by Geoff North
The wind picked up again later in the afternoon and the snow that had fallen days before started to blow. The ever-growing ridgeline north disappeared and soon they were struggling through a wall of solid white. George took Becky’s hand and motioned her to take Abe’s. Two men behind Boo and Ann took hold of the sled and the remaining three linked up behind them. Abe worried they would lose all sense of direction. The whiteout was disorientating and he found it easier to progress with his eyes closed. He glanced over at Becky and saw she was doing the same. They carried on this way for another hour until finally Abe came to a halt. George tugged at Becky, expecting the group to keep moving, but she shook her head, obviously in agreement with Abe.
“We can’t keep going like this.” She had to yell for George to hear over the howling wind. “How do you know we’re not going round in circles? We might have got turned around and are headed back the way we came.”
George yanked on her mitted hand but Becky stayed put.
Finally George spoke to them again, the first time in days. “Move! Keep walking!” Becky and Abe shook their heads. George waved his fur-covered arms in the gale. “We can’t stay out here. Too dangerous!”
Abe shouted back in his face. “It’s dangerous to keep going! We should burrow down here and make shelter in the snow until the wind dies!”
George shook his head and kept pointing out into the field of blinding white. Abe had lost all sense of direction and wasn’t taking another step. He sank down onto one knee and patted the snow around his foot with both hands. “We’re staying right here.”
Becky was set to sit beside him and ride it out when she felt a tremor beneath them. She looked back at Boo and Ann still bundled comfortably on the sled. The tremor grew stronger, almost rhythmic. She saw Abe with his palms still resting on the ground. He could feel it as well. For a second she had the sickening feeling the sheet of hard pack snow was about to split in two—that they would plunge into a bottomless crevasse of ice and be swallowed in cold, choking darkness.
She yelled at Abe. “He’s right! We have to keep moving!”
Something crashed into Becky, knocking her into the snow. Abe was at her side instantly. “What the hell was that?”
George was gone. Where he’d stood was one fur boot and a trail of blood already fading light pink in the drifting snow. Another of the men appeared from behind Boo and Ann waving them on with his seven-foot long spear. “Move! Move!”
Becky and Abe didn’t require more convincing. They were pulling the sled again, running and falling in places through snow up to their hips. The ground wasn’t cracking apart, as Becky had thought. George hadn’t been warning about crevasses opening beneath their feet or freezing to death exposed to the cold wind—he knew they were being stalked. Constant movement was their only chance.
The replacement leader turned to yell again but never had the chance. A grey streak, a moving house of a thing barreled into him, leaving his spear stuck in the snow flopping uselessly back and forth.
“Polar bear!” Becky screamed.
“Too big,” Abe replied. “Way too big.”
It was some kind of monstrous bear, Becky knew. She’d seen the side of its anvil-shaped head; its black eye a single glistening point set against a backdrop of white. On the third attack Abe was prepared. Almost. Its gigantic ten-inch clawed paw raked through the air and would’ve torn his head from his shoulders had he not stepped back a fraction of a second sooner. One claw tip tore across his forehead and Abe’s calculated step turned to a fall. A spray of warm blood splattered Becky’s face and blinded her in one eye.
“Abe!” She sank to her knees at his side as the creature leapt through the air again. Its back leg struck her shoulder and Becky was sent rolling uncontrollably through powder. It was like being hit by a bus. Becky crawled back to him, screaming for the kids to abandon the sled and run. She saw their black forms off to one side already hurtling away. Good for them, she thought, as she reached Abe. Maybe they’ll have a chance if the thing has bigger prey to hunt.
She shook him but he remained still, face down in the cold. “Come on, get up! You’ve taken harder hits than this!” She tugged at his furs and yelled some more. Becky felt her knees getting warm; she was sinking into sticky snow turned red. It was pooling around her, out from Abe’s body in a lazy, uneven circle. She turned him onto his back and half his intestines spilled out. It was worse further up. His throat had been slashed open so violently that only a shredded bit of spine was keeping his head attached to his body. His left arm was missing altogether.
