The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  Cass poked her head out. The VIP suite was on the bottom floor of the base. The galley and offices were located on the upper floor, so the bottom deck was normally the less busy of the two floors, but even for here it was quiet. Emergency footlights lit the hall every fifteen feet, providing a dim, uncertain light. She sniffed cautiously. The faint smell of gasoline floated in the air and she blanched; if the generators had blown the contents of their fuel tanks, the base was doomed.

  If Biddi was right and Hanratty and Taylor had managed to make a scapegoat out of her, the entire base might blame her for everything that had gone wrong since the last plane had left for McMurdo. Her only defense was that the second power outage had happened after she was imprisoned; surely no one could still believe she was the mastermind behind some insane experiment after she’d been locked up? She shook her head, trying to put theories out of her head; right now, she needed to get warm and for that she needed proper gear. Her first stop had to be her own berth, though as she padded down the hall, she peeked into several of the labs, hoping to find someone, but all were empty.

  After reaching the A4 wing, she headed straight for her room. Her stomach sank when she found no sign of her ECW gear, although the rest of her things were intact. Rummaging through her bags and rucksacks, she threw on every layer of clothing that fit, then pocketed a few personal items that included her headlamp, a flashlight, and the battery to her crude shortwave. Her nascent diary and the copy of The Worst Journey in the World she left behind, feeling just a twinge of regret at abandoning both.

  She backed out, leaving the little space that had been her home for much of the last year, then continued on, opening doors and poking her head into room after room. Each was deserted. Half cups of coffee sat abandoned on desks, pens and pencils rested on open notebooks. Had the electricity been running, she was sure she would’ve seen monitors showing unfinished e-mails and incomplete reports. A shiver went through her. The crew had left in a hurry.

  Unfortunately, ECW gear—the one thing she could’ve used—was also missing from every room. Cass circled back to check the dorms; it made sense people might retreat to their own quarters in the event of an emergency. Her footsteps rang hollow and empty on the floor and she closed each door gently, unable to bear the thought of the sound they would make if they slammed shut.

  But room after room was empty. Few were locked, and she glanced in to make sure some kind of . . . plague hadn’t laid the crew low. In some cases, the rooms resembled the offices she’d looked in: deserted in a hurry, with half-opened drawers and personal items strewn over beds and on floors. In others, the occupants had departed more strategically, with little left behind. What few things remained were the time-killers: books and CDs, impractical clothes, decks of cards, handheld games. But in every case, the critical element was the same—no crew members were left.

  Each room was equipped with an on-base phone; she tried every one of them and was greeted by the same flat silence. She’d thought that calling out loud for people was ridiculous, but after the fifth empty bedroom, she started yelling names, shouting hello . Her voice was a rusty croak, growing louder and more desperate as the five empty berths became ten, then twenty, then thirty.

  She was getting colder by the minute and her breath steamed in the cold. Feeling only mildly guilty, she lifted a few items from some of the sloppier berths—another cap, a second set of gloves, a spare flashlight, extra batteries—but if she didn’t find a heat source and some answers soon, filching clothes was going to be the least of her worries. She hadn’t checked the entire base yet, of course, but if there was no heat, no power, if all of Shackleton was compromised, options for getting warm and staying alive were few.

  A thrill of panic ran through her. No gear, crew left in a hurry, no power, gasoline leaking . Had the entire crew decided to evacuate and leave her behind? Surely Biddi or Ayres or someone had thought of her before they simply fled for . . . for wherever they’d decided.

  The real possibility that she’d been abandoned started to overwhelm her until she stopped in the middle of the hall and literally smacked herself. Idiot. Stop looking for people and start looking for places. Any sanctuary that had the elements she needed to survive was also going to be where others would gather: maybe the gym, possibly the galley, but most certainly the Lifeboat, an entire area devoted to keeping Shackleton’s crew alive in the case of a catastrophe. It had food, its own heat and power supply, and enough space to house an entire winter crew.

