The Winter Over(81)
Hanratty clapped a hand to the blood leaping from his neck and fell to the floor, looking up at his chief in disbelief. His mouth gulped like that of a fish out of water. Taylor, his eyes impossibly wide, took two steps back, then fled down the hall. Shouts and shrieks of the terrified crew came to Hanratty down a long, narrow tube, growing more muffled and faint as his blood pumped out to join that of the others scattered around him.
In the thirty seconds left of life, Hanratty gifted himself with the thought that he would be remembered, if not as a hero, then at least not as a coward, if he were to be remembered at all.
CHAPTER FORTY
Taylor ran along the hall—gun in hand, head swiveling—ready for anything.
It was all over. Hanratty was dead. Keene was nowhere to be found. Ayres and Deb and half the crew were crazy or gone or dead, he didn’t have time to figure out which. He’d had a suspicion it would end this way, had tried to warn Hanratty to stop talking to people and start leading them. Draw some fucking lines in the sand. Kick people back into their corners. Take charge. But instead Hanratty had decided to reason with people, talk to them. Well, we saw how that worked out, didn’t we, Jack?
He felt no responsibility for Hanratty’s death. If the moron hadn’t tried to grab his gun, he wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. But he was a trained professional, indoctrinated to handle insurrection brutally and effectively. What had Hanratty expected? What was he thinking ? When the world went to hell, you fired first and sorted things out later. If someone put themselves in front of the barrel, that was on them.
It hadn’t occurred to Taylor just where he was running to; he just knew he needed to get away from the mob and get out of the base before someone did for him like he’d done for Hanratty. He was halfway down the stairs in the Beer Can, taking the steps two and three at a time, when he realized his feet had already decided for him. He’d have to hurry; he wasn’t dressed for the sixty below of the service arches, but if he kept up his calorie burn, he might get through without losing too much to frostbite.
At the base of the stairs, he stopped briefly to listen. The lower level, always fairly quiet, was eerily silent now. He was too cold to stop for long, however, and jogged through the hatch and toward the arches. His labored breathing and the squeaking crunch of his steps along the ice became the only sounds.
Had he been moving at any slower than a full run, he might’ve been intimidated. But with the very real dangers of the crew behind him, imagined dangers were more easily dismissed, although it occurred to him that, despite the bloodbath upstairs, no one knew who had killed Anne and Pete. For all he knew, the killer was down here with him, as well. He covered his mouth with a sleeve to warm the incoming air and picked up his pace.
Humans were not built for sixty degrees below zero. At just over a minute in the tunnels, he could feel his body shutting down, his vision blurring. Gasping and shivering uncontrollably, he reached the VMF seconds before collapse. He had just enough sense left to wrap his sleeve around his hand before reaching for the metal latch to the garage or he would’ve lost all the skin on his palm and fingers. With his hand covered, he threw open the door and flicked on the lights while his breath poured out in great billows of white vapor.
His eyes darted around the garage. The VMF was warmer than the tunnel, possibly in the low teens, but that only meant his death would be prolonged if he didn’t find a source of warmth or protection in the next few minutes.
“Come on, Jennings, you bitch,” he snarled into the empty space. “I know you kept spares.”
There . Tossed casually on a stool was a set of Carhartt overalls covered in grease. He hurried over and started tugging them on, cursing at the tight fit. He was hopping around on one leg, trying to shove his body into the overalls, when he shouted in victory. Hanging from a hook in the corner: Jennings’s spare ECW gear.
He abandoned the overalls and snatched the parka. A light sheen of sweat that had formed on his brow and back had already frozen, and he ran a hand along his face to break up the ice. He began throwing on the gear as fast as he could, fumbling with the zips and buckles. His hands had lost feeling, the fingers thick as sausages and just as clumsy. In thirty seconds, however, he had the entire set on and the tremor in his limbs slowed to an occasional twitch. The gun he stashed in an inside pocket, which was a shame, but he no longer felt quite as exposed as he had back in the halls of Shackleton.
Now he needed wheels. He jogged over to the station’s fleet of Skandics, parked neatly in a row. Moving as quickly as the bulky gear would allow, he checked their gauges and general state of wear. He needed something tanked up and in good working order; his life depended on which machine he chose.
He finally settled on one of the older but more reliable-looking sleds, started it to get it warmed up, then ran to a supply shelf, where he rummaged through pre-stocked saddlebags meant for outside workers who needed to grab-and-go. Cannibalizing several, he managed to put together a bug-out bag of two first-aid kits, a GPS system, flares, a radio, and a basic survival kit. He tossed this onto the back of the Skandic, strapped down an extra can of gas, then trotted over to the large garage door to open it. The great bay door whined and ground its gears, unused to fighting the massive snowdrifts that had piled against it since summer. It rose slowly, inevitably, and the warmth of the VMF disappeared as the black cold of the South Pole night flooded in like water bursting over a dam.