Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (3 page)

But the power must go off all the time. Why would it make Soren so unhinged? Was he in a rage about Timber? Or was he worried Edie and Cal in the storm? That was probably it.

“Sasha, please come.”

“Coming,” she managed to stammer.

Damn. She was totally going to be busted. She groped her way to the door, feeling across the old built in wardrobe, and then along the wall, the brush of warmth from Timber moving out of the way, his claws clicking on the floor.

“Go lie down,” she hissed, and she heard him obey. Maybe she could slip out of the room before Soren noticed he was there.

She flicked on the light as she passed it, but the room remained in complete darkness. That was it then. The power. She hoped Soren had a candle or a flashlight. She couldn’t imagine that Mr. Safety would not be totally prepared. She should have been sleeping with her headlamp on her bedside table.

She opened the door to her room expecting to see the glow of some backup light, but instead she saw nothing. Surely there would be some ambient light from outside, even in a storm. Soren practically fell in on top of her and she extended her arms automatically to catch him. She felt his body heat and the rasp of his stubbled chin on her cheek. But then he righted himself and they separated. He remained closer to her than she expected, though. She could smell his faint scent of wood smoke and sweat.

“I can’t see,” Soren said, his voice forceful, but ragged. Had he been drinking? Was he having a breakdown? Surely he had dealt with a power failure before. Outside her room, the crack of the wind against the small windows in the station common room was almost stunning in its ferocity. Edie and Cal must be in trouble in the hut. She couldn’t believe Soren let them go out with a storm in the forecast.

Be matter-of-fact and empathetic—that was what she had been trained to do as a paramedic. “Well, neither can I. The lights are off. The power must be out. Where are your candles and flashlights?”

Soren’s body lurched at this. “You can’t see either?”

“I’m not a dog.” Dumb, dumb, dumb to have made a dog reference.

“Sasha,” Soren said with a sharpness to his voice that made her jump. “The power isn’t off. The heat circulator is on the same circuit as the lights. It’s still on. And I have a flashlight in my hand right now. I check the batteries every night. It’s on.”

Sasha shook her head a few times trying to process what he was saying and blinked her eyes in all directions expecting to pick up some hint of light from somewhere. But everywhere was this vague suggestion of dark nothingness.

She was blind.

Words spilled out over her realization. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Is it a chemical? Did something in the lab spill?” She heard the distant non-paramedic-like panic in her voice, and her knees felt loose and unreliable. She felt her way to the small sink in her room and splashed water in her eyes madly.

Soren spoke above the water. “I can’t smell anything and my eyes aren’t burning. I rinsed my eyes already. Then I stepped outside the emergency exit for a second to see if it would clear. I still couldn’t see anything.”

“We need to wake the others and get the eyewash. Have you called for an emergency evacuation?” She and Soren needed to get to a hospital immediately; the water was having no effect and her mind had already propelled her down the dark corridors of the possibility of a lifetime of night.

“The storm’s going to prevent an evacuation until morning at least. And there’s another problem. Edie and Cal haven’t checked in. They were supposed to radio me as soon as they got to the warming hut. I set my alarm so I would wake up at 1:00 a.m. to radio them if they hadn’t called me.”

The wind took on a particularly furious bent and the station windows rattled. Edie and Cal would be in significant trouble in this storm whether they had made it to the hut or not. Sasha opened her mouth to ask if Soren had known the storm was coming, but thought better of it.

“Have you radioed them?”

“I tried once, but then realized that I couldn’t see a thing, and I panicked and knocked the radio off my bedside table and it flew across the floor somewhere. Now I can’t find it. They didn’t respond anyway. I need to get to the main radio panel and try again, and then send a distress signal to Retort.”

Retort was the closest air force base on the mainland, and their point for emergency contact if something went wrong. It was also 2452 miles away.

She felt Soren’s hand on her arm. “Let’s go get the eyewash. Then you go wake the others while I get on the radio.”

“Okay.” Sasha dried her face on her towel and tried to run the layout of the station through her mind, and all of the barriers and invisible hazards that lay between her and the first aid station and the sleeping wing.

“You ready?”

