by JE Gurley
She tried to shrug off the persistent cold fingers of depression that had begun to plague her since reading the medical memo in the Russian snow tractor. Before, her problems were localized, confined to friends and acquaintances. Now, the entire world and everyone she ever knew could be gone. She followed Brad, one hand pressed against his back for support. His strength nourished hers as a small spark can be encouraged into a flame.
The two groups split up in the Beer Can stairwell. Liz, Brad, and Bain continued up the stairs, while Hughes’ group, consisting of DeSousa, Lester and Reed, entered the lower level through the closed double doors. The dim emergency lights cast the stairwell in shadows that seemed to whirl around her as she climbed. The echo of their booted footsteps on the metal treads rang loudly announcing their presence. She felt exposed and vulnerable.
Almost immediately upon entering the building, they spotted two zombies in the galley kneeling over the grisly remains of some unidentifiable hapless victim. Their blood-smeared faces turned to stare up at her as she entered the room. She recognized Sid Barrett, one of the botanists. She remembered him as a thin, smiling young man quick with the joke and always willing to help. He led the small ensemble of musicians that played in the gymnasium each week. Now, he snarled at her like a rabid animal, a piece of human liver in his hand. The other man’s name was Wolenski, but she didn’t know his first name. He had been one of those she had been treating for a high fever and congestion.
She jumped as Bain’s AK-47 exploded, stitching both zombies with a line of bullet holes, none of which stopped them. Most of his bullets went wild and ripped through the windows, allowing in a rush of cold air.
“Bastards!” Bain yelled and raised his rifle again.
“Aim for the heads,” Brad suggested. The barrel of Brad’s Winchester didn’t seem to move at all, as he fired from his hip and shot Barrett in the forehead. The back of Barrett’s head flew off and splattered gore over a table and the floor. He toppled across the half-eaten corpse. Bain heeded Brad’s advice. He took a wider stance to brace himself and pulled the trigger again. This time, several bullets from his short burst blew apart the second zombies’ head. Bain looked pleased with himself, but then, after a few seconds, he lowered his AK-47 and began sobbing quietly.
“What’s wrong?” Brad asked.
“They were people once. I knew both of them. I shot them.”
Brad tried to offer words of comfort. “The people you knew are dead.”
Bain glared at him. “How do you know? Maybe they’re trapped inside, seeing what’s happening but unable to stop it.”
“It doesn’t matter. If either of them had tried to kill you yesterday and you had that gun in your hands, would you have not fired?”
Bain didn’t reply. Instead, he walked over to the small bar at one end of the galley and grabbed a bottle of liquor from behind the counter. He didn’t bother looking at the label. He simply unscrewed the lid, turned up the bottle, and took a long swig. Liz stared at the bodies on the floor. It seemed wrong to leave them lying there. She took three red-and-white-checkered tablecloths from a stack and spread one over each body. To her horror, each tablecloth immediately turned dark from the bloody corpses.
“Let’s check the dorm,” Brad said.
The emergency lighting in the corridor, intended to guide people to exits in case of fire, provided just enough light to discern the walls and floor around the lights. Deep pools of shadow dotted the corridor between the widely spaced lights. She hugged herself and shivered. Without heat, the interior of the base was already growing chilly. Soon it would become as cold as the air outside and they would freeze.
The winter dorm was a separate wing, one of two that gave Pod A its U-shaped appearance. Several of the doors lining the corridor were open. These disturbed her more than the closed ones. Moving carefully, she followed Brad into the dorm. They inspected each open room and knocked on each closed door they came to. Brad suggested that Liz act as their spokesperson as most of the crew would recognize her voice. Several times, guttural sounds accompanied by pounding or scratching at the door, met their inquiries – people turned zombie. In these instances, Brad made sure the locks were secure, drew an ‘X’ on the door with a felt marker, and left them as they were.
