NOW
Zak Reeves was utterly alone.
He blundered away from the airstrip. His boots crunched icy snow, the crump-crump-crump the only sound in his head. Or rather, it was the only sound he listened to, because he blocked out the soft chanting of the red-jackets. No. Not just the red-jackets. May too. Mum and Dad. Dima. Their faces blank, their eyes empty, their bodies crawling with bugs.
He ran and ran, trying so hard to push their tortured faces from his mind. His legs moved as if they were on autopilot, because he needed all his mental strength to force the darkness from his head. It clouded in at the sides of his vision, made the world swim in front of him. The ground was hardly beneath him any more; it was softening, trying to fall away as the thing beneath the ice invaded his mind.
Zak had no idea he was shouting.
‘Get out of my head!’
Over and over again.
‘Get out of my head!’
Then it was gone. The probing fingers withdrew. His legs grew heavy – so, so heavy, like they were encased in concrete – but he continued to push across the snow, one foot at a time until he couldn’t move another step and he fell to his knees and hung his head. His chest heaved, the cold air saturating his body, every breath blowing out his precious body heat. He let the tears flow, pooling in the base of his goggles, freezing solid on his cheekbones. He cried for Mum and Dad. He cried for May, and he cried for the hopelessness of his situation. There was no one to help him now. There was nowhere for him to go.
And when there were no more tears, Zak felt the cold tighten around him. He shivered hard and lifted his eyes to stare into the unforgiving desert.
Ahead of him, there was nothing.
Literally nothing. He heard May’s voice as if she were right there with him.
The world stretched out for ever. On and on. Flat and cold and grey. If there had been enough light, it would have been brilliant white, but for now it was grey, grey, grey. To his right, another eternity of snow and ice. To his left, the same.
From somewhere out there, a rumbling reached out to him. The sound of an engine? Or was it something new? Something he hadn’t seen? Perhaps it was another biomechanical monster, created by the Spiders. Or maybe it was help. Someone was coming? The sound grew louder as if it were approaching, but it passed to his left, too far out for him to see anything.
Zak sat up and listened, allowing himself a brief moment of faint hope, but as the sound faded to nothing, his hope of rescue faded with it. And when it was gone, he sat back in despair, wondering if the sound had even been real.
In the distance behind him, the base looked small. It looked alien, like he had run out on to a faraway planet. The lights were out again, so Outpost Zero was nothing but a series of shapes. Behind it, above the mountains, the sky was clear. A sickle moon sat low and bright, casting its silver light across the base. Ice and snow glittered like riches.
The moon was surrounded by a billion billion stars, burning through the atmosphere, bringing light that was millions of years old. But even that was nothing compared to the colour. The sky was full of colour. Pink, purple and yellow streaks shone upwards like searchlights, shifting and swirling among the stars. They swam across the heavens in moving shafts, filtering the glow of constellations, colouring the sky like a bioluminescent alien landscape.
The Aurora Australis.
Zak could hear Dad’s voice in his head telling him what caused it. Something about electrons crashing into atoms in the atmosphere, but that made it sound so much less than it was. It made it boring. Actually seeing it was pure magic.
Zak shivered and tore his eyes away from the spectacle. He was wearing layers, good protection, but no kind of protection would last for ever out there. Already the cold was finding its way inside his clothes. He was losing body heat with every breath, and he could feel himself beginning to shiver more and more. He had to get inside. If he didn’t find somewhere soon, he would freeze to death.
Zak got to his feet and turned in every direction. Nothing had changed. The landscape was still endless. It was still empty. He looked back at the base and wondered if there was any part of it that was safe, but he knew they were waiting for him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, they would sneak into his thoughts and they would know. The only place for him to go was towards The Chasm. Follow the arrow he had seen on the map. There had to be something there. If he could reach it, he might be able to find out what was happening here. He might be able to stop it.
So he checked his bearings with the silhouette of the base, and began walking out into the endless desert of Antarctica.
The cold was worsening. It stung his lungs and numbed his fingertips. He pulled his hood tighter, banged his hands together and rubbed them hard as he dragged his heavy feet on and on. His movement was slow and his steps were clumsy. And when he glanced back again, the base was tiny. If he lifted his hand he could pinch Outpost Zero between his finger and thumb as if it were a million miles away. There was no going back now, he would freeze to death before he reached it, but there was nothing ahead, either. Nothing but ice and snow and wind. And the realization crept over him with a deep feeling of dread. He had been wrong. The icy desert was as endless as space. He might as well have been searching for a single snowflake.
His mind was woozy, his thoughts confused. Everything was beginning to shut down. His senses were failing, but Zak knew enough to understand what was happening to him. Hypothermia was taking him in his grip. Killing him slowly. It was grinning as it wrapped its arms around him, squeezing tighter and tighter.
Come on in, Zak, it said. Everyone’s safe and warm in here.
‘Head back,’ he mumbled, but Outpost Zero was nowhere to be seen now. He frowned and turned on the spot, watching the horizon, but there was nothing other than grey snow and black sky. The Aurora Australis was gone. Outpost Zero was gone. Zak had no idea which way to go.
Panic clutched at his heart. He was going to die out here. Like Scott of the Antarctic, he was going to freeze to death.
‘Don’t give up. You’re almost there.’
Startled, Zak whipped around and stared at the figure standing not far away from him. It was the same person he had seen before, the one wearing ancient all-weather gear, like in those old photos. His head was covered by a woollen balaclava, with a hood pulled over it. Goggles protected his eyes.
‘Who are you?’ Zak was too tired to be afraid any more. ‘What do you want?’
