The Cold Beneath (28 page)
The tears stung my face, threatening to freeze in place as they slipped from my eyes. “Please don’t leave me, Gideon. You were my only real friend.” I could sense the men gathering about us, each silent as they witnessed my breakdown.
“Lent,” Lightbridge croaked. He looked up to the man in question, and I could see his fire was fading.
“Yes, sir?” Lent asked.
“When I go, I should be … taken care of. Just like the others. I want you all to know … that it’s the right thing to do. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Lent sounded doubtful, but nodded all the same.
“Don’t sound so grim … son… you don’t have to do it.” Lightbridge laughed a little, then looked back to me to add, “Someone else … already promised.”
Clutching his hand, I whispered, “And I will.”
“Philip … I have to ask for one more promise.”
“Anything!” I gathered him to me, greedy for his final moments, wishing I could stretch them out across the rest of my life rather
than have them tumble away from me in the few seconds we had left.
“If you make it back … if God sees fit to forgive us and rescue you … there’s a place, on my estate, behind a grove of apple trees …” His voice became distant then, as he went lax in my arms. But his lips continued to move, so I lowered my ear in time to hear, “… and tell her I love her. Philip, go to her and tell her I still love her. And I’m so sorry.” He closed his eyes, and his voice grew to a thin rasp of wheezing. “I should have gone to see you every day … but I couldn’t bear the sight of that cold stone … I couldn’t live with the thought … that you were gone … I’m so sorry … I’m so sorry.” He paused to release a single ripple of warmth into the cold air as his life fled his body with his last word. “Bessy.”
“Go to her now,” I whispered. “She’s waiting.”
I don’t remember asking for the pistol, and perhaps the men pushed it into my open hand out of understanding more than command. Either way, I found myself in possession of the thing, so upon my given word, I did as asked. I cradled his corpse to me, poised the weapon beneath his chin and sent him on his journey to reunite with his true love.
We should all be so lucky.
The report deafened my left ear, and the powder burned my jacket in long streaks of black and blood. My own wound—a chunk of torn flesh gushing copious amounts of scarlet—was numb in the face of Lightbridge’s death. I had witnessed so many lives destroyed by whatever ill had befallen us, yet the death of that one man threatened to consume me. I stared at his remains, for they were still draped across my arm, then I turned my attention to the gun. How easy it would have been to place the barrel in my mouth and cease this tortured living. How comforting the sweet release of true death would have been. I craved it. No! I needed it! Better still, I deserved it after all I had seen. I raised the gun to my own face, pushing it against my temple, intent on ending my life.
I find that in moments of extreme stress, some people have the habit of shifting their attention away from the matter at hand, lest it drive them over the edge. It is an automatic reflex for them, nothing to find fault with, for they don’t do it out of ill will or meanness. And often, in this state of distraction, they blunder upon hidden gems of wisdom. This is what happened that day in the snow. While I was weeping and wailing and staring down the barrel of what I was sure would be my blessed peace, I heard one of the men behind me ask an odd question.
“Why are they not frozen?”
I looked up to find Bryant standing over the remains of the revenants, a curious look upon him. I asked, “What?”
“Frozen. They’re terribly exposed, look.” He stooped to finger the wide gaps in Johnson’s weathered suit. “Exposed to the elements for hours on end. Blue with chill, yet they ooze with blood. Though it’s black and dead as they are, it still oozes when it should be frozen solid in their veins. Why do you suppose that is?”
I was too tired for such needless questions. “I don’t know.”
Lent grunted. “It’s as if what keeps them alive also keeps them from freezing completely.”
No sooner had he spoke those words than I knew. I knew! I knew just what was happening and why it was happening, and the knowledge of it kept me from tasting the sweetest freedom of my weapon’s promise. Instead I was filled with a sudden and terrible anger. I shook from the power of it; my very core shuddered as if a chill were upon me. But it wasn’t the weather that had me trembling; it was the magnitude of the horrifying truth that took me so long to comprehend.
I not only knew what was happening, I knew who was to blame!
I laid my friend’s corpse upon the snow with all the gentleness I could manage, then scrambled to my feet without the help of the outstretched hands of the men. “You three, gather them to the ship.” I waved my wounded arm to the bodies surrounding us. “Don’t leave them out here for the animals. They deserve better. We all deserved better.”
After I placed my command, I turned on my heel and made a steady march for the ship. None of the men questioned my authority, though truth be told, I had none. They could have ignored me, could have joined me in my return to the ship and the awful task that awaited me there. But they didn’t. As men of habit, they fell into their dutiful role and tended to the remains of their friends and comrades.
I, however, made my way to the Fancy to end this madness once and for all.
****
****
Accusation
The trip back to the ship was of some distance, and I had lost a fair amount of blood in my struggle with the revenants. But neither of these things turned me from my path. I put one foot before the other and laid out a straight line to the tunnel, into the ship, past the flap of the ruined airbag, into the long hallway and to the other end. There awaited my final confrontation. There awaited the truth of the matter. The source of our scourge. I gripped the gun, its heavy weight reassuring as I marched past the pedometrics, past the water closets, past the kitchen, and paused outside the infirmary. Drawing a deep and steadying breath, I kicked open the door, raised the weapon and called down a curse upon my foe.
