the ground. But more still were pouring out of the drainage hole, maybe attracted by their fellows’ distress, or maybe just by the prospect of fresh meat.

  The creatures looked like a cross between shrews and rats, only larger than any of either Gabriel had ever seen. Each was more than a foot long and had a pair of sharp prognathic tusks protruding from below an elongated snout. And they were more aggressive than any rats he’d encountered, even in New York, jumping on him and Millie with no regard for their own safety, no fear.

  Gabriel batted them away as they came, while Millie fell back against one wall and did the best he could while balancing on his good leg.

  “Jesus Christ,” Millie said, picking one off his thigh before it could make the leap it was attempting onto his unprotected crotch. “What are these things?”

  What ever they were, a dozen more were boiling out of the hole in the wall. They were all over Gabriel in an instant, screeching, clawing and biting even as Gabriel swung and kicked out blindly in all directions. As soon as he got hold of one to smash it against the pit wall, three others seemed to take its place. The hot, musky stench of the creatures was nearly unbearable and their sharp teeth and claws were everywhere he turned, tearing into his flesh. In the frenzy, he lost track of Millie but he could hear him somewhere behind him, shouting and flinging the furry attackers aside.

  “We’ve got to block up that hole,” Gabriel said, dropping to his knees by one of the large blocks of stone they’d so painstakingly moved aside. He hauled it up in both arms as one of the animals leaped over the stone and onto the back of his hand. With a grunt, Gabriel pressed the stone into place at the bottom of the drainage hole. It did little to stop the flow of angry shrews—they just kept coming.

  “Get over here, damn it,” Gabriel shouted, plucking a shrew off his upper arm, where it had begun to make a meal of his triceps. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Millie lumber over and bend to lift another of the stone blocks. He shoved it on top of the one Gabriel had placed. Gabriel himself lifted the third of the stones and jammed it into place as soon as Millie’s hands were out of the way, and then Millie was there with the fourth.

  The fit was far from airtight—hell, it wasn’t even shrewtight, as evidenced by the continuing appearance of furry snouts between the stones. But the fit was tight enough to be a squeeze for any but the skinniest of the animals and the constant flow subsided, enabling Gabriel to pick off the ones that remained in the pit, first two or three at a time and then one by one as their numbers dropped. Millie, meanwhile, grabbed up bodies of fallen shrews by the fistful and shoved them into the spaces between the stones like so much fleshy mortar.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Millie said, finally, lowering himself exhaustedly to a patch of ground from which he’d swept a layer of bloody animal corpses. Gabriel sat beside him, sore all over from bites and scratches and the bruises and abrasions he’d sustained in bashing the creatures against the rock. He felt weak and wanted desperately to lie down and sleep, even just for a little bit. But he knew that with the sun beating down and nothing to eat or drink, he’d only feel weaker when he woke—assuming he didn’t find himself waking with more of the animals somehow chewing on his jugular.

  Getting up, he kicked aside the bodies before him and bent to retrieve the bone he’d taken out of the tunnel. It was human, the leg bone of some previous visitor unfortunate enough to find himself fighting for his life in this pit. Well, it was too late to do the bone’s original owner any good—but he might be able to do them some.

  Gabriel handed the bone to Millie, who turned it over in his hands and looked up at Gabriel quizzically. “Can you break it?” Gabriel said. “Two pieces, equal length would be best.”

  “You don’t ask for much, do you,” Millie said. He took one end of the bone in each hand, then thought better of it and reset his grip closer to the center.

  “Careful,” Gabriel said.

  “Why do you want a broken bone?” Millie asked.

  “I don’t,” Gabriel said. “I want a pair of titanium climbing pegs. But I’ll settle for a broken bone.”

  Millie gripped tighter, the veins standing out along his thick forearms. The bone bent in a narrow arc, then a bit farther, and then snapped in two, one piece just slightly longer than the other. He held the pieces out to Gabriel, who looked at the angled edges where the bone had broken. Nice and sharp—but all the same, he began working them back and forth against the face of one of the rougher stones, like a knife against a whetstone. The bones needed to go in smooth and come out the same way, and penetrate as deeply as possible into the cracks between the stones, and that meant taking off any rough edges or protrusions and sharpening them even more.

