by JE Gurley
The storm grew in fury as the small caravan of snow tractors slowly trekked north across the frozen wastes of Watson Escarpment toward McMurdo. It seemed odd to describe their direction as north, since they were moving almost perpendicular to their intended destination, but at the South Pole, all compasses pointed north. Winds off the ice sheet unhampered by any obstacle in its path reached speeds of sixty miles per hour, reducing visibility to near zero. The katabatic winds were a savage, hungry, howling beast seeking to obliterate them from its domain. Later, as they neared the coast, the winds would increase in strength as they fell from the two-mile-high frozen escarpment to sea level.
The snow tractors crawled along the wind-swept remnants of the snow road without stop for almost twenty hours carrying the remaining fourteen survivors of the forty-eight who had inhabited Amundsen-Scott Base, all of them weary, worried and disheartened. They approached the edge of the Transantarctic Range, a 2100-mile-long mountain range bisecting Antarctica with concern. Ahead, lay Leverett Glacier, a fifty-mile-long river of ice, four miles wide, their route down to the Ross Ice Shelf. The terrain became rougher with ten-foot-high sastrugi running like rows of sand dunes across their path. Rocky nunataks protruded through the ice and snow, the tips of solitary mountain peaks thousands of feet high, their roots buried in the bedrock of the continent. In such low visibility, any mistake could plunge the tractors into an ice crevasse or send them crashing into a wall of solid granite. Finally, exhausted and half-blinded by the near-whiteout conditions, DeSousa called a halt. He radioed the other two tractors to declare his intention.
The trio of vehicles parked close together in a triangle, providing a barrier against the raging wind through which the weary occupants could move safely from one vehicle to another, redistributing the uneven loads entailed by their hasty departure. Liz had slept fitfully in a series of short naps during the journey, jostled by the bouncing of the heavy tracked vehicle. Meals had been cold – bread, cheese, and canned fruit, served with hot tea brewed in a Russian electric percolator – and consumed in silence. No one spoke of the recent ordeal or of their expectations. A dark lethargy had settled upon the reticent riders, a combination of elation at escaping the destruction of the base and of guilt for being one of the few survivors. They had each left behind too many friends and colleagues. No one knew how many had succumbed to the zombie virus, or how many had found a secure place to hide only to perish in the fire or in its freezing aftermath. The Angel of Death hovered above all of them on silent wings. Each cough, each nervous twitch, produced a wave of unconscious recoil flowing through the crowd, subsiding only when the hapless offender proved he or she was not falling prey to the zombie virus.
Liz was overjoyed when Brad entered the Kharkovchanka. She was less enthused by the blast of frigid wind that accompanied him through the hermetically sealed door that separated the cab from the rest of the vehicle. His smile when he saw her thrilled her far more than she expected. She ran up to him and hugged him, surprising him at first, but he quickly responded by wrapping his arms around her. For that few seconds, she felt safe.
“I’m beat,” he said, as he pulled away.
She walked him to one of the bunks. “Sleep here for a while. How long are we stopping?”
“A few hours anyway. We need to refuel.”
“What then?”
“Hughes, Deen, and I are going ahead a ways to check the road.”
She didn’t know Brad as well as she wished, but she could tell that he was lying. “How far ahead?”
He grinned and scratched his head. “Well, we want to see what’s happening at McMurdo before traipsing in as a group.”
She sensed an underlying current of doubt in his voice. “You’re afraid everyone’s dead, aren’t you?”
Brad threw back his hood and sat on the edge of the bed. “There were a couple of hundred people at McMurdo. If they started turning zombie …”
He didn’t have to explain further. They had been unable to control thirty of the creatures. If a significant portion of the winter crew at McMurdo had become zombies running rampant, it would have been a massacre. She tried to curb her imagination, as her mind began to fill in the gory details. She could almost hear the screams of anguish and the pleas for help as friend attacked friend in a bloody, one-sided fight for survival. The survivors would have done as they had done – huddled alone or in small groups awaiting rescue or maybe they suspected that no rescue was coming and attempted to leave.
