The Last Hunter - Ascent (Book 3 of the Antarktos Saga)

by Jeremy Robinson

  “What the hell?” the woman says.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” I say.

  The man lowers his guard a little.

  “Wright!” the woman shouts. “What are you doing?”

  “They look like they could have killed us already if they wanted to,” the man named Wright says.

  “They’re just kids!” she says.

  “Watch it,” Kainda growls.

  The woman’s eyes lock with Kainda’s. It’s like seeing two lions sizing each other up. The woman must realize her partner is correct. She lowers her knife, though she’s not happy about it. “Fine.”

  I motion to Em and Kainda, introducing them one at a time. “This is Em. And Kainda. My name is Solomon.” I reach my hand out to shake Wright’s. “Solomon Vincent.”

  “Awfully polite for a boy in a loin cloth,” the woman says.

  I ignore her, as does Wright. He takes my hand with a strong shake. He motions to the woman with his head. “This is my wife, Katherine Ferrell. I’m Captain Stephen Wright, U.S. Special Forces.”

  “Stephen Wright?” I ask, my mind racing backwards through time and then I ask, “Junior?”

  The man squints at me. “Yes. How did you—”

  “I met your father once,” I say, remembering Stephen Wright senior. He was a member of the expedition at Clark Station 2. He mentioned he had a son, who wanted to join the expedition, but his father kept him home. Said he thought his son would end up being killed on Antarctica. Looks like his father could be right.

  “That’s impossible,” Wright says, letting go of my hand. “He died when I was eighteen.”

  I nod. “I met him twenty-three years ago.” I raise my hand in a three finger salute, knowing he’ll recognize it. “Scout’s honor.”

  Wright and Ferrell look a little bit stunned.

  “He mentioned you were in the boy scouts,” I say.

  The man leans against the stone wall and slides to a sitting position. He’s clearly exhausted, possibly injured and struggling to comprehend what I’m saying.

  “I met him here, on Antarctica, during the expedition to Clark Sta—”

  The man’s eyes light up. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Solomon,” I say. “Solomon Vincent.”

  “You’re the boy!” He sits up straighter. “The boy who disappeared!”

  I nod. “I was kidnapped.”

  “They never found you…”

  “I’ve been here. Underground. With the Nephilim.”

  Wright and Ferrell both tense at the word, so I know they’ve encountered them.

  “You know who they are?” I ask.

  The man nods. “Clark explained it.”

  “You were with Merrill?” I say, feeling excited that I’ve actually met part of Dr. Clark’s group.

  “Do you know what happened to them?” he asks.

  His question gives me my answer. “They made it, I think. Mira killed Enki. Last I saw, they were headed down river toward the sea.”

  Wright relaxes a little. “Enki… He’s the one that nearly killed us.”

  “How did you get away?” I ask.

  Wright nods at his wife. “Kat shot off his—I guess ‘crown’ is the best word for it—and he dropped us. If we hadn’t fallen in the river…”

  I see he’s replaying the scene in his mind and I pull him back. “Captain Wright,” I say. He looks me in the eyes. “Do you understand what’s happening—the war that’s about to be fought?”

  “I think I do,” he says.

  “Then you know that we’ll need an army?”

  “I do.”

  “Can you get me one?”

  “Get you one?” Ferrell says. “I’ve said it before, but no one seems to be paying attention. You’re just a kid.”

  I ignore her and keep my eyes on Wright.

  “I just need a way to call home,” he says.

  “Steve,” Ferrell says.

  He holds his hand up to her as if to say don’t worry, I can handle this. He turns back to me and says “But, even if I could make that call, I’m not going to until you give me a damn good reason.”

  I point to the canteen attached to his belt. “How are you for water?”

  He unclips the canteen and shakes it. Bone dry. I can tell he thinks I’m going to refill his canteen from my waterskin as some kind of peace offering, but that’s not my intention at all. Not only would it do nothing to convince him, or his wife, whose attitude matches her name, but I tend to not do things small.

