Raising the Past

by Jeremy Robinson

  Harry pointed his weapon at Eddy and almost pulled the trigger. “Take Jim and get back to the others!” Harry said with desperation. “I’ll slow them down.”

  Eddy wanted to object, but this was why they kept Harry around. They had known conflict might one day find them and that a quick escape facilitated by Harry’s wailing guns might be necessary. But Kat was already dead…dead! Eddy’s mind spun and he froze, as dazed as Jim was, rocking on the ground like a child on a swing.

  Unfortunately, the drug runners were prepared for unwelcome intruders and had no qualms about killing to protect their secrets. A grenade hit the ground between Eddy and the others. If not for Harry sounding the alarm, Eddy would have died with the rest of them. “Grenade!”

  Eddy looked down and saw the green object bounce once then stop in the mud. His eyes widened as his body spun and ran without having to think. Eddy rounded a thick tree and was knocked off his feet by the explosion.

  Ringing filled Eddy’s ears, but he was alive and unharmed. He stood and looked back around the tree, searching for the others. The smell hit him first: burnt chemicals mixed with flesh. He saw the overturned table Harry had been hiding behind, shattered and stained red. He didn’t see how Jim and Kat could have moved. They were dead, both of them.

  But Harry was quick on his feet. He was the first to see the grenade hit. Surely, Harry… An object landed at Eddy’s feet. He glanced down and prepared to run from a second grenade, but he remained locked in place, staring at his feet. Harry’s dark eyes starred back up at him, his head detached from the rest of his body.

  Eddy had seen several heads removed from bodies, but they belonged to creatures that had been dead for thousands or millions of years. He’d never seen a human head torn from its body and deposited at his feet. The sight locked his muscles. He was an unmoving statue.

  A bullet shattered the tree next to him, bringing him back to the reality of the jungle. Eddy turned, found his footing and sprinted back up the steep incline without looking back.

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  Heart pounding, lungs burning, Eddy reached the top of the incline and gasped for air. He was a fit man to be sure, but after seeing three people—three friends—murdered, he found moving at all to be near impossible, like running through molasses in a twisted nightmare.

  The shouts behind him grew louder, mixed with the shrieks of the agitated white-faced saki monkeys shaking the branches above. He couldn’t see the men pursuing him yet, but he knew when they caught him, they would kill him. Normally, the thought might spur a man on, give him renewed energy, but not this time. Tears filled Eddy’s eyes, blurring his path.

  His cool demeanor had vanished in the face of death. True, he had looked death in the face a hundred times, but death had never looked back before. Now he had seen death’s true gaze and was captured by it. He gave in to it, accepted the inevitable.

  Luckily for Eddy, not everyone had the same reaction. Some accepted it. Some feared it. And others ran from it like the dickens. Jim appeared on the path, wounded but running at full speed. He ran into Eddy and shoved him aside like a football player breaking for a touchdown. Eddy fell forward into the jungle, tumbling down a slight hill and coming to rest against the trunk of a massive, smooth-barked cuipo tree. His eyes snapped open just in time to see a bullet tear through Jim’s leg, sending him to the ground. Jim rose and continued forward, struggling on his hands and knees with the effort of a man who longed to live.

  Eddy felt a change in his heart and mind. A fire grew in his chest as he saw Jim clamor forward, desperate. Eddy felt his legs again. His arms became his own once more.

  A second shot tore through the air and struck Jim in the back. Jim slumped forward, still reaching out with his hand. Even as death took him, Jim managed one last push toward freedom. Then he stopped moving.

  Eddy sucked in deep and held his breath. Four men charged up the path. Their leader, a tan, handsome man wearing a red bandana, kicked Jim’s dead body and scanned the area with his eyes. Eddy ducked down and remained hidden until the men turned around and left.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The sound of cannons firing filled Eddy’s head, but it wasn’t from another attack, it was from the pounding of his blood surging through his veins, spurred forward by his body’s adrenaline. His mind cried out for revenge.