At one door, a voice answered Liz’s summons, but the occupant refused to open the door. She explained the situation and their intentions, and still he refused to cooperate. She could see Brad’s frustration mounting. They didn’t have time to play games.
She tried again. “There’s no power. The building will freeze soon. Zombies are loose. If you remain here, you’ll die.”
“Go away!” the person inside shouted.
Finally, pushed beyond his limit, Brad pushed Liz away from the door, shot out the lock, and kicked the door open. Inside, they found two people, Faith Menendez and Leon Grissom, the Ice Cube crewman who was Menendez’s latest folly. Grissom backed against the wall brandishing a fire ax. Liz held her breath, but after a few seconds, he lowered it. He glanced at Menendez lying in bed, no longer the beautiful heartbreaker she had been just a few days earlier. She was deathly pale with dark lines streaking her right cheek and circling her right eye like smudged mascara, but Liz’s heart sank as she realized the lines were not from running makeup. The sheet above Menendez’s breasts was heaving as she fought for each shallow breath. She could see in Grissom’s eyes that he knew that she was dying.
“Can you help her?” he asked her, his voice pleading.
She went to Menendez’s side, checked her pulse, and discovered that it was very weak. She pushed up the lid of one of Menendez’s eyes and noticed dark specks swimming in the iris. The fully dilated pupil did not blink. The white of her eye was mostly red. She threw back the sheet to reveal Menendez’s naked breasts covered with scaly, dead black skin. She suppressed a gasp at the sight.
She shook her head slowly. “She’s dying,” she whispered.
Grissom nodded. “I know, but I can’t leave her.”
“No one’s coming to help us,” Brad told him. “We’re gathering everyone to head for the coast. We’re leaving as soon as we can make preparations.” He glanced at Menendez. Liz followed his eyes. Once, a glimpse of her magnificent naked breasts would have aroused any male on the base. Now, she saw only sympathy in his eyes. “If she … passes before then, join us.”
“Leave me a Ski Doo. I’ll follow later.”
Liz covered Menendez with the sheet. Menendez’s eyes opened for just a second and stared at her before closing again. It was merely a reflex, but Liz imagined that she was pleading for help, help she could not offer. She looked at Grissom. He appeared exhausted by his death vigil. She doubted that he would leave the base, or that he could make the long trek to the coast alone, but she smiled and nodded.
“Keep the door locked,” Brad advised.
Once out of the room, she began to cry. She wasn’t sure why. Was she shedding tears for Menendez or for Grissom? Or maybe she was crying for herself, her disconnect from the reality of what was happening around her. Brad placed his arm around her shoulder, tentatively at first, to comfort her, but when she accepted his offer of solace and buried her face in his chest, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer.
“Don’t give up,” he whispered in her ear. “We’ll make it.”
She looked up at him. He had misinterpreted her display of emotion as surrender. “Give up? I’ll never give up. I’m crying because I’m a physician, and I can do nothing to help her, to help anyone. Leon is staying here with her. It should be me, but I want to live. I’m crying because I’m glad it’s not me lying there. I gave up on Ted and my marriage. He was in pain, angry and lashing out, but instead of being there for him, trying to work it out, I walked away. Maybe I resented being the breadwinner. I don’t know. I realize now that I should have attempted to understand. Instead, I ran away from him, from my job, and my life. I’m running now, but for a different reason. Ted is gone. That part of my lif
e is gone.”
She pulled away, but her hand remained pressed against Brad’s chest, reluctant to break contact with him. “Thanks, Brad. I understand what you meant, but you’ve got me all wrong. I’m no longer a doctor; I’m simply a survivor. Later, I hope I can be a doctor again.”
The core of her hardness surprised her. Maybe she was getting stronger. It seemed as if each death strengthened her. Like some kind of ghoulish vampire, she took the negative energy of death and wrapped herself in it, creating a cloak of invulnerability. She lived because she was afraid of dying.
