by Jonah Buck
“Yeah, I suppose that’s a good idea,” Denise said. She didn’t really want to go visit a bunch of penguins, as fun as that sounded. Now that she knew there were undead freaks prowling the ice, she wanted to check a few other things out around the station.
“Good. There’s only so much room on the tractor at a time. You and you, come with me.” Benoit pointed at Denise and Metrodora.
He was onto them.
EIGHT
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT
Denise sat on the snow tractor as the great mechanical beast trundled up the short hill toward the penguin rookery. The cold cinched around them and squeezed, penetrating every layer of clothing when the wind picked up.
Benoit and three other researchers rode on the tractor with Denise and Metrodora, but no one said anything. Benoit sat in the front next to the driver, Louvain. The other two researchers sat in the rear. Denise felt like she was riding around in a prison van.
The mood had completely shifted since the Sulaco first arrived at Delambre Station. Yesterday, the men at the research station had been cautiously pleasant. Even if they were clearly absorbed in their work, they’d been interested in seeing new faces after weeks of isolation.
She didn’t know how much of their earlier conversation Benoit had heard, but there was a tension in the air now. Everyone was playing a dangerous game, pretending everything was normal but sizing each other up.
When they set out for the penguin rookery, all the researchers who weren’t leaving had been gathered around the radio room. There’d been hurried communication in French back and forth between the researchers and whoever was on the other end of the transmission. Denise didn’t even know who they would be talking to out there. The last she had heard, some whaling vessel was the only thing within receiving range. Maybe they were talking to Merovée?
The researchers on the snow tractor were speaking in rapid-fire French, and every once in a while, one of them would glance at her or Metrodora. Most of the conversation went completely over Denise’s head. French was not a commonly spoken language in South Africa. She’d never bothered to learn it.
She could pick out one thing that they seemed to be saying again and again. “Dagenais.” It sort of sounded like a name, but none of the researchers were named Dagenais. For all Denise knew, they could be talking about what they wanted for lunch, though.
Benoit and Louvain were arguing over something. She didn’t need to speak any French to know that. Their voices were growing louder and louder as they talked, and their gesticulations grew more frenzied. Finally, Benoit made a slicing gesture with one hand and said something in a firm tone. Louvain went back to driving, but Denise could see that his shoulders were stiff with tension. Evidently, the matter had been put to rest.
Benoit turned around and looked at Denise and Metrodora. “So, how are you enjoying your stay so far? Is Antarctica everything that you hoped it would be?”
“Yes, it’s thrilling. Maybe I’ll hit the beach for some tanning later,” Denise said.
Benoit gave a big, fake laugh and smiled. The smile didn’t get anywhere close to his eyes. “Good. I’m glad you two are enjoying yourselves. I trust the weather wasn’t too rough when you and the pilot flew out?”
“No. It wasn’t too bad. Beautiful landscape but the trip was uneventful,” Denise said, playing the game. Benoit was trying to feel her out. He’d obviously heard at least some of her earlier conversation, and now he was fishing for anything else. He just wasn’t sure if Denise knew if he knew yet.
Denise was going to keep playing it straight. Just in case things took a turn for the worse, it was better that Benoit assumed he had the upper hand in who knew what. At least then, maybe she could keep a few surprises up her sleeve. In case things went really wrong, she had her revolver tucked into her pocket again, too. She didn’t think it would come to that, but it was better to be prepared. For all she knew, they could run into more frostbitten dead men while they were outside.
“I hope you don’t mind if I pry,” Benoit said, shifting his attention, “but Metrodora is an unusual name. It doesn’t sound African.”
“It’s Greek,” Metrodora said. “I picked it out myself, actually. I was raised by a philanthropic group after my parents died. They were very interested in collecting and preserving knowledge. It rubbed off on me. The original Metrodora is the first known woman to write a medical textbook. She was very influential in the Greek and Roman world because of it. I liked the sound of it, and I liked the story behind it.”
Denise had never bothered to ask. Maybe South Africa’s shitty politics were rubbing off on her. Or maybe she just didn’t like Metrodora enough to think about it too much. That was one point in favor of the Squires, though. For an organization interested in studying monsters, it was smarter to hire someone local, especially someone who would have better access to the regions folktales and legends.
Some tweedy type shipped in from London would have to start from scratch, and people didn’t always like to tell outsiders about the things people claimed to see in the darkness. In South Africa, the black population had been there for thousands of years longer than the Europeans. They’d know more about local conditions and other things the Squires wanted to know. It was a good call to bring someone like Metrodora on board.
For the first time since they’d arrived at Delambre Station, Dr. Benoit seemed to run out of pleasantries. The snow tractor fell into a protracted silence. The wind lashed at them through the open cab, whirling past them with howls and moans.
The snow tractor itself was basically just a bulldozer built for transporting people. It had a wide, slanted blade at the front to push through Antarctica’s rare snowstorms. The oversized treads allowed them to rumble over the ice and the rocks. Black, oily smoke belched out of the machine and wafted up into the brittle air.
