Sasha turned and ran, heading down the tunnel in the faint glow of red light. Where was that light coming from? She rounded a corner and saw Robert and the other man with their backs to her, peering out the entrance marked by the crow rock. They must have heard her, because they gave yells of excitement and started running toward her. She spun around and bolted in the other direction. After she had run for a few minutes, she realized she had taken the left fork, taking her away from Paul and Soren—not that running to them would likely help at all.
She could still hear the thuds, rattles, and panting of Robert and the other man behind her, and occasionally she glimpsed the white light of their flashlights bouncing and scattering on the tunnel walls, but they were not gaining, perhaps tired from their jaunt around the entire island and then ascent up the volcano.
The tunnel forked again and again, leading on a gradual incline down. She tried to follow a logical algorithm of only turning left and then left again. Robert and the other man would pause at each fork and listen to determine which way she had gone. No matter how much she tried to lighten her footsteps, each time it seemed like they guessed correctly. But each time, she was able to slightly increase her lead, and they were not shooting. Perhaps Soren was right about them wanting her alive, which might very well be worse than being shot. The glow that illuminated the tunnels seemed to grow brighter and the heat more intense at times, but perhaps it was just the exertion of running.
She began to make mistakes, veering right instead of left, finding herself heading up instead of down in this strange warren of tunnels, but after what seemed like hours of running, the footsteps behind her ceased.
Had she lost them? Or had they figured out a way to loop around and lie in wait ready to ambush her in the eerie gloom? She slowed her run to a jog and then to a walk as she frantically began to search for an exit from the tunnels, for Soren, for anything to mark her way.
She was going in circles, she was sure of it—uphill and then down, left and then right. Each footstep became punishing. When was the last time she slept, or ate? Her feet ached and cramped in her huge Sorels, completely unsuited for running, and sweat ran in rivulets down her back beneath her long Arctic underwear.
She had dropped the candle and her pack when Paul pinned her against the wall and she had nothing with which to mark the tunnels to record whether she had been there before to try to develop a map in her mind of where she was and where she was going.
It had been almost half an hour since she had heard anyone behind her, and nobody had jumped out in front of her. Sasha stopped and turned slowly in a circle. She was lost, well and truly lost, for the second time in the last twenty-four hours.
She trudged on for another half an hour, her blistered feet burning. She came to a small opening off the tunnel. She had never been here before, she was certain. She bent and crawled through the opening and found herself in a cave the size of a bathroom, with a rounded hollowed out section completely hidden from the tunnel. If someone came down the tunnel in a hurry, if they did not check the cave, they would not see her.
She sank to the ground, removed her boots and socks, closed her eyes at the clammy, bloody state of her feet, and promptly went to sleep.
She awoke hours—or was it minutes—later, her mouth dry and prickly. She needed water. Something moved in the cave, and she snapped her eyes open to see a man in the cave with her—a man with a long scraggly beard and hair in tattered old snow pants over a filthy plaid shirt. He stayed well back, watching her, a wild and almost hungry look on his face.
She jammed her bare, protesting feet into her boots and scrambled upright. The man rose too, but slowly, as if she were a squirrel and he the cat ready to pounce. Sasha was closest to the exit of the cave. She inched toward it, her back to the wall and then once she was right in front of it, vaulted through the opening and started to dash down the tunnel. The man was faster, and he grabbed her arm before she could escape. She swung out to punch him, but he blocked her fist and shook his head. Then he pointed down the tunnel opposite to the direction that she had been heading and nodded. She inspected him more closely now. He had the feral expression of the homeless, but his blue eyes surrounded by wrinkles and dirt seemed more sad than dangerous. A deep crease down his left cheek made his eye droop and gape a bit. He pointed down the tunnel again and made as if to drag her in that direction.
“Are you saying that way is out?” she ventured.
He nodded and continued to try to pull her down the tunnel.
“Who are you?”
He shook his head this time, his face shifting to a more intense glare as he continued to try to hustle her along. She noted that he had an ugly red line of scar tissue across the front of his throat. Perhaps he couldn’t speak.
Sasha hesitated. This unspeaking man might know the way out, or he might be trying to lure her deeper into the mountain where he could do who knows what. Hand her over to Paul quite possibly. Still, she was hopelessly lost, and limping badly. She had to find a way out. Of course, there was the problem of what she was going to do then. Stagger around the surface of the volcano alone in the dark?
They made their way silently through the corridors, the wild man seeming to know his way through the maze of indistinguishable tunnels.
“There she is!” a voice called. Robert. Sasha and the man automatically broke into a run. Sasha was relieved to find that the man was pulling her away from the direction of Robert’s voice, rather than taking her to him and turning her over. Who was this person? Did he live in these tunnels?
They ran together down the heated corridors, the man snatching her right and then pushing her left at the forks. Robert and the other man, clearly fresher now, and probably not limping as badly as Sasha, had started to gain on them. Soon, she could see them thundering behind them in straight stretches of the corridor.
At the last minute on a curve that led to another fork, the man pushed Sasha left and veered right himself. She almost stopped moving, confused, but he made a loud growling type noise and gave her a hard push down the left hand fork before turning and clattering off down the right. He had run as silent as a cat before. He was trying to make noise, to draw their pursuers off.
