Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (21 page)

She scrambled to her knees, the two bears looming over her. Where was Kyle?

She saw him running around the edge of the crater in the other direction. Was he trying to draw the polar bears off, or abandoning her to be killed?

Sasha closed her eyes, preparing to die for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last few days…and heard barking. She snapped her eyes open. It was getting closer. Timber and Tundra ran into view, barking like lunatics, their lips pulled back and teeth bared. The bears turned immediately to the dogs, who looked diminutive in contrast to the hulking white beasts. The bears would dispatch the two dogs in seconds. But the dogs were more agile than humans and ran in circles around the bears growling and barking.

She staggered to her feet, slinging the heavy weapon over her shoulder. The dogs were once again sacrificing their lives for hers. A sob caught in her throat. The dogs continued their game. She looked back down at the tag in the dead bear’s ear. The tags screwed apart into two pieces, like an earring. Quickly, she bent and removed the tag. Then she ran as fast as she could to the snow machine.

The keys were still in the ignition to keep the headlights on. She flipped the choke to on and started the machine. The bears and dogs had moved further away from the crater. Perhaps if she drove past them, she could distract the bears away from the dogs. A distant voice in her head reminded her that the bears could outrun a snowmobile.

A vibrating sound filled the air and floodlights cut through the mist and clouds overhead. A chopper. Flaherty had radioed someone when the bears appeared. They must have had backup close by.

The massive two-rotor helicopter descended out of the clouds and hovered fifty feet in the air while two men with high-powered rifles started taking shots at the bears. The bears turned and roared their rage. The dogs, startled by the chopper, skittered away barking.

“Go, go, go!” Sasha said under her breath to the dogs, as she headed the other direction at full throttle. Whoever those men in the helicopter were, if they were with Jenkins and Flaherty, they were not friends.

She headed in a zig-zag fashion through the craters, trying to put as much distance between herself and the helicopter as possible. It seemed like there were more craters than there had been before. They were everywhere, and they loomed out of the snow at her unexpectedly, a slightly elevated ring of snow-covered dirt the only indication of their presence, and the only thing preventing her from tumbling to her likely death. At times, she thought she heard voices coming from the craters, great choruses of people crying for help, or worse, screaming.

She drove wildly and probably in circles. With the clouds and fog, she couldn’t find any landmarks, and she kept hearing echoes of the helicopter rotor behind her. She needed to head for Mount Trainor, if she was going back to try to rescue Soren.

If.

No matter what Amber and Jenkins had said about Soren, Sasha did not believe it was true. Or did she just not want to believe it was true? Perhaps she had just been bewitched by his good looks and charm. And his goddamn dogs. His dead dogs. She had always been a sucker for dogs. Soren had clearly known something about the demons. Why had that Internet search on Soren brought up something about demons? Maybe he was more involved in this than she had thought. She slowed the snowmobile down. She was in the Arctic, with no food and no water, and she was already starving. She had no place to go, except back to the station, which had probably been taken over by the military guys, and the way things were going, probably a pack of demons too.

She had to find Trainor Mountain and go to Paulet. Even if she didn’t rescue Soren, she could take Vincent’s boat and try to get somewhere to safety. But that would mean leaving Vincent behind and stealing his boat.

The mist came up on her suddenly, soaking the fake fur around her parka hood. She did not have time to turn, and she hurtled through it, and out into a starlit sky with a purple aurora on the horizon, and the station right in front of her. The windows glowed a sumptuous yellow and smoke emerged from the chimney.

The Shackleton station.

She pulled the snowmobile right up close to the station, parked it, and walked over to the station door. She could hear the echoes of the buzzer inside the station, and the howls and barks of at least two huskies followed. A dog sled much like Soren’s was parked just to the right of the door.

A few minutes later the door swung open to reveal Gregor, the dark-haired man they had met before. An older copper and white husky pushed past him, sniffed Sasha, and then howled a greeting. Then Sasha was nearly bowled over by another dog, leaping and barking a welcome. Cedar. What was Cedar doing here?

