Cold Pride, Page 3

all spent. And there was tightness to his skin, a tingling sensation fighting against the numbness.

  But things had gone according to plan. A metal pole stood piercing a mound of nearby snow, a little light flashing on top; one of the survival packages Quinn had dropped earlier.

  Movements awkward, Quinn ached his way across the snow-shore. Scrabbling through icy-slush he found the package. Hands hard to control, shaking, the young hunter unwrapped the thermal seal and opened the package. Inside were all the accoutrements of survival; thick furs, snow shoes, stimulants, water, protein pills, grenades and a pistol.

  Quinn watered and fed, wrapping furs around his body and hands after injecting hot-flush chemicals. Weak, so weak…I’ll have to rebuild my body when I get back to the Order. Even his mind couldn’t fixate on a clear thought. Go home, must get home. Resolved to follow the Shaman’s interference signal, Quinn headed along the shoreline.

  Lightening skies ushered him away from the extreme north. When daylight returned, the landscape glinted silver and white. Blinding white.

  Something strange, unplanned, caused him increasing concern. Despite the intake of chemicals and nutrients, his body hadn’t replenished. He still ached. Cold blew through him like a tattered sheet. And that slug-goo stench had returned with a vengeance, following. But Quinn pressed onward along the shore, slowly, so slowly.

  Snow crunched underfoot. Slow-going. Tiring. Quinn trudged for days, maybe longer, until the cold didn’t matter anymore. Every step unreal, detached from that bundle of conscious thought behind his eyes. Just a monotonous movie from the archives in the Order’s Sanctuary watched from the comfort of an R and R pod.

  One day, blurred silhouettes in the distance broke the silver white landscape; fuzzy shapes in the shallows along the coast. Vision unfocused and prone to mirage, at first Quinn questioned the reality of it all. When bearded snow tribesmen approached, Quinn felt a surge of…relief. However it was short-lived.

  The men came close but didn’t smile. They sniffed the air, the goo-stink heavy. They turned their backs to Quinn, walked away and continued their work; tended silver frost fungus that grew on Kraken-manure covered beaches, or penned in fish schools and molluscs attracted to the banquet of nutrients in the Kraken’s waste.

  Still following the sound of interference, Quinn headed inland to a group of animal-skin tents. Women pulled their children away when Quinn passed. A group of elderly tribesmen, sitting around blubber lamps, unfastened bunches of plant from their furs, vigorously rubbed them over their faces. Then Brother Quinn remembered the frost heather balm offered to him when he first met the tribe. Silly superstition?

  Near the tents, a pack of huskies considered him. The alpha growled. Some padded away. None wanted to get close.

  Eventually, Quinn tracked the interference down to a snow shack surrounded by thick clumps of pink flowered heather, a single totem-aerial standing tall near the entrance. From the shack emerged the Shaman, as if expecting the young hunter. Antenna’s spiked from his scalp. The old face that peeked from the mass of furs looked healthier than last time. Yet the Shaman offered nothing but silence.

  Quinn knew something had gone wrong.

  “Shaman, I have hunted and killed a Kraken. Never will it ravage your shores again,” Quinn said, his voice only a whisper.

  “Brother Quinn, you did not stop to listen. You did not heed the words, I can tell by your face. Look for yourself, see your hands.”

  Quinn pulled off his wrappings and brought trembling hands to his eyes. The sight nearly made him fall to his knees in despair. His skin slowly simmered, boils raised all over. Not boils, eggs, something moving inside their translucent covering. Perhaps present since he had come out of hibernation, but his senses had been too tired and medicated to care. Now an itching under his skin and behind his eyes. Everywhere.

  “We wanted a hunter to trap the Kraken and destroy the parasites that irritated it, sent it raging against our shores. You were not to kill it. Our people’s survival and way of life depend on it. Instead, you were to fight the slugs from a distance, their spit and spores deadly. You were supposed to burn their eggs from the Kraken’s back. But you didn’t take the balm to cover your skin. Such a simple and effective measure. You have failed. Nothing can help you now. Leave us, in case you spread your terrible disease.”

  Quinn ran his fingers over his face, feeling the bumps and the growing scolds, the infestation grown rampant. When he took his hands away they were bloody. Why didn’t the masters tell me before I arrived? Why didn’t I listen? Then Quinn understood the lesson he was supposed to learn.

  Sucking in cold air, the hunter knew what must be done. He clipped the grenades from the survival package all over his furs. “Shaman, before I go, please do one thing.”

  “Yes, Brother?”

  “Tell those that come after me that a man called Quinn once killed a Kraken,” every whispered syllable an exercise in agony. Words scratched into a cough. Quinn buckled over, hands on knees.

  Barely keeping balance, he fought to stand tall. Shaky hands synchronised the timers on the grenades. A ‘beep’ signalled the start of the countdown. I pray the Order finds an atom to regrow me. Next time I will prove I have learnt my lesson.

  The Shaman moved his lips but Quinn couldn’t hear his words. Instead, scratching filled his ears. Under his skin things crawled and twitched; the creatures feeding. Brother Quinn, agile and fast, started to run. Joints screamed, bones cried, muscles burned. He ran into the great snowfields beyond the shore, deep into a world of white and silver. He ran; a hunter-beast on the verge of making a killer lunge. He kept on running and running until there was nothing left.

  THE END

  Also in The Numbered Entity Project:

  A Cause for One

  Transcendental Error

  Green Fingers and Broken Mirrors

  Empathising with Spiders

  Data Drop One, A Short Story Collection

  Future titles from The Numbered Entity Project will be coming soon. Very soon…

  Search for 'the numbered entity project'

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