The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  She clawed the scarf away and doubled over, vomiting onto the ice. The beard, the long nose, the glasses. It’s Keene , she thought as she heaved. Tears collected and instantly froze around her eyes and she had to gulp in deep breaths of the brassy, tainted air to make them stop. She stumbled blindly down the tunnel.

  Weaving like a drunk, careening off the ice walls, she pressed forward, not quite caring if she ran into whoever or whatever had killed the psychologist. She had one goal at this point and it was impossible for her brain to move beyond that single point, although her eyes registered that drops of the rusty brown stain decorated the ice floor in front of her every few feet . . . and were appearing with more frequency.

  A distant part of her mind edged through the fear and the growing scream that was building inside of her. Come on, girl. Just fifty more feet. She concentrated on counting off the remaining distance in strides. Thirty more feet. That’s just ten strides sprinting, fifteen walking, thirty crawling. Do it .

  The path was familiar, at least. Even without the flashlight, she could’ve found her way to the small corridor that peeled off the main artery toward the sewer bulb. She panned her light over the floor, the rungs, and the dark shaft that led into the darkness above.

  Coffee-colored stains speckled the ground at the foot of the icy ladder and decorated several of the rungs. She stared at the dots, paralyzed. She didn’t want to think what they meant overall, let alone what it meant for accomplishing her single goal. You can go up there and find out or you can curl into a ball and die right here.

  Cass held her breath, listening. Nothing.

  Swapping the flashlight for the headlamp, she began climbing, chasing the red light up the shaft. With a surgeon’s care, she placed her cramped hands and aching feet precisely on each rung before moving to the next. Every few seconds, she paused again to listen, trying to hear past her own heartbeat. Only silence greeted her and, halfway to the top, she allowed herself to feel a small flush of success. She tilted her head back so she could shine the beam directly up the shaft and her heart stopped.

  The hatch to her hideaway was open.

  The light from her headlamp punched through the open hole, illuminating the ceiling of the Jamesway hut above it. She was unable to move or swing the light away, holding in place so long that her arms and legs started to quiver from the strain.

  What’s it going to be, Cass? Do you have any other choice?

  Shaking, she climbed the last five or six rungs, expecting at any minute to see someone hurtle out of the hole at her, or a face to pop into view.

  With agonizing care, she raised her head and shoulders above the floor of the hut, flashing the light in quick half-circles around the tiny room, ready at any second to slide down the icy ladder and take her chances falling to the floor below rather than confront whoever had killed Keene. Debris from previous generations of Polies littered the room, throwing strange shadows against the walls of the hut.

  Nothing moved. There was no sound. She slowly crawled the rest of the way out of the hatch and into the Jamesway, whipping the headlamp around to try and see in every direction at once. Only after she was standing to her full height did she see it.

  Propped up in a corner was a body dressed in full expedition gear. The head had been torn away and the hood of the parka pulled up to frame the empty space where it should’ve been. A wave of black blood stained the torso down to the belt line, starkly contrasted against the scarlet material. One arm was held up by the back of a chair in a pantomime of a wave of greeting or warning. Rigor mortis had curled the arm back toward the body as though it were gesturing to itself.

  Cass stared at the corpse, then slowly closed the hatch and backed away as if it would stand and start walking toward her. Without taking her eyes off the body, she maneuvered her way toward the small patch of carpet where her shortwave was hidden. She knelt and, working by feel, reached for the piece of ancient shag carpeting that covered the false floor hiding the fragile components of her homemade radio.

  But nothing felt the way it was supposed to. Risking a glance down, she trained the light of the headlamp on the space. A low moan slipped from her chest as she saw the gaping hole where the hidden cache should be. In the depression, lying in a jumble, were the smashed fragments of her only remaining link to the outside world.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Only the pain told Taylor that he was both awake and alive. Coming to in complete darkness and cold had been so much like being unconscious, he couldn’t tell the difference.

