GPS Coordinates: –89.23321, –19.6875
February 27, 2010
It was absolutely surreal, a nightmare, like one of the PCP-induced bad trips he’d been warned about as a kid growing up in the drug-addled afterglow of the disco era. This can’t be happening, he thought, no fucking way. I, Alan Whitehurst, a lifelong science geek who didn’t get laid until my second year in college and even then had to beg for it, am going to die on this godforsaken chunk of ice in the middle of nowhere. Still, he had to appreciate the irony. Shakespeare himself couldn’t have dreamed up a more improbable death for the Huntington Beach native who had never even been snow skiing, preferring instead the feel of the hot sand under his feet and the scalding summer sun beating down on his red shoulders. Of all the places to die, you had to pick the only unheated structure on the ice field . . . Leonelli was right to question who the crazy one really was. If only he could’ve seen your mad dash through the snow in boxer shorts and bare feet!
Huddled like ice fishermen inside the small prefabricated hut they aptly called the Meat Locker, it had taken Alan and the team more than five-hundred hours, 24/7 for nearly a month at Igor’s controls—feeding cable, siphoning off thousands of gallons of meltwater—to breach the subglacial lake a half-mile beneath the unyielding surface of this frozen waste. If the hole in the ice were allowed to freeze shut because they were too cold and miserable to hack it, all of their work would go to waste. Suck it up and keep plugging away . . . You never know when you’re going to hook the big one. If Hell actually existed, they had discovered it in the last place anyone would think to look.
It seemed funny to Alan now that all of their troubles had started with a simple case of food poisoning. For weeks, Art Leonelli, the forty-three year-old hydrologist and aspiring gourmet from the University of Washington—affable, easy-going, a virtuoso in the kitchen—had been going on about the poor quality of chow at the research station. Canned this, just-add-water that—they may as well have been dying from a rare disease with a name they couldn’t pronounce, so flavorless and uninspired were their daily meals. Of course Leonelli wasn’t the only one who thought so. They were all tired of eating like astronauts. If Alan never tasted another foil-sealed packet of dehydrated beef stroganoff it would be too soon. Another day or two of hunger like this and he, a staunch supporter of both PETA and Greenpeace, would have gladly taken up hunting if it meant putting fresh meat in his belly. He’d read the nutritional information on the packaging and was convinced that the manufacturer’s claims were downright lies. The reconstituted scraps smothered in flavorless brown gravy left him feeling shiftless and weak.
Each night at dinner they made a game of comparing the food on the table before them with some of the most undesirable meals in human history. And although they came up with the notorious cannibal cuisine of such ill-fated groups as the Donner Party and the Brazilian soccer team whose plane had crashed high in the Andes, none could think of anything worse than the single-serving entrées of lumpy brown ooze and badly shriveled mystery meat on which they had and would subsist until Ethan Hatcher, a close friend of Alan’s since grad school and the one in charge of the expedition, told them that their work here was complete.
Adding to their culinary despair was the fact that in nearly four weeks of tedious exploration, Igor, the remote-operated vehicle (ROV) they used to explore the lightless depths beneath them, had revealed nothing of particular interest: a dense layer of silt two-hundred feet thick in some places, and a sweeping expanse of darkness as impenetrable as the lake’s virgin water was pure. It was not that what they’d found wasn’t important; in fact, they had opened a window into earth’s ancient past and the climatological forces that had been at work when man was little more than an evolutionary aberration in the primate line. Already this window had provided them with rare and invaluable insight into a rapidly changing global climate that many believed heralded the end of life on earth as they knew it. Much of what the team had learned so far was encouraging—that earth was no stranger to climatic upheaval, that large-scale atmospheric disruptions were nothing more than the natural growing pains of a planet experiencing the cosmic equivalent of puberty.
They had also made less encouraging discoveries, dire predictions based on computer models assembled from data collected in the field. No two ways about it, their happy little home was heating up. In another 100,000 years anyone who planned on spending a significant amount of time outdoors had better be armed with a sunblock boasting an SPF of 1,000. But why go all the way to the bottom of the world, Alan wanted to know, when one only had to look at the shrinking ice caps to draw the same conclusions about the warming trend that had concerned scientists for decades? Once blanketed by ice and snow, polar regions that hadn’t seen the light of day since well before the last Ice Age now lay bare and exposed. Alan appreciated the significance of their findings, however, he had hoped for something a little more dramatic, a little less apocalyptic. A new species of plant or animal, something not quite so passive as the acre upon acre of featureless abyssal plain Igor traversed much like a deep space probe.
It didn’t help boost morale any that Ethan had been deliberately vague about what exactly it was he hoped to find. Whatever it was, Alan had never seen his friend push so hard, work with such single-minded purpose. For a change, Ethan was behaving like a man on a mission. They often worked eighteen and twenty-hour days. When they weren’t sleeping or eating, they were alternating shifts in the drilling room—four on, four off. ‘On’ meant that you were freezing your ass off while Igor dutifully tracked a set of grid coordinates. These were plotted by Hamsun, a Norwegian undersea navigation expert who relied on coordinates plotted with the aid of an atomic clock to ensure they weren’t going in circles. ‘Off’ meant that you were back in the lab compiling and analyzing data that had been collected during the course of your shift. It was scientific grunt work mostly—something to show the expedition’s financial backers when it came time to account for the millions of dollars being spent. It was the first time in all the years Alan had known him that Ethan seemed determined to do things strictly by the book.
Despite the disappointment of their ongoing search, Ethan hadn’t let up. The less they found, the harder he pushed. It wasn’t like him. Alan had accompanied his friend on other expeditions. Usually, he was more interested in soaking up the local color, particularly if it came clad in a bikini or was served on the rocks with a splash of fruit juice. But this time was different. He’d been pressing—was more tightly wrapped than usual. They could all see it. Strictly business. Whatever the reason, Alan suspected the others were every bit as relieved as he when the Air National Guard V22 Osprey arrived to whisk Ethan back to McMurdo Station. He would then hop a C–130 charter to Christchurch International Airport in New Zealand where he’d catch a commercial flight to LAX. Apparently it all had something to do with business, an urgent matter that required his personal attention.
“Why don’t you tell me what we’re looking for?” Alan shouted above the roar of the Osprey’s powerful twin tilt-rotors.
With the temperature hovering well below zero it was standard procedure for aircraft to keep the engines running. To do otherwise was to expose the vehicle to a host of problems, including congealed hydraulic fluid and pistons that cooled so quickly they ran the risk of cracking. Alan used his arm to shield his eyes from a blizzard of ice crystals kicked up by the Osprey’s whirling rotor blades.
Ethan smiled uneasily from his seat behind the co-pilot. “You’re in charge,” he shouted. “I’ll be back in a week.” He then gave the thumbs-up to the pilot and off they soared.
Alan stood and watched as the unusual aircraft shrank from view—an olive drab speck vanishing over the horizon. Lucky bastard. He wished it was him and not Ethan leaving behind the bloodless chill of Antarctica for the blissful warmth of southern California and real food. The possibility that they might make a breakthrough discovery in Ethan’s absence was little consolation. But it was something, and he was a scientist, and Ethan had had the forethought before making his getaway to remind Alan and the others that the great ones always suffered for their work.
