Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Gabriel kept at it for what felt like an hour, though he knew it probably was less—it was hard to tell much about the passage of time here. The reddish light streaming down from above remained unchanging, and the only sound was the scrape of bone against rock.

Gabriel wondered what he would find when he finally hauled himself up over the rim of the pit. What if he was too late? Velda might have figured out how to set the coordinates, in which case Berlin might be gone, or all of Germany—who knew what sort of devastation the Nazi doomsday device might be capable of. Or, of course, the machine might no longer work properly after sixty-five years, and might casually destroy the wrong country. Perhaps it had been locked on Washington for so long it would be impossible to redirect it, and when Velda pushed the button…

He shook his head. He couldn’t let himself think about it. He had to clear his mind of everything but the climb. One thing at a time, and right now the one thing that mattered was getting out of this pit.

When Gabriel finally had the bone pieces as sharp and smooth as he wanted, he stood, stretching his arms and shoulders. He felt the pull and sting of every cut and bruise. His calf throbbed where it had been clenched in the unclean jaws of one of the biggest of the shrews, a long-fanged monster that had been murder to pry loose. It was going to be a tough climb and he was hardly in the best shape for it. But what choice was there? He took in a deep breath, stepped forward, and sank one of the bones into the highest crack he could reach.

Chapter 24

Raising his feet off the ground, Gabriel swung by the arm holding the bone wedged into the wall. At the top of the swing, he reached up and planted the second piece of bone about six inches higher than the first. Hauling himself up on the second piece, he pulled the first piece free and swung up to plant it higher. Then he repeated the process. Again and again he pulled out the bones and drove them in higher, sometimes as much as a foot above his previous handhold and other times only a few inches. There were times when he failed to drive the end of the bone into the wall at all and swung back away, returning a moment later for another attempt. His arms were already aching although he’d barely climbed five feet, but he kept on going, scanning the rock wall for cracks and crevices that might admit the bones—and that would hold his weight.

By the time he had made it halfway up the sheer face, his arms and chest were trembling from the effort and he was barely able to pull himself up inch by excruciating inch. Only thoughts of Millie waiting below with his broken ankle and Rue being forced at spear point to work on the plane—and Velda, half mad with grief, with the lives of millions in her hands—kept Gabriel pressing on. He didn’t look down and barely looked up, concentrating instead on the wall directly in front of him: the next crack, the next handhold. Twelve feet became fifteen; fifteen became twenty. He was less than three feet from the lip when the stones supporting his latest handhold began to crumble.

It began with a faint rain of grit and dirt on his arm; then the terrible feeling of the bone in his hand coming loose. The stone below his fist had a crack running down its face, and as he watched it slowly widened.

Desperately, Gabriel swung the bone in his other hand and jabbed it into the wall just as he lost his grip on the first. It slipped from his hand and plummeted end over end to the bottom of the pit. As he swung reflexively out of the way of a small avalanche of stones, he heard Millie’s voice from far below. “You okay?”

“I’ve been better,” Gabriel called back. He held tight to the one remaining bone. This one remained embedded, but at a bad angle—tilted slightly downward and looking as if it were seconds from coming loose.

He looked up. He was close—so close. But still more than an arm’s length away. He planted his toes against the rock, scrabbling for any sort of hold at all, and swung his free arm up. It caught nothing. No handhold, nothing to grab onto.

He tried again, aiming this time for the crumbling ledge where the stones had come loose. It was dodgy at best, unlikely to support his weight for long, but it was the best hope he had.

He reached it, caught hold. His fingers bit down fiercely, clamping onto the stone. It did feel loose, unstable—but he held tight and shifted until he felt the balance settle, and when it felt about as good as it was likely to get, Gabriel yanked the sole remaining bone free.

He swung by his fingertips twenty-three feet above the ground, holding onto this unsteady bit of rock, his heart racing. He could picture Millie looking up at him, holding his breath in fear, maybe holding his arms out to catch him if he fell, though the impact would surely shatter the already fractured bones of his ankle, maybe crippling him for life.

There was a happy prospect—Millie walking with a cane for the rest of his life, and all because of him. Gabriel forced the image out of his mind and swung his arm up, up, as high as he could, and stabbed the bone savagely into the space beneath one of the stones at the pit’s edge. He didn’t let himself swing back. Instead, he clenched the muscles of his abdomen and with an enormous effort swung his legs up. For an instant he hung sideways, like a gymnast on a pommel horse, then he managed to hook one ankle over the lip. He paused for breath in that awkward, stretched out position and then carefully worked his knee up over the edge, then got his other leg up beside the first. It took almost as great an effort to unlock his grip from around the bone clenched tightly in his fist, but he did, and wrenched himself up and over till he was lying flat on his back, looking up at the underside of the crimson dome of ice.

For several seconds, all he could do was lie there and breathe, trying to bring his heartbeat back down to something resembling its normal pace and hoping no one decided to show up and jam a spear into him while he lay there gasping like a gaffed bass. He slowly rolled over and raised himself to his hands and knees, adrenaline pulsing in his aching limbs and readying him for yet another fight. But nothing happened. There weren’t any guards around, only two old women and one young girl, the one he’d seen when they’d entered the village; she sat alone, working on stringing a long necklace of seedpods and bone beads. The two old women sat side by side about ten feet away from her, next to what looked like a crude well, and were concentrating on grinding some sort of wild grain. One was cracking open the thick outer husks and placing the softer grains into a hole in the ground while the other was lifting and dropping a heavy wooden post to crush the grains to flour. None of the three were paying any attention to him. Gabriel was about to slip away and quietly hunt for something that might help him get Millie out of the pit, but the sight of the old woman cracking the husks made him do a double take. The implement she was using—it was the butt of a gun. Not just any gun, either. Gabriel’s Colt.

“Hey!” he said. All three of the women looked up at the specter before them, a nearly naked man covered with rock dust and streaks of mud and angry red scrapes and swollen bite marks. The two older women fled like startled pigeons, the wooden post and gun left lying where they’d fallen from their hands.

The young girl stood unmoving, gaping at him wideeyed. The paralysis was only momentary, though. When Gabriel took a step toward her, open hands held out in a nonthreatening display, she bolted, too, leaving him alone in the center of the village.

Where was everyone else? Were they all guarding Rue? Or were some in the tall central building, watching unwittingly while Velda turned their god machine against innocents in their ancestors’ homeland?