As tough as their bodies had become—as hardy and virtually invulnerable as the alien virus had conditioned them—there was no recovering from this. Becky wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to drag her lover’s remains and set out after the children. She could do none of that. She couldn’t even breathe.
A hand touched her shoulder. A voice spoke distantly into her ear. “It’s too late for him. We have to get after Boo and Ann.”
She looked up and Abe was there. She studied the body again in the snow. She turned the bloody face towards her and stared into the dead and freezing eyes.
It was George.
Abe lifted her and they started out at a stumbling jog. Becky’s relief was short-lived. The ground shuddered again and the beast roared. It was like thunder shaking the earth. Abe was pulled from her side in another sweep of grey. She felt its fur brush across her face, coarse and scratching, smelling like things dead.
She reached out and snatched at it, digging her nails in with both hands. Becky didn’t think. There wasn’t time for rational thought. She was scrambling up its side and onto its back. Giant muscles quivered and rolled under her, a sea of writhing strength. It ground to a halt almost throwing her clear over but Becky’s knees dug in. It grunted and roared some more, shaking its massive frame in an attempt to dislodge her. Becky clung harder.
Abe’s underneath this thing. If he hasn’t already been shredded to pieces, he’ll suffocate to death.
Becky punched down repeatedly with one fist. It bellowed and shook furiously. Hitting it on the back wouldn’t be enough. She had to cause some serious damage, and she had to do it quickly. She crawled forward and her fingers found one big ear and held on. She reached out for the other but couldn’t find it. She burrowed in the thick fur of its skull, searching. It was like straddling a boulder. Where the hell is it? She reached further until her arms were stretched apart as far they would go. The tips of her fingers found the other ear. That would put the thing’s head at close to six feet wide. Why did all the animals in pre-history have to be so goddamned big?
She clawed forward some more and discovered its left eye. She dug two fingers into the socket and pulled back like a hook snagged in a whale. She took three fingers on her other hand and drove them into its right eye. More bellows, more violent shaking. Becky had blinded the beast but had no idea how to stop its rampage. She craned her head over to one side, trying to peer down past the side of its face. Seven feet below she saw a gigantic front paw dug into the snow. Abe’s down there… somewhere. She strained some more—as far as her eye-filled fingers would allow and saw Abe’s head next to the paw. It looked like a dime set next to a dinner plate.
He groaned up to her. “A little help?”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
The bear let out a low, long growl. It sniffed the air and poked its great black nose into the snow inches from Abe’s head.
“It can hear you,” Becky warned. “Not another word.”
Abe nodded but knew it would only briefly postpone the inevitable. One more sniff, maybe two, a six inch shift of the nose and it would find his face. His head would pop off between those massive grey-lipped jaws and slip past about a mile of teeth and disappear into the thing’s throat.
The side of its head thudded against his ear.
He gripped into the snow and hoped it would be quick. His fingers found cold fur buried under the loos
e snow. He turned his head and saw George’s boot. The bear’s mouth yawned open and Abe’s field of vision was encompassed in pink and red. He could see a series of white scars on the roof of its mouth. Old scratches and fading cuts caused from the crushing and chewing of bones a hundred meals past—fish, seal, a few Neanderthals, and maybe more recently, a human or two.
Abe realized he would be just another snack between meals, but he still planned to go down—quite literally—with a fight. He plunged his fist into George’s empty boot and brought the heel end up. Teeth scraped through boot fur and tore along the skin of his forearm as he drove the boot deep into the bear’s throat. He pushed harder, straining until his shoulder jammed up against an eight-inch long canine. “Chew on that, you ugly bastard.”
The bear made a gurgling noise. Abe loosened his grip and pulled his arm out. The boot stayed in.
Becky felt the animal shudder beneath her. Its head reared back and she prepared for another monstrous roar. It never came. Instead she heard and felt something more like a hiccup. She yelled down. “What did you do?”
“Shoved a boot down its throat.”