  Cass tucked her hands under her armpits and began to jog down the hall toward the room of last resort. The base, as deserted as it had felt sometimes during the winter-over, had never been dead silent. Background noises—small electronic burps, the distant murmurs of conversation, the almost subsonic hum of air moving through vents overhead—had always been present, a kind of constant proof of life. Now, there was nothing. The base was dead.

  Her steps faltered as she caught sight of something odd in the hallway. She was nearing the galley, itself only forty feet from the door to the Lifeboat. Between her and the entrance to her best shot at survival was a jumble of shapes lying on the floor, propped against the wall, draped over each other. In the dim gloom of the footlights, the shapes were indistinct and ugly, but they stood out because normally the halls were required to remain clear. But nothing about Shackleton was normal any longer.

  Cass shuffled down the hall in a stupor, unwilling to discover what her instincts told her was waiting up ahead, but unable to resist a strange, morbid pull to confirm it. A low, involuntary moan escaped. Her mind refused to process what she was seeing, pushing back hard in an attempt to assimilate the scene. Swallowing with difficulty, she pulled out her flashlight and pointed it forward.

  Bodies, four or five altogether. Black pools of blood, spooling out from skulls, guts, limbs. Slack faces limned in ice. She forced herself to check faces, if not bodies. Dave Boychuck. Beth Muñez. Her eyes slid away from a colossal head wound on another corpse, only recognizable as Pete Ozment by his apron. There were two or three others she could barely identify.

  Hanratty was propped up against a wall, as though he’d grown tired of standing and waiting for her and had decided to sit. His hands were folded over his stomach in a pantomime of napping, but they couldn’t hide the furrows in his shoulder or the crusted blood frozen in plaques on his chest. Covering her mouth, she leaned closer. The others had obviously been beaten or been involved in some kind of fight; it took Cass a long moment to realize that the wounds she was looking at were gunshots. Taylor . Only he would’ve had a gun.

  She put a hand out to a wall for support, dizzy and sick. It was as if a wave of madness had grabbed everyone by the throat and hadn’t let go, even in death. One of Dave’s arms had been bent back at an obscene angle; Beth’s face was twisted savagely in fear and anger. Glancing through the doorway in which Pete was sprawled, she spotted the shoes of another casualty, the feet crossed in an awkward jumble that no living person would tolerate.

  Cass stumbled away, gulping down the bile in her throat, her head screaming at what she’d seen. Leave it, get it out of your head, start over . Her mind clawed at something it could hold on to, found purchase on a goal that would keep her stable and safe. The Lifeboat . The Lifeboat is ahead of you . Five doors separated her and it on the right, three lockers on the left. She’d idly counted them months before when she was bored, in the same way that, as a bored child on long family trips, she’d tapped forefinger to thumb for each passing truck and car. Now the habit was a tenuous strand that barely kept her mind in one piece.

  As she approached the emergency shelter, she slowed, puzzled at the strange look of the entrance. Initially, she thought it was because the fire door was shut, which of course it would be if the Lifeboat were actually being used. It simply looked odd now because the massive emergency door had commonly been kept propped open , a safety rule that had never been violated since the first day she’d arrived at Shackleton.

  But th
en she realized it wasn’t just that. Two strange pieces of metal as long as her arm, struts or braces lifted from some other part of the base, were jammed at an angle against the door, planted into the ridge in the hall floor that was normally used to lock the door open. Hesitating, she grabbed one piece and tried to move it without success; pressure, bulging outward, was holding the metal as though it had been welded in place. Running her eyes along the jamb, she could see where the door had warped outward as though by some great force from within.

  Determined to get inside, Cass kicked the strut, aiming out and away from the door. The first try was ineffective, but on the third, she flinched as the metal strut sprang away and shot down the hall. The second did the same. She closed her eyes for a brief second, then turned the Lifeboat’s latch.

  The door was even colder than the air around her. She jumped at a faint scratching sound that started as soon as she began pulling it open—something was leaning against the other side, sliding down its face. She swallowed and opened the door the rest of the way.

