by Ryder Stacy
Rock could dimly see the glint of other shotpistols being pulled out. A shot was fired—McCaughlin’s. His sled was furthest back, his dogs being the least able to achieve the needed speed. There was a yelp; Rock saw a furry shape tumble to a halt on the whiteness behind. A good shot!
The wolves spread out now, as if they knew to disperse reduced the risk of more than one wolf getting hit at a time. Rockson was dismayed. He’d hoped that they’d stop to eat the wolf who had fallen. Rock expected that some bloody meat, even of their own kind, would be sufficient to stall their attack. But they were intent on human meat, or dog meat, or a smorgasbord of both.
He sighted as best he could and fired at the nearest wolf. The thing howled and fell, rolling end over end. But again it did nothing to stop the advance of the others. They had spread out in a wide arc that was beginning to encircle the sleds like a vise, even as they flew over the ice. These were no ordinary wolves, Rock realized with a start. They had a strategy, a leader, they could communicate. He noticed a certain rhythm, a certain give-and-take in the seemingly random yelps. The damned things were communicating.
“Men—shout, make noise, keep firing. They’re talking wolf lingo to one another. We’ve got to drown out the commands the lead wolves are giving.”
Rock saw what appeared to be one of the leaders, a big brown wolf, catching the moonlight far off to the right. He had to get a good shot at him, but how? As the men continued firing at every opportunity, Rock leapt aboard the sled he had been gliding behind on his skis. His added weight further slowed down the team, but it couldn’t be helped.
He crawled forward over the blankets covering the supplies, felt a long frigid object—his Liberator .9mm rifle. He tore off the blankets and pulled the rifle out, switched on its laser sight, checked the clip. He lay belly down. The sled danced and swerved forward, guided by the panicked dogs. Rock swung the light-sensitive scope around the horizon, found the big brown leader wolf. He lined the thing’s mad eyes in the crosshairs and squeezed off a full clip of .9mm explosive slugs. He got it. He swung the rifle slowly around again. The laser night sight found another, much closer wolf. It was coming toward Rock from only yards away. Its huge fangs opened far apart, ready to slam shut on human meat.
Rockson turned his attention to this more immediate problem. The devil in gray fur leapt, was suddenly upon him, knocking the wind from him, raking his body with its huge claws, biting. Having no other weapon at hand, he swung the Liberator’s stock, used it to slam the drooling jaws from his jugular. The teeth imbedded instead in his right shoulder. Pain shot through him, then numbness. He had no more use of that arm. He slammed the rifle butt again and again into the teeth, but it was an exercise in futility, and the awful realization that the next time the oversized incisors bit into him it might be the end welled up in his soul.
But a solid blow stunned the wolf. Rockson pulled the thing to the side and, dangling precariously half off the speeding sled, threw the creature from him. Half his parka tore from his body, caught in the locked jaws of the monster. The wolf fell away. He was alone again on the sled. But more red eyes were just feet behind; he could hear their labored breathing.
A rifle shot rang out, then another—a whole burst—and the wolves immediately behind his sled tumbled like bloody snowballs. He saw McCaughlin’s sled zoom past him. McCaughlin flashed the thumbs-up.
Rockson, who somehow still had his short steel skis locked on, crawled back to the end of his sled and took his old position, hanging on for dear life as he made contact with the rapidly passing ice beneath him. He was nearly jerked off his feet, but held the handle with a steel grip in his good left hand. Somehow he managed not to fall. The full weight of his body gone now, the dogs increased speed. Any second, he half expected one of the huskies’ hearts to burst.
Tinglim pulled alongside him, yelling something, whipping his dogs like mad. “We’ve been separated,” he yelled. “Someone’s missing!”
Indeed, there were only five sleds now. The wolves suddenly were nowhere to be seen.
A howling chorus of wolves’ voices, a cry of victory—Rock knew that’s what it was—went out now. The chorus of hell-voices spoke of their triumph. They had a human and six dogs somewhere back there on the bloodstained ice, and they were already tearing their prey apart in their bloody jaws. The wolves had won—this round.
