Chapter 10
We wake up on the second day of our attempt at surviving this hostile world.
My body is aching from use, both physical and sexual.
Moving makes every one of my muscles protest. I know it will get better once we start moving again, but I wish we didn’t have to move.
This feels like a day suited to lazing around in bed, watching old movies.
My father had a big collection of them. They’ll be ashes now, along with the rest of his legacy.
“The horde hasn’t moved,” Thor says. He went straight to the edge of the outcropping and ensured that the sleeping mass of carnivorous beasts remained in their slumber. I feel a pang of existential dread at the thought of them waking.
“We should put more distance between ourselves and them,” Drako says. “Head further up toward the mountains. If we gather firewood and skin a few beasts, we should be able to fashion winter clothes that will protect us from the elements.”
He’s thinking long term. He’s not planning on being rescued.
All Thor and I care about is staying visible. Our goals are absolutely not aligned past a certain point.
“What would happen to Drako if we were rescued, and he were with us?”
“He’d be charged for the deaths of our crew, as he deserves to be,” Thor says.
“Oh, right. So we’re still doing that justice thing,” I say.
Thor lifts a brow at me. “Yes, Selene. We are still doing that justice thing. So many people lost their lives because of his orders.”
“Sure. Yes. Absolutely. But he’s sort of saving our lives now, so…”
“You can fuck him,” Thor says bluntly. “I don’t know that you really have much choice. But don’t fall in love with him. That man is going to hang.”
I keep thinking Thor is soft because he’s more overtly civilized than Drako. The veneer of nice guy just sits on him so well. But every now and then, I get a glimpse into a heart that is just as dark and feral as Drako’s, if not more.
I nod quietly and avert my eyes. I don’t know how long I can safely look into that particular abyss.
I hadn’t even thought about falling in love. It’s not really something you think about, is it. It’s just something that happens to you. It’s illogical chemistry that sweeps through your synapses and fucks your whole life up. That’s the only way I can explain my sisters’ choice in husbands, anyway.
I never really thought it would happen to me. It still hasn’t, I suppose. Unless it has?
I don’t know what love is. But I know that when Thor talks about Drako being hung, it feels like a pit of endless despair opens up inside my belly, one that would absolutely never be filled.
So that’s interesting.
I pray for Drako to be unpleasant again, to make my knowledge of what awaits him less awful to bear.
But he insists on being handsome and sexy, and exposing his tattooed biceps covered in thick yet intricate tattoos depicting works of the gods.
Loki steals Thor’s hammer over and over with every rippling motion of Drako’s arm.
I am still curious about the Vikar. I wasn’t nearly as interested in them when they had me captive and were going to make me watch the bodies of my crew burn, but there’s something about fresh air and the knowledge that almost all of them are now also dead that puts me in a more forgiving mood.
Or maybe all the stress is turning me insane. Could be that. Hard to say.
Thor is going to let Drako call the shots. He is not going to bother arguing because he hopes our ships will scan the planet, find three human life signs, and sweep us all up before Drako can do anything about it.
We start walking again, heading away from comfortable temperate terrain and toward the rockier, icier heights. I follow because I have no choice. I don’t know if I really agree. It’s not even worth thinking about because nobody is going to listen to me anyway.
I stay a little nearer Thor than Drako, because interacting with Drako makes me feel like I have to contend with self-examination I don’t want to do.
“We don’t have cold weather gear,” I say as we leave the tree line behind and start heading into a rocky area that seems to have quite a few caves at various elevations.
“Arghghglblrag!”
It’s not the response I expected to get from Drako, and that’s because it doesn’t come from him at all. We all swing around to see something that I, for one, do not get a very good look at because I am too busy already running the other way. We are talking tall, shaggy, toothy.
The sound of a creature charging us echoes off the rocky surrounding walls. It is making the sorts of sounds a semi-verbal humanoid might make if it had never heard anybody say anything.
I have a vague sense of something two-legged rushing toward us faster than any man could ever run.
The three of us race away from it, following sheer, stupid instinct.
You can train people to react to dangerous situations all you want, but when you’re really caught off guard, the animal brain takes over.
“I’ll hold him off!” Drako says, turning around as if he has a death wish.
