Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “What do we do?” Ernesto said.

  “I think we should stay as quiet as possible. I’ll keep watch,” Camila replied.

  At first she couldn’t understand why the reptiles were milling about as though they were confused. Then the soldiers came into view over a slight rise and the sounds of distant cracks began to make sense. She took some satisfaction from the fact that only three of the black-clad soldiers were visible… and hoped that the missing man had died painfully.

  Then, to her disbelief, the smaller creatures broke and ran under the hail of bullets and headed straight towards the base.

  “They’re coming,” Camila whispered.

  “Of course they are,” Ernesto moaned. “We’re all going to die.”

  “Not so loud. Just keep still. The door is blocked.”

  She took her face away from the tiny chink, allowing the eternal sunlight to seep into the room. The outlines of the door and the drums staked in front of it became visible and she wondered whether the door could possibly hold. Their defenses were awfully thin.

  A shadow flitted past their bunker only a few meters away. Camila attempted to warn the others… but the words stuck in her mouth. She was too frightened to speak.

  Bang!

  One of the creatures crashed against the door. Inside the confined space, the sound was like an explosion. Camila whimpered. She couldn’t move.

  Crash followed crash and the door began to deform. Light could now be seen around its edges, and the bulging impact marks showed where something had struck with superhuman force.

  One of the drums fell away and rolled to one side. Ernesto ran forward and manhandled it back into place, desperation lending him strength.

  Now Camila could see the fatal flaw in their defenses. The drums only reached halfway up the door. The upper half was unblocked. A human, of course, would have found himself stymied by this arrangement: he wouldn’t have had the strength to bend the top half of the door out of the way.

  The creatures outside had no such limitations. Though the blows against the doorway appeared to be equally distributed along its height, the ones on the upper reaches were inexorably knocking pieces out of the door. Splinters showered the pile of debris beneath. Even if the creatures weren’t smart enough to take advantage of the weakness, they would still kill her in the end.

  A sudden blow against the top half of the door knocked out a board and allowed light in. The interior of their bunker became bright enough to see clearly.

  Now the creatures realized where the weakness was. She remembered having read that dinosaurs, even the biggest of them, had brains the size of a walnut. Whether that was true or not, she had no idea, but even if it was, it appeared that a walnut-sized brain was all an animal needed to realize that where a hole had appeared, a hole could be made bigger. Subsequent strikes all landed on the upper portion of the door.

  The view out allowed Camila to see how the dinosaurs—from this distance, she had no doubt that that was that they were—attacked. They weren’t using their armored claws as she’d imagined, but bashing the door with their heads, swinging the heavy skulls on long, muscular necks. It looked painful, but she assumed that the skull had some kind of armor plating… and that the creatures’ brains really were as small as advertised.

  Two more strikes were enough. The entire top half of the wooden door toppled inward with a crack that resonated in the enclosed space like the Trump of Doom. Four heads attempted to crowd into the resulting opening at the same time. Then they disappeared from view, and growls and grunts—a scuffle for primacy?—filled the room. Finally, a head squeezed through the opening and a single pair of eyes studied them.

  The look reminded Camila of a fat woman at a buffet. The head turned from Ernesto to Ingrid and back again, as if unsure which to nibble on first.

  The Swedish woman panicked. She threw herself to one side, trying to take cover in the safety of the room’s depths, but the effect was exactly the opposite. Attracted by the movement, the creature struck.

  Ingrid vanished. One moment she was trying to dive behind a pile of boxes, and the next, she was simply gone. Camila supposed that the neck must have stretched forward and that the creature must have grasped her in its jaws… but it happened too fast for Camila to be certain. A bump against the door—probably Ingrid being dragged through an opening too small for a fully extended human—and then the head in the opening was gone.

  Camila pressed her eye against the chink to watch the creature disappear towards the sea, Ingrid’s blond hair trailing in the wind. It seemed that Ingrid was actually striking it with her free arm. Could she possibly still be alive? Camila didn’t think it was possible, the movement of the creature must have been shaking the arm.

  Then she realized just how lucky Ingrid actually was: her ordeal was over, while the rest of them would also die, but still had to suffer first. Another head appeared in the opening, and wasted no time in poking deep into the room. It came straight towards Camila. She screamed, and felt her bladder letting go, warmly soaking her pants. She didn’t care. She was going to die.

  Ernesto attacked the thing’s neck with a section of wooden plank he’d pulled from the pile at the door. He landed a colossal blow just below the back of the creature’s head.

  The monster felt the blow but didn’t appear to suffer any damage from it. It just turned its head towards the tiny human attempting to attack. Ernesto shouted with rage and struck it again. This blow never landed because the creature dodged with unexpected speed and closed its huge jaws over the plank… and over much of Ernesto’s arm.

  A sickening crunch echoed over the concrete and the creature swallowed: plank and arm disappeared.

  Ernesto stood for a moment, staring uncomprehendingly at the stump that was pouring blood onto the floor. He swayed and looked like he was about to fall, but the creature moved too fast. This time Camila saw it close its jaws around his torso and grasp. There was no chance that Ernesto would survive the wounds the teeth made as they opened the skin of his gut and tore into his intestines.

