Outpost

by Adam Baker

  Ghost tried his radio. Waterlogged. Dead. He threw it aside.

  He closed the bunker doors.

  He didn't have time to dry his clothes. He poured water from his boots then held them directly in the flames. Water fizzed, boiled and steamed. He wrung his coat, balled it and held it in the fire until it smoked.

  He dressed.

  Ghost took a burning stick from the fire, held it above his head and set off down the dark tunnel mouth.

  Sian left the cab to fetch a flask of coffee. Kill time, she told herself. Do something ordinary. Kid yourself everything is fine.

  She boiled a kettle in the canteen kitchen. Silent corridors. Empty rooms. What if Jane and Ghost didn't make it back? Drifting for thousands of miles in the dark and derelict refinery. She was terrified of isolation.

  She returned to the cab, unscrewed the Thermos and poured coffee. She let the metal mug warm her hands. The windows steamed up. She wiped away condensation. The island was receding. The wreck of Hyperion was a distant, ragged silhouette against the Arctic twilight.

  She put her cup on the cab floor and uncapped binoculars. She looked south. She could clearly see the edge of the ice-field. The point where snow gave way to heavy black waves.

  She estimated Jane, Ghost and Punch had less than three hours to make it back to Rampart before the refinery reached open sea and they were left behind. Sian took out her radio.

  'Rampart to Jane, can you hear me, over? Jane, do you copy?' Static.

  'Jane? Ghost? Can you hear me?'

  Jane stood at the open doors of the bunker.

  A weak voice: 'Jane, do you copy? Jane, do you copy, over?' Jane took out her radio. 'Sian? Sian, can you hear me?' Nothing but feedback. Weak LED. Dying batteries. The campfire was lit. She crouched and examined sticks of burning furniture. A recent fire. Someone was here moments ago.

  She examined a discarded flashlight. It belonged to Ghost. Weeks ago, she had watched him bind it with duct tape to seal a crack in the case.

  Ghost had travelled from the rig. He must have headed straight for the bunker and reached it ahead of her. 'Ghost?' No reply.

  Jane aimed her flamethrower down the dark tunnel. Flame- roar. She glimpsed concrete walls receding deep underground. Jane checked her watch.

  41:54

  She shone her flashlight on the tunnel floor. Scuffed boot- prints led into shadows.

  She hitched the flamethrower, gripped her flashlight and followed the footprints downward into the dark.

  The Pit

  The damp tunnel floor betrayed the thick tread of snowboots. Jane crouched. Multiple tracks. Big prints, old and new, and a set of smaller feet. Probably Nikki.

  Jane followed the tracks, flamethrower primed. She triggered puffs of fire at each junction.

  The slope-shaft led downward into bedrock. The air got colder. The walls sparkled with pyrite and silica.

  Silent passageways and galleries. She paused every couple of minutes and listened to hear if she was being followed. No sound but distant tunnel drips, her breathing, the gentle hiss of the flamethrower igniter flame.

  She leaned against the tunnel wall. A sudden wave of heart- hammering fear. Her legs felt weak. Every instinct told her to turn and run back to the refinery. Rampart was floating away, and she was about to be left behind. It wasn't too late. She could still make it home.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. Giddy with adrenalin. Memories came, vivid and immediate like a fever dream.

  'Courage, like all personality traits, is essentially a habit,' explained Jane's old English teacher. Mr Stratford. Young, anxious to think himself inspirational. It was Jane's turn to read a poem at assembly. Byron. She would have to stand in front of the entire school. Stand at a lectern during chapel. She was terrified. 'If you act brave every day, adopt a confident posture, adopt a confident tone, eventually it becomes innate,' explained

  Mr Wilson. 'Yes, it's phoney. Utterly bogus pretence. But if you fake any trait long enough it becomes an essential part of you, like your fingerprint. So there's no point telling yourself not to be scared. You can't control your thoughts and emotions. But you can control your actions. In the end, we are the sum of what we do.'

  Jane had spent the past few months trying to save the crew of Rampart. And here she was. Transformed. Lean. Super- weapon strapped to her back. A stranger to herself.

  Jane kept walking.