  The four men didn’t have time to react. Eddy bounded out of the jungle like a predatory cat, shoving the nearest man down the steep incline and stealing his automatic rifle. Eddy brought the rifle around like a baseball bat and smashed the back of a second man’s head. The man slumped to his knees, bloodied before his head hit the ground.

  Eddy spun, raised the weapon, and pulled the trigger. Eight shots exploded out of the weapon, throwing Eddy back and ripping through the body of a third man. Eddy twisted toward the man in the red bandana and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled it again. Still nothing.

  The man in the red bandana laughed.

  Eddy ran forward, holding the rifle back, preparing to smash the man’s brains in. The man was quick and had a handgun pointed at Eddy’s face before he could swing. Eddy stopped, slid through the mud, and fell back on his hands. He crawled away from the man.

  The man pointed his gun at Eddy’s head and looked into Eddy’s eyes, smiling. “I can see you are a true warrior,” the man said. “I cannot bring myself to kill one such as you. You’ll be much more useful alive.”

  Eddy saw that the man had no intention of killing him.

  Why?

  “But first, a parting gift to remind you of me.”

  The man moved his weapon to the right and pulled the trigger. Eddy screamed as a bullet tore through his shoulder. When Eddy looked back up, the man was gone as though he had never existed.

  Eddy screamed as a hand grabbed his good shoulder and squeezed. He looked up into Eve’s eyes. She was saying something, shouting, but Eddy couldn’t hear a thing. His world went black.

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  Eddy sat back in his chair, face unmoving save a slight quiver on his lips. He’d just finished telling the story. “That was two and half years ago.”

  Silence.

  Nicole was stunned. Eddy had just revealed his deep dark past in front of the cameras. Every word was captured for mass market consumption! Nicole had never worked harder to hide a smile.

  Eddy stood from his seat, staring at Nicole with a fury few had ever seen in the man’s eyes. “The person I was died with Harry, Jim and Kat. Don’t bring it up again.”

  Eddy stood and walked off without looking back. No one protested. No one moved.

  Nicole leaned over to Mark, the nearest cameraman. “Please tell me you got all that.”

  “Every word.”

  “Perfect.”

  6

  LEAVING BASE CAMP

  Arctic wind bit Eddy’s bare arms. He stood alone against the cold, dressed only in cargo pants and a white T-shirt. He gazed out at the milky expanse laid out before him in striking contrast to the azure sky above. For days to come it would be all he would see, save the crew and the equipment they were bringing along; his world was about to be plunged into a landscape of high contrast. Light and dark, life and death; they were constantly vying for superiority of the Arctic, with little gray area to spare.

  There were no drug runners in the Arctic. A policeman friend once told him that all the bad guys went inside at night during the winter in Chicago. It made for boring night shifts, but it was true; criminals, like most people, didn’t like the cold. It kept them in at night and entirely out of the Arctic.

  Eddy was relearning to enjoy the cold. Here in his T-shirt, without a winter cap or cup of brandy to keep him warm, Eddy felt colder than he had in years. Submitting himself to this self-induced torture was his way of preparing for the future. He believed that what he felt now was the coldest he’d get on this expedition. Everything from here on out would seem warm to him… That and his numbing toes kept his mind from wande
ring too far.

  Crunching snow told Eddy someone was approaching. The sweet smell of peach perfume told him it was Eve.

  “Everyone all set to go?” he asked.

  Eve stopped next to Eddy and looked out to the horizon. “We’re ready as soon as you’re done thickening your blood.”

  “Few more minutes.”

  Eve glanced at Eddy, his eyes still glued to the view. She looked at his skin. It was red from the cold. She could see that it stung, that when he was done here it would continue stinging hours later.

  “Why are you doing this?” Eve said.

  “Preparing for the cold.”

  “You can put on a coat for that.”

  Eddy turned to Eve. “Not my body. My mind.”

  “You’re telling me that you’ve been standing here picturing a warm turkey dinner, warming yourself psychosomatically? From the looks of your skin, it’s not working.”

