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

We move fast and silent. The solid stone makes moving silently fairly easy, but if we do make a sound, it will be amplified by the vaulted ceilings. Em stops by a human sized wooden door. It’s simple and unlocked. Not exactly the kind of place you would expect an arsenal to be kept, but Nephilim and hunters have no need for modern weapons, and there’s generally no one else around to take them. I suspect they are kept only to be studied and understood.

Em opens the door. The room is pitch black, but she steps inside. A moment later, I hear a click and the room blooms with yellow light. As I step inside, my eyes are drawn up to the electric glow. It’s one of the over-sized light bulbs, like the one I saw in the Asgard library, and like what can be seen in ancient Egyptian pictographs, such as those depicted at the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, in central Egypt.

When Kat curses in glee, I look at the rest of the room. Stone shelves are covered in black, metal weaponry. I see handguns, rifles, machine guns, knives, grenades and an assortment of gear I don’t recognize. While Kainda closes the door behind us, Wright and Kat fan out into the room, scouring the weapons like kids loosed in Toys “R” Us with a million-dollar gift certificate.

I join them, looking over the guns. “What should I look for?” I ask.

“Anything with a sound suppressor,” Wright says. “In these caves, our ears would be ruined by anything without one, and our position would be given away.”

“You mean like a silencer?” I ask. My knowledge of weapons is mostly based on what could be seen on daytime TV in the 80s.

“No such thing,” Wright says, “but, yeah, that’s the general idea.”

“In that case,” I say, heaving a heavy rifle off one of the stone shelves. “Will this do?”

Kat turns to me and her eyes light up. “Oh dear boy, you know the way to a woman’s heart.”

Kainda grumbles, but doesn’t say anything.

Kat takes the weapon from me, whispering its features, as she looks it over. “Sound suppressed FN FAL. Selective fire. Collapsible stock. Good. Should make it easier to carry underground.” She hefts it in her hands. “About ten pounds.” She ejects the magazine. “Standard NATO rounds. Thirty round magazine. This is good.” She holds up the straight magazine with a distinctly angled bottom. “Any more of these?”

“Three,” I say, holding up a brown leather satchel.

She takes the satchel, looks inside at the three fully loaded magazines, and grins. “Perfect.”

“I fail to see what this...weapon will be good for,” Kainda says.

It’s at that moment that the door opens and a Nephilim gatherer steps into the room. Gatherers are what most people know as “grays.” They’re widely considered to be alien in nature, which isn’t too far from the truth. They gather humans from the outside world, for hunters (like Em) or for genetic experimentation—the sort that led to me having six clones. The first is Xin, a half-human, half-seeker, who is now my ally. The second was a horrible little half-human, half-thinker creature that I killed in a subterranean laboratory. And then there is Luca, a six year old, fully human duplicate of me currently hiding underground with the other rebel hunters. There are three other clones I have yet to meet, but from what I’ve been told, by Aimee and Xin, I’d be better off not meeting them. Of course, Aimee said the same thing about Xin, and I would be dead without him.

The gatherer, whose hands hold a wooden box full of dog tags, stops in its tracks. Its oval, jet black eyes go wide with surprise. But it quickly recovers, and before anyone can act, a painful pressure fills my mind. Gatherers and seekers are telepathic. This is a well-known fact in UFO/alien folklore, but the skill isn’t just for communication. Gatherers can literally kill you with a thought.

It recognizes the three hunters in the room as the predominant threat and targets Kainda, Em and me first, dropping us to our knees. But this gatherer has made a mistake. I hear a sound, like a cough, repeat three times in rapid succession. A fraction of a second later, three neat holes form a triangle on the creature’s forehead.

The wooden box drops from the creature’s hands, landing at its feet with a loud thunk. The gatherer’s limp body starts to fall backward, out into the hallway, where the purple blood from its forehead is sure to leave a stain and a scent trail that will alert any hunters nearby.

But Wright moves quickly, snagging the gatherer’s wrist and pulling it inside the room. He drags the body to the back corner, while Kat silently closes the door. When Wright stands up from his body disposal duty, it’s as if nothing happened. There isn’t even a drop of blood on the floor.

Kainda grins. “I stand corrected.”





4



“What the hell is that?” Kat asks, standing over the body of the gatherer she’s just killed. Its large, black, almond shaped eyes are now lifeless. “Looks like something out of Close Encounters.”

“It’s a gatherer,” Em says.

“Close Encounters was based on them,” I say. I remember the movie more for its depiction of late seventies family life, but the aliens conjured by Steven Spielberg were actually Nephilim. As I look over the three, clean holes in its forehead, I can’t help but wonder aloud, “Is it dead?”

Everyone stiffens, even Kainda and Em. They don’t know either.