Dark Winter

by William Dietrich

  “And so far no more of us are dead,” Pulaski answered grimly. “We tried it one way, with all of us wandering around like blind sheep and getting picked off one by one. Now let’s try it another way. Strategic deterrence, people. Mutual assured destruction. You take a predator like a mountain lion and they’ll back off if you fight back. They don’t want to risk injury. They can’t risk injury, because if they get hurt they starve. If our murderer is someone other than Lewis, then he or she can’t risk injury either, because they’ll be found out. You get jumped, you make sure you draw blood. Die if you have to, but scream bloody hell first.”

  “Jeez, Cueball,” Geller said. “Enough drill instructor dramatics, okay?”

  “You people are almost asleep on your feet. You need some dramatics.”

  “I just don’t know that we’re up to stabbing people,” Dana said quietly.

  “Well, someone might be up to stabbing you. That make a difference?”

  The New Zealander looked at him gloomily.

  “Come here, Dana,” Pulaski suddenly said.

  “What bloody for?”

  “Come here.” It was an order and she complied against her own wishes, walking to the cook. He turned her around to face the others. “You’re my Raggedy Ann for a little knife lesson.”

  “Oh please,” she groaned. “I just want to go to my bloody bed.”

  “Now listen,” he said to the others in the galley. “The whole point of this is that you don’t get attacked. That any killer knows that open season is over. But if you are attacked, you don’t want to pussy around, right? You want to stop an assailant so they can’t stop you, cut them so they can’t cut you, make them go down and stay down so you can run for help. Right? Otherwise all you do is piss them off.”

  They looked at him with exhaustion.

  “Stay here a moment,” he told Dana. He went to the kitchen and came back with a jar of spaghetti sauce and a basting brush.

  “Wade, Jesus Christ, come on…”

  “Stand still. This might save your life. Our lives.” He dipped the brush.

  “Please…”

  He dabbed a splotch of red under her nose and she started. “Hit them here, under the nose. Try to break it. Try it push it upward. It will hurt like hell. If you’re lucky, the cartilage will be shoved into the brain and the frontal lobes will bleed and they’ll go down permanently.” He dipped again and painted her throat. “Hit her. Under the Adam’s apple for men is a good pain point. It can chop off air for either sex. With a weapon you can cut an artery, with a blow you can collapse the windpipe. Don’t screw around! Don’t give your opponent time to do it to you! Not unless you want to get laid out in the snow with Gabriella Reid.”

  Dana looked at him with distaste.

  He dipped again and aimed toward the hollow behind her clavicle. “Next pain point…”

  “No.” She stepped away, raising her own knife. “Enough. Stay away from me Cueball,. I’m not some damned American killer mercenary.”

  “Excellent reaction, Dana. Get that knife up. This is exactly my point. I want to make you a damned killer mercenary.”

  “So I declare my graduation. Enough with the sauce.” She walked away and slumped in a chair, throwing her knife with a clatter on the table.

  He turned to the others, pointing with the brush. “The solar plexus, right under the rib cage. The abdomen. Breasts if it’s a woman, balls if it’s a man. The eyes. The ears. Anywhere you can inflict pain. Any way you can get the other guy to hesitate, back off, go down. Listen, I know it’s grim, but I’m tired of people dying like rabbits. You gotta look after yourself. I’ve climbed, I’ve rafted, I’ve jumped, I’ve shot. Look for yourself. Check your own chute. Sharpen your own bayonet. Lock and load, people.”

  “You’re scaring me with all this army stuff,” Gina said. “You’re going to make us fear every man and woman on this base.”

  “That’s right, Gina. Fear is the one thing that might just keep you alive.” He looked at the others. “At the end of the winter, that’s all that counts.”

  “Is that all,” Geller asked wearily.

  “No. When we finish boarding things up, I think it would be smart to search each other again as well.”

