Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (22 page)

It didn’t take them long to suit up. Gregor lent them new ice axes, a tent and down sleeping bags, the rations, and a rifle with five cartridges. “That’s all I can spare,” he said.

Once outfitted, Vincent’s movements slowed and he paused every few seconds to lean his pack on something in the storage bay, his eyes closed and brows knotted together.

“Is it your back, Vincent?” Sasha said. He had insisted on dividing the supplies equally between the two of them. Gregor had gone back inside to retrieve some binoculars for them.

“I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. These old bones prefer to sit by the fire these days.”

“Can you handle that pack? Soren told me about your fall on Vinson.”

Vincent gave her a squinty-eyed look.

“You know, your seven summits research expedition?”

“Vinson, you say? I had my accident on Sidley. One of the seven
volcanic
summits. Anderson was with me. I was helping him out with his dissertation research.”

Sasha realized that Soren had never actually said Vinson. She had just assumed.

“What did Soren get is Ph.D. in?”

“He didn’t. After all those years of work and scaling all those goddamn volcanoes, there was some sort of problem with his methodology. His committee shut him down at his defense. Why the arseholes didn’t mention the methodological problems at the proposal stage, I’ll never know. Anyway, Anderson doesn’t like to talk about it, but at one time, he was considered one of the preeminent volcano experts in the world.”

“So that’s what he was doing on Paulet? Researching the volcano there?”

“Yep, the lava tubes on Paulet are in an unusual formation, and he was keeping Marina company, of course. We’d best be off.”

Sasha watched Vincent trundle off through the storage bay, staggering a bit left and then right under the weight of the pack. At least they could do most of the trip on the snowmobile, she hoped. Vincent had assured her that he knew how to use the M72, as he called it, so she reslung it on her back and reached for her mitts stuffed inside her parka pockets.

Her hand closed on something small and hard. The tag from the polar bear. She pulled it out of her pocket and held it out to Gregor, who gave her the binoculars in exchange.

“I pulled this off one of the polar bears. Do you know what it is?”

Gregor took the tag from her hand and cocked his head. “It looks like a GPS tracking device with a chip in it. Biologists use them to collect data on animal movements, hibernation, and feeding habits.”

“Can you get anything useful off of it?”

“It’s not any use without the data collection unit.”

Sasha’s fingers closed around the white thing she had found in the pod. It was made of the same white plastic and had the same styling as the tag. She withdrew it from her pocket. “This wouldn’t be the data collection device, would it?”

“That’s a local one. It collects data when the sat link is out.”

“Do you want it?”

Gregor shrugged and extended his hand. “It’s not like I have a whole lot of other things to do.”

Sasha nodded and handed him the unit. Vincent was already outside the bay, leaning against the station wall. Cedar bounded around in the snow just past him. They had decided to leave the dog with Gregor, who had promised to feed Cedar until the end and then turn him loose. Sasha called the dog, and gave Cedar a pat and a kiss on top of his warm furry head.

“Right then, thanks for everything. Good luck, and well, good bye.”

She started to head out of the bay. An indent the snow caught her eye. It looked like the remnant of a three-toed triangular footprint. She stopped abruptly.

“Did you come to our station asking about the polar champion?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did a man named Kyle show up here?”

Gregor’s brown eyes had widened to the point that they looked like a pair of frog eggs in his skull, and he shook his head. “Nope. Never heard of him.” He turned and scurried back toward the inner station door, ushering Cedar ahead of him. At the door he turned, gave her a broad smile, and waved. “Best of luck to you.” Then he went inside and closed the door firmly. Sasha could have sworn she heard the deadbolt slide into place.

Sasha stared at the door for a second, and then turned and left the storage bay. Outside, she and Vincent got on the snowmobile and headed back in the direction they had come.

The mist seemed to take them back to “their” Arctic. Craters once again dotted the plain, the wind picked up, and the Shackleton station vanished. Sasha steered the snowmobile in a wide arc while Vincent peered through the binoculars, searching for the station they had left a few hours earlier. They hoped to approach it at a distance and see what was happening. Vincent was concerned about Amber’s well being, and if nobody was there, Sasha wanted to grab the file she had stuffed in the snow.

