Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  The doctor pointed to the deck below the level they were at, where water was rushing down the stairs to the deeper areas.

  “That just means that the hole is there. That big one must have had some seriously sharp claws to penetrate the hull of an icebreaker. It will take a long time for that level to fill with water. Everything below it needs to flood first.”

  “I’m still not going to take the chance. That level is where we set up the infirmary.”

  Suddenly, the knowledge that he would have to walk through the dark liquid brought the danger of the situation home. “All right. Let’s go.”

  They descended into the next level of the stairwell. The landing was covered with an inch of water. His black boots held it at bay, for now, but the sensation of the liquid slapping against it was extraordinarily unpleasant.

  “This way.”

  The corridor was illuminated by a single flickering light. It blinked on and off rhythmically, appearing to keep time with their footsteps. A single door opened into another room.

  The chamber was a small cabin with a single bunk and, thankfully, the lighting was working. The bunk was occupied; Javier could see Ingrid’s unmistakable blond hair spilling all the way to the floor.

  The doctor strode to a wheeled drip stand beside the bed. He pulled a needle out of his pocket, took a few seconds to prep it and injected the contents into the transparent rubber bag.

  Seconds later, the Swedish scientist began to stir. The doctor bent over her, slapped her wrist a few times and, within a couple of minutes had her sitting on the edge of the bed.

  At least Javier’s head and phone said it had been minutes. Everything else was screaming at him that they had to run, had to get the hell out of there now. The ship was sinking, dammit. Hurry!

  But the doctor refused to be rushed. He made sure Ingrid was wearing decent boots before he’d let her step into the frigid water. Only when he was satisfied did they trudge off to see to the other man.

  Javier tried to fight back the sensation that the water had gotten higher as they went. There was no way it could rise until the decks below flooded. And when that happened, he had a feeling they would sink before he could really begin to analyze everything.

  The sailor’s room was just around a corner. The hall there was dark, but the doctor knew where they were going. He navigated and entered the room.

  It was nearly pitch dark, but both Javier and the doctor had their phones with them. On came the flashlights, almost simultaneously—in Javier’s case, that came with a sigh of relief: after so many hours on the ice with a dead battery, having the phone back, complete with its clock and flashlight, made him feel like a citizen of the twenty-first century again.

  The sailor was gone.

  In his place was a mess of torn and tangled sheets covered in dark black blood.

  “Oh, God,” Javier said. He suddenly wanted nothing but to be out on the ice where he could see an animal coming from far away and get his shot in before the thing could reach him. “Let’s get out of here.”

  For once the doctor was amenable. They rushed out and headed towards the stairwell.

  A roar stopped them dead in their tracks.

  “That came from the stairs,” Javier said.

  “Are you sure? Aren’t those things too big for that space?” the doctor said.

  “They’re big, but only the head is inflexible. If it can squeeze the skull through the opening, the body can follow eventually.”

  “All right. Let’s try to get out some other set of stairs.”

  They ran back the way they’d come, splashes echoing loudly in the confined space of the corridor. Now that they were moving quickly, Javier felt the water splash over the top of his boots and seep inside. He suppressed a gasp; he thought he’d become inured to the cold after so much time on ice and snow, but getting water from the Antarctic Sea in your shoes was another level of cold entirely. It was painful to the touch.

  There was a stairwell across the ship, on the starboard side. They reached the cross tunnel and traversed it, but the stairs stopped in a tangle of bent metal meters above their heads.

  “Crap. I remember this now,” Javier said. “The big monster demolished this whole area.”

  “Then we need to try to get out through the stairs in the stern.”

  “Damnit.”

  They ran aft. Javier soon realized that it wasn’t his imagination. The water level was definitely getting higher. Maybe it was just because they were nearing the hole in the hull, or maybe…

  Javier shut down that line of thought. If there was one thing he didn’t want to be thinking about it was alternative explanations to that.

  So he thought about how the hell one of the nothosaurs had gotten below decks without anyone noticing. Of course, the crew had had other problems at the time, but it still seemed a fantastic thing to miss.

  Another roar brought him back from his reverie. There was a monster somewhere behind them, and it didn’t seem the least bit concerned that the ship was sinking.

  They sloshed around another corner and came to a stop. Ten meters away, water was gushing into the corridor in a torrent. For three meters, the water frothed at waist level before pouring down to the two-inch high slurry they were wading through.

  “We can’t go that way!” the doctor exclaimed.

  Scratching and snuffing sounds came from behind.

  “We’re going to have to,” Javier responded grimly.

  Pulling the stunned Ingrid along, they advanced towards the torrent. It felt like wading against the current in a stream swollen by snowmelt. Despite the danger, the shock of the freezing water was almost too much to bear. Javier wanted to turn back and run the way they’d come. A prehistoric monster would be a small challenge compared to the pain of this water. How long before hypothermia took him?

  As they got deeper, Javier felt Ingrid’s wet hand beginning to slip, and then she was gone, tumbling along to lie where the water level tapered off.

  “Damn,” Javier said. He turned back and, letting the torrent push him, he shouldered past the doctor and knelt next to the Swede.

