Exit Alpha (31 page)

Bell rabbit-chopped the girl.

She grunted, fell forward on Mullins.

He shoved her off. She fell back into her seat like a corpse.

Mullins, muttering obscenities, found the piton, picked it up, looked at it amazed.

‘Did you . . . see that?’ Bell was shaking.

Raul nodded. ‘The paranormal. Yes. It proves we are parts of a unified field. A hologram. Give it here.’

Mullins handed the thing across. Raul examined it as if expecting strings. He handed it back, careful not to appear disturbed. ‘The world in its true form is miraculous. The suspension of natural law is — at some level — natural.’ He turned to Cain. ‘Is that why she was with EXIT?’

Cain nodded.

Their tiredness, the extreme situation and the disorienting thin air made the phenomenon seem just another trial.

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ Mullins grouched. ‘I didn’t bloody sign on for this crud.’

‘Stop whining,’ Bell said. ‘If you want your second payment, put up with it.’

‘Second payment. Big deal. I’ll be stuffed.’

Bell, close to collapse, turned to Raul, his drawn face still respectful. ‘What do we do?’

‘Indeed.’ Raul shut his eyes and leaned on the vibrating engine cover. ‘I need to concentrate. Quiet!’ His mouth moved and he presently rumbled. ‘Then which way? Follow? Or go on?’

Bell watched the parody with weary devotion.

Raul finally opened his eyes and addressed the multi-vent heater before him as if it were a sacred relic. ‘We continue as before — using the compass.’

Bell turned back to the wheel, palmed his eyes. ‘Gustave, I’m dead. We’ve got to swap shifts.’

‘Very well. You and Cain swap with Karen and Jakov. They should have got some sleep by now. Mullins, get the medical kit. We’re going to inject that witch and knock her out.’

Cain said, ‘Got a better idea. Put her in the back with the pope.’

Raul’s derisory smile. ‘You think he can cast out devils?’

‘I think he can calm her. That’s all.’

‘Just get her out of my sight.’

It happened early next morning. Cain was in the rear cab, in a rapidly hardening sleeping bag, left shoulder propped against a drum. Bell was jammed beside him, Nina, the pope and Eve opposite. They were woken by a lurch, a crashing, a concussion. When he opened his eyes, Eve was on top of him, yelping, and the cabin was tilted 30 degrees to the side.

The engine had conked.

The sound of wind.

Slotted, he thought, along the crack line. At least they hadn’t gone in.

Bell, buried beneath the weight of the Church, struggled to push the pope off his chest. Then everyone talked at once.

Cain, drowsy and stiff, freed himself from Eve and told the others to stay put. Bell, ever eager, unlatched the side door, now almost above them. Being a fingie, he used one hand and the wind wrenched the door from his grasp.

Cain clambered after him into glare. Sunshine seared through a gap in low cloud but they were almost socked in and all surface definition was obscured by a dense tide of blowing snow. There was no way the second shift could have seen the slot. Raul must have had them steering blind.

He joined the front cabin contingent who were already out on the ice and drift-obscured up to the thighs. He climbed up over the roof to get down on their side, clinging to Zia’s frozen arm to lower himself.

Through gaps in the swirling snow he saw a slot more than a metre wide and perhaps two deep. But the floor was probably false. The Hagglunds lay along it, supported on one side by its tracks and on the other by its cabins.

‘Jeez, we fucked,’ Jakov said. His face was in bad shape — livid sunburns contrasting with ominous yellow patches that would eventually darken. Exhausted after driving for hours, he limped to the vehicle and leaned against it.

Cain said, ‘What’s up with your foot?’

‘Think it die.’

‘You drying your socks?’

‘How? Jeez. First got to get boot off.’

‘Forget about socks,’ Raul snapped. ‘We’re wasting time. How do we get out of this?’ The skin around his eyes was furrowed tight and he had frost nip on his nose and cheeks.

Hunt answered him. ‘If you want the classic ploy, you dig a ramp.’ She still seemed fit and wore her Batman-like face mask. ‘Then you get two other vehicles and haul from the side. As we don’t have those, you winch from ahead off ice anchors.’

