Black Mountain

THIRTY-SEVEN

Matt stayed hunkered down above the ravine, paralysed by the brutal action below. Sarah sat with her back jammed up against his, keeping watch on the upper slope, but he knew that she was blind in the darkness. She wouldn’t see anything coming until it was right on top of them.

He looked around for something he could use as a weapon… anything. There were a few loose branches nearby — not much use against the beast they’d seen in the cave, or against the guns in the fight below. Then he remembered… and moved his hands frantically around under the snow’s surface. His fingers touched Chief Logan’s handgun.

Matt had seen how fast those white-clothed men moved, how just one of them had beaten down Hammerson. Even armed with the handgun, he reckoned he’d probably last about thirty seconds… and that included twenty seconds to raise and fire it.

Jack Hammerson’s last order had been to wait five minutes, then head back down the mountain. Matt knew he needed to honour it. Also, he didn’t want to watch a brave man get beaten to death.

He was just about to grab Sarah when Hammerson’s voice boomed out: ‘Arcadian!’

Matt’s head snapped back to the ravine; he hadn’t heard that word in years. He scanned the rock face leading into the valley, then the snowy slope behind him. When he turned back to the cliff edge, he saw a figure silhouetted against the moonlight, arms outstretched, strength radiating from him. The sight reminded Matt of the last carving he and Thomas had seen in the cave: Tooantuh, Thomas’s people’s mighty warrior.

The old Indian had been sure his ancestor would return when needed.

‘Tooantuh will come and you must be ready for him,’ he had told Matt. ‘Help him to push the beast back into the mountain.’

The beast. Matt looked over his shoulder again at the dark slope.

Alex jumped the last thirty feet to the valley floor, going down on one knee and fist with the landing impact. He stood and walked towards the masked soldiers, stopping a few dozen feet away.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Where are you from?’

The men moved towards him, fanning out one to each side.

‘You are Captain Alex Hunter, formerly of the HAWCs,’ said the man without the blood-spattered mask. ‘The one they call the Arcadian. You are to come with us.’

Alex didn’t move. ‘Who are you?’ he repeated. ‘How did you get to be… like you are?’

Neither man answered the questions, nor even looked like they understood them.

‘You will come with us, Hunter,’ the leader said again. ‘That is our order, and all you need to know.’

The man’s head tilted slightly, studying Alex, then the emotionless voice came again. ‘You will come with us. If not, we are authorised to use extreme force.’

Caution flared within Alex and the skin on his neck crawled. These men were like him, he could sense it, but they appeared non-human, disconnected — almost robotic.

When Alex still made no move, both men slowly lowered their hands to their guns. Alex held his hands up, trying to slow them down.

‘Wait, I need to talk to you. If I come with you, will you —’

‘You will come with us,’ the man said again. ‘Alive would be better, but our mission will still be complete if we retrieve just your head. Your choice.’

Alex couldn’t think straight. He could tell the men wanted to attack him. Perhaps their orders were to bring him in dead or alive, but he knew they wanted to test their own skills against him first. Frustration writhed and coiled inside him. He wanted to talk to the men, but his heartbeat was rising and a fire was igniting deep within him.

The other man got shakily to his feet. ‘Alex,’ he called out, ‘if they get you back to the lab, you’ll end up as nothing more than tissue in formaldehyde. Graham wants to cut you up. I have the answers you need. I can tell you who you are, and where you began. I’m Colonel Jack Hammerson, your former commander. I know about your mother… Kathleen.’ He took a pace forward. ‘I know everything — your father, Jim, was my friend… He was more like you than you know.’

Hammerson… the name felt familiar. But before Alex could speak, the white-clad man closest to the grey-haired soldier had raised his strange bulbous gun at his face.

‘No!’ Alex yelled, and charged.

Hammerson dived and rolled, but the shooter was already spinning away from him and bringing his gun up to Alex. The other man turned side-on and did the same.

For Alex, the world slowed. He drew his own weapon and started firing as he crossed in seconds the twenty feet that separated him from the white-clad soldiers. The men twisted and dodged the projectiles, without receiving even a graze.

Their own gas-powered bullets were two streams, kicking up snow as they raced towards Alex.