  Grunting, he lifted her onto his shoulders in the same fireman’s carry he’d used before and began to work against the torrent once again. He was certain that each step would be his last, that razor claws or dagger teeth would tear into him from behind at any moment.

  His skin crawled, but he resisted the urge to look behind. He needed all his strength to fight the water, to keep his numb legs from giving out under the weight of the two bodies.

  It was like being back in his first officer training camp. He was exhausted, but he knew that he could only succeed if he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. The stakes back then had been a career in the military, a respectable position in society and the respect of his family… Now it was life and death, but the fundamentals were the same: keep moving forward, don’t give up, don’t let anything distract you. Ignore the pain.

  That last one was becoming increasingly hard. His legs trembled with each step. But if he fell now, it wasn’t just his own life he’d be throwing away, but Ingrid’s as well.

  They reached the bubbling fountain of water. The strength of the torrent here was almost overwhelming but, with a final groaning push, he made it past.

  Now the water was pushing him in the way they needed to go. He put Ingrid on the ground in front of him.

  “Can you walk?”

  She nodded, eyes wide.

  “Good, stay in front of me.”

  The doctor was waiting for them, an anxious look on his face. “We need to move.”

  The water on this side of the torrent was pooling higher than the other. Evidently, it wasn’t draining as quickly, and reached the top of Javier’s boots, above his ankles.

  They began to trudge along when suddenly a wave hit them from behind, slamming into the back of Javier’s knees and nearly knocking him over. Ingrid did fall, and for a terrifying moment, she disappeared
under the surface of the gelid water before her head popped back out, spluttering and cursing.

  “Shit,” Javier said. He turned back, expecting to see the bubbling brook turned into a raging river.

  What he actually saw was even worse. The enormous mass of the nothosaur behind them was standing right in the water’s path, diverting a stream in their direction.

  “Run!” he cried.

  The doctor wasted no time in setting off down the long hall. By the time Javier had dragged Ingrid back to her feet and set off after him, the man had disappeared around a corner.

  The Swedish scientist seemed to have been revived by her icy dunking and she shook him off and sprinted.

  Javier was certain that the next thing he’d feel would be the slicing open of his back, the feeling of claws that meant death was nigh. Only when he reached the corner did the itching between his shoulder blades die down. He even risked glancing back at the pursuing monster as he turned. It had been made sluggish by the cold water… or something. It appeared to be trying to get its bearings.

  Then it roared and Javier decided not to stick around to see how long it would take to react. He closed the gap on Ingrid and they reached the door—unfortunately, it was a flimsy wooden door instead of the more nautically traditional metal hatch.

  They still tried to close it behind them, but moving the door through six inches of water proved impossible. Just as well, it wouldn’t have slowed the creature down for more than a few seconds.

  The ship lurched sickeningly. “We’d better get the hell out of here,” the doctor said.

  “You’re just now realizing that?” Javier replied. He knew he was getting rattled—the sarcasm had mostly been beaten out of him in officer school, to be used only on training exercises and on wiseass enlisted men and junior officers, never in live-fire situations. And this one was about as live-fire as situations got.

  A roar behind them apparently signified that the monster had gotten its bearings. If form held, that meant it would come barreling down the hall at any moment.

  The aft staircase was only a single broad flight that led into a storage unit on the first level beneath the deck. Piled crates of supplies intended to last for a year in Antarctica teetered precariously on all sides except for directly ahead, where one of the piles had collapsed in the direction of the ship’s lean and was blocking their path.

  Javier didn’t complain: at least there was no water on this level.

  He jumped onto the nearest crate and helped Ingrid up. Other boxes, high overhead, loomed over them, held in place by straps tensed to the breaking point.

  The nothosaur’s head appeared at the top of the stairs. They turned and ran again, heading aft. Javier could see sunlight ahead of them, less than twenty meters away. All three were sprinting at full tilt. He’d never thought he could possibly be grateful for that wan illumination but right then it was the most perfectly beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  The ship lurched again, and it suddenly became extremely difficult to remain upright. Javier had to correct and run to the right for the final few meters, or he would have slammed into the far wall. Crates shifted ominously and a bright red fire extinguisher rolled across the floor and stopped against the wall with a crash.

  Behind them—too close for comfort—the nothosaur was having even more trouble than the humans. With a skittering of claws against metal, it lost purchase and slid downwards.

  It went down in a tangle of legs, neck, scales and crates.

  The respite allowed Javier to burst into the sunlight. He realized that they’d been running through the storage area under the heliport, and had emerged onto the rearmost deck of the ship.

  The ice lay only a couple of meters below their position, and the doctor had already jumped over. He was encouraging Ingrid to jump down after him.

  “Come on!”

  “This is going to hurt,” she replied.

  “I’ll catch you,” he said. “And if you miss, I’ll stitch you back together. It will be much easier than having to repair teeth marks again.”

  Javier didn’t bother to join the conversation. He slowed just enough as he ran past to put an arm around her and launch both of them from the ship.

