Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1)

by Ellis, Jennifer

  Occasionally, between blasts of wind, she could hear the nervous yips of the dogs, and the cries for help continued to invade her senses, like a siren luring her in. Sasha shook herself awake. She had drifted off to sleep imagining Edie and Cal as possessed beings enticing them out of the station. And then there was Robert. Where was he? And who had attacked Robert and Amber? Timber wouldn’t have done it. And why were they all blind? With Soren gone, Sasha found herself starting to tremble from more than just the cold.

  A snarling rose up in the pack of dogs behind her, and Sasha shrank against the wall. What did they see or smell that she couldn’t?

  The snarling turned into savage barks, and then a squealing growling fight broke out that all of the dogs seemed to be engaged in. Sasha had heard dogs fight before. But there was a hideous seriousness to this conflict that made her light-headed. Maybe it was one of the rogue polar bears, or more than one. Whatever the dogs were fighting was letting loose its own shrieks and grunts—high-pitched, determined, guttural sounds that she had never before heard from the dogs…or any animal. She had to get Soren. She tugged on the rope around her waist and then heaved on it. The sharp yelps and growls of the dogs escalated, and it sounded like someone, or something, was being rended to bits.

  She yanked on the rope again. This time there was slack. Maybe they were coming back. She started to haul the rope back through her hands, feeding it onto the floor beside her, while the wild conflict in the bay continued.

  Length after length, she pulled in the rope, expecting at any second for it to go taut, held fast by Kyle and Soren’s bodies. But as she pulled one more length in, she realized the she held the end in her hands. Kyle and Soren were not longer attached to it.

  They were somewhere outside the bay in the storm, while something raged against the dogs inside.

  She risked calling “Soren!” and then “Kyle!” once. But there was no response, and she did not want to draw attention to herself.

  Blind, freezing, and alone with some sort of unnamable predator, Sasha started to break down. Tears pooled in her eyes and streamed down her face. She groped at the rope around her waist with her stiff uncooperative fingers. She needed to untie herself and get inside the station, and hope that whatever it was that was fighting with the dogs didn’t notice her… and couldn’t turn door handles. Soren had given her the keys to the gun locker. She would go and get a gun, and shoot sightless into the night, and hope to hit the right thing. The din in the bay had somehow become slightly more subdued, not because the conflict had ceased, but because there seemed to be fewer dogs contributing to the noise. Did that mean some of them were already dead?

  She let go of the rope and started to inch her way back along the rail to the station door. Even though the violent altercation continued, it seemed to be growing infinitesimally more distant, as if the combatants were moving closer to the bay door. Sasha picked up her pace a bit, keeping her coat-sleeve covered hand on the rail. The ground smoothed out beneath her. She was on the cement pad near the door now.

  Abruptly, the fighting ceased. She froze. The remaining howls and barking of the dogs were far in the distance now, and the fury of the storm echoed in her ears. Where had the dogs gone? “Soren,” she called again. “Kyle?” “Timber?” The presence of the dogs, even fully engaged in battle, had been comforting, and in their absence she started to tremble outright.

  Then she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the cement, getting louder. “Soren,” she called again. “Kyle?” Then she cycled through Robert, Edie, and Cal to no avail. Nobody answered her. The footsteps continued, and she heard the tick of claws on the cement, but whatever was approaching her was too heavy to be one of the dogs. The sub-zero temperature seemed to plummet another few degrees, and Sasha once again caught a whiff of decaying fish.

  “Soren,” she screamed at the top of her voice this time.

  “Drop!” Soren’s voice cut through the roar of the storm.

  Sasha fell to her knees, lay flat, and laced her hands behind the back of her neck as gunfire reverberated through the metal bay. A bullet hit the wall behind her, followed by another, and another. Sasha whimpered on the ground, and something close to her emitted a hideous unearthly scream. There was another gunshot, and then the sound of retreating claws.

  She remained kneeling on the ground with her eyes closed—unnecessarily of course, she couldn’t see anything—until more footsteps approached, and she felt the cold nose of a dog against her cheek and solid impact of shins against her side. Human hands reached down and pulled her to her feet, while Tundra continued to nudge at her.

