Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (16 page)

Soren rounded the corner, brandishing his hunting knife. His face betrayed no surprise at the sight of Sasha pinned against the wall.

Paul flashed his disturbing canines. “Oh, good. You’re here. Your girlfriend and I were just having a conversation about how you’re going to help me out.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Soren said in a low voice. “I don’t do girlfriends. But you already know that. So you are mistaken if you think you can use her as leverage.” Somehow even with the pain in Sasha’s head, Soren’s words added another layer of hurt. She hadn’t really thought that he loved her, but liked her a bit maybe. But Soren’s feelings didn’t matter. What mattered was getting the hell out of here. Paul, having turned his attention to Soren, had loosened his grip on her neck a bit so she could breathe again.

“As for helping you out, you can kill me and her, and I’m not helping you out,” Soren continued. Sasha shot him a glare. What new Soren was this?

Paul expelled a huff of impatience. “Always the self-sacrificing hero, Soren. It doesn’t really matter. The world you know is ending one way or another. My way would just be more geologically spectacular, and I know you appreciate geologically spectacular.” With a flourish of his hand, Paul suddenly transformed into a middle-aged man with a giant mustache, sagging gut, and comb-over, dressed in a brown sweater vest. “Would you be more inclined to listen to my talk of geological history as Herman Rethoret?”

“You were Herman Rethoret?” Soren asked, his lips tight with fury.

Paul took a little bow and changed back into Soren. “The one and only. Anyway, there’s no need to adhere to any moral standards anymore. If only you could see what everyone else in the world is doing. The Kardashians were just the beginning. Besides, killing you and Sasha is one thing—I imagine you will go so very nobly into the night—but I regret to inform you that I’m not adverse to torture for you or her.”

Soren scowled. “Take me. Just let Sasha go.”

“I thought you didn’t care about her.”

“I don’t. But I do care about my dogs back at the station. Let her go and she can go back and look after them.”

“But how are we going to extract any information from you Soren, if we don’t have the one woman you seem to have decided to care about in the last fourteen years?”

The swaying that Sasha had felt before started again, and this time was accompanied by a sudden jolt. She dug her knee hard into Paul’s groin and pushed past him, heading down the tunnel. Soren was on top of the demon with his knife within seconds.

The two Sorens rolled over and over, a tangle of limbs and one flashing knife. The real Soren held the knife. But how did one kill a demon? She stood there uncertain, and then in the mess of arms and teeth, one of the Sorens looked up and snarled, “Go! They always have tells.” Then she thought Soren said something like “teeth”, but the other Soren, Paul, transformed into the hideous beast Sasha had seen earlier, and with the added weight took control, pressing the real Soren to the tunnel floor.

Sasha turned and ran, heading down the tunnel in the faint glow of red light. Where was that light coming from? She rounded a corner and saw Robert and the other man with their backs to her, peering out the entrance marked by the crow rock. They must have heard her, because they gave yells of excitement and started running toward her. She spun around and bolted in the other direction. After she had run for a few minutes, she realized she had taken the left fork, taking her away from Paul and Soren—not that running to them would likely help at all.

She could still hear the thuds, rattles, and panting of Robert and the other man behind her, and occasionally she glimpsed the white light of their flashlights bouncing and scattering on the tunnel walls, but they were not gaining, perhaps tired from their jaunt around the entire island and then ascent up the volcano.

The tunnel forked again and again, leading on a gradual incline down. She tried to follow a logical algorithm of only turning left and then left again. Robert and the other man would pause at each fork and listen to determine which way she had gone. No matter how much she tried to lighten her footsteps, each time it seemed like they guessed correctly. But each time, she was able to slightly increase her lead, and they were not shooting. Perhaps Soren was right about them wanting her alive, which might very well be worse than being shot. The glow that illuminated the tunnels seemed to grow brighter and the heat more intense at times, but perhaps it was just the exertion of running.

She began to make mistakes, veering right instead of left, finding herself heading up instead of down in this strange warren of tunnels, but after what seemed like hours of running, the footsteps behind her ceased.

