Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (23 page)

“I’ve never seen the ocean around Paulet so wild,” Vincent said almost absently. “Anyway, Soren and Marina came to stay with Murphy here on Paulet for a few weeks. To mend fences, Murphy claimed when he invited them, and Murphy wanted to explain his hypotheses to Soren regarding what he was claiming was the ‘hole in the world’. Marina was just excited to be at one of the penguin epicenters of the Antarctic. Nobody knows what happened, there were suggestions that Murphy made a move on Marina, or that they were having an affair, but whatever happened, it all went wrong. Marina died. Both Murphy and Soren were suspects, and both claimed it was an accident, but for whatever reason, the prosecutors went after Soren. After the trial, Murphy moved to Paulet permanently.”

“Vincent!” Sasha interrupted. “You said the hole in the world. That’s what those guys were looking for. Remember? That’s why they’re looking for Soren.”

Vincent shook his head. “That’s all rubbish, I’m sure. There is no hole in the world. That’s just some delusion of Murphy’s.”

Sasha looked out at the wild ocean and then down at the mist from which they had just emerged, and shuddered. “I don’t know. I’m beginning to think anything is possible.” She rose. “Are you going to help me look for Soren?”

Vincent shifted his gaze to the black rock at his feet. “I’m an old man. Part of me thinks I should just go find my boat, and take it back to the Antarctic Station, if there is a station, and see if there is any part of my former life left. I’m also fairly sure that I should insist that you come with me.”

“We can’t leave Soren. We have to at least try to find him.”

Vincent let out a big harrumphing sigh. “Yeah. That’s what the other part of me says. Up you go. We’ll have to use the tree entrance as I can’t squeeze my carcass through the crow entrance.”

“Vincent, I think a demon impersonated you yesterday. He was trying to get some information from me about the hole in the world. Just in case, I think we better have a safe word, in case we get separated.”

Vincent nodded, and they agreed that Soren and Sasha’s safe word “Franklin” would also be their safe word. They started to head up the cone in the direction of the lone short scraggy tree that jutted defiantly out of the dark rock. Amidst the penguin cries, Sasha was sure that she heard something else. Barking. Had some of the dogs survived Robert’s execution or—she blanched at the prospect—Paul’s snack time?

The barking grew closer and all of a sudden two huskies appeared, one copper and the other black and white, their muzzles spattered and stained with red. Timber and Tundra. As they drew closer, wagging and barking, Sasha could see that they had penguin guts and feathers all over their faces and backs, and they stunk of decay. Their stomachs bulged and a loud gurgling sound came from Tundra’s gut.

“You two idiots have been eating penguins for the last few hours,” Sasha declared. However grateful she was to see them alive and here, they were undeniably foul.

The two dogs continued to bark and wag enthusiastically, clearly confused as to why she was not greeting them with her usual hugs and exclamations of joy.

“Ugh, what do we do with them?” she asked. They could not take the two wretched, reeking dogs into the tunnels, as much as Sasha might like to have them for protection. Anyone would smell them coming a mile away.

Vincent had pulled his neck warmer up over his nose. “They have to be washed off. Let’s go down to the beach. We can drop off some of our supplies, and I should show you where my boat is moored anyway, just in case. It’s a secluded beach with a wide bridge of rock over it. If you don’t know the way down there, you’ll never find it.”

They set off down the mountain with Vincent in the lead, the dogs and their rotten stench following behind. The dogs moved more slowly than usual, and they had to pause while Tundra barfed up some half-chewed penguin bones and bile.

Sasha wanted to kick the blockheads for their stupidity. To survive everything that they had survived and then die from penguin overconsumption—that would be too much.

Near the beach, Vincent took a sharp right and began skirting the mountain. From this vantage point, it appeared that the rock formed a shelf with steep cliff that dropped off into the ocean. After a few minutes, Vincent stopped. There was a small dark hole in the lava rock near the edge of the mountain.

“We have to climb down there. There are lots of footholds, but be careful. It opens up after a few feet.”

