The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves (108 page)

In a flash, Mr. Patas was
at his side, the loud scrape of his gigantic toenails against the
stone floor rousing everyone that hadn’t already been awakened by
the racket of the great feline.

Garfield followed a
heartbeat later, his long razor-sharp claws fully extended, rasping
and scratching. It was no longer about being stealthy.

At that moment, Joaquin
understood, if they’d been discovered, then this would be a fight
to the death, silence was no longer necessary.

“
Patas what do you see?”
came the rumbling question from Kodiak, like boulders churning in
her throat.

“
The blanket covering the
entrance is moving… from the outside, in,” he answered at once as
the huge bear-dogs came forward.

“
Daughter, you and Mugzy
have the children,” was all she said as the rest of the Fist moved
forward in unison.

Kenai and the man-dog
stood before the sleeping area where rest of the Twelve were
sitting up, rubbing sleep from their eyes, trying to figure out
what was going on.

Mr. Patas used an arm to
put Joaquin behind him as Garfield took the point, the rabbit-man
and the bear-dog flanking him.

“
What’s happening, Kenai?”
Mikalah said in a sharp, piping voice, shaking with
fear.

Joaquin heard the bear-dog
mumble something to the girl, but couldn’t make it out. His focus
was forward. His vision was riveted to the furniture pad as it
moved almost unperceptively at first, billowing of a sudden. As a
group, they all braced for an attack…

This is it!
he thought just as…

“
Fist ready!” shouted
Kodiak, the cave resounding painfully with her booming
voice.

That was when he saw
something he’d been longing to see for some days now. The breath
caught in his chest as the heavy blanket ballooned inward, curling
onto itself, so a tiny portion of what lay beyond was visible. It
was only a sliver, but it was enough to discern –
sunlight.

The Sun!

They all froze for a
second time, still unsure of what to do.

Then came a growl, deep,
from a huge chest. It wasn’t like one any of the Fist would
make.

Garfield lunged forward,
his claws scraping the entire way until, in an incredibly fast
motion, he plunged them into the fabric and pulled the entire
blanket down from its’ moorings.

Joaquin saw the massive
muscles in Garfield’s flanks go rigid with shock. The large teen
edged his way forward, pushing Mr. Pata’s protective hand aside. He
was just in time to see the long rope-like
thing
slither the remainder of the
way up and over the barrier of snow that had drifted so high within
the passage, it had filled it to capacity. He couldn’t help but
notice the stained pink jeans and the white socks with bright blue
soles that Sophie had worn since her arrival onto the Melded
World.

“
Oh my god, a Crawling
Creep…,” he muttered under his breath, but, that was all he had
time to say.

As they watched the
bizarre creature disappear, another replaced it. It was a dog about
the size of a German Sheppard. Only it was black with the short
hair of a Rottweiler and the musculature to match. Yet, it was
clearly not a dog of that specific breed. Its’ jaws were too wide,
its’ teeth and fangs were too long. Its’ face, when they stared at
it closely, didn’t seem all that dog-like. Its’ snout was
pushed-in. Its’ nose was arched, prominent, a forehead and chin
distinct features about its’ skull.

Joaquin scowled, a
solitary thought coming to mind.
It looks
like the deformed head of a man.

Then, thoughts that
weren’t his own washed over him.
Isig-Pjäs
– the dog-like overlords of the Hël-Hünds; can only be controlled
by the will of a Prēost or a Dēowulf; extremely smart, near
man-like intelligence; extremely dangerous.

It was standing there upon
the rocky barrier concealing the cave, a very unsettling, very
human-like grin on its’ face. It was looking at them with insane
glee.

“
I’ve seen that thing
before!” yelled Anthony from further back in the cave, pointing,
stepping forward.

“
Stay back!” commanded
Kenai, her voice a near roar.

“
At last, I have found
you,” rasped the terrible beast through a vicious snarl.

“
Enough!” bellowed
Garfield and lunged.

He never got further than
two feet.

From above, in varying
parts of the cave, fell strange blob-like creatures, pinkish in
color, no more than a foot long and half that wide, egg-shaped,
stretching, elongating as they searched for purchase like huge,
plump earthworms.

One them fell across the
hind-quarters of Garfield and for the first time since he’d known
him, Joaquin heard the mighty feline scream.

~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼
}>>>>>>~~~~~~~~

Invasion

Day Four, Sunday, 6:51
am…

Anthony saw the great cat
leap forward as more than a score grotesque-looking,
slugs-like
things
fell from among the stalactites. They cascaded all about the
cave, but were concentrated the most heavily about their makeshift
beds.
Oh god, they were going to drop on
us en mass while we slept!
he had just the
time to think before he heard Garfield yowl in pain.

His eyes shifted toward
the scene before the entrance of the cave, seeing Garfield twist
away from some unknown assailant just as the massive jaws of the
Isig-Pjäs bit into the left hand side of his chest. The impact sent
them both deeper into the cave in a heap.

Kodiak and Mr. Patas
immediately took flanking positions, making ready to dislodge the
smaller, more agile beast from their fellow Fistian when Joaquin
yelled, pointing outside.

“
Hël-Hünds!” was all he
managed to say before he accidently stepped upon one of the giant,
pink slugs, his voice suddenly caught in his throat.