  He thought, at first, that he was sitting. He was bent at the waist, but peculiarly so, and in such a way that he couldn’t feel his legs. Raising his head, he hoped to see just how far he’d fallen, but the darkness was total. It was so absolute that, afraid that he might’ve been blinded somehow in the accident, he ran a hand over his eyes. When he felt no damage, he reached for a small penlight he kept in a pocket of his parka, breathing a sigh of relief when he saw the cone of light bounce off the walls of the crevasse.

  Taylor panned the light around him, assessing. The snowmobile, its front end smashed up to the seat, lay wrecked twenty feet away. Had he not scrambled out of the saddle when he had, he’d be part of that wreckage. Then again, he thought as he looked around, maybe it would’ve been a better thing.

  The wind, savage and unrelenting on the surface, was softer down here. Taylor pushed back the hood of his parka and peeled off the balaclava. It was no warmer—his ears immediately began burning from the cold—but he could hear the engine of the Skandic ticking as it cooled, and now that his mask was off, he could smell the stink of gas and motor oil leaking out of the machine.

  After composing himself, he pointed the flashlight at his legs. The left wasn’t so bad—only turned a little strange at the ankle, like he was stretching funny—but the right was bent up underneath him so that the sole of his foot was touching the side of his hip. The pain was a dull ache right now—maybe shock and cold were keeping it at bay—but he’d be screaming soon. Of the other bumps and bruises, few were worth mentioning except what he thought might be a broken rib or two, courtesy of the 9mm Glock he still carried in an inside pocket.

  He swung the beam of his light back toward the Skandic. The saddlebag he’d packed had been torn or thrown free in the fall and lay a tantalizing ten feet away. Ten feet that could be measured in many different ways. Three strides, if he were walking. Less than two body lengths. Or, as it turned out, fifteen minutes of crawling, gritting his teeth and crying and spitting as the pain from his leg began to explode.

  He gave a grunt of satisfaction as his fingers wrapped around the strap of the bag and pulled it close. Holding the penlight between his teeth, he clawed through the contents. The first-aid kits were less than useless: bandages and zinc oxide tape and sterilization pads weren’t going to help him solve a multiple compound fracture. He looked skeptically at a bivy sack and foil space blanket wondering just how long they could keep him alive, but he tucked them nearby anyway. A repair kit—rivets, extra nylon webbing, and a sewing kit—had him laughing so hard he started to cry.

  At the bottom, his hand wrapped around the blocky dimensions of a Saber field radio, the first truly useful thing he’d found so far. With trembling fingers, he turned it on, grinning like a skull when the yellow face of the channel display lit up.

  Hugging it against his body to keep the batteries warm and alive as long as possible, Taylor began hailing on every channel, making a call once a minute up and down the dial. Time passed, but he refused to look at his watch. Time was irrelevant. His calls transformed from understandable English into gibbering moans. Shivering set in after the first half hour and he had trouble flicking the channel dial. For the first time since leaving Shackleton, he realized he truly might die.

  When he could no longer feel his feet or his fingertips, he decided it was time. He could strip off his coat and let the cold take him, but the pain from his ribs was now on a whole new level—did he want to lie
here for hours, waiting for hypothermia to set in while screaming in pain?

  Carefully setting the radio down beside him, he scooted his back up against the wall of the crevasse and got comfortable. He reached under his coat and pulled out the pistol. Then, croaking out a “Sorry, Jack,” he put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Beside him, the Saber crackled and spat, barely audible in the soft wind of the crevasse.

  “Zdravstvuj? Zdravstvuj? Hello? Is anyone there? ”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Cass staggered down the tunnel, her mind enclosed in a hard shell, as removed from her own existence as though she were watching her body propel itself along a preconfigured track laid out on the ground. Behind, the track led from her berth, through the base, down the tunnels, and out into the cold. Nothing she could do would change the direction of the track. Vaguely, she hoped that meant nothing that got in her way would do so, either.