‘Can we use the tracks to help?’ Bell asked.

‘No. There’s no differential lock. You’d just spin the free tracks.’

Cain left them discussing it and shuffled forward to look.

As he reached the front of the Hagg, the blowing snow lessened for a moment just as the side of the slot ahead of the front cab sheered off and slid down. The crack ahead was now wider than the vehicle. If they winched forward, it would go in.

The others had come up behind him.

Jakov said, ‘Jeez. No way, José.’

Raul said, ‘Fool. Negativity kills, not situations.’ He turned to Cain. ‘What now?’

Cain looked at the single feature visible — the tilted hulk of the patched Hagglunds with the bizarre shape on the roof. The roof seemed to be floating — a black and orange striped shoal in a white sea. Eve’s face peered from the window in the back cabin door over the tide of waist-deep swirling snow. In minutes the wind had risen. The chill was painful. They were heading for Condition One. His hands already felt like wooden blocks and his nose was running. He pulled his inner hood lower down and leaned against the wind, head averted.

‘Should we put up tents?’ Bell asked.

‘Too late. We could end up chasing them, could lose them.’

As if to prove the comment, a squall hit them like a wave. Raul and Hunt went flying and surfaced 2 metres away, as if dunked. When they stood, they were pale shapes, half-obscured by flying snow. Hunt adopted wind-walking mode, head down, arms in by her sides. Raul didn’t, tumbled again. The sun had vanished in cloud.

Cain yelled, ‘Right. Everyone back inside!’

While the others struggled to take shelter, he gripped the roof rack on the leaning front cab and walked back to check the heater hoses between the two sections of the vehicle. They’d looked brittle enough yesterday and at 40 below they could break. One hose seemed to have a surface crack but he couldn’t spot a leak. The snow found the crack between his balaclava and goggles, stung his face. By the time he climbed up to the front cab roof hatch he was almost in total whiteout.

He dropped down out of the weather, secured the hatch against the blow and restarted the engine to get warm coolant flowing through the hoses. By then, the thin cabin was vibrating with the gusts. Luckily the patching was on the lee side.

The front cabin cast had changed. He was now cooped with Raul, Bell, Hunt and Mullins.

‘Perhaps it’ll die down,’ Bell said. Then, spotting a look between Hunt and Cain . . . ‘No thanks to you pessimists.’

‘Realists,’ Cain said and parked his stinging hands under his armpits.

It became a hissing blizz that sounded like a passing train. He’d survived blows like it before, in container-huts tethered with chains. The wind had been strong enough to make them creak and shudder, to ripple the steel roofs and cause bottles to vibrate off shelves. Fortunately the slot held the Hagglunds firmly secured. But despite its positive connection with the ice, the fibreglass cabin trembled.

He turned to Hunt. ‘Is the thing in gear?’

‘There’s no park position in the transmission.’ She stomped on the park brake pedal to set the ratchet at the point of furthest depression for maximum stability. Then she called up the back cabin to make sure the others were getting warmth before helping sort out the confusion in the tilted cab. ‘If we run the tanks dry we’ll need the Primuses. Yellow boxes.’

‘Why are you using our fuel?’ Raul complained, shivering like all of them.

‘If you let the engine freeze, what’s the good of fuel?’

He pursed his cracked lips, his hatred for her showing.

‘If you use a Primus in a Hagg,’ Cain added, ‘you’ll do a Zola.’

‘What?’

‘Gas yourself. We need ventilation. This blow could go on for days and bury us.’

A fierce gust made the cab shudder. Above the rumble of the idling diesel, the noise was now a dull booming.

Nothing to do but wait it out.

He checked the blur through the side windows, braced against the engine cover, looked around. The boxes and sacks had been restacked to roughly simulate a level floor, and the people were perched on top of them in the tilting space. Hunt, Mullins and Bell searched among the mess.