  Gabriel kept at it for what felt like an hour, though he knew it probably was less—it was hard to tell much about the passage of time here. The reddish light streaming down from above remained unchanging, and the only sound was the scrape of bone against rock.

  Gabriel wondered what he would find when he finally hauled himself up over the rim of the pit. What if he was too late? Velda might have figured out how to set the coordinates, in which case Berlin might be gone, or all of Germany—who knew what sort of devastation the Nazi doomsday device might be capable of. Or, of course, the machine might no longer work properly after sixty-five years, and might casually destroy the wrong country. Perhaps it had been locked on Washington for so long it would be impossible to redirect it, and when Velda pushed the button…

  He shook his head. He couldn’t let himself think about it. He had to clear his mind of everything but the climb. One thing at a time, and right now the one thing that mattered was getting out of this pit.

  When Gabriel finally had the bone pieces as sharp and smooth as he wanted, he stood, stretching his arms and shoulders. He felt the pull and sting of every cut and bruise. His calf throbbed where it had been clenched in the unclean jaws of one of the biggest of the shrews, a long-fanged monster that had been murder to pry loose. It was going to be a tough climb and he was hardly in the best shape for it. But what choice was there? He took in a deep breath, stepped forward, and sank one of the bones into the highest crack he could reach.

  Chapter 24

  Raising his feet off the ground, Gabriel swung by the arm holding the bone wedged into the wall. At the top of the swing, he reached up and planted the second piece of bone about six inches higher than the first. Hauling himself up on the second piece, he pulled the first piece free and swung up to plant it higher. Then he repeated the process. Again and again he pulled out the bones and drove them in higher, sometimes as much as a foot above his previous handhold and other times only a few inches. There were times when he failed to drive the end of the bone into the wall at all and swung back away, returning a moment later for another attempt. His arms were already aching although he’d barely climbed five feet, but he kept on going, scanning the rock wall for cracks and crevices that might admit the bones—and that would hold his weight.

  By the time he had made it halfway up the sheer face, his arms and chest were trembling from the effort and he was barely able to pull himself up inch by excruciating inch. Only thoughts of Millie waiting below with his broken ankle and Rue being forced at spear point to work on the plane—and Velda, half mad with grief, with the lives of millions in her hands—ke
pt Gabriel pressing on. He didn’t look down and barely looked up, concentrating instead on the wall directly in front of him: the next crack, the next handhold. Twelve feet became fifteen; fifteen became twenty. He was less than three feet from the lip when the stones supporting his latest handhold began to crumble.

  It began with a faint rain of grit and dirt on his arm; then the terrible feeling of the bone in his hand coming loose. The stone below his fist had a crack running down its face, and as he watched it slowly widened.

  Desperately, Gabriel swung the bone in his other hand and jabbed it into the wall just as he lost his grip on the first. It slipped from his hand and plummeted end over end to the bottom of the pit. As he swung reflexively out of the way of a small avalanche of stones, he heard Millie’s voice from far below. “You okay?”

  “I’ve been better,” Gabriel called back. He held tight to the one remaining bone. This one remained embedded, but at a bad angle—tilted slightly downward and looking as if it were seconds from coming loose.

  He looked up. He was close—so close. But still more than an arm’s length away. He planted his toes against the rock, scrabbling for any sort of hold at all, and swung his free arm up. It caught nothing. No handhold, nothing to grab onto.

  He tried again, aiming this time for the crumbling ledge where the stones had come loose. It was dodgy at best, unlikely to support his weight for long, but it was the best hope he had.

  He reached it, caught hold. His fingers bit down fiercely, clamping onto the stone. It did feel loose, unstable—but he held tight and shifted until he felt the balance settle, and when it felt about as good as it was likely to get, Gabriel yanked the sole remaining bone free.

  He swung by his fingertips twenty-three feet above the ground, holding onto this unsteady bit of rock, his heart racing. He could picture Millie looking up at him, holding his breath in fear, maybe holding his arms out to catch him if he fell, though the impact would surely shatter the already fractured bones of his ankle, maybe crippling him for life.