  They landed on a pile of ground snow which cushioned the impact, but Javier still had the breath knocked out of him. He stood with difficulty and brushed himself off.

  The rising wind had blown ice crystals into the air again, infusing the light with a milky glow. For a moment, Javier recalled Camila’s assertion that they were stuck in some kind of demonic time loop, forever condemned to live out the single day that stretched to infinity. It almost seemed that way. Kill one monster, another landed on top of you.

  What if she was right?

  A woman’s scream in the distance brought him out of his reverie. Was it Natasha? He didn’t stop to find out: ignoring the difficulty in breathing, Javier jumped to his feet and sprinted across the snow as quickly as he could without falling.

  Chapter 24

  Every nightmare scenario flashed through his mind. He saw Natasha disemboweled, two nothosaurs fighting over her entrails. He saw her beheaded. Or maimed and left to bleed out while he could do nothing but watch and hold her hand as she died.

  They’d dropped off the tilting icebreaker on the opposite side from where they’d left the knot of sailors and it was impossible to go around the back due to the channel in the ice where the ship had broken its way through. That meant he had to run along the entire length of the Irizar and circle around the prow.

  Slipping and sliding in his anxiety to get around the corner and see what was going on, Javier ran. It seemed to take forever in this place of diffuse light and non-existent shadows.

  He finally reached the prow and desperately searched for the group they’d left there. There was no one to be seen, just the scattered detritus of their party: a couple of bottles of champagne and a discarded jacket.

  Javier stopped. “Natasha!” he shouted.

  Gunfire erupted just beyond a ridge so he sprinted in that direction. Just below, five sailors and, to his relief, Natasha, were retreating from one of the monsters. For all he knew, it might be the same one that they’d encountered on the Irizar, a creature who’d decided to make it its business to terrorize the survivors of the expedition.

  The body of a soldier lay in a pool of his own blood a little further back in the direction they’d come from.

  The little group was retreating back the way it had come and Javier lay perfectly still at the edge of the ridge. Natasha passed almost within arm’s length, but he didn’t want to move in case it set the creature off. He didn’t dare move, and even tried to breathe into the snow so the condensation from his breath wouldn’t be visible.

  Suddenly, the nothosaur charged, galloping with that gait that always reminded Javier of horses.

  The sailors retreated, walking backward as fast as they could. Natasha brought the gun up and fired once, but she didn’t hit anything. The sailor with the FAL was shaking so badly he would have been hard-pressed to hit the ice if he’d been trying to hit it.

  The monster would be upon them in seconds. They just didn’t seem to have any concept of how to defend themselves. In all fairness, they were probably still more than a little drunk—they’d put away pretty much the entire contents of several cases of spirits that had survived unscathed in storage.

  He acted before he had a chance to think. Suddenly, as if of its own accord, his body was airborne, just as the prehistoric horror passed underneath.

  He landed on the neck near the head, and grabbed on with both hands. To Javier’s relief, his arms closed around the creature’s neck. He tried to pull them closed, to cut off its air supply, to strangle it.

  There was no way in the world that was ever going to work. It was like trying to squeeze a concrete pillar.

  All he could do was to try and hold on for dear life. He closed his eyes and rode out the bucking and jumping. A smell of decomposing flesh an
d death reached him from the creature’s mouth as it tried to tear him off. But he was too close to its head for that to work. The teeth couldn’t reach him.

  Next, the thing tried to claw him off, but, again, it couldn’t quite bend its legs to where he was located. For a second, Javier was thankful that his opponent had a brain the size of a walnut: had it been a little more intelligent, it probably would have realized that Javier could be brought into range by bending its neck.

  The thought didn’t last long. Javier was busy trying to stay on its neck. He knew that as soon as he hit the ground, death would follow within seconds.

  “Javier!” Natasha’s voice cut through the cold air like a sword.

  Getting his eyes to focus was difficult. He was taking a thorough thrashing. Finally, the beast swung Natasha into view. She was five or six meters away, pointing the gun at the creature.

  “Don’t shoot!” he shouted.

  She shook her head and he realized that she wasn’t aiming. She was showing him she had the gun. She wanted to give it to him.

  “No! Run away!”

  He couldn’t hold on much longer, and though the sailors had gotten out of sight, his sacrifice would be for nothing if Natasha was killed.

  Trying to time the bucking correctly, Javier let go of the nothosaur’s neck. He arced through the air and landed with a crash three meters from Natasha’s feet. He tried to stand, but his leg gave out under him. The constant beating from the expedition had finally taken its toll. He got to his knees and awaited the slavering maw.

  “Catch!”

  Natasha threw his Browning. It landed on the ice in front of him and only lightning reflexes heightened by the immense pain kept it from sliding away. The creature lunged towards him, enraged at the puny creature who’d dared to inconvenience it by jumping on its neck.

  Javier was quicker. Up came the muzzle of the gun and he fired. Once again, he found himself emptying a barrel into a nothosaur. He hadn’t been counting, but if he killed this one, he was probably the single person most responsible for the re-extinction of the nothosaur. Asteroids had nothing on him.