The Shackleton station.
She pulled the snowmobile right up close to the station, parked it, and walked over to the station door. She could hear the echoes of the buzzer inside the station, and the howls and barks of at least two huskies followed. A dog sled much like Soren’s was parked just to the right of the door.
A few minutes later the door swung open to reveal Gregor, the dark-haired man they had met before. An older copper and white husky pushed past him, sniffed Sasha, and then howled a greeting. Then Sasha was nearly bowled over by another dog, leaping and barking a welcome. Cedar. What was Cedar doing here?
“Welcome,” Gregor said with a faint Russian accent. “To the Shackleton station. I understand this is not how your history went down. Come in. I have someone here who’s very anxious to see you.”
Sasha felt a strange leap of hope that it was Soren, but was not surprised to see Vincent sitting at the station table.
He half rose when she entered, the tremor in his spotted hands more pronounced. “I came after you, with the dogs, as soon as I could get out of the station without getting caught. I let the dogs pick the direction, and then set Timber and Tundra loose when they started to go berserk. I hoped that it was because you were nearby. Then Cedar and I continued on, and found ourselves here, of all strange places. It’s one thing to go between locations through that godforsaken mist. It’s quite another to find yourself in an apparently different world or timeline. It’s all a little too much for my senior brain.”
She listened to him talk while surreptitiously checking his teeth. They seemed like the right teeth, so she allowed herself to relax marginally. She looked around the station. The furniture was different and arranged differently, the cupboards were a beech wood, and some of the angles and finishing varied, but overall the similarities between this station and the station they had just left were eerie. Gregor had gone to the kitchen and ladled something steaming into three bowls. He returned and set the bowls down on the table.
“Eat,” he said simply and gestured at the loaf of bread and cheese that sat in the middle of the table.
Sasha placed the weapon on the floor and felt herself sinking into the chair in front of the bowl. “The dogs saved me, Vincent. Thank you. What made you come after us?” She took a spoonful of the soup. It was the most delightfully flavored creamy mushroom soup she had ever tasted.
“That Connor fellow got into the beer after you left. It didn’t take him long to down an entire case. It was like he hasn’t seen beer in years. That was when I first got suspicious. A beer when nobody is looking, and under difficult circumstances, maybe. But military men don’t get hammered on duty. Anyway, he got chatty. So I started asking him questions, you know about the Health Care Bill, how the President felt about it, how long he’d served, things like that. Then I started throwing in a few military terms—I did a stint in the navy when I was young—Asked him why he was wearing full battle rattle for a simple rescue mission, and what we were going to do at zero dark thirty if his buddies didn’t come back and he had no working radio.”
Sasha tried to focus on what Vincent was saying while wolfing down the soup and bread.
Vincent grasped his spoon and swirled it around in his soup. “He didn’t get anything I was talking about. That guy isn’t from the military. So then I tune him into Helga and tell him that’s the only radio transmission we get and give him some science mumbo jumbo song and dance about magnetic reversal affecting all the radio waves on the poles. Then I tell him the story about the feral polar bears, which Amber is only too happy to chime in on.”
“Eventually, he has to take a leak from all that beer, and after he’s in there, I go and listen at the door. Sure enough, the fool’s on his radio, cause he’s scared now. Thinks he’s lost contact. Anyway whoever his buddies are, they ask him if he has secured the package or the determined the location of the hole in the world.”
Sasha stared at her bowl, wondering how she had emptied it so quickly. “I’m sorry Vincent. I don’t understand. Package? Is that what they were looking for in the station?”
Vincent shook his head taking his first spoonful of soup. “Nah. A package is a person.
“And the hole in the world?” Sasha said.
“Aside from potentially the craters? No idea. Anyway, he comes out of the can, and I play along as if Soren’s the murderer and tell him that I think Soren had a wall safe behind his wardrobe and maybe Soren stashed the weapon in there. So he and Amber go to Soren’s room to look for it, and I slipped out with the dogs. I’m sure he didn’t think an old man like me would dare head out on his own.” Vincent smiled as if he really was very pleased with his own daring, and Sasha couldn’t help but smile back. “So like I said, the dogs took off, and I saw that other fellow—what was his name?—Kyle, fly past on a snowmobile. I don’t think he saw me.”
