Outpost H311

by Townsend, Sara Jayne

  Navigation was easier this time, because they were able to track the sledges through the groove made by the first equipment sledge pulled along during the scouting mission, and they had a compass, but it was still slow going. It was cold, they were all affected by too little sleep and too little food. Nerves were frayed. Things came to a head the fifth time Nathan insisted on sitting down for a rest.

  “What is with you?” Jake growled. “Every five minutes you say your feet are tired and you need to stop. The longer we’re out here, the worse shape your feet will be in.”

  Nathan sneered at Jake from his perch on the edge of the equipment sledge. The first argument had been about him sitting on the equipment and possibly damaging things. Since then he’d made a point of pushing everything over to clear a space on the corner for him to sit on, insisting he didn’t want to sit in the snow. “So I’m not very fit. Sue me. It’s alright for you, you’re a marine. I’ve got a desk job. I’m not used to all this physical activity.”

  “You’re worse than the women for whining,” Jake said.

  “I’m not whining,” Neeta said.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “It was the way you said it. Suggesting that you expect women to whine.”

  “Usually they do,” said Jake.

  “That’s a very sexist assumption.”

  “Oh don’t go all women’s lib on me. I’ve been taking new recruits out for physical training for nearly twenty years. It’s always the girls who complain. I’m not being sexist, I’m stating facts. Women have less of a capacity for endurance than men do.”

  “It’s sexist to make that kind of sweeping statement, and it’s not true,” Neeta said. “Women’s bodies are designed to endure the agony of childbirth. We are more durable than men are. And we have a far higher tolerance for pain.”

  “Actually that’s not quite true either,” Nathan piped up from his perch. “I saw a TV show where they did an experiment on people’s pain threshold. Only the women who’d given birth had a higher pain tolerance. Those that hadn’t were no different from the men.”

  “Actually, if we’re talking pain, I would argue that I’ve got a stronger case at present than anyone to be complaining,” Daniel said from his sledge. “And are you hearing me whining?”

  “That’s because you get to lie down and be pulled along,” Nathan said.

  “Only because I can’t put any weight on my leg,” Daniel said. “Trust me, if I could walk, I would. This isn’t exactly a comfortable position, and I’m quite keen for us to get to a place indoors, where I can lie down and don’t have to be jostled about in the snow.”

  “We weren’t talking about pain tolerance, we were talking about endurance,” Ellen said. “And that’s nothing to do with gender. As it happens I’m a pretty good endurance runner – or I used to be. I was one of the top five endurance runners in school as a teenager.”

  “None of us is in school anymore,” Nathan said. “That kind of claim is irrelevant now.”

  Allison sighed. “This isn’t exactly how I would choose to spend my time, but it’s the situation we find ourselves in and complaining about it isn’t going to make it any better. Jake has a point. The sooner we get to the base, the sooner we can all rest up. Pete, turn off that damn camera.” She glared at Pete, who was filming the conversation.

  Pete emerged from behind the camera, a grin on his face. “When we get out of here, we’re going to have an award-winning documentary.”

  A wolf howled somewhere in the distance. “What was that?” Nathan asked.

  “It’s a wolf,” Ellen said. “I heard it before. There are wolves in the Arctic.”

  “We’ve seen no tracks,” said Allison. “It can’t be all that close.”

  “Sounded pretty close to me,” said Nathan.

  Jake hefted his pack more securely onto his back. “Let’s not give it time to catch us up. Let’s go. No more stops. Anyone who doesn’t keep up gets left behind. Ellen, let’s go.” He picked up one of the straps of the sledge that Daniel was strapped to. Ellen picked up the other strap, and the two of them started off, pulling Daniel’s sledge behind them. The others hurried to keep up. Even pulling the burden of the sledge, Jake and Ellen were still way ahead of everyone else.

  CHAPTER 16

  Ellen and Jake reached the top of the ridge first, pulling Daniel on the sledge. Allison, Neeta and Pete, pulling the equipment sledge, were halfway up the ridge. Trailing way behind was Nathan, so far back he was little more than a dark speck in the distance.

  Now that she knew it was there, Ellen could see the base easily. The trap door she had fallen through was now covered with a metal plate, but it was easily identifiable through the snow. The sledge they had used to bring out equipment on the scouting run still sat on the snow by the trap door, too bulky to haul down the ladder. Several meters beyond that a plume of smoke snaked up from a hole in the snow, marking the flue from the stove.

  The building that was above ground level was several meters beyond that. It was too dark to see what lay beyond it; even it was difficult to make out in the perpetual twilight.

  Ellen looked over at Jake, who was standing on the ridge staring down at the base with a thoughtful expression on his face. She edged closer to him and said, “It just occurred to me we never got around to checking out the building.”

  “No,” Jake said. “We discovered the underground tunnel and got distracted. We should explore the perimeter and approach that structure from the outside. In fact we should do it pronto, so we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Let’s get everyone else into the base first.” Ellen moved forward, overtaking Jake as she made her way down the ridge.

  The snow around the entrance to the tunnel was still churned up. At least no one else would fall down it, since the entrance was now clearly visible. Ellen moved the metal plate covering the tunnel entrance to one side. The scraping noise it made echoed dissonantly through the silent landscape.

