Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (18 page)

Sasha flipped the switch one channel lower. She indicated their location and the fact that they were in need of help. The familiar voice of Helga Murgo filled the room. “The time is drawing nearer. All polar champions must be ready. Meet me in High Desert Town. The time is drawing nearer. Soon, the master will come. All polar champions must be ready.”

Vincent snatched the radio from Sasha’s hand and flipped the switch to transmit.

“Helga, I insist that you stop this at once. This is Vincent. Please radio for help, for yourself and for the rest of us here at the Arctic station. If you don’t, I will be forced to come there myself today and relieve you of your duties.”

Vincent removed his finger from the transmit switch to hear gales of cackly laughter from Helga.

“She’s just not herself,” Vincent said. “Something must have happened to her. Maybe she hit her head as well.”

Sasha regarded her planned traveling companion doubtfully. She had scribbled down the last portion of Helga’s words on a piece of paper. “Meet me in High Desert Town.” She was sure no such place existed. She would have to see if there was an atlas in the station.

“The polar regions must be represented,” Helga replied. “Choose your champion carefully.”

“This is ridiculous,” Sasha said, flipping off the radio. She rose and walked over to the gun locker and tried to rattle the heavy metal door. Soren definitely took laws about locking up your guns seriously, although she supposed hosting prison work programs would necessitate that. The lock and door seemed industrial grade and not easily pried open, even with a crowbar.

A fragment of memory slipped through her mind, Edie’s bloodied body, stuff all over her room. The black barrel of something that could have been a gun. Perhaps she could shoot the gun locker open.

“Where have the two of you been sleeping?” she demanded.

“In the extra rooms in the west wing,” Amber said. “We haven’t gone into the dead body wing, thank you very much. Soren should have dealt with that.”

“Sorry, I think he was a little busy,” Sasha said without even looking at Amber.

Cautiously, she opened the door to the east wing. The putrid smell hit her at once. She returned to the main room where Amber and Vincent watched her curiously and grabbed a spare parka. If she opened the emergency exit door at the end of the hallway, she could air the wing out.

“Do you need my help?” Vincent asked.

Timber had walked over to join Sasha, and she shook her head at Vincent. “I’m okay. I just need to get something.”

She reentered the wing with Timber, pulled her balaclava up over her nose, and ran for the emergency door, flinging it wide. Frigid Arctic air and drifts of snow poured in. She would just leave it to air out for a bit.

On her way back down the hall to the door to the common room, Sasha glanced into Kyle’s room. When they had been here a few days ago, it had been as neat as a pin, the bed made with military precision and everything in its place, except for the overturned bedside table, which was odd, Sasha decided upon reflection, given that they had all been disrupted by the blindness and attack on the station in the middle of the night. Who would stop to make their bed?

However neat the room had been two days ago, it was not now. Papers lay all around the room, the blankets and sheets had been pulled from the bed and were piled in a corner, and all of Kyle’s meager belongings had been emptied from the drawers on top of the sheets and blankets.

Amber? Sasha doubted it. Someone else had been here. And where, for that matter, was Kyle? He had simply vanished. Was he, like Robert and Cal turned out to be, somehow involved in all of this? Whatever
this
turned out to be.

She turned in a slow circle in Kyle’s room, gazing at the floor. All of the papers seemed related to their research on the pack ice. She recognized her own handwriting and their data charts and maps.

The emergency door banged hard against the side of the station. She jumped, but then took a deep breath. The wind probably. She poked her head out of Kyle’s room. Timber stood in the hallway like a sentry, unmoving and unconcerned. The smell had dissipated. She should just go into Edie’s room, look for the gun and get out of here.

Edie’s room remained as it had been, but it had been askew before, and Sasha had only glanced into it for a few seconds, so she couldn’t be sure. She tried to keep her eyes averted from the corpse as much as possible. She had seen the black object in Edie’s suitcase. Rifling around though, she only uncovered long underwear, sweaters and other pieces of Edie’s clothing. No gun. She had probably just imagined seeing it…or someone had taken it.

