by Jonah Buck
A massive explosion annihilated the rear half of the ship before it could slip below the waves. The shell must have started a fire in the coal and fuel reserves, and it finally reached a critical mass. The light from the explosion lit up the day like a second sun. It took another split second for the sound of the blast to reach the mainland.
Their little window imploded inward in a shower of shattered glass. What heat they had disappeared as the freezing air rushed in. Inside their little structure, they were mostly protected from the blast itself, but the noise was still like having angry rioters trying to attack her tympanic membranes.
There wasn’t much left of the Sulaco out on the water. The entire rear portion of the ship had simply disappeared in the explosion. There would be individual rivets and scraps of metal falling from the sky out over the sea like red-hot hail, but the rest of the debris and human crew had simply disintegrated in that savage orange bloom.
What was left of the other half of the ship slid beneath the water in a tortured, burning ball of scalded metal. Flaming oil spread across the surface of the water where the ship had been. Only a few pieces of debris still floated on the surface, and they were soon engulfed in flame.
Outside the station, Benoit and his team had hopped on the motor sledges and taken off as fast as they could. That only meant one thing. The cruiser was about to start shelling the station. When Dagenais said that the situation had switched to one of containment, he meant that it was too dangerous to leave any survivors behind.
Denise saw another series of flashes out beyond the burning wreckage, just like the ones she’d seen before the Sulaco exploded. Colonel Dagenais had ordered the ship to start firing on Delambre Station.
TEN
INHUMAN
Denise bashed herself against the heavy steel door, but it didn’t even rattle in its frame. The doors here were meant to handle the stress of a severe environment while limiting the amount of cold air that could seep inside. They weren’t supposed to warp or buckle under even extreme conditions. They also made a dandy prison.
Fletch and Poole joined her in trying to slam the door open, but even the three of them together couldn’t force any give in the lock. Denise might have been able to shoot it open if she still had her revolver, but Benoit had taken it.
She could hear revving engines outside and then the roar of several motor sledges tearing past them all at once. Denise screamed at them through the door, but the first couple of them tore off without slowing down.
The first blast hit a few seconds later. Denise stumbled as the ground shook beneath her feet. Shelves collapsed in their storage room, and supplies rolled across the floor. Cans of food and spare parts rattled off the shelves that stayed up. The shell must have landed some distance away, or Denise knew she never would have felt the earth shake. She’d either be unconscious under a pile of heavy rubble, or she would have been blown out of existence. Dagenais and his men hadn’t quite found the range yet on the big guns. It wouldn’t take them long, though.
She banged on the door with her fist one last time, already knowing it was pointless. Then, Denise turned and looked around the floor for something, anything, they could use to get out. They needed a crowbar or something they could use to get some leverage. But there was nothing but nonperishable foodstuffs and some miscellaneous small equipment. None of it would do them a damn bit of good.
The window was too small to crawl out through. The fact that the glass was missing didn’t change that fact. They were stuck, completely trapped in here.
Another blast rocked the research station. Some fuel pumps near the docks went up in a series of secondary explosions, painting the ice red with dancing fire. Burning oil and gasoline sloughed across the ice like an avalanche of flame and slid toward the water.
The inside of the storage shed was a bundle of anarchy. There was shouting and more attempts to bash the door down. No one was having any success, though.
Denise’s ears were so stunned, she never heard the sound of the lock clicking. Nonetheless, the door suddenly flew open. Dr. Benoit stood on the other side next to an idling motor sledge. He didn’t say anything before hopping back onto the sledge and zooming away.
Evidently, he wasn’t any more pleased about suddenly finding himself expendable than Denise was. He was already speeding away, heading inland with the other remaining researchers. They were no doubt headed toward Merovée, that mysterious point on the map she’d found before.
Good God. She’d found that map and Villiers less than a day ago. She’d thought things looked bad before, but everything had gone to absolute hell in only the last few hours. If the researchers had been updating Dagenais about what was going on here on a consistent basis, it was no wonder the military decided to step in and take over the operation.
Apparently, the research team didn’t realize just what that would entail, though. No one told them that the contingency plan was to blow everything up, themselves included. They obviously weren’t interested in falling on their swords over this.
Of course, being forced inland was probably just as much of a death sentence as staying here. The elements. Dead men with slugs in their skulls and a hunger for human flesh. Some sort of goddamn dragon monster. And those were just the threats they’d face trying to reach anywhere else. Once they got to relative safety, there would be the problem of supplies and other essentials. Even if the French military didn’t send anyone after them, they couldn’t hide out in any one place forever.
Benoit had evidently opened the door to the storage shed for the same reason someone would unlock the cage doors at a burning animal shelter. There was no guarantee that the escapees could find a way to survive on their own, but anyone’s conscience would be bothered by just leaving them to their fate.
Denise glanced in the opposite direction of the fleeing motor sledges, toward the shore. There were still a number of motor sledges parked and ready. There were also some smaller shapes fanning out from the French cruiser, clipping across the water toward the coastline.