  ********

  Lewis was dreaming of Arabia. He was on a flat plain, stony and hot, looking for oil. The sky was white, the horizon watery, and he was uneasy because if he didn’t find his prize soon he would lose his job. The oil was under one of the rocks, he knew, but every stone looked alike. Each was the shape of a potato, burnt and glassy, and he was having to turn them over one by one to find what he was looking for. Finally he turned one over and was startled to see a face looking up at him. It was a woman, buried in the sand, her long hair made of strands of quartz and mica. He stepped back in surprise and she rose up out of the desert, robed, her gown made of silicon. It was a gray, shimmering, translucent thing, her body perfect beneath it. The woman was looking at him boldly and he heard himself think, I don’t know you, and then the gown turned to sand and slid away, leaving the woman naked except for specks of quartz on her shoulders and thighs and breasts like a scattering of glitter. The merciless glare turned a cool blue above her, like a circle of shade. Except the woman was now Abby, her hair shorter now and her expression shy, and the glitter wasn’t sand, it was specks of ice.

  Jed awoke groggily, his dream penetrated by a faint tapping. The sauna was pitch black and stuffy, the bench where he lay hard and uncomfortable. He sat up. Someone was tapping at the door. It was the latest in a series of noises that had bewildered him - an explosion, alarms, hammerings, drills, saws. Despite his shouts no one ever came to explain what was going on. It was like he’d been locked in the sauna and abandoned. It was like being buried in the old base. It was like freezing to death in the pit of Mickey Moss. His claustrophobia had come back to him.

  “Who’s there?” His voice was thick, doped from sleep.

  “It’s Abby. Can I talk to you?”

  He was angry and embarrassed at his plight. In the end she’d stopped trying to defend him. “Go away.”

  “Jed, please, we’re in danger. You’ve got to let me in.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say more in the galley. I was quiet because I had to think about things. I had to trust, first.”

  “Trust what?”

  “Trust who to believe.”

  He sat there brooding tiredly, feeling angry and frustrated. There was no chance to prove anything to anyone now, locked up in here.

  “I decided to believe you,” she said.

  “Well, hell.” Heflicked on the sauna light. Pulaski had barred the door from the outside as he’d promised, preventing Lewis from escaping his makeshift prison. But he’d also left the latch working on the inside, preventing anyone from getting in that Lewis didn’t want to see.

  “We can’t afford a guard to protect us from you, and we can’t afford a guard to protect you from us,” the cook had growled. “I don’t want some vigilante coming in here and beating the crap out of you until we know what’s going on. So lock the damn door from the inside and don’t open it up for anyone but me. Okay?”

  Lewis had nodded. He wasn’t even going to open it to Pulaski until he was so damn hungry and thirsty that he had to face the cook. Until then he wanted to be alone in his depression, willing himself mentally ten thousand miles from the Pole.

  Yet did he? He felt so isolated. And Abby...

  He cautiously opened the door, fearing a mob behind her, but it was only the woman and she slipped inside, latching it behind her.

  “Jed, I need help,” she whispered.

  “You need help? What the hell is going on out there, anyway?”

  “We’re completely cut off from the outside world and we’re making prisoners of ourselves. Comms blew up and...”

  “What!”

  “The batteries exploded. They think it was sabotage. It knocked out the power grid to the outside buildings
and everyone’s gone nuts. They’ve barricaded all the entrances with beams and bolts and they’re building walls to block off the fuel arch and the generators because that’s where we’re most vulnerable. We can’t get to the fuel and we can’t get to the gym and garage anymore. Only Pika knows how to get around them; he’s the only one everyone trusts. And he’s become some kind of hypochondriac, running off to BioMed all the time like he has a case of the runs. The rest of us are in prison, just like you. They’re walling us in against a boogeyman nobody is sure is really out there, until they rebuild the communications hub. It’s like a kettle coming to a boil and they’ve screwed down the lid. I’m worried the whole place is going to explode. I’m worried we’re building a firetrap.”

  “Jesus.” He rubbed his head wearily. “What the hell am I supposed to do about it? I’m locked up.”