  Looking at the shattered pieces of her shortwave lying on the floor of the hut, her emotions had circled the drain. She might escape Shackleton and whoever had engineered the murder of most of its crew, but without external aid, she would still die. Never forget. Antarctica wants to kill you .

  She had stared at the pieces of the sabotaged radio until her teeth started to chatter. Then, as though planning to return later, she’d carefully stowed the shortwave away and left. She averted her gaze from the corpse in the corner as she moved to the hatchway and slipped down the ladder to the ice tunnel below.

  Vox or no Vox, Orlova was her only hope now. She needed to leave the base, and quickly. For that, she needed transportation and supplies. The VMF and warehouse could provide both.

  If they were still there. Rolling black smoke stained the ceiling and the petroleum stink had grown so bad that she had to double up her scarf and press it hard to her mouth and nose to breathe. She had forcefully kept her mind away from thinking about the source of the gas smell, but her engineering mind provided the answer anyway: unless a Hercules had landed on the strip outside Shackleton and spontaneously combusted, either the fuel depot for the base or the petrol tanks in the VMF had been sabotaged. Nothing else within a thousand miles of the South Pole had enough fuel to send fumes all the way to the Beer Can and beyond.

  If the fuel depot had been tampered with, that would explain the power failure and would also confirm that Shackleton was doomed. If it was the VMF, her plans for escape were gone. Living or dying depended on the answer.

  She hadn’t gone a hundred feet down the tunnel when she got it. Smoke spilled down the side artery to her garage in great clouds, blackening the walls and ceiling. The acrid stench of petroleum joined with the fresh-tar odor of burning tires and the chemical stink of evaporated solvents. Cass pushed down the hall anyway, even dropping to her hands and knees to try and slip beneath the smog of smoke and fumes, but she was turned back, choking and gagging, before she’d gotten halfway down the corridor. Residual heat had begun to melt the ice forty or fifty feet away from the entrance, and the walls and floor were slick with water.

  Back in the main corridor, she crawled up to a wall and sat with her back against it, staring blankly at the ice opposite her. Almost immediately, the chill started seeping through her coat. She didn’t care.

  Trekking overland on a snowmobile or a snowcat in the middle of an Antarctic winter would normally be considered suicidal, but—in light of the living hell that Shackleton had become—the term had lost any meaning. With enough fuel and maybe an emergency kit or an MRE or three under the seat, a snowcat would give you even odds of surviving long enough to get to Orlova. A snowmobile, open to the elements, would be a shot in the dark, though still better than freezing to death or waiting to be killed and having your body parts propped up in a shrine.

  But with a fire hot enough to melt the walls fifty feet away, there was nothing with a track or a wheel or a tire left whole in the VMF. And that meant there was just one way to escape: a thirty-mile trek alone, on foot, during winter, in the darkest night. Something no one had attempted in the hundred-year history of Antarctica. Because it wasn’t possible.

  “I can’t do it,” she whispered to herself. “I’ve got nothing left.”

  Is it time to give up?

  She groaned. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

  That’s not what this trip was about , the voice persisted. You were supposed to dig down deep and find out something about yourself you didn’t know before .

  “I didn’t sign up for this.”

  No one signs up for the hardest thing in their life .

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Get up .

  “Fuck off.”

  Get up. Or die .

  Crying, spitting, cursing, she rolled to her hands and knees and crawled. First, a few yards, then thirty. At fifty, she staggered to her feet, away from the reek of the burning garage, and stumbled down the corridor. Ahead was the warehouse—with enough food to keep her alive for twenty years, but nothing to keep her warm unless she set fire to the place—and the power plant, which might be intact, but likely sabotaged or damaged beyond her ability to fix.

