10

 

The ground rumbled from repeated impacts that shook up through Val’s legs. She leapt onto her ATV and shouted over the noise. “Scatter! Get the quads away from the path. Deeper into the bones.”

For once, Morten followed an order without debate. He leapt onto his green ATV and took off in a straight path through the bones to the left of the trail they had taken into the nest. Oskar was quickly behind him.

Val broke right, and Ulrik, Trond and Nils were with her. The others were already gone from sight. But Val didn’t look for them. Her attention was completely enveloped with the sight of the thing rushing out of the storm toward them. The smell hit her first, like a pulsating wave of death, and she realized when the creature roared again that it was the thing’s breath she was smelling.

To call it a bear was to call a puddle the sea. It was half the height of the trees—twenty feet tall at least. Its arms ended in paws that held far too many claws for them to even be effectively functional. Like a handful of loose straw all different lengths and angled in different directions. They would be useless for digging but perfect for eviscerating prey.

The creature moved on its hind legs only, which she had never seen before. Bears were known to stand, but never run on their hind legs. Unlike the deformed polar bear she had battled as a child, this creature was brown and black, and nothing like any bear should be. It had fin-like ridges protruding from under the fur on its back, almost like a whale fin. The rest of its body was covered in fur but rippled with mounds the size of human heads, like tumors pushing up under the skin.

But the monster’s head was its most terrifying feature. Its snout was distended, and the jaw hinged three ways—ahead and to each side, with three sets of jaws, as if it needed to eat on three sides of its head at once. One of its black dead eyes had been clawed out—by another creature or maybe by itself, but the wound was infected with oozing yellow pus. Deep long gashes trailed from the mangled eye socket up and over its head.

As it chased after her group, Val noticed the massive creature’s spine had picked up a few more protrusions. Arrows. Anders was in the trees somewhere, firing arrow after arrow into the creature’s hide, but the assault didn’t slow the monster’s frantic sprint into the bone nest.

It roared as it ran. The thunder of its hind legs striking the ground and crushing bones as it rushed after them, combined with the buzzing engines of the retreating ATVs and the continual cracking of the bones under the wheels of the quads, was a cacophony of sound that was almost as bad as the wretched smell of decay and putrescence that preceded the monster like an advanced invading force.

“The trees,” Ulrik yelled at her. She saw that he was right. He was arcing his ATV around and back toward the forest that had acted as a barrier between the road and the bone nest. The tall conifers would probably not stop the rampaging mega-bear, but they might slow it.

Trond must have already made it into the cover of the huge spruce and pine trees. Val couldn’t see him anywhere. Ulrik raced ahead of her, and was nearly to the treeline. She was fifty feet behind him. Her ATV skidded left and right as she tried to navigate the recently fallen snow and haphazard bones.

Only then did she realize that the jagged snapping bones had the potential to puncture one or all of her tires. She swore aloud and hoped the gods would prevent that from happening. The pursuing mega-bear was only a hundred feet behind her as she raced in an arc back toward the trees. The slightest delay and the creature would be upon her. The only question in her mind was whether it would eat her or simply crush her in its rush to get to the others.

The creature roared again, and this time she could feel the pressure wave of its breath blasting across her back and neck like a hot wind. Then she was in the trees, the ATV’s knobby tires gripping the smoother ground. The snow wasn’t as deep here, since the tree cover overhead was thicker. There was no clear path through the trees, but she threw her body left and right, weaving around the two-foot thick trunks.

Then trees snapped behind her, the sound like the wrenching of the world, with groans, creaks and explosions of wooden splinters. The trees wouldn’t slow the monster much.

She had lost sight of Ulrik, but kept moving straight, steering around whatever trees crossed her path. Her hope was to reach the road, where she could outrun the monster, and she figured that was where Trond and Ulrik had gone as well. But then she saw a sparkle of light on metal to her left, and when she glanced that way, she saw a parked ATV, missing its rider.

“Where the hell is—” she started, when she burst out of the thick tree cover into a small glade. A thick pine came tumbling over her head to crash in front of her in the middle of the clearing. She cranked the handlebars to the left, but the turn was too sharp, and her ride began to tumble. She sprang off it, but the velocity kept her body flying through the air and tumbling until she crashed into a thick cushion of pine needles. She thought the pine would break her fall completely, as the dark green boughs enveloped her, but then her hip and lower back slammed into a branch and a lance of pain shot through her spine up to her head.

She shouted out, and the rampaging monster bear suddenly stopped its chase. She stayed perfectly still, realizing the thing had just overshot her position, as she had plunged into the thick cocoon of needles.

But its hearing is excellent.

Val held her breath, not daring to move her body even a fraction of an inch. The horrific stench that spoke of countless dead animals for meals washed over her again. It has turned back this way.

Her lungs begged for air, but she refused them. She needed to move, but the movement she had in mind had nothing to do with her chest and everything to do with her arm. It was twisted behind her, and it would be useless there. She had no desire to die a horrible death at the triple jaws and multiple claws of the mutated bear. But if she was going to die that way, she would deliver the beast as much pain as she could. She slowly inched her right arm out from behind her back, pushing against the wall of green pine needles with her elbow.

Once her arm was free, she slid her hand down to her aching hip, where the metal ring that held her long ax was attached to her belt. She secured a scavenged leather holster that kept the handle of the ax from swinging when she walked.

Her eyes felt as if they were bulging in her sockets from holding her breath so long. Her lungs screamed at her with all the profanity of the gods.

She had to breathe.

Val slowly sucked in air, and the rotting aroma of the creature’s breath nearly made her pass out, as her stomach wobbled and her vision narrowed.

Then two things happened at once.

The pine needle wall in front of her face burst apart, as the triple-jawed beast mashed its snout through the barrier. Its nose stopped just two inches from the rim of Val’s goggles. The shiny black eye of the creature stared right at her. Long splinters of wood pierced the thing’s face, suggesting that, in addition to knocking the trees in its path down, the mega-bear had also bitten through whatever branches or trunks had been near its face.

The second thing that happened was her hand reaching the holster, fingers scrabbling for the ax.

But the holster was empty.