  A blast of frigid air hit her full force. She jumped as an object flopped through the open doorway. It was the frozen hand of Ron Ayres. His body, no longer propped up by the door, rocked in place, preserved by the cold in a stiff, bowed curve. His arm and hand were a claw that had been draped over the inside latch and now hung in the air above his head in a grotesque croisé devant . Beyond him, softly lit by the emergency lights, were the stiff, crystalline bodies of twenty or thirty people, huddled together to conserve a warmth that had been leached out of them by degrees and dissipated into the Antarctic night, slowed only marginally by the insulated walls. If the Lifeboat had been heated, there was no evidence of it now.

  Cass backed away from the door, her mind simultaneously screaming and numb. Her eyes tried to unsee the twinkling crystal forms arrayed in a row, unsee Ayres’s frozen face, unsee the struts that had transformed the Lifeboat into a tomb instead of a sanctuary. She turned her head away, only to face the bodies sprawled across the hall near the galley.

  Thoughts of rescue or hunkering down to wait out the crisis were gone. The idea that the atrocities that had occurred were either accidents or arranged by Hanratty evaporated. Someone was responsible, someone had made this happen. There might not be a reason, but there was an answer. She just had to live long enough to find it.

  Cass turned and ran down the hall, chased by the cold and the frozen gazes of the dead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  As Shackleton’s security chief, Taylor had spent little time looking out over the ice fields that made up the world around the base. If he’d noticed the outside at all, it was in the early days of last summer, when the sunlight bouncing off the bright snow irritated him enough to snap closed the blinds or pull a blackout curtain across the window.

  On the rare occasion when he gave himself the time to wrap his head around the immensity of the ice, the intimidating expanse of white, his thoughts ran toward the impossibility of traversing it. The fact that men had attempted to travel over it with dogsleds, ponies, and even on foot was stunning. Sometimes, when he saw the cliffs and crevasses, felt the screaming wind, comprehended the absolute nothingness that lay in every direction, he had to sit down on the floor to get back in touch with something solid, man-made, and real.

  The vision of that immensity and the fear that those thoughts provoked began enveloping Taylor as he skimmed over drifts and fought the giant, insistent hand of the wind. Even though the great white desert had unnerved him, the constant darkness—with the same uninterrupted, featureless face, just black instead of white—was no better. The beam from the Skandic’s headlight died an arm’s length in front of him, illuminating nothing more than the next snowbank or the toothed ridges of the damned frozen sastrugi that made his teeth slam together in his head.

  Only the GPS kept him on course; there was no chance he could use a compass, and sight, of course, would be useless until he was almost on top of the Russian base, his final destination. His situation was still dicey, of course, but he permitted himself to feel a tiny amount of optimism for the future, because even if those bastards back at Shackleton survived his parting shot into the VMF and the subsequent fire, the fever that had consumed the high-strung and volatile crew was enough to finish the job. They’d been on the verge of tearing each other apart; it would be a miracle if anyone else made it out of that hellhole alive.

  All of which meant that, if he made it to Orlova, and they didn’t turn him over to whatever secret police they were using these days, and he managed to make it back stateside, his future was set. As Shackleton’s sole survivor, the story he’d tell the press would keep news cycles running for a week. He’d make a few appearances, describing the deplorable living conditions and the psychological stresses, then hit them with the biggest surprise of all: it had all been an experiment to drive people crazy. He’d sue TransAnt, write his memoir, sign a movie deal. These last four or five shitty months would turn out to be the meal ticket he’d been looking for his whole life. Not bad for a piss-poor kid who used to dream about owning a pair of shoes.

  A gust hit him sideways, lifting the right side of the sled a foot into the air. He leaned into the rise and slammed the snowmobile back down to the ground. The track’s teeth slipped and spun, then bit into the ice. With his heart slamming in his chest, Taylor wrestled the sled back under control and reluctantly slowed the Skandic down to a crawl. At high speeds, the machine was the equivalent of an expensive kite, and getting dumped onto the ice was not an optimal outcome right now.

