EDEN (13 page)

Sauri put another round into the bear’s skull for good measure as Cody ran past.

Cody dashed to Bobby’s side and slid down into the snow alongside him. He fought down a glob of vomit as he saw the terrible damage to the kid’s thigh. The clothing had been torn free and the flesh stripped away in a ragged, bloody mess. Tendons and skin flapped and quivered in the wind, caked in snow.

Cody turned, saw the team approaching. ‘Beth, get over here, now!’

Beth stumbled across the Cody’s side.

‘Oh Jesus,’ she uttered. ‘Help me get him into the BV.’

Cody managed to get his arm under Bobby’s back and together they lifted him from the snow and carried him across the ice to the nearest of the vehicles. Jake helped as they hefted Bobby aboard and lay him across the rear seats of the cab.

Beth squeezed in alongside him and snatched a medical kit from her bag as Cody knelt alongside her and yanked the cab door shut.

‘Cody,’ Bethany said, tears streaking down her face, ‘he’s in a bad way.’

Bobby’s face was pale with the cold and he was mumbling a feeble and incoherent stream of nonsense, his eyes closed.

‘You got morphine?’ Cody asked.

Bethany struggled to get hold of arterial clamps as she handed Cody a vial of morphine.

‘Wait until I’ve stemmed the blood loss,’ she managed to say as she fought back her tears. ‘Or it’ll be wasted.’

Cody watched, trying to ignore his squeamishness as Bethany used the clamps on the frayed arteries spilling blood across the seats and onto the cold metal floor beneath them.

‘The cold’s helping him,’ he managed to observe.

The arteries should have been firing high pressure blood like water cannons, but instead it was pulsing in lethargic spurts.

‘He’s lost a lot of blood,’ Bethany said, her speech quivering with cold and grief. ‘He’s fading fast.’

‘Stick with it,’ Cody encouraged her, closing his eyes and turning away from the bloody mess.

‘Okay,’ Bethany snapped. ‘Get it in him.’

Cody yanked Bobby’s right glove off and pushed the capsule’s needle into the back of his hand. The seal broke automatically and the morphine drained into Bobby’s body. Within minutes his ramblings had ceased and he lay in silence, breathing softly.

Bethany sat back and stared at Bobby’s shattered leg in dismay. Her hand flew to her mouth as she averted her head and choked on her sobs.

‘Can you do anything?’ Cody asked as he slipped an arm across her shoulders.

‘Jesus no,’ Bethany gasped, looking at Bobby’s shattered leg once more. ‘It’s too far gone. He’ll lose the leg. But we can’t do it here.’

Cody sat back in the cab and wiped a hand angrily across his face as he looked down at Bobby.

The door to the cab swung open with a blast of frigid air and snow as Bradley ducked his head inside.

‘What’s the verdict?’

Cody sighed. ‘He needs surgery. We’ll have to go back.’

Bradley stared at Cody from inside his hood for a brief moment, surveying the wounds.

‘He won’t make it,’ he said clairvoyantly. ‘Best we keep movin’.’

Cody turned and leaped out of the cab, forcing Bradley to stand back. ‘You think?’

‘He’s a liability now!’ Bradley insisted. ‘We can’t drag him around with us. It was his choice to stay out here all alone and now he’s paid the price.’

‘He came out here to prepare the beacons,’ Cody shouted above the gale. ‘He was taking a risk on our behalf! Are we going to leave him now to die for it?’

‘Better him than the rest of us!’ Bradley bellowed back. ‘We’re not going back!’

Jake’s voice cut above the gusting wind.

‘Then good luck, Brad. You’re on your own.’ Jake turned to Cody. ‘Get Bobby back to Alert. We’ll follow, with or without Brad, after we’ve loaded the bear on board for food.’

Jake turned and trudged toward the second BV without giving Bradley a chance to respond. Cody turned and slammed the BV’s door shut before heading for the cab. Reece and Sauri started off toward the dead polar bear.

‘Where the hell are you going?’ Cody heard Bradley shouted at Sauri.

The Inuit did not respond. Cody saw Bradley curse and shout as he stormed away.

The team was Jake’s again.

*

Jake reached up for the lead BV’s cab door when something stopped him in his tracks.