At the roaring fire that night, Rockson sat with his head buried in his hands. Pedersen, good old Pedersen—gone. He had liked the man. It wasn’t the way to die, ripped apart by wolves. But then there were few ways to go that were particularly pleasant.
And the death of Pedersen wasn’t the only thing troubling the Doomsday Warrior. There was the constant image of Archer. The big lug lay near death—or already dead—back in Ice City. And Rock himself had lost use of his right arm. Farrell, acting the medic again, had made it a sling. The throbbing pain reassured Rock that the arm still was alive, still connected despite the huge teeth wounds. Tinglim rubbed some bear salve in the wounds and the pain diminished. Tinglim told him, as the fire roared its red threat into the icy sky, “There is little danger of infection, wolves are very clean creatures. They don’t eat decayed meat, only fresh, warm flesh. And the salve I put on your wounds will knit them closed very very soon. You will see!”
More misfortune—and totally unexpected—found them before dawn. One of the best sled dogs slept too close to the fire. As a big stem cracked and popped in the fire, a hot coal burst out and caught in the dog’s pelt. The dog rose yelping and leapt into the woods. It didn’t yelp for long. Before anyone could go after it, its sounds were cut off by the snapping jaws of things huge and mean. They couldn’t sleep after that, as exhausted as they were.
Dawn came, its fingers of amber light like the hand of a cadaver reaching up for a chance of rebirth. But there was none. Just the barrenness of the dead forest they had camped in: Twisted, gnarled tree trunks and fallen branches, and around it a white barren wasteland stretching seemingly forever.
Rockson felt weary of spirit, not just of body, as he scanned the way ahead. It was so very cold—the belt thermometer said minus thirty. Could Killov still be alive out there? Or was his body sprawled under a dozen wolves, just foul meat. Somehow the bastard always survived. Only last month he’d had Killov in his sights and was about to dispatch the dark one to hell when the fiend pressed a button and rocketed away in an escape module that had snapped shut around his chair.
No, he lives, Rockson thought, I know it. He expects us to give up, to not follow him through this hellish frozen wasteland. But I will follow him to the gate of hell and beyond if I have to, to finish him off. I will stand over his dead body and pump slug after slug into it, make sure he stays dead. Pedersen and many other good men had been lost in the attempt to stop Killov. Their deaths must not be in vain. With Killov dead, the whole world could have a few decent nights’ sleep, Russians and Americans alike.
Scheransky took another antimatter meter reading. It indicated that Killov was about four days’ hard traveling ahead of them. The Russian major’s once plump, but now gaunt face was blistered and cracked from the cold. He had lost all his excess weight, too. He was trembling constantly, ever since Pedersen was lost. “Please, let us go back. This is insane. I can’t go on,” Scheransky pleaded.
“We go on, buddy,” Rock said. “Sorry.”
Scheransky threw a fit. “You Americans—you—you—are mad. Crazy. You—you are a suicidal race.”
“Maybe,” Rock said. “Maybe we are suicidal or maybe we just value freedom more than our lives.”
To get on as quickly as possible, Rock decided to cut the loads of the remaining sleds. He began to go through the supplies they carried. What could be dispensed with? There was only one answer: the heavy stoves—four out of five would have to go. Rockson hated to do it, but there was no choice. They moved too dangerously slow.
Food was now a problem too. Pedersen’s sled, the one that was lost, had had most of their food suppli
es on it. So, while the rest of the party remained camped, the three Ice City Eskimos, Ngaicook, Dalmok, and Zebok, strode off through the dead forest with their harpoons and rifles.
It was Zebok who found the first trace of the caribou family a few miles beyond the camp. The Eskimos followed the meandering trail of the three animals—past clump after clump of lichens that had been nibbled to the quick.
The men spread out when Ngaicook’s sensitive nose picked up the smell of the caribou.
Each of the Eskimos moved silently, surely, through the snow, careful to stay downwind from the quick creatures. If the caribou caught their scent before they were within range, they would be gone in an instant.