Anthony was caught between
dueling visions. He saw the large teen kick his foot outward, in an
attempt to dislodge the worm-like creature from his lower
extremity, only to see it hold fast, a sickly steam beginning to
waft off Joaquin’s boot. A split-second later, he saw two more
dog-like beasts breach the threshold of the cave only these ones
didn’t have the deformed skull of a man. These beasts were clearly
something else.
Hël-Hünds
, Joaquin had yelled. The
name was apt, for they looked like dogs straight out of
hell.

They were squat and
heavily muscled, running on short, thick legs that powered over the
rock and snow. With short, somewhat pushed-in snouts, their heavily
drooping jowls dripped with long streamers of saliva. Their ears
were short, laid back against their skulls. Their coats were a
piebald mixture of black and browns, splotched with an occasional
white. Though they didn’t have large fangs, they possessed powerful
jaws, strong enough to break through the thickest human bones
without a moment’s hesitation. Even from across the cave, he could
see their glowing eyes, bobbing orbs of crimson, twin sets of angry
fire-flies darting about their sanctuary.

That was when he gazed
beyond them and saw more and more of those hate-filled, gleaming
eyes. There had to be at least a dozen of them, but he couldn’t
tell for certain. They had only paused for a moment.

Kodiak and Mr. Patas
rounded on them, roaring and hissing respectively.

From a few steps before
him, Kenai and Mugzy charged and so did the Hël-Hünds. Ululations
and screeches resounded painfully off the walls of the
cave.

Everything seemed to be
happening at once, but Anthony saw it all with stark clarity, down
to the minutest of detail. He knew his heart should be pounding in
his chest. He knew he should be paralyzed with fear and maybe he
was. Only, he didn’t know it. He didn’t feel it.

There was an odd tingling
arching across the front of his forehead, a streak of electrical
current shooting up his spine, a nervous pain surging through his
fingers and toes - inward, upward. For him, there was nothing else.
When they combined somewhere in the center of him, he jolted as if
shocked by electricity. Everything slowed, or so it seemed. The
entire scene before him unfolded as if he’d been blind to more than
half it a second prior, though the lighting in the cave had been
sufficient enough for him to see perfectly. It was a different sort
of light, a new sort of perspective. It was as though a fog had
been lifted from his mind. The truth of the world about him was
abruptly revealed.

Oddly, he thought back,
more than a week ago, when he’d been playing video games with his
uncle and they couldn’t lose. He had seen things happen before they
had within the game. They’d had an unfair advantage because of
it.

This was the same. This is
what it was to truly
see
.

In that second, he
understood. He accepted it and every aspect of reality it implied.
He
was
the
Kring-Hël. He was the center. He was the middle that held the
Twelve together. He was Anthony Herrera, Leader of the Guardians of
Man.

A calm that shouldn’t have
been in his breast steadied him. A long breath issued forth from
his lungs. His eyes flashed about the cave, never lingering in any
given place for long, but it was enough. He only needed a glance.
In his mind, unbelievable calculations began to tumble, line after
line, equations solved in fractions of a second – velocity,
vectors, gravitational relationships, friction, air-pressure, mass,
density, probability – the list went on and on. He was able to make
decisions before he knew he had actually made them.

“
Elena!” he yelled of a
sudden.

His tiny sister yelped at
his side.

“
Take care of that,” he
commanded, pointing toward Joaquin, who was dancing about the cave
with one of those strange slugs stuck fast to his boot. “There is
little time, Ellie. It is eating through his shoe.”

There was something in her
brother’s tone that galvanized her, something demanding her
attention, her focus. She responded in kind. Her mind was really
not her own.

The cave went dark for no
more than a blink of an eye. All the light suddenly consumed,
pulled within chest of the nine-year-old girl. She giggled with
joy, as though she’d been tickled, and released it.

As fast as the speed of
light, a sparkling web of smoldering, red fire enveloped the
worm-ish thing about Joaquin’s foot. It lasted for no more than a
second. The creature fell to the floor, charred through and
through.

The Fist and the Hël-Hünds
were now a roiling mass of teeth and claws, blocking the entire
front of the cave.

Joaquin was limp-skipping
around a dozen or so of the ugly slug-beasts, skirting past the
privy crack, angling around the fire pit, trying to get closer to
the rest fo them.

“
Mikalah, bring wood, as
much and as fast as you can,” directed Anthony. “The rest of you,
rebuild the fire, except Jason.” He peered over at the Asian boy.
“You’re with me.”

Suddenly, there was a huge
wind, hurtling back and forth within the cave, as if the storm of
the past few days had taken root within. A few feet from the fire
pit an inordinate pile of wood began to grow as if it were growing
out of the rock itself. But, it wasn’t. It was Mikalah streaking to
the far end of the cave and back faster than any of them could
follow.

“
What do you want me to
do?” asked Jason, bewildered.

“
Grab wood, one for each
hand,” Anthony replied sternly.

Already, the others were
throwing log after log into the fire pit. It didn’t take long.
Soon, there was a bonfire raging at the middle of the
cave.

*****

Garfield shook with all of
his might, trying desperately to dislodge the burning fire stuck
onto his hips near the base of his tail. It was difficult with the
Isig-Pjäs trying to shred the muscles of his chest. He was only
able to grind the slimy creature into the ground.