The blustering snow whipped across the ice fields almost horizontally, obscuring details in the snow and constantly reshaping the land around them. Jake could see the gruesome bloodstains where Bobby had been attacked, Reece, Sauri and a reluctant Bradley now hauling the huge corpse of the polar bear toward their BV.

A trail of blood in the snow marked where Bobby had been carried to the other BV, but from where Jake stood a second, fainter trail of blood led away from the station through the snow.

It was possible that the bear had eaten nearby and that Bobby had inadvertently disturbed the animal, which may have attacked if it felt that its food source was threatened or that it was being challenged. Jake turned and trudged across the snow field in the hopes of finding an uneaten seal or similar.

The trail was feint, pink splotches in the ice, but it led to a deep drift to the south of the station. Amid the snow, Jake could see patches of blood and fragments of clothing.

Panic flushed through him as he ran to the drift and saw a deep hole in the snow stained with ugly patches of black-brown blood. Strips of filthy fabric fluttered in the bitter wind, and as Jake reached the edge of the hole and squatted down a waft of putrid air hit him, stained with rotting meat and putrefaction.

Jake gagged, one gloved hand over his mouth as he peered down into the hole and saw the head of a man peering lifelessly out at him, thin hair fluttering on the wind, bloated purple tongue poking from between yellowing teeth and the whole macabre sight surrounded by a pair of severed hands, one of which had been shredded by the bear’s teeth.

Overcoming his revulsion and hoping that he had discovered the remains of an Inuit or polar explorer, Jake reached down and lifted the undamaged hand from the snow. It took him only a moment to realise that the hand was neither petrified nor fully decayed.

The body could not have been in the ice for long.

***

My beloved Maria,

Our situation has not improved since I last wrote to you. Tragically, it is even worse.

Bobby Leary’s injuries were such that Bethany was forced to remove his leg. The base at Alert has a small operating theatre, but without professional staff we were forced to amputate using only morphine. Bobby recovered well for a few days, but then suddenly began a decline. He is now very sick and we have no means of treating him. Bethany suspects some kind of blood poisoning, perhaps from the bear that attacked him or from the broken femur he sustained when he leapt from the tower at Alert Five.

With Bobby so ill we are unable to travel. Bradley is threatening us all with physical violence if we do not depart soon. We have placed a permanent watch on Bobby in case Brad attempts to intervene and “put an end to his suffering”, as he so casually puts it, but we all think it’s just bluster and arrogance: it was Brad who charged the bear without thought for himself. Had he not done so, Bobby might not have survived at all.

I don’t know what we will do, Maria. The sun is permanently above the horizon now and daylight reigns. The ice in the Lincoln Sea cracks and thunders as it breaks up and the tundra is becoming visible all around us as the snow melts away into the sea. It would be truly beautiful and something that I would love for you one day to see were it not so brutally lethal to us now.

Our food runs low and the meat from the polar bear is almost gone.

We all know that we cannot remain here much longer.

*

Bobby lay on a bed in the accommodation block, a room to himself. Cody leaned on the wall outside and saw Charlotte Dennis sitting in a chair beside his bed, quietly reading a novel that he was fairly certain she had read twice already over the winter.

‘He said much lately?’

Charlotte looked up from her book and glanced at Bobby. She shook her head.

Bobby’s skin was pallid and sheened with a thin film of sweat. He lay beneath a duvet, a saline drip in his arm that Bethany had rigged for him. Although nobody really believed that Bradley Trent would wander in and throttle Bobby as he slept, the watch also prevented Bobby from thrashing in his delirium and ripping the line from his arm.

The idea of the kid dying of both blood poisoning and dehydration was too awful to bear.

‘How are you holding up?’ Cody asked her.

Charlotte smiled weakly but said nothing. She closed the book in her lap and stared at the floor.

‘We’ll get out of here soon enough,’ Cody said, just to break the silence.

‘Do you think they’re waiting for us?’ she asked.

Cody figured he knew exactly what she meant, but for reasons he could not explain he asked: ‘Who?’

‘Our families,’ Charlotte replied, seemingly immune to Cody’s apparent ignorance.

Cody looked at his boots for a moment, wondering what the hell he could say that wouldn’t sound trite.

‘We’ve got to hope that they are. What have we got, if we don’t have that?’

Charlotte stared at Cody for a moment and he feared that he had uttered something ridiculous.

