“You look weak, hunter.” Nephil lowers himself toward the ground. He raises a hand toward Hades. “Though, you are certainly faring much better than our mutual friend.”
I glance at the giant and notice something I’d missed before. He’s not breathing. My eyes dart to his forehead. The dark purple blood drying on his bald head nearly conceals the wound, but I see it—a two inch slit. I look back to Ninnis and find his sword, Strike, hanging from his waist. The first twelve inches of the blade are coated in Hades’s blood.
“No,” I whisper, then louder, “You killed him?”
“He betrayed me,” Nephil says. “Betrayed all of his brothers. His life alone could not repay what was taken.” He grins. “Fortunately, he has so much more to give.”
“He knows,” I whisper to Kainda.
“Yes,” Nephil says, as though he could hear my words as easily as though I’d shouted them. “I know...everything. Not even the mighty Hades can resist the touch of my spirit.”
Despite the fact that Hades was a Nephilim warrior with a reputation for bloodlust, his death causes me great sadness. He had tasted the freedom of Tartarus, yet returned to the underworld with the Nephilim. He gave up a life of peace, living among the enemy, his true intentions concealed by the blood and gore that repulsed him. And now he has paid the cost for that sacrifice, with his life. He has been erased. As though he never was.
But my memory of the giant, and the lesson to be learned by his sacrifice, will live on.
My eyes, wet with tears, look beyond Nephil, to the gates of Tartarus. He was so close. Just a mile away. He could have covered the distance in a minute. Anger replaces my lament.
“I’m going to throw you through those doors,” I say, stalking toward Nephil.
A howling wind fills the chamber, summoned by my unconscious.
“I am the storm,” I tell him.
Thunder rumbles through the cavern.
“Solomon,” Kainda says.
I ignore her. “I am the wind.”
Ninnis’s hair whips wildly as a gust of wind strikes him, but the tendrils hold him still.
“Sol,” Em says, and I detect the warning in her voice.
“I am the—”
“Hey kid!” It’s Kat. “Cut the melodramatic bull crap and turn around!”
I turn.
And face an army.
It’s not just the hunters. Or my two clones. There are at least fifty warriors as well. Some step out from behind stone pillars, others from behind bone mounds, and still more step out of side tunnels all around.
Nephil chuckles. “Like I said, I know everything. I missed you at Hades’s chambers by hours, but was able to track his descent. We found him here, just short of his salvation. Once possessed, the mind gives up its secrets rather quickly. I know about the Jericho shofar, Solomon. I know what it does. How it works.” He grins with a burning hatred that not even Ninnis could achieve. “And I know where it is.”
No... This can’t be. Not even I know where it is. Hades gave me vague hints that I’m supposed to figure out along the way to prevent this very thing from happening.
To my surprise, Nephil moves away from me. We’re surrounded. Out-numbered and out-muscled. Escape might be possible, but not without exacting a toll on my already weary body. He knows that, too, I think. He’s not here to waste time trying to kill me. He’s here to slow me down. Or rather, that’s why this small army is here. Nephil intends to find the shofar first!
“Take them,” he says, before his tendrils, moving like squid legs over the stone floor, carry him away.
“Ninnis!” I shout. “Resist him! Fight!”
“Ninnis is no more,” Nephil says as he drifts away. “His voice has been silent for some time now.”
I’m not sure why I’m reaching out to Ninnis. He’s as black-hearted as the rest of the Nephilim and hunters now closing in around us. But I know he never intended to give himself fully to Nephil. If the man could fight back, return to himself, it could disrupt their plans. But it seems even Ninnis has been lost.
Wright. Hades. Ninnis. Even the stranger slain by Pan. I can feel their deaths adding weight to a newly forming burden. This war needs to end—I turn to face the force encircling us—but not, it seems, without fighting another battle.
“We can’t defeat them,” Kainda says.
“We don’t need to,” I reply. “We need to follow Nephil. Down.”