Alan couldn’t help it; he was losing interest in the expedition. He could fake it for the others so as not to further undermine morale, but he couldn’t lie to himself. They had been out here fifty-eight days, two-thirds of which had been spent peering at a video monitor broadcasting images of a barren world they could only know vicariously. The cold, the isolation, the brief hours of daylight and interminable stretches of night were getting to him. Much more of this and he’d go nuts—start reciting the alphabet backwards, combing his eyelashes for dust mites, arguing with himself in the mirror. For months, they had been going through the motions like good little scientists—taking readings, recording their observations, checking their findings against established databases—but they hadn’t come across anything that set their work here apart from previous, less grueling expeditions to Antarctica.
Okay, so Leonelli was having a whale of a time analyzing his ice cores and water samples, and Hamsun and Northcutt were getting pretty good at poker, and Ellis was convinced the ice cap was melting more rapidly than anyone previously believed—none of it fueled Alan’s imagination the way Ethan had intimated the expedition would.
And what about Ethan? He was being so damn cryptic about it all. He hadn’t given them anything to go on which wasn’t like him considering he was typically all too anxious to hype his most recent quest. Equal parts showman and scientist, Ethan lived for the spotlight. He was described by many of his detractors as the P.T. Barnum of the scientific community. But this time he was all go and no show. He was being guarded with information, deliberately obtuse, his agenda as ill-defined and impossible to fathom as the three chimps they had toted to the ass end of the world and had been caring for ever since. According to Ethan the chimps were nothing—he was simply making good on a favor he owed a buddy of his, a guy from UMASS Boston he’d once worked with. Ethan insisted that any day now a group of scientists would arrive to claim the ill-fated trinity of experimentees. Alan hadn’t the faintest idea what anyone could want with chimps way the hell out here; however, he was of the impression that whatever their fate they were better off not knowing.
Alan was frustrated and a little pissed off that Ethan wasn’t being more up front with him, but he had faith that his friend knew what he was doing. And as much as he resented the chimps their rowdy odor and occasional simian nattering—the shrill howls that every now and then reverberated within the walls of the station like primal declarations of angst—he was sure that he and his human companions weren’t faring much better in the personal hygiene department. Bathing wasn’t exactly top priority in a region where every ounce of water had to be obtained by melting chunks of the surrounding ice. It was cold, miserable work that required a considerable expenditure of fuel better reserved for electricity and warmth.
Face it, without the chimps things would have been even worse. The personable knuckle-draggers were an antidote for the boredom that plagued them all. One in particular, the juvenile male Hamsun had named after his younger brother, Sven, had offered them a diversion when the nights seemed especially long. Now that Ethan was gone Hamsun insisted that Sven be permitted to roam freely about the station as long as he behaved himself. Alan and the others agreed, grateful for the comedy relief.
They weren’t exactly model parents—Northcutt had taught Sven to brandish his middle finger like an enraged commuter on the 405—but they kept the kitchen knives locked up and had instructed him semi-successfully in the use of the chemical toilet in the rear of the station. Alan was going to miss Sven when his rightful owners arrived to claim him and do god knows what to him in the name of science.
Ethan had only been gone a few days when the team finally made the sort of discovery Alan had spent his entire professional life dreaming about. During a routine grid sweep, Igor happened upon a region of the lake bottom that was unlike anything any of them had ever seen before. For the time being, they were simply referring to it as an anomaly—at least until they better understood what exactly it was they were looking at. Much of their surprise was owed to the fact they had been searching the general vicinity for nearly a month—using every inch of the ROV’s mile-long tether—without any luck. Why they had not spotted it earlier they could only attribute to the limited nature of the search protocol. Based upon some simple calculations, Hamsun had divided the lake bottom into a precise grid. Five-hundred square feet at a time, quadrangle after quadrangle, they plodded through the list of coordinates. They had passed within a hundred feet of the anomaly nearly a week ago, but had continued blindly with their sweep of the adjacent grid without ever knowing it. And then suddenly their prayers were answered.
Northcutt and Leonelli were at the controls when the discovery was made, but soon all of them were huddled together in the Meat Locker, eyes glued to the monitor. The first pass was like something out of a dream. The featureless abyssal plain gave way to a geologic hot zone about twice the size of a tennis court. A network of hydrothermal vents—deep fractures in the earth’s crust—belched out a smoky mix of superheated water and toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Stout, monolithic mineral deposits—each between five and six feet tall—proliferated along the edges of the vents like giant toadstools.
At well over +400°F the water in and around the vents was hot enough to boil lead. At such great depth however, the usual laws didn’t apply. The tremendous pressure kept the typically raucous hydrogen molecules in check, and but for a slightly hazy tincture the vent region appeared more or less undisturbed. Decades of exploration had turned up a limited number of similar sites located primarily along tectonic hot zones at staggering depths in virtually every ocean on the planet. To the best of Alan’s knowledge, though, no one had ever discovered a hydrothermal vent in a body of fresh water. Nor had anyone documented the presence of anything like the enormous stone toadstools studding the landscape of the watery inferno. The team was thrilled. From the way they jumped around cheering and laughing their heads off, you would’ve sworn that they had discovered a king’s ransom in sunken treasure. But this was better. What they were looking at may have constituted the basis of all life on earth. A living Eden.
Igor’s second pass—this time to within an arm’s length of the bizarre colonnade—ignited an otherworldly fireworks of bioluminescent activity. Much like coral, the toadstools apparently comprised the skeletal remains of colonies of microbial life. The unusual formations closely resembled stromatolites—ancient deposits of calcium carbonate located in the hypersaline shallows of Hamelin Pool on Australia’s west coast. Perhaps it was Igor’s running lights, or the disturbance in the water generated by his passing—whatever the case, it was suddenly like the Fourth of July. Rapid pulses of ethereal blue-green light rippled over the surface of the phallic domes as Igor glided silently through the eternal night. Before long every one of the hundred or so stromatolites was flashing wildly. The lake bottom was transformed into an eerily beautiful light show. Their raucous cheers gave way to awestruck silence. No one moved, no one spoke. About the only thing Alan could hear was the doleful passage of the wind and the rapid drumming of his heart.
Acting as beacons, the stromatolites summoned an unexpected guest. Like snowflakes, frail and elegant, the first schools of shrimp descended on the fiery display. Ghostly transparent, their graceful passage through the water was hypnotic. With each passing moment their numbers increased. In less than a minute, thousands had swarmed out of the illimitable darkness to cling to the pulsating monoliths. There, congregating in a fervent crush like disciples before an arcane deity, thousands of crystalline decapods, each about four inches long basked in the ambient heat of the smoking vents. Whether predator or prey, their relationship to the colonies of bioluminescing microbes was unclear. The deluge of shrimp continued until it was as if a plague had been unleashed. Soon, it was difficult to make out the stromatolites at all within the swirling blizzard of shrimp. With the bioluminescent display all but totally obscured, the shrimp turned their attention to Igor and his high-intensity LED running lights. By the time Northcutt got over the spectacle of the amorous assault it was too late. Igor was dead in the water.
It took them nearly twenty-seven hours to retrieve the disabled ROV foundering at the end of five-thousand feet of Kevlar-wrapped fiber optic cable. It was cold, tedious work. Even with the aid of an electric winch, recovering Igor was no easy task. It required an inordinate amount of hands-on attention and gentle coaxing to get him back to the surface where they could make the necessary repairs.