  I take the canteen and step up to the wall. I place my hand against the stone and reach out. I can feel the earth, hard and heavy. There are pockets of air, tiny and cavernous. And there are veins of water, flowing like blood. I focus on one of these veins and open up a small fissure. Pressure helps me draw the water up, though opening the stone takes more effort. But I keep the hole small, splitting stone until it reaches the cave.

  The pair remains silent when the spring opens and fresh water pours out. I could fill the canteen right there at the wall, but decide to leave no doubt that I am uniquely qualified to handle the Nephilim. I still have doubts about my ability to lead a war against these creatures that terrify me, but I seem to have a knack for vexing the monsters and foiling their plans. I don’t like it and I don’t feel prepared, but there is no one else.

  The water transforms into steam as it exits the wall, as I coax it out. The fog fills the tunnel. I can feel it, moistening my lungs with every breath. Then I bring it in closer with a swirling breeze, condensing it over the open lid of the canteen. As though being wrung from the very air itself, water trickles from the cloud as it cyclones back into a liquid. As the canteen fills, I seal the hole in the wall with a thought. The swirling cloud disappears as the last of it converts back into water and tops off the canteen.

  I screw the cap back on the canteen, give it a shake so they can hear it’s full and hand the canteen back to the stunned man. Ferrell actually has her hand over her mouth.

  They’ve been to Olympus.

  They’ve fought the Nephilim.

  But they have never seen anything like me.

  I smile at them and say, “I am Solomon Ull Vincent, the first and only child born on Antarctica.” I stand up feeling a sense of purpose like never before. I’m framed on either side by Em and Kainda. “I am the last hunter.”

  I look the man in the eyes. “Will you help me?”

  EPILOGUE

  Lieutenant Ninnis stared up at the sky. The vibrant blue looked brighter than he’d ever seen it. Birds swooped into his field of view, calling loudly, hovering on the breeze. He recognized them as seagulls, the rats of the sea. An image flashed through his mind. A boat. A voyage.

  He shook his head and it was gone. A vision.

  Pain filled his chest as he took a deep breath. But through the pain, he smelled salt. The ocean.

  Flash.

  A wedding. A beach.

  Ninnis tried to scream, but only managed a hiss of air. His body, which had sailed miles through the air, had been ruined when he fell from the sky and collided with the solid, rocky coast. A little further and he would have landed at sea, where he would have likely drowned. A little more inland and he would have been hacked to pieces by the jungle trees.

  But he was fortunate. His body had landed on the stony shore. Everything inside him had been obliterated. His bones. His organs. Even his mind. He’d become nothing more than a loose sack of flesh. But even now, it stitched itself back together. The pain was nearly unbearable, but he was accustomed to it.

  What he could not bear were the snapshots of someone else’s life replaying in his thoughts as his brain physically reformed.

  Flash.

  A woman. Her smile.

  “Ahhh!” Ninnis found his voice as his neck came together. “What did you do to me, Solomon?”

  Speaking the boy’s name made it even worse. The pup had beaten him. Again. Even with the power granted him by the body and spirit of
Nephil. Solomon, and his gift, had somehow been stronger.

  The admission sent a wave of sickness through Ninnis’s body. If he could have moved, he would have curled into a fetal position. But he was stuck in place, staring up at the sky. His hearing returned and brought the crashing of waves.

  Flash!

  The woman’s face again. Her lips. A kiss.

  Something broken inside Ninnis stitched back together, but it had nothing to do with physical repair. It was something broken long before the injuries he received today, and with the repair, came a name.

  “Caroline!”

  Ninnis shuddered and convulsed.

  The name made him weak.

  It stole his will.

  His skin roiled and pulsed.

  Ninnis screamed again, this time in horror.

  Darkness emerged from his body, lifting him off the ground. It spun around him, forcing his body back together far quicker than the Nephilim blood could. And when he was hale again, the darkness returned, filling his body.