  “I’ve been thinking about things and I think I need to unlock you.”

  “Escape?”

  “Reconnoiter. Get to a computer that works and try to figure out what’s going on. Before it’s too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pulaski has armed everybody. He gave a class and painted poor Dana with globs of spaghetti sauce to show where the lethal parts are. He said we’re all warriors, we’re all deputies. He said it’s like the arms race. People are strutting around like gladiators and someone’s going to get hurt. Hiro did get hurt: He was tired and got in a quarrel with Alexi and the Russian cut his hand and now it’s bandaged up and Alexi is in a funk about the whole thing because it’s just the kind of craziness he’s been accusing you of. Hiro’s terrified of him. All the rooms have been searched again, this time throwing everything into the open. There’s no privacy left, no dignity. If something more happens I’m afraid they’ll coming looking for a scapegoat. Looking for you.”

  “They can’t blame anything on me when I’m in here.”

  “Some people already have. Someone prepped Comms to explode before it happened. Something to do with the wires and batteries. It was a booby trap, and Clyde had his entire face burned off. He might even die. So who did that?”

  “Not me.”

  “The same somebody who killed Gabriella.”

  Lewis shut his eyes in weariness. “Does Norse know you’re here?”

  “No.” She glanced sideways as if he might be watching. “He led the others into sealing you off, and I think it’s deliberate. He doesn’t want me talking to you. Or you talking to anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “He called me in after you were locked up, after the explosion, and said he understood my support for you but that Gabriella’s death had changed everything, changed his own thinking. Then he showed me the note.”

  “What note?”

  “He said he found it in Rod Cameron’s desk drawer. It says Rod can save his career by giving you the meteorite, and it’s signed...by you.” She was watching him.

  “Come on. I didn’t write that note.”

  “It had your name.”

  “It’s a forgery, Abby. It has to be. You’ve got to believe me. This is all so crazy! Norse, or Rod, or someone, is screwing me. They’re out to turn us against each other.”

  “He said he hadn’t showed it to the others yet but if more bad things continued to happen they might have to ask you some hard questions...”

  “Hard questions?”

  “Jed, I think he wants to interrogate you. Break you, somehow.”

  “To hell with that.”

  “I’m just telling you that you can’t stay here waiting for things to play out.”

  Now he was suspicious. The paranoia was infectious. He looked at her narrowly, suddenly wary. “Bob put you up to this, didn’t he? He wants me to try to escape. He’ll use it against me.”

  “No! But he wants to turn your head around, just like what’s happening now. He twists everything. He objects to Pulaski in public, and then confers with him in private. He’s playing him. Playing you, playing me. There’s something wrong…”

  “Wait a minute! I did sign it!” Lewis had remembered.

  “What?”

  “A piece of paper, the first day I came here. We were joking around about psychology and handwriting analysis and Bob had me sign something...” His eyes were distant, trying to recall what Norse had done with the paper. “I did sign it. What the hell, has this been a setup from the beginning?”

  Abby looked confused. “You think he planned this?”

  “I don’t know what to think. That far ahead?”

  “What if Mickey was right and it was Bob who took my picture?” she asked. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about. What if he planted it on Moss?”

  “But why?”

  “To confuse us. Make us think Mickey might have committed suicide. Put pressure on me to see how I’d react.”

  “You think Norse is responsible for all this?”

  “What do we really know about him? He’s a fingie just like you. He came at the last minute, just like you.”

  “To figure us out.”

  “Or bewilder us.”

  “But he’s been holding things together.”

  “Has he?”

  “Jesus.” He thought a minute, trying to go back over events. Norse had admitted he’d heard where Mickey might have hidden the meteorite. Norse had been out in the storm when Adams died. Norse had helped Tyson flee…”But why?’

  “That’s what you’ve got to find out. You’re the one person who can sneak out of the dome right now and not be missed. The one person with time to wait for the satellites and get on the Internet. The one person who will ask who Robert Norse really is.”

