Black Mountain

FORTY

Alex lay still for a moment, breathing heavily, blinking away pain from a hundred different spots on his battered body. Then he lifted one of the creature’s shoulders and eased out from under the massive torso. He knelt in the snow for a few seconds, sucking in deep breaths.

Adira lay some distance away, and he crawled to her. Blood smeared her lips, and her face was disfigured from the beatings she had received. She took his forearm and tried to smile through split lips.

‘I think I’m broken.’

He put his hand over hers. ‘You always turn up when I need it most.’

‘I am your guardian angel… didn’t you know?’ she replied softly.

Alex half-smiled. He would never trust her again, but, for a time, he had loved her; and she had loved and protected him.

She groaned as she shifted, and looked away from him. ‘I can’t go back. Better I die here, Alex.’

He shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’

He quickly ran his hands over her body, feeling the breaks and for other injuries. He pulled her to a sitting position and she grunted in pain and coughed blood.

She squeezed his arm. ‘What is there to live for? I know I have lost…’

She couldn’t finish her sentence, and he saw that her eyes were shining with tears. She gritted her teeth and pulled him closer.

‘I need to tell you… Everything I did, I did for you. I lied to you because I had to. Now it doesn’t matter.’ She swallowed. ‘You are Alex Hunter, a HAWC agent, part of the American Special Forces. You were dying with an incurable sickness and your superior, Jack Hammerson, took a big risk and sent you to us, to Israel. We saved you… I saved you! I took you to my homeland, and you were cured there… but not fully. Your memory did not return, and so you lost your old life. I thought I could fill the gap for you.’

Her voice became urgent. ‘Your people wanted to kill you, Alex, to cut you up to see what makes you what you are. They still do. And now I think my people want to do the same.’ She glanced over at Hammerson. ‘But not that man. He is not your enemy. It was through him that you were saved.’

Alex stared at her, absorbing the information. Everything seemed to click into place, as though the missing details had plugged themselves into the blank areas of his memory. He reached down and pushed the hair from her face, but sticky blood held it there.

She turned away from his gaze. ‘I was weak and selfish, Alex. I thought we could both run away from our lives. I wanted you for myself… Stupid.’

A small pack landed in the snow beside Alex. He looked up to see that Hammerson had dragged himself over to them. The stocky man didn’t look in much better shape than Adira. Alex stared at him, the shattered fragments of memory rebuilding themselves. ‘Jack?’

Hammerson nodded and smiled. ‘Welcome back, son.’ He gestured to Adira. ‘Get her on her feet.’

Alex picked up the packet and tore it open, then broke the gel cap under the battered woman’s nose. ‘Breathe in,’ he told her.

She did and coughed, before inhaling several more times. Then she pushed his hand away from her face, and he grabbed her around the waist to help her up. Adira shook her head as if to clear it, and sucked in a few deep breaths. She staggered a bit, but managed to remain upright.

Hammerson rolled a shoulder under his shattered armour. ‘That’ll give her an hour or so. After that, she’s going to need help, or she’ll probably die. In fact, we all need to get the hell out of here.’

Alex walked over to the creature’s massive corpse and pulled the spikes from its neck. He returned and handed them to Adira. She lifted her dark eyes to Hammerson and Alex edged between them. He knew what she could do with the deadly throwing spikes.

After another second, she spun the weapons in her fingers, bringing them back towards herself, and they disappeared into a small sheath at her belt. She pushed her hair back with a shaky hand and looked across to the massive corpse. She inhaled deeply and then slowly let her steaming breath out through her nose before speaking.

‘So, now it’s over.’

Alex remained still for a few moments before his eyes moved from the creature’s body, up once again to the sharp edge of the ravine. He shook his head slowly. ‘No, not yet, but soon. She’s close — my answers are close, I can sense it.’

Matt and Sarah came out of the trees a few hundred feet down the hill. Matt’s curiosity had overridden his sense of self-preservation, and now the fight was over, he needed to see if Jack Hammerson had survived… and maybe get a glimpse of the massive creature they had encountered.

