Terminal Freeze (18 page)

Private First Class Donovan Fluke walked glumly along the B Level transverse corridor of the south wing, weighted down by no fewer than three heavy duffels. At first he hadn’t believed his luck, catching the assignment of escorting Ashleigh Davis to her new temporary quarters. She might be a bitch, but she was most definitely hot-by far the prettiest woman he’d seen in four months. In fact, not counting the rest of the documentary crew, she was just about the only woman he’d seen in four months. Before joining the engineering corps he’d been something of a womanizer-in fact, he’d enlisted primarily to escape trouble with an angry husband-and he knew how to chat up the skirts. And Davis ’s personal assistant was in her own temporary quarters, recovering from a bad concussion. He’d definitely caught another break there because now he had Davis all to himself. She had asked to be housed near the soldiers’ quarters for extra protection. And so he figured he’d use the escort to turn on the charm, smile his patented aw-shucks-ma’am smile. And if that didn’t do the trick, he’d scare her a bit, talk up the rumors going around about the vicious polar bear running amok. Either way-romance or a case of nerves-he’d see if he could get himself invited into her room, spend a little time. Maybe more than a little time.

It hadn’t worked out that way at all. Davis had proved impervious to his every amorous strategy. She’d remained silent, deflected his sallies, refused to respond to his hints or leading questions. Exiting the base, they’d gone initially to her trailer, where he’d had to wait-outside in the cold-nearly fifteen minutes while she packed up a few things for the overnight stay. Standing there on the trailer steps, sidearm in hand, thinking about the bloody and savagely mauled body of Josh Peters he’d first observed not a hundred yards from this spot, had gone a long way toward dampening his ardor. Then to top it all off, he’d had to carry the “few things”-three duffels full-by himself as they returned to the base and made their way into the south wing.

They reached an intersection and Fluke let the duffels slip to the floor.

“What’s the problem?” Davis asked immediately.

“Need to rest a moment, ma’am,” he replied.

Davis sniffed disdainfully. “How much farther?”

“Another couple of minutes.” The only suitable room they could have ready on short notice, the duty officer’s bunk, was at the far end of the enlisted men’s quarters. Fluke had initially looked forward to the long walk-more time to chat. Now it seemed an intolerable slog.

His radio chirped, and he plucked it from his nylon duty belt. “Fluke.”

“Fluke, this is Gonzalez. What’s your status?”

Fluke glanced around at the shadow-haunted doorways. “We’re outside the Intercept Array Center.”

“Report in once Ms. Davis is secured.”

“Roger.” He snapped off the radio, returned it to his belt, heaved up the duffels. “We go left here,” he said.

He led the way through the section of the base that had housed the support services for the military population: gym and library, medical and dental. The actual platoons were long gone, and the spaces were now disused and cheerless. They passed the open door leading to the library, the empty, bookless shelves unrelieved lines of black in the gloom. Fluke believed himself to be used to all the silence. But tonight it seemed more oppressive than usual, almost a tangible thing. He tried whistling, but it struck a false, strident note and he stopped immediately.

Walking half a step behind him, Davis shivered. “It’s so dark.”

So it was getting to her, too. Fluke decided he’d give it one more shot. “That’s the infirmary just ahead,” he said. “Weird, isn’t it, how the body of that guy, Peters, has gone missing? Makes a person wonder who took it-and why?”

Davis ’s response was to wrap her fur coat more tightly around her narrow shoulders. Fluke opened his mouth to offer another chilling salvo, then decided against it-if she got too creeped out, instead of inviting him in she’d probably insist on going back to the others…and the last thing he wanted to do was lug the duffels all the way back to the Operations Center.

As they walked past the infirmary door, Fluke’s thoughts remained on Peters, the dead production assistant. The shredded head, brain exposed and eyestalk dangling ridiculously; the explosion of blood over the permafrost…despite his horny advances toward Davis, those images never strayed far from his mind.

He shot a glance at the door. And just where the hell was Peters’s body now?

Past the infirmary-the only spot in this section that had seen use recently-the hallway grew still darker. It felt oddly cold here, given the usual hothouse temperatures inside the base. Fluke stopped to fasten the top button of his uniform. “Not much farther now,” he said in what he hoped was a helpful tone. “Right up ahead and down a set of stairs. I’ll get your blankets and linen, then see what I can do about getting some of these lights working.”

