by Tim Curran
“Wonder what they found down there,” Warren said. “700,000 years old. Hell could it be?”
“Doc said we’d see soon enough.”
Warren tried to smile but completely missed the mark. “Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.”
“I got something better to be afraid of,” Biggs said, his voice oddly hollow. “Dryden wants to thaw it out . . .”
12
NOAA FIELD CAMP POLARIS,
ATLANTIS ICE DOME
IT LOOKED LIKE THE inside of the habitat had been painted red.
They all knew it was blood, of course, because it could not be anything else. It was splashed over the floor in an ice puddle, sprayed up the walls in frozen runnels and inkblots, and even hanging from the ceiling in cherry-red icicles.
When they came into the habitat, Coyle in the lead, they saw it right away in the beams of their flashlights: not just death, not just murder, but absolute barbaric slaughter.
“Dear God, what happened here?” Flagg said.
The habitat was trashed. Desks flipped over, books scattered, papers flung about, dishes shattered. The airlock and outer door were wide open and snow had blown over the floor, drifting in the corners. Waters lines had burst in the cold, bleeding icicles from the ceiling.
Coyle kept looking around in disbelief. Lots of blood, but no bodies. What could that suggest?
“Horn?” he said. “You better go check that generator.”
“Right.” He didn’t like the idea of going out there alone with what he was seeing, but he went.
While Flagg took video of the mess in the common room, Coyle and Gwen went down the corridor to check the other rooms.
“Look,” Gwen said, indicating a bloody smear on the wall.
It looked like something wet with blood had been dragged along the wall. The trail ended at a doorway where it became a handprint . . . only distorted, the palm print weirdly angled, the fingers splayed out seven and eight inches.
“What kind of hand made that?” Gwen asked, her breath frosting out in a rolling cloud.
Coyle swallowed. “Must’ve . . . must’ve been smeared or something.”
The dorm rooms were untouched. No blood, no nothing. The beds looked slept in. They scanned their lights around and found a frozen bottle of water, a few magazines cast aside. Nothing else.
Storage lockers were untouched.
The lab was a different story.
Going in there, Coyle’s first sensory input was smell: a slightly acidic stench of fermentation that had no business being in the freezing air of the habitat. He breathed it in and it made something roll in his belly. Seconds later, he wasn’t sure he’d smelled it at all.
Everything was wrecked. Equipment tossed to the floor, glassware reduced to fragments, notebooks torn in half, laptops shattered against the walls and lying in twisted heaps. Ice cores had been broken into pieces.
And slime.
There was slime everywhere . . . or something like slime.
Something gluey and clear like the mucilaginous secretions of a plant. It was pooled on the worktables, webbing instruments together, ribbons of it oozing over the edge and dripping down in long strands like snot. A glistening smear of it ran right up the wall and dripped from the ceiling. All of it frozen hard as granite. Coyle could barely chip it with his ice-axe. It was clear and hard like acrylic.
Coyle felt a singular dryness in his throat like he’d just inhaled a mouth full of coal dust. His lips were stuck together, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. His belly felt like it was filled with looping black worms.
He stood there, flashing his light around, hunchbacked shadows crawling over the walls.
“Nicky . . . I keep smelling something bad,” Gwen said, her eyes huge and dark and wet. “But it can’t stink . . . not in this cold.”
“I smell it, too. There . . . then gone.”
He found himself transported back to 10th grade Biology with Mr. Slapp. He could almost smell the chalk and hear pencils scratching on papers, see autumn leaves blown up against the tall mullioned windows as Mr. Slapp nervously paced back and forth in front of the blackboard, making bad jokes about his thinning hair and jingling the change in his pockets. And what did it, what really brought that absurd memory back to him, was the smell in the room of chemicals and preservatives. In Slapp’s classroom, there had been a wooden cabinet built into the wall that ran the length of one side of the room. It was filled with jars and glass vessels of pickled things—snakes and toads, fetal pigs and marine life, even what had looked like a shriveled and hairless monkey’s head floating in pale serum—that were white and puckered, pressed up to the glass, staring and clutching and coiling, but perfectly dead.
