Mullins shook her. ‘Shut up or you get it.’
‘Fuck off, mullet.’ She held her breath.
The cabin chilled, light flickered.
An ugly-looking ice piton rose from the floor, hovered in the air, jagged sides gleaming, sharp point aimed directly at Mullins’s left cheek. Astounded, he shrank back.
Bell yelped, ‘Christ.’
Raul opened his eyes, saw the unbelievable, gaped.
Instinctively Mullins snatched the floating thing, perhaps to turn it on the girl. But his hand was jerked sideways and smashed against the window ledge. As he bellowed with pain and released the piton to hug his bad hand, the metal stake dropped harmlessly to the floor.
Bell rabbit-chopped the girl.
She grunted, fell forward on Mullins.
He shoved her off. She fell back into her seat like a corpse.
Mullins, muttering obscenities, found the piton, picked it up, looked at it amazed.
‘Did you… see that?’ Bell was shaking.
Raul nodded. ‘The paranormal. Yes. It proves we are parts of a unified field. A hologram. Give it here.’
Mullins handed the thing across. Raul examined it as if expecting strings. He handed it back, careful not to appear disturbed. ‘The world in its true form is miraculous. The suspension of natural law is — at some level — natural.’ He turned to Cain. ‘Is that why she was with EXIT?’
Cain nodded.
Their tiredness, the extreme situation and the disorienting thin air made the phenomenon seem just another trial.
‘Fuckin’ hell,’ Mullins grouched. ‘I didn’t bloody sign on for this crud.’
‘Stop whining,’ Bell said. ‘If you want your second payment, put up with it.’
‘Second payment. Big deal. I’ll be stuffed.’
Bell, close to collapse, turned to Raul, his drawn face still respectful. ‘What do we do?’
‘Indeed.’ Raul shut his eyes and leaned on the vibrating engine cover. ‘I need to concentrate. Quiet!’ His mouth moved and he presently rumbled. ‘Then which way? Follow? Or go on?’
Bell watched the parody with weary devotion.
Raul finally opened his eyes and addressed the multi-vent heater before him as if it were a sacred relic. ‘We continue as before — using the compass.’
Bell turned back to the wheel, palmed his eyes. ‘Gustave, I’m dead. We’ve got to swap shifts.’
‘Very well. You and Cain swap with Karen and Jakov. They should have got some sleep by now. Mullins, get the medical kit. We’re going to inject that witch and knock her out.’
Cain said, ‘Got a better idea. Put her in the back with the pope.’
Raul’s derisory smile. ‘You think he can cast out devils?’
‘I think he can calm her. That’s all.’
‘Just get her out of my sight.’
It happened early next morning. Cain was in the rear cab, in a rapidly hardening sleeping bag, left shoulder propped against a drum. Bell was jammed beside him, Nina, the pope and Eve opposite. They were woken by a lurch, a crashing, a concussion. When he opened his eyes, Eve was on top of him, yelping, and the cabin was tilted 30 degrees to the side.
The engine had conked.
The sound of wind.
Slotted, he thought, along the crack line. At least they hadn’t gone in.
Bell, buried beneath the weight of the Church, struggled to push the pope off his chest. Then everyone talked at once.
Cain, drowsy and stiff, freed himself from Eve and told the others to stay put. Bell, ever eager, unlatched the side door, now almost above them. Being a fingie, he used one hand and the wind wrenched the door from his grasp.
Cain clambered after him into glare. Sunshine seared through a gap in low cloud but they were almost socked in and all surface definition was obscured by a dense tide of blowing snow. There was no way the second shift could have seen the slot. Raul must have had them steering blind.
He joined the front cabin contingent who were already out on the ice and drift-obscured up to the thighs. He climbed up over the roof to get down on their side, clinging to Zia’s frozen arm to lower himself.
Through gaps in the swirling snow he saw a slot more than a metre wide and perhaps two deep. But the floor was probably false. The Hagglunds lay along it, supported on one side by its tracks and on the other by its cabins.
‘Jeez, we fucked,’ Jakov said. His face was in bad shape — livid sunburns contrasting with ominous yellow patches that would eventually darken. Exhausted after driving for hours, he limped to the vehicle and leaned against it.
Cain said, ‘What’s up with your foot?’
‘Think it die.’
‘You drying your socks?’
‘How? Jeez. First got to get boot off.’
‘Forget about socks,’ Raul snapped. ‘We’re wasting time. How do we get out of this?’ The skin around his eyes was furrowed tight and he had frost nip on his nose and cheeks.
Hunt answered him. ‘If you want the classic ploy, you dig a ramp.’ She still seemed fit and wore her Batman-like face mask. ‘Then you get two other vehicles and haul from the side. As we don’t have those, you winch from ahead off ice anchors.’
‘Can we use the tracks to help?’ Bell asked.
‘No. There’s no differential lock. You’d just spin the free tracks.’
Cain left them discussing it and shuffled forward to look.
As he reached the front of the Hagg, the blowing snow lessened for a moment just as the side of the slot ahead of the front cab sheered off and slid down. The crack ahead was now wider than the vehicle. If they winched forward, it would go in.
The others had come up behind him.
Jakov said, ‘Jeez. No way, José.’
Raul said, ‘Fool. Negativity kills, not situations.’ He turned to Cain. ‘What now?’
Cain looked at the single feature visible — the tilted hulk of the patched Hagglunds with the bizarre shape on the roof. The roof seemed to be floating — a black and orange striped shoal in a white sea. Eve’s face peered from the window in the back cabin door over the tide of waist-deep swirling snow. In minutes the wind had risen. The chill was painful. They were heading for Condition One. His hands already felt like wooden blocks and his nose was running. He pulled his inner hood lower down and leaned against the wind, head averted.
‘Should we put up tents?’ Bell asked.
‘Too late. We could end up chasing them, could lose them.’
As if to prove the comment, a squall hit them like a wave. Raul and Hunt went flying and surfaced 2 metres away, as if dunked. When they stood, they were pale shapes, half-obscured by flying snow. Hunt adopted wind-walking mode, head down, arms in by her sides. Raul didn’t, tumbled again. The sun had vanished in cloud.
Cain yelled, ‘Right. Everyone back inside!’
While the others struggled to take shelter, he gripped the roof rack on the leaning front cab and walked back to check the heater hoses between the two sections of the vehicle. They’d looked brittle enough yesterday and at 40 below they could break. One hose seemed to have a surface crack but he couldn’t spot a leak. The snow found the crack between his balaclava and goggles, stung his face. By the time he climbed up to the front cab roof hatch he was almost in total whiteout.
He dropped down out of the weather, secured the hatch against the blow and restarted the engine to get warm coolant flowing through the hoses. By then, the thin cabin was vibrating with the gusts. Luckily the patching was on the lee side.
The front cabin cast had changed. He was now cooped with Raul, Bell, Hunt and Mullins.
‘Perhaps it’ll die down,’ Bell said. Then, spotting a look between Hunt and Cain… ‘No thanks to you pessimists.’
‘Realists,’ Cain said and parked his stinging hands under his armpits.
It became a hissing blizz that sounded like a passing train. He’d survived blows like it before, in container-huts tethered with chains. The wind had been strong enough to make them creak and shudder, to ripple the steel roofs and cause bottles to vibrate off shelves. Fortunately the slot held the Hagglunds firmly secured. But despite its positive connection with the ice, the fibreglass cabin trembled.