Leading Sarah cautiously over the rim of the ravine, he looked down to see Hammerson and the HAWC woman standing by the body of the most magnificent thing Matt had ever seen. He climbed as swiftly as he could manage down the rock face, keeping an eye on Sarah, who followed him more slowly. She had been subdued ever since they’d fled the cave and its grisly sights.

When they reached the valley floor, he noticed the HAWC woman’s face was ravaged by more than just her wounds. She looked as if she was grieving.

He looked around. ‘Where are the guys in white?’

‘Dead,’ the woman replied, her eyes lifeless.

‘And Alex Hunter?’

She looked up at the snow-covered ridge towards the dark peak. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone where?’ Matt asked, frustrated by her terse replies.

‘To fight his demons.’ She shrugged and turned away.

Matt looked at Hammerson, but he just shook his head.

Matt pointed at the large creature. ‘Is it dead?’

‘All yours,’ Hammerson said.

Matt knelt beside the beast, and Sarah joined him. She placed her hands on the massive back, her eyebrows pulled together in a frown.

‘It’s real. It actually exists,’ she said, her tone incredulous. She ran her hands over the creature almost tenderly, brushed the blood-matted fur off its gargoyle face. ‘An inglorious end to a magnificent creature. Its first encounter with humans in 10,000 years, and it turns out to be its last. No wonder they rebelled against us all those millennia ago. Now, we may never —’

‘It killed Charles and Emma Wilson.’ Matt’s voice was flat.

Sarah pulled her hands back as if burnt.

Alex scaled the sheer rock wall. In a few seconds, he was standing in the cave’s entrance. The revolting stench he’d smelled on the creature itself became stronger the further he went into the pitch-dark interior.

He ignored the cave drawings and the battered headless body of an old Indian man on the ground, only pausing to lift a large Colt revolver from the dry soil. He could smell that the big handgun had been fired. Opening it, he saw there were two bullets left. He tucked the weapon into his belt and continued towards the rear of the cave and the passages that led off it.

The light was so faint it was barely enough even for Alex’s enhanced vision, but he could just make out the scuff marks in the dirt that told him which passageway to take. A short way in, he made out a ledge, a tiny shelf of bloody stone, and as he stared harder, the row of grisly trophies come into focus. He recoiled — the pain, suffering, and terror pressed into the flesh of their faces was horrifying. Pale windpipes and red and blue tendons, stained with dried black blood, hung from the ragged stumps of the necks of men, women and children. Just when he felt able to tear his eyes away, he saw her, his mother, or what was left of her. The skin was drawn tight on her skull, and the ligaments of her jaw had shortened in the dry atmosphere, setting her face in an eternal scream.

He reached out to touch the cold flesh. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save you,’ he said. ‘I was never there for you.’

He kept his hand on the dead woman’s cheek and rested his head against the cold, damp stone. The soft rustling sounds from deeper in the caves, the stench of death and decay, faded; time became meaningless as his mind retrieved fragmented images of his mother, his parents, his childhood, and played them over and over.

He couldn’t tell how long he stood there remembering. After a while, the memories became distorted, a soft fuzziness, like white noise, interrupting them.

Returning to his grim surroundings, Alex looked down at his feet. His boots stood amid a mess of bones. Most were adult, the meat recently scraped or chewed away. But there were smaller bones too… a femur still attached to the tibia by gristle and tendon at the knee. Far too tiny to belong even to a small adult. Men, women and children — all had been prey; brought here dead or alive, he couldn’t know. But this was where it had ended for them… for his mother.

He looked at the hellish desecration all around him, the heads lined up on the ledge. So many of them, and all killed so brutally, he thought miserably. He stared again into his mother’s face. I wish I could have helped you…

The thought disappeared as he jerked his head back towards the mouth of the cave. There were too many remains here for only the one predator.

Idiot!

Alex sprinted for the entrance.