None of them had known exactly what to expect, but when they pulled Igor from the hole in the ice the source of his malfunction was abundantly clear. The ROV, once every bit as sleek as a Ferrari, looked like an entry in the World Series of sushi. The glassy little shrimp covered every inch of the five-foot long probe, clogging the prop and jamming the stabilizers. Virtually every last one of them, dozens in all, was still alive. Alan was astounded that they had survived the journey intact. The atmospheric pressure on the lake bottom could have easily compressed a school bus into a cube of scrap metal no bigger than a can of Budweiser. On the surface where the atmospheric pressure was relatively nonexistent, the shrimp should have been doing just the opposite and exploding like popcorn. The shrimp, however, continued picking over Igor’s polished titanium housing, a writhing tangle of articulating legs and probing antennae.
“Tenacious little bastards,” commented Northcutt. “Look at ’em trampling each other—they’re like soccer hooligans.”
“They’re still fresh,” said Leonelli. He was practically licking his lips.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” said Alan. “We don’t know anything about them. They could be poisonous.”
“We don’t know anything about the crap we’ve been eating for the past month,” Leonelli observed wryly. “But it hasn’t killed us—not yet. I can fry up a couple dozen in a little butter and garlic . . .”
Alan looked at Ellis. “What do you think?” he asked. “Would it be terribly irresponsible of us?”
A polar geologist with the USGS, Ellis was the most level-headed among them. A pragmatist through and through, he was not the sort to let the novelty of a good-tasting meal override his sense of the expedition’s objectives.
“Absolutely,” Ellis replied without hesitation. “Not to mention unprofessional, risky, and frivolous. We’re scientists, not cooks.”
Ellis was right. They all knew it. But it didn’t make the verdict any easier to swallow. Alan looked around. Every last one of them was crestfallen—like children who’d had their Halloween candy stolen by bullies.
“With that said . . .” Ellis continued. “Why the hell not? It’s not as if we deliberately went after them. They came to us, right? Think of it as divine providence.”
Leonelli brightened. “They mobbed poor little Igor like he was a rock star. They were practically begging to be eaten.”
“Groupie shrimp,” said Northcutt. “Sounds naughty.”
“I say we go for it,” said Ellis. “Some real food will do us good. Besides, it’ll be something to tell our grandchildren about when we’re all rich and famous.”
Schmidt, a climatologist from Oklahoma City, could scarcely contain himself. “National Geographic, here we come!” he shouted, his concern for the ailing ice caps momentarily dulled by the prospect of real food.
“Forget National Geographic,” said Leonelli. “This will make the cover of Bon Apétit.”
“Fucking shit!” said Hamsun. Because of his limited facility with English, he relied on a rich, though nonsensical, array of expletives to get his points across. Sven clung to Hamsun’s side, bundled against the cold in a borrowed parka that fit him like a dress.
“Come on,” Leonelli pleaded with Alan. “I’ll whip us up a meal that’ll knock your socks off. Shrimp á la Jules Verne. We can include the recipe with the National Geographic piece. I’ve got a bottle of wine I brought for just such an occasion. It’s a Napa Valley cabernet . . . A bit heavy for seafood, but it beats the crap out of purple Kool-Aid. Look, there must be close to a hundred of the little bastards. I’ll put half aside so we can study them later. And we can always get more if we need ’em.”
Lim—the marine biologist on loan from the People’s Republic of China as part of an international goodwill exchange program (his American counterpart was off in a balmy bamboo forest somewhere observing the courtship rituals of giant pandas)—didn’t seem to have the faintest idea what was happening. In his neck of the woods scientists didn’t use state-of-the-art technology to pick up groceries. He simply absorbed the mysterious debate and smiled.
“Let’s ask Sven,” suggested Leonelli. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders. If Sven says no, then I won’t say another word about it. Sven,” he said, upping the pitch of his voice for the excitable ape. “What do you think—how does a gourmet meal strike you? That sound good, buddy? Yummy?”
Sven bobbed his head and curled back his lips exposing his formidable teeth. Hamsun and the others egged him on, encouraging the chimp from every direction at once like little league parents reacting to an infield blooper. Sven’s movements became more anxious and demonstrative until a series of excited whoops escaped his mouth. When the noise died down they all turned to Alan.
“When do we eat?” he relented at last, the others clapping him on the back heartily. Ethan was probably sitting down to a gourmet meal at this very moment—Patina or Spago, if Alan were to take a guess. It was only fair that they all be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Particularly now with something worth celebrating.
An hour later the six of them, including Sven, sat down to a tantalizing concoction of shrimp sautéed in garlic-butter on a bed of instant Imperial Ramen noodles masquerading as linguine al dente. The pointed aroma of garlic filled the station. They each expressed their thanks and admiration for Leonelli’s skill in the kitchen, toasted Igor’s newfound vocation as a world-class shrimper, and tore into the food on their plates.
For a time no one spoke as they devoured the meal, the clink of utensils and chewing noises rising above the distant drone of the generator that powered the station and kept them from freezing to death in the sub-zero forge at the bottom of the world. Alan, their resident videographer, recorded the historic meal. It probably wasn’t the sort of footage Ethan had in mind when he had assigned Alan camcorder duty, but what the hell. . . . In the interest of posterity.
“What do you think?” Leonelli asked expectantly. “Not bad, eh?”
“If you’re this good in the sack,” said Schmidt, “I may have found myself the perfect little wife.”
Leonelli sized him up and smiled. “I’d give you a heart attack before you could get your shoes off, you fat bastard.”
“World class grub,” said Northcutt. “You really outdid yourself.”
“What about you, Lim?” asked Leonelli. “Italian rub you right?”
Typically reserved, Lim smiled. “Very good.”
Leonelli turned to Hamsun who was shoveling the food into his mouth with his bare hands. “Guess I don’t have to ask you.”
“Fucking good!” Hamsun replied robustly between heaping mouthfuls, his wild blond beard streaked with grease. He plucked a shrimp from the plate with his fingers and fed it to Sven, who occupied Ethan’s seat at the head of the cafeteria-style folding table.
Sven gulped down the shrimp and reached for another. Jealously guarding his lion’s share of the meal, Hamsun slapped the assertive chimp on the wrist. Sven let out a frustrated shriek and cuffed Hamsun on the side of the head. The table was momentarily quiet. Wind rattled the walls of the station. Hamsun, they imagined, was not the sort of man who responded well to physical abuse, especially from a precocious chimp he outweighed by two-hundred pounds. He was too big, too strong, too imposing to readily acquiesce to a show of force. The rest of them watched, expecting the worst. Leonelli collected his plate and scooted back from the table so as not to jeopardize a single shrimp in the event of a melee. Hamsun, though, merely shrugged and admonished Sven to use a fork.
What do you know?” said Ellis, letting go of the tension they all felt with a chuckle. “Hamsun’s baby bro’ eats meat.”
“If a single drop of that cabernet crosses his gums,” Leonelli warned Hamsun, “I’ll cut out your tongue.”
“I always thought monkeys were vegetarians,” said Northcutt. “Like hairy little hippies minus the marijuana and incense.”
