Chapter 4: Chapter 4: Of Battles New and Old

The fire had died out by the time Alice woke up. Its heat lingered in the small, round building despite the hole in the roof, leaving her feeling warm and content. Light was streaming into the room, of course, and dust danced in its wake. 

Her clothes had dried and Alice eagerly slipped them back on. They smelled of firewood and smoke. She laced up her boots and stood. Most of the soreness from the day before had gone away, leaving only the more persistent aches in her legs from all the climbing and walking. It was a damn sight better than the soul-deep ache Zeus had left after attempting to body jack her. Though, in light of that event, Alice felt almost suspiciously good.

She decided to deal with it later, if it became a problem. It almost certainly would, with Zeus at the root of the issue. But for now, she’d be thankful for the lack of pain even while cursing out the cause. 

Her backpack was thankfully still intact, hanging up in the air. It would really hurt, losing what provisions she had left. Especially so far from Anchorage. Normally, Alice would’ve been confident in her ability to forage up more food, but it could end up being a big issue with everything changed so much. She no longer had any idea what was safe to eat and drink. 

Trying to make what she had last until making it back to civilization seemed like the best course of action. It would be a lot easier if she had more than just four meals left, but nobody bothered telling her her weekend trip would be extended. 

Alice skipped breakfast in light of the food situation, setting off to the east immediately. A road of cobblestone and shale led out of the town, twisted and broken by the great-trees in places and encroached upon by dirt and plant life in others, nearly completely buried. Still, it was nearly a straight path away from the ruined buildings, and something told Alice there’d be more examples of an empty civilization along the way. Nobody built a road to nowhere, after all.

 

Walking along the twisted road gave her a good look at the forest itself, and how it had changed from even the day previous. 

There’d been a faint artificiality present, before. More a feeling than anything concrete, it had just seemed like the trees were planned, somehow. The ground had been naked, high quality soil. The great-trees had been the only vegetation present, though other plants had started popping up throughout the day. That was then. 

Looking around, vegetation abounded. Smaller trees had cropped up in the shadow of giants, and Alice had no idea how they were getting enough light or nutrition to support such rapid, unchecked growth. It shouldn’t even be possible for a tree to grow so much in a single day. 

The ground had been covered over by patches of hardy, resilient grass and various mosses, wildflowers popping out every now and then as if just adding color to the forest. Vicious brambles full of wild berries had appeared, not resembling any that Alice recognized. She’d never seen any wild fruit with that shade of almost neon pink before and trusted it was probably wildly poisonous.

The sounds of wildlife had started returning as well. The day before, Chugach had been eerily silent, only broken up by the burbling of the stream she’d followed and the moose. Though, that wasn’t to say the wildlife sounded normal. Birdsong trilled through the trees, yes, but it was of an unsettling quality, too high or too low, warbling wildly from one end to the other. Clacking almost like that of a woodpecker echoed through the forest, though the hits were spaced out more and from far off. She hadn’t heard anything from larger animals yet, but it was probably only a matter of time before Alice ran across another moose. Or, a bear. 

She really wasn’t looking forward to either occurrence. And it wasn’t like the threat was limited to those species. Realistically, wolves were always the biggest threat in the wilderness, but the pistol should have handled them well enough. Alice wasn’t sure how things would shake out after everything started mutating. If they turned out anything like the moose, the pistol wouldn’t cut it anymore. Which was a shame, since the wolves had been one of the reasons she’d bought the gun in the first place. 

 

Alice came across the first waystation about three hours into her hike. It was set to the side of the road and looked to have been a cozy spot to stop. Well, once. 

It was eroded worse than any of the buildings in town had been, the mortar between stone bricks having almost disintegrated. A wall had been scattered among the grass and dirt, almost thrown outward from the rest of the building. Without that wall, everything else had sagged in place, and the second floor was almost touching ground level. 

Frankly, the fact that the building was standing at all was remarkable. She’d run electrical cables through modern steel and concrete buildings which would have fared less well.