They chugged up the low ridge that separated the penguin rookery from the station grounds. The low hill was a mixture of ice, rock, and stony debris. Trying to walk up on foot would be a surefire way to break an ankle or lodge a leg in some narrow stretch of rock. Fortunately, the snow tractor was able to trundle upwards like a tank. It wasn’t especially fast, but it could fight its way through rough terrain just fine.
Cresting the ridge, Denise looked down the other side. There was a gently sloped icy surface leading down toward the water. It was rimmed on several sides by more rocky outcroppings, creating a sort of protected bowl. A few hundred penguins were out on the ice.
“This is where we get out,” Benoit said. “The penguins like to nest in the rocky portions here. If we try to go down in the tractor, we risk disturbing them or crushing a nest. Just stay where we can see you.”
Just stay where we can see you. Yeah, Benoit was definitely onto them.
Denise hopped out of the snow tractor with Metrodora and stepped out into the full force of the wind again. She hugged herself tight, which had the benefit of keeping her a little warmer and also allowing her hand to rest closer to her revolver.
She didn’t think she would need the weapon to deal with Benoit. She prayed she didn’t need the weapon to deal with Benoit and his men. They were just trying to make sure they could keep watch on her now that they suspected she knew too much. She didn’t think they’d taken her out to summarily execute her. Benoit had been fishing for more information about what she knew just a minute ago. She was pretty sure that they just wanted to keep an eye on them from here on out to prevent any further incidents. Or anything like the shakedown Metrodora had planned for their laboratory. She hoped so, at least.
Still, things had moved into potentially dangerous territory. Well, they’d been in dangerous territory the entire time, given that something about that meteorite had caused a dead man to get up and start trying to kill them. But now, they all had to deal with the fact that the researchers would be keeping a much more vigorous eye on them from here on out. There was probably some sort of law on the books that could get them all in a lot of trouble if a
government lawyer decided they were a menace to the interests of France. False pretenses. Industrial espionage. Trespassing. They’d think of something if they really wanted to throw the book at her.
She started to pick her way down the side of the slope one step at a time while she plotted how to ditch their chaperones at some point. Or at least learn something useful from them. So far, she had a lot more questions than answers.
What was at the point on the map labelled Merovée? What on earth had happened to Villiers, the man she’d been forced to put down? How did the meteorite fit in? St. George’s Squires would want to know the answers to all those questions, and her own curiosity wasn’t satisfied, either. Staring at some penguins would be a pleasant diversion, but it paled in comparison to the other things she wanted to know about.
She noticed the smell about halfway down the side of the slope. The air was painful to breathe. Each intake of air was like swallowing a handful of tiny knives. They cut all the way down. Each exhale sent out a little white puff. The air was completely pure, too. Except for that odor.
That was why she noticed the smell so quickly. She tried to pay attention to odors when she was out in the field. The scent of rotting meat could indicate that there was a carcass nearby, maybe just starting to get picked over by the vultures. It could also indicate that a large predator was nearby, though. There were few things quite as frightening as suddenly getting a whiff of old viscera and musk while walking through the tall grass. Once you smelled that, it was an open question over who was stalking who.
This odor was sort of similar. There was a rotten component to it, but there was also something else, something acrid. It wasn’t a pleasant smell at all. Something like leftover bacon mixed with hot vomit. Meaty yet sharp. It was the smell after a summer hot dog eating contest gone horribly awry.
She looked up and tried to pinpoint the source of the smell. With the wind moving the way it was, the odor had to be coming from somewhere off to her left. She veered off the route she had been taking and angled around, still searching for wherever that smell was coming from.
She was almost to the bottom when she found the source. She’d found it, but she still wasn’t sure what she was looking at.
Near the base of the rocks was a puddle of some kind of semi-congealed sludge. It was a vaguely yellowish color and chunky. To Denise’s eye, it looked like something that had been poured out of a witch’s cauldron after a serious potion bender.
There were bits of brown fur sticking out of the morass in irregular clumps. In addition, there were a few meaty bits strewn around, but only near the edges. She stared at some nubby bits for a moment before deciding that they had probably been bones before they’d been rendered down like a tooth left in a saucer of cola.
This had been an animal of some sort, but then something awful happened to it. Denise circled around to get a better look at some of the few relatively intact pieces. She found a mostly unscathed flipper, but the rest of the animal looked like someone had poured lye on it. Judging from the flipper, it had been a seal once. The flipper was the only thing that gave it away, though. Even the basic skeletal structure was almost completely unrecognizable after what had been done to it. The corpse was mostly dissolved.
Well, this raised a brand-new set of questions for her to wonder about. Could the researchers have done this? It clearly wasn’t the work of anything like the dead man she’d encountered before. He’d been trying to take a bite out of her and Fletch. This was a different kind of mess altogether.
“What are you doing?” Benoit noticed that she’d stopped at the base of the incline and scrambled over. He really didn’t want her wandering off.
“There’s something over here,” she said. Maybe there was some sort of natural phenomena down here that melted the occasional seal. She didn’t know all the secrets of the Antarctic. There could always be dangerous geological hot springs or something. She didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.
