by David Nickle
“Get her!” The elfs clawed through the packaging, sending Barbies tumbling everywhere. Emily gave a yelp and rolled onto the next shelf, which was lined with teddy bears.
Chuff chuff chuff. A teddy bear inches away lost its eye and toppled over backwards. Another bullet whined into the next aisle, which she could see now as a brightening among the stacked bears. She dug her way to it and tumbled out, shouting, “Elfs! Help!” There was nobody here.
This place had been crowded only moments ago. Where were all the shoppers? It was only then that she heard the fire alarm. She wondered how long it had been going as she raced for the check-out end of the aisle.
They’d head her off, she realized, before she got there. Thinking quickly, she looked back. An avalanche of teddy bears signalled the arrival of her pursuers. She climbed back onto a shelf on the same rack as she’d come from, being careful this time not to disturb the boxes of Lego blocks on it. She built a wall of them, pausing, hand in the air, as she heard the bumbling thud of elfish feet racing by.
Two of them stopped in the aisle only inches away. She hunkered down and tried not to breathe. They muttered together in Pole-ish. Hearing the dialect again after so many years brought tears to Emily’s eyes—not tears of nostalgia, but of bitter remembrance.
“Whar’d the gam offit?” whined one.
“T’other end,” grated the other. “Roundabout, ar?”
“Nay, here come Sharles and Pennytinkler. She nae dropped ’em that way, neither.”
“Then which?”
Any second now they would figure out where she was. Emily had to do something fast—but if she moved she would give herself away. She bit her lip and raised her head a little to look out.
The whole crowd of them had congregated next to her. They were staring hectically about, frustrated and excited. One was chewing the net he held, and the elf with the pistol held it in both hands, pointed up. His feet were planted in a wide stance and his eyes were narrowed. The others kept giving him uneasy sidelong glances.
“The Claus won’t like an’ we lose her,” one mumbled. Somebody else elbowed him sharply.
“Nae talk’o the choppin block, Sammykins. Getinher’s the way, awm yup.”
At the sound of the name Claus, Emily laid her head back and whimpered. It was him. He was alive, against all odds, and he had sent his minions to find her. Maybe he was waiting outside the Consumer’s Cornucopia right now, kneading the runners of his great black sleigh and coughing through his beard in anticipation.
She had thought it was all over. Claus was dead, long since, and his great Mill razed, nothing left of it but a dark smear on the Arctic tundra. She had hoped that by now it would be erased by the snow and wind, and his memory with it. The thought that he was alive (though maybe that wasn’t the word—active might be a better one) made Emily’s pulse hammer. After all, she had been the instrument of his destruction.
“Whar’s Edny?” gargled one of the elfs.
The one with the pistol spoke. “Scoutin’s he, brave boy. Took his flare gun.” There were murmurs of approval all around.
A Lego box tumbled into Emily’s face. She tried to remove it as soundlessly as possible.
“What’ll the Claus do if we nae snatch her?” whined an elf.
“Shutnem! Be ye not thinkin of the Arctic fate, of stakes in the ice and blubber trails for the white bears,” said Pistol. “Think ye rather of reward, of boats, babes and free jerky year ’roun!”
Lying there in the dimness, Emily had brought her breathing under control. She felt almost able to move again now, but for some reason an uncanny dread was prickling up her neck again. Something was wrong.
She turned to look behind her—right into the eyes of a swarthy elf with matted hair, who lay where he had crept within inches of her. His right hand hovered just above her throat.
She screamed.
Everything happened with great speed after that. Lego blocks flew all over. Edny the elf tried to clutch her but she bit his hand. He brought up his flare gun and got off a shot which left her ears ringing. The flare bounced crazily through the mob of elfs in the aisle. Now everybody was screaming. Emily and Edny the elf wrestled among the boxes, finally falling to the floor of the aisle next to the one where the rest of the elfs were hopping up and down trying to quiet the fires from the flare.
Emily tore free of Edny’s pawing fingers and ran for it. She smelled smoke.