  The tunnel was pitch black. They had set up a lantern in it, but it had evidently gone out or had been moved for some reason. Ellen was annoyed. They had left instructions with David to maintain the lanterns.

  Jake moved up beside her and shone his torch down into the tunnel, illuminating the ladder which was still in place. “Why has that asshole let the light go out?”

  “Maybe he’s been engrossed in fixing the radio and forgot about everything else,” Ellen said. “I’ll go down first and shine the torch back up the ladder so people can see where they’re going. Give me a sec.”

  Ellen shrugged out of her backpack and put it down on the ground. She pulled out the head torch and pushed back the hood of her parka, turning the torch on and securing the elastic around her woollen hat. The hand torch she tucked inside her jacket, before zipping it up securely, and then very carefully she lowered herself down onto the ladder.

  The rungs were slippery. If she fell again she might do herself some damage, and she couldn’t afford for that to happen. Rung by rung she lowered herself down the ladder, the head torch illuminating only the area where she was, not where she was going.

  With relief she felt her foot hit the tunnel’s solid floor. She looked back up at the entrance. She could only see Jake’s silhouette, outlined against his torch shining down at her. “OK, I’m down,” she called out. She looked back down the tunnel, the rooms beyond the light from the torch in darkness. “David?” she called out.

  There was no answer. She felt uneasy in the dark. But there was no time to dwell on it. Neeta was starting her descent down the ladder.

  Ellen stepped back from the foot of the ladder, pulling the hand torch out of its snug nest between her parka and her sweater and turning it on. She shone the beam at the foot of the ladder as Neeta carefully made her way down.

  Pete came next, moving surprisingly agilely for such a big man. His camera case was secured to webbing straps across his body and it bounced against his chest as he climbed down. Allison followed,
moving much more cautiously, trying to find purchase on the ladder in her thick snowy boots. As she got to the bottom, Jake called down, “The sledges are too bulky to come down, so I’ll need to stay here and pass the equipment down to the rest of you, piece by piece.”

  “We’ve also got to get Daniel down,” Neeta said.

  Ellen moved to the bottom of the ladder, pushing past the small crowd gathering and looked up at Jake. “Jake, I’m going to find David and see how he’s getting on with the radio,” she called up.

  She saw Jake’s silhouette nod. “OK. Everyone else down there needs to take the equipment as I hand it down. Form an assembly line or something. Nathan, get your ass over here. Quit dawdling.”

  As Neeta, Pete and Allison lined up to take possession of the gear that Jake was handing down, Ellen opened the door into the comms room, surprised to find it deserted. The radio was in pieces, parts lined up in neat rows on the console. There was a tin mug full of tea next to the parts. Ellen picked it up. It was stone cold. Puzzled, she put the mug down. David had made himself tea that he hadn’t drunk, but he wasn’t engrossed in fixing the radio as she had assumed. Where the hell was he?

  She walked down the corridor and into the kitchen, her torch beam casting the only light, making eerie shadows dance in the corners of the room. The paraffin lamp they had left here had gone out – possibly out of paraffin. The pan of melted snow was still on the hob, but the gas was off. The room felt cold. Ellen opened the door on the pot-bellied stove. The coals had burned down, nothing remaining but a pile of cooling ashes. Annoyed, she said, “David, why did you let the fire go out?”

  No one answered. Feeling nervous, she walked into the next corridor, towards the barracks and officers’ quarters. The farther away she got from the others, the more uneasy she felt. She should have helped move the equipment, stayed with them until the job was done, but she’d been so keen to find David. “David?” she called out, the word echoing in the emptiness.

  Ellen continued walking cautiously along the corridor until a scream from the direction of the entranceway made her stop in her tracks.

  CHAPTER 17

  Ellen charged back down the corridor to discover the others clustered in a group around the junction in the corridor where the snow block was. Neeta was deathly pale, her hands covering her mouth.

  “What happened?” Ellen asked. Jake stepped back, his face set in a hard expression, and shone his torch down the corridor. Ellen moved in closer to see what it was he was showing her.

  David was lying face up on the floor. His eyes were open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His mouth was frozen forever in a scream. His dark hair had turned white.

  Ellen staggered back, leaning against the concrete wall for support.

  One by one the others crowded in to look, all stepping away white-faced when they saw David’s corpse.

  Nathan was the first to speak. “You said this place was safe.”

  “I said it was safer than the plane,” Jake said. “There was insufficient shelter in the plane. We would die of exposure in a matter of days. Here we have shelter, heat, water, food.”

  “And there’s evidently something else here that poses a bigger threat.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jake said.

  “Look at him.” Neeta pointed at David’s body. “He’s been scared to death. Literally.”

  “And you’re a doctor now, are you?”

  “His hair has gone white,” Neeta said. “I don’t have to be a doctor to know that it’s extreme shock that does that.”

  “It’s too early to be making rash decisions. We need to do some more reconnaissance, but we’ve still got a better chance in here than we do out there. And will you turn that fucking thing off?” Jake rounded on Pete, pushing away the camera that was close to his face.

