The Winter Over(84)
But room after room was empty. Few were locked, and she glanced in to make sure some kind of . . . plague hadn’t laid the crew low. In some cases, the rooms resembled the offices she’d looked in: deserted in a hurry, with half-opened drawers and personal items strewn over beds and on floors. In others, the occupants had departed more strategically, with little left behind. What few things remained were the time-killers: books and CDs, impractical clothes, decks of cards, handheld games. But in every case, the critical element was the same—no crew members were left.
Each room was equipped with an on-base phone; she tried every one of them and was greeted by the same flat silence. She’d thought that calling out loud for people was ridiculous, but after the fifth empty bedroom, she started yelling names, shouting hello . Her voice was a rusty croak, growing louder and more desperate as the five empty berths became ten, then twenty, then thirty.
She was getting colder by the minute and her breath steamed in the cold. Feeling only mildly guilty, she lifted a few items from some of the sloppier berths—another cap, a second set of gloves, a spare flashlight, extra batteries—but if she didn’t find a heat source and some answers soon, filching clothes was going to be the least of her worries. She hadn’t checked the entire base yet, of course, but if there was no heat, no power, if all of Shackleton was compromised, options for getting warm and staying alive were few.
A thrill of panic ran through her. No gear, crew left in a hurry, no power, gasoline leaking . Had the entire crew decided to evacuate and leave her behind? Surely Biddi or Ayres or someone had thought of her before they simply fled for . . . for wherever they’d decided.
The real possibility that she’d been abandoned started to overwhelm her until she stopped in the middle of the hall and literally smacked herself. Idiot. Stop looking for people and start looking for places. Any sanctuary that had the elements she needed to survive was also going to be where others would gather: maybe the gym, possibly the galley, but most certainly the Lifeboat, an entire area devoted to keeping Shackleton’s crew alive in the case of a catastrophe. It had food, its own heat and power supply, and enough space to house an entire winter crew.
Cass tucked her hands under her armpits and began to jog down the hall toward the room of last resort. The base, as deserted as it had felt sometimes during the winter-over, had never been dead silent. Background noises—small electronic burps, the distant murmurs of conversation, the almost subsonic hum of air moving through vents overhead—had always been present, a kind of constant proof of life. Now, there was nothing. The base was dead.
Her steps faltered as she caught sight of something odd in the hallway. She was nearing the galley, itself only forty feet from the door to the Lifeboat. Between her and the entrance to her best shot at survival was a jumble of shapes lying on the floor, propped against the wall, draped over each other. In the dim gloom of the footlights, the shapes were indistinct and ugly, but they stood out because normally the halls were required to remain clear. But nothing about Shackleton was normal any longer.
Cass shuffled down the hall in a stupor, unwilling to discover what her instincts told her was waiting up ahead, but unable to resist a strange, morbid pull to confirm it. A low, involuntary moan escaped. Her mind refused to process what she was seeing, pushing back hard in an attempt to assimilate the scene. Swallowing with difficulty, she pulled out her flashlight and pointed it forward.
Bodies, four or five altogether. Black pools of blood, spooling out from skulls, guts, limbs. Slack faces limned in ice. She forced herself to check faces, if not bodies. Dave Boychuck. Beth Mu?ez. Her eyes slid away from a colossal head wound on another corpse, only recognizable as Pete Ozment by his apron. There were two or three others she could barely identify.
Hanratty was propped up against a wall, as though he’d grown tired of standing and waiting for her and had decided to sit. His hands were folded over his stomach in a pantomime of napping, but they couldn’t hide the furrows in his shoulder or the crusted blood frozen in plaques on his chest. Covering her mouth, she leaned closer. The others had obviously been beaten or been involved in some kind of fight; it took Cass a long moment to realize that the wounds she was looking at were gunshots. Taylor . Only he would’ve had a gun.
She put a hand out to a wall for support, dizzy and sick. It was as if a wave of madness had grabbed everyone by the throat and hadn’t let go, even in death. One of Dave’s arms had been bent back at an obscene angle; Beth’s face was twisted savagely in fear and anger. Glancing through the doorway in which Pete was sprawled, she spotted the shoes of another casualty, the feet crossed in an awkward jumble that no living person would tolerate.
Cass stumbled away, gulping down the bile in her throat, her head screaming at what she’d seen. Leave it, get it out of your head, start over . Her mind clawed at something it could hold on to, found purchase on a goal that would keep her stable and safe. The Lifeboat . The Lifeboat is ahead of you . Five doors separated her and it on the right, three lockers on the left. She’d idly counted them months before when she was bored, in the same way that, as a bored child on long family trips, she’d tapped forefinger to thumb for each passing truck and car. Now the habit was a tenuous strand that barely kept her mind in one piece.
As she approached the emergency shelter, she slowed, puzzled at the strange look of the entrance. Initially, she thought it was because the fire door was shut, which of course it would be if the Lifeboat were actually being used. It simply looked odd now because the massive emergency door had commonly been kept propped open , a safety rule that had never been violated since the first day she’d arrived at Shackleton.