“Welcome,” Gregor said with a faint Russian accent. “To the Shackleton station. I understand this is not how your history went down. Come in. I have someone here who’s very anxious to see you.”

Sasha felt a strange leap of hope that it was Soren, but was not surprised to see Vincent sitting at the station table.

He half rose when she entered, the tremor in his spotted hands more pronounced. “I came after you, with the dogs, as soon as I could get out of the station without getting caught. I let the dogs pick the direction, and then set Timber and Tundra loose when they started to go berserk. I hoped that it was because you were nearby. Then Cedar and I continued on, and found ourselves here, of all strange places. It’s one thing to go between locations through that godforsaken mist. It’s quite another to find yourself in an apparently different world or timeline. It’s all a little too much for my senior brain.”

She listened to him talk while surreptitiously checking his teeth. They seemed like the right teeth, so she allowed herself to relax marginally. She looked around the station. The furniture was different and arranged differently, the cupboards were a beech wood, and some of the angles and finishing varied, but overall the similarities between this station and the station they had just left were eerie. Gregor had gone to the kitchen and ladled something steaming into three bowls. He returned and set the bowls down on the table.

“Eat,” he said simply and gestured at the loaf of bread and cheese that sat in the middle of the table.

Sasha placed the weapon on the floor and felt herself sinking into the chair in front of the bowl. “The dogs saved me, Vincent. Thank you. What made you come after us?” She took a spoonful of the soup. It was the most delightfully flavored creamy mushroom soup she had ever tasted.

“That Connor fellow got into the beer after you left. It didn’t take him long to down an entire case. It was like he hasn’t seen beer in years. That was when I first got suspicious. A beer when nobody is looking, and under difficult circumstances, maybe. But military men don’t get hammered on duty. Anyway, he got chatty. So I started asking him questions, you know about the Health Care Bill, how the President felt about it, how long he’d served, things like that. Then I started throwing in a few military terms—I did a stint in the navy when I was young—Asked him why he was wearing full battle rattle for a simple rescue mission, and what we were going to do at zero dark thirty if his buddies didn’t come back and he had no working radio.”

Sasha tried to focus on what Vincent was saying while wolfing down the soup and bread.

Vincent grasped his spoon and swirled it around in his soup. “He didn’t get anything I was talking about. That guy isn’t from the military. So then I tune him into Helga and tell him that’s the only radio transmission we get and give him some science mumbo jumbo song and dance about magnetic reversal affecting all the radio waves on the poles. Then I tell him the story about the feral polar bears, which Amber is only too happy to chime in on.”

“Eventually, he has to take a leak from all that beer, and after he’s in there, I go and listen at the door. Sure enough, the fool’s on his radio, cause he’s scared now. Thinks he’s lost contact. Anyway whoever his buddies are, they ask him if he has secured the package or the determined the location of the hole in the world.”

Sasha stared at her bowl, wondering how she had emptied it so quickly. “I’m sorry Vincent. I don’t understand. Package? Is that what they were looking for in the station?”

Vincent shook his head taking his first spoonful of soup. “Nah. A package is a person.

“And the hole in the world?” Sasha said.

“Aside from potentially the craters? No idea. Anyway, he comes out of the can, and I play along as if Soren’s the murderer and tell him that I think Soren had a wall safe behind his wardrobe and maybe Soren stashed the weapon in there. So he and Amber go to Soren’s room to look for it, and I slipped out with the dogs. I’m sure he didn’t think an old man like me would dare head out on his own.” Vincent smiled as if he really was very pleased with his own daring, and Sasha couldn’t help but smile back. “So like I said, the dogs took off, and I saw that other fellow—what was his name?—Kyle, fly past on a snowmobile. I don’t think he saw me.”

“You saw Kyle on a snowmobile?” How was that possible? Had Kyle somehow gone back for the other snowmobile?

Vincent nodded, his grey beard bobbing.

“Then Vincent showed up here, worried about you, just in time for soup,” Gregor announced, removing her bowl from the table and returning with it refilled. “He and I were just comparing notes.”

“Where exactly are we?”

