by Karen Dionne
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. My eyes are kinda blurry, is all. And I’m gettin’ a killer headache. Stomach hurts, too, like I’m gonna puke.”
“Sounds like a migraine.”
“If it is, it’ll be the first.”
“My mom gets migraines,” Toshi offered. “Sometimes she can’t get out of bed for days. Maybe you should go lie down.”
“Maybe I will,” Eugene said. “Read a little. Sleep it off.”
He got to his feet, gripping the edge of the table for support, and reached for his novel. Sleeper Cell, Ben read on the cover, by a Dr. Jeffrey Anderson. He looked at Eugene, sweating and breathing as heavily as if he’d just run a marathon, and wished they had a doctor right about now.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. He stood up to take Eugene’s elbow.
“It’s only a headache.” Eugene shrugged him off and stepped away from the table, then swayed and put out a hand to catch himself, knocking the open box of test tubes to the floor.
“Oh my God! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said to the sound of shattering glass. He grabbed a pair of file folders off the table and began shoveling up the mess. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not usually so clumsy.” He looked up. “I sure hope you have some more.”
Chapter 18
Raney Station, Antarctic Peninsula
The storage room next to Raney’s water cistern had been called the biolab ever since Fernando Montoya, their Brazilian ichthyologist, set up a cold-water aquarium in one corner. Someone—not Fernando, but one of his many female admirers (who all agreed that Fernando was as cute as the proverbial button)—had made a sign to that effect and taped it to the door, a painstakingly calligraphied masterpiece decorated with butterflies and kittens and puppies that proclaimed Ferdie’s Biolab, the domain of All Creatures Great and Small.
The aquarium was home to his rather uninspiring collection of limpets, starfish, and krill, along with several very impressive Antarctic cod: three-foot-long, one-hundred-pound monsters with leonine mouths and razor-sharp teeth—the same kind of fish Luis had caught on a long line and baked for their Thanksgiving dinner. Last season, Fernando isolated an antifreeze protein from his cod that had already been tested by an ice cream manufacturer in hopes the protein would prevent his product from developing ice crystals when it sat too long in the freezer. The experiment worked, except for one unfortunate problem: The ice cream tasted like fish.
Zo’s specimen cage waited in the opposite corner. Science didn’t often get the chance to observe what happened from the outset of the introduction of a nonnative species, and while rodentology wasn’t exactly her area of expertise, she knew enough about basic research methods to lay an adequate foundation. Next season, if someone wanted, they could pick up her study where she left off. She actually didn’t mind her new avocation. There was something about the rats’ naïve, unmitigated fearlessness that appealed to her. She envied the way nature had conspired the circumstances that allowed them to do whatever they wanted. More to the point, now that Elliot had canceled the next three tour ship visits (even though he knew full well the rats had followed her across the peninsula after the destruction of the ice shelf disrupted their food supply, though he didn’t know about the vomit piles she’d dropped like bread crumbs along the way), she had absolutely nothing else to do. Fernando had donated an old, cracked aquarium to her cause, and Mac had fashioned a piece of galvanized hardware cloth into a lid. Newspaper bedding and an empty tuna can water dish completed the habitat. All she needed now was a rat.
“Hey, Sam,” she called as she stepped inside the maintenance shed and quickly shut the door. “Can I borrow a bucket? I’ll bring it right back.”
A hand appeared from beneath the Hägglunds and pointed in the direction of the worktable. “Over there.”
“Thanks.” Zo circumnavigated a disassembled engine block and stepped carefully over the arc welder’s hoses. Sam’s feet were always poking out from under one vehicle or another. For all practical purposes, he lived in the maintenance shed, taking his meals there, and often spending the night on a cot. Shortly after she’d arrived at Raney, Zo had been advised to give Sam as much space as possible with the promise that in return, he’d keep the Hägglunds running for her, and thus far the bargain seemed to be working. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that a Class A mechanic with zero social skills and an empty continent that was murder on equipment were a good fit.
His workbench was littered with the usual mechanic’s assortment: hammers, wrenches, grease guns; coils of wire, scraps of metal, balls of string; empty coffee cups, dirty rags, a roll of toilet paper, and jars filled with washers, nuts and bolts, and other unidentifiable but potentially useful objects. She found the bucket behind an open jar of peanut butter alongside a half-eaten loaf of bread. She was tempted to repeat Elliot’s warning about not leaving food out in the open, but Sam was an adult, and a crotchety one at that.
“Can I use this piece of sheet metal?” she called over her shoulder instead. “And I need some tin snips, and some string.”
“Why don’t you just take the whole damn toolbox.”
“That’s okay. This’ll do.” She added a short length of pipe to her rat-catching paraphernalia and went outside.
Think like a rat, she told herself as she hiked away from the station. What did a rat need besides food and shelter? Food, they had in abundance: Raney’s unsuspecting shorebird colonies formed a virtual rat smorgasbord. Two penguin carcasses had been found on the beach in the past two days, their bones picked as clean as museum specimens.