They came at the caribou buck and the two does in a small lichen-filled clearing. They had already decided to kill only the smallest of the three graceful creatures. It would be sufficient for the food requirement, and Eskimos did not kill for sport. They crept quietly to within a hundred feet of the group.
Suddenly the big buck looked up in alarm and began running. Ngaicook opened fire, and an instant later so did the others. The smallest doe fell immediately, dead before she hit the ground. After whispering their apologies in the dead animal’s ear, which was the Eskimo custom, they quickly cut all the meat from the animal and headed back toward Rockson and the others.
Jubilant voices shouted out praise for the good hunters. McCaughlin prepared a man-sized caribou steak dinner for all of the men. The rest of the meat was loaded, a bit to each sled, and after the dogs were fed the gristle and fattier parts—and the bones—they were on their way much fortified.
Twenty-One
After three more days of arduous travel, the cold and weary attack team came directly below the enormous volcanic mountain called Mount Draco. It was a mountain that hadn’t existed before the earth upheavals that had occurred in the atomic war four generations ago. Its towering twin 21,000-foot summits were loaded with glacial ice.
Rockson had the men stream out their sleds in a long single file as they passed to the west of the sometimes-lost-in-the-clouds peaks. He wanted the group to make as little noise as possible, for there was the danger of an avalanche.
The sleds were nearly beyond the pass and out in the flat snow of the plain again when the lead dog of Tinglim’s sled stepped on a sharp rock. He let out a yelp that set the other dogs to barking as if in sympathy.
There was a sharp crack far above. The giant mass of glacial ice somewhere in the cloud-covered slope above pulled free and started down.
The Doomsday Warrior thought it had sounded like an explosion.
With a sickening feeling in his stomach, Rockson screamed, “Mush—mush, you huskies,” and snapped the whip. His sled instantly lurched forward. The cracking above had given way to a rising rumble. It vibrated their sleds. A wall of ice began moving down the slopes above. The sleds behind Rock were losing ground, but he could still hear their panicked yelping dogs. The rumbling, like a thousand freight trains, was overtaking them. Rockson tensed his body as he expected to feel the crushing weight of a million tons of white death smash onto him and his team any second. He snapped the whip again and again as the dogs howled and panted, the rumbling sounds echoing and building louder and louder. It was a race against white death—a race that seemed futile.
The massive cloud of snow dust behind them blotted out the pale Arctic sun; the way grew so dark that he could barely see a thing. The massive death wave towered over them as if their sleds were some tiny insects about to be smashed to bits by the enormous white hammer of a giant.
The dogs pulled like they never had before, nearly bursting their strong canine hearts as the sleds began the climb up a foothill. The mighty masses of volcanic rock beneath the skids of the fleeing sleds shook as if there was an earthquake. Rockson glided on behind the sled, holding the vibrating handles for dear life.
The first of the snow waves struck the far side of the slope the men were on, but was unabated by the rise of terrain. First came the lighter powdery snow. Then came the rocks and ice boulders each the size of a house, smashing into and colliding with one another in one liquid wave. The huge tumbling things plummeted toward the puny creatures who were attempting to elude it.
The two sleds furthest back were enveloped by a fog of white powder that preceded the huge avalanche.
Rock put his sleds on a diagonal course—up the slope to the left. The sled strained, nearly turning over in its course. If they could reach even another hundred feet up the gently rolling hill, there was the slim chance the roaring avalanche would just pass them by, heading down the valley.
Looking back to make sure his men saw his move, Rock saw the awesome thousand-foot-high wall of snow moving forward. It looked like a whole planet was rolling at them. Rockson was enveloped in the white powder mist.
The avalanche was now a living thing, an evil entity determined to snuff out the intruders in its cold domain. The wall of ice and snow hollowed itself into one huge breakerlike wave.
Rockson searched for some cover. The roiling white powdery mist parted at that moment. There! To his left, barely visible between two boulders, was a blue darkness in the side of the snowslope. It looked like an ice cave. If they could only reach it . . .