And smelling the sharp, sickly sweet odor in the air brought it all back to him.
This lab, of course, was not like a tenth grade biology classroom. Everything was white and sterile or gleaming stainless steel. Instruments and chemicals were locked in metal cabinets, tables crowded with the remains of digital binocular microscopes, laptops, chromatographs, and protein analyzers. A maze of electronic equipment on carts. The lab had been well equipped for geology, glaciology, and microbiology studies.
Coyle stepped around tables and workstations, bumped into charts on the walls.
Gwen was pressed up close to him, her arm looped around his own. “This is . . . this is spooky, Nicky. Blood everywhere. No bodies. Everything wrecked like somebody went insane. What could have happened?”
He shook his head. “I just don’t know.”
“Mama thinks we should leave. Right now.”
Horn came through the door, puffing out clouds of white air that did not dissipate in the polar chill but slowly rose towards the ceiling. “Generator’s been dead for days. Fuel cells are ruptured, lines slit . . . it was done on purpose, Nicky. Somebody wanted to cool this place off in a hurry.”
Sure, somebody, he thought as he looked around, trying to make some sense of the madness. Whoever did this slaughtered the NOAA team, wrecked the generator, then selectively smashed-up certain rooms.
Coyle squeezed his eyes shut, trying to find his center.
Flagg came down the corridor, holding his video camera in one hand. “It’s all been documented for what good it will do us. I can’t begin to . . . to understand something like this.”
“Let’s go,” Coyle said, stepping past Horn and Flagg and taking off down the corridor as if he couldn’t get out of the lab fast enough.
Flagg caught up with him. “We just can’t leave this . . . like this.”
“We have to. The NSF will do their own investigation in the spring. We’ll leave it for them. Our job is to look for survivors, not play detective.”
He led them back out into the cold and wind.
13
STANDING AT THE PERIMETER of a flagged pathway, Horn did not look too happy in the reflected glow of his flashlight. “Nicky, c’mon, what good is it going to do us to tromp around out there? We have a safety factor here, fuel-wise. I told you when we left we have about thirty minutes and then we’ve got to get out. We’ve already burned about twenty of those thirty minutes and I don’t care for the idea of running out of gas out on the plateau.”
“Quit your bitching,” Gwen told him.
“Just a few minutes. Let’s just do a quick canvas of the general area, see if we find anything,” Coyle told him. “If we don’t, Hopper’s going to be asking why we didn’t.
“Exactly,” Flagg said. “We didn’t come all this way to tuck our tails between our legs and run.”
Horn sighed. “Shit. Okay. But I’m telling you right now I got me a real bad feeling about this.”
“Noted,” Coyle said.
The wind was fierce and steel-edged, kicking up wild, twisting snow-devils that engulfed them in spinning ice and drift. Several times as they followed the black flags down the pathway they had to pause, hold onto one another, as solid sheets of drift enveloped them, powdering them white, leaving t
hem clawing snow from their goggles and gaiters and balaclavas.
They stayed together, only a few feet apart, fierce gusts trying to knock them down or throw them right over the guide ropes. But they pushed on, leaning into the wind.
Coyle wasn’t sure why he insisted on this, but he felt it was important. In the final analysis he could have really cared less what Hopper wanted or didn’t want; something else was driving him. Something beyond mere morbid curiosity.
Gwen held her light up. The beam was filled with spinning snowflakes. “Something up there . . . something ahead,” she said through her balaclava.
Coyle saw it, ducking into a blast of drift and heading over there.
“Oh man,” Horn said.
All lights were on their discovery. It was a body dressed in ECWs, covered now in a membrane of ice and snow. But not so much that they could not see that it had no head.
