Carrion Scourge_Plague Of Monsters

by Jonah Buck

  No sooner had Denise finished her little spiel than an alarm sounded over their heads. The sudden wail of the klaxon nearly blew her off her seat. She jumped up, her hand pawing at her hip where she was so used to the weight of a revolver. There was nothing there, though. Her weapons were still buried in her luggage, hidden under clothing and the trunk’s false bottom. She half-expected French commandos to sweep into the room and throw handcuffs on all three of them for plotting against the state’s interests.

  There was a gunshot from deeper inside the facility, from the direction of the research ward. Denise’s head whipped around at the sound. In the hallway, two researchers pounded down the corridor in the direction of the science center. A second later, there were another couple of gunshots, and then the alarm shut off. It had only been on for perhaps fifteen seconds, but the silence in its wake suddenly seemed to fill the world.

  Dr. Benoit came down the corridor at a rapid clip. He stopped in the mess hall’s doorway when he spotted them. He had a scratch under his right eye that wasn’t very deep but was still bleeding quite a lot.

  “There’s been a technical malfunction. It’s been taken care of, but you three should retire to your quarters now.”

  Cornelia took a step closer. “I was a nurse during the war. Let me see your eye. I can bandage that up for you.”

  “No.” Benoit threw a glance over his shoulder at something Denise couldn’t see. “You should go. Right now. Everything is under control, but we need to do some maintenance immediately.”

  Denise stood up and edged a little closer to the door. She caught a brief glimpse of the two scientists she’d seen running down the hallway before. Now one of them was wheeling a gurney toward the research wing of the building, and the other had a jerry can of gasoline in his hands.

  Then Benoit moved to the side and blocked her view. Denise had already seen enough to reevaluate Cornelia’s idea that maybe everything was fine here, though. They were going to have to find some conclusions at this station, and Denise wasn’t sure she was going to like them.

  FIVE

  THE BIG WHITE EMPTY

  The little biplane bucked in the air again as another gust hit it. Denise grabbed onto the side of her seat as the plane tilted for a brief but unpleasant second, threatening to roll onto its side like it was performing some kind of barnstorming stunt.

  She hadn’t particularly enjoyed the ride on the Sulaco through tumultuous seas and churning waves. This was worse. This was a thousand times worse. Denise held onto the seat harder as the plane shuddered before flipping back onto its proper axis.

  Even though she was strapped in, it was all too easy to picture the small plane hitting a particularly rough patch of turbulence and launching her right out of the open-air passenger seat. And it was equally easy to imagine one of the wings simply shearing off and sending them on a spiral toward the packed ice below, almost as hard as cement.

  “Sorry about that,” Fletch yelled from the forward seat. The wind tried to whip his words away, but Denise managed to hear. Even so, conversation was nearly impossible, even if she felt much like talking. That didn’t stop Fletch, though.

  “So like I was saying, they taught me to fly planes during the war. I flew a reconnaissance plane, the ones that fly over the enemy trenches and bunkers and snap pictures for the generals to look at. The fighter pilots like to hog all the fame, but they get to fight back. We had to fly steady while the Germans were firing at us from the ground or sending their own fighters in. Most of the other guys in my unit, Littlejohn, Pennington, O’Malley, pretty much everybody mustered out and went back to civilian life after the war ended. I stayed in, and they asked me to start doing supply runs for some of the Antarctic expeditions down here. The next thing you know, everybody wants to hire me out because there’s not many people with the experience to do that. Of course, the planes today are a lot better built than they were ten years ago, so that helps.” Fletch kept talking, and Denise listened with half an ear to the parts she could understand over the wind.

  They were buzzing around a few hundred feet in the air, sweeping back and forth into the interior. They were moving generally toward the mountains Denise had seen off in the distance yesterday when they landed at the docks.

  The winds today were less intense than yesterday. Before they took off, Fletch had explained that the pervasive gusts were something called katabatic winds. It was a strange phenomenon driven by geography rather than any particular weather system. Because the ice sheets around Antarctica rose to levels far above sea level, the entire continent was basically one gigantic plateau. Due to the extremely cold temperatures, it created a sheet of unusually dense air high up on the continent’s shelf. That air then tried to disperse off the Antarctic plateau. Because the air was extra thick, it was almost like rolling a bowling ball down a hill. The winds were actually driven mostly by gravity.

  Just because the wind was less intense today didn’t mean it was gentle, though. Denise felt the plane shift under her again and she grimaced under her ski mask. Or she tried to anyway. Her face had gone mostly numb but for an unpleasant tingle. The wind itself was already deathly cold. Combined with the air rushing past the open plane seats, it was like getting into a slap fight with Father Winter. She would have rubbed at her face to try to press some feeling back into it, but that would require her to release her white-knuckled death grip on the sides of the plane’s seat.

  They always said not to look down when heights were involved, but that was exactly what she needed to do. She was out here to see if there was anything unusual down there on the ice. Some things would be a lot more obvious from the air than they would be from the ground. Bits of scuffed ice where many feet or vehicles had traveled would be hard to spot just hiking around. So would any individual creatures or people, who wouldn’t be much more than specks on a glittering horizon from the ground. Up here, they would stand out like individual dots of paint on an otherwise blank canvas.