  Then, like Ingrid before him, Ernesto was dragged out. Droplets of his blood landed in front of her and he disappeared into the distance, screaming and unsuccessfully trying to keep his intestines on the inside.

  Another head appeared. She’d known it would. There would be no quarter until they were all dead. There had been four monsters outside, she remembered. There were four of them inside—or at least there had been at the beginning. This obviously wasn’t just coincidence. A plan, something sinister orchestrated by the forces of the universe itself, some kind of karmic action she couldn’t fathom, was at work.

  Camila decided to get it over with. She took two steps towards the colossal head. It was important to be killed quickly; she didn’t want to die like Ernesto, with her guts hanging out and her limbs bitten off. It was bad enough that she would die covered in her own pee.

  Anderson yelled. “Don’t just stand there looking at it, shoot the thing. Shoot it!”

  She turned to look, uncomprehending. He’d grabbed on to a pipe, a metal water pipe that obviously served the astronomical instruments above them. The pipe was embedded in the concrete.

  Unfortunately for Anderson, the creature also turned to look. It struck with lightning speed, gripping his leg and attempting to pull him away. But Anderson’s panicked grip was much stronger than the bite-weakened flesh of his thigh. The leg tore away in an arc of blood that splashed over Camila’s face.

  The man, however, kept screaming at her. “Shoot, oh, God, please, shoot it. Please.”

  The reptile bit him again. Camila watched, fascinated as the jaws opened wide—wide enough to encircle his waist, just above the hips. With a crunching of bone, the teeth, long as knives, took hold. Then, like a puppy worrying a chew toy, the reptile shook its head.

  Anderson shrieked, and then fell silent. Gobbets of meat flew everywhere, but nothing broke his death-grip on the pole. The top third of the Venezuelan student still
held on. It took the creature another couple of minutes to gnaw away the man’s arm and carry its prize out of the room, leaving the rest of the fragmented body scattered all over the place.

  As soon as it was gone, another head appeared. “Of course. I am going to die.” Camila was blubbering, talking to keep herself from fainting. “And look at me,” she said to the huge, malevolent head in front of her. “I’ve pissed myself. What will people say at my funeral?”

  She gestured towards her wet crotch, to show her humiliation to the monster that would end her life, and realized she was holding something. Her eyes fixed on a black shape, all business.

  The pilot’s pistol.

  Confusion lasted only a few seconds. Camila raised the gun and began firing just as the creature’s mouth flashed towards her. Her world was filled with teeth and tongue. She, in turn, filled the gaping maw with round after round. She expected the magazine to run out after the sixth bullet. But then it didn’t. Seven. Eight. Nine. She lost count somewhere around twelve, but the gun kept firing. After the bullets ran out, she kept pressing the trigger, again and again and again.

  When she stopped, the first thing she noticed was the pain in her arm and shoulder. The second was the ringing in her ears. Only after that did she recognize the fact that she was still alive.

  The creature was not. It might have a brain the size of a walnut, but the odds had been stacked in Camila’s favor. One of the rounds had to hit something vital… and one, evidently, had.

  She waited, Zenlike, for the next monstrous head to appear, for the following monster in the queue to pull back the corpse of its fellow and avenge it. She could already feel the blades of teeth tearing into her.

  But a minute passed, and then another. Nothing happened. A flicker of hope began to burn in her breast, but she quashed it. Why make the suffering worse? She would die there. That was all.

  And yet, she didn’t. The minutes turned to a half hour, and time stopped having meaning. She started feeling things other than fear and desperation. Cold. Her legs were cold, the urine against her skin was clammy and uncomfortable. The creature’s neck didn’t take up the entire opening. There was a gap wide enough to see out of, and wide enough to squeeze through if the coast was clear.

  She would leave. Evidently, the universe had decided that Camila didn’t deserve to die. She must have passed some cosmic test and been reserved for a different task… so she would live, but only if she managed to understand what that task might be.

  Camila went. There were no more creatures in sight as she left the charnel house. The snow was white all around her except where long red streaks headed towards the sea. Camila turned her back to those. She’d seen enough blood already.

  The buildings. They were red, too. She couldn’t go there. But it was that or the sea and the blood of her friends. She decided to dart between two of the structures, closing her eyes against the crimson of their walls.

  Success. Now there was nothing in front of her but pure white snow. She walked into the open plain, away from the sea and the buildings. Away from the red. One foot in front of the other until, when she turned, the buildings were just children’s toys in the distance. Then she kept walking until they were hidden by a ridge.

  There, she stopped and realized that she was thirsty. Kneeling on a soft white patch, she removed a glove and melted some snow in her hand, rejoicing in the bitter cold that told her she was alive. Then she drank the drops.

  Finally the pain of the cold made her stop. She put her glove back on.

  There was a gun in her other hand. She threw it away and walked some more. She stopped again when she could no longer see the black pistol in the snow behind her.

