“I’m…not sure.”
“You are, I believe, an investigator’s secretary. Perhaps you could do a little investigating yourself? Have you looked at his email? Checked his telephone messages? Oh, I don’t know, read his files?”
The child on the other end of the line swallowed. Hopefully that gum hurt going down. “Uh. No…ma’am.”
Good God. Fiona as a five-year-old would have been better at this woman’s job. She shut her eyes against the wave of resentment that went through her every time she thought of all of the lost potential.
“Well, then, perhaps you should.” It occurred to Katherine that she was close to yelling at someone who was not her own employee. With another of those deep breaths in, she pulled back and did her best to channel her mother. Sweet, syrupy, all smiles. Even as she stabbed you in the back.
“I would be so grateful, young lady, if you could establish what it was, precisely, that sent your boss wherever he went. That location—or the person with whom he met, for example—would be helpful hints as to his whereabouts. Or a paper trail? Please provide me with that information at your earliest convenience.” She didn’t mean that last part. But people apparently appreciated the false impression that their time was their own.
Nothing but nervous breathing on the other end of the phone, then finally, “Of course.” A pause. “Ms. Harper.”
“Now.” She stretched a thin smile across her lips, doing her best to ensure it could be heard in her voice as well. Mama would have been proud, but even after all these decades, being friendly felt like trying to fit into someone else’s clothing. “Thank you so much for the update. I look forward to hearing from you again.” Night or day, she almost added, but that would be too eager. It would set off alarm bells, if she hadn’t done that already. “Soon.”
But how, oh how could she hold this inside when it was so very momentous? The man who’d stolen the original virus—Daddy’s virus—wasn’t far now. They’d find him. She felt it with certainty, in her bones.
Because she just had to tell someone, she broke her own rule of not visiting her daughter during working hours and walked out. Grasping her cane tightly in her hand, she went to the end of the hall, down the stairs to the ground floor, then toward the back of the house—away from the mountain and the company’s headquarters.
As she always did before entering, she sucked in a deep, preparatory breath. Serenity. Everything else, she left at the door.
Slowly, she opened the door, pleased to see that the curtains were open, the view absolutely spectacular, as always. Well, calmly spectacular—an English garden in the middle of West Virginia, not quite in bloom, though buds had started to spring up everywhere.
The nurse, who’d likely been reading to Fiona, stood up quickly. From her lap, hidden beneath Anne of Green Gables, a mobile phone dropped to the floor with a thud. So, not reading.
She cleared her throat and stared at the young lady, who couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“May I have a moment with my daughter, please…uh…”
“Catherine.”
Ah yes. She and the nurse shared a name—though spelled differently. How could she possibly have forgotten?
“Yes. Catherine. Thank you.” She smiled as the woman left the room, then waited until the footsteps faded before letting her eyes take in her sweet, perfect baby, frozen, eyes staring blindly ahead.
Every morning and every night, she came through this door, and every single time, this sight was like a spear through her chest.
She sank into the armchair she kept close to the bed and grasped Fiona’s cold thin white hand.
“There’s news, pumpkin.” She gulped back an unexpected wave of excitement. “Remember that man I told you about, who stole from us all those years ago?”
Fiona moved slightly, giving Katherine quite a start before she realized she was squeezing her hand too tight. She loosened her hold with an effort and leaned forward to stroke her daughter’s cheek. “We’re so close, my darling. So close to having a viable virus. And you know what this means, don’t you?”
Oh my, Katherine was breathing hard. But this was a lot to happen at once. The virus, first of all, showing up after all this time. Goodness, the excitement of that! And while the team at the South Pole wasn’t exactly the most efficient, things were happening now. Change was coming. She could feel it.
“All of our hard work is coming to fruition. Men like the ones who hurt you… Terrorists,” she breathed, hating the word, but needing to say it aloud every once in a while. Needing to remember the man attacking the school. Needing the ache of memory—the physical blow to her belly when she’d received the call. The news stories she’d watched for hours…days. Until they’d stopped airing them. And the anger even at that. How dare you stop talking about the death of my family? The loss of my grandchildren? One daughter dead, the other forever asleep. Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, they called it now, which she much preferred to the phrase vegetative state.
A syndrome was something she might wake from someday. A vegetable was grated, cut up, cooked into soup.
“We will obliterate them.” The words emerged harsh and certain. She softened her voice with another long, slow stroke of Fiona’s pasty cheek.
Really, Catherine needed to take her out a bit more often. Even with the chill, she should give Fiona a little sunlight instead of sitting in here watching whatever it was on her telephone. Or texting some boyfriend. This generation…good God.
Odd, because Catherine wasn’t that much younger than Fiona. But she’d never let her daughters turn into one of the zombies. Never.
“I know you’re kinder than me, my dear, but I can’t forgive that man for stealing from us all those years ago. He took our virus.” The man who’d stolen it had called them evil when he’d done it. Vowing they’d never get their hands on it.
Well, he’d been wrong, hadn’t he?