  She used to read books of Chinese philosophy. Bushido. The Samurai code. Her young, fat days were dominated by fear. She was terrified of school, scared to walk round town on a busy day. 'Fat bitch.' 'Porker.' 'Cow.' The world was a war zone. It took warrior courage to leave the front door.

  Samurai soldiers called themselves dead men. They tied their hair in a ponytail before each battle to make it easy for their enemies to lift their severed heads as a trophy. A warrior with no regard for his own life, who flew into battle powered by careless, suicidal rage, was unbeatable. Negative courage. Give up on yourself, and you have nothing left to fear. You become invincible.

  The shaft took her further below ground. She felt wind on her face. Maybe there were other routes to the surface. Air shafts and ancillary exits. Ghost said there was an old airstrip nearby with an Antonov cargo plane turning to rust. Maybe there was a connecting passageway.

  A figure stood in the dark up ahead. A man standing sentinel in the middle of the tunnel. Jane wondered how long he had been alone in the dark.

  She waited for him to make a move. He remained still.

  She crept closer. She shone a flashlight in his face. Officer uniform. Brass buttons, epaulettes, anchor insignia.

  Jet-black eyes.

  The figure slowly inclined his head to look directly at Jane. He screamed. A long, unearthly howl. Mouthful of metal spines.

  The scream seemed to last minutes, seemed like it would never end. Jane sparked the flamethrower and blew the man off his feet and down the tunnel.

  She stepped over the burning figure.

  A shriek from deep within the tunnels. Something, down in the depths of the bunker, was answering the sailor's call.

  The tunnels played strange music. Gentle, fluted breaths that rose and fell as she passed through passageways and galleries.

  A vertical shaft to the surface. Ventilation. A massive air-con turbine in the tunnel roof. Rusted blades.

  Snow had tumbled down the shaft. A high mound of ice blocked Jane's path.

  Sustained blast from the flamethrower. Ice shrivelled, liquefied, steamed.

  She found a sailor sitting against the tunnel wall. Jane trained her flashlight on his face. Beard. Striped naval tunic. He was weak and emaciated. Metal leaked from his ears. His eyes glowed red like a cat lit by headlights. He hissed.

  Jane pushed him over and stamped on his head.

  She headed downward, deeper into the fossil layers. Her flashlight lit glittering mineral veins. Cambrian, pre-Cambrian. That dark and distant epoch when Arctica was raging volcanism.

  She checked her watch. How far had Rampart drifted from the island? It might already be four or five kilometres offshore. Might be fifteen or twenty kilometres distant by the time she reached the surface. She could make it, though. She could sprint across the ice. She had stamina.

  Sudden flashback. A cross-country run. Bleak fields. Lumbering along an endless, rural lane. Sweating, sobbing with exhaustion. Long since left behind.

  Miss Gibson, the PE teacher, leaning on a farm gate.

  'Come on, stinky. Make an effort.'

  Storage vaults. Lead doors high as an aircraft hangar.

  One of the doors was ajar. No time to explore. But if the vaults hid infected passengers from Hyperion she might find her route back to the surface cut off.

  She stood in the giant doorway and shone her flashlight into the darkness.

  A wall of black. A massive propeller. The tail section of an Akula Class nuclear sub. Black, anechoic hull plates. Rudders. Stern planes. Jagged metal where the tail had been plasma-cut fro
m the main hull.

  The reactor had evidently been dredged from the ocean bed. Barnacled and streaked with sediment.

  Hard to comprehend the vast scale of the wreckage.

  What was the radiation count in the vault? Rust pools on the chamber floor. The interment was incomplete. The wreckage should be buried in salt and sealed in lead. Instead, the reactor chamber was exposed to open air.

  She hurried onward.

  School days.

  The chapel. Jane walking up the aisle, trying not to waddle, trying not to shake. She stood at the lectern. She looked at the blazered congregation. Rose, the gum-smacking class bitch, sitting in the back pew with her smirking, sneering gang.

  Jane took paper from her pocket and unfolded the poem. She cleared her throat, blushed as the cough was amplified throughout the chapel.

  She adjusted the mike position.

