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

Dmitriy stared, willing his mouth to form words to express his love, but he remained silent. He swallowed audibly and felt a sick feeling in his stomach. He glanced to the side, avoiding her penetrating eyes as his silent embarrassment grew, and noticed she was holding her Geiger counter. He remembered why they were there and wondered if she had found something important. He didn’t really care at the moment, but it gave him something to say. “You wanted to show me something?”

She seemed startled by the question. “I, uh…” She noticed Dmitriy’s eyes on the Geiger counter. “Oh, yes, I… Look at this.”

Viktoriya pulled herself away from Dmitriy’s arms and stepped out toward the waterline where small, frigid waves lapped against the shore. She stopped and held out the Geiger counter. Sweeping left to right, the counter clicked slowly at first, then rapidly, then slowly again. She repeated the sweep two more times.

Dmitriy stood next to her and studied the shoreline beneath her feet. It looked as harmless as the rest of the beach, but he suspected something was buried there. He looked at the Geiger counter’s gauge as she swept it over again. The radiation levels read slightly above normal, but not high enough to kill them. Enough to shorten their lives by a few hours, perhaps, but otherwise safe.

They had been sent to the faraway place to investigate mishandling of environmental pollutants during the Cold War. Siberia, at that time, had been used primarily for dumping toxic waste and exiled criminals. Now, after all these years, it was finally being recognized as a natural wonder. But severe damage had been done, and Dmitriy believed they were about to uncover more evidence of his country’s environmental neglect.

He bent down and scraped several small stones aside. As he set his eyes on a larger stone, he felt sweat gather on his forehead. He was hot. He wrote it off as exertion—he still wasn’t in very good shape— picked up the large stone, and tossed it to the side. Beneath it were more stones. This was going to take a while.

“Dima?”

Dmitriy turned and saw Viktoriya removing her parka.

“Are you hot?” she asked.

“Da, but I think I haven’t worked this hard in…” He noticed she was sweating, too.

Something was wrong. The temperature had risen. Removing his parka, Dmitriy let the heat soak in as he attempted to remember a time in his life when, if ever, he’d felt the air so hot. He couldn’t. The temperature seemed to be rising exponentially.

“Dima…the radiation?”

Dmitriy looked into Vika’s eyes and recognized fear. Had the radiation sprung a leak when he removed the stones? Were they being poisoned? He took the Geiger counter from her hand and swept the area. He shook his head. “No, something else.”

Still the heat rose.

His throat began to sting. He took a swig of water and offered the canteen to Viktoriya. She gulped it greedily.

The trees behind them groaned as they bent under a burst of pummeling wind. The wind was dry and hot, like bending over an open oven. Dmitriy blinked his eyes as the moisture was wicked from them. Something was very wrong.

“We have to leave!” he said. He glanced up the shoreline where they had landed the helicopter, a football field away. “Get to the helicopter!”

He took Vika’s hand and helped her across the loose rocks. The rising heat made his heart beat wildly in his chest, urged him to sprint at full speed. But he couldn’t leave Vika behind. She had saved his life. She was his life. He would not let her die now.

Viktoriya slipped on a stone and fell forward, but Dima was there to catch her. He swept her into his arms and stumbled toward the copter.

The heat continued to rise. Dmitriy struggled to keep his eyes open. The heat was so intense that it felt as though his eyes were peeled grapes. He looked at Viktoriya. Her eyes were clenched shut.

They were halfway to the copter now, and Dmitriy was wheezing. His body was dry. Every bead of sweat that his body produced evaporated. A loud crack drew his eyes back to the forest. He saw a tree falling to the ground, pushed over by the punishing winds, but what shocked him was the state of the trees. The needles, moments ago vibrant green, were now tinged brown, dried out. Dead.

A rising cloak of darkness, like an evil apparition, caught Dmitriy’s attention as it plumed into the sky above the forest. It assaulted his nose first: acrid smoke laced with sulfur. The trees were burning, and while he couldn’t see it, he suspected a volcano had erupted. The blackness poured out from the tree line and rolled over the beach. Dmitriy found it impossible to breathe.