“No blood,” Flagg said, kicking the snow around it. “This person wasn’t killed here. Either they were blown here by the wind or–”
“Something dragged them here,” Horn finished for him.
Flagg documented it with his camera.
They moved on until they found a rope tethered to one of the flagpoles. It was tied very tightly and white with snow. It had been there for some time.
Putting his back to the wind, Coyle said, “There must be something out there. I’m going after it.”
“It’s too dangerous to leave the pathway in a blow like this,” Flagg pointed out. “You could get lost in ten feet.”
“I’ll follow the rope. Doc, you and Horn wait here.” He got no argument on that. “C’mon, Gwen.”
They ducked under the guide rope and followed the other rope off into the darkness. The weather was wild as it can only be out on the plateau where there is nothing to stop the wind. It screamed with demonic fury as they fought forward, holding mittened hands and not daring to let go of each other even for one second.
They didn’t go far before they found something heaped with snow.
“It looks like a coffin,” Gwen said, not attempting to hide the unease in her voice.
And it did as Coyle brushed the snow off it: a long silver coffin made of aluminum. Inside, there was a lot of snow as if the lid had been opened to the elements for some time before blowing shut. They stood there staring down into its shadowy confines for a few moments. Then Coyle, on his knees on the hardpack, dug around in there, pushing aside snow and finding something clear and hard as ice.
“Look,” he told Gwen, his light on it. “Slime. Like in the lab.”
He wanted to tell himself that maybe this had been some kind of case for scientific equipment, but deep inside he knew better. Whatever had laid waste to the camp had come in this container. Something vicious. Something unbelievably deadly. And something that oozed copious amounts of slime.
They followed the rope maybe another twenty feet in the storm and there it ended, frayed and red.
“What the hell’s going on, Nicky?” Gwen said, almost frantic with the need for an explanation.
So he told her quickly what he thought. “I know it sounds crazy, but if you’ve got something better, I’m listening.”
The drift wind lightened for a moment and with their lights they could see things just ahead mounded in snow. They went over there, knowing they were taking big chances by straying away from the rope. What they found was a hand torn off at the wrist. It still had a wool mitten on it. And not ten feet away . . . another body.
“Oh God,” Gwen said.
It was nearly buried in snow. It was a man and he had been thoroughly gutted, leaving a hollow trough from throat to crotch that was half-filled with snow. One arm was extended upwards, hand reaching towards the sky, his face a gray, shriveled screaming mask of horror.
He had died violently and in agony.
Coyle took Gwen by the hand, found the rope and followed it back towards the flagged pathway. The wind was screaming and he kept imagining that he heard something like a female voice buried in it, shrill and cackling and absolutely deranged.
“About time,” Horn said when they showed.
“Anything?” Flagg asked as they started back along the pathway.
“Another body,” Coyle told him. “All fucking torn apart.”
He and Gwen led on, Horn and Flagg just behind them. The wind was at their backs now and it made the going easier as it pushed them along. But still the drift blew and whipped, blinding them and dumping snow over them.
They had sighted the lights of the idling Spryte when a gust that was practically cyclonic punched into them with incredible force, knocking Coyle to the ice and tossing Gwen right on top of him. Horn went sliding across the snowpack.
As Coyle hit the ice, he was seized by a manic, irrational terror because he was not so certain it was the wind. As it blasted into them it shrieked with a sound that was like some deafening unearthly squealing.
He pulled himself up and helped Gwen to her feet, shining his light in all directions. The storm raged, drift flying like buzzing hornets in his flashlight beam. He thought for one crazy, devastating moment that slid icicles into his stomach that he saw something . . . something large and distorted, hunched-over pulling off into the blizzarding darkness.
“Where’s Flagg?” Gwen said, panic in her voice. “Where the hell is Flagg?”
Horn and Coyle looked around frantically.
He was nowhere to be scene.
Then Horn said, “Oh shit . . .”