“Stap er I’ll shute!” howled Edny. She didn’t look back.
She got clear of the aisle, then stopped. “Darn it!” She’d gone the wrong way, not towards the check-out but to the back of the store. The only door was the one to the stock room, which was several aisles away. She would have to run past the mouth of the aisle where the other elfs were, and they could easily catch her there.
There was nothing for it. She ran, hearing them take to the chase with triumphant cries.
She had to run through the TV department to get to the stock room door. All the TVs were on, showing the same picture. She was surrounded by images of a burning, ruined house as she ran. An announcer said, from all around her, “The house, at 129 Tamarac Avenue, appears to have exploded. Witnesses claim a bright blue light lit up the entire neighbourhood just prior to the blast. Firemen are on the scene, but there is no word of casualties at this time.”
Wait a sec. Emily blinked in confusion, her steps faltering.
That was her house.
She had no time to think about it. She started to run again, but just then the mahogany cabinet-model TV just in front of her blew up. The concussion knocked out the fluorescent tubes above her and she was showered with white powder as little pieces of glass spun and danced across the floor and sparks rose in a miniature mushroom cloud. Emily skidded to a halt and went down on one knee.
Silence stretched out in the aftermath. Slowly, she raised her head. Standing in a semicircle around her were the elfs, looking a little scorched and dishevelled. The big pistol was aimed directly at her head. Behind this tableau, flames rose in majestic waves from a pyre of plush toys and cardboard. Distant sirens wailed.
A net fringed with mistletoe whirled down over Emily’s head. The elf with the pistol sneered at her and said, “Best of the season, Emily.”
White-out!
His eyelids were stuck together. That wasn’t much of a problem, though, since Neil had been caught in a white-out for the past eight hours anyway. He was fairly sure he was upright, and continued making skiing motions with his arms and legs on the assumption that he was moving. But in this perfect, featureless black there was no way to be sure.
“You’ve been colder,” Neil told himself. It was what Uncle Augustus would have said. “You’ve been colder—and what’s a little cold to a man with a mission?”
A man with a mission. He shivered. It seemed like all the heat of the earth was haemorrhaging into space from this lightless plain, and Neil could feel his own body heat curling up and away with it. In his exhaustion, he imagined he was the heat in his body, slowly being drawn up and out. He could look down on himself, a pale statue stiffly moving at the bottom of a white ball. He felt no connection with that clockwork thing.
If he had succeeded in telling that dried-out bureaucrat from the sub about the thing he’d found embedded in the ice, Neil might have felt he could lie down, succumb to the false warmth of hypothermia, and become the popsicle the arctic wanted him to be. But something about that giant hunk of metal, squashed like a bug into the polar ice, had disturbed him. It didn’t look like any manufactured thing he’d ever seen, and yet it didn’t look natural either. It was as if some intense, focussed and utterly monomaniacal craftsman had decided to build some complex machine, like a jet airplane, by hand-crafting the parts. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the wreck had an air of wrongness to it that made him worry, all out of proportion, for what might be going on elsewhere, below the southern horizon where his loved ones lived. The feeling that it was his duty to report what he had se
en drove him on.
That, and a mental picture of Uncle Augustus, who if he were here now would probably be knocking back a can of Bud the way he used to on their cross-country skiing expeditions—just to defy the cold. He’d be soldiering on. He’d be saying, “No foreign commie Russian-weather-machine-made blizzard’s gonna stop this Yankee from reporting in. No siree Bob. Your CO depends on you, boy, you can’t let him down.”
“Nothiree Bho,’” Neil mumbled past frozen lips.
After the subs had flushed back into the black gleaming pits they’d come from, Neil had tried to recover the radio from his hut, but it was irrevocably smashed. When he saw that, Neil felt a pulse of anxiety he at first put down to a fear for his own life. After all, he was alone, exposed on the arctic plains. It wasn’t that, though; he had the GPS, after all, and some confidence that he could get to the coordinates the submarine guy had given him. No, it was when Neil realized just how much of an effect the sight of that crashed thing had had on him, that he retrieved his skis and a few supplies from the remains of the base, and set out. The thing was important. He had to tell—warn—someone about it.