She rose to leave, keeping her back to Edie. Her eyes caught the corner of something under the standard-issue wardrobe that occupied all of the rooms at the station. It was the tiniest corner of green, like a piece of paper, or a folder, or perhaps just a candy wrapper. She bent, and with her fingernail eased the thing out bit by bit until she could grasp it and pull it in its entirety out from under the wardrobe.

It was a green folder with the outline of a black hand on the front. Sasha flipped it open. It contained a few typed pages. The first page was titled: “Archea microbes in Antarctic Volcanoes.” Sasha rolled her eyes at her own original interest in the folder. It was probably just some polar researcher’s old thesis notes.

She was about to close the folder when her eyes caught a sentence further down the page. “Human infection trials to start in 2015” and then further down the page “may cause temporary blindness” and further down “U.S. military.”

She flipped to the next page and found a list that ran down the page. They were lat long coordinates. “Erebus” was handwritten in brackets next to the first set of coordinates on the list. Two of the other sets of coordinates lower down the page were starred.

Sasha glanced over at Edie’s desk, which was cleared of all papers. Only Edie’s laptop remained on the fake oak surface, the green power light still glowing. Sasha crossed the room and flipped open the lid, placing the green folder on the desk beside her. Edie’s aurora wallpaper illuminated the screen, but nothing was open. Sasha was about to snap it shut when she saw the live network icon in the top right corner.

Edie still had Internet from her satellite USB stick.

Sasha double-clicked on the browser. A black-screened home page filled the window with the words “The Dark Net” in creepy white writing. Up in the top right corner in the search box where a friendly Google icon usually lingered, a black icon with the letters DN sat.

Timber started to growl, low and steady, and Sasha heard the faint sounds of a commotion of voices in the other room.

With shaking fingers she typed “Soren Anderson Hole in the World”. A new tab opened and Dark Net search results filled the screen. Sasha scanned the list.

“
Two Volcano Researchers rescued from Baffin Island
”

“
True Demon Encounters by Franz Bauer
”

She moved the mouse to click on the first link. “Sasha, someone’s here,” Amber’s voice skipped down the hall in nervous beats. “It’s the military, I think. You better come. Now.”

Sasha closed the browser and felt a frisson of irrational panic. There was no reason to panic. The military was on their side. But Timber’s growls escalated and she was already casting about for a place to hide the folder.

She looked everywhere around the room. There was no place that someone could not easily find it if they were looking. She ran down the hall to the emergency exit door and looked out. Soren dutifully kept the path from the door cleared, although about a foot of snow had built up in the past two days. Snow from the aluminum roof of the station had cascaded into a pile right by the door and between the pile and the station wall there was the narrowest of crevices. The faint smell of clean laundry drifted past her nose—the dryer vent. Soren said there was an extra set of station keys in the dryer vent. Maybe there was a key to the gun locker too.

Sasha slipped the folder into the crevice, pulled the emergency exit door closed and hurried down the hall to the common room. At the last second, she spun around and ran back to Edie’s room. She snatched the satellite USB stick out of Edie’s laptop and shoved it in the pocket of her parka.

Three U.S. military men in snow camouflage fatigues already occupied the common room. They were all smiles with Amber and Vincent, but they were, Sasha noted, strangely rigid and armed to the teeth, their assault rifles still in their hands and wide barreled anti-tank weapons slung around their backs. Unusual for a rescue mission to a polar research station. And Sasha thought that it was the Canadian military that was responsible for rescue missions on Ellesmere. It was the Canadian military stationed at Retort. Even though she, Amber, and Vincent were all American, and the station was International, it seemed surprising that the Canadians would let the U.S. military undertake a rescue operation on Canadian soil, unless there no longer
was
a Canadian military.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” Amber was gushing. “We were beginning to think we’d be stuck here forever. When do we leave? I don’t even need to bring anything with me. Let’s just get out of this bucket of bolts. I can’t believe you even landed in this weather. But you military guys are amazing, I know. Do you have a chopper?” She glanced out beyond the three men as if the helicopter might be sitting in the foyer.