  “It’s me,” Soren said. “Are you okay? I didn’t hit you, did I?”

  Sasha shook her head, mute, and then remembered Soren couldn’t see either. “I’m okay.”

  “Loop your arm through mine. I don’t think we should risk getting separated again. I’m closing the bay door.”

  “Where’s Kyle?”

  Soren tucked her arm into his, and started to guide her back in the direction of the panel that controlled the bay door. “I don’t know. Gone. Lost. Something happened to the rope. It was like it was cut or something. I yelled for Kyle like a lunatic. And Edie and Cal and Robert. But nobody answered me. At first I kept hearing the cries for help, but they seemed to be just getting further and further away, like something was trying to draw me away from the station. When I heard the dogs fighting, I turned back. It was a good thing I had Tundra on a lead. He brought me back, but he was going crazy wanting to get back and help out the pack.”

  “What were they fighting with?”

  “Dunno. From the sound of the claws and the weight of the tread, and the fact that the dogs went loony, I’d say a polar bear.” Soren stopped, and seemed to be touching his hand against the bay wall. He found what he was looking for and the rumble of the large bay door closing followed.

  They automatically leaned together for warmth in the frigid air. Sasha’s shivers tumbled through her in waves and her teeth had started to chatter uncontrollably. There was some warmth to be had from Soren, but he seemed to be shaking too. “Aren’t you worried about locking Kyle, Edie, and Cal out? And what about the dogs?” she managed to say through clattering lips.

  “They know where the side door is. They’ll come and buzz if they’re anywhere around. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of the dogs are lying there dead. The rest of them are gone. Without our sight, we’re pretty much sitting ducks out here. We need to get inside and warm up, get back on that radio, and hope that help shows up. I’ll suit up properly in a bit and come back out and look for them, but right now, if we stay out here in this cold, we’ll just be adding our own names to the body count.”

  Sasha wanted to say something about the dogs, but she was too numb, and she allowed Soren to lead her back to the station door. The quivering body of a dog was pressed against the threshold. A smaller dog. Cedar. They opened the door and Timber’s low whine greeted them, and Sasha felt Tundra give a rumbling howl in response. Soren pushed Sasha, Cedar, and Tundra into the station and closed the door behind them. Soren never let the dogs come inside. Somehow, this more than anything reinforced the gravity of their situation.

  She fell to the ground as her knees, stiff from the cold, crumpled, and buried her head in Timber’s fur.

  Soren shoved wood into the wood stove that heated the common area and stoked the fire. Then they both stood as close to the stove as they dared, letting the heat bathe their faces and hands.

  “Do you really think that was a polar bear?” Sasha said after a bit. “Would it have screamed like that?”

  “I don’t see what else it could have been.”

  “Hmm,” she replied, noncommittally.

  For the next two hours, they took turns on the radio, flipping through each channel one by one, stating their situation and asking for help. Sometimes they heard people speaking in other strange languages or the crazy lady talking about the dragon. Other times, they got static. But th
ey got no response from Retort Air Force Base. They tried the sat phone, but couldn’t get a signal, and eventually Soren swore and threw it across the desk. They rinsed their eyes repeatedly, and placed eyewash inside the east wing for Amber, who once again told them to get lost. After equipping Sasha with a gun, Soren put on his full outer gear several times and went out with Tundra to call for Kyle, Edie, Cal, Robert, and the other dogs, leaving Sasha to listen to every tick and bump in the station, but each time he came back alone. They decided on a safe word—Franklin—that Soren would say whenever he returned so she didn’t shoot him. Of course, it would require an incredible stroke of luck for her to hit anything blind. She hadn’t been a great shot when she could see.

  Sasha tried sending a few distress emails, but she couldn’t see what she was typing or even if she was in the email application. She moved the mouse to where she thought the application was and double-clicked, but for all she knew she was just typing randomly to herself.

