The Winter Over(93)
Put your foot down, bring that boot up . She is slow. You are fast .
Then why do I feel like I’m dragging the world behind me? I don’t think I can feel my legs. I’m swimming in mud.
You were kept sedated and imprisoned for a week , the voice reminded her. You’re fatigued and rusty. That’s all. Keep moving.
Cass ripped the scarf away, feeling like she was being asphyxiated. The icy air hit her lungs like a dagger stabbing her through the mouth and chest, but the shock of the coldest temperatures on the planet jolted her into greater effort—for a moment, her stride lengthened to its normal spread, her arms swinging like she had hit her runner’s high in her best marathon.
But then she hit an uneven patch of ice and her ankle, the bad one, wobbled and buckled. A twinge ran up the side of her leg and she gasped at the old, yet familiar, pain. Please, no . Her runner’s pace evaporated, the ache sending her limping and stumbling forward into an intersection of the tunnel. She would never be able to outrun Biddi like this. She would have to fight.
As she came even with the cross-section, however, a figure lurched at her out of the side tunnel. Cass had a brief flash of a gaunt, terrifying face—black nose, cauliflowered ears, frostbitten gray cheeks—before he clubbed her in the head with a soft, heavy arm, sending her sprawling. She lay on the ground, stunned, as the figure shambled around to face Biddi.
A hoarse shout of rage and recognition emerged from the man. Biddi yelped and swung the axe, but it was a clumsy attempt, and it only raked harmlessly down Leroy’s arm. His clawed hands reached for Biddi, but the woman windmilled the axe desperately, keeping him at bay. A sustained, high-pitched shriek emanated from him as he batted Biddi’s swings aside.
From the ground, Cass backpedaled in a panic, skidding along the ice as she watched the melee. Gasping, she rolled to her feet and stumbled down the tunnel, slamming into walls as the grunts and yells from the desperate fight behind her faded. She navigated her way past the ancient rooms and the fragile wooden struts, the sight of which caused a prickle in her scalp as she remembered the accident she’d had months ago.
Retracing her steps in the near dark, she tried to conjure the base schematic from memory. The common room, where the pipe was. Ahead? Yes. There it was, the tiny, cramped opening. She dropped to the ground and crawled through the opening.
The sharp stink of human feces—not sewage—and the overall stench of close living hit her, permeating even the layers of the mask and scarf. She played the light over the room, steeling herself.
Cans and tins of food littered the floor, while the furniture and debris that she remembered from her first visit lay stacked in bizarre towers and shapes. The old shag carpeting had been ripped up and formed into a kind of cocoon in the middle of the room.
Cass crossed the room quickly, keeping an eye out for anything at this point: traps, rotten floorboards, things to slow or injure her. If she remembered the schematic, the old station only had one main stubby corridor that ran from its entrance to the common room she was in right now. Dorms and labs split off from that main artery like flowers on a vine, but it should be a straight shot to the exit.
Careful not to touch anything, she moved across the room and shoved her weight against an old foam-core door. It wouldn’t budge. She tried again, with minimal result: she managed to create a half-inch gap between the door and the jamb.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Desperate, Cass flicked the beam of her flashlight around the room, looking for anything that could help her. Freeze-dried couch cushions, battered old tables, splintered chair legs—none of it was of any help. She fought down panic. No matter who won the fight behind her, the winner would come after her.
She scoured the room. In the far corner, to the right of the entrance, she found something promising: the wall’s paneling had been torn away, exposing a supporting structure of rebar and two-by-fours. With a dozen desperate yanks, she managed to pry away one of the lengths of rebar.
Cass ran back to the stubborn door and squeezed the tip of the rebar into the opening she’d created. Using the metal pole as a lever, she pried open the door first an inch, then a half foot, and eventually a space wide enough for her to slip through.
The hallway beyond had the dark, still atmosphere of a tomb. Crystal mounds of ice and snow had invaded the old base through microscopic cracks, forming alien, curved sculptures along the ceiling and walls. Her heart leapt into her throat at a roar from far behind her in the tunnels. She jogged down the corridor, sparing only a flash of her light and a glance for each room as she passed. At the end of the short hall, a simple set of stairs climbed two stories, ending in a small antechamber and what she’d hoped would be the door to the outside, but turned out to be nothing but a rounded snowbank.
Gasping and crying, she hacked at the pillows of ice with her axe. After a sweaty minute, breathing heavily, she had managed to expose the door. But all her efforts to move it weren’t even as successful as moving the common room door an inch.
She slumped against the wall, then slid to the ground and put her head down on her arms, beaten. A half mile of snow and ice could be pressed against the other side of the door. It was true, after all: Antarctica would kill her. Her death might actually come at the point of Biddi’s axe or Leroy’s curled fingers . . . but it would be the continent itself that defeated her.
Had the early explorers, living so much closer to the edge than the modern expeditions, ever felt this way? Death, always just on the other side of a door or the walls of your ship. Even the scientists of the early twentieth century had to have lived with fear most days, especially during a winter-over when the chances of rescue in the case of a disaster were truly nil. How they even went about their daily work was hard to imagine . . .