The Exodus Read online

  A weak and remote sound finally reached his ears. More likely, it sounded several times before, but only now Nick realized that this was the horn from the pier on the other side. “They must be looking for me,” he thought lazily. He had a fleeting idea of responding with a light signal, but then he thought better of it. Whisperer then would send people to his rescue. They would go into certain death if they decide to cross the field from the pier to the lighthouse.

  Underneath the staircase, the painfully familiar chirping started again. “Here they are, crawling!” Nick thought and got up with difficulty. His body was rocking and swaying. To keep his balance, Nick used the wall for support and got to the entryway to the staircase. Earlier during the short break he blocked it with the heavy metal chest. And now it was really helping his defense. To reach him, the beasts had to get up on the back limbs and extend their claws to reach him. However, there were some that were more creative. They would climb the backs of their brethren and then tried to leap into the room. The last time in happened, Nick managed with great difficulty to kill two monsters with one strike when they approached him from the rear, and he had to strangle one of them with his arm that had no sword in it. Now his arm was burning with pain from the palm to the forearm, as if it had been burned. Numerous spikes broke off and penetrated deep under his skin.

  The beasts were of different types and when attacking, all kinds of them were mixed. It was difficult to discern in this bloody mess what exactly they looked like. One thing they all shared: the nature gave them all sorts of fangs, stings, spikes, and claws in abundance. Although, now Nick was starting to doubt that. Why nature, which is usually rational and reasonable in any world with biological life, would create monsters whose only goal was to kill and to kill only people and no one else?

  Half-consciously, Nick realized that he was losing strength with every minute. His sword was not flying anymore in his hand, but became heavy as lead. Grinding his teeth, Nick hardly managed to deflect the attacks of sharp claws that were getting dangerously close to him. When he chopped a beast, another one immediately appeared, full of strength and desire to kill him at any cost.

  Suddenly he heard a weird scratching sound from the window side. Something big, clawing at the lighthouse wall, was quickly moving up. Nick’s hair rose when he imagined the picture. He must have lost his concentration for a second, because the next thing he knew there was a large beast jumping over the metal chest and hitting him in the chest. Nick lost his balance, with his wounded leg betraying him, and tumbled to the side. He managed to hold on to his sword, but because of that he painfully hit his head on the wall. For a moment, something large and dark completely covered the tall arched window and the large room suddenly became too crowded.

  The animal was huge. It had powerful legs and a big head with yellow eyes the size of a small plate. The short silver fur was barely covering its steel muscles. And the animal was moving fast, incredibly fast. Nick had to go into speeding-up mode to keep up with the animal’s movement within his perception. His consciousness started to wane because of the pressure. He was still trying to keep his eye on the entryway. At that very moment, when the way was clear, a new stream of attacking beasts was coming up the staircase. Nick has not seen these arthropods before. They were all of bright green, a poisonous color. Deep-throated quacking sounds were coming from their wide and round mouths looking like large balls spangled with sharp cone-shaped teeth. Nick realized that it was the end. On reflex, he sped up, using his last strength to delay his death for another second. The time slowed down. The creatures froze while moving, but hundreds of their small red eyes continued to stare at Nick.

  Then the animal roared. Nick’s ears nearly popped, and he thought that the lighthouse walls shook, for the second time in this one wild night. The roar seemed to have gone beyond human perception, but the vibration it created was still strong. The animal that stood at the window just seconds before, suddenly disappeared and turned up in the way of spider-like creatures entering the room.

  Powerless and drained, Nick was half-sitting at the far wall. The only thing left for him was to watch the battle. To be honest, this could not even be called battle. It was more like butchering. The animal was incredibly quick to deal very short but powerful and accurate blows with its front paws. To an onlooker, it seemed that the animal only slightly touched them, however the creatures were flying through the air like rag dolls torn apart. They died in the air, before their breathless bodies flew into the stone walls with a muffled knock. Suddenly, everything started to float in Nick’s eyes and he realized that he was losing consciousness.