As she sat down beside Brad, her hand sought his. “I don’t want to die, not here in this frozen wasteland.” She looked into his tired face, her face own pleading with him. “Don’t go.”
His grip on her hand tightened. “I have to go. I started this whole thing.”
She looked away, not letting him see the tears she blinked away. Then she nodded. She knew she couldn’t hold him back. “You’re right. Get some sleep now.”
She released his hand reluctantly. He removed his parka, wadded it into a pillow, and stretched out on the bed. Within minutes, he was snoring softly.
Ten minutes later, the door of the Kharkovchanka flew open again. This time she paid no attention to the cold air. A man stuck his head in and yelled, “Doctor Strong! Someone is turning zombie.”
* * * *
It was a false alarm. In their fright, the people in the Sno-Cat had mistaken the coughing and choking of Singleterry as symptoms of the zombie disease. It was a heart attack. Weakened by his self-imposed starvation and by the trials of the evacuation, his heart had simply given out. As he lay across the rear seat, pale and gasping for breath, his eyes never left her face, as if he was fixing her features as an anchor to keep the last wisps of his soul from breaking the bonds of his fragile flesh. As she tried in vain to massage life back into his failing heart, the other passengers stood around outside in the freezing cold of the storm rather than risk being in the same space with him. She found she could bear them no ill will. They were simply frightened. When his heart finally succumbed, she sat back and wept, even though she hardly knew him. His death was just one more stain on her too-bloody hands. Even if she dismissed the other deaths as inevitable, unavoidable, she should have been able to save him. She had saved others before under similar circumstances. What she feared most was that in some dark recess in the back of her mind, she had asked herself, “Why bother?” What sort of future did he have, did any of them have? If no rescue awaited them at McMurdo, they had no way off the ice-bound continent, and it was unlikely that anyone would come to rescue them even when the seas thawed. Eventually, their supplies would run out – their food, their fuel. They would face being marooned on the most inhospitable place on Earth. Without rescue, their chances of survival were dismally small.
After she had sobbed out her grief, she cajoled two men into removing Singleterry’s body from the tractor. They hacked out a shallow depression in the ice with ice picks, and then without ceremony, placed him in the ice and covered him with snow. It was a pitiful end for any human being. She consoled herself with the fact that in ten thousand years, his perfectly preserved body would wind its way to the sea to feed the fish. She couldn’t shake off the depressing feeling that perhaps his fate was better than theirs was.
* * * *
With just a few words of departure to Liz and with pangs of regret at leaving her, Brad joined Hughes and Deen in the Sno-Cat. The storm was still raging. Travelling in the dark during a storm would have been a prelude to disaster at any other time, but they had no choice. Singleterry’s death had rattled people badly. One more such alarm, false or not, would drive them beyond the limit of their nerves. He didn’t want people wandering alone on the ice. It would mean a sentence of certain death.
Brad had noticed the depth of Liz’s anguish but could do nothing about it. The needs of the group came before her need or his. Hughes had been right about that. She was strong enough to snap out of the depression into which she had fallen. They all faced difficult choices. As a physicia
n, she was used to making such calls. The others looked to her for guidance. He was certain her instincts for helping others would take over eventually. He had to fight off the fog of doubt that threatened his mind. All his senses tingled, but he could pinpoint no specific danger, just a vague sense of dread.
Because of his intimate knowledge of the snow road, Deen drove the Sno-Cat, but Brad noticed the unease with which he stared into the blinding snow and darkness.
“Any problem?” he asked.
Deen’s grin didn’t alleviate Brad’s apprehension. “It’s just a lot harder than it was this summer. I can’t see as far as I could piss.”
Brad glanced at the speedometer – twenty miles per hour. “Then maybe you had better slow down.”
Deen waved his hand toward the windscreen. “There’s nothing out there for miles. It’s when we reach the edge of the glacier that I’ll need to take it easy.”