  Consuming his mind.

  Taking control.

  Lieutenant Ninnis was no more.

  Now, there was only Nephil.

  Lord of the Nephilim.

  “Solomon,” the demon spoke. “You’re alive.”

  Motion above drew his eyes back up. His brethren filled the sky like locusts, flying out to destroy the world of men. But it was not yet time.

  Nephil raised Ninnis’s hand to the sky and shouted, “My brothers!” His voiced boomed out over the ocean, powerful. Unnatural. But even those too far away to hear his voice, heard him in their thoughts. “Return,” he told them. “Our fight here is not yet over. The boy still lives.”

  Nephil turned his eyes to the jungle behind him and the continent beyond it.

  “Go! Find him! Bring him to me!”

  Older Kindle model? Click here for estore.

  JEREMY ROBINSON is the author of eleven novels including PULSE, INSTINCT, and THRESHOLD the first three books in his exciting Jack Sigler series. His novels have been translated into nine languages. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and three children.

  Visit him on the web, here: www.jeremyrobinsononline.com

  —SAMPLE—

  ANTARKTOS RISING by Jeremy Robinson

  Available on Kindle for $2.99.Click here to buy!

  DESCRIPTION:

  ** Antarktos Rising parallels the story in The Last Hunter - Ascent. The last two Hunter books finish BOTH storylines as they merge at the end of ASCENT.

  THE WORLD RACES TO CLAIM A NEW CONTINENT

  A phenomenon known as crustal displacement shifts the Earth’s crust, repositioning continents and causing countless deaths. In the wake of the global catastrophe, the world struggles to take care of its displaced billions. But Antarctica, freshly thawed and blooming, has emerged as a new hope. Rather than wage a world war no nation can endure, the leading nations devise a competition, a race to the center of Antarctica, with the three victors dividing the continent.

  It is within this race that Mirabelle Whitney, one of the few surviving experts on the continent, grouped with an American special forces unit, finds herself. But the dangers awaiting the team are far worse than feared; beyond the sour history of a torn family, beyond the nefarious intentions of their human enemies, beyond the ancient creatures reborn through anhydrobiosis—there are the Nephilim.

  ...ONLY TO FIND IT ALREADY TAKEN.

  “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.”

  – Genesis 6:4

  EXCERPT:

  Chapter 1

  Angutagrew more terrified as each paddle stroke carried his bone-and-sealskin kayak across the unusually placid Arctic Ocean and closer to the whale. His knotted muscles shuddered in spasms, not from the cold but from the realization that his lifelong goal might finally come to fruition. At age fifty-seven, the idea of single-handedly killing a sixty-foot humpback and towing its carcass back to the village seemed a ridiculous task. And while this rite of passage had been a long time coming, his aging body didn’t feel up to the job.

  Grasping a bone-tipped spear in his gloved hand, Anguta did his best to ignore the throb of arthritis attacking his knuckles and waited . . . patiently . . . for the leviathan to return to the surface. Three days of tracking and sustaining himself on cured salmon had taken him this far. If he didn’t take the beast this year, he would return to the arctic waters off the coast of Alaska to try again—and he refused to consider that option. This was the year. He knew it.

  “Come to me, whale,” Anguta mumbled through his thickly scarfed mouth. “Come to me and I will honor you with a quick death.” Anguta knew the death would only be quick if he were lucky enough to pierce the whale’s eye and penetrate its brain on the first blow. Otherwise, his first strike would tether his kayak to the whale’s body and a day-long struggle between man and beast would begin. The tradition belonged to his tribe alone, and Anguta was the only man who had yet to achieve the task. He had tried every year since he was nineteen.

  Anguta cursed himself for finding the largest humpback in the entire ocean. He had hoped to find a young calf, newly weaned from its protective mother, but instead he had encountered a large bull, perhaps close in age to Anguta himself.