  She stared, mesmerised, into the foam bulb of the microphone.

  She froze. She couldn't speak. And she knew, in a giddy rush of heightened awareness, that she would relive this memory her entire life. The sounds, the textures. The shame would be seared into her like the pavement burn-shadow of a Hiroshima pedestrian.

  She stared at the mike. She could see, in the periphery of her vision, ranks of schoolgirls staring at her. They started to fidget. They started to giggle.

  Wherever she went, whatever she did, part of her would be trapped in this moment. A fat girl, clutching the lectern, paralysed with fear.

  Jane's flashlight started to fail.

  She hurried down tunnels shored with steel props. She passed evidence of interrupted excavation. Uncleared rubble. Discarded tools. Dormant diggers.

  She saw something move in the darkness up ahead. A white figure stepped away from the tunnel wall.

  'Hello?' called Jane. 'Are you on your own, or did you come with friends?'

  The spectral figure didn't move.

  Jane rested her flashlight on a ledge. She triggered the igniter flame. Quiet hiss of gas. She strode forward.

  'All right then, babycakes,' she muttered to herself. 'Let's dance.'

  The man shuffled towards her. A chef. He had bottles and jars taped to his chest like he was wearing some kind of suicide vest.

  The chef tore a pickle jar from his chest and smashed it on his forehead. Kerosene. Jane backed away. He held a lighter in his left hand. He struck it. Jane ran. The blast threw her down the tunnel. Big dent in the SCUBA tanks. She got to her feet and retrieved her torch. The tunnel was blocked by a wall of fire.

  Jane covered her face and ran through the blaze. Her boots caught alight. She stamped out the flames.

  Ignition. Motor roar, amplified by the tunnel walls. Dazzling headbeams.

  Jane shielded her eyes. Gear change. Escalating roar. Headbeams approaching.

  Jane squinted into the glare. The serrated teeth of a digger scoop heading her way. She hugged the left tunnel wall. The digger drove straight at her. She dived clear at the last moment. The scoop dug into the tunnel wall, bringing down rock.

  She glimpsed heavy caterpillar tread, and a hunched, misshapen figure in the yellow cab.

  The digger backed up. Jane hugged the right tunnel wall. The digger drove at her. Dumb enough to fall for the same trick.

  Jane dived clear. The scoop dug into the tunnel wall. Rockfall. The digger pinned by boulders, engine house partially crushed.

  Jane got a good look at the driver. Two dinner-suited passengers fused together like Siamese twins. The digger tried to reverse. The damaged engine coughed and revved. Gouts of smoke from the exhaust. Caterpillar tread ground and span.

  Jane fried the cab. The twin drivers were consumed in a typhoon of flame.

  The jet of flame stuttered and died. Jane took off the SCUBA tanks and shook them. Empty. She left the spent flamethrower by the burning digger.

  White tiles. Shower heads.

  Some kind of decontamination area.

  Lockers. Rubber radiation suits hung on pegs like human skin left to tan. Ghoulish, skull-eyed gas hoods.

  The passage led to a bare chamber. Bloody letters:

  WELCOME HOME, JANE

  Dried blood drips. Black flakes.

  Nikki knew she was coming. The guys in the tunnels, the men melded to the digger, had just been entertainment. Nikki knew Jane would make it to Level Zero, and prepared a welcome.

  Jane heard a scratching sound behind her. Another fuel-soaked crewman trying to spark a Zippo. She snatched the claw hammer from her pocket and shattered his head. She crouched over his body. She ripped a kerosene bottle from his chest and slipped it into her coat pocket.

  White tiles. Shower heads.

  The school changing rooms. Hiss of water. Thick steam. Five girls jeering, chanting, screaming. 'Stinky bitch. Stinky bitch.' Pelting their victim with soap. A small, Asian girl cowering fully clothed in the corner of the communal shower. Jane among her tormentors. 'Stinky bitch.' A shameful memory. A reminder that Jane wasn't always a righteous victim. Sometimes cowardice made her join the herd.

  There was a steel lid in the floor like the turret hatch of a tank.

  She heaved the hatch aside. A deep, vertical shaft. Flickering light at the bottom.