The figure didn’t speak again. Instead, he lifted his right arm and beckoned with his hand.
‘You want me to follow?’
The figure turned and walked away.
So Zak followed. His feet dragged, and his body shivered. He had no idea where he was going, and he wasn’t sure if he even cared. He just didn’t want to be alone and he didn’t want to die. But his body was starting to fail him. He couldn’t feel his face, his fingers were numb, and his legs were growing weaker by the second. His mind was vague and unfocused. The cold was forcing its way in. Hypothermia was winning, and Zak began to think dying wouldn’t be so bad. If he gave up and fell into the snow to lie still and let the cold take him, all of this would be over. All the fear and the pain would disappear.
What a relief that would be.
But he didn’t stop. He trudged on and on, following the figure towards a rise in the perfect landscape. And as he came closer, Zak turned his head slowly left and right, peering along the length of the ridge. It was at least a hundred metres high, and stretched as far as he could see in both directions. A perfect white wall with smooth sides. The only way to climb it would be with ropes and spikes.
He had reached a dead end.
‘Why?’ Zak shivered violently and looked at the figure that had led him here, but instead of seeing the ancient explorer, with its face covered like a ghoul, he saw his sister.
May.
Now I know I’m going mad . . .
She wasn’t dressed as she had been when he last saw her. Instead, she was dressed how he best remembered her. Tight black jeans with knees so ripped it was a wonder they didn’t fall apart when she wriggled into them. A black T-shirt with The Walking Dead printed in bold white letters. A leather biker jacket with pin badges on the lapels. One of the pins was completely yellow, such a happy colour, with two black dots for eyes and a big smiley mouth. There was a splash of red blood on one side. She wore her favourite Dr. Martens boots, and a black beanie with a picture of a white hand holding a red heart-shaped hand grenade. Her hair was hanging loose from the edges of the beanie.
May had her arms crossed and was staring at her brother as if she couldn’t understand why the cold was bothering him so much. ‘Come on, you loser, what are you waiting for?’
Zak didn’t know if she was actually there, or if he was even hearing her voice for real. He had seen so many bizarre things over the past few hours, this was just another one to add to the long list.
‘What are you waiting for?’ May spoke (thought?) again, and a wide door slid open in the endless white wall beside her. When the door was open enough for a person to pass through, May lifted a hand and swept it towards the entrance and the darkness it had revealed. ‘Get inside, you freak. You’re the only one who can see this. The only one we can tell. You’re the only one who can know.’
Zak frowned and hesitated. It might be some kind of trap, but what did he have to lose? There was nowhere else for him to go.
So he stumbled forward, and followed May into the unknown.
Zak found himself in a rectangular room carved into the ice. White light shone from tiny bulbs fitted into the perfectly square corners, and an Arctic Cat snowmobile sat idle by the door. On the other side of the room a sloped corridor led deeper into the ice. There was no heat to warm his body, and Zak struggled to control his shivering as he followed his sister along the ice-corridor. A harsh draught moaned around him like the ghosts of the unhappy dead.
Zak made his way down and down, deeper and deeper into the ice until he came to a vast cavern with perfectly smooth walls of ice and a high, flat ceiling. The space was at least three times as big as the assembly hall at school, but instead of being stuffed with stacked chairs and smelling like school dinners, it was filled with horrors and stank like a slaughterhouse.
Bugs, like the ones that had smothered Mum, Dad and May, were everywhere. They crawled along the walls, they carpeted the floor, they clicked and rustled and fluttered as they scuttled over each other or took to the air. Littered among the insects covering the floor, there were parts taken from the dismantled plane and Magpie, and cobbled-together machines clattered with gears and glistened with grey cords of muscle, but all these were dwarfed by the giant monster towering over them.
Zak guessed it had been one of Mum and Dad’s Spiders, but it was hardly recognizable now. Instead of shining steel and alloy, the drone was encased in a hard outer shell similar to the kind covering the bugs. Grey translucent sinews twisted at its joints, and criss-crossed the creature’s underside. The monster was a demented mix of mechanical and biological. Metal pincers protruded from its face, coarse hairs growing around them. It was part-Spider, part-bug, all gross. Insects swarmed over it, disappearing beneath the shell, crawling over its fleshy parts, shedding their armour and melting into the monster, becoming part of it. They were giving it life. The smell rising from it was like wet soil and fresh meat.
On the other side of the cavern, opposite the corridor, May stood in a place where the world fell away into nothing. An immense and jagged rip ran from left to right like a monstrous mouth, its edges like dangerous teeth. A tear in the ice so wide it was impossible to see the other side.
The Chasm.
Zak crossed the huge room and went to his sister. He peered over the edge of The Chasm and stared into the endless depths of the Earth, thinking that if he toppled forwards and fell, he would be falling for ever. But the longer he stared into its eternity, the more he began to see.
There was something moving down there. Flickering fluorescent lights flitting backwards and forwards like fireflies in the darkness.
‘Let us show you.’ May spoke again, but Zak knew it wasn’t May, and when he looked at her, she faded and shimmered like an old memory. She was an illusion, put into his head by something he didn’t understand, but she was trying to tell him something. Whatever lay beneath the ice, it wanted Zak to understand.
Zak stared down into The Chasm once more, and saw the flickering lights lifting towards him like tiny lanterns in the night. The hum of insects grew louder as the swarm approached from below, and then they were rising up, surrounding him. And as they covered his body, Zak felt warm, and the familiar darkness of another vision came to him. But he no longer felt afraid, and this time he didn’t fight it. Instead, he let his mind go.
Zak surrendered himself to the vision.