  Eddy looked at his skin, its tan color drained and replaced by a light pink. “Not a very flattering color, is it?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  Eddy bent down and picked up a handful of powdery snow. He began forming it into a ball in his bare hands. “We’re prepared for anything we can conceive. But I want to be prepared, at least mentally, for everything we can’t think of. I’ve been working through the most unlikely scenarios. I learned that from you, you know. Earthquakes. Polar shifts. Catastrophic type stuff. Basically anything that involves the crew dying and me having to watch.”

  Eve shifted, unsure how to respond. She didn’t have to.

  “In every scenario I come to the same conclusion.” Eddy looked Eve in the eyes. “I couldn’t handle it. I’d crack. I’d be useless.”

  Eve’s gaze dropped to the snow. “That’s not true.”

  “Death never frightened me before. It’s had a stranglehold on me for two years, waiting for the right moment to squeeze again. I’m sure of it.”

  “Eddy…”

  “Eve, promise me. If I lose it out there, if I put someone in danger, promise you’ll take over and get everyone off the ice.”

  Eve was surprised. It wasn’t what she was expecting. “Eddy, I’m no good at leading. I—”

  “You got us out of the rain forest, out of Venezuela. I don’t trust myself, and Norwood has too much invested to make responsible decisions. If things fall apart, the torch goes to you.”

  Eve didn’t like this one bit. It wasn’t like Eddy to admit defeat before the challenge was even known. Maybe he really wasn’t ready to come back. “Fine,” Eve said. “But that’s not going to happen.” She spun around and bounded away. “Hurry up with your self-loathing. The rest of us are ready to go.”

  It was a rare event for Eve to lace a statement with so much hostility. He felt her concern and anger at his show of weakness. It brought warmth to his heart and strength to his bones. The renewed sense of reality broke through the frozen chains of the past and Eddy realized that frostbite would claim his toes soon if he didn’t head back inside.

  He gave one last glance to the icy world into which they would soon plunge and chased after Eve, holding his shivering arms and looking forward to reclaiming the soul of the man he used to be. He knew Eve would be the key to his undoing or his rebirth.

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  A roar like that of an angry dragon split the frozen air as the fleet of Sno-Cats and snowmobiles launched out over the niveous expanse.

  Eddy, Eve and Kevin rode in the lead Cat. Eddy sat behind the steering wheel with a slight grin on his face. Eve sat on the passenger’s side and Kevin was in the back, alone except for the stack of comic books in which he was already engrossed. Eddy looked over to Eve, who returned his smile. “This is it,” she said.

  Eddy picked up his CB and spoke into it, knowing every crew member would be able to hear his voice. “Okay, people. Let's keep the pace steady and let’s stay on track.”

  The sour-faced trio of Paul, Steve and Nicole listened to Eddy from their shared Sno-Cat. They could all guess why Eddy had clumped them together for the long journey, but they were determined not to let his meddling work; Paul and Steve wouldn’t ever become friends, or even casual acquaintances, with Nicole. At least they all agreed on that.

  Eddy’s voice continued over the radio: “We don't have time for sightseeing. Only stop if there is an emergency.”

  Paul glared at the radio as he squeezed the steering wheel. He looked across the cab to Steve who read his mind, smirked, and looked back at Nicole. “Emergencies don’t include broken nails, gum in your hair or dirt in your eye.”

  Nicole feigned a smile, which was quickly replaced by a grimace, then covered up by a middle finger thrust into Steve’s face.

  Steve laughed. “Ooh, feisty!”

  Steve picked up the CB and spoke into it. “Eddy, my man, you need to relax, and I have just the thing for it.”

  Steve dug through a black backpack at his feet and pulled out a homemade CD labeled “Steve’s Master Mix.” He put the CD into the Cat’s customized CD player and turned up the volume. For a few moments everything was silent. Steve pushed the CB button down and held it to the speaker. He counted in his mind, bobbing his head to music only he could hear.