He dived, spear-like, at the closest man, rolling and coming up in front of him, grabbing his gun and forcing it straight up in the air. The man responded with the same manoeuvre, so each was now gripping the other’s weapon, twisting and pushing, their strength matched. As Alex fought, he knew he was vulnerable to the other man, who was circling the struggling pair, looking for the smallest opportunity to put a bullet in him.

He released his gun into his attacker’s grip, freeing his own hand and bringing its fist around hard into the man’s jaw. The man pulled away and Alex’s blow glanced off his chin. Alex knew he should have planned better; they shared the same speed and anticipation skills, so trying to be simply quicker or stronger wasn’t going to cut it.

The man must have seen the logic in Alex’s move for he released his own gun. Alex took it and threw it to Hammerson. He didn’t understand why he felt he could trust the HAWC, but he did. Perhaps it was simply down to the oldest military truism: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. If he was wrong, he was as good as dead.

In the millisecond it took Alex to hurl the weapon, his opponent took advantage of his exposure and landed a stunning blow to the side of his head. Alex heard the man’s fist break on the bone of his brow. His vision blurred for an instant and he felt like he’d been hit by a speeding car. Nevertheless, he grabbed the man’s wrist, extended from the blow, and hung on… and saw the smashed metacarpals slide back into place below the skin.

‘Who are you?’ he yelled into the blank, featureless face.

The black eyes stared back at him through the slits of the ski mask, indicating no understanding or emotion.

In Special Forces training, every hard point on your body is a potential weapon. The knowledge came to Alex from somewhere deep inside, and his body took over. He pulled the man towards him and lowered his elbows to smash them into his cheeks. The blow disorientated Alex’s opponent, giving him time to bring a knee up into the man’s ribs. The grip on his gun arm loosened enough to allow him to pull it free and grab the ski mask. Alex needed to find out who this man was; to see some flicker of humanity beneath the robotic responses.

He pulled the mask free, and recoiled. Pustules crusted the man’s tormented flesh; black-rimmed ulcers exposed the bone of his skull. Alex smelled antiseptic and realised that the ski mask wasn’t just to keep the cold out or hide the man’s identity; it was a medicinal bandage.

The man screamed and went berserk in Alex’s grasp. His fury escalated his strength and he picked Alex up and threw him ten feet across the valley floor. As soon as Alex landed, another zipper of bullets raced towards him, fired by the soldier still wearing his mask.

Immediately, the barrage was answered by return fire, causing the white figure to leap back into cover. Hammerson was making good use of the weapon Alex had thrown him.

The unmasked soldier came at Alex like a charging bull, head down, arms spread wide. The collision threw them both down into the snow. Alex tried to hang onto the berserker and hold him down. He could see that his eyes were red-rimmed and furious.

‘Stop and listen to me!’ he yelled.

The man was literally frothing at the mouth, and some of the deep cankers on his face had erupted, dripping black, infected blood onto the snow. Alex could feel the heat coming off his body — it was way beyond normal, even way beyond Alex’s own overheated metabolism. The soldier punched, clawed and raked at him, his mouth spitting words and sounds that didn’t make sense. Alex struggled to hold him down.

They rolled together across the ground, crashing into the cliff face and dislodging rocks that bounced down and buried themselves in the snow around them. A piece of granite the size of a loaf of bread landed near Alex’s head, and he quickly reached into the snow to seize it. He smashed it into the man’s skull and a crackling crunch told him he had caved in the bone.

The man immediately fell still. Alex released him and pressed his fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse, but his flesh was too hot to touch for long. The snow around him started to melt, then the white suit he wore began to steam and smoke. Alex backed away, shaking his head. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

He reached out to touch the blistered face; a gesture of comfort for whatever hell the man had been subjected to in the name of science. He wished he could have talked to him, discussed their similarities, shared the mutual pain of their situation. It was clear to Alex that the man had suffered the rages that sometimes consumed him. He had been learning to control his fury, but this man’s demons had broken free — and eventually killed him.

Is this how I’ll end up, he thought, consumed and destroyed by rage?

Was this his own future playing out before him like some ghastly movie?

As Alex watched, the disfigured face collapsed in on itself, the flesh liquefying and bubbling in the cavity of the skull. He cried out in horror, and scooped snow over the putrefying mass that had been a man only minutes before.