  The old man’s only consolation was that he was not cold. After years of fruitless arctic hunting trips, he had learned that technology could be useful. His outer layers were traditional Inuit—furs of caribou, bear, and seal hide. This covered him from head to toe, leaving only his eyes exposed. Underneath the furs was a combination of moisture-wicking fabrics and a military-grade thermal bodysuit. His eyes were sealed behind a face mask that not only warmed his skin, but by virtue of its tinted surface also dulled the harsh glow of bright sun on white ice.

  Anguta let his eyes wander across the mirrored water which perfectly reflected the cloud-specked sky. He looked for any distortion that would reveal the presence of a rising whale, but saw only sky. His thoughts drifted with the clouds. He pictured his wife, Elizabeth, a French Canadian originally out of Quebec, feeding the dog team. Their marriage had been extremely unconventional at the time but was more common these days. Though shunned at first for his choice of wife, Anguta and Elizabeth’s marriage had produced five children and seven grandchildren, all of whom he now missed greatly and wished were there beside him, hunting the whale. His marriage and half-breed children had already broken so many of his people’s customs. Why not one more?

  Chapter 2

  Looking down at the canteen in his hand, Dmitriy Rostov wished that it was full of vodka instead of water. But his lust for the clean spirit’s warmth on his tongue lasted only a moment, a much shorter duration than it had only a year ago. Dmitriy, at the age of thirty-seven, had learned he was an alcoholic, a plague that claimed 45 percent of his Russian compatriots. It was said that two-thirds of Russian men die with a bottle in their hands, a fate Dmitriy had resigned himself to . . .

  “Dima, come see this.”

  . . . until he’d met her.

  Viktoriya Petrova.

  “Coming, Vika,” Dmitriy called as he picked his way across the stone-strewn shoreline of Vadim Bay. The bay was part of the Kara Sea, a remote region off the northern coast of Siberia which could only be navigated during mid-summer. The bay was a large U-shaped inlet with cliff walls on either side. Behind the rocky shore grew a forest of strong pines that creaked and swayed in the salty sea breeze.

  Rounding a boulder, Dmitriy came face-to-face with Viktoriya; it was the closest their faces had ever come to touching, though still not quite close enough for Dmitriy. She was bundled in a red parka and thick snow pants. Even in the summer, the temperature at Vadim Bay, located hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, was cold enough to chap the skin.

  Surprised by Dmitriy’s sudden appearance, Viktoriya stumbled back and tripped over a loos
e rock. She yelped as she plummeted down.

  “Vika!”Dmitriy’s strong and steady hand had sprung out before he could think about what to do and snagged the arm of her parka. Her descent stopped. Dmitriy thanked God he was sober. A year ago, she would have fallen to the rocks and he would have laughed drunkenly. He realized now that he would never have come this far without her encouragement. He had been headed for a very early retirement from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, but when Viktoriya had been assigned as his new partner, she had seen something worth saving in him. She had an iron will and whipped him into shape; when the reviews came in, his report showed a marked productivity increase. Now only ten days away from his fortieth birthday, he was a new man. His job was saved.

  No. More than his job. He not only began to care for himself while on the job but also at home. Showering daily, brushing his teeth, wearing deodorant—all the good habits that Dmitriy had abandoned during his days as a drunk returned. The pale, oily-skinned, puffy-faced waste of a man had, under Viktoriya’s influence, changed to the core. He’d shed pounds, smelled clean, and when he finally began shaving again, displayed the handsome face of which his mother had once been so proud. It wasn’t that Viktoriya had changed his mind—she’d infected his heart. Like his person, he kept his apartment neat and nicely decorated. Just in case she came to visit. Just in case the day came that he would tell her everything he felt. He’d always imagined being at home, in the city, on that day. But here, alone, in the wild, he felt brave. Today would be the day.

  He pulled her up until her cushioned body rested against his. They were closer still than ever before—close enough for Dmitriy to smell the subtle fragrance of her perfume. Rose.

  “Vika, are you all right? I didn’t mean to startle you.”