Vincent lowered himself slowly into the hole. The dogs, alarmed by his sudden disappearance, started going berserk leaping and hopping around the rim. Sasha peered down into the black expanse, and withdrew a headlamp borrowed from Gregor from the pack. Would the dogs be able to navigate it? The pair of them charged around the hole skittishly as if it were alive. She saw the white sand not too far below them in the hole, but the walls were too steep for a four-legged creature. They would have to jump, and hope not to bang their heads against the side. Sasha started the descent herself. The dogs, even more concerned now, thrust their stinky snouts with extended tongues into her face as soon as she was at their eye level.

She batted them away. “Get back, you two nitwits.”

A few seconds later, she stood next to Vincent in the deep grey sand on the small curve of beach in a natural cave, a hollowed out scoop of rock in the island, not more than forty feet wide. The echo of the waves had amplified as the foamy surf surged at their feet. Two large motorboats bobbed in the swells and two overturned rowboats nestled side by side in the rocks at the top of the beach.

The dogs continued to bark like lunatics, but then Sasha saw the flashes of white fur as one after the other leapt into the dark hole.

“There are two boats,” Sasha said, stating the obvious.

“One of them is Murphy’s,” Vincent replied. Sasha scrutinized the boats. One was a small white and blue trawler obviously in good repair. The other, a tinier silver craft, looked like it had seen better days.

The dogs eyed the surging water suspiciously and made no move to go anywhere near it. Tundra danced along the edge of the surf that threatened to soak his paws.

“We’re going to have to throw them in,” Vincent said. “Huskies don’t generally swim. I have rain slickers in my rowboat. I suggest we put those on.”

They donned the rain slickers and commenced the ludicrous process of trying to lure, force, or drag the two recalcitrant huskies into the water. At several points, especially when her boot filled with water, Sasha contemplated giving up and just leaving the two beasts behind tied up in the cove. But eventually they got the two dogs sufficiently washed off. They stowed the slickers and both dogs then proceeded to shake their wet fur all over Sasha and Vincent.

“Thanks a lot,” she muttered.

Sasha put her headlamp back on and flashed it around the cove. The light came to rest on Vincent’s boat. “The Helga” was clearly inscribed in flowing blue script on the white side.

She left her light trained on the words and shifted her eyes to Vincent. “Anything you wanted to share?” she asked.

“Not really,” said Vincent. “Shall we go?”

“Yep,” said Sasha.

They left some of their food supplies, outerwear, the tent, and sleeping bags beneath one of the overturned rowboats and made their way back up the mountain through the oddly warm moonlit night, the dogs beacons of white ahead of them.

At the tree, Vincent pulled the rifle from where it was slung on his back.

“You’d better give me the M72. It’s finicky,” he said.

Sasha nodded silently and handed him the heavy weapon, which he hooked over his shoulder. He handed her the rifle, which she grasped with sweaty palms.

They made their way silently down the tunnel. After several admonishments from Sasha, the dogs seemed to understand that they needed to be quiet. It was warm inside, warmer than Sasha had remembered it being before, and the tunnel was lit with that same strange glow. Vincent had put his headlamp on before going into the tunnel, but now flicked it off as he peered about the tunnel uneasily.

But he didn’t say anything. He just set his lips in a grim line and headed off down the tunnel.

“Soren was captured near the crow entrance,” Sasha whispered. “Do you know your way around here at all?”

Vincent shook his head, and flicked his headlamp back on. “I can get us from here to the crow entrance. That’s about it. I guess we might as well start there.”

They hustled along, the eerie stone tunnels echoing with the scrape and shuffle of their boots, the click of the dog nails, and Vincent’s labored breathing. Maybe this was a fool’s mission. Why would the demons have kept Soren here, of all places? They could easily be long gone to anywhere in the world by now, leaving her and Vincent to wander fruitless in this maze of tunnels.

“You kind of look like her, you know,” Vincent said.

“Sorry, what? Who?”

“Marina. She was small and dark-haired like you. From certain angles, the two of you are almost identical.”

Sasha tried to process the implications of this. Was Vincent suggesting that Murphy thought Sasha was Marina, or worse, that Soren had liked her because she looked like his dead wife?

She was trying to muster up some response when Timber and Tundra started to sniff the tunnel floor and run in circles, their noses pressed to the ground. The tunnel seemed vaguely familiar, like it could have been near the place where Paul had grabbed her.

