“No!” The one word punched a hole in the wind. She jumped as if startled. “Sit.” He pointed at her sled, not waiting to see if she obeyed before turning to unpack the necessities from his.
At some point, a few minutes in, she joined him in his fight to keep the tent from being snatched by the wind’s greedy hands. When, finally, he’d staked it out as best he could, he sent her inside with the pads and sleeping bags and whatever else she could carry. If the gale picked up at all, her weight could be the only thing standing between them and homelessness.
Nearly blind, he hacked at the ice beside the tent, building as much of a wall as he could.
He was bent double by the time his muscles gave out. Everything hurt, but it would hurt a lot worse if he didn’t get inside. Warmth. Hydration. Angel.
He dropped a dozen pieces of ice by the entrance to the tent and forced his way in. By the time he’d zipped both layers up behind him, the storm had poured another pile of the stuff onto the tent’s floor.
His heart tried to shove its way through his throat when he finally focused on Angel. She was in the sleeping bag, hunched over the stove, staring at him, her big, bottomless eyes hopeless.
“Can’t,” she said through clattering teeth. “Can’t light it.”
Wordlessly, he grabbed the fuel canister and eyed the stove, primed it, and lit it carefully.
She looked like a zombie. He imagined he did, too. Running a palm over his jaw produced a fistful of tiny icicles. They sat in his still-gloved hand like a pile of white marbles. For one furious instant, he wanted to fling them outside, to fight back, somehow, against the absolute hopelessness.
“You okay?”
She nodded from her nest where she sat huddled smaller than he’d ever seen her.
He slid into the bag and held her tight until the shivering subsided. His or hers, he couldn’t tell.
“That storm wanted a piece of us.”
He nodded. “Yeah, we should have stopped before.” He didn’t have to say what he was thinking—that they couldn’t afford this delay.
Maybe food would help. Not just for sustenance, but because it meant something to her. It fed her soul. He might not know her well, but he’d gathered that much about this woman.
As he set to work doing all the things that would ensure their survival, he thought of how the GPS unit had flickered earlier. At the time, it had told him they’d gone seven miles. He couldn’t imagine they’d made much more progress once it had gone full whiteout.
Seven goddamn miles when they had over two hundred to cover. Somewhere around two hundred forty now, probably. At this rate, it would take over a month to get there. Longer if the storm didn’t let up. Their food wouldn’t last that long.
And then there was the distinct possibility that their pursuers would come after them once the weather cleared. Maybe not by plane, now that the chill had arrived in earnest. Nobody flew here once it hit fifty below.
And they were definitely getting there.
Which made him want to laugh in a screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t kind of way.
“Here.” She jolted him from his thoughts. “I’ll do it.”
He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. Working helped the time pass. It kept a person from going crazy out here.
She looked better as she took over. Tired and drawn, but more herself. After a few seconds, he turned to his own issues—the socks he needed to get out of, the blisters and chafing to patch up, the fingers and toes to check for telltale numb spots and loose skin.
Everything around them shook—the canvas, the zippers, the clothes they’d hung to dry. It all rattled as if the earth itself were shuddering beneath them. But in his sleeping bag, with an extra bag wrapped around him and the stove on, he felt human again, if not toasty. As he watched Angel cook, the color seeping back into her face, something strangely content, almost domestic, overtook him.
His eyes shot to hers. She couldn’t possibly know what he was thinking.
But so what if she did? She was cooking; he’d set up the shelter. If it resembled—in even a passing way—a cozy living situation, then he’d take it.
He sat forward and sniffed, wishing he could get a whiff of what she was making, but the day’s travels had burned that sense right out of him.
Apparently his taste buds didn’t care if it smelled good or not, because just the sight of brown, rehydrated chicken à la king, or whatever stewy mess sent steam rising from the bowl, had saliva shooting into his mouth. It felt good, this hunger. His body had earned this meal.
She handed him his food and he dug in like a starving man. They ate, cleaned up, and prepared for bed in silence, exhaustion making extraneous effort impossible.
With the raging storm, they couldn’t hear each other speak. Their language was barely suppressed groans—of pain, exhaustion, pleasure.
It wasn’t until she went outside to take care of her needs that he looked at the sleeping bags, separate now, and had a moment of awkward indecision.
They’d be warmer together. But last night had been…confusing. He wanted to curl himself around her again, craved the feel of her body, soft and appealing, even through layers of clothing. And that desire freaked him out.
She came back in and fussed around without meeting his eyes. Embarrassed, maybe, at having to perform bodily functions in such close quarters. He headed out for the same purpose—into the hard, stinging, soul-snatching vortex.
Coop hadn’t experienced darkness like this since last winter, before the sun had risen for short-lived austral summer. Before she’d arrived.
Now, he barely felt the ice and wind and snow as he stared at the half-buried orange structure glowing like an oasis in the desert.
And suddenly, he understood why he couldn’t have her back then or now. Or ever.
He was a starving man and she was an oasis, a hallucination, a single sparkling drop of water in his desiccated world. And the problem with giving in, drinking that water, getting just one little taste, was that he’d know exactly what he’d been missing. And he’d never ever be able to go back.