“You saw Kyle on a snowmobile?” How was that possible? Had Kyle somehow gone back for the other snowmobile?
Vincent nodded, his grey beard bobbing.
“Then Vincent showed up here, worried about you, just in time for soup,” Gregor announced, removing her bowl from the table and returning with it refilled. “He and I were just comparing notes.”
“Where exactly are we?”
Gregor offered a funny tight-lipped smirk and arched a single eyebrow. He did have lovely chocolate-brown eyes, but there was a sardonic undertone to his expression that made Sasha nervous. “Well, the good news is, you are on Ellesmere Island. However on this Ellesmere Island, Shackleton set out for his sledge trip to become the first person to reach the North Pole, so it’s a little bit different from your Ellesmere Island, you see. The bad news is, this world has been completely overrun by zombies.”
“Zombies?” Sasha paused in mid gulp. Soup dribbled off her spoon and back into the bowl. This did shock her. A bit. It should probably have shocked her more. But not that much was shocking these days.
“Yes, well, living dead, psychosis, some sort of infection or something. Nobody knows, other than they infect anyone they come into contact with. They are uncommunicative, unconcerned about their own wellbeing and focused on only one thing—chasing down those who remain living. So, zombies.”
Gregor paused and took a bite of his own soup. “Continuing with the good news, they haven’t gotten this far north. Evidently an inclement climate is good for something and zombies don’t know how to dress for the weather. The bad news is I’m almost out of food and wood, so I will likely be starving or freezing to death soon.” He said this quite matter-of-factly.
Sasha stared down at her empty bowl and the huge chunk of cheese she had just skewered and placed on her bread. She had just inhaled at least a day’s worth of rations.
“Are you the only one living here?”
“Yes. At the beginning of the outbreak the military came by and offered everyone a flight home. All the other researchers took it. Concerned about family and things like that. I don’t imagine they’re still alive.”
Sasha reached across the table and touched his arm. “You can come back to our station.” Then she paused and made a face. “Course, we have magnetic reversal, crazed polar bears, giant methane-venting craters, and fake military guys. But we do have food.” In reality, with the arrival of that chopper, it might not even be “their” station anymore. Perhaps with Gregor’s help, they could retake it, but she and Vincent would probably just be better off heading to Paulet.
Gregor smiled faintly, his lips bloodless. “That’s really selling it. I’m a polar bear biologist and the bears here are dangerous enough. Have you taken an inventory of your supplies yet?”
Sasha shook her head. Why hadn’t they? “No. I think we were just thinking we’d be rescued at some point.”
Gregor exhaled in a whispery puff of laughter. “Don’t hold your breath on that one. I think we’re on our own, and it’s a long trek to any sort of civilization, not that it’s even necessarily civilized anymore.”
“You could come
with us through the mist. The mist on Mount Trainor—well at least our Mount Trainor—leads to Paulet Island in the Antarctic. That’s where Vincent and I are going, I think. I think the mist in all the craters in our Arctic lead somewhere. We heard voices tonight in a lot of them, and that’s how Soren and I first went to Paulet Island. Of course, none of the voices we heard in the craters sounded very happy, so maybe that’s a bad idea.”
“Thanks for the offer.” Gregor paused. “But I’m a solitary sort. I can still hunt and fish. I might make it through until summer. And the way things are, dying alone might not be so bad. There are definitely worse ways to go.”
Sasha noted with some sort of wry and demented amusement—she must be going loopy—that Gregor did not extend an offer for her and Vincent to stay with him.
“Are we still going after Soren, then?” Vincent asked, breaking the silence.
“Do you think he’s a murderer?” Sasha said.
Vincent hesitated for a second before declaring, “Not on your life.”