  The sky was wrong. That was why these things had happened to her. It was the sky; the sky was to blame. How could anything work correctly under a sun that never moved other than to change its position capriciously with the hours? It should be night by now. Darkness should make her safe from the monsters that roamed, protected by the velvet cloak of the heavens.

  But there was no night.

  There would never be another night.

  The wind picked up as she waited. Within minutes, snow particles that lay like dust upon everything around her, had been kicked up into the air. They hung suspended everywhere and made the blue expanse above her head even more alien and unbecoming. The sun, the ever-present monster in the sky, refracted off the crystals to create a halo around itself. She stared up at the ghostly circles of light and cried for night.

  The faces of her companions, men and women she’d selected herself, and who’d trusted her to bring them along, flashed before her. They were all dead now, and she’d seen most of them die with her own eyes. It was her fault.

  Even worse, Ernesto and Ingrid and Anderson had died awful deaths for no reason. She could have saved them all if only she’d remembered to use the gun.

  But she hadn’t. She’d failed them and let them die. They would never return to their families and friends, their lines of research—Nobel-worthy in the case of the Götthelm sisters—would be dropped forever, or passed on to researchers who would only give a passing note to the fact that the queries had been begun by someone else… if that.

  She cried. Her tears fell into the snow, and she watched them, expecting to see them turn into tiny frozen diamonds. Summer in Antarctica was determined to be disappointing, however. The temperature was nowhere near freezing and the tiny drops simply disappeared into the snow.

  Finally, her tears dried up, not because she wanted to stop but because she no longer had the physical capacity to cry.

  The sky mocked her and the ice crystals danced.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, realizing, as the words came out, that they were true.

  “Javier. Javier is a military man. He had to know what was going on, he certainly knew what he was leading us into. He’s the murderer, not me.”

  And the man had abandoned them on the flimsy pretext of going to find help. Ha! If he’d wanted to help them, he would never have brought them here.

  But that wasn’t the way that men—it was always men—in the military thought. They put civilian lives in danger because they were convinced that they were invincible, that they’d be able to deal with anything that came up, and that the civilians, if any were present, would be perfectly safe. In fact, it was better if civilians were there so someone could ooh and ahh at their macho antics.

  Of course, like everyone who took unnecessary risks, the lives of the people they were endangering meant much less to them than the possibility of showing off or going about on some great adventure.

  Adventurers never admitted they were wrong, and if someone dared to point it out, they banded together to defend themselves and mock the accuser as a worrier, a small-minded conservative. A brotherhood dedicated to taking risks with other’s lives, unassailable in their superior numbers.

  But she would show them. She’d get back to the Irizar and then to Buenos Aires. She’d report them to the police. She’d go on TV and write to the newspapers. She’d make people aware of what these cowboys were really like. It might not be enough to stop them in the future, but it would put this set of clowns, particularly Javier fucking Balzano, out of business.

  Camila remembered Ingrid—poor dead Ingrid—and her suspicions about Breen. Javier would have known about that, too. He was obvious about it, in fact. No one had ever pretended that the American was really part of the science crew. They hadn’t even bothered to try to make it look good.

  If she couldn’t make it back to the ship… well, then, if he was still alive, she would take matters into her own hands.

  She looked out over the empty white plains and grinned into the teeth of the wind. In this emptiness, the bastard wouldn’t have anywhere to hide.

  Perhaps it was time to see deserving blood spilled. God knew that enough innocent blood had fallen on the virgin wastes of the white continent.

  She faced the sea and began to retrace her step
s. There was no need to keep running into the endless interior of the landmass. Panic was gone now that she had a purpose. She knew why she’d been spared.

  “Javie-er…” she called into the wind. “I’m coming for you Javier.”

  Chapter 13

  The cave was a place of nightmares brought to life.

  They stared at the tableau in front of them, rooted to the ice. Now Javier understood why Natasha had needed to run out and empty her stomach. Even Breen, hardened as he likely was by his military and paramilitary background, looked a bit green around the gills. The Australian, on the other hand, just took the new horror dully. He appeared to still be in shock from the death of his lover, unable to take anything in, and even something as appalling as the scene before them held no power to move him.

  The mystery of what had become of the crew of the empty fishing boat and of the people stationed at the Argentine base was now solved.

  The deepest corner of the ice cave, the place where the top and bottom of the hole came together in an acute angle, was packed with frozen human bodies, piled in a roughly semicircular wall. Some still wore the red parkas of Argentina’s Antarctic missions, others had had those outer garments torn away. Some were completely naked, or wore only socks. A few of the bodies were mangled and missing limbs. A disembodied head had bled onto the ice and frozen there. Fortunately, it wasn’t anyone he knew, just some blond man with a scraggly beard who was most likely one of Natasha’s erstwhile shipmates.

  “Look at this,” Breen said after they’d all been standing with their mouths open for several heartbeats. Javier approached.

  At first, he couldn’t see what the American was going on about, but then he realized that the ice of the floor was streaked with parallel red lines. Javier’s stomach turned. He knew exactly what that was. “Fingers,” he said. It wasn’t a question.