Those were landing craft. The French were indeed sending in a team to clear out anything that survived the shelling. Even if there was some safe haven near the station, Denise knew she didn’t want to be around when those troops arrived. Maybe Benoit had let them out simply to serve as a distraction and speed bump for the soldiers coming to clear the area.
“Get those sledges running,” Denise yelled, pointing to the remaining vehicles. “I need to get something.”
“No, we need to leave right now,” Cornelia shouted at her. Off in the distance, Denise saw more giant muzzle flashes. Dagenais was firing another set of shells at the station.
Cornelia was right. They needed to leave right now. But Denise also needed something from inside the research facility. There was a good chance that they were all only delaying the inevitable if she didn’t get it.
“You go. Take everyone inland, out of the range of the guns. Just leave a sledge running for me.”
Cornelia tried to grab her, but Denise dodged out of the way and ran into the main science facility. Behind her, she could hear the sound of engines humming to life.
Delambre Station was abandoned. There were some papers on the floor where they’d been hastily dropped, and Denise stepped over them. To her left was the science wing of the facility. There were still gurneys and other medical equipment parked near the door.
She ignored all that and took off for the crew quarters, sliding past the mess hall. Outside, she could hear the scream of incoming shells growing louder and louder. Denise ducked back inside the mess hall and threw herself under one of the tables as the sound grew into a banshee shriek.
A second later, the shells hit the far side of the structure. The blast picked Denise up off the ground and threw her back down. A concussive shockwave of air swept through the facility. Denise lay still for a second as the air settled inside the building. Cornelia was the one who knew all about explosives and artillery from her stint as a warti
me nurse, but Denise knew a little too.
Namely, she knew that she didn’t have to be that close to the actual explosion for it to kill her. Fire and shrapnel would do the job just fine, but with naval artillery, that probably wasn’t even the biggest threat. The shockwaves from the burst could kill her just as dead. When the shells exploded, the force of the blast pushed all the air out of the way very suddenly.
In a way, it wasn’t so very different from the katabatic winds that blew over Antarctica all the time anyway. The wave of extra dense air could move so fast that it was like smacking into a brick wall with a car. It could pulverize organs, break bones, and hurl a person through the air.
Probably the only reason Denise was still alive at all was because of the station’s heavy construction methods. The same techniques that helped it withstand the elements meant it could block some of the shockwave from the blasts, sort of like a bunker. If the rounds had landed much closer though, she wouldn’t have survived.
She could hear crumbling cement and shifting rubble back in the direction of the science quarters. A few seconds later, the dull roar of a fire overtook the other sounds.
Denise crawled out from under the table. She didn’t have much time. Dagenais and his ship were going to raze this place around her in short order. The ship’s crew was no doubt already reloading the guns and preparing to send more shells toward the facility.
The floor around her was now littered with shattered dishes and scattered utensils. The shockwave had blown open cabinets and spewed the contents onto the floor. There were large cracks in the concrete walls from where the blast sent reverberations through the entire structure. With a couple more well-placed shells, there wouldn’t be much left of the research station’s main structure. The increasingly loud crackle of fire reminded her that there wouldn’t be much left soon regardless of whether the French ship kept firing. Soon, it would be a race between the flames and the military to see who could reduce the building to rubble faster.
She debated scampering back outside and leaping onto one of the motor sledges. She could retreat inland and hope for the best. Trying to traipse through the facility while it was being bombarded by naval artillery was a cosmically stupid idea on almost every level.
Instead of turning around, she plunged deeper into the facility, though. Rounding a corner, she reached the cramped room that had been her quarters. Denise ran through the door and wrenched her luggage out from underneath her cot. She yanked clothes out and threw them on the floor. Then, she lifted the false bottom out of the trunk. Her .577 Nitro Express gleamed up at her.
If they were about to head inland, deeper into the territory of that flying monstrosity that attacked the snow tractor, she wanted something that would up their chances of survival. Wandering into the wasteland unarmed would be just as deadly as staying here. It would just be a colder death.
Just as she slung the gun over her shoulder, the sound of more incoming shells reached her ears. The little room didn’t offer anything solid to hide under. Denise did the only thing she could. She dove under the cot.
The roar of the shells grew and grew under it mushroomed into the deadly bellow of an explosion. This one had been farther away, striking near some of the more distant outbuildings. It wasn’t as if the French knew where she was. From that far out, they couldn’t even tell if anyone was still in the facility. They were just working to level the place. But still, Denise was playing a dangerous game by staying here any longer. It was only a matter of time until a shell landed too close. With the size of the cruiser’s guns, there wouldn’t be anything left of her except a puff of blood and a burnt and shredded parka.
She could still feel the reverberations of the blast in her entire body from the last impact. Scrambling to her feet, Denise picked up the elephant gun and a sack of ammunition boxes. She dashed back out into the hallway.