Timber continued a low rumbling in his belly and stayed close to Sasha as she made her way across the room. The men continued to smile, and were saying something about having to wait until the storm was over, that Connor just barely pulled the landing out. Pools of water gathered around their feet from their heavy black boots and the shoulders of their coats.

“So if you don’t mind extending your hospitality for the night, the weather report’s looking good for tomorrow, and we’ll have you out of here in no time,” the man in the center with the name tag that read Jenkins said. He looked around the station. “Weren’t there more of you? Are the others in their rooms? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be out in this storm.”

“There have been some unfortunate accidents,” Sasha said. “I’m afraid three of our researchers were lost in a storm on the night of the blindness.” She observed the men carefully. She could have sworn the one on the left flinched slightly, but their smiles did not falter.

“Blindness, you say?” Jenkins replied. “What caused that do you figure?”

Sasha narrowed her eyes a bit. So had the blindness not happened everywhere in the world? President Kent said it had. She offered a tight smile. “Solar flares, perhaps caused by the magnetic reversal that seems to be underway.”

Jenkins nodded. Apparently he was not about to deny the reversal. “Yep, navigating’s been a real bitch these last few days.”

“Do you have GPS back up and running yet?”

This caused a nervous shift of eyes from the guy on the left, Flaherty, to Jenkins, who was now regarding Sasha with a raised eyebrow. “’Fraid not,” Jenkins said. “But we’re getting along just fine using maps. We’ve already met your friends here, but let me introduce myself. I’m Lieutenant Jenkins, and this is Corporal Flaherty and Pilot Connor.”

“I’m Sasha Wood, one of the researchers here. Nice to meet you.” Sasha tried to smile like Amber, who was still beaming and practically bobbing from one foot to the other, but she couldn’t quite muster the same level of enthusiasm for these men with so many guns.

“So three researchers were lost in a blizzard,” Jenkins said. “And the caretaker, Soren Anderson?”

“He was lost trying to find them,” Sasha said quickly. “At least we assume he was. He just didn’t come back.” She hoped that Amber would decide that the Antarctica story was too ridiculous to share. Vincent didn’t seem to be fessing up that he had just waltzed in from Paulet either.

“That’s very unfortunate,” Jenkins said. “And that’s everyone that was here then?” Sasha looked at Vincent and Amber, trying to decide whether to tell them about Edie. If these guys decided to check out the east wing, the fact that there was a dead body in the station would become all too obvious.

“I’m afraid the other researcher was murdered. Her body is in the east sleeping wing. We haven’t moved it, or touched anything. We think whoever did it broke in.”

“Broke in?” Jenkins glanced pointedly at the snow-shrouded windows. “I didn’t know this was a high crime zone.”

Sasha forced another smile. “Odd, isn’t it?”

“We’re going to have to take a look,” Jenkins said.

“That’s probably a good idea. Have…have any weird things been happening in the last few days? You know, unexplained phenomena. Things like that?”

“You mean other than the House passing the new Health Care Bill, and the fact that north is now south and vice versa, which has caused a number of challenges everywhere? Other than that, not anything really strange. Why do you ask? Have strange things been going on up here?”

Just demons, several plane crashes, rabid polar bears, a crazy woman babbling about a dragon, and mist that takes you to the Antarctic, Sasha thought, squinting her eyes at them. Even the remote possibility that everything was okay, that Jenkins and his crew were the good guys—the U.S. military—here to rescue them, and she could return to her life of research and leisure and general good times, sent a visceral cord of hope down the entire length of her body.

She considered the small shard of hope for a few seconds, examined it, savored it, and then she shook it off.

They were jostling about each other like a trio of demented hyenas, wearing wide and forced grins. That guy who had arrived in the helicopter two days ago had said that everything had gone to hell everywhere—that in fact it was worse elsewhere, and the address from President Kent had indicated the blindness had occurred worldwide. Demons were involved, and this trio of jokers was either lying or unprepared to protect them, and given that they were all clutching assault rifles as if their lives depended on it, they pretty much held all the cards right now.

She had to get out of here and get to Soren as soon as possible, but she couldn’t exactly open the gun locker and load up on weapons in front of these guys. She would have to wait.