“Don’t you watch the Discovery Channel?” asked Schmidt. “The little savages will eat each other when the mood strikes them. Or when other sources of food get scarce enough. It’s the law of the jungle. Natural born omnivores.” He turned to Sven. “No offense, partner, but it’s true.”
Sven was too occupied picking over Hamsun’s dinner to give these perplexing creatures a second thought. They were always chattering about something or other. He only tolerated them because it was better than being locked up in a cage. Every now and then he’d feign interest in their goings-on to ingratiate himself to the group. Otherwise, they were a nuisance and smelled bad.
Leonelli fixed Schmidt with a look of disbelief. “And we won’t? Man is the animal kingdom’s ultimate survivalist. The average human would rather eat his own mother than risk losing a few pounds to starvation.”
“Is that right?” Schmidt replied, an amused look on his face. He and Leonelli were always wrangling with one another about something. “Of course you’re speaking from personal experience.”
“If the situation demanded it, I’d do what had to be done,” Leonelli confirmed matter-of-factly.
“So it’s toss Mom in the frying pan and pass the salt?”
“Like I said, if the situation demanded it . . .” Leonelli paused and took a small sip of the cabernet he had distributed evenly among the six of them. “Think about it. How else would a relatively weak primate with no natural defenses have survived the past two million years?”
“Intelligence?” said Northcutt.
“Attrition—” Leonelli continued. “It’s in our genes. Pure fucking I’ll-do-whatever-it-takes desire. Tooth and nail. Homo erectus didn’t make his way to the top of the corporate ladder by blowing every Neanderthal with a stiffy.” Leonelli downed the last of his wine and smacked his lips. “He did it in the trenches. With grit. The real dirty work. He ate bugs and fucked his own sister when times were lean.”
“You’re crazy, Leonelli,” said Northcutt. “You can cook, but you don’t know the first thing about human nature.”
“Like hell I don’t,” countered Leonelli. “We’re here of our own free will, aren’t we? What do you call that? I’ll tell you what—masochism. We’re here because we’re a bunch of goddamned masochists. We get off on being miserable. Shit, Jesus probably enjoyed it when they nailed him to the cross—at least the part of him that was human.”
“Easy there,” said Alan. He stopped recording and set aside the camcorder. “No point upsetting the flock.”
“What are you gonna do?” Leonelli asked irreverently. “Try me for heresy? I’m a scientist, it’s what I do.”
Hamsun ignored Leonelli’s earlier warning and offered Sven his wine. The chimp took one whiff of the contents of the plastic cup and turned up his nose.
“I’ll be damned,” said Schmidt. “A monkey wine snob. Looks like you’ve got yourself a friend, Leonelli.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” Leonelli crowed. “Go fuck yourself.”
Hamsun’s lessons had paid off. On cue, Sven’s middle finger went up. They all laughed.
Alan changed the subject before things got out of control. They were a good bunch of guys but fuses had been running a little short lately. “What are you gonna cook for an encore?” he asked. “Now that we’ve been spoiled like this, you’re going to have to come up with something really special to wow us.”
Leonelli thought it over and flashed Alan a knowing smile. “Turn off the lights.”
Alan didn’t know what to think.
“You asked for an encore—” said Leonelli. “Get the lights, and I’ll give you one.”
Alan stood and flipped off the lights. There, glowing blue-green in the dark on each of their plates like malformed question marks, lay all the shrimp yet to be eaten. It’s an omen of some sort, thought Alan. It has to be. But he was a scientist and didn’t believe in omens. He believed in pathways, connections, cause and effect. The shrimp had been feeding on the bioluminescing microbes, and now he and his team were feeding on the shrimp. It was a simple case of you are what you eat. Just another link in the food chain. Their green, glowing smiles told them all they needed to know.
Leonelli was cataloguing ice core samples less than twenty-four hours later when he developed a fever. Despite being thousands of miles from the nearest urban center in a climate not exactly conducive to the propagation of viral organisms, Alan and the rest of the team dismissed it as a case of the flu, nothing a few days of bed rest and plenty of Tang couldn’t fix. But then Leonelli’s temperature had soared to +109°F and he had started hallucinating and muttering incomprehensibly.
They were prepared to medivac Leonelli to the nearest hospital—all they had to do was keep him alive until the sun came up in a little less than seventeen hours and McMurdo could dispatch the Air National Guard—when his fever broke just as suddenly as it had come on. He was exhausted and dehydrated, but seemingly intact and thinking rationally. Leonelli had begged Alan and the others to call off the medivac. They all knew that research opportunities like this came along once in a lifetime and that to send Leonelli home now because he couldn’t hack it in the harsh conditions would almost certainly negate his inclusion in future expeditions to the white continent. If anything it was Leonelli’s voracious appetite upon first rejoining the ranks of the living that convinced them he was well on the road to recovery. Already he was getting his strength back. Obviously, the thermometer hadn’t been working right—a fever that high would’ve peeled the paint off the walls in Leonelli’s cramped quarters. Nothing ever worked quite right down here. Malfunctions were the norm.
Then, one after another, each came down with the same blistering fever that had soft-boiled Leonelli’s brain. Although they were too ripe with madness to see it, the fever’s onset roughly corresponded with their shifts in the Meat Locker. Cold was, of course, the one common denominator shared by all, the obvious reason for the difference in the amount of time elapsed from infection to the fever’s onset in each of them. But then again, reason to a madman is like prayer to an atheist—fool’s gold. They had all gobbled down the shrimp together like one big happy family, but they took turns “walking the dog,” Northcutt’s colorful way of describing the regimented tedium that was part and parcel of overseeing Igor’s sweeps of the not-so-lifeless abyss. The more time they’d spent in the bitter cold of the Meat Locker, the lower their core temperatures had remained and the longer it had taken this “flu” of theirs to incubate. Even dressed as they were in the warmest polar gear available, at –30°F hypothermia was always knocking at the door. The reason Leonelli’s symptoms had progressed more rapidly than the others’ should have been routine to a group of scientists who’d spent their professional lives answering complex questions.
As a way of expressing their gratitude for the gourmet meal, the team had volunteered to cover Leonelli’s next shift, the hiatus from the Meat Locker allowing him to concoct a glow-in-the-dark gumbo they’d enjoyed the following day, even as he laid moaning and writhing in his miserable sweat-soaked cot engulfed in a blaze of fevered delirium. Of course Leonelli becoming bedridden (even after he was seemingly on the mend they wanted to give him a few days’ rest before subjecting him to the harsh conditions) meant longer shifts and more of them for the able-bodied members of the team, Alan included. Getting warm was next to impossible after you’d spent four-plus hours shivering yourself silly in an unheated rattle-trap hut designed to protect the instruments from the blasting wind but not much else. It could take hours considering the temperature inside the station usually hovered around +55°F. By the time they got “warm” between shifts—what they naively mistook for warmth was undoubtedly the organism asserting its will—it was back to the Meat Locker at which point the unforgiving cold, to a limited extent, actually worked as their ally. But it was only four days from the time they had first eaten the contaminated shrimp that Alan and the others would realize, if only distantly, that they had made a terrible and ultimately fatal mistake.
That it may have been something in the shrimp they had foolishly eaten and not a particularly nasty strain of Antarctic flu that had laid siege to the station occurred to them much as everything else had in the wake of their fateful feast—vaguely and without the empirical connections men of science are trained to discern.