“No!” I scream. It doesn’t matter. Thor has grabbed me by the back of the shirt and he is dragging me with him, hauling me into his arms and maintaining pace.
We are heading toward the edge of the mountain, which has decided to stop being a mountain, we discover as we scramble over large rocks that reveal a sudden edge.
There isn’t time to stop. The ground beneath our feet crumbles as we run and before we know it, we are falling.
The predator leaps, overshoots us, and goes arcing out into thin air. The drop below has to be well over a mile. There is no surviving that kind of fall.
Thor grabs the side of the cliff just in time to stop us from falling. I don’t know if I am screaming or not. I grip onto Thor with all the primate instinct my brain can gather. In this moment, I have not evolved a bit from an ancient monkey clinging to its mother in a tall tree.
Drako’s head appears over the edge. He is lying flat on unstable ground, reaching out an arm to Thor.
“Give her,” he says, referring to me.
The uncanny feeling of not having ground beneath my feet and knowing that there is nothing but eternity below me will never leave me. I felt more secure on the spaceship when we were surrounded by nothing at all than I do here, with the ground much closer, relatively speaking.
Thor hoists me up with one arm and Drako grabs hold of me. In total, I was over the edge for less than a minute, but it felt like forever. I don’t know how many times I can face mortality before I lose my mind, but I have to assume it is not that many more.
I scramble away from the edge, staying on my belly, crawling toward what feels like solid ground. I don’t know if I am ever going to trust the earth again.
I look back, and see Drako.
I realize in that moment, that there is absolutely nothing to stop Drako from just letting Thor fall.
He could keep me for himself, and he could start his little colony project just as he was instructed to do.
It would be a win for him. It would be the best idea, really.
It would be the road to self-preservation.
I watch as the muscles in his back flex. He’s pulling Thor up, shuffling back across the scree and using his body as leverage to help Thor’s big frame find purchase. I was rescued in a matter of seconds, but it takes longer to help Thor up.
I find myself holding my breath, terrified that the rest of the cliff might decide to crumble and they’ll both fall and then I’ll be here alone trying to survive a world that’s killed hundreds of people without blinking an eye.
Finally, after what is probably less than a minute, they are both up and moving across to me. All of us make tracks down the mountain as quickly as we can, not at all liking the biodiversity we just discovered.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask the question when I can breathe and think.
“Looked like a troll,” Drako says. “Or a really big monkey. Whatever it was, it was fast. Big teeth. Long arms. Colored like rock and snow. Blended in perfectly until it decided to move.”
“Everything on this planet tries to kill you,” Thor says.
“Cheer up,” I say. “We could be on Australia.”
“Australia isn’t real,” Thor says quickly. “It’s a story the ancients made up to scare their children.”
“I believe in Australia,” I say.
“We need to make a fortified encampment,” Drako says, changing the subject. “We’ve got to harvest trees, carve staves, and bury them so we have a proper wall to keep things like that at bay.”
“I don’t know if we can build a fortified encampment out of wood that is going to keep anything out,” Thor says. “That horde isn’t going to be stopped by wood. And that thing that chased us? If the cliff hadn’t given way, we’d be troll food.”
“Cave, then. We need fortifications. We have all almost died more times than I can count in the past few days alone. Our luck will run out soon.”
There is a pause in the conversation that I feel compelled to fill.
“Thank you for saving our lives, Drako,” I say pointedly.
“That’s alright,” he says. “You’d do the same for me.”
I look at Thor, trying not to seem too pointed. I’m waiting for him to say thank you. He doesn’t. He looks away from us both with an expression that even on a six foot whatever-the-fuck warrior firefighter, looks petulant.
I look back at Drako, and give a little shrug. I truly feel grateful to him, and I don’t feel like he is understanding how much I feel.
“I’m serious,” I say. “You were willing to fight for us.”
“I was willing to fight for you,” he says, somewhat ruining the moment. “Thor can take care of himself.”
Oh, that is a good save. A conversation with Drako is always an exciting proposition.
He’s downplaying his heroism though, for sure.
He deserves a lot of credit for being able to turn and face a creature that was bigger than all of us put together and clearly well adapted to running prey down on craggy mountainsides.