So the question was, after the rats bellied up to the bar, where did they go to sleep it off?
Working on the presumption that the simplest answer was the correct one, Zo shone a flashlight into each likely-looking crevice in the jumble of ice and rocks where the glacier met the shore. She felt like the host of one of those hands-on television nature shows. Crikey, wot’ve we got here? [sticks arm into hole in the ground; pulls out something dark and wriggling] It’s a banded gecko! Isn’t she a beauty? And just look at those teeth! Ow!! Crikey, did ya see that? [laughs] She bit me finger!
Finally, she found what she was looking for beside a crack six inches wide. Ah, look here, mates. Ya see these brown pellets? Ya know wot these aar? [winks at camera] This is rodent spoor. You know what that means! Stay with me now, and maybe we’ll see something!
She tied one end of the string around the pipe, propped up the bucket, and placed a chunk of Velveeta underneath. After unspooling twenty feet of string, she sat down cross-legged on the gravel to wait. The whole setup looked suspiciously like something out of a Roadrunner cartoon, but it was the best she could do.
She sat as still as possible and tried to ignore her dripping nose. Realistically, the odds of catching a rat with her makeshift arrangement were ridiculously small. Ross’s students had been sending him rat facts ever since he told them about the rattus norvegicus invasion, and according to the kids, rats were like miniature superheroes. They could climb, jump, fall fifty feet without injury, and fit through an opening the size of a quarter. And if they couldn’t go around or over an object, they went through it, gnawing through materials as diverse as lead sheathing, cinder block, aluminum siding, and glass, to say nothing of cardboard and paper. Rats were excellent swimmers and could cross half a mile of open water, swim through sewer lines against the current, and tread water for three days. She frowned at Torgeson Island across the bay. She hated to think what would happen to Mac’s penguin colonies if Raney’s rats decided to go for a swim.
After ten torturous minutes that gave new meaning to the phrase “frozen as a statue,” she saw movement. A black nose appeared, followed by a set of twitching whiskers, a slender brown head, furry body, and leathery tail. Zo held her pose. The rat studied her for a long moment, sniffed, then darted beneath the bucket to take the bait. She yanked on the string, and the bucket fell with a clatter. Inside, the rat scrabbled an
d hissed.
She grinned. Apparently the coyote knew a thing or two about catching critters after all. She hurried over to claim her prize, keeping an eye out to make sure that none of its pals were going to play the hero. Carefully, she worked the sheet metal between the bucket and the ice. With one hand pressing on the bucket’s bottom, she slid the other underneath and flipped the contraption upright.
Suddenly the rat leapt at the lid, knocking the sheet metal to the side. The bucket tipped, and the rat tumbled out. For a moment the rat was as stunned as Zo was. She recovered first, grabbing the rat and flinging it back into the bucket before she could consider the consequences. She threw the sheet metal on top and sat down on it to hold it in place. Quickly she pulled the tin snips from her pocket, cut the excess metal into strips, and, using the snips as a hammer, bent the tabs down and sealed the bucket shut.
Breathing heavily, she stood up. Her knuckles were scraped, her back muscles ached, and her lip sported a snot mustache that would have done a Canadian lumberjack proud, but she had her rat. And crikey! Isn’t he a beauty!
As she started back to the station, she decided that while Antarctic rat-catching would undoubtedly never become an Olympic event, it should be.
Chapter 19
Two days later, the winds gusted at sixty as Raney got socked by the first official blizzard of the season. Great, crescent-shaped mounds of snow curled around each corner of the buildings like sleeping guard dogs; by morning, the regulars predicted they’d be the size of small elephants. Zo took note of the drifts as she headed for the shore, gripping her hood about her face as the snow stung like BBs and her goggles fogged with every breath. The wind worked its way inside her clothes despite multiple layers, so cold against her skin it burned.
Ten minutes, she promised herself. If she couldn’t finish the job by then, she’d hoof it back to the station and the Zodiac would have to take its chances. She’d helped Mac tie it off earlier when he got in from Torgeson, but she was no Girl Scout, and with the way the winds had picked up, she wasn’t at all sure her knots were going to hold. She peeled back the cuff of one glove, exposing her wrist long enough to check the time, and continued toward the beach, shuffling her feet like a blind man. Inside her gloves, she curled her fingers into fists and stuck her hands under her armpits. After treating three cases of frostbite, Dr. Rodriguez had laid down the law: One more, and they’d all be confined to the station for the duration. Zo wasn’t afraid of a little frostbite, but she wasn’t about to be the one responsible for a lockdown. The atmosphere inside was frigid enough.