About the time they had all started coming down with the fever, Leonelli was well on his way to total and irrevocable madness. In less than a week they would all undergo the same cycle—fever, delirium, the rapid onset of a hunger-driven madness—but they would be too far gone to see it. No one mentioned the strange after effects—the horrible dreams, the alien out-of-bodiness, the taut lucidity of ideas once unthinkable to civilized, rational men.
Beneath the soft layering of flesh and blood now existed something larger and more vital, deeper and more absolute than mere words could ever hope to express. They had gone about their work collecting specimens and analyzing conditions at the hydrothermal vent but this somehow seemed remote and unimportant to them now. A new directive lived behind their eyes—or a very old one—summoned from an epoch unknown to men when all things living competed with one another for an evolutionary niche.
Alan had felt it; he could feel it now. A primal current slithered through his bloodstream, amassing energy, each cell host to an unwelcome hitchhiker—slowly, almost imperceptibly subordinating his will, redirecting the flow of information, urging him toward a rendezvous with a side of himself from which there was no return.
Already he was contemplating a course of action he would have never dared consider only moments earlier. Sure, it was suicide—removing the fifty-five gallon fuel drum with which he had barricaded the door—but he was sick to death of Hamsun’s maniacal rants, his stupid fucking Berlitz English, his pathetic howls echoing through the moribund station like the call of a brokenhearted coyote. Alan wanted to push aside the drum of fuel, fling open the door, wrest the ice axe from Hamsun’s massive hands and use it to hack the dumb oaf into little pieces. And had it not been for the agony in his feet—a vicious all-consuming cold that seemed to gnaw at the bare flesh, cut deep into the bone—he may have done just that.
For the moment however he was forced back inside of himself. Hamsun’s relentless assault with the ice axe against the thin steel door once again awakened Alan to his plight. Each blow was like the dull sky-rending rumble of distant thunder, the mean edge of the blade dimpling the metallic skin but failing to penetrate completely. Alan shut out the pain in his feet and continued to brace his shoulder against the drum of fuel keeping Hamsun at bay. Then, as unexpectedly as it had all started, the axe blows ceased. Alan held his ground for a minute perhaps, expecting Hamsun to resume his assault with renewed vigor, but the quiet only deepened.
“Hamsun, you still out there?”
There was no reply.
“Listen to me,” Alan pleaded earnestly. “You need help. You’re sick—we all are . . .” he continued, suddenly possessed by a voice not his own. “Leave me alone, you fucking freak or I’ll kill you!” he roared.
Before he knew it the words were out, hanging in the static air. “I didn’t mean that,” Alan apologized, slipping back inside himself, and then out again just as quickly. “Like hell, I didn’t. I’ll chop you into little fucking pieces and eat your heart!” he shouted, battering the door with his frozen fists.
Thank god there was still no reply, Alan thought to himself as he regained his grip on his tenuous self-control. No point pissing off Hamsun any more than he already was. Nonetheless, Alan was not about to stick his head out and take a peek. Just sit tight, help is on the way.
Lim had escaped in the midst of the chaos. With a little luck he would make it to the Russian weather station at the opposite end of the ice field and return with the cavalry. But there was a problem: six hours of darkness and more than a mile of perilous terrain stood between the diminutive zooplankton expert and possible rescue. Not to mention the fact that Lim’s brains were hopelessly scrambled. Nor could Alan have known that no sooner had their last hope lost sight of the single guiding light at his back then he had become disoriented and fallen into a jagged crevasse camouflaged by a thin crust of ice, breaking his arm and snuffing out any chance of rescue. Alan would never have the opportunity to consider why Lim had neglected to use the tundra buggy; he was simply too preoccupied trying to save his own skin to worry about that now.
Just because Alan was now and then beset upon by fits of murderous rage did not mean that he had lost the will to live. Strangely, his own survival seemed more vital to him than ever before. Although he couldn’t explain it, he was certain that his newfound violent streak was simply a manifestation of a more aggressive approach to self-preservation—proactive, ambitious, indomitable. But he could think about all that later. Now, he decided, is the time to sweeten my insurance policy, put a little more mass between me and Hamsun.
Alan tried to move, but what little heat remained in his body had melted a thin layer of the ice beneath his feet only to freeze hard again as his core temperature dipped dangerously into the realm of hypothermia. Now he was stuck, his bare feet fused to the frozen slab. He clawed at the ice with his fingertips but it was hard like iron. This is going to hurt, he thought, marshalling his strength and heaving his legs upward, one after the other. After several attempts, he managed to wrench himself free, leaving behind bits of graying frostbitten flesh and congealed blood in his icy footprints. Fortunately, his feet were too numb to feel the pain that would surely register if and when he ever got warm again.
With considerable effort he was able to move the first of the half-dozen remaining fuel drums and belly it up to the one currently barricading the door so that the red diamond-shaped flammable label was facing him. Better, he decided, but not enough. Hamsun was a big, powerful man—six-five, two-seventy maybe—riding an adrenaline high that had imbued him with superhuman strength. That he hadn’t managed to breach the makeshift barricade was really just a matter of luck and pure life or death determination on Alan’s part. If he could just get one more drum in front of the door, the additional weight would be enough to keep out a grizzly. He couldn’t be too safe.
He began pushing a third drum across the floor, but the uneven surface, the poor footing and his waning energy made it nearly impossible. Exhausted, he collapsed where he stood and reclined against the drum, defeated. Deranged laughter wracked his body. That twenty minutes could change his life so dramatically seemed somehow funny to him, if not absolutely hysterical. It had all happened so fast that he hadn’t had time to think about the sinister mood that had laid claim to them all over the past few days. And what about the bizarre turn of events that had left him barefooted and freezing to death in a room fit for a side of beef at the edge of nowhere? It was amazing how much had changed in so short a time. When he finally returned, Ethan would be in for the surprise of his life.
Well on the road to recovery, or so they’d deluded themselves into believing, Leonelli had volunteered to accompany Ellis on a day trip to a dry rift valley on the other side of the mountains at their back. In a region dominated by sweeping expanses of unmitigated flatness and mountainous peaks, the geographic anomaly was irresistible to Ellis in the way that the golden city of Eldorado had fired the imagination of the legendary Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro. Although they all agreed that exploring the valley was particularly dangerous given its limited accessibility and hazardous landscape, they couldn’t exactly say no to him. After all, Ellis wasn’t technically a member of their team, but rather a last-minute addendum insisted upon by the government agency that both signed his paycheck and had provided the $400,000 tundra buggy he and Leonelli would use to ferry them to their proposed destination. Ellis had promised that they would simply collect a few soil specimens, record a few elevations and return well before nightfall. It was late February and the sun wouldn’t give its last hurrah for a few weeks. They packed an enormous lunch—enough for days—and headed out.