“You got another one?”
The bear made another hiccupping sound. A strained sneeze. Abe remained silent. No more boots, Becky thought. She would have to find something better. She squeezed in with her knees and let go of the thing’s right eye. She grabbed onto the fur coat fluttering about her shoulders and pulled until the leather hide tore free.
She felt like a bronco rider—the very first rodeo performer—hanging on for dear life with one hand buried three knuckles deep in prehistoric bear face, the other waving a shredded fur around her head. “Catch!”
She hurled it down and Abe caught the last bit before the wind could steal it away. He started to twirl his arm, bunching the fur into a loose clump twice the size of the boot. The bear made a terrible horking sound and its face pitched forward. The boot dislodged and thumped into Abe’s chest followed by a gallon of snot and hot bile. Abe jammed the fur in and pushed deeply once again. He snatched up the boot and threw it in a second time for good measure.
The bear became desperate. Its choking panic kept its mouth yawning wide open. Good thing, Abe thought, or he would’ve been an arm short like poor George. He squirmed and writhed, working his way free a few inches out from under the crushing weight. Abe dug his elbows into the ice and pulled some more. He became aware of a hammering noise as the bear twisted its massive head back and forth. He squirmed another foot to his left and saw Becky silhouetted against the white sky, fingers buried into the animal’s bloody, leaking eye socket. Her other hand a fist smashing down repeatedly against the top the bear’s skull. Pounding. Hammering. She wasn’t going to knock it unconscious, but the steady beating was keeping it from doing much else.
Abe wriggled away further until his shoulder hit something. He reached back and found the spear left in the ice. Abe pulled it free and rose to his feet. George’s boot shot out of the bear’s throat a second time. A piece of Becky’s fur-covered hide slithered out after it.
How many lives does this thing have? Abe ran forward and buried six feet of stone-tipped wood into the roof of the bear’s mouth.
Becky stopped in mid-swing as the spear point erupted through the patch of white fur she’d been hitting. Her blows had softened the bone, fracturing it in enough places for the spear to work through. A flow of blood and brains followed, splashing into her chin and throat. The beast stopped hiccupping, sneezing, and coughing. Becky tightened her grip as the great weight fell forward into the snow.
There was a belching sound that turned Becky’s stomach as her hand slipped out from the jellied eyeball. Abe helped her down and started to wipe the mess from her neck and chest with a bit of even slimier fur hide. They were in a maroon slush of blood and snow up to their ankles. He kissed her forehead. “Bigger they are, harder they fall, hey?”
“Boo and Ann,” she sloshed around in a half circle, searching. “Which way?”
Abe turned a few more steps. “That way.” He pointed in a line straight out from the bear’s snout. “Last thing I saw before I got pinned.”
“You sure?” She had seen them running as well, but no longer had any idea which direction they’d gone.
“Sure as either one of us can be.”
George was dead. The one carrying the spear was either in the same state or dying somewhere out in the drifts. There was no sign of the four other men. We didn’t even bother giving them names, Becky thought guiltily. But her concern for Boo and Ann was greater.
She set out with Abe, calling for the children.
The howling wind was all that replied.
Chapter 21
The wind dropped and the snow settled. Abe and Becky trod through the late afternoon and into early evening towards the navy blue wall of ice. It ran along the northern horizon like a giant wave frozen between an endless field of snow and a darkening grey sky.
Their progress had improved. The snow here was hard packed, solid and unyielding as stone beneath their feet. Becky marched on, clothed only in crude fur pants and a leather jerkin that didn’t even cover her entire stomach and back, her arms and shoulders left exposed. Abe had lost his boots in their struggle with the bear and trudged along on bare feet. There was no feeling in his toes but he wasn’t worried of losing them. Becky and Abe were made of tough stuff. The gash across his forehead had healed over. The tears running along the skin of his forearm had faded to light pink streaks. Temperatures dropping to minus thirty, forty, and further wouldn’t slow them down. They thrived in it. If anything, the two were getting stronger.