Davis replied with a muttered monosyllable.

The stairway lay at the end of the corridor in a pallid pool of light. As they approached, Fluke tried to forget his aching arms by mentally checking off what he needed to do next: make sure the room was aired and reasonably presentable, get the linens and lightbulbs from the quartermaster’s stores, go over the floor plan so-

Suddenly he stopped dead.

Davis looked at him, startled by the abrupt halt. “What is it?”

“There’s something wrong.” Fluke gestured ahead and to his left, where a heavy metal door was hanging ajar. “That door-it’s supposed to remain locked at all times.”

“Well, close it and let’s get going,” she said uneasily.

Fluke put down the duffels, plucked the radio from his belt. “Fluke to Gonzalez.”

There was a crackle of static, then the sergeant’s voice came on. “Gonzalez here.”

“Sir, the door to the powerhouse staging room is open.”

“Then secure it. Report anything suspicious.”

“Yes, sir.” Fluke glanced at Davis. “Any of your people been wandering around this quadrant?”

“How would I know? They searched a lot of places. Come on, do what he said and let’s get out of here.”

Fluke approached the door. Something about the way it hung in its frame looked odd to him. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, and ran its beam along the doorframe. Then he quickly unshipped the radio again.

“Sergeant?” he spoke into it. “Sergeant Gonzalez?”

“Go ahead, Fluke.”

“The door-it looks like somebody’s kicked it open. The lock’s broken.”

“Are you sure, Private?”

“Yes, sir. Not only that-it appears to have been kicked open from the inside.”

“We’re on our way.”

“Roger, out.”

Fluke stepped closer now, moving slowly, the beam of his light licking over the linoleum flooring, up the damaged door, into the thin black wedge of the room beyond.

“Can we go now?” Davis asked. “Please?”

“Just a minute.” The chill he’d noticed-it came from here. He could feel it seeping out the crack, as if the room itself was exhaling.

He kicked the door gently open. It moved awkwardly, groaning on sprung hinges. He felt along the inside wall, found the light switch, snapped it on.

The overhead fluorescent flickered into life, lending a feeble illumination to the space beyond. It was a large, spartan-looking metal cube, containing ganged power conduits bolted to metal housings leading in from the powerhouse outside, with step-down transformers to attenuate the voltage entering the base. The room thrummed with current; Fluke could feel it almost tingle his skin. He looked around, frowning. There it was: the source of the chill air.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

On the far wall was an access panel. It was about four feet square and set just above the floor; it was used to reach the repair and maintenance crawl space for the length of conduit between the room itself and the base’s external shell. Normally, this was kept securely closed. But now it yawned open, the panel sagging loosely on twisted pins. Arctic air from outside was pouring in.

“My ears,” Davis said. “They hurt.”

Fluke walked quickly across the room and knelt before the damaged panel. Grasping its edge, he tried to push it closed, but it was folded back on itself and refused to budge. He tried again, heaving with all his strength. No luck. He stopped to warm his fingers and catch his breath. As he did so, his gaze fell on the crawl space that lay beyond the frame of the access panel.

It was a dark hole perhaps ten feet deep. At the far end, the exterior panel had also been torn away and Fluke could see outside: the outline of an equipment shed, ribbons of snow swirling like dust devils in the banshee wind. Staring, he realized that his ears hurt, too. But it wasn’t a pain he’d felt before-it was a strange, deep ringing, almost felt more than heard, accompanied by an unpleasant sensation of pressure, as if his inner ears were swelling within his skull…

And then-as he crouched, staring-the swirls of snow at the far end of the maintenance crawl space were abruptly blotted out.

He peered down the tunnel in confusion, wondering if the exterior panel had just been shut from the outside. But then the darkness shifted-and he realized what had suddenly blocked his view was a large shape, moving stealthily toward him down the crawl space.

He fell backward onto the floor with a neigh of terror. He pulled his sidearm from his holster but his fingers were suddenly fat and stupid and it clattered to the floor. He tried to marshal his wits, to rise to his feet and run, but he was paralyzed with shock and disbelief. The thing was closer now, filling the wide crawl space with its bulk, and as he stared Fluke felt the pain in his head swell until it was almost unbearable. There was a sudden flood of warmth around his thighs as his bladder let go.