Leonelli flashed them all a sinister smile on his way out the door. “Be good,” he said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Just as Ellis had promised, the tundra buggy trundled into view shortly before dark. From Alan’s vantage at the station’s only window, an ice-encrusted port no bigger than a dinner plate, the silly-looking vehicle resembled a large insect as it slowly made its way across the massive ice field that was now the color of zinc in the anemic Antarctic dusk. Preceded by the low growl of its powerful diesel engine and the squeaky revolutions of its all-terrain treads, it pulled into their encampment on the ice almost fifteen minutes later. Because the external temperature hovered at –72°F Alan and the others awaited the return of their colleagues in the common room. This is where the team ate, relaxed and commiserated about the cold when they weren’t busy working. Since the fever’s outbreak they had set the thermostat at a tropical +85°F, well above the prescribed maximum of +55°F. At the current rate, they would burn through their precious heating fuel long before the re-supply plane arrived from McMurdo, but no one was talking about freezing to death. It simply wasn’t tops on their list of concerns. Their sudden need for heat and the fact that they had been gorging themselves on everything edible were just two more reasons among many less clear to them why they were lying about in a hypnotic stupor when Leonelli burst through the door covered in blood and clutching the ice axe Hamsun had since appropriated.
Roused from their somnambulant state, Alan and the others gathered near the entrance. The bloodied hydrologist stood framed in the slate-gray rectangle of the open door, ice axe in hand like a character from a cautionary tale about the effects of hypoxic dementia on mountaineers. He was barely recognizable beneath the mask of blood that obscured his face, the viscous runoff of an open flap of skin still gushing just below his hairline. His eyes were impossibly wide and his chest heaved with the force of an overworked bellows. They tried to talk to him, to calm him down so they could figure out what the hell had happened, but Leonelli was incoherent, rambling.
“Where’s Ellis?” asked Alan. Instinctively, he’d grabbed the camcorder when he had heard the tundra buggy pull up. He’d been filming since Leonelli had thrown open the door. Northcutt shouted something at him, but Alan wasn’t listening. He didn’t dare take his eyes off Leonelli who stared into the camcorder as if possessed.
For what seemed like an eternity they tried to convince Leonelli to put down the ice axe and allow them to dress the wound on his forehead. Although he was alert, he was unresponsive, his eyes bulging in their sockets. The stream of gibberish spilling from his mouth was driven by the same fever-pitched momentum that had been incubating in each of them and would soon boil to the surface in them all. His parka, the front of which was spattered with dark crimson constellations, was torn just above his left bicep, the blood-soaked lining revealing yet another gash worthy of medical attention.
Though there was no reason to suspect foul play, there was an unmistakable aura of distrust in the way they regarded their wounded colleague. Something—maybe it was his refusal to relinquish the ice axe—had awakened in them a base survival instinct. With each passing moment the standoff became tenser, a current of animosity, paranoia and rage spooling through their edgy minds as if they were psychopaths wired to the same faulty circuit.
Alan now realized how strange it was that no one, himself included, had probed Leonelli regarding Ellis’s whereabouts. It was as if they already knew or at least had some idea of the terrible truth shrouded beneath Leonelli’s blood mask. They knew what had happened in the dry rift valley—not the specifics per se but enough of the outcome that any questions they might have asked the resident gourmet would’ve been pointless. He knew; they knew; he knew they knew. And nothing anyone did was going to bring Ellis back. All any of them really wanted was to get warm again, for the inside temperature to return to the oozy tropical bluster in which they had basked like iguanas before Leonelli had opened the goddamned door and allowed their prized heat to escape into the very cold night. They didn’t want answers—they didn’t care. They wanted Jamaica, man . . . No problem!
Hours after Leonelli’s return from the dry valley, Alan awoke in a deep sweat, his clothing and bed sheets knotted about him. The forced air spewing out of the vent in the wall of the tiny sleeping quarters he and Lim shared was as warm and dry as a Saharan wind. The entire room was awash in crisp ultraviolet light, one of the many tricks the scientists used to stave off the onset of seasonal affective disorder in a region where natural sunlight could be as elusive as warmth. The muffled shouts and curses he had at first dismissed as a component of the nightmare that had awakened him with a start, cut through the fog of his half-asleep mind and forced him to his feet. Socks, he needed a pair of socks. Like the rest of him, they were soaked entirely through with sweat. He couldn’t go around in wet socks and not expect to catch a cold. He’d seen a pair somewhere in this mess not too long ago . . . Couldn’t have gone far unless Sven had gotten his thieving little hands on them. And why the fuck not? The hairy little klepto had been wearing Ethan’s precious Kirk Gibson jersey all over the station. Fucking primates—can’t trust any of them.
As Alan rummaged through piles of dirty laundry and other junk camouflaging the floor the cramped quarters that reminded him of his college dorm—he had found one sock but had yet to track down its twin—he was distracted by a series of resounding thuds that rocked the floor and traveled up into his bare feet. There was more shouting, a savage exchange that passed easily through the thin walls compartmentalizing the station—Schmidt, he thought, possibly Northcutt—but this was cut short by a brisk wet whack. He shook off the torpor that had plagued him since first coming down with the mysterious fever, fitted the camcorder over his right hand and ambled into the common room.
Like the night of the big shrimp feast, the air was filled with the intoxicating odor of garlic and butter, a moist bank of aromatic steam originating from a frying pan sizzling on the small propane cooktop in front of Leonelli. This room was also awash in wan UV light, imbuing the skilled chef with a ghoulish purple tint. A trickle of blood seeped from the swath of crude blue stitches that traversed his gashed forehead like railroad tracks. It was a peculiar time to be cooking dinner. But then arose the insatiable hunger that had been nagging at Alan for the past couple of days and he understood perfectly.
Although he’d torn the storage room apart looking he hadn’t found a single scrap of meat, dehydrated or otherwise, on one of his all too frequent daily raids—Kool-Aid, instant oatmeal, a dozen foil pouches of freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream (someone’s idea of a sick joke!), all of which lacked what he craved—but the rich succulent odor of seared flesh was unmistakable, intoxicating. But was it chicken? Pork? Beef? Fuck, for all he cared it could’ve been his neighbor’s golden retriever twisting on a spit. So what was it sizzling away on the stove, the oily fats and precious juices wasted on the air? Did it really fucking matter? Leonelli had been holding out. A private stash in a time of famine—it was criminal and he needed to be dealt with accordingly. Desperate times called for desperate measures. One way or another Alan would have his pound of flesh.
“What’s cookin’?” Alan asked casually, jockeying for an angle of Leonelli’s latest creation. He had no idea why he still bothered recording their daily activities only that some small vestige of who he once had been was compelling him to do so. Posterity no longer factored into the equation. Perhaps he was gathering evidence. Of what, exactly—he hadn’t the faintest clue. “Smells like meat . . .”
Leonelli smiled narrowly and shook his head, his eyes as hard and black as obsidian. “Can I help you?” He hunkered over the frying pan jealously, shielding Alan’s view of its contents.
“I thought we were out of meat . . . You’re not holding out on us?” Alan was sick of eating nothing but ramen noodles and dehydrated ice cream. Problem was, they’d already eaten everything else. Even now, his stomach was grumbling to be fed.
“Meat meat meat,” Leonelli echoed mockingly. “Is that all you ever think about?”
Alan was no mind reader, but he didn’t have to be to get the message. Leonelli wasn’t about to share whatever it was that smelled so damn good. First things first . . . He was still practically naked, not to mention Leonelli was using Ellis’s ice axe as if it were a spatula. No surprise really, considering he hadn’t let go of it since returning from the dry valley the other day. One thing was certain; when the time was right Alan wouldn’t have to look very far to find Leonelli. Neither of them was going anywhere. No bus stops down here. No time off for good behavior. “Socks,” Alan replied distantly. “Mine are wet.”