* * *
Ford was alive.
Pummeled and shot and bleeding out in an underground forest of ice, yes, but alive.
Angel wrapped her arms tighter around him. She needed to keep him warm, then get him to safety. No. No, first she had to stop the bleeding. She could do that. Stop bleeding.
What she couldn’t do was lose it right now.
Okay. Okay. She blinked back the tears that threatened to freeze her eyelids shut and took a look around.
As fast as she could, she dragged herself the few dozen feet, over Sampson’s body, back to the sled. She pulled out a pack and rifled through it. Clothing. That would work. And the first aid kit. Sleeping bags and mats, too.
She yanked at the bag, dragged it behind her, and started to crab-crawl back to Ford, then thought better of it. The sled would come in handy and she needed to be efficient with her movements. Quickly, haphazardly, she pushed everything she wouldn’t need from the sled, then hesitated, staring at the five metal tubes. She ran her hand over the nearest one, gleaming at her like some cursed relic from the past. In a movie, she’d leave them buried for the next poor person to find.
Yeah, well, this isn’t a movie. And I’m not cursed.
She hefted the ice core back onto the sled and zipped the whole thing closed. She’d come back for them.
First, she had to help Ford.
Beside him, she unzipped the first aid kit with difficulty, since her stupid glove kept getting in the way, then dumped the contents. Bandages—good. WoundSeal. Yes. Yes, that would work.
Next, she pulled out clothes until she found a couple pairs of her own clean underwear—the only cotton they had—and a few nylon base-layer items. Then she turned to him.
Oh God. Had his chest stopped moving?
“Live, dammit. Please. Live. Live, Ford. Live.” She said the words like a mantra, sang them like an anthem, over and over. “You’re mine now. You hear? So, live. Freaking live.”
Shit, he’d freeze if she opened up his coat. But maybe not. The air felt hot now. Was it her? Was she immune to the cold? Ha! Maybe by destroying the evil killer, she’d unlocked the cold resistance achievement. Sure. And Ford was gonna stand up and walk to Volkov like this.
She unzipped him, quickly threw clothes onto his chest to warm him, then put the sleeping bag over top, fighting to pull his arm from his coat. It weighed a ton.
Every move was an effort: ripping open the WoundSeal powder, sprinkling it on, turning him, doing the same on the other side, wadding up the cotton cloth, pressing hard.
“Live, live, live, live.”
She unrolled the bandage, lifted Ford’s heavy arm away from his body, grunting, wrapped, pressed.
Finally, she zipped him up, and considered collapsing, but if she did that, she’d die here, with him, surrounded by the scattered bodies of the men who’d done this.
Quickly, she sucked down four ibuprofen, stuck the water bottle into her coat, and looked at the bloody labyrinth around them. Before letting herself acknowledge the real problem: How the hell was she going to get them up?
Chapter 44
She bent to zip Ford into the second sleeping bag. “Don’t you leave me. Don’t die. Don’t you dare. Because I love you. I love you, you jerk.”
At some point, the mantra had changed and Angel couldn’t change it back. Didn’t matter if he heard or cared or knew how deeply she felt for him. All she wanted was to keep him alive. She figured tough love was just about Ford’s speed.
She couldn’t lift him, had no idea how to build a pulley, and couldn’t climb out of here anyway.
Which left her with one option—they needed a ramp.
She eyed the massive columns of ice above and around her, some wide and long, others thin and fragile-looking.
She’d done it once. She could do it again.
As far as she could see, the ice chunks rose up, intimidating and regal, smooth in places, bumpy in others, looking like they’d sprouted from the earth. She moved away from Ford to a solid-looking rectangle adjacent to an exterior wall. After a fortifying inhale, she shoved it with all her might.
It didn’t budge.
Of course it didn’t. The thing was massive, much bigger than the one she’d pushed before.
Come on. Come on. I can’t—
Her eye landed on a corpse, flicked immediately away and then, with purpose, looked at it again. Their axe stuck out from the man’s head.
“Oh, hell no,” she complained, even as she moved toward it. She wrapped her fingers around the handle, braced herself with the shovel…and yanked it out.
She waited for the dry-heaves to pass, working hard to forget all thoughts of meat and cleavers. After a cleansing breath, she went back to the tall column of ice and, because there wasn’t any time to lose, let the axe fly, chopping at the base until, with a suddenness that made her fall back on her ass, it collapsed.
There. She smiled to no one. A ramp.
Triumphant, she rushed back to Ford, every movement an awkward fight against her own body. “Okay. How do I do this?”
She’d emptied the sled of everything, piled their sleeping mats on top, and with great difficulty, worked to shift Ford onto it, one leaden body part at a time.
“God, you’re heavy,” she huffed. “I can’t…get you on the damned sled.”
A sound stopped her cold. Did he say something?
“What?” She leaned close, heart trying to punch its way out of her chest. Were his eyes open? Oh God, his mouth moved.
