They kept going, Hayes bringing the ‘Cat around in a loose circle, staying within the perimeters of the GPS field. Cutchen splayed the spots around. The snowfall died down a bit and they could see a huge ice barrier just beyond them that must have been seventy or eighty feet high.
“There,” Cutchen said. “There’s something over there.”
He was right.
A cluster of irregular shapes thrust from the snow, right at the foot of the barrier. Hayes could see what might have been roofs, an aerial, the rusted sheet metal of a wall blown clean of drift. Much of it was lost beneath an ice fall. The glaciers were pushing that barrier down from the mountains, a few feet a year. Sooner or later, Vradaz Outpost would be crushed beneath it.
Hayes pulled the SnoCat in closer, pushing through the night. Waves of snow like breakers at sea were spread across what must have been the compound at one time, gathering here at the foot of the ice barrier.
“A few more weeks and the camp would have been buried,” Cutchen said. “I think we should have waited.”
Hayes pulled the ‘Cat to a stop and killed the engine. Suddenly then, there was only that immense and eerie stillness, that ominous sense of desertion and lifelessness all abandoned camps seemed to have. The wind was blowing and that great ice barrier was cracking and popping.
They sat there in the cab, waiting, thinking.
Hayes didn’t know about the others, but the sight of Vradaz entombed in snow and ice made something in his belly stir like gravy. There was a tenseness to his limbs, a tightening of his ligaments and a quickness to his pulse. He found himself involuntarily reaching out for Sharkey’s hand just as she reached for his and for Cutchen’s. And there they sat, in that windy darkness, listening to the snow glance off the windshield and pepper the sides of the SnoCat. Nobody was moving. They were barely breathing.
Like standing outside a haunted house on a chill October night, Hayes found himself thinking. Listening to the leaves blow and the shutters creak and wondering if we have the balls to see this through.
“Okay, I’ve had enough,” Cutchen said. “Either we do this or turn around. I say we turn around. The brochure clearly said this place had a pool. I don’t see any pool.”
Hayes broke his grip with Sharkey’s gloved hands. “I suppose we can’t sit here like this being all girly.”
He opened his door and the cold blasted in.
And outside, the snow piled up and the wind screeched their names.
29
Well, it was no easy bit getting into the Vradaz Outpost.
It was a small camp, but the buildings — those that weren’t crushed beneath the ice barrier—were pretty much drifted from roof to ground. Hayes and his compatriots had to fight through snow that came up above their hips at times and then was blown clean five feet away. Hayes had brought lanterns, ice-axes, and shovels and they put them to good use. They chose a squat, central structure that appeared to be connected to the others and got to work. The sight of the place had filled them all with an unknown terror, but after thirty minutes spent shoveling and cutting their way through the heaped snow, that passed.
It was just a dead camp.
That was all it was and the exertion helped them see it. Their nerves were still sharpened, but Hayes figured that was only natural. Jesus, this was the South Pole at the dead of winter. Wind screaming and snow flying and the temperature hanging in at a steady fifty below. If their imaginations got a little worked up, it was to be expected.
When they found the door, it was sheathed in blue ice, buckled in its frame and Hayes had a mad desire to plow right through it with the SnoCat, but he didn’t want to take the chance of destroying anything in there. Anything that might remain. So they took their turns chopping through the ice by lantern-light, the snow whipping and creating jumping, distorted shadows around them.
And then the door was free. One good kick and it fell in.
“You first,” Cutchen said. “I’m the intellectual type . . . you’re the brave, stupid type.”
“Shit,” Hayes said, ducking in through the doorway and turning on his flashlight, something pulling up inside of him as he entered the abandoned structure. There was a smell of age and dust and wreckage.
The place was made of wood and prefab metal like most of the buildings at the South Pole. Concrete didn’t hold up too well with the abrasive wind and extreme temperature changes, it tended to flake away and crack wide open.
Looking around in there with his flashlight, Hayes was seeing debris everywhere like a cyclone went ripping through. The floor planking was ruptured, the roof sagging, great holes punched into the walls. Snow had drifted into the corners. He supposed the place was held mainly together by frost and ice. Seams of it necklaced the walls.
“Look,” Sharkey said. “Even the back of the door.”
“Jesus,” Cutchen said.
There were crude crosses etched into just about any available surface. Hex signs, really, to ward off evil. You could almost breathe in the madness that must have overtaken the place. Those scientists losing their minds when their science could not explain what appeared to be some sort of malefic haunting . . . in their desperation they had turned to the oldest of apotropaics: the cross.
But it had failed them.
Hayes, Sharkey, and Cutchen stood there maybe five minutes, sucking in the memory of evil and insanity that seemed to ooze from those bowed, ice-slicked walls.
“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” Cutchen finally said.
“Maybe one did.”
They were in some sort of entry, what Hayes’ mom had called a Mud Room back in Kansas. The sort of place you stowed your boots and coats and work clothes when you came in out of the fields. They passed through another doorway into a larger room. There were some old fuel oil barrels in there and a stove over in the corner. Everything else was in shambles . . . camp chairs overturned, video equipment shattered, papers spread in the dusting of snow. What looked like a desk had been reduced to kindling. A light fixture overhead was dangling by wires. The rungs of a red fireman’s ladder against the wall were hung with icicles.
Sharkey was examining some of the papers with her lantern.
“Make anything of it?” Hayes asked her.
She dropped them. “My Cyrillic is a little rusty.”
They passed into another room in which the ceiling was caved in, stalactites of ice hung down and pooled on the floor. The walls were charred and bowed. There was a lot of electronic equipment in there, most of it destroyed and locked in flows of ice.
“Looks like they had a fire,” Cutchen said. “I wonder if it was an accident.”
They kept going, moving down a short corridor past some cramped sleeping quarters and then into another room which had been a laboratory once. There was still equipment in there . . . microscopes and racks of test tubes, antique computers and file cabinets whose drawers had been yanked open and left that way. The floor was a down of broken glass and instruments and papers. Hayes found a couple drills and an electric saw they must have used to slice up their ice core samples. There was a small ell off the room with a handle like a freezer on it. Inside were the core samples themselves, dated and tagged.
Sharkey almost went on her ass on a flow of ice on the floor. “Look at this,” she said, indicating a room just off the lab. The walls in there had great, blackened holes ripped into them through which you could see a maze of snow, ice, and lumber . . . the portion of the outpost crushed beneath the ice fall. There were a series of smaller holes drilled into the walls, too.
“Bullet holes,” Hayes said. “And those bigger ones . . . “
“Grenades?” Cutchen said, panning his light over them.
Sharkey was on her hands and knees studying some ancient stains on the walls, others spread over some folders caught in the ice flow. “This . . . well, this could be blood. It sure looks like it. I guess it could be ink or tomato sauce or something.”