"Stalked and Stalker" Pt. 6 (Patreon)

I entered, and won, Dean Spencer's story contest for one of his pieces of art. I'm now completing it with (theoretically) weekly entries. This is part three.

Part One can be found here, Part Two here, Part Three here, Part Four here, and Part Five here.

Paying Patrons can instead go here, for a compiled, slightly more edited version of the story-to-date, along with my thoughts and author's notes about each section.

(Low res image. High res will be used for the final product. Art by Dean Spencer)

6

For long, cold seconds, no one moved. MacKenzie felt his fight-or-flight response fading, leaving him without the energy to do either… or to attempt much of anything else. His eyes kept roaming over the burning mass of bramble, bone, thorn, and fang. It was… a plant. A mobile, seeing, roaring PLANT. There was no hidden predator inside using it as a complex but natural disguise. No infestation of insects moving it like a roaming hive. No cunning gears, levers, or pistons to reveal it was truly a machine. Not even a hint that it was somehow haunted.

Just the tangled roots, and vines, and thorns he had first seen, with the scattered pieces of bone and tooth he noticed only late in the fight.

His brain scrabbled for SOME explanation. He’s faced monsters, yes. Most were just animals no one had seen before, or thought long lost. Living dinosaurs in deep jungles. Ape-men far from human habitation. Squids of a scope and cunning no surviving record warned about. Bunyips… and as of today, arctic bunyips. On much rarer occasion, there had even been huge, carnivorous plants. The acid orchids of Buyan. Giant flytraps along the Virginia Dare coast. The King Cobra Lillies of Antonio Island. But none of them could walk. None of them howled. None had eyes.

And yes, MacKenzie had faced true monsters. Or at least, things he could not explain. Things no learned man he’d ever had with him could explain, without relying on theories that fell well outside accepted science. Mac had fought evil spirits, and unearthly horrors, and unspeakable things that, even when escaped, left him unable to give any description of their form, shape, or purpose.

But none of them had been running, screaming plants littered with bits of fang and skull.

These things, this pack, that had attacked with such speed and fury? These inexplicable terrors his brain has labeled bramble wolves, just so he could pretend he knew what they were? If he’d been asked a day before, he’d have said nothing like them could exist. Even now, his brain screamed nothing like these should exist. And no matter how hard and long he stared at the last of them, how doggedly his mind tried to find some pigeon-hole to place it in, some similar threat he could link it to, the burning pile remained belligerently alien to his every experience.

It was a relief to his overwrought brain that it was fading from sight.

Fading. In the heavy snow. From the blizzard.

“Shit!”

Blaze and Alec spun and looked at MacKenzie in shock. They’d been staring at the lifeless, burning mass as slack-jawed as he had. Only his exclamation brought them out of it. Alec’s parka had been torn to shreds by the lashings of thorny vine-tentacles, and Blaze had shed hers entirely, along with her gloves. Both were shivering as hard as Mac was… which was amazing, since he was still fully bundled up and they were much more exposed to the cold. Mac would have been unable to move by now, if he faced this cold in as vulnerable a condition as either of them now was. He mentally added this to his list of ‘ways Alec and Blaze are better than me at everything.’

As far as he’d ever been able to tell, being universally superior to him was the only thing they had in common. But he definitely needed to keep them both alive, and just because neither of them was hypothermic now didn’t mean they wouldn’t be in another 10 minutes. He started barking orders.

“Blaze, grab at least two logs from Alec’s fire and get them into the stairwell. Check on the Doc. Alec, grab the rear canoe with me. We’re going to sled it up to the entrance.”

To their credit, neither explorer paused, complained, or deviated from his plan. Blaze took longer than he’d have liked to pick the two BEST logs from the fire, but at least she should be warmer closer to the flames. Alec made it to the rear canoe, the one Mac hadn’t grabbed supplies from yet, before Mac could join him. Alec used the spare seconds to toss a few items from front canoe into the rear one.

The blizzard continued to worsen by the second, snow piling up and winds tearing at MacKenzie’s face as he joined Alec and the two of them took positions on either side of the canoe, propeling it toward the stairwell. The square of darkness in the snow-covered hill that was the stairwell entrance was quickly being hidden from sight by worsening whiteout conditions. Mac had seen weather come on hard and fast, seen people killed by it, but this was still TOO fast. The drag on his legs was heavier than the snow’s depth and wind’s intensity accounted for. And the canoe? First gliding easily over the frozen ground, now every meter of progress was met with a drag that began to make his muscles ache.

The sense of being watched, being judged and found wanting, grew as the blizzard strengthened and the ground itself seemed to wrestle with them. MacKenzie could not explain what faction or force meant them ill, or why, or even how it was manifesting the conditions that opposed their progress. But he no longer doubted there was some intelligence working in opposition to his expedition. They weren’t just fighting the elements. They were fighting some unseen, unknown enemy.

Fine. MacKenzie knew how to fight.