On his flight to Amundsen-Scott, Leverett Glacier had looked like a highway made of ice, spilling the contents of the Antarctic Plateau into the Ross Ice Shelf. He knew that close up it would be broken pressure ridges of ice thrusting like daggers into the air, crevasse that might reach hundreds of feet deep into the surrounding ice, and snow bridges that could collapse beneath them. Moving at five miles per hour in the twenty-four-hour daylight, the supply convoy had encountered no such difficulties, but they would be driving in total darkness, trying to find what few flags still marked the road. Without a functioning GPS satellite feed, they would depend upon Deen’s ability to locate a few familiar landmarks. Brad hoped Deen was up to the challenge.
Hughes showed no concern. He reclined in the rear seat softly humming to himself. Brad listened closely and recognized the song – Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. His eyes locked onto Brad’s, and he smiled.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you,” Brad shot at him, annoyed by his composure.
“I’m resigned to the journey. There’s a difference. If a problem arises that we can deal with, we will. If we can’t …” He shrugged.
“You sound like Charles Lester.”
“Lester has the right attitude. Worrying solves nothing. The worst that can happen is that we fall into an ice chasm. The next worst is that we get lost. If so, we just head for Mt. Erebus. We’ll find McMurdo.”
“I wish I could be as calm.”
“Sometimes it helps others just to look calm.”
Brad didn’t know if he should take Hughes’ remark as a slight or an admission that Hughes was more worried than he appeared. Their earlier row after Hendrickson’s death had increased the tension between them, but it had not yet arisen to the level of open confrontation. In spite of Hughes’ cold demeanor, Brad respected his knowledge and experience. They would depend on Hughes over the coming weeks. Deen continued driving for several more hours before asking Hughes to take over, but Deen swapped seats with Brad, alert and carefully observing the landscape through the snow. Finally, the peaks of the Harold Byrd Mountains and Tapley Mountains through which the Everett Glacier flowed showed their peaks in the distance. At times, Hughes reduced their speed to less than ten miles per hour as he picked a safe path between jagged pressure ridges, any of which could have ripped a hole in the Sno-Cat’s oil pan, stranding them in the frozen waste.
The dark and light banding of the glacier, a result of rocks relentlessly ground from the surrounding mountains and picked up and carried by the ice, was less visible from close up. Each separate river of ice flowed at a different speed. The boundaries where they met became tortured zones of fractured ice. At times, deep crevasses yawned just feet from the rubber treads of the Sno-Cat. Near the lower end of the glacier, where it spilled into the frozen sea, the banding became wider and the fractures more numerous.
On the third day of their journey, as Brad regarded with trepidation one chasm that he considered a trifle too close, the vehicle suddenly lurched and began to tilt toward the crevasse. He grabbed the edge of the seat and hung on as Hughes cursed from the driver’s seat of the vehicle.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Ice quake. A piece of the wall broke away beneath us.”
At first, Brad thought that Hughes was rocking the Sno-Cat forward and backwards in an attempt to dislodge it. He quickly realized the tractor was not the only thing in motion. Rills of ice shattered and toppled. The ground rose and fell in graceful waves. The crevasse upon which they were perched split wider as the far edge broke away with the sound of dried twigs snapping and tumbled into the Stygian depths. Brad closed his eyes and waited for the final lurch that would send them plunging over the edge to their deaths. After several breathless seconds, the trembling stopped. They were still alive, but still trapped.
Hughes gunned the engine. Three of the treads tossed plumes of ice and snow into the air as the fourth spun uselessly. The Sno-Cat didn’t budge from its precarious perch. In fact, the tractor tilted even farther toward the precipice.
Deen began donning his anorak and heavy mittens, and then looked at Brad. “I’ll need some help. We’ll have to shove something under the right rear tread to gain some traction.”
Brad didn’t hesitate. Without the tractor, they would die. He began dressing for outside. “What can we use?”