  “I thought you said the radios and the computers are down.”

  “The hub at Comms is destroyed. But if you could get to another source of power and shunt some electricity to Clear Air, you could still use the machines out there.”

  “If I can get to another source of power.”

  “There’s an emergency generator at the Hypertats at Bedrock Village.”

  “Can I start it?”

  “You could try. I think it might work. I think that’s why Bob has allowed Pulaski to wall up the dome. He doesn’t want us getting out there, calling out. All the doors are locked now. The perimeter is patrolled.”

  “So how the hell am I going to get out there.”

  “That’s why I came here. Look, everyone’s exhausted. Almost everyone’s asleep. They’ve been up for hours and hours, locking us in. I’m blitzed too, but I was going crazy, thinking about Bob, thinking about you, so I couldn’t sleep and got up and wandered outside and I just sort of collapsed in the snow under the dome, utterly defeated, just lying there, and then a snowflake hit me in the eye. You know how that feels? Between a kiss and a sting. So I stood up and then all these little snowflakes were sticking to me…”

  He looked at her in wonder. It was like the image from his dream.

  “Then I realized what we all overlooked.”

  ERROR OF JUDGMENT

  For three days I was a hero. Then the weather cleared, recovery teams ventured out on the ice below Wallace Wall, and the bodies began to be recovered. Some goober of a deputy sheriff, who probably watched too much Columbo and talked like a Mayberry hick, started to yodel about the neatly-clipped end of the line still attached to the corpses of Chisel Chin and Carrot Top. I professed shocked innocence - I’d left both fine young men on the ledge with the others. Just why the devil they were roped and how they’d fallen (were they trying to climb out on their own?) was a mystery to me. But then why was my own line broken? There were the beginning of awkward questions of just who had been roped to who. I expressed grieving outrage, of course, at any implication of negligence or wrong-doing. I had risked my life to save those kids! To save that fucking whale Fat Boy! But the holier-than-thou crowd wanted to know why I had saved myself. Slow-talking Deputy Goober wouldn’t shut up about it, even though he didn’t have the balls to go down the cliff himself and look for evidence -
like a knife secreted in a convenient crevice. Finally the university had to exert some pressure on the sheriff because of fear of a lawsuit. The matter of exactly just what did happen on the mountain was not-so-quietly dropped, despite the confused bleating of bereaved parents. And that was that. I’d done my best and was prepared to get on with my life.

  Except my application for tenure was denied.

  They wouldn’t let it drop.

  They wouldn’t let it drop!

  Barney Fife, deputy dipshit, kept nosing around. The whispering started. The peer reviews of my research papers began to get very much more pointed, very pointed indeed. They started murmuring about me in the campus coffee shop - I could feel the stares! - and plotting against me in the department. They denied it, of course, but I knew what was happening. I knew it! The file cabinets that were locked, the meetings called without notifying me they were being held, the evasive looks, the papers turned upside down on desks so I couldn’t read them, the hollow sympathies. God, did I know it! Friends became distant. A woman I thought I felt something for became chillingly remote. No charge was ever brought and no charge was needed - my life had become intolerable. I’d been sentenced without ever being charged. So one day I just walked away.

  Let me be perfectly clear about exactly what happened on that mountain. An act of individual and immature foolishness by a single fat student led to leadership miscalculation, group panic, and a brutal winnowing based on skill and common sense. The strongest, clearest-thinker had survived. It was as pure an experiment in natural selection as one could hope for. So don’t call me lucky! I was not blessed! I was realistic. Brutally, coldly, and rationally realistic. No one was going to save me so I saved myself. Once my companions slipped I didn’t have any chance of saving the others. With their trust in each other they had all doomed themselves. The ropes that bound us together had proved to be gossamer threads long before I brought out my knife. I am merely the surviving witness to the fragility of society. Any society.

  Do you see my point? We are alone in life. We can’t know another person. We can’t join with another person. We are islands, made of either rock...or sand. Anything else is delusion.