It might well be on my life if you’re wrong, Sasha thought. “If we manage to rescue Soren, maybe we can head to South America in your boat,” Sasha said.
Vincent’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “My dear, my boat, while seaworthy, is for going from island to island. It’s hardly the kind of boat you want to set out in across the Southern Ocean, especially with no working compass or GPS.”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
“I suggest that we take the boat to the Antarctic station and find Helga.”
“I’m not sure what good Helga is going to do,” Sasha mumbled, but she let this go for now.
Sasha turned to Gregor. “Do you have any guns you can lend us?”
Gregor pursed his lips and remained silent for several seconds. “I have an old rifle I can give you. And I’ll give you some old biscuits. Survival rations. They taste like crap and were slated to be tossed, but they’re better than nothing. It looks like you eat a lot,” he commented to Sasha.
It didn’t take them long to suit up. Gregor lent them new ice axes, a tent and down sleeping bags, the rations, and a rifle with five cartridges. “That’s all I can spare,” he said.
Once outfitted, Vincent’s movements slowed and he paused every few seconds to lean his pack on something in the storage bay, his eyes closed and brows knotted together.
“Is it your back, Vincent?” Sasha said. He had insisted on dividing the supplies equally between the two of them. Gregor had gone back inside to retrieve some binoculars for them.
“I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. These old bones prefer to sit by the fire these days.”
“Can you handle that pack? Soren told me about your fall on Vinson.”
Vincent gave her a squinty-eyed look.
“You know, your seven summits research expedition?”
“Vinson, you say? I had my accident on Sidley. One of the seven volcanic summits. Anderson was with me. I was helping him out with his dissertation research.”
Sasha realized that Soren had never actually said Vinson. She had just assumed.
“What did Soren get is Ph.D. in?”
“He didn’t. After all those years of work and scaling all those goddamn volcanoes, there was some sort of problem with his methodology. His committee shut him down at his defense. Why the arseholes didn’t mention the methodological problems at the proposal stage, I’ll never know. Anyway, Anderson doesn’t like to talk about it, but at one time, he was considered one of the preeminent volcano experts in the world.”
“So that’s what he was doing on Paulet? Researching the volcano there?”
“Yep, the lava tubes on Paulet are in an unusual formation, and he was keeping Marina company, of course. We’d best be off.”
Sasha watched Vincent trundle off through the storage bay, staggering a bit left and then right under the weight of the pack. At least they could do most of the trip on the snowmobile, she hoped. Vincent had assured her that he knew how to use the M72, as he called it, so she reslung it on her back and reached for her mitts stuffed inside her parka pockets.
Her hand closed on something small and hard. The tag from the polar bear. She pulled it out of her pocket and held it out to Gregor, who gave her the binoculars in exchange.
“I pulled this off one of the polar bears. Do you know what it is?”
Gregor took the tag from her hand and cocked his head. “It looks like a GPS tracking device with a chip in it. Biologists use them to collect data on animal movements, hibernation, and feeding habits.”
“Can you get anything useful off of it?”
“It’s not any use without the data collection unit.”
Sasha’s fingers closed around the white thing she had found in the pod. It was made of the same white plastic and had the same styling as the tag. She withdrew it from her pocket. “This wouldn’t be the data collection device, would it?”
“That’s a local one. It collects data when the sat link is out.”
“Do you want it?”
Gregor shrugged and extended his hand. “It’s not like I have a whole lot of other things to do.”
Sasha nodded and handed him the unit. Vincent was already outside the bay, leaning against the station wall. Cedar bounded around in the snow just past him. They had decided to leave the dog with Gregor, who had promised to feed Cedar until the end and then turn him loose. Sasha called the dog, and gave Cedar a pat and a kiss on top of his warm furry head.
“Right then, thanks for everything. Good luck, and well, good bye.”
She started to head out of the bay. An indent the snow caught her eye. It looked like the remnant of a three-toed triangular footprint. She stopped abruptly.