“Everyone can’t be dead,” she said, basing her reasoning on hope rather than logic. “Somewhere out there, someone is working on a solution. We’ll find them.”
Brad glanced around the dark corridor. “I hope you’re right, but now, we need to search for survivors.”
* * * *
Sept. 2, Amundsen-Scott Base, Antarctica
Time mattered very little to the perpetual darkness outside or to the oppressive gloom inside the base. Each interminable hour morphed slowly into the next, little changed except for its passing. By two a.m. of the second day after their journey to the Russian tractor, Brad had been awake for nearly fifty-six hours and was on his last legs. They had spent hours checking each room. The physical exertion of breaking down so many doors to see what lay behind them had exhausted him. The mental torture of arguing with recalcitrant, frightened people had drained him emotionally. They had discovered at least two possible zombies behind locked doors and one person turned zombie ambling down the corridor. He had shot it to end its misery. They had also found four more people in the last stages of infection who would not survive long. For these few, like Faith Menendez, they could offer no comfort or solace. They could only seal the doors, mark it with an ‘X’, and hope for a miracle.
Between the two search groups, they had located and brought six people to the galley. Ten or eleven people were still missing somewhere inside the base. With no way of knowing if they were hiding or if they had already turned zombie, searching for them in Pod B or the outlying buildings would be too dangerous. Many of the survivors were too weak to travel, deliberately choosing to starve themselves rather than risk leaving the security of their rooms to find food. They would never survive the long journey to McMurdo. They would have to be nursed back to health. The plan to vacate the base as soon as possible had quickly become an impossible goal.
Heat became the first priority. Without the generators, the temperature inside the base dropped quickly, hovering just above freezing. Sous chef Mullins solved the heating problem by lighting all the propane burners in the kitchen and sealing off the galley from the rest of the base. They boarded up the window shattered by Bain’s wild shooting spree, creating a safe and cozy refuge. Food was plentiful and candles helped augment the emergency lighting. They shoved the tables to the edges of the room to provide space on the floor for blankets and makeshift beds.
Hughes and Lester returned to the Kharkovchanka in a snowmobile pulling sledges loaded with diesel to refuel the tractor and bring it to the base. Brad watched them leave from the upper rear deck of the dormitory. All of the people they had placed outside who had died of infection or from zombie bites had now turned into zombies. They patrolled the grounds around the base like silent sentinels. He regretted his decision not to burn the bodies as he had first intended. Several zombies followed the snowmobile as it left. He kept his rifle handy, but Hughes threaded a safe path through the zombies. Some of the creatures who had chased after the remotely controlled snowmobile bearing Mclean’s dead body had since returned. He tried not to dwell on what had happened to McLean’s corpse. He tried to bury any sympathy for the creatures prowling the darkness that had once been friends and acquaintances. Those people were dead, replaced by soulless beasts eager to kill him.
He kept his cold vigil until Hughes and Lester returned two hours later. The sight of the massive red vehicle lumbering out of the darkness with Hughes driving brought a lump of relief to his throat. It represented hope. He spotted one zombie edging too close to Lester’s snowmobile and dropped it with a single shot to the head. At the sound, several of the creatures turned away from the tractor and toward him, gathering at the foot of the stairs. He suppressed the urge to kill every zombie he saw, hating them for what they had become, but hating them more for what they represented. He tried to multiply their number by tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, and became sick to the stomach at the idea. Ammunition was too dear to waste unnecessarily in a blind rage. He allowed them to mass around the foot of the stairs. A few began slowly climbing. By the time the Russian tractor and the snowmobile were safely inside the garage, several of the creatures had managed to reach the first level. He retreated inside and secured the door behind him.
Moving down the dark corridor, he heard stirrings inside several of the locked rooms. More of the sick had died and turned into zombies. In some instances, the entire conversion process seemed to take only hours after death. He could well imagine the scenes of horror in heavily populated cities as hundreds or thousands of the recently deceased suddenly wakened with a craving for human flesh. The panic as people sought to flee the cities would have quickly become a stampede as overcrowded streets and freeways turned into bottlenecks.