  *****

  “Nicky, come over here!”

  “What is it, grandma?”

  Nick was already twelve and he always felt embarrassed when grandma called him that, especially in front of strangers. To be honest, there was no one else in the experimental biology lab at that moment but them, but just to be consistent he expressed his displeasure. In fact, the day before Nick himself begged his grandmother to take him on this trip to the Swan Islands. The matter was that shortly before that, the scientific world experienced a bombshell. In the Crimea Natural Reserve, a cat named Masha had given natural birth. Of course, that was not just a usual cat, but rather a cloned smilodon, better known to laymen as a saber-toothed tiger.

  As grandma explained, the name was misleading as smilodons were the subtype of the extinct type of the saber-toothed cats. An adult smilodon was in size similar to a large lion or Amur tiger, weighing about six hundred pounds. Some specimen could be as large as eight hundred pounds. Smilodon was different from other species in the cat family in its powerful body. Its fangs could reach ten inches. They were flat on the sides, curved, and sharpened on the in-bent side. The smilodon’s specialization was hunting young mammoths, mastodons, bison, and horses.

  Humans had succeeded in cloning long-extinct animals about a hundred years before. At the time Nick was visiting his grandmother’s lab, numerous Earth’s natural reserves housed these representatives of the Cenozoic and even Mesozoic eras. Unfortunately, all experiments to make the cloned species multiply naturally failed before that. Masha, or Mashenka, as the media nicknamed her, had a litter of five healthy kittens, three females and two males. The entire world of the scientific biology and adjacent disciplines was shaken to the core. Everyone was hailing the new breakthrough in the research of pre-historic forms of life.

  “Grandma, may I please feed them?” Nick was watching the spotted kittens, kept separately in special boxes, with great interest.

  Nick, just like his grandmother, was wearing a light hazmat suit to prevent harmful bacteria and viruses getting into the closed ecosystem of the newborns’ artificial habitat. Their mother, a huge cat of about 4.5 feet in length, was nervously pacing behind a transparent wall. She didn’t like that some strangers were so close to her babies. She was kept away from them as well, to avoid infections. Mashenka roared a couple of times menacingly, baring her beautiful saber teeth.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” Nick’s grandma was smiling. “Here, take this bottle with milk.” She pushed a button and the lid of the closest box glided to the side without a sound. The kitten seemed to have been waiting just for that. It immediately got up to its rear legs, trying to catch grandma’s finger. “Here you go, sweetie!” Grandma took the kitten out and gave it to Nick. “Hold it gently but tightly.”

  Nick heard a fearsome roar from behind the transparent wall. He made the kitten comfortable, holding it in his left arm like a baby and gave it the milk bottle with his right arm. The bottle was just like the one used to feed human infants. The kitten started to suck on it greedily, and Nick suddenly thought that already in eighteen months it would become a large and dangerous beast. Mashenka stopped pacing. She must have realized that there was no threat to her baby and lay down on the floor, putting her large head on her paws. But Nick still felt her watchful gaze through the half-closed lids of her eyes until he finished the feeding.


  *****

  At first, he felt hot moist breathing. Something huge leaned over Nick. He opened his eyes with great difficulty. A pair of amber-yellow eyes, each size of a small plate, was gazing at him.

  Nick clearly remembered his most recent dreams, even though it never happened to him before. Usually, his dreams immediately disappeared from his memory when he woke up. As a kid, he even envied his best friend Paul when the latter was colorfully retelling him his fantastic dreams. If Nick had ever dreamed about something, he completely forgot about it upon awakening.

  But now everything was different. Nick suddenly realized that his dream was not a dream at all, but the real memories, as if someone sent them to him. He could swear that the animal leaning over him was carefully watching him. Nick was absolutely helpless, and that is why he simply looked into the animal’s hypnotizing amber eyes. The next moment, the animal disappeared. For some time, it was completely quiet and Nick thought that he was left alone, but then he heard quiet roaring from the opposite corner of the room. He tried to raise himself on his elbow to see better what was going on, but his strength left him and he leaned back, completely exhausted.