  The storm beat against the station all night, and by the time Sasha’s stomach told her it might be morning, she lay on the couch trying to nap, while Soren doggedly worked his way through the channels another time. Timber lay at her feet, and Tundra and Cedar lay by the door of the station growling intermittently.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell Soren that she didn’t think his efforts with the radio would be of any use. She had minored in linguistics in university, and she was pretty much completely certain that the languages that the people were speaking over the radio didn’t exist. It also occurred to her that strangely, Kyle had never asked for the eyewash.

  And then there was the issue of what she was quite sure she had heard the polar bear say just before Soren had started shooting.

  Perfect. She was pretty certain it had said perfect.

  Chapter 4 – Day of Dark

  When it seemed like it was very likely day, Soren and Sasha made their way to the kitchen and prepared toast, their movements measured and careful. They opened the door to the sleeping wing and called out to Amber, but she did not reply. They left a plate of toast on the floor just inside the corridor, and relocked the door.

  They ate in silence and then remained sitting at the table. Sasha wondered if they were looking at each other. The storm had lessened overnight, but still railed against the windows. Nobody had rung the buzzer on the external station door.

  “Now what?” she asked finally.

  Soren hesitated for a second before replying. “The storm’s died down a bit. I think we go out looking for the others and take the portable radio and see if we can get a better signal somewhere else. Based on the way they’re moving around the station, I think the dogs can see. They’d be freaking out if they couldn’t. So maybe Tundra can guide us, and I have a voice-activated GPS somewhere. Then we can at least be sure we can find our way back. But you can stay here if you want.”

  She pictured his earnest face across the table from her. Being sightless on an ice plain in an Arctic hurricane with whatever had attacked the dogs was hardly on her top ten list of Arctic adventures, but she couldn’t let him go alone.

  The GPS was located after turning out the contents of several drawers. “I never did care much for the thing talking to me,” Soren said, as he checked the batteries.

  After explaining their plans to Amber through the crack of the east wing door, and asking her to relinquish the gun, which was met with open hostility and threats, they piled survival bars just inside the wing and relocked the door.

  “It’s not like she can’t escape through the emergency exit,” Soren said when they discussed the ethics of keeping Amber locked up. “This just prevents her from bursting in on us here in the station.”

  They suited up in their long underwear, fleece mid-layers, parkas, and snow pants and packed water, hot shots, survival bars for two days, ropes, and climbing gear. At the last minute, Soren went back into the station to collect a tent and some sleeping bags. Sasha supposed that the good thing about everyone being blind was that Soren couldn’t see her expression at the prospect of needing the tent. Maybe in a world of blind people, she could come across as a tougher and cooler person than she was.

  In the bay, Soren hitched Tundra to a sled. Tundra was unusually skittish, lunging and pulling at the leash, and Soren had to raise his voice to get the dog under control. Sasha was just thankful neither of them tripped over any dead bodies. The faint smell told her what Soren had not yet informed her after all his trips outside the previous night—something or someone had died there. Kyle? Robert? One of the dogs? It seemed bizarre not to know, to ignore the stink and carry on.

  Once she, Soren, and Tundra were all tied to the sled, they opened the bay door and headed out. The storm had diminished into a comparatively gentle squall. Ice and snow no longer pelted their faces, and the wind did not seem so determined to rip them from their feet. It seemed almost…warm. Well, warm for the Arctic fall. If the temperature had risen a few hours ago, it was possible Kyle, Edie, Cal, and Robert were still alive. That is if the weather had been their only adversary. Sasha suppressed a shudder and resisted pointlessly glancing over her shoulder to see if anything was behind them.

  They agreed to head northwest in the direction of the warming hut for a few miles. This would put them between a couple of the eastern coastal mountains from a radio perspective, and Soren was hoping to pick up a signal from Greenland. Since Tundra alone could not pull them both, one person would ride, while the other jogged, switching off to keep up their stamina and pace. They had briefly considered taking out one of the machines, but decided driving blind was out of the question, given the sheer cliffs to the both east and northwest. Sasha prayed that Tundra could in fact see.