‘My father,’ she said, ‘was a senator…,
is
a senator. I never heard a word from him about what was happening out there. There was no warning call, nothing to let me know what was going on. Nothing.’

‘You said that it would have happened fast,’ Cody replied. ‘And the storm came during the night for the folks back home. Maybe he was asleep, didn’t have chance to do anything before the lights went out and it was all over.’

She smiled faintly but Cody could see that he had not convinced her.

‘There would have been some warning,’ she said, ‘even if only a few hours. NASA would have known about the coming storm. They had a satellite called SOHO that did nothing but observe the sun’s activity. The loss of power across the country, perhaps across the world, would have had immense defence significance. The military and the government would all have been informed.’ She shook her head. ‘Yet, he said nothing to me.’

Cody watched her for a few moments.

‘You think that they knew this was going to happen and they didn’t tell anybody?’

Charlotte shrugged. He had never before realised how small she looked, her shoulders narrow and her frame light. Maybe it was the near starvation rations that they were being forced to endure since the wildlife had fled the area when Bradley and Sauri had started hunting in earnest.

‘Maybe,’ she said finally. ‘Sure would have solved a lot of problems, I guess.’

Cody looked at Bobby, aware of the sudden metaphor their conversation had created. Bobby was holding them back. Without him, they could escape Alert and make a break for Grise Fjord. They could be down there in as little as….

Cody struck the thought from his mind. To do so would be barbaric, cruel.

‘We’re not animals,’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘How long do you think he’ll last?’

Charlotte looked again at Bobby and sighed. ‘Bethany would know better, but he’s been getting steadily worse. A few days, maybe?’

They had already used up half of their meagre supply of antibiotics on Bobby, trying to fight the infection that was raging through his body to no avail. Now, the kid had no choice but to fight it on his own.

Charlotte’s eyes flicked up past Cody’s, and he turned to see Reece watching them from the doorway, his face stricken and his eyes big and black in the dim light.

‘I did this,’ he uttered. ‘I should have been there.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Cody said. ‘Don’t put this on yourself, okay?’

Reece stared at Bobby and then turned and rushed away down the corridor outside.

‘Cody?’

Jake McDermott’s voice carried down the corridor as Reece vanished, laden with urgency. Cody turned and hurried down the end of the corridor where Jake stood holding the door ajar.

‘What’s up?’

‘All sorts of things,’ Jake murmured. He kept his voice low as he spoke, to avoid alerting Charlotte to their conversation. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I found a dead body in the ice near the observatory.’

‘A body?’

‘The human kind,’ Jake whispered, ‘the sort that hasn’t been long dead.’

Cody swallowed thickly. ‘Have you told anybody else about this?’

‘No,’ Jake whispered. ‘I figured that I’d keep it to myself, but now it looks like Bobby isn’t going to make it and I can’t help but think that we shouldn’t care if he does or not.’

Cody felt a tremor of unease ripple through him. ‘You think that
he
killed the man you found?’

Jake stared at Cody. ‘I didn’t say it was a man.’

Cody winced. ‘For Christ’s sake, there are far more men than women up here, Jake.’

Jake shrugged. ‘I guess.’

Cody rubbed his temples. ‘Jesus, it never rains.’

‘That police detective who called from Boston, before the storm,’ Jake said, ‘they must have suspected somebody here of murder. All of you guys came from Boston, right? And that news report you were viewing, about the homicide? Maybe that was the crime.’

Cody looked Jake straight in the eye. ‘You still think I had something to do with this?’

Jake held his gaze for a long beat and then sighed. ‘No. If I was looking for a murderer in our group I wouldn’t look at the only family man here, and I wouldn’t really pick Bobby either. I’d pick a recluse, somebody who looked like they wanted to get away from a crime.’

Cody felt a chill ripple down his spine. ‘Reece?’

‘He’s the odd man out,’ Jake whispered, ‘the odd ball. If he buried somebody’s remains out here, he’d have been indirectly responsible for the attack on Bobby. The bear must have sniffed out the body.’

Cody’s vision blurred as he glanced back toward Bobby’s room. ‘Christ, I hadn’t even thought of that.’

‘And Reece was the one who had the meltdown,’ Jake pointed out. ‘What if he wasn’t just cracking up from isolation and fear? What if he really did kill somebody?’