  The problem was just that the canvas was very, very large. That, and the risk that they might fall out of the sky fast enough to leave a big smear of red paint. Denise scanned the horizon from behind her tinted goggles, squinting against the ice’s bright reflections.

  After last night, she knew there was something happening down here at the bottom of the earth. Benoit and his men had shuffled her, Cornelia, and Metrodora off to their rooms as almost as soon as the echoes of gunfire had faded completely. The poker tournament had been cancelled, too. Benoit told them this morning that they’d overloaded a piece of equipment in the science ward, and it had exploded. He said that a little piece of shrapnel had grazed him, and that was why he had the cut under his eye.

  Maybe taken on its own, that story was believable. Denise knew the sound of gunfire pretty well, but the pops she’d heard had been pretty muffled by the concrete walls all around them. A generator backfiring or a piece of mechanical equipment suffering a catastrophic engineering failure might very well be able to be mistaken for gunfire.

  But there were too many other niggling little doubts for Denise to believe that story right now. A lot of little things seemed to point to the idea that there was something bad happening here. She just didn’t have an inkling what it was.

  Metrodora was right about one thing. Breaking into the science labs would give them the quickest answers. Metrodora wasn’t in charge of this little venture, though. She was just a chaperone for the Squires. Denise still wanted to take a more circumspect approach with her snooping before she tried anything rash. Now wasn’t the time for rashness.

  Especially if the French team was quick with their guns. Despite Benoit’s story, Denise was inclined to trust her first instinct and assume that she had in fact heard gunfire last night. Naturally, that raised the question about what they had been shooting at.

  Maybe she could gather some clues out here. Or at least some ideas that would point her in the direction of some clues. She really didn’t want to try breaking into the research wing
until they’d run out of other options. She didn’t know what those guns might have been pointed at last night, but she intended to avoid any sort of situation where they might end up pointed at her.

  So far, she couldn’t tell if her strategy of playing things smart was actually panning out. She didn’t actually feel that smart riding around in the little biplane as it farted across the sky and rattled like a toy every time the wind kicked back up. Climbing into this death trap actually seemed real dumb, now that she was up here.

  But there was still the possibility that she was onto something. From up here, she could see where motor sledges or other vehicles had chewed their way across the ice. They left marks on the surface as well as the occasional oil stain. The paths and tracks carved the ice up a little, like a crack in a mirror.

  There were lots of the little trails in the region right around Delambre Station. They led from the docks up to the buildings, and then there were smaller paths leading between all the outbuildings where the scientists had trudged across the ice enough times. There were also a few trails that led away from the station to various points of interest nearby.

  She’d told Fletch to circle around to some of the trails. She hadn’t bothered to tell him that she wanted to know what the researchers were up to down here. In fact, she hadn’t told Fletch much of anything. She’d generally avoided talking to him or the crew of the Sulaco. As far as any of them knew, she was just some modestly wealthy kook on the vacation of a lifetime with a couple of friends. The fewer people who knew she had been sent here by a shadowy group she only barely trusted in order to investigate whether anything dangerous had crawled out of a meteorite, the better. Not that anyone would believe her if she told them the truth.

  Fletch had buzzed around the various trails, just as she’d requested. One of them led over a ridge toward what appeared to be the penguin rookery Benoit had mentioned the other day. Another extended onto a stretch of sea ice where the researchers had drilled some holes and seemed to have some instruments dipped down into the water below. Neither of those paths held Denise’s interest for long. They looked like more or less what she expected a normal, ordinary science team would be doing down here.

  There was another path that extended away from the station, though. There were deep tracks in the ice, as if the trail was well-travelled. They extended away from the coast and deeper into the big, white empty.

  Sometimes the ground below dipped in little valleys or crevices. Other times, spires of rock poked out through the ice. The earth beneath must have been fairly rugged terrain. Further out, closer to the center of Antarctica, the ice would be so thick that there wouldn’t be any indication about what the land was like below. If the ice sheet was massive enough, it had probably flattened everything beneath it, actually.

  Closer to the shore though, the tracks she was following had to weave around occasional outcroppings or short dips. They were already a few miles out from Delambre Station. Even so, she still couldn’t see what the tracks were actually supposed to be leading to. They simply continued on toward the horizon as if they were marching toward the South Pole. For all she knew, maybe they were. If she ordered Fletch to book it, they could cover a lot of ground fast in this little plane. As it was, she was having him sweep back and forth, covering as much ground as possible and giving her a chance to scout the trail out more.

  Denise squinted down at the ground, trying to see if she could tell what had actually beaten the trail through the ice. She assumed that a collection of motor sledges probably made the trail over many trips. It could have been dog sled teams. Delambre Station had a small collection of sled dogs, but they were mainly used for short distance trips. She couldn’t imagine that the trail had been made by people on foot. That would take dozens, maybe even hundreds, of trips to wear the ice down like that. Motor sledges were heavier and a lot more convenient. They’d wear a rut in the ice a whole lot faster.