Beyond the guide ropes there was a vibrant red spray in the snow that led off as far as their lights would reach and as they took that in, each one shivering with escalating dread, they heard a sound which was not the wind: a hysterical, agonized screaming in the distance.
Flagg.
It rose up and died away and then there was only the sibilant voice of the wind, droning on and on, an eerie and otherworldly soundtrack to the fear that each and everyone felt deep into their bones.
“Get to the Spryte!” Coyle said. “Now! Go! Go!”
Gwen looked at him, her eyes bright and hunted-looking through the slit of her balaclava. “But Flagg–”
“Fuck Flagg,” Horn said, leading the charge.
Running in bunny boots is an adventure and they found themselves tripping and falling as much as they were gaining ground. Coyle’s heart was pounding, adrenaline kicking in and making his entire body tingle with exhilaration.
They made the Spryte and slammed the doors shut, locking them against what haunted the polar wastes.
“Get us out of here!” Coyle snapped.
But Horn did not have to be told. He threw the Spryte in gear, grabbed the brake bars and off they went. The heater was pumping out full blast but they still shivered. They didn’t even want to think about what had just happened.
The Spryte’s wipers were whipping back and forth, clearing snow, the headlights filled with agitated flakes. The drift wind was still throwing sheets at them and creating huge jumping shadows.
When he finally found his voice, Coyle got on the radio and called Clime, telling them they were en route to their position. And when Hopper asked if they’d found anything all Coyle would tell him was, “No survivors.” He hated even saying that, knowing that just about any station out there with a strong enough receiver could be listening in but Hopper demanded something.
“I’ll fill you in upon return,” Coyle said into the mic.
And at that precise moment something hit the Spryte.
It hammered into it like a freight train, the impact making the vehicle rock on its tracks and knocking the mic from Coyle’s hand. Horn, his face tight and corded in the dash lights, did not slow down. GPS was locked and he was not going to stop.
“That wasn’t the wind,” Gwen said.
“No,” Coyle told her. “It wasn’t.”
Something was out there, something strong enough to nearly stop a 3,000 pound vehicle dead in its tracks.
Nobody spoke.
They were all feeling it: the sense that they were far from safe, that whatever had devastated NOAA Polaris was still out there, hiding in the darkness and stalking them, using the storm as camouflage. They did not dare speculate as to what it might be.
Coyle just listened for it, knowing it was there.
He could feel its presence up his spine and in the gooseflesh that covered his arms and skin, creeping at the small of his belly. His mouth was so dry he could not swallow and so fixed were his eyes on what the headlights were revealing that he had to remember to blink.
Gwen’s hand in his own was damp with sweat.
The snow blew around the Spryte like a heavy, claustrophobic sea fog, the wind roaring and whistling. The Spryte was not known for its stealth. It was a loud machine and you had to speak loudly to be heard in the cab. It was not unusual to return to camp after a trip in it with ringing ears.
But Coyle didn’t hear the engine, the tracks cutting across the hardpack, he could only hear the wind, listening for the voice of the thing that was hunting them, knowing damn well it had not given up the chase.
And then–
Gwen tensed next to him, every muscle in her body seeming to draw upwards as she jerked at the sound the wind carried. It was a weird, almost feline screeching that echoed from the belly of the storm, chilling, piercing, unearthly. It rose up so loud it seemed that what made it was right next to the Spryte and then faded off into an obscene female cackling that sounded impossibly distant and then was lost altogether out across the ice fields.
Then something jumped in front of the Spryte.
They all saw it.
Just for a few seconds but enough so that they all gasped and pulled back in their seats, nearly cringing. It was some huge amorphous shape like liquid midnight, flowing and rippling and repulsively fleshy. The snow obscured it, then the headlights revealed it: a weird composite that looked like a reaching, corded mass of dead trees that had grown into one another in a mutiny of spiky limbs and then maybe four or five bodies strung together with a blue-black membranous skin that jutted with bony protrusions and trailing boneless limbs. They clearly saw three heads whose faces were like melting wax and running slime.