  She banged through the door to the warehouse and on into the cavernous warehouse. Her light illuminated once-familiar racks of dried goods and supplies; in the complete darkness, though, it seemed like she’d wandered into some post-apocalyptic storehouse. Her footsteps rang hollow on the metal floor as she hurried down the center aisle. She flicked her flashlight from side to side, washing the sacks and boxes in a brief, stark light, before pointing the beam in front of her to guide her steps. Her goal was at the back of the warehouse and it was her last shot.

  She sniffed. The air had become fresher and cleaner as she’d moved away from the VMF. The Beer Can is functioning as a chimney, drawing the fumes and smoke away . A small consolation, but she was at least able to stop pressing her hands to her face just to breathe. Great. She could die with a cold, frigid lungful of air instead of asphyxiating.

  “Shut up,” she said savagely. The time for giving up and dying was over. If she hadn’t thrown her hands up and cashed it in after discovering the fire, then now wasn’t the time to take cheap shots at herself.

  “Cass?”

  She stumbled back at the sound of her name, gasping as though a cold hand had slipped inside her chest and seized her heart. It clenched painfully in her chest before starting again with a reluctant thud. Whipping the flashlight to her left, she got a brief view of a short, round figure bundled in the thick layers of an expedition parka, fat gloves, and enormous bunny boots before light flooded her eyes, blinding her.

  Cass winced and threw up a hand. “Biddi?”

  The light left her face and the figure peeled off a glove to pull down the mouth covering of the balaclava. The apple-cheeked face of her friend peered out of the fur-lined hood, giving her a weak grin. “In the frozen flesh, dearie.”

  Cass exclaimed an inarticulate noise and hugged Biddi, barely able to feel her friend’s body through the thick layers of the parka. Biddi hugged back, then pushed her away to look at her. “Speaking of frozen flesh, what the hell are you wearing?”

  Cass wiped her tears away before they could freeze. “Seven shitty layers of clothes stolen from half the rooms on base.”

  Biddi made an “oh” sound and tugged her arm. “Get over here, you dummy. There’s a whole cage full of emergency supplies lying here in piles just waiting to be used.”

  Her friend turned and waddled away, playing the beam from her flashlight over the stiff, steel wire of the emergency rack. She carried a mountaineer’s ice axe in her other hand.

  “Biddi, what the hell happened while I was locked up? There are . . .” Cass choked as images flooded into her head. Instinct and self-survival had compartmentalized all the horrors she’d seen, tucking them away so she could focus on basic survival. But asking Biddi the simple question brought all the scenes back in a rush. “I saw bodies. Hanratty and Dave. And the Lifeboat.”

  Biddi opene
d the gate to the ECW cage and threw it back with a clang that made Cass wince. Her friend searched her face. “They didn’t make it?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  Biddi shook her head. “The day after I visited you, there was a terrible riot. It was a . . . a mutiny, of sorts. A bunch of others were hurt in the aftermath.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It was pure anarchy. Doc Ayres rallied whoever was left after the fracas and made for the Lifeboat. I think he hoped our radio silence had triggered some kind of alarm at McMurdo and that all they had to do was wait out the crisis. They should send help sometime, right?”

  “You’d think so.” Cass moved quickly down the line of clothing, folded and organized by size. She found a set that fit and began slipping the parka and expedition pants on over her clothes, shivering at the change in temperature. Bunny boots followed. Armed with the kind of gear meant for eighty below zero, her body finally began to warm itself.

  “What happened to them?” Biddi’s voice rang hollow in the empty space.

  Cass cinched the parka’s hood down tight, then turned to the non-clothing gear. Rucksacks and web belts were mounded in piles, while axes and testing poles leaned in a corner of the cage. Cass helped herself to one of the axes. The heft of it in her hand felt good. “Someone had braced the doors shut. They . . . froze to death.”

  Biddi stared at her, silent.

  Cass felt her throat tighten. “Biddi, they were . . . huddled together. Trying to stay warm. They died that way.” She took a deep breath, fighting to get her emotions under control. “I am just so glad you weren’t with them. How did you not get trapped there, too?”