“Geraldine!” I shouted.
“Pip!” she cried as she leapt to her feet and rushed to meet me. “Oh Pip! You look just awful. What has happened? I heard shots and screaming. Please …” She paused in her onrush and request to stare, comically cross-eyed, down the barrel of my weapon. It took a few heartbeats for the gravity of the moment to settle upon her. She blinked, then shook her head as if trying to loosen the image of me holding her at gunpoint from her mind. She backed up a step, then two, all the way until she was braced against Albert’s bed behind her. “Pip? What are you doing?”
“What I should have done years ago,” I whispered. I cocked the gun, relishing the metallic click of it. How happy that sound was! What joy it heralded into my cold, black heart!
“Laddie?” Albert asked from his sickbed, his voice hoarse and weak. “What on Earth are you pointing your weapon at the lady for?”
“She’s not a lady,” I said. “She is far from it. She is a monster! You hear me? A monster!”
“Philip!” Albert shouted.
Geraldine gaped as her dainty hands covered her mouth in surprise.
“She killed Lightbridge,” I snarled.
“Gideon is dead?” Albert asked. The hurt in his voice tore at me, but there was no time to share in his grief. I was too full of fire and brimstone for that now.
I nodded. “Yes, and it’s
her
fault.”
Geraldine’s look was one of pain as well, but whether for our friend’s passing or her own predicament, I couldn’t tell. She lifted her trembling hands and said, “Philip, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re so pale. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Lad?” Albert asked. “Calm down. You aren’t making a whole lot of sense.”
“That compound!” I shouted. “Those injections! They are the cause behind all of this. They haven’t been keeping us alive. They’ve been killing us!”
“What?” she shouted. “What are you talking about?”
“Think about it, Albert,” I said, my gaze never leaving Geraldine’s surprised face. “Just think about it. Why would all of those … those … revenants not be frozen solid? You left Baugham at the bottom of that icy chasm for hours, yet he moved as if he were warm to the core. Why?”
Albert stammered his response. “I … I must admit, I hadn’t given it much thought.”
“It was the injections. The very things that keep us from freezing while we live, keep us from freezing in our death. They aren’t vitamins. God knows what they are, but they aren’t vitamins.”
Looking back upon the whole affair from a medical frame of mind, I suppose I should have been more suspicious of the injections from the beginning. An herbal remedy to keep out the cold? Steady injections that dropped our core temperature to inhuman degrees? Listening to myself say such words aloud leaves me feeling like a first-year student, wet behind the ears and green. How could I have been so blind? Easy. The injections were hers. And as something that belonged to her, it was something with which I wanted nothing to do. By ignoring the injections, I was, in essence, ignoring her. But I was also ignoring the source of our misery.
Those needles weren’t filled with herbs and vitamins.
They were filled with concentrated evil, straight from the bowels of Hell itself!
I could see Albert sitting up just beyond the shaking form of Geraldine. He snapped his attention to her and asked, “Is this true?”
Geraldine shook her head at me again. “No. Pip, please, you must believe me. I would never hurt Gideon. Or Albert. Or you. Pip, I love you.”
Her sincerity gave me pause. I relaxed, lowering the gun just a tad as I considered her words. Was her innocence genuine? Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she was as much a victim in all of this as we were. How could I accuse my true love of something so monstrous?
Then I caught sight of her shivering, her trembling, heard the chittering of her chattering teeth, and it struck me that she wasn’t quaking from fright. She was cold. Very cold. Too cold for someone who had an equal share of the compound flowing through her veins, hormones be damned!
It was then I knew that she hadn’t been dosing herself at all.
I sneered, raised my gun again and asked, “Why do you tremble so, my love?”
She glanced to her shaking hands, then drew them to her, as if she could hide the damning evidence from me. “I’m frightened.”
“No. I think you’re cold. And I don’t think it’s the fault of your sex. I think you haven’t been taking those injections. Just giving them to us. Why?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Though she still quaked, she lifted her chin in defiance.
In that movement, she betrayed her words.
All of my deepest fears were confirmed. I walked forward, closing the distance between us so she would have no room to make a break for it should she dare. “You don’t know? I’ll tell you, then. You’re experimenting on us. You have been this whole time. You knew what was happening since that night Morrow returned, yet you kept pushing that cursed concoction into our veins.”
“Lass?” Albert asked. “Is Philip right?”
With her back to him and her face to me, she let a small smile surface. “No. He couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Her ill-placed humor enraged me. I bounded forward and pressed the weapon tight against her skin. Her cowering turned real then. The smile fell away; a genuine whimper rose from her as I poised my pistol under her chin. But I would not be moved by her cower or the silent plea of her eyes. No pity lay in my heart for such an evil woman.
“A great man’s blood stains my hands because of you,” I snarled. “You should suffer a worse fate.” As I lifted her chin with the cold steel of the gun, my eyes settled on her neck.
And the cog that lay in the hollow of her alabaster throat.
The sight of it stopped me in my actions. What was I doing? The woman I loved, the woman I had spent ten years dreaming of winning back, the woman who gave me her body and soul so unselfishly but a week before, now cowered and shivered under my armed hand like a frightened doe. Surely I had gone mad.