Less remarkable was the god leaning against a lone pillar of brick which might have once held up the roof of a stable. 

“This place tells an interesting story, if you know where to look,” he remarked. 

Alice ignored him. Her eyes were hurting again. Was it something to do with his appearance? 

“Take the construction, for instance. Perfectly regular stone, masterfully shaped into exactly the same shape thousands of times with exacting precision. And it’s all quarried stone, hewn from natural rock. It must have taken a lot of time to achieve this, but the results seem to have withstood the test of time in a quite literal way. I find myself impressed. The design of the building itself is nothing remarkable, but the way this wall fell out is,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect. Alice didn’t look at him. He barreled on anyway. “It was blown out!” he passionately explained, like she was listening intently. “As if someone threw a boulder against it from the inside! But, there is nothing large enough to have done such a thing. Not here, at the very least.” 

Alice could feel Zeus’s eyes on her, staring expectantly. She very carefully didn’t look. 

“It presents an intriguing mystery, does it not, my vessel?” he asked. And, rather than waiting for an answer, vanished into mist soon after.

Alice wondered what the point of his appearance had been, before resolving to put it out of her mind. Even if his words had enkindled a slight curiosity. She very consciously pushed the burgeoning interest aside. A lot of mysteries had ended up materializing in the Alaskan wilderness, but her primary goal hadn’t changed. 

Get back to Anchorage.

 

Everything else could wait. 

Shaking her head, Alice moved on from the ruined waystation. 

 

There were, however, curiosites she could ponder while walking. 

Like, for instance, Alice’s wayward compass. It had continued to simply spin wildly, never settling on a direction for more than a few seconds at a time. It was odd, and she had no easy explanation for the phenomenon. The easiest solutions would simply be that something had stripped the magnetic properties from the compass’s needle. Another magnetic field of sufficient strength could have done it. A continuous field would have simply realigned the compass to a new ‘north’. To send the compass into aimless drifting, a much stronger magnetic field would be required. But any of a sufficient enough strength would have also broken her phone, which was working just fine. It wasn’t connecting to cell service, sure, but that was normal for the Alaskan wilderness. 

Alternatively, she could simply be standing on top of a new true north, at one of the poles. It seemed unlikely though, to say the least.

The local magnetic field could just be really messed up, for whatever reason. There could be a bunch of magnetic metals in the area screwing with the compass. Point was, there were a number of things it could have been but they all led to the practical reality—her compass was useless. 

Normally, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Alice knew how to find her heading through the stars and the sun. However, that only applied when she could see the sky above. At the moment, walking under the great-trees which had grown out of nowhere, there was a rather dense canopy blocking everything above it. The forest was unexpectedly dark because of it, and Alice had no clue if the road she was following remained a straight line. 

But, what was she supposed to do about it? Climbing the trees to get above the canopy was a non-starter. They were too big. There wasn’t a way to check the sky, so she was left simply hoping that the road led in the right direction. 

Hopefully, she’d find a clearing sooner or later. 

 

In the meantime, the road continued on. 

Alice stopped for brunch sometime in the middle of the afternoon, after a full day of walking. The road felt straight, but it was impossible to tell without any references, and she’d been hungry for a while at that point. She carried on after finishing the dry, military style rations. 

She’d been walking for another thirty or so minutes when Zeus showed up again. She came around the side of a great-tree which had grown in the middle of the small road and there he was, lounging against the side of another tree. Her eyes briefly stung. 

“Watch out, there’s something up above,” he unexpectedly cautioned. 

Alice sighed and decided her safety was more important than ignoring Zeus’s extraordinary punchable face. 

“What is it?” she asked, gruffly. 

“Dunno,” Zeus remarked, shrugging lackadaisically. “Some sort of pit. There’s a fight going on. Be ready.” 

Then he vanished. 

Shaking her head and huffing, Alice pulled out her bear spray and made sure the pistol was easily drawable. The road was clear for the small amount not obscured by the trunks of great-trees, and she felt like whatever Zeus was warning about waited behind the next tree growing through the middle of it. She could hear something, just faintly. It got louder as she approached, until a very loud, very pissed off roar split the day’s relative peace, interspersed by smaller sounds. 