“Where?” Em asks.
This, I don’t know. Nephil is now out of sight. “We’ll break through the circle and figure it out from the—duck!”
An arrow zips past our heads, carried high by a gust of wind. The shot was intended for Em. It serves as a trigger. The hunters rush in. Five make it close before I can act, but the rest are knocked to the floor when I bring the air above rushing down.
Kainda meets the five attackers first, kicking one in the gut and backhanding another.
“Kain,” Em shouts, lifting her single remaining knife.
Kainda draws her hammer, while kneeing a man’s chin, breaking his jaw. With a glance, she sees the hunter approaching Em. She twists the hammer in her hand and Em throws the knife—at Kainda.
The action not only confuses me, but the attacking hunter as well. Before either of us understands what’s happening, the knife deflects off the hammer’s stone head and punctures the hunter’s heart. He drops to the floor with a look of surprise frozen on his face.
“Geez,” Kat says, equally impressed. “Take this,” she says to Em, tossing her a knife. “You’ll do better with it than I will.”
Kat, who’s rifle is missing, draws her silenced pistol and starts dropping the hunters I’ve knocked to the floor. I hadn’t intended to kill the men and women, just immobilize them, but I don’t say anything, despite my growing discomfort.
This is war.
People die.
But they don’t have to.
A woman screams, not in pain, but in fright. A female hunter lies on the stone floor. Kainda stands above her, hammer raised.
“Stop!” I shout.
To my surprise, everyone listens.
My instinct is to give some kind of speech, expose the error of their ways, turn them to our side, but there isn’t time for that. The hunters are closing in.
I back away from the two hunters still standing, and the woman cringing on the ground next to two dead bodies. Em, Kainda and Kat know enough to stay close to me. I focus on the air, moving it slowly. I’ve done this trick before, to fuel and starve a fire in this very chamber, but this time, I’m starving the hunters.
As one, they fall to the ground choking and gasping. Their faces turn red. Desperation fills their eyes. I have removed the oxygen from the air surrounding them, and just when their bodies are about to give in to death, I return it. Some fall unconscious, some wheeze, but all are incapacitated. Their lives are spared.
The warriors break into a jog. They’ll close the distance in seconds.
I try the same trick. It doesn’t work. They’re either holding their breath or know that killing me, or at least knocking me out, will undo the effect.
“What do we do?” Em asks.
Axes, swords, maces and spears rise up as the gods of old close in. They’re dressed for battle, wearing the fine armor of their various tribes: Egyptian, Sumerian, Norse, Olympian, Aztec and more. Wings open wide, making their presence even more massive and blocking any and all escape routes. From beneath the wings come long scorpion tails, twitching and eager to sting.
I try to push them back with a wind, but only manage to slow them down and drain my energy. Their united front is too large, and there are no natural katabatic winds to call to my aid in the underground.
We back away until we’re standing at the feet of Hades. He seemed so confident. But here he is. Dead. Maybe he was wrong? Maybe everything in this screwed up world is just wrong? And all of this—all of it—is just humanity and inhumanity, acting out in some base instinctual way, like Japanese
fighting fish who fight to the death for no other reason than the instincts that drive them.
A shadow falls over us.
I look up.
A gargantuan body descends.
I move to defend, but notice the thing’s trajectory and pause. It lands between us and the warriors. The thing is twenty feet tall and concealed beneath a cloak, perfectly camouflaged to look like the plain gray stone that composes much of the underworld. When the cloak billows upon landing, I see that the inside is also camouflaged, but brown. We could walk right by it and never know it was there. The cloak is unfastened and falls to the floor behind the massive bare feet, revealing the pale-skinned legs and torso. Like Hades, its head, what little of it can be seen as it hunches forward, has been shaved bald. Its arms stretch out, all four of them, each wielding a tremendous curved sword.
For a moment, I think this must be some Indian god Nephilim. Shiva or something. But then it turns its face toward me, and then another, and another. Each of them looks just like me.