Their own position was just as tentative. With heat and power, they could have secured the base against the creatures outside, but how could they protect themselves from themselves. If Liz was correct and everyone was infected, each person was a potential zombie.
Brad was grateful that Liz became more like her old self, tirelessly tending to the weak. She never rested. She moved among the survivors with words of comfort, bowls of food, and a ready smile. How much was merely an act, a façade of reassurance she presented for the others, he didn’t know, but the effect on them was remarkable. She was the base doctor, a physician, and as long as she projected an aura of hope to which they could cling, they rallied. He understood what it was costing her. He wished he could do a better job of masking his own doubts, but they leaked onto his features whenever he thought of what might become of them all. He found it easier to find other things to do rather than face their questioning eyes.
Lester provided him an excuse to avoid the other survivors.
“The emergency batteries will fail soon. If we crank up the emergency generator, we can at least have some lights.”
He realized that Lester was right. Searching for any other survivors would be much easier if they had lights. DeSousa, Reed and Hughes were busy readying the Kharkovchanka and the Sno-Cats for the journey to McMurdo. He recruited Lester, Bain, and Eugene Houseman, a computer programmer, to go with him to the emergency generator room. Once away from the warmth of the galley, the cold quickly closed in on them, as did the darkness. The lower level was even colder as the cold air settled. In the greenhouse, once the source of all their fresh vegetables, the plants had withered from the cold. One of the hydroponics lines had frozen and ruptured. Water seeping beneath the door into the corridor had frozen into a pool of ice.
“Did someone leave a door open somewhere?” Lester asked, pulling his parka’s hood over his head.
“We sealed all the outside doors as we searched,” Brad replied.
“Well I feel a draft,” Lester insisted. “It’s damn cold down here.”
“It’s just air moving from the colder part of the station,” Bain said.
Lester glanced at the weatherman and arched his eyebrows. “And just how is it doing that?”
Bain sighed and began lecturing Lester as if he were a first-year graduate student. “Look, it’s simple enough. Cold air is heavier than warm air. The cold air on level two is moving downward, forcing the warmer air on level one to move upward. It’s cyclical, the same way storm fronts operate.”
Lester grimaced. Bain’s condescending tone might have offended him, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. “No, I meant, where is the air coming from. We secured the fire doors on bot
h levels.” He glanced down the corridor. His light reflected from the slightly ajar fire door. “Someone’s opened them.”
The hairs on the back of Brad’s neck began standing at attention. Only one person would do that – Overton.
The emergency lighting was not functioning in Pod B. It was dark and cold, but it was not silent. Eerie noises drifted down the dark corridors. Sounds that might have been muffled footsteps and moans emanated from deep within the darkness. They could have come from frightened residents or from zombies. Brad swallowed to force down the growing lump in his throat and tightened his grip on the rifle. They reached the generator room without incident. To Brad, the maze of pipes and cables was as puzzling as a 3-D Rorschach inkblot test and as hopeless as a tangle of jungle vines. He half-expected to see a monkey clinging to the pipes, chattering at them. One wall sprouted panels and switches as if a mad sculptor had been busy with a torch and a screwdriver. He stood there dumbfounded, staring at them, and then turned to Lester.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Lester didn’t look or sound too convincing as he scratched his head and replied, “Looks simple enough. Bain, can you check the fuel tank?”
Brad motioned for Houseman to follow him. “Grab Bain’s AK-47. We’ll stand guard while he and Lester work.” They took up positions just outside the door. Brad stared down the corridor as he listened to the two men talking.
“It’s full of fuel,” Bain announced.
“Good. I’ll start her up,” Lester said.
The whine of the generator as the starter spun filled the room. The noise continued for a full minute before stopping. The silence that followed was disheartening.