They’d come across the light sled tracks an hour before. Boo and Ann wouldn’t have been able to travel this far dragging it. That meant there were other survivors. Some had gone back for the sled and found the children along their way. Or so they had hoped.
Becky pulled Abe to a halt. “I see something. There!” She was pointing at a distant clump of black specks.
Abe focused on it and saw a thin trail of white smoke rising above. “They’re burning the last sled.”
They covered the last two miles in minutes. Boo and Ann ran out to greet them, leaving two of the surviving men huddled around the charred remains of the second sled.
Ann leapt into Becky’s arms and kissed her dirty forehead and cheeks, stoking her fingers through the older girl’s hair in joyous disbelief. Boo trotted around Abe in excited circles, whooping at the top of his lungs. “Home! Home! Abe, Boo, Becky, Ann! We go home!” Before Abe could ask what he meant the boy hurtled off to the fire and beyond, towards the wall of glacier half a mile distant.
“Home?” Becky asked Ann. “You two think this place is home?”
Ann nodded and rushed after the boy.
Abe and Becky approached the dying fire. The men picked up their remaining weapons and started for the wall. “Wait a minute,” Abe called. “The others—did you find any of them?”
One turned back and shook his head solemnly.
“We’re sorry,” Becky said.
The man shrugged his heavy shoulders and continued walking. Abe took Becky’s hand and followed. “We must be close to some kind of shelter. They wouldn’t have torched the last sled if we weren’t.”
“It was a beacon. They were lighting the way for us.”
Boo and Ann were sitting on a high drift of snow less than fifty feet in front of the glacier. Becky craned her head back and marveled at the size of it in the gathering twilight. Hues of purple and navy blue streaked above them half a mile into a sky dancing green with shifting light. Never had she seen anything so awe-inspiring yet so cold and foreboding. Throughout all their travels crossing continents, struggling in a time eons before they were born, Becky now felt completely insignificant and removed from her surroundings. We don’t belong here… I don’t belong here … No human should be here.
Abe was looking down instead of up, into a dark hole at the bottom of the drift Boo and Ann were sitting on. �
��Is that a cave opening?”
One of the men grinned and thumped him on the back before descending down into the opening. Boo and Ann slid down the drift enthusiastically and went next. Abe sank to his knees and peered in after them, a lump forming in his throat. He saw a dull blue glow further down, illuminating the narrow, angled passageway. His mouth went dry. There were steps hewn into the snow-ice and rounded off along the edges from use, leading down at a forty-five degree angle. Abe turned back to the last man next to Becky. “You want us to go down there? Into a hole in the snow? That’s where home is?” He was more than disappointed. He was afraid.
“More,” the man answered. He pulled Abe back to his feet and indicated another snow mound a hundred yards away. There was another a hundred yards beyond that. They ran the length of the glacier wall as far as Abe could see—tunnels to a frozen world below. Deathtraps.
“Let’s see what they fought so hard to bring us to,” Becky said in a muffled tone. She was already working her way past the snowy entrance and down the slippery steps. Abe followed, overwhelmed by choking dread. He wasn’t good in tight places. As a little kid he had been the one that watched his sister dig out the snow forts on their farm. In the fall their father would pile square straw bails in a way that left a narrow opening and a pyramid shaped space inside as black as night. Allan used to tease him when he came to visit. He’d play inside the snow forts with Sheila, and crawl after her into the bale houses. But not Abe. Never Abe.
He stopped after twenty feet of descent and sat to catch his breath.
“You okay up there?” Becky called from somewhere ahead and below.
It sounded like she was a mile away, yet it seemed she could’ve been mumbling directly into his ear. Sound had an echoless, dead quality deep under the snow. “Give me a second. I’ll be right there.” Abe ran his fingers gently along the smooth ice wall next to him. He watched the tips trace the curved surface above his head, searching for a dozen cracks that weren’t there and imagining a hundred more ready to give way. This is where it will all end, crushed beneath a ton of snow and ice. He began to scuttle back on the palms of his hands.