Rather than screaming back to the men behind him, for his voice would be lost, the best thing Rockson could do was head there himself. He turned the team, nearly whipping the ears off the lead dogs to push them to the top speed possible. The Doomsday Warrior’s sled sped past the misshapen ice boulder, plunged into the blue-black darkness of the cave.
He could see nothing, but the echoing yips of his dogs and the icy ground grating under the sled told him they were still moving forward at great velocity. He pulled the flashlight out of his sealskin parka, lit it, and saw the precipice ahead—a fall into a nearly bottomless steaming abyss. He yanked back hard, nearly beheading the dogs who tumbled in a heap, bringing the sled to an abrupt stop. Suddenly he heard shouts, more dog yelps behind him. One after the other, the sleds had followed him into the ice cave.
They all heard the tremendous concussion of the snowmass hitting the mouth of the cave, the snowmass stopped short, though sealing them inside. Rock got off the sled and ran back to see who the hell had made it and who was buried forever beneath a million tons of ice.
Chen, Robinson, Detroit, McCaughlin, Tinglim, Scheransky, and himself were in. The Eskimo guides too had made it—miraculous.
They sat down, exhausted, in the lights of several flashlights, too exhausted to speak. After several minutes of stunned silence, Rockson rallied them to begin digging out. They whittled away at the snowmass with their shovels, depositing the snow in the steaming pit. “We don’t know,” confided Rockson, “how deep we’re buried. I’ve noticed that the temperature is rising. The volcanic steam will make this cave our watery tomb. We must dig as hard and fast as we can.”
After hours of exhausting digging, using the same method of cutting out blocks of ice that they had used to build the emergency igloo, they had accomplished little. The men were starting to breathe with difficulty. The air was filled with hot steam and, Rock suspected, sulphur gases from the abyss at the far end of the cave. It was choking them. The walls of the ice cave were melting, drips became rivulets of running water.
Soaked, they continued to frantically dig, passing the ice blocks to be dumped in the abyss.
Rockson wondered how long they could go on. The desperate team was near their last breaths—when suddenly there was a whoosh and a blast of frigid air.
They had reached the outside world!
They made sure their dogs and sleds were okay and then set off again. Rockson and the others were silent. The sun, which had been edging over the horizon, sank. The northern lights came on like a neon sign sending blue-green curtains across the starlit sky.
Rockson realized it hadn’t been sheer luck that he had found the ice cave that had saved them. It had been timing. If he hadn’t been at that precise place on the slope at the
exact moment when the ice cave was visible through the white mists, they would have all perished. Could the Ice Shaman’s delaying tactics have arranged it all? He would never know for sure.
On and on they plunged into the near-endless darkness of the forbidding northlands. After a brief rest stop, they spent the next twelve hours speeding across an enormous flat expanse. It grew colder by the hour. It was down to almost minus forty degrees and was still dropping by the time they joined together three tents and crawled into the shelter. They huddled close to the seal-oil heater that was their life-giver. But they were short of precious fuel and it had to be used sparingly.
Chen and McCaughlin had frostbitten feet. Rockson was deeply worried about them, but nothing could be done except to try to keep the flesh as warm as possible and move the injured tissue as much as possible to keep the blood circulating. Tinglim brought one dog—a precious lead dog that was whining a lot—into the cramped quarters. The big brownish husky had scarred feet. Rockson had a look. The pads of the dog’s feet were badly torn.
Rock greased its feet with fat cut from wolf meat. Tinglim lashed soft sealskin on the pads of the dog.
Rockson had never even thought of such a thing, dog boots. He was sure the dog would rip the makeshift shoes off, but the big gentle husky hunkered down and put its head on Rock’s lap. “They won’t accept shoes until they are actually bleeding,” Tinglim said. “Then they see the light. Necessity is the mother of acceptance.”
Rockson nodded. Perhaps, with Tinglim’s resourcefulness, they would yet win out against the northern hell.