  With a burst of speed, Steve began banging his head up and down as the rhythm of Metalica’s “Enter Sandman” blared from the radio.

  Nicole covered her ears and screamed for the volume to be turned down, but her voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the wailing guitar and thumping double bass drums.

  Eve jumped as the sounds of heavy metal fury blasted from their CB system. She fumbled for the volume and turned it down, but the music didn’t fade. Steve’s feed blared through every CB system in the fleet of vehicles.

  With a burst of acceleration, a Sno-Cat sped up next to Eddy’s side and matched their speed. Steve leaned out of the open window, releasing a fresh shriek of music. “Hey, Eddy!”

  Eddy looked at Steve, a smile creeping onto his face.

  Steve began to thrash his head around to the music, his hair bouncing in the wind. Steve was in heaven. “Whoo hooo!”

  Eddy burst out laughing. It was the first time he’d laughed since Eve picked him up in Arizona. She hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  Steve reentered the cab of his Sno-Cat, shivering from the cold, and rolled up the window. Elated from his musical tirade, Steve turned down the volume and spun toward Nicole with a smile. “So, Nicole, why are you filming all this? Didn't someone make a documentary like this a few years ago?”

  His question was honest and without trickery. Even Paul was surprised by his friendly demeanor.

  Nicole stammered, looking for words beyond “go to hell.” “Umm, well…how many documentaries have you seen on lions in Africa?”

  “Uh huh, good point. But what makes this different from other documentaries? What makes your vision unique? C'mon, wow me.”

  Steve was transformed. Was it the thrill of finally getting underway? Could his childish teasing have all been a show, like hazing? Maybe a test to see how she’d handle abrasive personalities? She couldn’t decide, but she didn’t want the Steve she’d met a few days ago to return, so she answered his questions without sarcasm.

  “The last time this was done,” Nicole said, “it was kind of anticlimactic. The mammoth was raised, but it sat on an airstrip for months. The original ratings were good, but interest disappeared and nothing ever came of it. What could have been one of the highest rated documentaries was really just a dull precursor to the one I’m going to make about this expedition.”

  “Okay, but what makes your film different? If you go on TV and say, ‘Hey, we’re showing another dead, hairy elephant being pulled out of the ice,’ everyone who saw the first documentary is gonna say, ‘Blah, who needs it?’ Right?” Steve turned to Paul. “Am I right?”

  Paul nodded and kept on driving.

  Nicole was eager to respond. “Actually, you’re right
on the money. But I’ve got two reasons why people will want to watch my documentary over any other show on TV—network, cable, Japanese crossover hit or otherwise.”

  Steve just waited for the answer with his eyebrows perched high on his forehead.

  “First, the human element. In other documentaries, most of the action is focused on science, how the ice is chopped away, how heavy the mammoth is, you know, boring stuff like that. The first hour of my documentary is going to focus on the human side of things.”

  Steve was curious. “Human side?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Not just you personally. The entire crew. How you interact. How relationships pan out and how tensions are dealt with. Like Eddy putting the three of us in one Sno-Cat.”

  “I noticed you didn’t complain much about that,” Steve said, as he tilted his head in thought.

  “While I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of being cooped up with two Neander—” Nicole stopped, afraid to break the peace, “…with you two, I knew it would make for good TV, so I went along with it.”

  Paul finally spoke his mind, “Okay, so you’ve got a good angle on an old idea. But how’re you gonna carry it out? You got, like, four camera crews—and they’re back there.” Paul motioned behind them with his thumb. “It’s not like you can film all of us, all the time.”

  “Actually,” Nicole said, her lips spreading into a smile, “it’s just like that.”

  Paul and Steve turned their full attention to Nicole, waiting for an explanation.

  Nicole sat up straight. “There are four cameras mounted in each Sno-Cat and one on every snowmobile. Every word we say on the road is being recorded for posterity.”

  Nicole pointed to four corners of the interior cabin where small vents were placed. “There are cameras there and there. In every corner.”