“There should be some aluminum ladders secured to the back of the tractor. They might be enough. If we lay them across the crevasse, the Sno-Cat might be able to crawl along one to solid ground.”
“If they aren’t?” he asked, knowing he would not like the answer.
“If we keep rocking it, it’s going to slide in. We’ll be on foot.”
Brad understood the consequences of that. They could never make it to McMurdo on foot and might never find the other vehicles if they tried to backtrack. Outside, staring into the depths of the crevasse, he was glad it hadn’t suddenly opened up beneath them. The seemingly bottomless split in the ice was thirty feet long and eleven feet wide, easily large enough to swallow the Sno-Cat. Working carefully along the brittle edge of the yawning chasm, they placed the ladders just at the front edge of the right rear tread. The two extension ladders were each just twelve feet in length. Their legs barely clung to the edges of the chasm. If they slipped into the crevasse, they would have nothing with which to free the vehicle.
Satisfied that the ladder placement was correct, Deen opened the cab door. “Don’t gun it,” he cautioned Hughes. “Just move forward onto the ladders.”
The Sno-Cat inched forward. One of the ladders slipped slightly.
“Stop!” Deen yelled.
He jumped down from the tractor and began rummaging through a storage bin, where he found a bag of pitons used for ice climbing. Using a hammer, he carefully drove several of the metal pitons into the ice behind the ladders. Then, to Brad’s amazement, he secured a nylon climbing rope to one of the ladders, and then tied the rope around his waist.
Seeing Brad’s consternation, he said, “If we lose the ladders, we die.”
Deen lay on the ice, his head just inches from the tractor tread as he said, “Okay, try it again.” If the tractor slewed sideways, it would crush him.
Brad stood well back and watched as Hughes inched the Sno-Cat onto the aluminum ladder. He glanced through the open door at Hughes. From the slight smile on Hughes’ face, he was certain that Hughes was enjoying himself. Brad felt like throwing up. He admired Hughes’ guts, but wondered at the temperament of a man who faced death with such glee. He had always hoped that he could face death without fear, but had never considered tempting death for a thrill. During his years hunting in the frigid North Dakota winters, he had always travelled prepared for emergencies. The closest he had come was when a bear had wrecked his camp and had eaten his food. Even days away from his vehicle, he had not felt as much concern as he did now. Then, he had broken the ice on a river and caught fish to survive the long trek back to his jeep. Here, the danger was much more intimate.
The ladder shuddered and bowed as it accepted the weight of the t
ractor. The pitons bent as the movement of the tread pressed the ladder against them, but the right rear tread clambered atop the first ladder. With the additional support, the tractor moved forward but still dangled precariously over the precipice. Brad held his breath as the tread edged toward solid ice. Now, both ladders supported it. Suddenly, two of the pitons popped free of the ice. The first ladder slipped, plunging into the chasm. The second, roped ladder shifted, sliding toward the edge. Deen leaped backwards, dug his heels into the ice, and pulled on the rope with all his strength. For a few seconds, it appeared that Deen was supporting the entire weight of the tractor. Then, the errant tread was on solid ice and the tractor shot forward. Brad relaxed the fist he had kept clenched throughout the entire ordeal and exhaled.
As Deen lay sprawled on the ice, breathing hard from his exertions, Brad walked over to help him to his feet. To his horror, the second ladder broke free and tumbled into the crevasse. The rope snapped taut around Deen’s waist. Deen grasped the rope with both hands and held on, but the momentum of the heavy ladder yanked him forward across the slippery ice. His upper body disappeared from view. Brad had no time to think. He leaped into the air and grabbed Deen’s feet just as they slid over the edge. Now, he was holding the full weight of both Deen and the ladder. His arms felt as if being pulled from his shoulder sockets, but he couldn’t let go. If he did, Deen would die. His body began to slide forward. He tried to dig the toes of his boots into the ice for purchase, but he was inching inexorably forward to his death.
Hands gripped his ankles.
“Got you,” Hughes yelled.