  The gust presaged a shift in the wind. Snow hit him full in the face, cutting visibility down to nothing, and he slowed the sled down even more. Slow enough, in fact, that he risked a glance behind. In his imagination, he’d assumed he’d see a starlike pinpoint of light from one of the outside spotlights or maybe even the Halloween glow of fire from the explosion he’d triggered in the garage.

  But Shackleton had long since disappeared from view, and the world behind him was as dark as the bleak, flat night in front of him. Nothing ahead, nothing behind . A hollow pit opened up in his stomach, despair and dread and naked fear fusing together . . .

  It took longer than it should have to realize that the twisting, careening sense that the bottom of his world was dropping away was real, not imagined. The Skandic’s headlight tipped forward and away, a plank of light teetering over the crumbling edge of a crevasse. Taylor tried to roll backward from the sled, but it was too late. Man and machine tumbled into the darkness, the single headlight playing over the blue-black walls.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Cass unwound the scarf from around her neck and doubled it over her mouth and nose. The smell of gasoline was strong enough to make her gag and she had to squeeze her eyes hard to clear it of tears that formed and froze. Rationally, she knew that the Beer Can, always unheated, couldn’t be any colder than it had always been, but it somehow seemed darker and less protective than ever as she started down its metal steps.

  The central shaft of the staircase appeared to her flashlight in muddy sections. The familiar sterile lights of each level were gone, as was the sluggish glow at the bottom of the shaft that she associated with the service lights of the ice tunnels that led to the arches and the VMF. Just one emergency footlight glowed at the top of the Beer Can. Her flashlight was the only other illumination.

  Her steps made a hollow, staccato rapping as she descended the staircase. She wanted to move quickly, but the muscles of her calves and thighs twitched and shivered, making both her steps and her judgment risky. Her only source of heat was movement, which might be good enough for now, but as she failed to replace the calories she’d lost, her body would start to break down, slow, and die.

  The dark maw of the ice tunnels loomed in front of her. She swung the light back and forth, expecting, perhaps, to see more bodies lying in the tunnel, on the ground, propped against the icy walls, but there was nothing. The sound of her breathing was loud in her ears. T
he layers of cloth swaddled around her head kept her warm, but also kept her isolated and deaf.

  The smell of the gas was stronger. Moving slowly but steadily, she made it to the conduit intersection in twice the time it normally took with the power on and the lights guiding her way. Tugging the cloth aside from one ear, she listened down the tunnel.

  Nothing.

  But the arches weren’t her destination, not yet. She moved to the plywood door that led to the rough ice tunnels, her feet crunching and squeaking on the ice floor. She wrapped her hand around the rope handle of the door and yanked it open, thrusting her flashlight into the opening like a sword.

  The light showed nothing but the round-roofed shaft leading into darkness. The silence beyond was absolute, sepulchral.

  She closed the door behind her and shuffled forward. The walls of the older tunnel were serpentine, and the beam from her flashlight illuminated only a few feet ahead, refracted by the next turn or aberration in the tunnel. The smell of gas was less oppressive here, but there was a new, brassy odor she couldn’t place. It sat in the back of her throat like a pill half swallowed.

  She moved down the tunnel slower than she ever had, her muscles and eyes twitching, her breath coming in a quick, one-two rhythm just shy of a gasp, trying to inhale and exhale without tasting the air. The first turn was coming up.

  Steeling herself, she rounded the corner with the flashlight held steady and straight. Light splashed over Jerry’s screaming bust.

  Then, Cass’s vision shifted violently, as though she’d been blindsided in traffic, and she realized Christ, oh God, it wasn’t Jerry, it wasn’t a bust of snow tinted with axle grease or human shit; it was smaller and more articulate than the crude sculpture had been. Gaskets were still there where the eyes should be and the vacuum hose still made the outline of the mouth an “o” of surprise, but this head had a long nose and a bearded chin, gold-rimmed glasses crushed into a face crusted with ice and covered with a stain that spread over the rim of the ice shelf it rested on, forming rusty brown stalactites that hung from the ledge.