Should she get Cornelia’s elephant gun, too? It would take less than a minute to grab it, and it would double the firepower available to them. No, there just wasn’t time. She was already going to have trouble making it out of the building before the next set of shells crashed to earth. Better to get out safely with one weapon than get killed trying for two. A bird in the hand and all that.
Weaving back the way she’d come, she did her best to navigate the cramped corridor while holding the large rifle. She vaulted over some overturned equipment that kept spitting out sparks and made her way down the hallway. It was like trying to move through a crippled submarine. The blasts had knocked debris loose, and the narrow space was quickly filling with smoke and dust.
Denise made it past the mess hall when she realized that the hallway ahead had partially collapsed. She was going to have to go around to the other side of the building and use the other exit. She darted down the next cross-section of hallway, skirting around the wall that separated the laboratories from the rest of the facility.
The wall was cracked and crumbling, and Denise could feel intense heat building on the other side. The roar of the fire was loud now. Despite the cold air seeping into the building from every shattered window and collapsed wall, Denise started to sweat as she ran past the wall. It was like standing next to a bakery oven.
Rounding another corner, she took cover as the scream of more incoming shells built up again. She laid herself flat on the floor and cringed as the roar of the shells grew louder and louder. A moment later, they landed at the far edge of the station, sending an angry rumble through the main building.
Coughing on the smoke, Denise hauled herself back to her feet. She tried to wave away the soot billowing through the air, but that only seemed to sir it up even more. Her eyes burned and streamed tears as she fought her way through the acrid cloud.
She came to a section where the wall to the laboratories had collapsed. Most of the science facility was engulfed in dancing flames, casting the room into stark shades of light and flickering shadow.
But what caught Denise’s attention were the bodies. There were maybe ten of them strapped to gurneys around the room, and they were moving, thrashing at their bonds. Some of them were already on fire. Others soon would be.
The artillery rounds had hit this portion of the building. Some gurneys were tipped on their sides or blown apart. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay burning on the floor in a scene straight out of hell.
Denise stepped forward to help when she realized what she was actually looking at. The people strapped to those gurneys were already dead. Several of them were black with frostbite, just like Villiers. Others looked relatively fresh, and some were rotting slightly. Some of the moving corpses wore button-up shirts. Some wore a jumpsuit of some kind.
Benoit and his men had kept this part of the facility secret because they were experimenting on the undead. This was where they kept their specimens. They’d known about the slugs and what they could do this whole time.
As Denise looked at some of the empty gurneys that had been flipped over, the restraints snapped. She paused and fished out a box of ammo. Cracking open the Nitro Express, she loaded in a couple of oversized bullets.
There was more equipment to the rear of the laboratory, but it was hard to make out through all the smoke. It looked like there were autopsy tables and a sort of morgue.
But there were also big, cylindrical tubes. Most of the tube was metal, like a big trash can, but they had large glass windows in front. The stainless-steel tubes were dented and punctured by shrapnel. One of them was completely snapped in half. The glass observation windows on all of them were shattered.
There was something inside each tube. They were all roughly man-sized. They were even vaguely man-shaped. But they weren’t human. The outlines were all wrong. The things inside the tubes were apparently still alive. Or maybe they were like the people strapped to the gurneys and they were dead but moving. They flailed in their containment cells as the flames lapped around them, cooking them like lobsters in a pot.
Denise couldn’t get a good look at them, and sh
e wasn’t sure she wanted to. All she could make out were spindly limbs and the glint of what appeared to be segmented eyes. Those things must have come from the same place as the slugs and the huge, flying monster. Maybe they were aliens. Maybe they were just horrifically mutated human beings.
Whatever they were, there was no way for Denise to help them. The flames were already too high, and they were surrounded by undead trying to break free of their restraints. Denise coughed again. There were a dozen different ways to end up dead from trying to venture into the science facility, even without more naval artillery inbound.
Nearby, she saw the entrance to the radiographie room that she’d first seen when she walked into Delambre Station for the first time. This time, the door hung from its hinges, and she could see what lay inside. There was some unwieldy equipment that Denise recognized as an X-ray machine. There were also individual X-ray sheets of a multitude of different heads. Each skull had an angry, blotted mass in the middle of the brain matter. There were several dozen pictures hung up on the walls, and each one showed a different human skull with a slug ensconced inside.
She pushed down the hallway, and a figure lurched out of the smoke ahead. It was a man holding a severed leg. He stopped midway through ripping a strip of sinew away from the leg with his teeth and looked at Denise. The man was wearing one of those jumpsuits. He dropped the leg. It hit the ground with a meaty splat as he stumbled toward her.
Denise leveled the Nitro Express at the ghoul and pulled the trigger. Inside the enclosed space of the hallway, the roar of the elephant gun was almost as loud as any of the peals of artillery Denise had heard. The man’s head disappeared in a burst of red. Shattered chunks of skull clattered off the wall, and bits of brain matter plopped onto the floor alongside shredded lumps of slug. His body flipped backward like he was trying to perform some particularly difficult gymnastics move. Denise skirted around the twitching body and continued down the hall.