They came over a small rise and cut the engine. The rotors of the helicopter were visible above the snow-covered station roof and every window of the station cast yellow light onto the white ground below. An armed sentry stood outside, staring in their direction. He must have heard their approach, but he couldn’t possibly see them in the dark. Nevertheless, a few seconds later, the storage bay door opened and two snow machines pulled out, heading their way.

Sasha gunned the engine and sped off into the night. The fire from the crater that Jenkins had ignited still reached up into the sky, and she headed in that direction, for no other reason that it was a landmark which would prevent her from making the mistake of circling back to the station. They had enough of a head start and had been far enough away when the chase started that they had at least temporarily lost their pursuers. But if the men brought out the helicopter, Sasha and Vincent would be easy to find. They had to figure out how to get to Trainor and hope that they could still get to Paulet, or they would be in trouble.

The night had mostly cleared and a skiff of stars was visible through the final traces of cloud and the ever-present aurora. A tiny fingernail of a moon hung in the sky. Could they navigate by the moon? Possibly. Unless the moon no longer followed the same path. Sasha clenched the grips of the snowmobile. She had to believe that something had remained the same. They had left Gregor’s at around eight o’clock. The moon would still be in the west, and Trainor Mountain was generally to the northwest, or the old northwest.

She headed that direction. There were so many craters now in some spots that to navigate around them, she had to slow and try to find her way along the fifteen-foot wide bridges of snow that separated one crater from another. Vincent wobbled around behind her, his grip loosening and tightening, destabilized by the two packs hooked over his arms.

Why were there so many craters?

By the time she heard the throb of the helicopter, she had glimpsed the pale looming outline of Trainor Mountain. The buzz of the rotors grew alternately louder and then quieter, as if the chopper was sweeping the area.

She pushed the snowmobile as fast as it could go, begging it to cut through the snow faster, for the mist-shrouded mountain to come closer. By the time they were partway up the initial incline, the air was thick with the beat of the chopper rotor. It was close by now. Too close.

They had only gone another hundred feet up the mountain when the snow ahead of them was bathed in a brilliant white light that skated quickly over the snow and then came to rest in a pool around them.

“Stop immediately,” someone said over a loudspeaker. “Or you will be shot.”

The speaker was obviously confident, Sasha thought. Not shot at, but shot. She cut the engine on the snowmobile. It had started to dig in anyway. They would have had to struggle through the snow from here. The silvery sea of mist hung just thirty feet ahead of them.

“Put down the weapon, get off the snowmobile, and turn around with your hands in the air.”

Sasha lowered the anti-tank weapon to the ground. If they had been smart, she would have dropped Vincent off beside the last crater. Vincent could have hidden behind the lip of the crater with the M72 while she continued on the snowmobile, drawing the chopper to their location. Then if Vincent was still as good of a shot as he claimed to be, he could have taken out the helicopter. But she hadn’t thought of that until now.

She felt Vincent ease off the seat behind her. Then she did the same, and turned around to see the helicopter hovering at eye level only a few hundred feet away. The white light blinded her temporarily and then slipped past her as it scoured the rest of the hill.

“We have reason to believe you know where Soren Anderson is. You will have to come with us. Do not move, or you will be shot.”

The helicopter started to drop to the ground beneath them. If they ran for the mist, they would probably be shot before they reached it, especially Vincent, and if by some miracle they weren’t, these guys would follow them.

Instead of feeling the fear that she probably should, Sasha wanted to kick the snowmobile in frustration.

The chopper edged the final few feet to the snow, and two men with assault rifles leapt out.

The spotlight came to rest on her and Vincent again, and Sasha lowered her eyes to the almost incandescent sheen of her navy parka.

They had failed.

A deep guttural yawp rocked the air, throwing Sasha to her knees. The dirt and snow on the ground beneath the helicopter shot into the sky on the wave of what seemed to be a colorless gas, taking the men and chopper with it. A giant black hole opened on the plain where the helicopter had been sitting. Then the chopper burst into brilliant orange flames, and the men and machine disappeared from sight as they plummeted into the vast new crater.

Sasha stared at the crater, waiting for the helicopter to rise out of the black expanse. But nothing emerged, and after the initial blast that threw debris almost to the foot of Trainor, the crater went ominously silent and became just a deep dark pit like all the others.

She looked cautiously over at Vincent. He was still standing at least, but his skin had a funny greyish tinge.

“Alright, so I guess we carry on,” he managed.