And then it was in the room. Davis screamed-a sharp, piercing sound-and the thing turned toward her. Fluke just stared. There was absolutely nothing in his understanding or experience, no nightmare, no fever dream, no creation either of the Almighty or the Prince of Darkness that could account for what was now with them in the room.

Davis screamed again, wildly, a dreadful, larynx-shredding scream, and then instantly the thing was on her. The scream escalated in pitch and volume, then changed to a desperate, bubbling gargle. Fluke felt himself lashed with a warm, viscous spray. Quite abruptly, he realized he could move. He staggered to his feet and wheeled desperately toward the door, weapon forgotten. Distantly, as if from very far away, he thought he heard shouts; a cry of warning. But then it was on him and suddenly there was nothing at all left in his universe except pain.

The front windows of the Sno-Cat 1643RE were vast-they took up the entire face of the cab-and from his vantage point in the driver’s seat Marshall had a panoramic view of the storm. Although the heavy glass and metal shielded him from the worst of the fury, he was all too conscious of how the big vehicle swayed under the fierce gusts and of the ice pellets that hammered incessantly against the roof and sides. The wind cried and moaned constantly, as if frustrated in its desire to peel back the steel and get at him.

Marshall took his eyes off the swirling whitescape long enough to glance at his watch. He had been driving now for almost forty minutes. Once he’d cleared the immediate area of the camp and its labyrinth of lava fissures, he had made good time. The permafrost was quite level, and he’d managed a steady thirty miles an hour: he didn’t know the maximum safe operating speed and was playing it safe. He’d lied to Logan about his expertise-he’d never driven a Sno-Cat in his life-but the vehicle had proven mercifully easy to handle, its controls similar to a truck or tractor, with extra switches for the plow, winch, rotating beacon, and transmission-pan heater. The hardest thing to adjust to had been the four independently sprung steel tracks, hydraulically steered by the front and rear axles, which-combined with the cab’s alarming amount of glass-gave him a lurching, almost vertiginous sense of being perched far too high off the ground.

The Cat’s half-dozen halogen headlights lanced ahead, barely penetrating the murk. Marshall peered along their beams into the raging storm, then glanced over at the GPS mounted onto the control panel. He knew the Tunit camp was situated near a frozen lake; Gonzalez had mentioned as much. There was only one such lake in the GPS unit’s database within a thirty-mile radius to the north, but it was sizable. That made fuel his biggest concern. The Cat had half a tank. That meant twenty-five gallons to reach the lake, find the village, and get back to the base. And Marshall had no idea how much fuel the enormous machine used.

He drove on, wipers flailing at the whirlwind of snow and the needles of ice peppering the window. He shook his head blearily, trying to clear it, wishing he’d brought a thermos of coffee. Was it really only thirty-six hours since he’d discovered the creature was missing?

Again, Marshall found himself wondering why exactly was he making a trip that could well prove a wild-goose chase at best-and ruinous at worst. If he broke down out here in the Zone, lost power, he’d never be found in time.

The Tunits have the answer. Some scientist had written those words, fifty years ago. The man had felt them important enough to commit to paper, to encrypt, to conceal within his quarters. And now, today, someone had been savagely killed. And another assaulted in the most bizarre way. Almost forty people were in grave danger. If there was even the merest chance the Tunits knew something-an old myth, some oral tradition, anecdotal evidence, anything that could shed a little light on what was afflicting the base-it was worth the risk.

And there was another, more personal reason. No matter where he’d gone or what he’d done over the past seven days, it seemed to Marshall he’d never quite been alone. There was a presence, always there, always watching: two yellow eyes, big as fists, with pupils like bottomless black pools. Since he’d first seen them looking back at him through the ice, those eyes had haunted him. The paleoecologist in him wanted-needed-to understand this creature better. Even if Faraday was right, even if it was somehow still alive and behind the recent atrocities, Marshall felt a yearning to decipher its mysteries. And he would travel a lot farther than thirty miles in a blinding snowstorm to accomplish that.