  Nick did not know for how long he had stayed in this half-conscious state. Several times, he briefly regained consciousness. Then he thought that he heard muffled growling, and for some reason he thought it was pitiful, calling for help. Several times he woke up because someone was loudly whimpering. Sometimes, weird coughing, remotely resembling a human old-man croaking, was getting to him through his restless sleep. Nick lost all sense of reality and did not understand where his awareness ended and hallucinations started. In the end, he managed to fall into a deep but alert sleep.

  *****

  The Orphius’ rays were pleasantly warming Nick’s face. He moved his parched lips and tried to open his eyes. His eyelashes, glued tightly with blood and gore, wouldn’t separate. Nick rubbed his eyes. His whole body was aching. The left arm was swollen up to a monstrous sight. It went numb and refused to bend at the elbow. Nick remembered that during the fight he had wrapped it around with some thick cloth and used it as an improvised shield. He tensed and relaxed his muscles several times. His whole body immediately responded with a long nagging pain. However, at this point it was a good sign. In any case, all of his limbs were still in place.

  He lay on the floor a little longer. He didn’t want to move. At least he was alive. Nick registered that in the back of his mind, but he was not particularly happy about it. He was parched. With his eyes, he looked for the barrel with drinking water and suddenly felt a light tickling in his wounded hip. Carefully and slowly, Nick brought his right arm to the hip to feel out the wound. His fingers stumbled upon something furry and alive. He recoiled in horror, moving clumsily to his side. At the very spot where he was just sitting, there was a puppy. It was still half-blind, stumbling into everything in his way. Nick pulled away even further. Is this, by any chance, a continuation of his night horror hallucinations? He looked at the far corner of the room. The light from the window had not got there yet, but Nick now had no doubts. What happened during the night was not his dream or hallucination.

  Nick forced himself to come up to the water barrel, picked up a clay cup with his trembling hand, scooped the water at the very bottom and greedily drank everything. His head started to hum with a noise. He leaned back on the wall and looked at the far corner again. Yesterday’s alien animal was lying there not moving, like a large hill. The animal was dead. Something attracted Nick’s attention. He hesitated a little, but then dragged his heavy feet, wobbling and swaying, toward the animal.

  The animal was lying, extending his powerful paws, as if getting ready to jump. Its eyes were closed. Nick looked at the long matt claws and shivered, “This cannot be!” The five-fingered paw lacked one claw. Nick felt the amulet on his chest that had been given to him, as if in another life, by a strange girl named Niya. He took it out from under his shirt, looking at the amulet incredulously. What did she say then? “This is Morok’s claw. It will help you. Show it to HER and she will not harm you.” Yes, that’s exactly what she said, “Show it to her!” At that time, Nick thought it was some childish nonsense.

  “But it was nonsense indeed! How could the girl have known that I’d end up here and meet THIS?” Nick thought. He couldn’t have imagined it even yesterday in his wildest nightmare. And then Nick remembered what made him come up to the dead animal. Nick approached carefully. He immediately understood everything, as if something clicked in his brain and the puzzle pieces fell into a complete the picture by themselves.

  Nick saw horrible wounds on the animal’s body. Previously shiny fur was covered in blood and gore, torn off in many places. Next to the animal, there were four puppies, curled in a fetal position. They were all dead, for sure.

  The animal came here to give birth, correctly thinking that the lighthouse was the best place to hide that night. How did it get here? Was the Exodus chasing it from the very Forest? Looks like the fatal wounds were inflicted upon it a lot earlier, before the animal came here for cover. Nick remembered his nightmare, the wet breathing of the animal leaning over him and the heavy hypnotizing gaze of the large amber eyes. A belated chill ran up Nick’s spine. He realized that at that moment, the animal was deciding his fate.

  Nick heard weak whining. The puppy, whining and growling, stubbornly crawled toward him. “What am I supposed to do with you, Gray?” he mumbled with a sigh.