“I guess so. There’s probably other men back at the station. They’ll be on their way in snowmobiles very soon.”

Sasha retrieved the packs and the M72 and handed the lightest one to Vincent. Then she turned and started to trudge through the heavy snow toward the mist. Vincent trailed her, clearly having more difficulty and stopping to rest every few steps, but he had a determined set about his face, so she did not ask him if he was okay.

She waited for Vincent at the edge of the sea of mysterious fog. What had happened to this world, to her world? It seemed as everything had become unmoored. Would gravity be next?

The wind picked up, sending ice crystals swirling in miniature tornadoes in its wake. She braced herself against the assault and glanced over her shoulder. High-piled clouds had collected on the horizon and glowed ominously purple in the light of the aurora. The next gust of wind nearly flattened her. She turned to see Vincent on his knees in the snow behind her. The clouds rolled and rearranged themselves in the gale, moving in to block out the starlit sky with alarming speed.

She ran back and grasped Vincent’s arm.

“We need to go. That storm’s not right.”

She managed to pull him to his feet. The wind whipped at their clothes and snow started to rain out of the sky.

A loud whoomph reverberated through the air. An avalanche. The explosion, or the snowmobile, had destabilized the snow. They would be crushed. Vincent had already automatically pivoted to bolt down the mountain that shook beneath their feet.

“No!” Sasha yelled. “Vincent, We have to run into it. We have to get into the mist. Or we’re dead.”

Vincent stopped and turned, his head bowed. “The things you ask of me,” he said, before launching up the mountain faster than she had ever seen him move. It went against every instinct, every hour of avalanche training, and every bit of good sense that Sasha once believed she had to follow him. The thick snow clenched their legs and began to move beneath them as they fought the last few feet into the mist. But the cement-like snow gradually dissipated and vanished, and they found themselves running across the volcanic rock of Paulet Island.

It seemed even warmer here than before, and the air was thick with the smell of sulfur. The chatter of the penguins on the beaches and rocks below filtered up to them against the backdrop of the pounding surf.

Sasha dropped to her knees, cupped her hands around one of the warm black rocks, and uttered every form of thanks she could think of.

Vincent squatted with difficulty, his stiff limbs popping, his stance unstable, and his breath coming in heavy wheezes. “Well after that, young lady, I’m definitely going to need a muscle relaxant, a stiff scotch, and a colostomy bag. At the very least, I’m going to have to get my heart rate down a little before we move on.” He removed his glove and placed his hand on the rocks beneath his feet. “It’s warm,” he murmured. “Paulet has become active again.”

Sasha nodded, and Vincent took a seat on a rock. They could rest for a few minutes.

“Do you know the tunnels, Vincent?”

“Only a few of the main branches, and I’ve only gone in a few hundred feet. Murphy knows them though.”

“Murphy?”

“Murphy lives on the island in the tunnels. We bring him food and other supplies every month.”

“Scraggy looking man? Long hair, beard?”

“Did you see him?”

“I think so. He helped me find my way out of the tunnels.”

Vincent looked thoughtful. “That’s good. Maybe there’s hope for him. Did he talk to you?”

Sasha shook her head. “Who
is
he?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Let me guess, it has something to do with Soren. I need to know, Vincent. Now.”

Vincent sighed and placed his hands on his knees. “Murphy and Soren were best friends. They were both volcano researchers. The three of us did the seven volcanic summits together as part of Soren’s dissertation research. Some say there was a rivalry, but I don’t think so. At least not in the early days. They supported each other’s research. But then Marina came along, and both of them fell for her. Hard. Maybe Murphy the hardest. But Marina liked Soren and they got together. Murph took it badly. He had set up a shack on Paulet here to study the volcano. He claimed that based on his research, Paulet was going to erupt again. He has some half-baked theory about the world’s volcanoes being connected, and that the eruptions of one influenced the eruptions of the others. It didn’t get a lot of traction. But Murphy was always that way, a little eccentric. Some academics are like that—a little too close to the fire.” Vincent paused to turn and look out to the ocean, which roiled and surged against the edges of the island. But the night was a vast canvas of stars, aside from the patch of fog that hovered just below them, and the wind, while strong, was warm. Sasha removed her parka and tried to tie it around her waist with the sleeves. She would not make the mistake of leaving her parka behind again.