She nodded, and then realized that at this point, nodding was as good as useless. “What if the radio antenna is down?”

“That thing was built to withstand a hurricane. Let’s hope it’s not down.”

Soren took her elbow, and together they groped their way down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen. At one point, Sasha wondered if someone was following them, if Timber had left her room, but decided it was just her mind playing tricks on her. The main rooms swirled with the chill air of the storm as the gale force winds took advantage of all sorts of tiny fissures in the station walls.

They descended the short flight of stairs into the kitchen, but then Sasha bumped her hip on one of the kitchen stools, and Soren tripped over one of the packs that had been left on the floor, letting out a stream of expletives.

The first aid station was just off the kitchen. It was a small pantry-like closet equipped with a defibrillator, antibiotics, stacks of gauze, antiseptic, cylinders of oxygen and Entonox, all manner of slings and crutches, and most importantly, emergency eyewash. Soren threw open the door and the thunk and thwap of items falling off the shelves followed.

“They’re on the left. Third shelf,” she said.

“I know,” Soren grunted.

A bottle of eyewash was thrust into her hand and with shaking fingers she twisted it open and pressed the cup against first one eye and then the other again and again. Nothing. She still saw nothing. She could hear Soren swearing next to her. They had to get to a hospital. Maybe there was some operation, some procedure they could have to restore their sight. She grasped on to this small fragment of hope like a piece of floating debris in the frigid Arctic Ocean.

“Any use?” he said.

Her voice was thick. “No.”

“Me either.”

She tried to quell the trembling of her hands. “Let’s get the others up.”

They continued their slow advance through the kitchen, navigating by fingertips and memory. A palpable sense of terror hung between them, in the stiffness of their bodies and the edginess of their words, that
this
—this fumbling through nothingness, this strange and sightless world, could be their new reality.

When Sasha placed her hand on the knob of the open door that led to the other sleeping wing, they stopped. Soren let go of her arm to feel across the opening and grasp the wall on the other side, so he could make his way down to the lab where the main radio was housed.

“You okay from here?” he asked. She had imagined hearing his deep resonant voice in the dark before, but not like this. Never like this.

“Yup,” she said. “I’ll get them to guide me back to you.” She heard Soren start to inch his way down the next set of stairs to the lab, and she turned and started to move down the hall, one arm outstretched, the other tracing the contours of the wall. A gust of icy air swept down the corridor, and her body jolted in sudden shivers. It was too cold. She should call Soren. She opened her mouth to say his name when screams filled the small passageway. Amber.

The sounds of Soren tripping and falling over stuff in the lab followed, and one of the doors in the sleeping quarters was flung open. Something rushed past Sasha, heading down the sleeping quarter hall, and growls joined the screams. Soren arrived at her side, touching her arm to verify that it was not her screaming, just as she heard Kyle’s voice.

“What’s going on? Where are the goddamn lights?” he bellowed.

“The power might have just gone out,” she called, trying to make herself heard over Amber’s screams, and straining to hear the heat circulator. Surely Kyle was not blind as well.

“Don’t you have any emergency lights in this bucket of bolts?” Kyle said, his voice closer now.

“Even if the power is out, this whole hall should be lit up like a Christmas tree,” Soren said, “but none of us seem to be able to see.”

Barks, growls, and the sounds of fighting came down the hall. The thing that had rushed past her a few seconds ago—was it Timber? What was Timber attacking? He wouldn’t go after Amber and Robert, would he?

“Timber,” Sasha yelled. “Timber, no!”

“What is that dog doing in here?” Soren demanded, trying to feel his way past her and down the hall. “Timber!”

“What does he mean nobody can see?” Kyle asked.

A door slammed down the hall, muting Amber’s wails. The conflict intensified for a few seconds and then Sasha heard another door slam and the sound of feet scrambling down the hall toward her, accompanied by a rush of icy air. She felt the brush of ice against her skin and inhaled the faint scent of fish, then the breeze stopped as suddenly as it started, and the front door of the station opened and closed. Everything was silent, and Sasha felt the press of Timber’s soft nose against her hand.

“What the hell was that?” Soren said from down the hall. “Who just left?”