Alice cautiously rounded the great-tree and noted that the ground fell away past it. Indeed, into some sort of pit, though the word didn’t do any justice to the massive section of forest which had simply been scooped away, leaving desolate piles of shrubbery to grow among solid Alaskan bedrock, dotted by the dark entrances of caves. A familiar glowing river was slowly trickling into the pit from one of the caves, forming a small lake at the bottom. It was shaped like a very, very large bowl. 

There was also a bear fighting off a bunch of wolves next to the small lake. 

 

A bus sized bear. With armor that looked like thick bone plates growing on it. At Alice watched, it breathed a gout of noxious flames at a slower wolf. It started making soundless yelping motions as fur caught on fire, dooming it to a painful, drawn out death. At least, until the mammoth jaws of the bone bear snapped around its head with an audible crunch. 

It was at this point that Alice realized that the bone bear didn’t have eyes. Smooth bone plating had grown over the bear’s entire face, entirely eliminating that particular weak spot in a bear’s anatomy, but also divesting it entirely of sight. 

The bear was striking based on sound and smell alone. 

It was also bleeding quite a bit. The wolves hadn’t been able to get through the armor plates, but they had managed to hit the bear’s less armored underbelly. Dark fur had turned even darker from the blood pouring from those long gashes and bites. 

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Of course, the wolves were able to do this because they’d been changed, too. 

The bear was evolving a better defense and fire-breath. The wolves had gone another direction. 

They were darting around the bear silently, like shadows on the ground. Faster than she’d thought possible. One ran under the bear, leaving another wound with a flash of something white. Teeth or claws. The entire pack was in motion, and Alice couldn’t make out any fine details. They hadn’t gotten any bigger, at least, not like the moose or the bear had. Both had been far larger than they should have been; the bear by a factor of at least three. No, if anything, the wolves seemed to have shrunk a little, becoming more lithe and agile. They coordinated together extremely well, moving like a tide of shadows while harrying the bear, striking and fading back into the pack’s embrace without a sound. 

But the bear wasn’t going down without a fight. Alice had already watched it catch one wolf with a fire-breath attack, and it seemingly ignored the rest of the pack in order to eat the charred remains, no matter how many injuries it accumulated while doing so. It was odd behavior, almost entirely removed from how a bear would normally react. It was a bad sign. Normally bears wouldn’t be hostile towards humans. Would this one be? 

It finished off the dead wolf, vanishing the entire carcass in massive, violent bites. The bear turned, tracking the main bulk of the silent pack effortlessly. One shot in from behind, trying to strike the bear’s underside. It was too slow. The bear lashed out with a massive paw, and Alice heard the cracking of bones from the lip of the bowl. The wolf tried limping away, and Alice finally got a good look at the changes which had infected them. 

Her comparison to shadows was a good one, since they churned off the wolf’s matte black fur like mist in the air. Baleful red eyes were fixed upon the bear over wicked white teeth, snarling silently. The wolf’s legs were armored, thin bone plates theoretically providing protection without the sacrifice of speed. Its claws gleamed cruelly, designed for hooking and tearing apart flesh. 

The bear stomped on the wolf’s head and it snarled no longer, becoming another meal to fuel the bear’s defense. The death didn’t deter the rest of the pack. If anything, they became more vicious, more willing to commit to causing harm regardless of the injuries inflicted in turn. 

Alice watched three more deaths in short order. None of them were the bear, which had slowed down but not enough to be felled any time soon. It acted like the juggernaut it had become. 

They were fighting a war of attrition for some reason. The wolves could have—should have left the bear alone as soon as it became clear killing it would wipe out most of the pack. For some reason, they hadn’t, and that was scarier than the bear could ever be. The wolves wouldn’t stop until their prey was dead. 

What would happen if they decided Alice was the prey? Would all the wildlife she encountered act like this? 