My sixth clone is Cerberus, a combination of me and a Gigantes.
Speaking one word at a time in three slightly different voices, Cerberus says, “Go. Solomon. Now!”
19
I don’t move. I can’t. The realization that my sixth clone is a three-faced, four-armed giant is staggering enough, but the faces and voices, are recognizable versions of myself. The tone. The emotion. The concern. This creature might be different from me in almost every physical way, but I sense its core personality is very similar to mine. With the exception of Luca, this monster might be the clone most similar to me.
When it turns to me and says, “Remember. The. Baseball. Card. Bully,” I under-stand why. Somehow, beyond my understanding, my sixth clone ended up with my childhood memories.
It was 1988, just months before I came to Antarctica. I was thirteen. My cousin, Shawn, who was twice my size and an avid baseball card collector, had come to visit. Shawn, Justin and I walked to Fred’s Baseball Card Shop. Shawn bought six packs of cards, chewing the cardboard flavored bubble-gum sticks all at once. Justin picked up an equal amount of Garbage Pail Kids cards. And I thumbed through the box of comic books at the back of the store.
The place was frequented by a lot of kids, so I didn’t think much of it when some other boys my age started looking around at the back of the store. When I caught one of them looking at me, I smiled, said, “hi,” and went about my business.
Upon leaving the store, the boy who’d been staring at me, confronted me. Using expletives, some of which I had never heard before, the boy claimed that I had been his second grade nemesis at Beatle School. I denied this, of course, claiming to have attended Cove School on the other side of town, which was true, but that was third grade. In second grade, I did indeed go to Beatle School. I imagined the boy younger and recognized him as Rick Carson, the boy who had tortured me in second grade. Funny that he remembered me as the antagonist.
But my lie, backed up by Justin, who knew to lie as well, was convincing. Rather than just beating me on the spot, Rick offered me a five-second head start. It was generous, but I wasn’t a very physical person. I knew I couldn’t escape. And while Justin was much more athletic than me, I knew he wasn’t a fighter. But we had a trump card that day. Shawn. He casually stood between me and Rick, looked back at me and said, “Go ahead. I’ll see you at home.”
And I ran. Justin rode his bike next to me. We fled the scene, out of breath, but unharmed. Half way home, we stopped and looked back. Rick was nowhere to be found. So we waited and ten minutes later, Shawn walked into view like nothing had happened. He simply held up a Mark McGwire baseball card and said, “Got a McGwire.”
The memory comes and goes in a flash. Cerberus is filling the role of Shawn. I trusted that my cousin would be okay handling the bully. He’s asking me to do the same with him. This isn’t quite the same situation, but there is little choice. Every second I wait, Nephil gets closer to retrieving the Jericho shofar first, and I have no doubt he’ll destroy it if he does.
“Thank you,” I say and leave my new ally behind. I round the pillar to which Hades is bound and find three Nephilim warriors blocking my path. It’s not good, but it’s better odds than what Cerberus is facing. A battle cry pulls my head around and I see Cerberus charge. His arms move like blurs, the blades flashing in the dull light provided by the crystals embedded in the ceiling high above. With uncommon grace and power he launches himself into the Nephilim, combating several of them at once and holding his own.
Inspired by my clone’s bravery in the face of certain death, I mimic his battle cry and charge the warriors blocking my path.
But the warriors don’t back down or even flinch. They shout right back at me and charge.
“Em,” I say as she runs by my side. “Aim for the center warrior.”
She nods and aims the large knife retrieved from the hunter’s body. I ignore the red blood staining the blade and focus on my enemy. I harness the wind, bringing it down from above, over my head and straight for the head of the central warrior. Then I bend it up and pour on the speed.
The giant’s hair whips up as the blast of condensed air strikes. His head snaps back as though punched. But my intended target—the gold crown protecting its weak spot—remains unaffected.
What the—
“Solomon,” Em says, sounding worried as the distance closes between us and the warriors.