Cain got his goggles out of his pocket, adjusted his balaclava. ‘Keep the engine running. I’m worried about the heater hoses.’ He checked his windproofs and hood, hauled his nose-wipers back on. ‘I’m going to check the old man and the temperature in the back.’ He got his hands on the roof hatch. ‘If you need me, there’s the interphone.’

Just then it buzzed. Bell picked it up. ‘No.’ His face clouded. ‘He hasn’t come in here . . . How long? . . . Half an hour? . . . All right.’ He shifted his mouth from the handset. ‘It’s the pope. He says Jakov went out to relieve himself and hasn’t come back.’

Hunt said, ‘Didn’t he know to rope himself up?’

Bell repeated the question into the phone, shook his head, hung up.

‘Well, as you’re popping out, Cain,’ Raul said, ‘you can look for him.’

‘In that?’ Cain laughed. ‘Did you know people down here get lost and freeze to death even between buildings at a base? Even if they have blizz lines? Forget it.’

‘Are you saying we write him off?’

‘He’s your man.
You
look for him. Just rope yourself to the roof rack and walk in circles till you find him. Except you’ll be blown off your feet. And there won’t be circles because you’ll end down the crack. And you won’t see him till you trip over him. Personally, I pass.’

Bell said, ‘You won’t even look?’

‘I’m heading straight across the roof, hanging on for dear life. If he’s squatting there wiping his arse, I’ll let you know.’

He put both hands on the hatch again.

The others waited for the shock of freezing air.

Hunt grinned. ‘Then there were eight.’

Jakov had given it much thought. He was fastidious about such things. That was why he could never be an airman. Fighter pilots had told him that they often had to pee their pants rather than risk a false move that could cause them to eject themselves. And they were forced to sit in their shit. That’s why the cockpits stank. He wasn’t sure about guys in tanks. As a military man, he knew his place on the totem pole was low. But Antarctica or not, he refused to do it in a bucket in front of a woman and a pope.

He got out, hanging on to the vehicle, and was almost blown away, dropped to all fours for stability. There was nothing to see at all — like the inside of a ping-pong ball. He hugged the tracks of the Hagglunds, worked his way further back, then tried to unzip himself. The mean bitch called Eve had given him toilet paper taken from the plane. Not much. Four wipers and a polisher. He was shivering already, freezing. He’d have to be bloody quick.

He removed his big mittens so he could undo his clothes. Then a gust blew him on his back.

Mittens flying from their harness, ventiles half-undone, he struggled back onto all fours.

The blizz drove steel-hard ice crystals into his ruined face. The vehicle was nowhere in sight. He tried to crawl back in the direction he’d been blown. The Hagg could only be steps away.

Just more whiteness.

As he tried to get his mitts back on, his hood was ripped back by the blast. Snow instantly froze in his hair, and around his eyes. By the time he turned from the hail of ice and dragged the hood back he had no idea of direction.

Then he heard the engine start up.

So close.

The wind tearing at his hood drowned the noise. He turned in a futile attempt to hear it again. Numbness striking at his limbs. His legs were stiff, as if his kneecaps were freezing. Dizzy, confused, breathless, responses blurred and shaking with cold, he crawled into the wind.

And fell into the slot.

There it was warmer, quieter, sheltered. He’d fallen on soft snow. He could see a bit in here — ice walls either side. Not high. And a little ahead, eureka! Blurred like something seen underwater — the underside of the Hagg.

He could hear the engine going.

The slotted tracks were hanging low.

He could reach them and haul himself up.

How lucky could you be?

He crawled underneath the vehicle, rose to his feet . . .

. . . and increased his ground pressure.

The false floor collapsed and he plunged 60 metres to his death.

Just before he hit, terror made him soil himself.

T
he blow lasted two days.
When the engine stopped, Cain and Mullins roped up and, bodies slow and stiff, off-loaded fuel drums and refilled the tanks. They returned to the front cab, numbed, light-headed with the effort and the cold. The big diesel ran for an hour, then coughed, stopped, wouldn’t even kick. Hunt told them that the fuel injection could have been damaged by frozen condensate.