“Why don’t you ask one of them?”
Had it not been for a low moan emanating from across the room, Alan would’ve thought the guy was seeing ghosts, a trick of the weird lavender light. But there it was again—the same low, almost imperceptible keening coming from behind the workstation where Northcutt had spent five hours straight earlier that day staring into an empty coffee mug.
Cautiously, Alan crossed the room to investigate. Northcutt and Schmidt lay entangled in one another’s grasp as if locked in a life or death struggle, though only the latter was still breathing, each forced inhalation like the sound small pebbles being poured from a paper cup. Alan had never seen so much blood—smears and droplets and bold broad strokes of it painted about the site of the struggle by desperate flailing limbs. Mingled with the smell of garlic, the raw bouquet was both nauseating and inviting. The faces of both men were transfigured by bruises and swelling and assorted wounds so that the helter-skelter composition, particularly their hands—even Leonardo da Vinci cited the difficulty of accurately depicting hands—evoked the sort of visceral reality that only the most brilliant species of cruelty is capable of rendering. A masterpiece of human savagery. There were teeth marks—a near-perfect impression of both uppers and lowers—penetrating deep into the flesh of Northcutt’s left cheek. Alan captured it all on flash memory.
“What did you do to their hands?” he asked. Schmidt grasped—if, in fact, it was possible to grasp sans fingers—for Alan’s pant leg but only succeeded in smearing blood on Alan’s bare feet. Irritated, Alan kicked Schmidt’s ruined hand away.
“I’ve been thinking . . .” Leonelli mused dangerously. “We’re something like 85% water, right? But what’s the point? You’d have an easier time squeezing water from a rock. But if you really think about it, we’re more meat than anything else . . . And it’s right there for the picking.”
“You’re demented.”
“I thought you came in here looking for socks?” Leonelli called back, annoyed.
“Schmidt’s still—”
“Alive?” Leonelli finished. “How much you want to bet he doesn’t last another minute? Hell, I guarantee you, he won’t make it another thirty seconds.”
“Bet? I—” Alan’s voice was almost drowned out by the angry sizzle of the frying pan.
“For fuck’s sake!” Leonelli gruffed, abandoning the cooktop and striding purposefully toward where Schmidt was still twitching and moaning. “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . .” he counted down as he crossed the room. “Twenty-six, twenty-five . . .” At the count of twenty-four, he reached Schmidt, glowering over him; at twenty-three, he raised the ice axe high over his head; at twenty-two, he brought it down full force in a long whistling arc and buried the pointed end in the crown of Schmidt’s balding skull. “Twenty-one . . . Blackjack!”
No doubt about it, Schmidt was dead in less than the thirty seconds Leonelli had guaranteed.
“You owe me big, partner,” he informed Alan before returning to the predatory hiss of the frying pan.
“You killed him,” said Alan, unsure how he felt about what he had just witnessed. If he had any sense of right and wrong it now existed in an abandoned corner of his mind, an arbitrary concept that had outlived its usefulness.
“Don’t give me that look like I’m the whacko,” Leonelli was incredulous. “It’s fifty below outside and you’re the one walking around in your underwear without any socks on.”
Alan wanted to fly across the room and bash in Leonelli’s skull with the camcorder. “He’s dead!”
“Yeah, well, meat is murder . . .” Leonelli remarked dryly. “Isn’t that what all the bleeding heart vegetarians say?” He popped something from the pan into his mouth, moved it around with his tongue until the heat had dissipated and crunched it down with a self-congratulatory grin. “God, I can cook!”
Alan was considering making a grab for the ice axe—Leonelli can’t be trusted—when Hamsun and Lim emerged from another area of the station amid a raucous spectacle of giddy-ups and war whoops. Hamsun straddled Lim like a professional bull rider as the two of them galloped and bucked around the common room. Sven trundled along behind them shrieking with delight, waving his arms and beating his chest. Although Lim was a willing participant in the bizarre exhibition, his body told a different story. He made it to the center of the common room and collapsed, his ribs snapping like dry twigs beneath Hamsun’s crushing bulk. Hamsun exhorted his broken steed to get up, but the stunned marine biologist groaned in protest, the sudden influx of pain momentarily sobering him to the mad folly of their equine waltz.
“Hamsun, looks like your horsie’s ready for the glue factory,” Alan chuckled, zooming in on his face.
“YOU!” Hamsun thundered. He kicked aside Lim and plodded after Alan. “Now you be horsie-horsie!”
For the first time since he’d been awakened, Alan was . . . Not scared, exactly, but guarded, the old caution creeping back into him with new prominence. While the temperature of the air inside the station hovered somewhere in the range of an equatorial low pressure front, Alan’s body temperature, although still well above normal, had been dropping since first stripping off his wet clothes. He and Lim were the only ones in the room not dressed as if for an assault on the summit of Mount Everest. Hamsun, Leonelli, Lim—even Schmidt and Northcutt (wake up you fool, they’re dead!)—were bundled inside their parkas. Suddenly, he felt very exposed standing there wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and an imaginary saddle only Hamsun could see.
Buoyed by an evolving awareness, Alan tossed the camcorder to Leonelli and retreated from Hamsun’s groping arms. He circled behind the television where a short time earlier the erstwhile cowboy had watched Clint Eastwood gun down stubble-faced adversaries with cold, clinical precision. Leonelli laughed riotously, continuing with the documentary where Alan had left off. Alan’s nerves twanged like banjo strings tuned well beyond the breaking point. It was as if something in the depleted UV light was corrupting their senses and aligning every member of the team with a wavelength at the wrong end of the spectrum. Hamsun overturned one of the workstations, sending thousands of dollars of lab equipment crashing to the floor. Leonelli laughed even harder, the manic cascade of shrill hoots taking flight like the warning cry of an imperiled spider monkey—primitive, lean, a baseline response to a threat older and more dangerous than snakes.
Dimly, Alan wondered what had happened to Ellis in the dry valley—not the outcome, that was obvious. But the trigger, the spark that had ignited Leonelli’s rage. Ellis was dead somewhere out there, penguins congregating over his frozen corpse in pagan worship. Had a disagreement taken a wrong turn, aimed them toward a literal dead-end? Or was it a mood gone septic? Bad blood in the air. Whatever the case, they had finally succumbed to Antarctica’s terrible desolation. Somewhere along the line the paradigm had shifted and they—himself—were no longer the same men they had once been. The old rules no longer applied. But the new rules? At this rate, they’d all be dead before anyone figured them out. Why, when he was running a malaria-grade fever, did Alan feel so unbearably cold, the brassy ache in his head and extremities deeper than Siberian permafrost? Over the past several days they’d all been sick at one time or another—aching, shivering, lapsing in and out of awful delirium. But this, too, seemed like the murky residue of a dream, a memory of a past life. But not here, not now.
Not me. Not like this.
And then Alan was shouting at Lim where he lay groaning on the floor, clutching his broken ribs. He screamed at him to get help, to go to the Russian weather station on the other side of the ice field and tell them what was happening. “Tell Shurik that we’re killing each other! Have him call McMurdo for help!”
But Lim just squirmed and giggled.
“Snap out of it!” Alan bellowed fiercely. “Go, or we’re all dead!”