“It’s not coming off,” I say, and then I see why. Twin streaks of purple blood trickle down the sides of the Nephilim’s forehead and cheeks before getting lost in the deep red beard. The golden crown has two circular indentations, just above the beast’s eyes.
They nailed the rings to their heads! Removing them won’t be so easy anymore. If the Nephilim topside have made the same change, then the human forces, including our band of escaped prisoners, are in a lot of trouble. I’m a little surprised they didn’t think of it sooner. The pain must be excruciating—just the way they like it.
Wind, bullets and physical strength can no longer remove the rings, but I have other options. Unnatural options.
“All of you,” I say to Kainda, Em and Kat, who come to a stop with me. “Be ready!”
I close my eyes and reach out toward the Nephilim. I feel the air and the building pressure in it as the three massive warriors push through. I feel their leathers, tailored from the skin of their feeder young. And I feel the metal bands, forged from iron and gold—metals pulled out of Antarktos—my continent.
The ground shakes beneath me as the giants close in.
I ignore their approach and focus on the atoms of gold and iron, pushing them apart. The metal resists my unnatural urge. With a shout, I shove them apart, changing the density of the metal to something more closely resembling chocolate syrup.
Confused grunts open my eyes and I see the rings oozing down over the Nephilims’ faces. Their charge comes to an abrupt halt as they paw at the sticky metal now covering their eyes.
“Now!” I say.
Kainda throws her hammer. Em lets her knife fly. And Kat squeezes off three silenced rounds.
All three women find their targets.
All three Nephilim drop, their existences from this world and any other, extinguished forever.
While Em and Kainda rush to retrieve their weapons, a shout of pain catches my attention, mostly because it’s my voice. Cerberus is surrounded. I count six Nephilim warriors lying dead, and there are still forty more closing in around him. But the source of his pain isn’t from one of the warriors, it is from the other two clones.
The bigger of the two has severed one of Cerberus’s arms with an ax. Blood—red blood—flows from the wound. Cerberus falls to one knee, clutching the wound with one hand, still brandishing swords with the other two.
But he is done. He can see it as well as I can.
One of his faces looks up at me. For a moment, I’m lost in his gaze. It’s like looking in a mirror. Then he smiles, gives a faint nod and sta
nds, swinging around in a wide arc. The speed of the attack catches the larger, ax-wielding clone by surprise. His arms are raised high, ready to strike, when the long sword strikes his waist and cleaves him in two.
The bold attack is effective, but flawed. And Cerberus knew this. By turning to face the ax-wielder, he left his back open to attack. And the wiry clone, the one using the original Whipsnap, leaps into the air and drives the spear tip deep into Cerberus’s core. The blade emerges from his chest, right where his heart should be. It’s a killing blow.
Without a sound, Cerberus closes all six eyes and falls to the ground. Once again, I feel an intense sense of loss for something that should terrify me. Cerberus was an abomination—a combination of my stolen genetic material merged with that of ancient Gigantes, which were lab created to begin with, thousands of years before modern labs existed. But his heart was good. His blood, human. And he gave his life, willingly, to save me and all of mankind. Once I got past the strangeness of his appearance and the fact that we share thirteen years of memories, I think we would have been friends. More than friends. Like Luca and Xin, we would have been brothers.
I shake my head, anger welling up again. The body count on my side of this conflict is rising far too quickly. People die in war. I understand that. But I can’t accept the idea that people I’ve never met will die for me.
The wiry clone yanks Whipsnap from Cerberus’s back, unfazed by the fact that it is now coated in red blood, and charges toward me. He’s followed by the warriors, who take to the air.
“To the far wall,” I tell the others, pointing the way. “Go!”
“I won’t leave you,” Kainda says.
“I don’t intend to stay long.”
After just a moment’s hesitation, Kainda acquiesces and runs with the others—straight toward a solid wall of stone.
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The Last Hunter - Collected Edition Page 68