Chapter 21
Day 2—Harper Research and Testing Facility, East Antarctic Ice Sheet
“Goddammit!” Sampson’s fist left a dent in the wall.
Clive forced himself to stay rooted to the spot and watched with a wary eye. There seemed to be an awful lot of rage simmering beneath Sampson’s smiling surface.
In this case, his frustration arose from their inability to track Cooper and the woman. A storm raged outside—Condition 2, according to the reports coming out of McMurdo—which meant they were stuck.
He couldn’t say that he was glad, exactly, since his objective was to get his hands on that virus, but he didn’t mind seeing this asshole foiled. Again. He pressed his lips together to hide a smirk.
“Bastard can’t possibly survive in this shit,” Sampson spat out and moved to the map on the wall. “But without wings, we’re just as screwed. We need eyes in the sky or this hunt’s gonna be a crapshoot. Over before it starts.”
Sampson traced a circle around the South Pole and stared at the dots and ridges and wide-open spaces that made up the highest, driest, coldest wilderness on earth.
“We’ve got a man and a woman on their own out there. Wind chill as low as seventy-five below. Can’t see. Can’t move.” He tilted his head, staring at that single dot marring the middle of the continent. “Why’d they leave Pole?”
“Surely, they guessed we’d return for the samples.”
“And the bastard took ’em with him.” Sampson shook his head, looking…excited almost. “Fucker’s smarter than he looks.”
“Or paranoid.”
It took an effort not to step back when Sampson focused his sharp blue eyes on Clive. “Ain’t paranoid if a threat’s real.”
Clive narrowed
his eyes and considered the map. The most commonly used route for long expeditions headed through the Transantarctic Mountains to McMurdo, the large U.S. base on the coast. But that had to be close to a thousand-mile trek. People did it in the summer, but in this season? Impossible. What else could they do?
Was there some place they could hunker down through the winter? Had they left the station and hidden nearby, only to return once the coast was clear? The South African station was the obvious choice.
Or… His eyes widened as they landed on a small dot that lay a good distance across the ice from Burke-Ruhe. Wouldn’t that be funny?
There was always door number three. Clive glanced at Sampson to see if he’d come to the same conclusion.
When their eyes met, he felt, for the first time, a sense of camaraderie with this monster. Which maybe wasn’t such a bad thing, since they’d be stuck at this facility for months, wintering together along with the staff and researchers, not to mention the trial subjects.
“We should probably just wait for now, given the weather,” Clive suggested lightly, to which Sampson replied with a smirk and a wink. He was in a much better mood apparently.
Good. It was best to keep the caged animals from getting too agitated.
Clive smiled back.
In fact, things were absolutely looking up again, weren’t they? While Sampson stomped off to do whatever it was meathead brutes did in their downtime, Clive made his way to the lounge, hoping he’d find a book or two in English to read.
* * *
Day 2—239 Miles to Volkov Station—19 Days of Food Remaining
Coop reentered the tent to find that Angel had made the decision for him: the bags were zipped together.
“Is this okay?” Angel had to yell above the wind’s boisterous din. His chest did an odd clenching thing.
“Good. Good idea.” He nodded as he pulled his boots off, wincing when they rubbed against the raw places on his feet. He needed to take a look at them. “We’ll share, uh, body heat.”
“Share what?” she yelled through the unbelievable din of wind-shaken nylon.
“Heat!” he replied.
When she shrugged, he gave up. He couldn’t yell and she couldn’t hear. He wiped the frost from his face and body, removed his outer layer, and then slowly dropped to the ground, where he slid into the sleeping bag.
She turned her back to him and wiggled close, as they’d done last night. As if this were a thing they did.
He hesitated for three long breaths before succumbing to the siren’s song of warmth and comfort and that other thing. The thing he’d never had growing up. The thing he’d never needed or, frankly, wanted until he and this woman had been forced to team up against the world.
Connection.
Despite himself, he sighed at the close, warm smell of her neck and the perfect, easy fit of their bodies.
Her answering sigh didn’t surprise him. It seemed natural, as did the press of her rear to his groin, the tightening of his arms and the loosening of something vital in his chest.
As he lay there, a concept seeped into his head. An idea that he’d never had occasion to examine, much less yearn for. Something he’d have sworn he didn’t care about or have time for or, in fact, believe in at all. How could he believe in something he’d never been able to fathom until this very moment?
Home. It floated through his mind and lodged itself somewhere deep inside, awkward but not uncomfortable. Home, he thought, as he let sleep take over.
Chapter 22
Day 3—239 Miles to Volkov Station—19 Days of Food Remaining
“Angel. Up.”
A freight train ground overhead, smashing the world to smithereens.
The darkness split open, revealing orange-tinted shapes. Socks on the ceiling, swaying above her. Beside her, a man, bent, yelling something that she couldn’t hear. She shut her eyes and pressed her fists hard to her ears so her eardrums wouldn’t explode from the pressure.
And the cold.
Angel!
Her eyes snapped open again to see Ford’s mouth move, but any sounds he made were just notes in the cacophony, whipped away like tiny bits of paper.