One week, one lousy week since the rats had invaded the station, and she was well on her way to taking home the award for Raney’s Most Despised Person. The climatologists griped because the rats’ body heat skewed their microclimate recorder calibrations—as if rodents could be expected to respect a roped-off research area. Dr. Rodriguez was concerned about disease, Shana was freaked because a rat had stolen her sandwich after she’d foolishly laid it on the ground, and so it went. Every time Zo spotted another rat skulking about the station, the cumulative guilt trip the others were laying on made her feel like the Pied Piper’s evil twin.
Finally, she spotted the Zodiac. She hurried forward and crouched in the lee for a respite from the wind. Beside her, the inflatable tugged at its moorings like a balloon in a hurricane. She ran her hands along the rope, following the line into the snowbank to locate the knot. Halfway down, she touched something soft. She lifted her hand, and saw that her glove was smeared with red.
“Another one?” Fernando looked up from his evisceration as Zo came into the biolab carrying her bundle.
“Uh-huh. Found it by the Zodiac.” She dumped the carcass on the worktable next to Fernando’s cod and stripped off her gloves. “Third one this week,” she said through stiffened lips. “Another chinstrap, I think.” She sniffed and dragged her hand under her nose. “Hard to tell with so much meat gone.”
“You’re louco, ne, going outside in weather like this.” Fernando lifted her chin and turned her face toward the light. “Just as I thought, querida. You better have Luis look at that. Your right cheek is pretty white.”
She touched her fingers to her face. “It’s okay. I haven’t lost feeling yet.”
“Gonna sting like hell later.”
“Don’t I know.”
She shook the snow off her coat and hung it over the back of a chair. Using one of Fernando’s scalpels, she sliced off a chunk of penguin meat, weighed it, noted the figure in her ledger, and dropped the meat inside the cage. The rat tore into its meal with a ferocity that belied its size. Quickly she replaced the cement block that secured the lid. Collecting penguin carcasses and comparing the amount of meat her specimen rat ate with how much meat was missing helped determine the total rat population, but every time she fed the rat, she couldn’t help envisioning the victim’s final moments as the rats tore into it like a pack of rabid hyenas. She estimated the count at 30 to 50 animals, though she wasn’t about to tell the others that—or that the rats’ numbers seemed to be increasing as more found their way across the peninsula every day.
Fernando shook his head. “I do not know how you can stand taking care of him. I hate that guy.”
“Everything’s got to eat. Besides, I think Pinky’s kind of cute, in a penguin-eating, rat gang-member sort of way. All he needs is a little motorcycle helmet and boots.”
Fernando laughed. “Why do I get the feeling you were the strange little menina who kept tarantulas and scorpions as pets?”
“How’d you know? Besides, I—oh.” She put her hands to her cheeks.
“Told you. You really should let Luis look at that.”
“I’ll be fine.” Zo closed her eyes while she waited for her brain to convince her nerve endings this was an acceptable level of pain, then stuffed the penguin inside a garbage bag and stuck the carcass in the fridge. She cracked open a bottle of Dr Pepper and guzzled half, belched, then downed the rest, smiling at the confirmation that after three tortuous months, her nonstop morning sickness was finally gone.
“I’m going to hang out in the rec room for a while,” she said. “Want to come?”
“Definitely. Just as soon as I wash up. Mac talked Elliot into doing his Frank Sinatra imitation.”
“Really.” Elliot only did Sinatra when he was feeling particularly happy. She wondered what had happened to put him in such a good mood—and why he hadn’t told her.
“You think this is something?” Mac was saying as Zo entered the room. He and Shana were cozied up on one of the ratty orange vinyl sofas Zo was convinced were older than the station itself. She often wondered how they came to be here; who had donated them, and why they thought the scientists didn’t deserve better than castoffs. Due to the wear and tear of decades, the couches were upholstered now with more duct tape than vinyl.
She scanned the room. Nearly all of Raney’s residents were present, whiling away the blizzard playing Foosball or Ping-Pong, talking and reading. Elliot and Ross occupied a love seat in the far corner. Elliot was gesturing animatedly while Ross smiled and nodded. A few glanced her way, but no one acknowledged her, or invited her to join them. She leaned against the doorjamb, feeling as welcome as a leper in a bathhouse, while the conversation swirled around her like the snow outside the windows.
“You should try spending a winter at the Pole,” Mac went on. “Six months of darkness; temps of ninety below. It’s so cold, your breath freezes. Suck the air through your teeth, and it’ll crack your enamel.”
“Really?” Shana snuggled closer and looked up at Mac with ingenue eyes. Zo shook her head. Shana’s come-on was so blatant, she may as well have batted her eyelashes. Zo was surprised Mac couldn’t see it. Then again, maybe he had.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, puffing out his chest and slipping a macho arm around Shana’s shoulders. “You have to wear a respirator when you go outside to prevent lung damage or mouth frostbite. But when it’s that cold, your breath condenses, and th
e respirator clogs with ice. So then you’ve got a choice: keep the respirator on and suffocate, or take it off and let your tongue freeze.” He put his free hand over her face and pretended to smother her while she giggled and pretended to struggle.