“I’m still here,” Sasha said. Amber’s screams had turned to whimpers, coming from one of the rooms.

“I’m here,” Kyle said. “Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”

“I wish I knew,” said Soren.

“I have Timber,” said Sasha. She patted the dog’s head and felt the wet of blood on his neck. She tried not to cry out. She pressed her fingers against the wound and felt the entire length of his body. It didn’t seem deep and he was otherwise intact.

“Was it Robert who just left?” Sasha said.

“Robert,” Soren called. “Robert? Amber?”

“Don’t you come near me. Someone was just in our room,” Amber yelled. “I’m not coming out until you get the lights back on and your dogs under control.”

“Well, that might be a problem,” Soren said. “Where’s Robert?”

“One of your dogs attacked us. They’re vicious.” Amber declared. Sasha curled her hand protectively around Timber’s neck.

Soren spoke soothingly but firmly. “Look, Amber. We have a little problem here. None of us can see. If you or Robert can see, you need to come out and help us. There’s a huge storm out there, and we need to get an S.O.S. to the base and figure out how to launch a search party for Edie and Cal. I don’t know what happened, but we need to figure this out. Is Robert in there with you?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t know which room I’m in. I don’t know where Robert is. I can’t see anything.” Her voice bordered on hysterical, as the storm outside pummeled the windows of the station.

Soren’s voice remained level. “Go to the bed. Feel for the bedside table. I keep a charged flashlight in the top drawer in each room. Get it out and tell me what you see.”

Amber stopped wailing, and they could hear the sounds of her thumping against objects in the room, and then the crash of a piece of furniture falling. “This is just great,” Kyle was muttering next to Sasha, his cigarette breath stale against her face.

“Are you okay?” Soren called.

“The battery’s dead,” Amber yelled.

“No,” Soren said. “It’s not.”

“I’m not coming out. I’m not playing your little games in the dark,” Amber said. “I have a gun.”

Soren’s voice cracked with frustration. “What? What are you talking about? You need to come out.”

“So you can sick your dog on me again? Get away from me. For all I know it was you in our room. I’m not coming out until you get a plane in here with proper military personnel to take me home. If you try to come in here, I’ll shoot you.”

“Ugh,” Soren said. There was the sound of a fist pounding hard on a door, and then footsteps approaching. “She can stay where she is, then.” Sasha felt the brush of hands as Soren felt his way past her. “We need to get a distress signal out.”

“Timber’s hurt,” Sasha said.

She heard Soren’s exhale, and then his fingers touching hers as he reached for his dog. “There’s another first aid kit down by the radio. How did he get in here?” Anger threaded through his words.

She shrank away slightly in fear. “I’m sorry. I smuggled him into my room. He was in there when you came and got me. He must have followed us. I don’t think he attacked Amber and Robert, though.”

It seemed like she could almost see his intense blue eyes in the dark, even though she knew could not. She was blind. She opened her own eyes wider in entreaty out of habit. Kyle’s heavy breath was warm on her neck.

“We need to get down to the lab,” Soren said after a few seconds, nudging them in the direction of the stairs. Timber stayed close to Sasha. “I’m going to close and lock this wing until Amber settles down. I do not like the idea of her with a gun. If she freaked out and started shooting, with our luck, she’d hit one of us. I’m not even going to ask where she got the gun. But I think I know.”

Sasha cocked her head at the suggestion in his tone. Where
did
he think Amber had gotten the gun? Kyle said nothing.

“So, you can’t see anything either?” Soren said to Kyle, as he pulled the door to the east wing shut.

“Nada,” Kyle said.

The jingle of keys came next as Soren presumably tried to locate the right one from the set he always wore around his neck, followed by the sound of Soren attempting to press a key into a lock.

Sasha clutched the bannister and inched her way down the rest of the few stairs into the lab. She could feel the bodies of the other two men close around her, and the occasional press of Timber’s furred back. The wind screamed against the windowpanes and her hands were sticky from Timber’s drying blood.

“I don’t know what the hell Robert’s doing, or why he went out,” Soren said. “He better be in the storage bay, or he’s a goner. One of us is going to have to go after him.”