  She checked her watch.

  17:25

  'You're nothing special,' she told herself. 'You're not a hero. You've been a coward and a victim all your life. But plenty of others would turn and run right now. The girls who made your schooldays hell. That jeering, hateful crowd that drove you to the ends of the earth. None of them would have the courage to walk into this bunker and battle their way to the lowest levels.'

  We are what we do.

  She could be riding Rampart home. Instead she walked into hell to rescue a friend.

  She climbed into the shaft and gripped the wall-rungs. She recited Byron as she began to descend.

  I had a dream which was not all a dream.

  The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space.

  And men forgot their passions in the dread

  Of this desolation; and all hearts

  Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light.

  The Hive

  Approaching footsteps. Dancing flashlight beam.

  Nikki grasped Nail by the ankle and dragged him down the tunnel. She was half Nail's body weight, but possessed a maniac's super-strength. He sobbed and begged. His fingers raked concrete. Punch could hear Nail pleading as he was dragged away down the corridor. Echoing screams.

  Punch adjusted his grip on the sharpened coin. He cut as fast as he could. The cord binding his wrists had started to fray.

  Nikki returned and untied him from the girder. She dragged him down the tunnel. He didn't scream. Whatever horror Nikki planned for him, he resolved his last words would be 'Fuck you.'

  There was an office chair in the middle of the tunnel. Nikki tied him to the chair and pushed him down the tunnel.

  'Where are we going?' demanded Punch.

  'To meet the family.'

  Nikki kicked open double doors and propelled Punch into some kind of operations centre.

  The room was rippled with liquid metal like melted candle wax. Hyperion passengers were melded to the walls and ceiling like flies trapped in a web.

  Hyperion crewmen stood sentry round the walls. Drones. Worker bees. Officers in brass-button uniform. Deckhands in striped tunics.

  A figure at the centre of the room. A body lying in state. A Russian cosmonaut in a scorched pressure suit, part cooked by thermite but still intact. Canvas hanging in charred strips, under- suit ribbed with cooling tubes. The helmet visor was raised. Metal tendrils snaked from inside the enamel helmet, hung from the table, wound across the floor and fused with the wall.

  Nikki parked Punch at the back of the room. He craned to see past Nail. A figure tied to a chair.

  Ghost.

  They both leaned forward so they could talk. Nail sat between them, sobbing.

  '
How the hell did you get here, Gee?'

  'I came across the ice,' said Ghost. 'I came to help Jane. They caught me in the tunnels. Two of them. Thought they would kill me for sure, but they dragged me down here. It was like they had orders.'

  'Are you okay? Are you infected?'

  'I'm all right.'

  A wall screen pulsed static. A figure was fused to the screen.

  'Who's that?'

  'I think it's Rye,' said Ghost. 'What's left of her.'

  'Thought she was long dead.'

  'She was on Hyperion all the time we were living it up. She was down below with the passengers. Guess she survived the fire.'

  Nail kept sobbing.

  'Nail. Hey, Nail.'

  Nail didn't look up.

  'Forget him,' said Ghost. 'He's lost it.'

  'Have you got your knife?'

  'She took it.'

  'I can't get my hands free.'

  'Jane is around here some place,' said Ghost. 'The best we can do is stall for time.'

  Jane checked her watch. The final seconds.

  00:00

  Turn-around time. If she wanted to save her own skin, she should forget Punch and head for Rampart before it drifted beyond reach. Take a guaranteed ride back home.

  She unbuckled the watch and threw it away. Fuck it.

  Jane stood at the end of a corridor. She guessed the lower levels of the nuclear waste repository hid some kind of doomsday, continuation-of-government facility built during the cold war. A minor synapse of the Soviet command structure. Perhaps regional control for the submarine fleet.

  She passed a communal shower.

  She passed a powerhouse. Three rusted diesel generators. The generators appeared dead. She laid a hand on the metal housing. Cold. No vibration. Output dials smashed, needles at zero. So why were the lights on? The ceiling strip-lights pulsed like a slow heartbeat. She wondered if something had infiltrated the ducts and conduits. Perhaps the bunker itself was somehow alive and sentient.