  “Look. We need a plan,” Allison said. “We can’t all stand around here. And we need to get Daniel somewhere where he can rest.”

  “I’d rather not be shoved off in a room all on my own,” Daniel protested from the sledge where he’d been left in the corridor.

  “We can’t keep hauling you around like this,” Allison said. “You need to keep that leg still.”

  “There are bunks in the barracks rooms,” Ellen said. “Let’s get him into one of those.” She turned to Daniel. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted. But we do need to get you settled somewhere, where you won’t get jostled about.”

  Jake, Nathan and Pete between them carried Daniel down to the barracks room next to the conference room and got him settled on one of the bunks. Then everyone else gathered in the conference room, where there were sufficient chairs for everyone to sit around the table. Bringing in lanterns and torches there was sufficient light, but the heat hadn’t reached this room and it was cold.

  “The first thing we’ve got to do is a full exploration of the base,” Allison said. “We need to figure out how to get past that snow block in the corridor so we know what’s beyond it.”

  “We know what’s beyond it,” Jake said. “There’s a map.”

  “Where?” Allison stared at him. “You didn’t say there was a map.”

  “It’s in the comms room. It wasn’t a priority to mention it at the time. It’s a bit academic at present. Half the base is inaccessible, so knowing what’s there doesn’t do us any good.”

  “What do you mean by ‘inaccessible’?” Nathan said.

  “Some of the corridors are blocked off.”

  “Why?” said Neeta.

  Jake glared at her. “Since they’re inaccessible, we have no idea.”

  “Are we sure that staying here is such a good idea?” Neeta asked. “I mean, something literally scared David to death, and we don’t know what it was. If we can’t access parts of the base, how do we know whatever it was isn’t still here?”

  Jake cast Neeta a withering look. “That’s why we’re sitting here talking about having a look around, so we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We all agreed to come out here because we thought it would be temporary.” Nathan pointed at Jake. “In fact, you said that David was fixing the radio so we could phone for help and then we could get out of here. But David is dead, and he’s our only engineer. Who’s going to fix that radio now?”

  “Forget about the radio,” Jake said. “We have food here, and we have heat and shelter from the elements. We deal with everything else as and when.”

  Nathan folded his arms. “I was the one who said we should stay put, to be better seen by passing planes, but no one listened to me. Who’s going to see us, way underground like this, waiting to be picked off by whatever it was that got David?”

  “He might have a point,” Neeta said. “Until we know what happened to David, this place might not be safe.”

  “So first priority, as I keep saying, is reconnaissance,” Jake said.

  “We also need to take a look at that outbuilding on the surface,” Ellen said. “I suggest that Jake and I explore that at ground level.”

  “No offence, but I’d rather do that alone,” Jake said. “It’d be a lot faster.”

  “Until we know what we’re dealing with, no one should go anywhere alone,” Ellen said. “And I can move as fast as you can. I was the only one who kept pace with you on the trek out this far. The two of us are the people in this group best able to deal with the outdoor temperatures. So it makes sense for us to explore together. Believe me, I’d rather it wasn’t that way.”

  “OK, that sounds like a plan,” said Allison. “The rest of us can set up camp here in the meantime.”

  “Can’t we do it in a room with heat?” Neeta said. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “I suggest we set up base camp back in the kitchen, where the coal-fired stove is,” Jake said. If we can get the generator going, we might be able to put heaters in some of the bunk rooms and sleep there.”

  “Can we get the toilets and showers working?” Neeta asked.

  “I might be able to get the w
ater running if I can figure out what set-up the Nazis had, but the reconnoitre mission takes priority,” Jake said.

  Allison looked at the Nazi flag adorning the wall of the conference room. “That does bring up the elephant in the room. This place is a Nazi base.”

  “We had already figured that out,” Jake said. “But we’re pretty sure the Nazis are long gone.”

  “Doesn’t make it any less creepy though,” Allison said.

  “It’s a fucking Nazi base,” Nathan said. “Not exactly brimming with warm and fuzzy vibes.”

  “It was set up to provide food and shelter in the Arctic,” Jake said. “In that respect, it’s perfect for our needs. Would you rather be out there, in sub-zero temperatures?”

  Allison shuddered. “No. Of course not. But if we are staying here, we need to sort out priorities. Food and heat are the most important. I’ll get that fire relit. Neeta and Pete, can you go explore the pantry? See what’s in there that’s still edible. Catalogue what we have and we can work out how long it will last us. Pete, will you put that damn camera down?”

  Pete appeared from behind his camera and set it to one side. “You idiots are costing me an Emmy nomination, you know that?”

  “So sue me when we get back to civilisation,” Allison said. “OK, we also need to sort out all of the supplies and work out what’s useful here. Nathan.” Allison turned to the accountant, who was sitting in a chair and rubbing his gloved hands together. “I want you to start clearing that snow block in the corridor. I know there are a couple of snow shovels in the equipment. Grab one and make a start.”

  Nathan stared at her. “You really get off on proving your balls are as big as any man’s, don’t you?”

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do and everyone’s got to pitch in,” Allison said. “Nobody who’s able-bodied can spend time sitting around.”