“Up. Come on.”
Angel turned over with a groan, keeping her ear covered to block out Ford and the wind and the incessant rattle of straps against tent poles. “This is the worst alarm tone in the world.”
He drew close and put a hand to her shoulder. “Here. Take this,” he said, his voice like a chainsaw scraped slowly over metal. What had happened, she wondered—not for the first time—to damage his vocal cords like that?
“Don’t…” want it, she meant to finish, but she couldn’t quite get her mouth to function. She tried to roll again and knocked her knee to the ground, which sparked off a series of lancing, interconnected pains. “Ooooohhh.”
“Sit up.” Only the consonants were audible through the screech of the wind.
“It’s so dark.” How long would they be battered by the surreal presence outside? She pictured it like a storm at sea, waves crashing over their tiny vessel. Alone. So alone. “Is it even day?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t know why that made her feel better. “Did we sleep?”
“Some.” He tightened his hold on her shoulder, all gruff business. “Sit.”
No break, of course. Days off were for regular expeditions across the far reaches of hell. Not for this running-for-your-life malarkey.
Okay. She could do this. With a grimace, she put her weight on her fists, feeling every bone as if it were bruised, and pushed up.
Once she’d worked her way to sitting, he shoved the tea in her hands and plunked her coat over her shoulders. “Where’s it hurt?”
“Where doesn’t it?” Every bit of her hurt. Although mostly her knee. She opened one eye and looked him over. “’S it cold out?” The question was ridiculous, obviously, but out here, the difference between -15 and -40 was substantial.
His answer—“Not too bad”—made her smile.
“Why’re you so chipper?”
“Chipper?” Brows up, the edges of his mouth pointing down, he gave her a disbelieving look. Insulted, almost. Okay, so maybe chipper wasn’t the right word, but she couldn’t exactly ask him why he didn’t look his usual level of angry. God forbid the man show a glimmer of joy.
“I feel like refried turds and you look…” Less pissed off. She took a sip of lukewarm tea, swallowed, and almost moaned at how good it felt going down. “Well rested.”
His cheekbones went a little red before he shut it down, back to the Ice Man: cold and remote and not at all amused. He hadn’t been any of those things when he’d held her in the night. He’d been her warm sanctuary, her corner of heaven. Funny how safe she’d felt with the world falling apart around them.
Don’t get used to it, dummy. In three weeks, we get to safety and then…
A blank. Nothing. No concept of what awaited them there. A dangerous emergency evacuation? A winter on the ice, in some foreign enclave? Would she have a room, a bed? Would they be forced to share? Would he refuse?
She looked away, annoyed with the path her thoughts had taken. As if what was happening here were anything but practical companionship. “What time is it?”
“About five.” He threw a look up, as if he could see the sky through fabric. “Storm’s died down.”
A strong wind buffeted the tent, showing them exactly who was boss.
“Well, some. Nobody’s flying in this, but we gotta move.” His head gave a fatalistic little tilt. “Temps seem to have risen, so I doubt we’ll freeze to death.”
“That’s heartening.” She’d put a hand down, ready to match her actions to his words, when he stopped her.
“Drink. Eat.” He handed her a morning ration. “And tell me where it hurts.”
It was an
order and, since he was the man in charge of her survival, she sipped, bit, and chewed, enjoying the give of frozen butter as solid as cheddar against her teeth, and twice as satisfying. Next, she crunched into the precooked bacon they’d brought along.
She closed her eyes and took stock.
Food: good. Drink: satisfying. Body:…
“Knee hurts. But that’s pretty much par for the course. Back, too. Can’t say that’s a surprise.” She managed a smile. “Man, this is the world’s worst workout program. The Drag Your Own Butter.” She tensed and rolled her head to one side, then the other, letting out a long, relieved sigh.
“What else?”
“Dude. Give me a sec.” She slitted her eyes and grimaced his way. “Besides, I can handle it.” She flexed her right leg. It didn’t feel great, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t push through. It was how she’d gotten through a million late shifts—ignoring burns and sprains and aches—and she’d do it again. “I’ll be fine.” She slurped down the rest of the tea and shifted, ready to emerge from the bag when he stopped her with a heavy hand on her thigh.
“You wanna survive this?” It was immediately obvious that the question wasn’t rhetorical.
She blinked, gaze meeting his, working hard to ignore the magnetism of those strange, crushed-crystal eyes, of freckles and sunspots, of a strong nose, burned red from the wind, and that square, no-nonsense, scruff-covered jaw. He was so handsome it hurt. Especially with that raw annoyance focused right at her.
“You know I do.”
“Then tell me what hurts.” His face, his voice, even the way his body bent toward her were deadly serious.
“Aside from my pride?” Her smile went unanswered, sending her right back to the galley her first week at Burke-Ruhe, when he’d walked in and scowled. And he hadn’t stopped since. What was it about this guy that made her feel like a bad twelve-year-old? He didn’t respond now, of course, so she closed her eyes again and concentrated. “My knee, but like I said…” She hated talking about it. Hated it almost as much as she hated thinking about the events leading to and from it. “That’s normal.”
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