*****
Marcus was still grinning as he maneuvered down the crawlspace that was his emergency exit, leading him down a dark tunnel that required a half-crouch, half-crawl to get through. This particular part of the shelter was not lined, as the other rooms were, with strips of tree bark and sticks.
The linings, over time, became extremely dry and actually adhered themselves to the walls as the permafrost warmed and cooled. The process essentially petrified them to the wall, accelerated by the dry heat of wood-burning stoves; although, he had to use wood that was dead already, or it just decomposed and fell off... it stunk too. This part though, had no lining, and it came back to haunt him every time he used it, because dirt and other things were scooped and funneled right into his butt-crack from the edge of his pants rubbing against the wall.
He always waited to don the coveralls outside; it was just easier when leaving this way. The first act out of the hole was to jump in place and twitch his legs to get the majority of the dirt down and out of his clothes, though it never came out all the way. Marcus did his dirt-butt dance and then took a survey of the area, a full three-hundred and sixty degrees, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He looked to the path he took out and back in the day before, planning his approach as he went, then got his gear out of the hole and strapped it on for travel.
He decided that if Maddie had been accurate about her departure, and she didn't seem like the type to miss any details, she had made a large, hooking path to where he had found her on the ice. He reasoned that the best path for him would be to start from the spot where he had found her, then head ninety-degrees inland to where he estimated the whales' breathing hole should be. This gave him a clear view of his approach to the hole and a trenched path that he could sneak through, or he could hook around to where the shot had come from that killed her friend, heading around to the opposite side of the station to the bunk house.
Marcus was familiar with the general layout of the camp. One of his favorite things to do was to explore the surrounding areas, and that area had been visited several times. He knew from Maddie's description that the farthest left end of the station, left from what would be his perspective, anyway, was the bunk house. This was the living quarters for all of the staff, with the cafeteria, research facilities and clean labs in the middle and the storage and maintenance building at the far right.
This general knowledge led him to believe the best approach would be on the farthest side of the maintenance building, where the least activity and interest should be. However, it would depend on what he saw when he got there.
He figured that he had gone about a mile before he started smelling burnt plastics and wood from the previous day's explosion. He was getting close. He started crouching and taking a turn every few steps to scan the horizon, always both front and back. When he caught sight of the breathing hole and the trench that wound up from the shoreline, he stopped to survey again before moving on.
The shore hooked abruptly from just about where Maddie had been lying on the ice, in over a mile, then sloped back out into the sea over a distance of around two or three lateral miles. This was known on maps as the Harrison Bay and Cape Halkett, but Marcus called it 'The Claw.'
On his way back from his first trip to Nuiqsut, he stopped to camp overnight on a small uprising of land where he could see out onto the ice and all around for some ways, looking for bears, of course. From this vantage, the hook of the land resembled a huge claw swiping the top of the ice, and the floes and jagged pieces bunching together, around and away from it, lent credibility to the illusion.
He inched along on his belly now, over the incline and onto the plateau of the right side of the trench. He could see the breathing hole and Tim's body, long strips cut into it on the back, legs, buttocks and arms. An eagle and an Arctic fox were already feeding on it. This made it clear why the bodies were cut up and stripped, they wanted to speed the arrival of scavengers to dispose of them.
The whales periodically surfaced in groups to breathe, which made him glad, as the noise would help mask his own movements. It was uncanny how well sound could travel in these conditions, while at other times, no sound could travel at all. He loved this place, it kept him on his toes, thinking and problem-solving... and Marcus loved to think as much as he loved overcoming challenges. The only thing that ruined it was people. People ruined it every time, just like they were doing now.
Carefully positioning himself at the edge where the excess snow was piled from clearing the trench, Marcus peeked over the edge and took a look around. It seemed to be exactly as Maddie had said, right down to the bodies, although, the pace seemed pretty hectic right now. There were groups of men in white jumpsuits with equipment belts, face-masks and guns moving around at a fevered pitch. The far right building, the maintenance building, was essentially gone, burned to the ground. Only jagged remnants of the building's two outer walls remained.
There were several pieces of debris scattered about from the explosion and a lot of blackened snow. He decided to take a closer look and chance using the binoculars. Marcus trained his binoculars in an upward angle, just to the point where objects were on the very bottom of his lenses. This reflected light upward and away from what he was looking at and the general area around it. The same tactic worked great when he was trying to look up on something with binoculars or a scope, without giving his position away.
Two 'invaders', as he was calling them in his head, were running with papers in their hands, dropping several and turning to regather them as they went. They were yelling too. The two got to the edge of a larger group of invaders and one, who must have been some kind of an officer-type, rudely snatched the papers from the man's hands. The man who had brought the papers was leaning over, puffing out clouds of mist, breathing heavily with his hands on his knees, obviously winded from the run.
Must be important... Marcus thought.
The officer-man was motioning over toward the naked and mutilated bodies, then smacking the papers with the back of one hand. Marcus trained in on the papers and squinted to try and see further, when his heart jumped into a beating pattern nearly as fast as a hummingbird's. Employment files... the words grew larger in his head at the same rate that his eyes were growing larger in real life.
They had found the employment records, they had counted the bodies, then they had counted the active employee files. They knew Maddie was not among the dead, and now they also knew her age, physical description, medical information, personal contact information and exactly what she looked like; even from his current distance, he could see the glossy photo on the front of the folder reflecting light as it waved in the breeze.
Mythical Page 10