“Do you think they smell Soren?”

“Possible,” Vincent said. “Following them is as good a choice as any as right now.”

“Okay. Find Soren,” she urged the dogs. “Find Soren.”

The dogs bolted off down the tunnel in a stop and go fashion, hurrying down some corridors, but pausing to sniff all around and occasionally wait in some spots. It felt once again to Sasha like they were going in circles, but the dogs did not hesitate, and they were definitely progressing consistently downhill, which meant that they had not doubled back on themselves…and that they were getting deeper into the heart of the mountain.

Vincent withdrew his compass and held it in the palm of his hand several times. But inevitably he shook his head in frustration and put it back in his pocket.

The heat seemed to be rising, and although Sasha did not want to say anything, it seemed like the tunnel was brighter. Sweat dripped down her back and between her breasts. She was no longer sure how long they had been walking, or if the dogs ahead of them were in fact just a mirage and they had walked through more fog to another place entirely. At times, she thought she heard the pad of footsteps behind them, but every time she turned, the tunnel was empty.

She blinked in the half-light. The dogs. Where were the dogs? She could no longer see them. They had been pretty good about stopping and waiting, but now they were nowhere to be seen. Vincent had clearly noticed too, for he like Sasha, quickened his pace and swung his headlamp around from right to left like a pendulum, trying to find the dogs.

“They’ve taken off,” Sasha said.

“They must have smelled something.”

“What do we do?”

“Well, keep going, I guess, and hope. Isn’t that basically what we’ve been doing all along?”

Hope.

How did one hope in an apocalyptic world? She supposed you just did. If you were walking, you were hoping, in some format. Otherwise, you would just stop walking, and running directly into avalanches…

Sasha kept walking.

The heat spiked and perspiration started to cloud Sasha’s vision. Clanking and grinding noises filtered down the tunnel toward them and the whole mountain now seemed to be emitting a satisfied hum.

The low howls of the dogs echoed up the tunnel. It sounded like they were excited, but had been told to be quiet. Like they had found Soren.

Sasha started to run toward the sound, but Vincent caught her arm. “You need to be slower and quieter and have your rifle at the ready.”

Sasha raised the rifle and continued down the tunnel.

The noise and the heat intensified, and the tunnel made a slight bend and then abruptly opened up into a large well-lit circular cavern. In the center of the cavern a giant metallic cylinder jutted out of a broad, steaming, smoking, sulfur-scented hole. The cylinder rose up to the ceiling and fit into a large machine braced to the second floor of the cavern with large metal arms. The machine was a mass of interlocking gears and pulleys cranking and whirring. The room vibrated faintly and Sasha had to take a couple of deep breaths to control the trembling of her legs. All around the edges of the cavern were the darkened outlines of exits.

The dogs emerged from one of the darkened exits and ran urgently over to her and then back again as if they wanted her to follow.

She skirted the hole and the machine, followed by Vincent who looked positively clammy and ashen, despite his ruddy complexion. A quick peek over the edge into the hole revealed bubbling orange lava many hundreds of feet below them. She shrank away. The stench and smoke made her throat burn and her eyes sting.

The exit that the dogs had led them to turned out to be a new tunnel, and a few feet town the tunnel in a slight indent, Soren was chained to the wall shirtless and spread-eagled, his rippled abdominal muscles streaked with sweat and soot. He watched them approach with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. The dogs danced around him, nosing his inner thighs and butting against his ankles.

“Water,” he said in a raspy voice. “Call the dogs off. Don’t touch the cuffs. They’re alarmed.”

The dogs responded reluctantly to Sasha’s command to lie down. She retrieved her almost empty water bottle from her pack and held it to his cracked lips. He consumed the water with what looked like painful gulps, and precious water spilled down his chin as he choked and coughed. Sasha pulled the bottle away.

“More,” he gasped, his blue eyes burning into her.

She returned the bottle to his lips and he drank more carefully this time, emptying the bottle.

“Food?” she asked.

Soren shook his head. “Too thirsty.”

Vincent had already emptied his bottle himself and murmured something about going back to
The Helga
for more water.