“Did you come to our station asking about the polar champion?” she asked.
“No.”
“Did a man named Kyle show up here?”
Gregor’s brown eyes had widened to the point that they looked like a pair of frog eggs in his skull, and he shook his head. “Nope. Never heard of him.” He turned and scurried back toward the inner station door, ushering Cedar ahead of him. At the door he turned, gave her a broad smile, and waved. “Best of luck to you.” Then he went inside and closed the door firmly. Sasha could have sworn she heard the deadbolt slide into place.
Sasha stared at the door for a second, and then turned and left the storage bay. Outside, she and Vincent got on the snowmobile and headed back in the direction they had come.
The mist seemed to take them back to “their” Arctic. Craters once again dotted the plain, the wind picked up, and the Shackleton station vanished. Sasha steered the snowmobile in a wide arc while Vincent peered through the binoculars, searching for the station they had left a few hours earlier. They hoped to approach it at a distance and see what was happening. Vincent was concerned about Amber’s well being, and if nobody was there, Sasha wanted to grab the file she had stuffed in the snow.
They came over a small rise and cut the engine. The rotors of the helicopter were visible above the snow-covered station roof and every window of the station cast yellow light onto the white ground below. An armed sentry stood outside, staring in their direction. He must have heard their approach, but he couldn’t possibly see them in the dark. Nevertheless, a few seconds later, the storage bay door opened and two snow machines pulled out, heading their way.
Sasha gunned the engine and sped off into the night. The fire from the crater that Jenkins had ignited still reached up into the sky, and she headed in that direction, for no other reason that it was a landmark which would prevent her from making the mistake of circling back to the station. They had enough of a head start and had been far enough away when the chase started that they had at least temporarily lost their pursuers. But if the men brought out the helicopter, Sasha and Vincent would be easy to find. They had to figure out how to get to Trainor and hope that they could still get to Paulet, or they would be in trouble.
The night had mostly cleared and a skiff of stars wa
s visible through the final traces of cloud and the ever-present aurora. A tiny fingernail of a moon hung in the sky. Could they navigate by the moon? Possibly. Unless the moon no longer followed the same path. Sasha clenched the grips of the snowmobile. She had to believe that something had remained the same. They had left Gregor’s at around eight o’clock. The moon would still be in the west, and Trainor Mountain was generally to the northwest, or the old northwest.
She headed that direction. There were so many craters now in some spots that to navigate around them, she had to slow and try to find her way along the fifteen-foot wide bridges of snow that separated one crater from another. Vincent wobbled around behind her, his grip loosening and tightening, destabilized by the two packs hooked over his arms.
Why were there so many craters?
By the time she heard the throb of the helicopter, she had glimpsed the pale looming outline of Trainor Mountain. The buzz of the rotors grew alternately louder and then quieter, as if the chopper was sweeping the area.
She pushed the snowmobile as fast as it could go, begging it to cut through the snow faster, for the mist-shrouded mountain to come closer. By the time they were partway up the initial incline, the air was thick with the beat of the chopper rotor. It was close by now. Too close.
They had only gone another hundred feet up the mountain when the snow ahead of them was bathed in a brilliant white light that skated quickly over the snow and then came to rest in a pool around them.
“Stop immediately,” someone said over a loudspeaker. “Or you will be shot.”
The speaker was obviously confident, Sasha thought. Not shot at, but shot. She cut the engine on the snowmobile. It had started to dig in anyway. They would have had to struggle through the snow from here. The silvery sea of mist hung just thirty feet ahead of them.
“Put down the weapon, get off the snowmobile, and turn around with your hands in the air.”
Sasha lowered the anti-tank weapon to the ground. If they had been smart, she would have dropped Vincent off beside the last crater. Vincent could have hidden behind the lip of the crater with the M72 while she continued on the snowmobile, drawing the chopper to their location. Then if Vincent was still as good of a shot as he claimed to be, he could have taken out the helicopter. But she hadn’t thought of that until now.
Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) Page 17