But she also had no idea what sort of conclusions she could even jump to just by looking at the ex-seal. She needed a mental ladder to get to the elevator that would take her to the stairs that would get her within jumping height of any conclusions here.
Benoit and Louvain crunched over. The other two researchers stayed near Metrodora as she approached. The French team stayed clumped around them like a team of bodyguards.
“What have you found?” Benoit asked. He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder.
“I think it used to be a seal, but you tell me. See the flipper?”
“I see…” Benoit took another step closer and bent down on his knees to get a better look.
From up close, the smell of the thing was truly revolting. The mélange of material wasn’t rotting. It was too cold for it to decay very easily. The entire continent was basically one giant ice box. Nor did it look like the corpse had been eaten. Denise was used to looking at the carcasses of downed antelopes and zebras. They were always torn open and covered with claw marks and gashes. There was no sign of any sort of conventional attack here. She didn’t see any indication of tearing fangs or slashing talons. This almost looked like some sort of chemical accident, as if the seal had dissolved.
The smell only seemed to confirm that idea. There was an odd, vaguely acidic tinge to the scent. The odor wasn’t so much rotten as it was unwholesome. Somehow, the meat had been rendered down to a semi-liquid state rather than being left to spoil.
Denise grimaced. The idea that maybe the French were working on a new generation of chemical weapons flitted across her mind. That was not a business she was eager to stick her nose into. She was here to see if anything living had arrived on that meteorite. Maybe the Squires had interpreted their data incorrectly, though. Maybe the French biologists sent down here hadn’t travelled to study something living but rather the effects of a new compound on other living things.
That was a possibility. She had no idea. Maybe that answer could explain why she and Fletch had been attacked by a seemingly dead man, or it could help explain what could melt a seal. But it couldn’t explain both, could it? Those incidents seemed far too different to be so neatly explained with one answer. Denise shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. There were still far too many pieces of the puzzle for her to say anything definitive about anything she’d seen. For all she knew, she was adding pieces to the puzzle that didn’t fit at all.
Benoit stood up and started speaking in French to Louvain again. She picked out that name, Dagenais, again, but the rest of what they said was completely opaque. Their emotions were clear, though. This time, they didn’t seem to be in disagreement. They both just seemed perplexed. Whatever had happened to that seal, it was apparently news to them, too.
Turning around, Benoit issued an order to one of the men guarding Metrodora. Then he turned back to his guests. “I’m afraid we have run into a problem here.”
“What happened here?”
“I have no… I’ll explain later,” Benoit said, meaning that he needed time to come up with some sort of logical explanation for what they were looking at. “Moreau will take you back to the station with the ice tractor. Louvain, Ferrand, and I will stay behind to deal with this.” Benoit issued another stream of French to the man tasked with guiding Denise and Metrodora back to the station.
Moreau took Denise’s arm in one hand and Metrodora’s in the other, brokering no argument about coming with him. He started off up the slope toward the parked snow tractor.
Denise didn’t try to resist. She wasn’t going to learn anything new just by staring at the dead seal for any longer, and they weren’t about to let her go get Cornelia and the proper tools for poking and prodding at the dead creature. She wasn’t even sure that any sort of autopsy would do her much good in figuring out what had happened here. It would be like sorting through a tub of cold grits.
They started up the craggy slope, finding their footing one step at a time. The slope wasn’t quite as rough on this side, and Denis
e managed to pick her way up without too many problems. She did twist around to get one more good look before she continued on, though. The whole scene was so bizarre that she wanted to gather a final impression before leaving it behind.
Benoit was still standing near the outcropping, looking down at the mess in front of him. Louvain had scooted closer, getting ready to prod at the swamp of ruined flesh with a pen. Suddenly, there was a little spurt of movement among the ruined mass.
Louvain jerked backward, but it was already too late. Something leapt out of the mass and attached itself to his outstretched arm. At first glance, Denise thought it was a tentacle of some sort. Then, she realized that the strange mass of lumpy flesh that had jumped out at Louvain wasn’t attached to anything except for a clinging trail of goopy ooze.
The thing was some sort of segmented slug, maybe eight inches long. It had a pale, squishy-looking body.
Louvain batted at the creature with his free hand as it squirmed up his arm. It opened up its mouth and unsheathed some sort of pincers. The pincers crunched down on Louvain’s fingers like a pair of stubby hedge clippers. There was a squirt of blood, and a couple of Louvain’s fingers sheared off.
Benoit was trying to help, swatting at the slug while trying to avoid its mouthparts. Louvain’s finger disappeared down its maw with a crunching and grinding noise. Bloody drool dripped from the slug’s mouth as it continued up Louvain’s arm.
The slug, Denise really didn’t know what else to call the creature even though it clearly wasn’t like any mere garden slug, surged up Louvain’s arm. The creature moved surprisingly fast, flailing and flagellating its body to propel itself along. A trail of mucus remained in its wake after it had finished squirming across an area.
Denise had already broken free of her guide’s grip and rushed down the incline to try to help. Louvain kept reaching around with his injured hand to try to peel the slug off again, and he flailed with his other arm. The flailing only made it harder for Benoit to aid him, though.
