The Winter Over(85)
But then she realized it wasn’t just that. Two strange pieces of metal as long as her arm, struts or braces lifted from some other part of the base, were jammed at an angle against the door, planted into the ridge in the hall floor that was normally used to lock the door open. Hesitating, she grabbed one piece and tried to move it without success; pressure, bulging outward, was holding the metal as though it had been welded in place. Running her eyes along the jamb, she could see where the door had warped outward as though by some great force from within.
Determined to get inside, Cass kicked the strut, aiming out and away from the door. The first try was ineffective, but on the third, she flinched as the metal strut sprang away and shot down the hall. The second did the same. She closed her eyes for a brief second, then turned the Lifeboat’s latch.
The door was even colder than the air around her. She jumped at a faint scratching sound that started as soon as she began pulling it open—something was leaning against the other side, sliding down its face. She swallowed and opened the door the rest of the way.
A blast of frigid air hit her full force. She jumped as an object flopped through the open doorway. It was the frozen hand of Ron Ayres. His body, no longer propped up by the door, rocked in place, preserved by the cold in a stiff, bowed curve. His arm and hand were a claw that had been draped over the inside latch and now hung in the air above his head in a grotesque croisé devant . Beyond him, softly lit by the emergency lights, were the stiff, crystalline bodies of twenty or thirty people, huddled together to conserve a warmth that had been leached out of them by degrees and dissipated into the Antarctic night, slowed only marginally by the insulated walls. If the Lifeboat had been heated, there was no evidence of it now.
Cass backed away from the door, her mind simultaneously screaming and numb. Her eyes tried to unsee the twinkling crystal forms arrayed in a row, unsee Ayres’s frozen face, unsee the struts that had transformed the Lifeboat into a tomb instead of a sanctuary. She turned her head away, only to face the bodies sprawled across the hall near the galley.
Thoughts of rescue or hunkering down to wait out the crisis were gone. The idea that the atrocities that had occurred were either accidents or arranged by Hanratty evaporated. Someone was responsible, someone had made this happen. There might not be a reason, but there was an answer. She just had to live long enough to find it.
Cass turned and ran down the hall, chased by the cold and the frozen gazes of the dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
As Shackleton’s security chief, Taylor had spent little time looking out over the ice fields that made up the world around the base. If he’d noticed the outside at all, it was in the early days of last summer, when the sunlight bouncing off the bright snow irritated him enough to snap closed the blinds or pull a blackout curtain across the window.
On the rare occasion when he gave himself the time to wrap his head around the immensity of the ice, the intimidating expanse of white, his thoughts ran toward the impossibility of traversing it. The fact that men had attempted to travel over it with dogsleds, ponies, and even on foot was stunning. Sometimes, when he saw the cliffs and crevasses, felt the screaming wind, comprehended the absolute nothingness that lay in every direction, he had to sit down on the floor to get back in touch with something solid, man-made, and real.
The vision of that immensity and the fear that those thoughts provoked began enveloping Taylor as he skimmed over drifts and fought the giant, insistent hand of the wind. Even though the great white desert had unnerved him, the constant darkness—with the same uninterrupted, featureless face, just black instead of white—was no better. The beam from the Skandic’s headlight died an arm’s length in front of him, illuminating nothing more than the next snowbank or the toothed ridges of the damned frozen sastrugi that made his teeth slam together in his head.
Only the GPS kept him on course; there was no chance he could use a compass, and sight, of course, would be useless until he was almost on top of the Russian base, his final destination. His situation was still dicey, of course, but he permitted himself to feel a tiny amount of optimism for the future, because even if those bastards back at Shackleton survived his parting shot into the VMF and the subsequent fire, the fever that had consumed the high-strung and volatile crew was enough to finish the job. They’d been on the verge of tearing each other apart; it would be a miracle if anyone else made it out of that hellhole alive.
All of which meant that, if he made it to Orlova, and they didn’t turn him over to whatever secret police they were using these days, and he managed to make it back stateside, his future was set. As Shackleton’s sole survivor, the story he’d tell the press would keep news cycles running for a week. He’d make a few appearances, describing the deplorable living conditions and the psychological stresses, then hit them with the biggest surprise of all: it had all been an experiment to drive people crazy. He’d sue TransAnt, write his memoir, sign a movie deal. These last four or five shitty months would turn out to be the meal ticket he’d been looking for his whole life. Not bad for a piss-poor kid who used to dream about owning a pair of shoes.
A gust hit him sideways, lifting the right side of the sled a foot into the air. He leaned into the rise and slammed the snowmobile back down to the ground. The track’s teeth slipped and spun, then bit into the ice. With his heart slamming in his chest, Taylor wrestled the sled back under control and reluctantly slowed the Skandic down to a crawl. At high speeds, the machine was the equivalent of an expensive kite, and getting dumped onto the ice was not an optimal outcome right now.