Almost sobbing with relief, she put her ear to his neck gaiter and listened.
“Trying.” A rasping breath lifted his chest painfully. “You…too…”
“What?”
“Love…you…too.”
No time to cry.
“Yeah?” She grasped his face and held it tightly. “Then climb onto this sled.”
He huffed out an agonized sound and grimaced, which hurt her insides, but when she pulled this time, he put his arm on the ground, turned to one side, and with a groan, made it on.
“Gonna get you home,” she assured him, although she had no freaking clue where home could be. Or how she’d get there. “Get you home.”
With Ford loaded on the sled, she took a second to lean back and consider the situation while she caught her breath. No way could she pull him anywhere, home or otherwise. The impossibility of what she had to do crushed her for a good five seconds before she remembered the snowmobiles. Right.
All she had to do was climb up and out of here, then she’d tie the sled to a snowmobile and pull him out.
After that…could they make it to Volkov in a day? Crap, she had no clue.
Chapter 45
They were out.
Angel wanted to crawl into the sleeping bag with Ford and take a rest, but there wasn’t time. She pictured him freezing to death. Or bleeding. Or maybe the knocks to his head had caused him to—
Shut up and go.
She’d planned to make him lie on the sled and haul him across the ice, but he insisted on bringing the cores with them, so rather than waste time arguing, she’d piled them on the sled and turned to find him slowly, painfully climbing onto the snowmobile.
He caught her eye. “Want me to drive?” he asked, and she honest-to-God laughed. The man could barely stay upright, much less handle a moving vehicle.
“I’ve got this.”
She tucked her feet into the footwells and stared down at the GPS. With fumbling fingers, she twisted the key and got the engine running, its roar extra loud in all this stillness.
Ford wrapped himself around her, leaned into her body, pressed the side of his head to hers, and sighed.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He nodded.
“Which way?”
He whispered the coordinates into her ear.
She gave a deep, exhausted sigh and lurched toward Volkov Research Station.
* * *
Day 15—4 Miles to Volkov Station—No Food, No Shelter
“No. No, no no. Son of a bitch!” The snowmobile came to a slow, lurching stop in the middle of nowhere. Out of gas.
For several mind-numbing seconds, Angel could only press her hand to her mouth and wait for the wave of hopelessness to pass. No. Not hopelessness. She needed that anger back. Only anger.
There. She held it in so tightly that it shook her body.
It wasn’t enough to leave five corpses on the ice. To cross miles and miles of nothing, practically freezing to death every night in a sleeping bag for two. To blow out her knee, with no way in hell to get it fixed down here. And then to watch the man she’d unwisely fallen in love with get shot and beaten.
No. Now, they had to break down within miles of their destination.
Goddammit, she’d had enough.
If Ford hadn’t been plastered to her back, she’d have—what? Stomped around swearing? She couldn’t even do that with her stupid knee.
And now they had to walk.
“Ford.” She turned just her head. “Come on. Got to walk.” Or crawl, if that was what it took.
“Mm-hm.” And it just might.
“Uh-huh. Yes. Up. Let’s go.”
Shit. They had nothing. Just the water in her coat and a couple bars in her pocket. She hadn’t thought…
Tears pricked at her sinuses.
No. Hell no. First, buck up, get our asses to safety
. Then cry like a damn baby.
With one hand gripping Ford’s coat to keep him from slumping, she twisted off their ride and eyed him, hysteria bubbling up inside.
I am totally losing it.
“Okay, mister. We’re doing this. But I need your help.” A pull on his good arm produced no results. “Come on, Ford. Please.”
She yanked with every ounce of strength she had, and he slid too fast, his weight nearly crushing her. She caught the handlebar at the last minute, straightened her left leg, and held steady for a few long, agonized seconds.
“Let’s go. We need your two legs.” She propped him up on the snowmobile. “I’ll use the one that I’ve got.” Her next strangled laugh was high and frenzied. “A tripod.”
He muttered something.
“What?”
“Go…” He swallowed. “’thout me.”
“No.”
“Dammit. Go.”
“Fuck off, Ford.”
“I’m…slow.”
“And I can’t even walk on my own.” Every drop of humor left Angel’s body in a rush. She turned to put her head to his, cheek to cheek, her mouth against the opening to his hood. “We’ll go at your pace.”
“Sweetheart.” His words brushed against her ear. “Go. Get…help.”
“Remember when I told you to let me die if I weighed you down?” She shook her head, nuzzling him in the process. “Remember that? I didn’t want us both to die. Didn’t want to be responsible for killing you.”
“I remember,” he breathed.
“You wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t promise.” She’d been so close to falling apart that day.
Months ago, Angel Smith had arrived in Antarctica, alone and directionless.
But, man, did riding the razor edge of death change a girl’s priorities.
These last two weeks had boiled her life down to exactly one thing: getting their asses to Volkov Station.
No more aimless soul-searching for Angel. Today, she’d drag this man to safety. Or die in the process.
Whiteout Page 26
