by Jonah Buck
Pushing through the smoke, she saw that the door outside had been blasted off its hinges by the explosions. She lunged outside and took a great, rasping breath of outside air. The cold clawed at her raw throat, but she didn’t care. It was relatively free of smoke, and that was all that mattered to her right now. She bent over and dry heaved. Her lungs felt like they’d been used to sponge up grime at a steel mill, and she’d just seen a human head pop like a soap bubble. It wasn’t a good combination.
She glanced backward through the open doorway. Smoked puffed out of the opening, swirling up into the otherwise perfectly clear air. There was so little precipitation in Antarctica that there would probably be a giant black smear in this location for years from the soot. The debris might very well sit here for longer than she was alive.
Denise started to straighten herself back up when she saw something move amid the smoke inside the facility. It was a flicker of light in the swirling darkness. Then the flaming corpses started to pour through the doorway.
Several of the ghouls had managed to free themselves from their confinement in the science laboratory. Either they’d broken loose on their own, or the fire had eaten through the restraints for them. All of them were on fire to varying degrees.
The first one through the door wore the remains of a bloody parka. Only his sleeve was on fire. The second one out the door was a walking pillar of flame. Bits of burning clothing and charred flesh crumbled off with each step, leaving a macabre trail of ashes and hot grease in his wake. Obviously, the dead body didn’t feel any pain. It simply continued forward toward Denise, arms outstretched to grab her.
Denise didn’t bother to waste her bullets. She took off running around the side of the building. She only had so much ammunition, and she had even less time. The next round of shelling would start at any moment.
She rounded the corner only to see that more of the undead had actually beaten her outside. They must have gotten free from their restraints right after the shelling struck the science labs. Hobart and Valdez lay dead on the ground near several idling motor sledges, and the ghouls now had Cornelia surrounded in the alcove where the vehicles were parked.
Cornelia had a lead pipe, and she was swinging it at the dead men every time they reached for her. The metal club struck grasping arms, breaking fingers and snapping bones in the process. The ghouls coming after her didn’t seem to care one way or the other, though.
The dead men must have taken her and the others by surprise while they were warming the motor sledges up. She’d probably been watching for Denise to come out through the same door she entered in. Instead, the dead had come around from the other side and killed the two sailors and trapped Cornelia.
Denise raised her Nitro Express again and aimed at the monster closest to Cornelia. She was too far away to guarantee a headshot, so she simply swiveled the gun over and fired. The man tore in half like a wet piñata. Guts and viscera spooled out in an explosion of red confetti.
Cornelia looked up in surprise and saw Denise. Then she immediately had to push another dead man away with her pipe.
There were a couple of ghouls gnawing on the sailors’ corpses. Denise broke open the Nitro Express and jammed in a couple more rounds. She lifted the gun up and fired twice more in quick succession.
The .577 Nitro Express was a big, mean weapon. The kickback could seriously injure a person’s shoulder if they were handling the elephant gun improperly. Even though Denise had plenty of experience with the weapon, she knew she’d have a sore arm tomorrow from the repeated donkey kick recoil. The weapon was meant to not only kill but bring down large, enraged or panicked animals. It was designed to have stopping power through sheer, massive bodily trauma and penetration. You could destroy a lightly armored tank with a Nitro Express. Using it on something as small and puny as a human being was almost a waste.
She stepped over the four motionless bodies now in front of her. The creatures from the laboratory lay next to the men they’d been eating. The ghouls were both missing everything above the shoulders. There was very little liquid blood, though. It had all coagulated inside their bodies some time ago. The pulped remains of their heads were more like dried pet kibble spread across the ice than the soupy mass that occurred when an elephant gun struck living flesh.
Denise slapped a couple more rounds into the Nitro Express and blew the last of the things attacking Cornelia way. Going back for the weapon had been the right choice. They could have just as easily all been trapped by the undead while waiting for the motor sledge engines to warm up. Now, she only regretted not grabbing Cornelia’s elephant gun, too.
“Thanks,” Cornelia said, tossing her pipe to the side. Her blonde hair lay scattered around her face, and she was breathing hard. “We need to get out of here.”
“I know. Where are the others?”
“Metrodora, Fletch, and Poole were able to hop on their sledges and get out before those things surrounded us. The rest of us got cut off. They were on top of us before we could do anything about it.”
Denise looked at the bodies of Hobart and Valdez. In a couple of minutes, a shell would probably land in the vicinity and spread the two men over the landscape in a fine mist. She already felt guilty about bringing everyone straight into the heart of the storm here. Now, the Sulaco was destroyed, nearly all of its crew was dead, and Colonel Dagenais and his men were actively trying to obliterate any sign that any of them had ever been here.
She hadn’t known things would be so bad. She hadn’t known, dammit. But she knew that wasn’t an excuse. She’d done things the way the Squires wanted them done, not the way that she thought was right.
The blame wasn’t entirely hers. Not even mostly hers. There was a lot of blame to go around. The research teams had clearly been tampering with things that never should have seen the light of day, and it had come back to bite them. Colonel Ozias Dagenais was the one who had actually given the orders to destroy the Sulaco and murder its crew.