Gregor offered a funny tight-lipped smirk and arched a single eyebrow. He did have lovely chocolate-brown eyes, but there was a sardonic undertone to his expression that made Sasha nervous. “Well, the good news is, you are on Ellesmere Island. However on this Ellesmere Island, Shackleton set out for his sledge trip to become the first person to reach the North Pole, so it’s a little bit different from your Ellesmere Island, you see. The bad news is, this world has been completely overrun by zombies.”

“Zombies?” Sasha paused in mid gulp. Soup dribbled off her spoon and back into the bowl. This did shock her. A bit. It should probably have shocked her more. But not that much was shocking these days.

“Yes, well, living dead, psychosis, some sort of infection or something. Nobody knows, other than they infect anyone they come into contact with. They are uncommunicative, unconcerned about their own wellbeing and focused on only one thing—chasing down those who remain living. So, zombies.”

Gregor paused and took a bite of his own soup. “Continuing with the good news, they haven’t gotten this far north. Evidently an inclement climate is good for something and zombies don’t know how to dress for the weather. The bad news is I’m almost out of food and wood, so I will likely be starving or freezing to death soon.” He said this quite matter-of-factly.

Sasha stared down at her empty bowl and the huge chunk of cheese she had just skewered and placed on her bread. She had just inhaled at least a day’s worth of rations.

“Are you the only one living here?”

“Yes. At the beginning of the outbreak the military came by and offered everyone a flight home. All the other researchers took it. Concerned about family and things like that. I don’t imagine they’re still alive.”

Sasha reached across the table and touched his arm. “You can come back to our station.” Then she paused and made a face. “Course, we have magnetic reversal, crazed polar bears, giant methane-venting craters, and fake military guys. But we do have food.” In reality, with the arrival of that chopper, it might not even be “their” station anymore. Perhaps with Gregor’s help, they could retake it, but she and Vincent would probably just be better off heading to Paulet.

Gregor smiled faintly, his lips bloodless. “That’s really selling it. I’m a polar bear biologist and the bears here are dangerous enough. Have you taken an inventory of your supplies yet?”

Sasha shook her head. Why hadn’t they? “No. I think we were just thinking we’d be rescued at some point.”

Gregor exhaled in a whispery puff of laughter. “Don’t hold your breath on that one. I think we’re on our own, and it’s a long trek to any sort of civilization, not that it’s even necessarily civilized anymore.”

“You could come with us through the mist. The mist on Mount Trainor—well at least our Mount Trainor—leads to Paulet Island in the Antarctic. That’s where Vincent and I are going, I think. I think the mist in all the craters in our Arctic lead somewhere. We heard voices tonight in a lot of them, and that’s how Soren and I first went to Paulet Island. Of course, none of the voices we heard in the craters sounded very happy, so maybe that’s a bad idea.”

“Thanks for the offer.” Gregor paused. “But I’m a solitary sort. I can still hunt and fish. I might make it through until summer. And the way things are, dying alone might not be so bad. There are definitely worse ways to go.”

Sasha noted with some sort of wry and demented amusement—she
must
be going loopy—that Gregor did not extend an offer for her and Vincent to stay with him.

“Are we still going after Soren, then?” Vincent asked, breaking the silence.

“Do you think he’s a murderer?” Sasha said.

Vincent hesitated for a second before declaring, “Not on your life.”

It might well be on my life if you’re wrong, Sasha thought. “If we manage to rescue Soren, maybe we can head to South America in your boat,” Sasha said.

Vincent’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “My dear, my boat, while seaworthy, is for going from island to island. It’s hardly the kind of boat you want to set out in across the Southern Ocean, especially with no working compass or GPS.”

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

“I suggest that we take the boat to the Antarctic station and find Helga.”

“I’m not sure what good Helga is going to do,” Sasha mumbled, but she let this go for now.

Sasha turned to Gregor. “Do you have any guns you can lend us?”

Gregor pursed his lips and remained silent for several seconds. “I have an old rifle I can give you. And I’ll give you some old biscuits. Survival rations. They taste like crap and were slated to be tossed, but they’re better than nothing. It looks like you eat a lot,” he commented to Sasha.