The cab shook violently once, then twice-the terrain was growing uneven. Marshall cut his speed. The GPS showed the lake directly ahead now: a vast wall of blue that took up the entirety of the tiny screen. And then there it was, beyond the windows: a dim line in the howling murk, covered with drifting snow, recognizable as a body of water only by its uninterrupted and featureless horizontal line.

Marshall slowed the Cat. Turning the wheel, he began to cruise along the edge of the lake, scanning carefully for any sign of habitation. He’d used ten gallons of gas already; that meant he could spare only two or three more in his search. The frozen ground sloped down steeply toward the lakeshore, and he had to keep a tight hand on the wheel and a steady pressure on the foot throttle to maintain forward traction.

Suddenly the Cat sheered violently to one side. Realizing a crevasse yawned ahead, Marshall turned the wheel sharply in the opposite direction and stepped on the gas. The cab shook as the metal tracks crabbed along the slick ice sheet. Marshall feathered the engine, trying to find the balance between traction and forward motion, struggling to keep the tracks from slipping sideways into the widening crevasse. The big vehicle whipsawed back and forth, at last struggling over the lip of the ice sheet and falling heavily forward onto level ground once again.

Marshall let the Sno-Cat roll to a stop. He sat there, idling, as his heart gradually slowed. Then, applying pressure to the throttle again, he eased forward, moving gently away from the steep shoreline.

Then, through the swirling snows, he saw something-or thought he saw something: gray shapes in the strange late-summer twilight. He stopped the Cat, staring hard through the glass. It was off to the side, away from the lake. Twisting the wheel, he inched the Cat forward. As he approached, the dim shapes resolved themselves into rudely built igloos: two of them, snow-scoured and pathetically small, surrounded by vortexes of swirling ice.

Marshall stopped the vehicle, killed the engine, zipped his parka tight. Then he exited the cab and clambered down the trapezoidal tread. Turning his head away from the teeth of the wind, he approached the first igloo. It was dark and cold, its entrance tube a black void. He staggered over to the second igloo, knelt before its doorway. It, too, was tenantless, the fur blankets and skins within cold and stiff.

Beyond, Marshall could now make out three additional igloos and a larger snowhouse. There were no other structures around, and he realized with surprise just how small the last Tunit community really was.

These three igloos were just as deserted as the first two had been. The ice walls of the snowhouse, however, danced with a faint, flickering orange glow. A fire was burning inside.

For a moment, the winds slackened, as if to rest from all their blowing. As the clouds of snow subsided, Marshall could once again make out the strange, blood-red northern lights lowering in the sky. They cast an eerie crimson glow over the tiny village of ice.

Taking a deep breath, he made his way to the snowhouse, drew back the caribou skin that served as a door flap, and stepped cautiously inside. The interior was dark, low-ceilinged, and full of smoke. A profusion of skins and blankets covered the floor. Marshall brushed the ice and snow out of his face and looked around. As his eyes adjusted, he realized there was only one occupant: a figure in a heavy caribou-skin parka, kneeling before a small fire.

Marshall took another deep breath. Then he cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said.

For a long moment, the figure remained motionless. Then, slowly, it turned toward him. The face was a dark hollow within the fur-lined hood. The figure raised a hand to the hood, pulled it back with an unhurried, deliberate motion. A wizened face marked with intricate tattoos stared up at Marshall. It was the old shaman who had come to the base, warned the scientists to leave. He held a reindeer antler in one hand, decorated with fantastical lines and curlicues, and an intricately carved bone in the other. There were several small items scattered across the reindeer skin before him: polished stones, tiny fur fetishes, animal teeth.

“Usuguk,” Marshall said.

The man gave a faint nod of his head. He didn’t seem surprised to see him.

“Where are the others?”

“Gone,” the man replied. Now Marshall remembered the voice: quiet, uninflected.

“Gone?” he repeated.

“Fled.”

“Why?”

“Because of you. And what you have awakened.”

“What have we awakened?” Marshall asked.

“I have spoken to you of it already. Akayarga okdaniyartok. The anger of the ancient ones. And kurrshuq.”

There was a pause in which the two men regarded each other in the flickering light of the fire. The last time they met, the old man had seemed anxious, frightened. Now he looked merely resigned.

“Why did you remain?” Marshall asked at last.

The shaman continued to look at him, his black eyes shining in the reflected firelight. “Because I knew you would come.”