But Denise had still played a role in the way things turned out. That brought a sour taste to her mouth.
“Let’s get out of here. There are going to be more of these things coming out of that building any minute,” Denise said, gesturing at the dead men on the ground. She didn’t bother to mention the additional shells that were no doubt coming their way.
“Where can we even go?” Cornelia asked. It was a good question. They couldn’t stay near the coast. They cruiser out there would destroy them. Even if they could follow the shoreline out of French Territory, there wasn’t another outpost of any sort for thousands of miles. Antarctica was double the size of Australia, but there were probably no more than a hundred people walking its surface right now.
That number was about to increase substantially. Denise looked back out toward the coast and saw the troop transport ships steadily approaching, bringing men and equipment to clean up and contain this mess. Unfortunately, they considered Denise and Cornelia to be part of that mess.
Denise looked at Cornelia. “We go to the only place we can. Merovée.” They both got on the humming vehicles and took off before the next round of shelling could start. The great white expanse opened up in front of them as they accelerated away, and Denise just hoped there was actually something out there for them to go to.
ELEVEN
SPOILED FOR CHOICES
Denise couldn’t really feel the wind rushing past her face anymore. She’d been outside long enough that her skin was numb anywhere that she wasn’t wearing several layers of clothing. She hadn’t grabbed any extra gloves or anything else from Delambre Station before she left, and she regretted that now.
Even though the continent wasn’t locked in winter anymore, it was only a few degrees above freezing. The wind robbed them of any warmth they might have been able to find, though. The constant dry wind bombarded them like it was trying to push them back in the direction of the coast, like it was frantically trying to convince them not to go any deeper into the interior. Denise’s face
felt like a sheet of chipped porcelain, as if the skin would shatter if anyone tapped on it too hard.
She didn’t have frostbite yet. The operative word was “yet,” though. They were all going to need shelter and a heat source in the not-too-distant future if they didn’t want to start losing fingers and toes.
The problem out here was that there was no way to live off the land, even for a short time. There was no fuel to start a fire. Away from the coast, there was no animal life to hunt for food. They could get water from the ice, if they had to, but that only served to remind everyone how much they needed heat more than anything else. Surviving down here took vigorous planning and attention to supplies. And that was without monsters to contend with.
None of them had done any planning, and they didn’t have any supplies except for an elephant gun and some ammunition. Denise didn’t even know for sure what they were steering toward. She’d just seen the point on the map, and she’d seen the trail from the air. For all she knew, there was nothing out here but an impact crater from a meteorite.
The French researchers had taken off in this direction, though. She had to assume they would travel toward shelter and supplies, if there were any to be had.
Given that Dagenais was trying to contain the outbreak of monsters, he couldn’t have asked for an environment that was more favorable to him. Destroying Delambre Station meant that there were only so many options for someone who didn’t want to be blown up. They could go to Merovée, or they could freeze to death. Or they could freeze to death on the way to Merovée. That was an option, too.
Dagenais seemed to have been dispatched down here by the French as a contingency plan. The research team had clearly been in communication with him. However, Benoit and his men had apparently expected the colonel to help them if things got out of hand. Dagenais, on the other hand, had obviously decided that the safest course of action was to destroy anything having to do with the monsters. That included the research itself and anyone who knew about it, apparently.
It wasn’t even a wholly unreasonable decision. Denise had seen what those slugs could do to a person. She’d seen the slug-infested corpses attack the living. If the meteorite had released the slugs into a populated area, it would have been a disaster.
As far as she knew, the slugs didn’t spread or reproduce by killing people. They just seemed to need a human body to control, and then everyone else was food. Just being bitten didn’t seem like it would spread the slugs to a new host. Maybe if the little slime balls were happy and well-fed for long enough, they would lay eggs or something and spread that way. Denise couldn’t tell much about their life cycle from the little she had seen of them.
The best plan was probably just to steer clear of anything that might be of alien origin. That meant a growing list of threats, though. As far as Denise could tell, there were at least three different types of organisms loose down here.
First, and probably the most dangerous, was the giant dragon creature. It could sweep in and carry them off or lob deadly acid at them. Denise kept her eyes on the sky as she rode the motor sledge across the bleak landscape. Even with her Nitro Express, she wasn’t at all confident that any of them would survive an encounter with that monster. Maybe the elephant gun could punch through its armor. Maybe the elephant gun couldn’t. She didn’t care to test the idea out, if it could be avoided.
The next biggest threat was the slugs. Or rather the human corpses the slugs used as surrogate bodies. Denise wasn’t too worried about them right at the moment, though. Her group had already passed the overturned motor sledge she and Fletch found before. Villiers was still sprawled out dead. They might run into more of the walking corpses in due course, but they could move faster than the dead mean with their motor sledges. And Denise knew perfectly well that her Nitro Express could deal with a few of the ghouls at a time. Besides, the open spaces out here were so vast that the odds of running into a group of the dead men were actually pretty small. One problem at a time.