Lim lurched to his feet in a rush of nervous laughter and scampered out the door, his mind coiled tightly about a message he interpreted as a component in a strange and exciting game. But Alan couldn’t think about that now—whether or not Lim would make it and return with help . . . Couldn’t think about it because there was nowhere to run from Hamsun, and because Leonelli was psychotic, possibly worse. Much worse. And mostly because he couldn’t awaken from a nightmare that possessed them all.
Alan was beginning to think that Hamsun had called it quits, but this momentary lapse of optimism was almost immediately shattered by the heavy footfall that accompanied the Norwegian giant everywhere he went. The lumbering goon wasn’t exactly cut out for Dancing with the Stars—look who’s talking, you’ll be lucky if this little escapade doesn’t cause you to drop two shoe sizes!—but Hamsun was a natural for those World’s Strongest Man competitions that dominated ESPN 2’s late night lineup. Alan forced himself back onto his feet, blue-veined and white as marble. Fortunately they were so numb with frostbite that he couldn’t feel the pain he knew was there. In fact, he couldn’t feel anything below the knee. Nothing. There was merely a pronounced absence atop which he teetered precariously as Antarctica’s merciless cold traveled up his legs, ravaging the cells within. It was no surprise, really. His comical half-naked scamper from the research station to the Meat Locker—forty yards at best—was alone enough to make a double amputee out of him. Finish barricading the door . . . You can worry about your feet later. If by some stroke of pure dumb luck you manage to keep your toes (wishful thinking), there will be plenty of time for pain and suffering. The tiny beads of perspiration that had accumulated as a result of his earlier efforts had given way to a crystalline layer of frost covering every inch of his exposed torso. The skin beneath had acquired a waxy texture and bluish-gray cast that reminded him of the worn naugehyde upholstery of the 1966 Ford Mustang he had slammed into the side of the mountain on Mulholland one night during his first semester at USC. He had loved that car despite her uncanny knack of breaking down at precisely the wrong moment. From her broken heater and streaky wipers to her fickle starter and the extra quart of burnt oil she contributed to global warming each month. . . . Just like every other female in his life, she was a struggle, but well worth every headache and heartbreak. Her fickleness was no one’s fault but his. He had the same deft hand with women. He hadn’t been able to give her what she needed, what she deserved. By his own reckoning, he was never good enough. His lack of hands-on mechanical expertise—not to mention how utterly buried he was in student loans—was on display over every inch of her, but especially in the pair of rusty vise-grips he’d used to replace her broken passenger side window crank. But that was part of her charm, her mystique. She was a wondrous pain in the ass, and even after all these years he still had it bad for her.
The cold was killing him quickly—another twenty minutes and he would lose considerably more than his frostbitten fingers and toes to the sub-zero freeze—but he was urged on by a will to survive that surpassed all logic. It would have been a thousand times easier to close his eyes, surrender to the cold and allow himself to slip into the tranquil oblivion of a hypothermic coma—the deep white sleep of death Antarctic style—but the will behind his eyes rejected the notion, weakened though it had become in the absence of warmth.
I’m living for two, Alan thought ironically.
During those brief moments of inactivity in which he had sat around recollecting the series of events that had landed him here, Alan’s joints had stiffened to the point that it was nearly impossible for him to move. Even so, he found himself, shoulder to the fuel drum, pushing with all his remaining strength so that he might keep Hamsun out until the Russians came to his rescue. Frustrated by the fact that his feet were slipping on the ice, and failing to budge the drum of fuel a single inch, Alan backed off a few paces and threw himself at it, directing all the force he could muster into a single push. Frozen as he was, he half-expected the impact to shatter him like glass. Instead, he was rewarded with an outcome not the least bit reminiscent of success. The drum moved, but only inches before it caught a rolled steel lip on the uneven scab of ice beneath it and pitched onto its side with a resonant metallic oooomph! Made brittle by the cold, the weld seam circling the lid of the drum cracked open. The damaged drum disgorged a bright pink cataract of fuel that spread quickly over the floor going glurg-glurg-glurg until Alan was standing in the midst of a small ecological disaster.
He was overcome by a wave of nausea as gasoline fumes filled the Meat Locker. And if this wasn’t bad enough, things got immeasurably worse when he realized the reason behind Hamsun’s earlier departure. He recognized the abrupt ripping sound of the chainsaw’s starter cord from the dozens of occasions he, himself, had used it to carve blocks of ice for drinking water from the frozen reservoir all around them. On the fourth or fifth pull, the motor caught, roaring to life like a swarm of provoked insects. Hamsun triggered the throttle a few times and engaged the blade. Desperate, Alan attempted reasoning with him, but either the crazy Norwegian was deafened by the violent growl of the motor, or he was simply too far gone to give a damn. The wall began to vibrate as the spinning toothed blade tore into the composite wood paneling comprising the station, and with zero resistance, sliced downward along the edge of the heavy insulated steel door, spewing popcorn-ish bits of yellow foam insulation into the Meat Locker.
“Hamsun!” he shouted, hammering on the wall with his fists. “You’ll kill us both! I’m standing in a lake of gasoline. The entire station’s gonna go up like a match if you don’t stop. HAMSUN!”
But it was too late. A moment later the blade caught the lip of one of the fuel drums and let out a metallic screech. A spray of sparks ignited the saturated ice around Alan’s feet. The fire spread quickly, flames engulfing the lower half of his body, his feet and legs wrapped in a ravenous shroud of blue-orange light. So much for freezing to death, he thought as he danced clear of the rippling conflagration playing out over the frozen ground beneath, and beat out the fire that had licked the hair from his legs and crisped his flesh in a matter of seconds. His feet were blackened to the ankles, but had been numbed to such an extent by the cold that they may as well have belonged to someone else. His nerve endings were simply too far gone to register pain.
He knew as only a doomed man can know that there was no escape. Short of jumping into the hole in the ice that gaped before him like an open mouth, his only way out was irretrievably lost to him, barricaded behind a wall of fire. Resigned to his fate and strangely comforted by the heat amassing dangerously around the drums of fuel—acquiring purpose as is the nature of fire to comfort, consume and destroy—Alan edged closer to the blaze. He was unfazed now by Hamsun’s continued assault with the chainsaw. He simply wanted to be warm again, to not feel so torn between what he had once been and what he had become, to remember if only briefly what it was like to bask in the penetrating Huntington Beach sun and know nothing of the twists of destiny that would land him here.
If anyone ever asked him what was good on the menu, he would warn them to stay away from the Shrimp á la Jules Verne . . . Have the pepper steak, the Buckaroo Burger, the rack of lamb for two, anything but the shrimp! He had delivered this warning to Ethan via satellite phone—a rambling semi-intelligible rant—as he had announced their discovery of the hydrothermal vent community at the bottom of the lake. But this was days ago, and he had already been infected with whatever it was that had driven them all mad, and was far from thinking straight. He couldn’t remember exactly how the conversation with Ethan had ended only that the signal had been weak and that his friend’s voice had seemed hopelessly distant. It was as if it had originated from a point in time and space that no longer existed—a place no more accessible to Alan than the memory of the warm Pacific shore that was obliterated with the rest of him as the drums of fuel exploded and a massive fireball roared upward into the pale Antarctic twilight.