  Another gust of wind blasted them, and the plane shook like a wet dog. Denise stopped focusing on the ground below and went back to focusing on keeping her butt glued to the seat. Due to the creeping numbness in her hands, she could only feel her grip on the plane as a sort of vague pressure. She wished her hands were warmer so she could be sure she had a tighter grasp. She wished everything was warmer.

  Finally, the wind finished toying with them, and the plane settled into a more stable flight again. That’s when she saw it.

  “There’s something on the ice down there,” she shouted, touching Fletch’s shoulder to make sure he could hear her. “Take us over it. I want to see what that is.”

  Fletch nodded and banked the plane a few degrees to the right. The wind buffeted them again, and Denise did her best to calm the little edge of fear that tried to whisk her thoughts apart.

  Down below, the trail passed beneath a sheer outcropping of rock. There was something just off to the side of the path, resting in the shadow of the outcropping. From here, it didn’t look like much more than a little black dot. However, that was more than Denise had seen in the entire rest of the time they’d been out here.

  As they drew nearer, the dot resolved itself into a more defined shape. It was a motor sledge. The vehicle was tipped over on its side, and Denise could see a tumble of supplies around it like a splash of arterial spray. Oil and gasoline had leaked out of it and formed dark puddles on the ice nearby.

  The motor sledge didn’t keep Denise’s attention for long, though. She spotted a flash of color in the shadows under the outcropping. She looked around, trying to get a fix on what she’d just seen. Then she saw the flash of yellow again. It was a man in a brightly colored jacket moving among the rocks. He stumbled and lurched as the plane banked around for a second pass.

  “There’s somebody down there,” Denise shouted above the wind.

  “I see him. They look like they’re in trouble. Did Dr. Benoit tell you not to try to help anyone we found out here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Screw ‘im.” Fletch worked the stick, and the place circled away from the outcropping toward a flat surface, losing altitude as it went. He was going to land.

  SIX

  FROSTBITE

  Denise looked at Fletch. She couldn’t see him except for the back of his head and his shoulders, and both of those were wrapped up in cold weather gear. She felt a swell of respect for him. And with that came a dip of guilt for dragging him into the middle of this. He had no idea that St. George’s Squires suspected there might be something seriously wrong down here. She was using him as a sort of patsy.

  There wasn’t time to delve too far into her own feelings, though. The plane touched down on the ice with a jolt, bounced, and then came down for good. Fletch worked the engine, throttling the propeller down and slowing the plane as it slid across the ice. They skidded and slipped for the length of a football field before the tiny plane finally lurched to a stop on the ice.

  Denise hopped over the side and stumbled a little. She felt a little funny after being jostled through the air for so long. It was disorienting to be standing where the ground wasn’t heaving and bucking each time the wind kicked up now. She shook her limbs out for a second, trying to throw off some of the numbness that had settled over her skin.

  Then she started walking toward the outcropping of rock. She’d lost track of the man with the yellow parka again. He must have been behind one of the boulders that had crumbled off the side of the outcropping. The tall ledge had a number of small hollows and crevices. One of them appeared to be the entrance to a cave.

  Marching across the ice, she kept an eye on her surroundings. She didn’t know why there was a man stranded out here, his transport tipped over; she just knew that something wasn’t right. There weren’t any obvious signs of bug-eyed monsters from outer space, but Denise knew better than to let her guard down.

  After last night’s incidents in the lab, she wasn’t completely unprepared. She had a heavy revolver tucked into the pocket of her outermost jacket. The weapon
was the same kind game preserve rangers kept on them when they were wandering a park. If something jumped out of the grass right in front of them, the idea was that a point-blank shot to the face would take down anything short of a rhino.

  Right now though, Denise wished she’d brought her Nitro Express elephant gun. There was no way to hide it on the plane, and it would have been awkward trying to explain its presence to Fletch. She continued forward with her hands in her pockets, both to keep them warm and to keep one wrapped around the grip of the revolver.

  Denise approached the outcropping slowly, moving as deliberately as if she was walking through the African tall grass. She had better visibility out here than she would out on the savanna, but she was on less familiar territory. The sudden blasts of freezing wind and the white expanse extending out toward the horizon were both disorienting. The wind threatened to smear ice chips across her goggles. The white field in front of her made it hard to gauge distance.

  She still didn’t see the man in the yellow jacket as she drew nearer to the overturned motor sledge. She’d reached the outer ring of the debris field around the vehicle. There were cans of food, several of them bent and burst open. They’d sprayed their contents across the ice like exploded bug guts on a giant windshield. Other cans were intact and unopened.

  Denise spotted a tent peg but no tent. The wind might very well have blown it away right after the accident, sending it over the horizon like an autumn leaf plucked from a tree and hurled into the October sky. There were other miscellaneous items. She nudged a shredded rucksack with the toe of her boot. A single brass bullet casing lay nearby, but there was no sign of a gun. The debris was spread out in all directions around the overturned sledge like little planetoids orbiting a dying sun.

  Looking around, Denise had a bad feeling about what she was seeing. The scene looked like an accident of some sort. She tried to picture that flash of yellow she’d seen from the air. Was she sure the little speck of color was moving? Could the man be laid out dead behind those rocks?