Anyway, the bureaucrat had been playing with him. The man was simply too much of a coward to shoot him then and there. He had decided to let nature take care of Neil. “Rat bastard,” Neil tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t move now and only a croak came out of his mouth. For an instant he was fully in his body and completely aware of where he was: stranded on the ice, freezing to death. But it only lasted an instant, and then he was back above himself, in the ice fog.
The Global Positioning System had seemed like his salvation. After all, it told him exactly where he was, and the bureaucrat had told him where he had to go. All Neil needed to do, he’d reasoned, was walk until the numbers on the little screen matched up with the ones he’d been given.
The problem with the GPS was that it also told you exactly how slow you were moving. After four hours he had been ready to throw it away. The numbers changed so slowly he wondered if the giant ice floe he was on wasn’t moving, like a treadmill, in the opposite direction.
What had he been thinking about just now? He couldn’t remember. It couldn’t have been important. Trouble was, he knew, the numbers had been getting pretty close together lately. Until his eyelids froze together he had even felt encouraged. But he couldn’t see the GPS now, so there was no way to measure his progress anyway.
Something hit him in the nose painfully. “Ow,” he said in a slow, low tone he had never heard from himself. Funny, his arms wouldn’t move properly anymore.
For some reason this was significant. Oh, he’d fallen over. That must be it. That was important too. It meant something. Hard to say what.
It means you’re dying, somebody in his head said.
Oh. But he was nice and warm. He couldn’t be dying if he was warm, could he?
And speaking of warm, he had one flare left. The idea of lighting the flare was attractive for some reason, though he couldn’t quite say why. He deduced he was lying on his face, so he rolled to one side and sat up. It seemed to work. Neil pawed at the straps of his backpack, and slowly worked the thing off. He couldn’t feel or see what he was doing, but his hands found resistance where he expected it, so he worked doggedly until he had something he thought might be the flare. He made pulling motions at its end with his free hand.
Bright pink light blossomed from nowhere. Oh, I didn’t realize my eyes were on this side. He’d gotten all turned around somehow. He brought the flare up close to his face. This should warm me up.
At first the light was a liquid swirl of colour, but after a few seconds he perceived a narrow line of brighter red. Then, with an almost audible pop, his eyes opened.
He was sitting in the centre of a dome of pink light, holding a flare in his left hand. His backpack was freezing to the ice next to him. Outside the dome there was nothing except faint highlights from small upthrusts of ice and snow here and there on the plain. Overhead, the light faded away in striations of colour in the ice fog. Neil had never seen anywhere as cold and desolate as this place.
For some reason this made him think of the ice-man. That man, or creature, with his giant flying sleigh, had seemed like he belonged here. As if he were so cold-hearted already that his blood would never freeze. The thought made Neil shiver, and for the first time in hours, he really felt the cold.
He was going to die here if he didn’t get moving. Where was the GPS? He found it still hanging by its strap at his side. Levering himself to his feet, and leaving the backpack where it was, he used the last fading light of the flare to read the screen of the unit.
The numbers…the numbers were right. They were the exact numbers the bureaucrat had told him to aim for. Neil felt a bit surprised, since he’d always been told people walked in circles if they got disoriented. Well, maybe things were different closer to the pole.
The old windbag had obviously given him bogus coordinates. There was nothing here.
At least he was on his feet again. He would die that way, he thought abstractly, and they would find him in ten or twenty years, standing staring into the GPS, which would probably still be working…
The flare went out. With a sigh, Neil started to walk again.
He had only gotten a few yards when he began to get the strange feeling he was being watched. Nonsense; there couldn’t be anyone up here to watch him. The sensation persisted, until he finally stopped, and looked around himself.