  The puppy’s short fur was of dirty-gray color, just like the stone floor. Nick bent down and clumsily picked up the puppy with his good right hand, uttering, “Looks like I owe you one now, boy.”

  Chapter 8

  Nick was sitting at a large, crude wooden table, drinking the famous mead brewed by Pak from a clay cup with great pleasure. The host proudly told him that the mead had been brewed according to the recipe of his late grandfather. The drink was cool, slightly alcoholic, but at the same time, probably thanks to some mysterious herbal additives, it was perceptibly energizing. Nick thought it was easy and pleasant to just sit like this, calm and relaxed, and not to tense his senses, already sharpened by the danger closing in on him, expecting an attack at any moment.

  Little by little, the feeling of calmness and content was coming back to Nick. Now he was philosophizing about how subjective the feeling of time was. It seemed just like shortly before that, not more than a month ago, that he was sitting at this very table, eating the best-tasting dinner cooked by Lola, Niya’s mother. He then listened to the hunters’ merry table conversations. On the other hand, looking back at the kaleidoscope of events that took place in this short period of time, Nick thought that he managed to live through a whole life.

  He only remembered patches of what happened at the lighthouse, and what he remembered was vague and foggy. It must have been an effect of the post-traumatic shock. He learned about it from the experienced Space Emergency Services guys. He honestly believed then that this could never happen to him. But no, his consciousness blocked a large part of his painful memories. It felt like some powerful safety latch that nature had built into his brain switched on for psychological protection.

  Whisperer thought so too. That is why he was so strongly against the immediate journey to the Valley. Although, of course, he was worried about his clansmen who had stayed there during the Great Exodus, just like everyone else. Still, he said they needed to wait for at least five days for the “land to calm down” so that it is easier and safer for everyone to move. But Nick suspected that Whisperer was doing that for his sake, allowing him more time to recover.

  To be honest, Nick really needed to restore himself both psychologically and physically. The swelling in his left arm subsided. The small cuts on his entire body were already healing, and the deeper ones were coming together as well. They did not ache anymore, only itched mercilessly. What really concerned Nick was the wound on his hip. He had to refresh the skills in biokinesis that were drilled into him at the Military Space Academy. Several
times a day, he would go into the healing trance, envisioning the wound from inside. In his mind, he was washing the wound with water, removing the toxins and dead tissue. That way, he increased the targeted impact of his immune system on the wound, which facilitated the healing.

  Whisperer, while putting some cream, of which only he knew the ingredients, to Nick’s wound, was only clinking and incredulously shaking his head. As Nick understood from his words, the beast’s cut was poisonous. The toxins penetrated into the blood and caused severe damage, and sometimes resulted in death. Nick remembered Rigo, when he had been bitten by a yellowbelly on the swamps. It was Nick then who helped to bring the wounded hunter to the Valley.

  Whisperer never tired of admiring the ability of Nick’s body to regenerate. Nick didn’t explain the details to him; he simply would fail in selecting the right words to explain this. The matter was in the mandatory biological blockage that was performed on every infant on Earth, both in the colonies and on the periphery. In particular, Nick’s body was practically immune to any organic poison. The same related to the pathogenic microorganisms. His immune system easily neutralized infections, preventing the wounds from getting inflamed and infecting the lymphatic system. After five days, Nick started to feel a lot better. Only the unbearable weakness prevented him from thinking of himself as fully recovered. He still limped a little while walking. The skin at the place of the bite was black and detached in large patches. But underneath it, there was already a new young skin forming, pink like an infant’s.

  Nick remembered how on the second day after the Exodus he saw the approaching ferry from the lighthouse. He put Gray into his back bag and limped to the pier to meet his friends. And that was it. As if someone cut off all his other memories. He came to only at Niya’s house. Sith told him later that when they had approached land on the ferry, not believing that Nick was alive through some miracle, he was just standing there on the riverbank, smiling like a fool. Nick had not reacted to their greetings and questions in any way. Whisperer spent the last of his magic potions trying to bring Nick back to his senses.