The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

My eyebrows rise involuntarily. “You like my name?”


“Are you serious? King Solomon the wise and his legendary mines. Solomon Grundy—the nursery rhyme and evil comic-book zombie super villain.”

Then she’s singing, “Any hemisphere. No man’s land. Ain’t no asylum here. King Solomon he never lived round here.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The Clash,” she says.

“Clash of the Titans?” Harryhausen was a genius with stop motion, but I don’t recognize the lines as being from any of his films.

She gives me a funny look. “You don’t listen to music much, do you?”

“Only what Justin brings over. He’s my friend.”

She digs in her backpack. “I kinda figured that.” She pulls out a bright yellow cassette walkman. She extends the earphones as far as they’ll go and stretches them over both our heads, one side on her right ear, the other on my left. Then she hits play and I hear a tune similar to the one she was just singing.

I don’t hear the words at first because I’m distracted by the softness of Mira’s cheek up against mine. She’s bobbing her head to the music and our skin is rubbing. As I grow accustomed to the closeness, I hear the beat again. Then the tune. To my surprise, I like it. Then I hear the lyrics, and I’m not so sure.

There ain’t no need for ya. Go straight to Hell boys.

Go straight to Hell boys.





5



Logan is a whirlwind of confusion. I’m not sure how my parents can navigate through the terminals. But they do. And after checking our luggage and Dr. Clark’s massive amount of supplies—so much that he needed to get special permission to bring them—we’re on the plane and in the air.

I sit in a window seat, watching the East Coast pass below us as we head south. My mom and dad are sitting next to me and coax me into eating a small bag of peanuts and drinking a Sprite. I’d be worried if this was all I had to eat—the airline food is hideous—but I know Mom’s carry-on is full of food and drink. As my father’s photography assistant it’s her job to be prepared for anything, which includes my father’s voracious appetite.

About an hour into the flight, people become restless and a sort of musical chairs breaks out. Some people move to unoccupied rows, seeking solitude. Other people shift spots so they’re sitting next to friends or relatives they weren’t seated with. About five minutes into the shift, my parents are on their feet.

“I’m going to visit with Aimee,” mom says. “Your father needs to pee. Won’t be long.”

I shrug, not really caring where they’re going and turn my attention back to the view. I can no longer see the ocean. That’s right, our stop-over is in Texas. Then Peru. Then... As my thoughts turn to Antarctica, I feel my Dad return to his seat next to me. But something’s not right.

I sniff. The person next to me doesn’t smell like my Dad. I turn, expecting to see Mira, but it’s not her either. It’s Dr. Clark. He looks over at me, his dark hair ruffled in the back from leaning on his seat. And there is something odd about his eyes. Not the color, they’re a perfectly normal blue. It’s the tightness around the edges. He looks nervous.

I know I must, too, because he forces a smile. I return it with one I’m sure looks equally as awkward. He clears his throat. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just excited to meet you.”

“Excited to meet me?” I’m honestly thrown by this.

“You are the modern equivalent of what I’ve spent most of my career searching for.”

“An Antarctican.”

He nods.

“That doesn’t make me special. If anything it makes me stranger than I already am.”

“Strange, my boy, is a good thing,” he says. And I can tell he’s not joking. “We live in a world of mediocrity, of settling for society’s norms. Anything outside of that is deemed strange. If you’re smart. If you’re creative. If you simply just want something different for your life. Of course, you’re all three of those, aren’t you?”

“So, I’m stranger than most?”

“Better than most,” he says with a wink.

I can tell he’s relaxing, which is good, because it’s helping me relax, too.

“We weren’t put on this Earth to be stagnant.”

I think about his word choice. Stagnant in the current context means a lack of progress. But when talking about the physical world it means things are going foul from standing still. It’s a loaded sentence. “So our brains will rot if we aren’t strange?”

“Precisely.” He laughs. I smile. This is going much better then when I fell on my face.

“But I’m not really different because I was born on Antarctica, am I?”