She stumbled down the left-hand fork, her battered feet stinging, and a cool wave of Antarctic air washed over her. This tunnel led to the outside. She picked up her pace and covered the last hundred feet. A dark slit of stars and night stood at the end of the tunnel. She squeezed and pushed her way through the opening, and then she was back on the outside of the volcano, running down the slope in the chill wind of night. The storm had dropped off, and the sky was a vast canvas of stars. A sea of thick mist encircled the mountain, obscuring the ocean from view. The sound of the surf and clamoring of the penguins filtered up through the night.
Robert and the other man must have followed the bearded man at first for it took them several minutes to appear. Sasha was already well down the mountainside, and they scrambled down after her, rocks tumbling down in front of them.
Sasha careened down the hill. The fog loomed ahead, surrounding the mountain. No matter what, if she went lower on the volcano, she would descend into the mist, and who knows where she would end up. But Robert and the other man were closing in on her now. She did not slow her pace as the fingers of the mist reached out and enveloped her. She continued running, and then she was tripping, falling, and rolling in snow, and she was freezing.
Snow soaked her face and hair and pushed its way up her sleeves and down the neck of her fleece. When she managed to brace herself sufficiently to come to a stop, she rose to her feet, frantically pulling the icy snow out of all the cracks in her clothing while scooping handfuls of it into her parched mouth. Stars illuminated every corner of the sky and the purple and green of the aurora painted the horizon just above the jagged peaks of the coastal mountains to her right.
She was back in the Arctic.
From this elevation and with the bright moonlight and aurora, she c
ould see that this part of the island was now pitted with craters. At least no fires burned in them at the moment. She skittered the rest of the way down the hill, half running, half sliding. Fog occupied the mountain above her, it seemed to be almost rolling down the hill, following her—fog from which Robert and his buddy could emerge at any second, right on top of her. She needed to get as far away as possible, but without her parka, the wind chill was stunning, almost cardiac arrest inducing. At least she was hot from running. She had to find one of Soren’s safety pods or she would never survive. She pulled her mitts out of her pocket and jammed her hands into them. A flash of movement caught her eye.
A polar bear carved its way through the snow in her direction, its movements stealthy. They were the movements of a bear on the hunt.
The bear erupted into motion, crossing the remainder of the distance between them in seconds, and then it crouched and leapt.
Sasha closed her eyes and braced for impact. This was probably a better way to go than being tortured by Paul.
She felt the brush of the bear’s fur, and heard a scream of shock. But it was not her own. The bear had landed with precision right on top of Robert, who lay beneath the bear on the edge of the fog that furled its silky fingertips around her.
Sasha forced her unsteady feet to start running, daring only the smallest of glances back at the bear, its snow white fur now marked by spatters of red as it devoured its prey.
The fog was now like the holes in the ice that the bears had once stood by waiting for seals. Robert had come to the wrong hole.
Sasha ran almost aimlessly for several minutes, her teeth beating a disorganized staccato in her mouth. Without her parka, she was completely unprepared for this kind of cold. She had to remember where the pods were before she started to shut down. Sasha tried to picture the landmarks that Soren had made her memorize. The pods were organized in a grid, with each pod two miles from the next, elevated from the tundra on posts or strapped to spindly trees. If she was standing at the base of Trainor Mountain, which she was fairly sure she was, there was a pod a mile east of her. She just hoped a crater had not opened up beneath it.
She set off at as rapid a pace as she could muster, hoping that the man who had been with Robert would not emerge from the fog, and that the bear would be sated by consuming Robert. The pod would have a winter coat, food, water, and a compass. It would also have flares, but realistically, who would come? Maybe she could use them to light a giant bonfire. What the pods really needed were guns. But that was probably against some Canadian law. She almost laughed hysterically to herself. She was becoming half crazed with cold, hunger, and the relentless succession of weird events.
At least the direness of the situation prevented her from thinking too much about Soren, what might be happening to him back on the island, what kinds of torture he might be enduring.
She had only gone about a quarter of a mile when she realized that splayed triangular footprints with three sharp pointed toes, or claws, were appearing in the snow beside her. There was no associated body and no animal in the world that had feet like that. Over her shoulder she could see that the blood-spattered polar bear trailed her at a distance, regarding her with his long broad face, dark eyes, and crimson maw. She had deceived herself into thinking that the polar bears were somehow on her side when they had chosen to kill Robert and Cal instead of her. But now she could see that she was quite mistaken. This bear wanted to tear her to pieces, plain and simple.
“Okay. I give up. What do you want?” she said.
“They’ve gone quite mad, you know.” Ice’s voice. The demon wore white boots on feet of human shape, yet the footprints behind him remained clawed; his corporeal form, like that of Paul’s, clearly not reflecting the whole of him. She was already freezing, and yet the temperature seemed to plummet even further in his presence.