Had she lost them? Or had they figured out a way to loop around and lie in wait ready to ambush her in the eerie gloom? She slowed her run to a jog and then to a walk as she frantically began to search for an exit from the tunnels, for Soren, for anything to mark her way.

She was going in circles, she was sure of it—uphill and then down, left and then right. Each footstep became punishing. When was the last time she slept, or ate? Her feet ached and cramped in her huge Sorels, completely unsuited for running, and sweat ran in rivulets down her back beneath her long Arctic underwear.

She had dropped the candle and her pack when Paul pinned her against the wall and she had nothing with which to mark the tunnels to record whether she had been there before to try to develop a map in her mind of where she was and where she was going.

It had been almost half an hour since she had heard anyone behind her, and nobody had jumped out in front of her. Sasha stopped and turned slowly in a circle. She was lost, well and truly lost, for the second time in the last twenty-four hours.

She trudged on for another half an hour, her blistered feet burning. She came to a small opening off the tunnel. She had never been here before, she was certain. She bent and crawled through the opening and found herself in a cave the size of a bathroom, with a rounded hollowed out section completely hidden from the tunnel. If someone came down the tunnel in a hurry, if they did not check the cave, they would not see her.

She sank to the ground, removed her boots and socks, closed her eyes at the clammy, bloody state of her feet, and promptly went to sleep.

She awoke hours—or was it minutes—later, her mouth dry and prickly. She needed water. Something moved in the cave, and she snapped her eyes open to see a man in the cave with her—a man with a long scraggly beard and hair in tattered old snow pants over a filthy plaid shirt. He stayed well back, watching her, a wild and almost hungry look on his face.

She jammed her bare, protesting feet into her boots and scrambled upright. The man rose too, but slowly, as if she were a squirrel and he the cat ready to pounce. Sasha was closest to the exit of the cave. She inched toward it, her back to the wall and then once she was right in front of it, vaulted through the opening and started to dash down the tunnel. The man was faster, and he grabbed her arm before she could escape. She swung out to punch him, but he blocked her fist and shook his head. Then he pointed down the tunnel opposite to the direction that she had been heading and nodded. She inspected him more closely now. He had the feral expression of the homeless, but his blue eyes surrounded by wrinkles and dirt seemed more sad than dangerous. A deep crease down his left cheek made his eye droop and gape a bit. He pointed down the tunnel again and made as if to drag her in that direction.

“Are you saying that way is out?” she ventured.

He nodded and continued to try to pull her down the tunnel.

“Who are you?”

He shook his head this time, his face shifting to a more intense glare as he continued to try to hustle her along. She noted that he had an ugly red line of scar tissue across the front of his throat. Perhaps he couldn’t speak.

Sasha hesitated. This unspeaking man might know the way out, or he might be trying to lure her deeper into the mountain where he could do who knows what. Hand her over to Paul quite possibly. Still, she was hopelessly lost, and limping badly. She had to find a way out. Of course, there was the problem of what she was going to do then. Stagger around the surface of the volcano alone in the dark?

They made their way silently through the corridors, the wild man seeming to know his way through the maze of indistinguishable tunnels.

“There she is!” a voice called. Robert. Sasha and the man automatically broke into a run. Sasha was relieved to find that the man was pulling her away from the direction of Robert’s voice, rather than taking her to him and turning her over. Who was this person? Did he live in these tunnels?

They ran together down the heated corridors, the man snatching her right and then pushing her left at the forks. Robert and the other man, clearly fresher now, and probably not limping as badly as Sasha, had started to gain on them. Soon, she could see them thundering behind them in straight stretches of the corridor.

At the last minute on a curve that led to another fork, the man pushed Sasha left and veered right himself. She almost stopped moving, confused, but he made a loud growling type noise and gave her a hard push down the left hand fork before turning and clattering off down the right. He had run as silent as a cat before. He was trying to make noise, to draw their pursuers off.

