The Winter Over(94)

The thought stopped Cass. Their daily work .

Slipping and skidding, she hauled herself to her feet and jogged clumsily back down the hall. The early base crew knew that they’d never get the front hatch open during the winter. They must’ve done their work by using observation tubes at the top of the stub-ups she’d been told about. Popping her head into room after room, she found what she was looking for on the fourth try: the telltale horizontal bars of a hatchway ladder leading upward.

She hurried past the relics of a former workstation and flashed her light up the shaft. The ladder ended at what looked in the darkness like a bubble or tiny observatory.

Breathing heavily, she began pawing her way up the ladder. Her axe, hanging from its lanyard, banged against the side of her leg. After twenty slippery steps upward, she found herself at the top of the observation tube, a tiny circular room with a Plexiglas dome for a ceiling. Scratched and scoured after decades of ice storms, it was almost opaque now, but originally was meant to allow someone standing on the last rung a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the night sky in the winter. Primitive by any modern standard, it would’ve been the only way to do basic astronomy in the original days of the South Pole station.

Cass ran her light along the edge of the dome, looking for a weakness or a seam, finally finding it behind her. Wedging herself against the wall of the tube, she pocketed the light, grabbed her axe with both hands, and began bashing at the tiny line that ran up the dome.

She stopped after thirty swings of the axe, out of breath and aching. The brittle dome had begun to give way, however, and the wind moaned through the aperture. It reminded her of the inhuman bellow Leroy had made as he attacked Biddi. The memory made her grab the axe and continue swinging.

At the fortieth whack, the dome cracked a foot up the seam. The wind’s groan turned into a scream, and with the next blow, the Plexiglas split with the sound of tearing cloth. The dome rattled in place for a brief second, then was torn away by the gale. Cass, almost knocked back down the shaft by the force of the wind, pulled out her flashlight and grabbed for the rim of the tube.

Before she could haul herself over the lip of the tube and out, a noise from below made her focus the beam between her feet and down the shaft.

There was nothing but the black hole leading down into the hell that was the old base. Errant flakes of snow, long held at bay by the dome she’d just shattered, floated down into the shaft. Cass’s imagination took hold and she almost saw Biddi, her mask and balaclava covered with blood, or Leroy, with his nightmarish, frostbitten face, looking up at her from the bottom of the ladder.

Cass turned and clawed her way hand over hand around the opening of the rim. Finding a clear spot, she shoved herself belly-first onto the rim, then dumped herself over the edge of the tube. She slid down the slope of ice and snow that had built up around the tube like a toboggan, coming to a stop ten feet below.

Stumbling to her feet on the uneven ice, she spun in place several times, trying to get her bearings in the dark, resisting the fear that was screaming at her to start walking no matter what the direction. Picking the wrong direction now would be fatal.

The wind shrieked in her face and the pitch-black darkness surrounding her was almost overwhelming. At a guess, she was about two hundred meters from base, maybe more, but Shackleton’s red lights and the normal illumination visible through the windows were gone. Panic welled inside her when she couldn’t find even a simple reference point, but then a windblown cloud was pushed out of the way, giving her a momentary view of the base carving out a blocky, black silhouette against the stars. Taking several quick, deep breaths, she oriented herself against the angle of the silhouette and forged ahead, aiming for the southeast corner of the base and the start of what would be her pathway to survival—the SPoT road—if she could find it.

Each small patch of progress forward was contested by the wind, the ice, and the darkness, at times pushing her off her feet or suspending her body in mid-step. The wind shifted unpredictably, causing her to stumble as it went from nearly standing her up to buffeting her from the flank. Every few meters, Cass was forced to stop and pan the flashlight back and forth, looking for the telltale road flags, without which she was truly dead.

Numb from the cold and the constant battering wind, with the endless roar in her ears, her perception of the trek took on a surreal, alien feel, a detached journey dialed in from a light-year away. Time was measured only in how many steps it took to close the gap from one highway flag to the next . . . whether it took a minute or an hour to cross that distance was irrelevant.

The moon was full, casting a wavering ghostly image on the ice in front of her that grew in definition and detail as the scud moved off, pushed by a wind crested into a high-pitched shriek even as a shadow behind her became perfectly, crisply outlined in the snow.

Too tired to turn, the best Cass could do was throw herself to the side, letting gravity take her out of the way of the swing of Biddi’s axe. Moving with glacial speed, she rolled over and over in the snow, trying to build up the momentum she needed to get to her feet. Biddi chased after her, swinging the axe in wild, drunken passes. Cass, mesmerized by the motion and her own exhaustion, watched as Biddi raised her axe and brought it down in a two-handed chop.

Cass slipped out of the way, scrambled to her feet, and threw her shoulder into Biddi’s torso, pushing more than striking her. The woman stumbled back, flailing her arms to keep her balance. Clutching her axe in two hands, Cass followed her with desperate swings, missing by wide margins. Staggering, tripping, running, she followed after Biddi. In the face of Cass’s onslaught, Biddi slipped and went down on one knee.