The demon continued, “When the seals disappeared and the ice began to melt, and it became harder and harder for them to find a mate, they just began to go mad. Other events have contributed to their madness. I’ve done what I could to keep them going. I am an admirer of large predators, but with ever declining habitat, they’re not in good shape. I’m afraid you won’t find anything useful in the pod you are heading to. The bears have ripped most of the pods open over the last few months. They’ve gone rogue.”
A sick shiver washed over her, and Sasha realized just how much she had been counting on the safety pod for her rescue. But really, she was probably going to be dinner or breakfast for a polar bear anyway. Might as well simply sink into the snow and hope to be a popsicle before he attacked. The bear’s fur coat was starting to feature in her imagination as a warm and desirable thing, as if the bear would cradle her in his arms and wrap his fuzzy body around her.
“I’m prepared to offer you a deal,” Ice said. “The location of a pod and removal of the bear in exchange for your help.”
Sasha folded her arms over her chest to try to quell the trembles that wracked her body. Waves of hunger were making the stars spin. “What could I possibly have to offer you? And what could you offer me? Isn’t the world basically ending? It’s just a matter of how and when. My demise is likewise assured, it’s also just a question of how and when. Doesn’t seem like either of us are holding a lot of cards.” Sasha realized that even as she said these words, she did not totally believe them. She still believed that there was a chance that the world could be saved, that she could be saved, that it had not gone to hell everywhere. “Besides, if I spend much more time out here chitty chatting, I’m dead anyway and pretty useless to you.”
“You talk a lot, Sasha Wood.”
“So I’ve been told. Look Ice, you want my help. Take me to a pod right now.”
“I can, but you won’t like it.”
“What do you mean?” Sasha said.
“Do we have a deal?”
“Sure, we have a deal.”
Ice turned and grasped her two shoulders and then she was spinning though something—air, space, time. The colors all around her blurred and scattered like a thousand fun-house mirrors, and when it stopped and Ice released her, she fell to her knees and retched out what little remained in her stomach, trying to get her brain to stop twisting precariously about in her skull. Her eyes felt like they were askew and tangled and she crawled in a slow painful circle in the snow taking deep breaths.
“Remember this,” Ice said. Sasha looked up and saw one of the pod poles. The demon was gone.
“You could have just taken me to the station,” she said to the empty expanse of snow.
After she had put on the jacket and wrapped the blanket around herself, she started a small fire with the fake log, melted some snow to drink and then inhaled the two power bars and the dried soup mix. Dawn streaked across the island in red and pink, transforming the tiny snow crystals into a glittery carpet of white. She huddled by the log trying to absorb the last few bits of warmth. The early morning sky transitioned from pale to deep blue. Sasha stared at the vast expanse of clear sky. There were no contrails. Normally the Arctic sky was a crisscrossing mass of them, but today the sky was empty. Perhaps the world really had ended.
She searched the pod for anything else useful and pocketed the compass and headlamp. The pod also contained a slim rectangular white electronic device, almost like an iPhone but fatter. Was it a beacon of sorts? She pressed the button that she thought would turn it on. There was no response on the small screen. Dead battery probably. She slipped the device into her pocket.
The log sputtered out. Sasha packed everything up, checked the compass, which was still useless, and headed in the direction of the station.
She found Timber outside the station in the alcove of the small door to the storage bay. He was folded into the smallest ball possible, his furry body quaking with cold, but he was alive.
Sasha punched the code on the station bay door and dragged the stiff-legged dog inside. She pulled him, shaking, across the empty cavernous storage bay and flung ope
n the station door to find the common room rosy with wood stove heat and Amber and Vincent sitting on the couch drinking coffee. Tundra and Cedar raced at her, howling greetings, but Tundra ran right past her into the bay, looking for Soren. She shooed him back inside, closed the door, and guided Timber over to the wood stove. Then she sat with her arms around his torso and her face pressed into his fur, until his shaking subsided.
Vincent and Amber had risen immediately with exclamations of surprise and fluttered about her. She imagined she was quite the sight with her hair wild and face and clothes spattered with penguin blood, but she waved them off while she warmed Timber and herself by the fire. Vincent and Amber returned to their spots on the couch when it became apparent that she would not answer any questions yet.
“Soren’s gone,” she said finally when Timber’s shakes became more controlled. “He’s been taken hostage, by some…” She couldn’t say demons. Even she wasn’t sure she believed in demons. But if they weren’t demons, what were they? “…bad people. I have to go back and try to rescue him. He’s in the Antarctic. The mist leads there.” She flapped her arms at Amber to stop her trying to talk. “Vincent knows what I’m talking about. That’s how he got here.”
She rose, her tight and weary limbs arguing with every move. She would have to bandage up her feet. She wondered if she had time for a short sleep, if she would be more successful in rescuing Soren if she had slept. How on earth was she going to rescue Soren from a demon?
“I’m going with you,” Vincent announced.
“Sorry, what?” Sasha had already moved on to the list of things that she would require for the trip. Guns for one. Lots of guns.
Vincent gestured at the radio. “I need to go and talk to Helga. She’s clearly gone off the deep end. She obviously still has a functioning radio, and I need her to radio for help. We’ve been unsuccessful in contacting anyone else. The Internet and sat phones are still out.”
Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) Page 13