There was one last problem that they might have to deal with, though. Denise thought back to the weird, inhuman shapes she’d seen in observation pods back at Delambre Station’s science quarters. She didn’t even know what those were. For all she knew, they weren’t even dangerous. They could be not-particularly-little green men here to offer the people of earth peace and prosperity. Or they could be here to harvest human brains for lunch.
The creatures were shaped a bit like people. That made Denise think that maybe they were different from the slugs or the dragon. Maybe they had some intelligence and understandable motivation. Or maybe they were just dumb, hungry brutes. Just because they had a vaguely familiar shape didn’t mean it was safe to assume anything about them. It was speculation to try to guess either way.
It might have been a moot point to begin with. As far as she knew, the only specimens of that species had burned up with the rest of Delambre Station. Anything that made it out had presumably been riddled with bullets courtesy of the French military shortly after that. The creatures’ intentions didn’t matter much one way or the other if they were dead.
Denise rode at the front of their little convoy because she had the elephant gun. Fletch and Cornelia rode behind her, and Metrodora and Poole took up the rear. They’d been travelling what seemed like forever over the ice, picking their way forward a little at a time.
Strictly speaking, their destination wasn’t that far. The motor sledges could make the journey fairly quickly if they opened up the throttle and went at full speed. However, their journey was punctuated by fits and starts as they darted between the landscape’s rare pieces of cover to check the skies for approaching monsters.
The trail that led to Merovée was easy enough to follow. The ruts and chewed ice mostly just continued in a straight line across the landscape, occasionally weaving around the rare ridge or dip in the ice.
However, Denise was having a difficult time figuring out how far they’d come. The route to their destination was mostly flat and featureless. It made gauging distances harder than it should have been. She thought that they’d reach the mountains visible from the research station half an hour ago. Instead, they were only just beginning to reach the craggy foothills.
The ground was becoming less flat, and the route they were following took more twists and turns to avoid eruptions of stone or crevasses. Right now, they were in a shallow valley that tilted gradually upward.
With everyone lined up as they were, it was impossible to hold any sort of conversation. That just left Denise alone with her thoughts. She tried to steer clear of thinking about what she could have done differently over the previous few days. The simple answer was, she wasn’t sure. Instead, she focused on trying to gather up what she knew and what she could surmise about the situation they were in.
Unfortunately, she was coming to a pretty simple conclusion. They were screwed. Behind them lay Colonel Dagenais, who wanted them dead if it helped contain this incident. She didn’t know exactly what lay ahead of her. For all she knew, they had managed to pick up some arms of their own and would shoot on sight.
There was death behind and uncertainty ahead. It was more death off to the sides, too. Either from the cold or from monsters. They could press onward and maybe die, or they could go in some other direction and definitely die.
Spoiled for choices.
The icy gorge’s walls were riddled with thick cracks and crevices. In places, frozen boulders had collapsed down to the floor of the canyon. In other places, raw stone managed to poke up through the ice from below, and the walls of the valley gave way almost completely to rock. There were more cracks and even some caves carved into the ice.
Denise kept her eyes pointed toward the sky whenever she could. The gorge they were moving up was shallow but only modestly wide. If something dropped in on them from above, there would only be so much room to maneuver.
She hadn’t seen any sign of the dragon creature since it attacked the snow tractor, but she knew it still had t
o be out there somewhere. Denise didn’t think they could outrun the creature with their motor sledges. The beast moved fast through the air. An airplane might be able to outrace it, but not by much.
She wondered what Colonel Dagenais knew about the creature. Benoit and his team seemed surprised about the monster. If Dagenais had been keeping abreast of the situation through the researchers here, he might know even less than Denise. Did he even have the equipment to kill the monster? One surefire weapon would be the cruiser’s big guns, but the creature moved too fast to have much chance of hitting it with those. If Dagenais only knew that something large had attacked the snow tractor and killed a couple of the researchers, he probably had no idea what he was actually up against.
As if summoned by her thoughts, a black dot appeared in the sky behind them. Denise swiveled her head around and cursed. The dot grew into a larger speck. It was heading their way.
Denise spotted a particularly large cave opening in the rock wall ahead of them. She signaled with her hand and pulled her motor sledge over to the side of the rock. Dismounting, she pointed skyward.
“I see it,” Cornelia said.
Denise peered into the darkness inside the cave. She couldn’t see much more than a few feet inside, but the cavern seemed relatively deep. Certainly deep enough for five people to huddle up inside for a little while.
“It’s dark,” Poole said.
“I don’t think we have any other options,” Denise said. “Our best shot is to get inside.” She gestured toward the cave entrance.
Everyone parked their motor sledges along the wall of the gorge and scrambled inside the cavern entrance. Denise took her elephant gun with her as she abandoned the sledge. If she could get a good shot at the dragon, she intended to take it. Maybe she was wrong and the creature’s armor wasn’t as durable as it appeared. Striking the monstrosity down would make the rest of their journey a lot safer. Eat your heart out, St. George.