  Soren ordered the GPS to mark their current location as the home base waypoint, and the GPS responded affirmatively. “All right,” he said to Tundra. “Don’t let me down, buddy. Haw. Easy.” Sasha gripped the handles of the sled as Tundra set off over the white plain, Soren’s booted footfalls crunching in the snow beside her.

  They turned to the left out of the station and traveled for a few seconds before Soren addressed the GPS again. “Take us on a 315 degree heading northwest,” he said. It was his best guess regarding the direction of the hut. Soren, not surprisingly, didn’t have the lat long memorized, and they could hardly consult the map of northern Ellesmere that hung over the lab desk. Until last night, she and Soren had lived so very thoroughly in a sighted person’s world. It was surreal to travel through utter nothingness and know that light was in fact all around them.

  “Turn 100 degrees to the right and head straight 315 degrees northwest,” the GPS responded.

  Soren’s let out a frustrated exhale. “I hate these stupid things. We’re facing north. Why is it instructing us to turn around?”

  “Maybe it’s confused. It probably wants lat long coordinates, or UTM,” Sasha said. “Do you know any lat long coordinates around here? Could you guesstimate them maybe?”

  “No. I know we’re 82 degrees north by 80 degrees west. But that refers to the whole northwestern part of the island. Goddamn technology. I’d give my ass for a braille compass right now.”

  Despite the circumstances, Sasha giggled at Soren’s comment, or perhaps it was the thought of his ass. She was drunk on exhaustion and blindness.

  “Okay GPS, take us due North.”

  “Turn 122.5 degrees to your right and head due North,” the electronic voice offered.

  “That’s almost due South, you blasted thing,” Soren barked.

  “Maybe we should just head the direction we think the hut is and use the GPS to get back. Surely it’ll trace our route,” Sasha said.

  Soren ignored her. “GPS take us to 76 degrees north by 80 degrees west.”

  “Remain on your current heading to 76 degrees north by 80 degrees west.”

  “This thing is totally back to front. 76 degrees north is due south of here, and it’s telling us to go north to get there. I hate technology.”

&nb
sp; Sasha imagined that if they had not been in such dire circumstances that Soren would have chucked the GPS as far as he could in disgust. Perhaps he had.

  “So what do we do?”

  “We carry on the way we think we need to go and lay waypoints. Hopefully this stupid thing will at least allow us to retrace our steps.”

  They continued on for a bit, stopping every hundred yards or so to call for the others, only to have their words thrust back at them in the storm. The wind, while still whipping into the hood of her parka and making her eyes water, was positively balmy by Arctic standards at times. But then it would shift direction to come from behind them and become icy again.

  “The wind is all wrong,” Soren muttered after a bit.

  Sasha knew the prevailing winds at the Arctic were the Polar Easterlies, which blew east to west—the icy winds that were currently slamming them from behind—but the warm winds were blowing west to east. She had assumed that this happened sometimes in storms.

  “You’ve never seen this before?” she asked.

  “Never,” Soren said firmly.

  “Do you want to try getting a radio or sat phone signal from here?” she asked. Looking for the others in this condition was, in her opinion, as good as useless.

  “We haven’t come far enough to be out of the lee of the mountain,” Soren replied.

  They continued on until Tundra came to an abrupt stop, barked, and veered right, almost throwing Sasha off the sled.

  “Soren!” she cried, but it was too late, Soren’s yell of surprise came an instant later, and she felt movement in the rope around her waist that attached her to Soren.

  “I’m falling! Plant your ice axe!”

  Falling? Into what? A crevasse? Why would there be a crevasse here? Where were they? Sasha fumbled with the axe that Soren had fastened at her waist. The rope snapped taut, and Sasha was jerked off the sled onto her knees, and started to slide in the direction of Soren’s yells. She reared up and drove her ice axe as deep into the snow as she could. It caught and held. The weight of Soren’s sudden stop on the straps of her harness almost took her breath away, and she nearly released her grip on the axe. She could feel him scrambling about on the other end of the rope to get a foothold, the rope alternately slackening and pulling tight. Her ice axe was too loose and she could feel it carving a trench in the snow as inch by inch she was dragged towards Soren. But if she pulled it out and drove it in again, she could be pulled over the edge too.