Something huge and black was looming over him. He shouted, and sat down again. Whatever it was, it didn’t move, so after his initial panic had faded a bit, Neil crawled in its direction.
As he went, lights began to emerge from around the dark thing. They were moving, bobbing in his direction.
Neil reached out a gloved hand, and slid his numb fingers along the mesh of a vast, half-buried radar dish. Now he could hear voices. One said, “This way! I’m sure it was this way.”
Three snow-suits materialized out of the ice fog. He could see no sign of the men who must be in them; they seemed like collections of mitts, boots, skidoo parkas and scarves walking on their own. One shouted, and their flashlights roved out and up to spear Neil where he hung on the radar dish.
Things got confused for a while. All he could really make out were the voices, but they weren’t making much sense: “Advanced hypothermia. It’s amazing he survived this long.”
Another said, “We’ve got to get him inside. I’ll run a hot bath.”
But a third voice said, in a thick Australian accent, “I’ve got a better idea. Leave him ta me. We’ll fire up the dew, royt? Nothin’ better for him.”
Fire up the dew? He had no idea what that meant, but the snow-suit had said to leave him here, and that’s what they seemed to be doing. Two of the figures stalked off into the night, leaving the third standing over him.
“At least shoot me,” Neil tried to say. No sound came out of his mouth.
“Hang tough, mate” said the snowsuit. “You’ll be fine in a minute.”
It reached out a swaddled paw and took the GPS away from him. Neil tried to protest, but he was too weak. The snowsuit pitched it out into the night.
Somewhere, something sounding like a heavy diesel engine coughed and started up. Lights sprang up around the periphery of the radar dish. A series of loud clicks and pops came from all around. Neil blinked up at the lights in annoyance. All this hustle and bustle, and nobody paying the least heed to him.
Neil slipped and fell. He was starting to feel warm again. No—not warm. He was starting to feel hot. The snow-suit backed away to the side of the dish, where it knelt to retrieve the GPS. As Neil levered himself up again, a terrific pins-and-needles sensation of returning sensation swept his body. “Aow!”
The snow-suit chuckled.
The snow was melting for yards in every direction, to the sound of loud clicks. It took a while for Neil to realize the clicks were coming from inside his own head.
He felt wond
erfully warm now, as if he were standing next to a fireplace. He coughed, and stepped away from the dish. “What the hell—?” he managed.
The man in the snow-suit tilted his head back and laughed into the frozen sky. “Nothin’ like a nice dose of Distant Early Warning dish microwaves to toast a body up. Welcome to DEW Station fifteen. Amoco Jones, at your service.”
“Umberto sent me,” said Neil. Then he fainted.
Amoco Jones was handsome, with a cleft chin, coal-black hair and vivid blue eyes. His skin was a weatherbeaten bronze, and he moved like a cat. Inside the quonset hut, he plunked a Tilly hat on his head and unzipped his coat. “So Umberto sent you, did he?” he asked, working over the stove with seemingly limitless energy while Neil sat hunched forward, trying to soak as much heat from it as he could.
They were the sole habitants of this hut which, apart from the soiled carpet and a few shelving units plus the stove, was completely empty. It was lit by a single hundred watt bulb hanging near the door. But Amoco had been doing miraculous things with the stove, producing cocoa, hot broth and as much heat as Neil required.
“Hmm?” Neil looked up from his cocoa. “Umberto? Oh, yeah. That’s right. He told me to talk to you.”
“Too royt.” Amoco clapped his hands together and grinned hugely at Neil. “’Old boy still got his wooden leg?”
“Uh?” Neil blinked at him. “Oh, sure. Yeah.”
“Hmph. Still got the plastic allergy then, eh?”
“Uh? Ah, I guess.”
“You guess?” Amoco’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t miss a thing like a plastic allergy. Ain’t you never seen him come all over with hives and done that little dance he does?”
“Oh,” said Neil. “That.”
Amoco laughed. “Good old Umberto. And what about that…you know…other problem?” He sidled up and nudged Neil with his elbow. “You know…that one?”