She shuddered, ill at ease. None of what was happening seemed natural. No being would display such callous disregard for their own lives. It went against everything evolution taught them. 

 

The bear breathed fire again, this time catching a good swath of the wolf pack and lighting a good half dozen of them on fire. Chaos spread. The fire stuck like napalm. One of the wolves leapt into the pool of glowing water at the center of the bowl. It didn’t surface. 

Suddenly, on the turn of a dime, the fight came to a climax. 

There were only five wolves left. The bear was hurting, but seemed fully capable of fighting off another pack. Alice didn’t think it was bleeding as heavily as it had been.

The much reduced pack still circled the bear. 

Suddenly, change struck like lightning. All the wolves attacked at once, nothing held back. A couple clamped onto individual limbs, restricting the bear’s motion but not overly much. It simply had too much mass to be bothered much by fleshy little fetters. 

One wolf went for the bear’s face, clawing and biting at what little remained vulnerable under the encompassing bone plating. The bear’s nose, its ears, the throat; all were valid targets. The wolf struck truly and the bear bellowed out in pain. One of the wolf’s legs accidentally fell into the open maw, and it lost that leg in short order. 

The remaining two wolves raked the bear’s underbelly even more, forgoing the hit and run tactics to simply deal as much pain and damage they could. The bear’s titanic entrails hit the ground soon after, gently smoking in the Alaskan air. One of the wolves crawled up inside the bear, and more blood soon hit the ground. The other got unfortunately underfoot of the bear and squished. 

The two wolves clinging to the bear’s legs got scraped off with prejudice and pulped against the ground. Alice learned that there was a surprising amount of blood in a wolf’s body. 

 

Two wolves left. One was legless and clinging to the bone plating of the bear’s face. A single mistake would see it dead. The other was inside the bear, presumably performing a blender impression on its internals. Blood was fountaining out of the wound it had used to get inside the bear. 

And then it was fire cascading out. 

Alice guessed that the inside wolf had found whatever organ allowed the bear to breathe fire. And shredded it. Apparently it was volatile. And near some vital organs, because the bear fell right afterwards, cooking in its own fire. The smell was horrifying. The sizzling was even more so. 

That left but a single combatant still standing, though still grievously injured. It didn’t appear to care, immediately feasting on the bear. 

 

She stared in horrified awe. 

It was like something from a story. One that she’d want to be far, far away from. Alice stood up, using the distraction of the wolf’s feast to skirt around the bowl, continuing on her way. 

At least, until the ground underneath Alice gave out.

 

She fell down the lip of the bowl, tumbling violently and cursing up a storm, dirt and hair getting everywhere. She came to a stop at the bottom on her hands and knees. The rolling hadn’t helped the nausea she’d already felt because of the slaughter going on below. 

In the bowl. 

Where she had just fallen. 

 

Alice looked up, through a curtain of her own hair. The bear carcass wasn’t more than ten meters away from her. 

The last wolf had vanished. 

Hands frantically flying, Alice tried to find her bear-spray and couldn’t. She’d been holding it at the top of the bowl, it must have been knocked away by the fall. Small mercy that it hadn’t sprayed in her face on the way down, at least. 

That left the pistol, which she drew without hesitation, thumbing the safety off.

With gun in hand, Alice stood up, and spun in a slow circle, eyes open and ears straining to find any sign of the last wolf. It was only after facing towards the bear again that she spotted the shadow silently crawling along the ground towards her, red eyes just barely visible. 

She stared at the shadow. It stared back. 

Neither moved.

Alice raised her gun. 

 

It leapt at her just after the first bullet hit. 

The second and third brought the wolf’s charge to a halt and sent it slumping to the ground. 

She’d aimed for the head. It had happened very quickly. 

The ringing in her ears would take a while to go away. But it would eventually fade. 

The reminder that the wildlife in Alaska was fully willing to kill her wouldn’t.

It was a sobering splash of reality. 

Alice looked around her, at the carnage. 

 

She wished she had more bullets.  

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