She stumbled down the left-hand fork, her battered feet stinging, and a cool wave of Antarctic air washed over her. This tunnel led to the outside. She picked up her pace and covered the last hundred feet. A dark slit of stars and night stood at the end of the tunnel. She squeezed and pushed her way through the opening, and then she was back on the outside of the volcano, running down the slope in the chill wind of night. The storm had dropped off, and the sky was a vast canvas of stars. A sea of thick mist encircled the mountain, obscuring the ocean from view. The sound of the surf and clamoring of the penguins filtered up through the night.

Robert and the other man must have followed the bearded man at first for it took them several minutes to appear. Sasha was already well down the mountainside, and they scrambled down after her, rocks tumbling down in front of them.

Sasha careened down the hill. The fog loomed ahead, surrounding the mountain. No matter what, if she went lower on the volcano, she would descend into the mist, and who knows where she would end up. But Robert and the other man were closing in on her now. She did not slow her pace as the fingers of the mist reached out and enveloped her. She continued running, and then she was tripping, falling, and rolling in snow, and she was freezing.

Snow soaked her face and hair and pushed its way up her sleeves and down the neck of her fleece. When she managed to brace herself sufficiently to come to a stop, she rose to her feet, frantically pulling the icy snow out of all the cracks in her clothing while scooping handfuls of it into her parched mouth. Stars illuminated every corner of the sky and the purple and green of the aurora painted the horizon just above the jagged peaks of the coastal mountains to her right.

She was back in the Arctic.

From this elevation and with the bright moonlight and aurora, she could see that this part of the island was now pitted with craters. At least no fires burned in them at the moment. She skittered the rest of the way down the hill, half running, half sliding. Fog occupied the mountain above her, it seemed to be almost rolling down the hill, following her—fog from which Robert and his buddy could emerge at any second, right on top of her. She needed to get as far away as possible, but without her parka, the wind chill was stunning, almost cardiac arrest inducing. At least she was hot from running. She had to find one of Soren’s safety pods or she would never survive. She pulled her mitts out of her pocket and jammed her hands into them. A flash of movement caught her eye.

A polar bear carved its way through the snow in her direction, its movements stealthy. They were the movements of a bear on the hunt.

The bear erupted into motion, crossing the remainder of the distance between them in seconds, and then it crouched and leapt.

Sasha closed her eyes and braced for impact. This was probably a better way to go than being tortured by Paul.

She felt the brush of the bear’s fur, and heard a scream of shock. But it was not her own. The bear had landed with precision right on top of Robert, who lay beneath the bear on the edge of the fog that furled its silky fingertips around her.

Sasha forced her unsteady feet to start running, daring only the smallest of glances back at the bear, its snow white fur now marked by spatters of red as it devoured its prey.

The fog was now like the holes in the ice that the bears had once stood by waiting for seals. Robert had come to the wrong hole.

Sasha ran almost aimlessly for several minutes, her teeth beating a disorganized staccato in her mouth. Without her parka, she was completely unprepared for this kind of cold. She had to remember where the pods were before she started to shut down. Sasha tried to picture the landmarks that Soren had made her memorize. The pods were organized in a grid, with each pod two miles from the next, elevated from the tundra on posts or strapped to spindly trees. If she was standing at the base of Trainor Mountain, which she was fairly sure she was, there was a pod a mile east of her. She just hoped a crater had not opened up beneath it.

She set off at as rapid a pace as she could muster, hoping that the man who had been with Robert would not emerge from the fog, and that the bear would be sated by consuming Robert. The pod would have a winter coat, food, water, and a compass. It would also have flares, but realistically, who would come? Maybe she could use them to light a giant bonfire. What the pods really needed were guns. But that was probably against some Canadian law. She almost laughed hysterically to herself. She was becoming half crazed with cold, hunger, and the relentless succession of weird events.

At least the direness of the situation prevented her from thinking too much about Soren, what might be happening to him back on the island, what kinds of torture he might be enduring.