The Winter Over(82)
Staggering against the push of the wind, he returned to the snowmobile, threw his leg over the saddle, and headed out of Shackleton for the last time. As he crossed the threshold, however, a thought occurred to him. He slowed the Skandic, then stopped. The idea was vicious, and possibly self-destructive if anyone with any authority ever caught up to him, but it suited his sense of completeness and right. TransAnt wanted to see if the crew of the Shackleton base could handle adversity and stress? Well, he’d give it to them.
Jogging back into the main floor of the garage, he pulled a fuel hose twenty feet out of its reel, then nicked the hose with a pair of shears. Back at the fuel dashboard, he punched on the flow button and kicked the lever. Gas pulsed out of the hose and pooled on the floor, filling the garage with evil-smelling fumes. He ran back to the Skandic, kicked it in gear, and tore away from the garage as fast as he could.
A hundred feet away, he parked and looked back. The bright lights of the VMF formed a perfect square in an otherwise velvet black world. He couldn’t have asked for a better target—it was literally the size of a barn door. Reaching into the saddlebag, he pulled out the flare gun and aimed directly for the center of the square, like he was shooting the heart of Shackleton itself.
The flare, blown slightly off course by a savage wind, barely sizzled and tumbled its way into the garage. But, as he’d hoped, an errant spark met the spreading gas fumes. The square blossomed into a flower of fire.
The shockwave hit Taylor hard, nearly knocking him off the snowmobile. But he kept his balance, then turned and sped off, the weak beam of his headlight showing the way into the night.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Leroy woke crying. He’d been dreaming of the ocean and pale sand the color of a peach, the warm breezes he’d felt once on a trip to the Gulf, and the feeling of the sun hot on his back. The dream dimmed, and out of the darkness, he saw his sister, her face first scared, then smug and cruel, slipping and molting into another woman’s face, someone dark-haired and screaming.
He lay under the mounds of carpeting and nesting material he’d scavenged, trying to calm the tumult in his head. Guilt, anger, pain, hunger, fear. And cold. So incredibly cold. He couldn’t seem to stay still and he was always cold, so he’d taken to stalking up and down the ice tunnels, hitting himself and slapping the walls like they were sides of beef to reassure himself he could still feel. But now the cold seemed to be inside of him, freezing him from the inside out, and there seemed to be no answer to it.
His days and his nights had been filled with suffering. His mind seethed with impressions of the wrongs done to him, or those that might be done. For the pain, he took the pink pills—the blue pills had run out long ago—but they seemed to do little except excite his imagination. Scenes of blood and the visceral feel of a wrench breaking bone passed through his vision and he groaned, realizing he was replaying memories—recent memories—not visions.
Starving after nearly a month of living in the tunnels under the station, eating only what he’d managed to bring with him and the little bit of food he’d grabbed from intermittent raids up above, he’d begun wandering closer to the base, eventually coming across someone hauling supplies from the warehouse on a cart. Leroy had followed him, frustrated when he’d taken the freight elevator, and so he’d ascended the steps to the base for the first time in a week. Smells from the galley had pulled him in and he’d begun panting at how warm everything was. He’d followed the cook quietly, only meaning to knock him out and steal the food he needed. But then he’d seen her and suddenly the only important thing was to obliterate the person who reminded him of a lifelong source of guilt and fear.
When he was done, he’d grabbed what food he could and fled back to the safety of his nest. Exhausted, he’d fallen asleep immediately, only to be ripped awake by his nightmares. When he was awake, however, the visions of blood were still vivid and alive in his head . . . Then he looked down at his hands and saw the real thing.
They’d come for him eventually, he knew. He could’ve lived down here indefinitely if he hadn’t bothered anyone, but now that he’d killed, they’d want to capture him and drag him back for their judgment. The thought made him twitch under his layers, and his mind careened off into a new clutch of anxious thoughts. He croaked threats and curses into the air.
He froze in mid-curse. A dull, distant whump had reached his ears. Considering how far away he was from the occupied parts of the base, it must’ve been earsplitting at the source. The sudden noise was a shock in a place where, aside from the creak of ice and burble of fluid through the sewage pipes, he was the only source of sound. Had he actually heard it? Or imagined it?
Throwing off the blankets and pieces of carpet, he struggled to a sitting position. He held his breath, listening intently.
He heard nothing. But he felt something.
It began with a light, feathery touch, caressing the sliver of exposed skin on his cheek. A few seconds later, it was pressing insistently. His scarf, frozen permanently in the shape of his face, crackled as he peeled it away.
The wind, forced through the halls and corridors under the station, moaned its greeting, then, squeezing and tilting through tiny spaces, it pitched upward until it was a constant, insistent shriek.
Leroy scrambled to his feet, his heart racing. Without thinking, he began shrieking along with the wind, his voice rusty and breaking from disuse. In his mind, he saw nothing but colossal movements of color and emotion. A part of him made a weak attempt to hook reason onto his actions, but in the end, he gave up and gave in. A cracked smile broke across his face as he shuffled out the door of his nest and into the ice tunnel beyond, still singing the song of the wind, looking for its source.