Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (9 page)

They returned to the common area and shut the door to the sleeping wing. Sasha did not even want to think about how they were going to get Edie’s body out of there.

“Amber, was Robert with you when you were attacked?” Soren said.

Amber squinted at Soren. “Of course he was. Where else would he be?”

“Did you actually talk to him?” Soren said, “or feel him next to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Amber said.

Soren’s blue eyes looked pained and he sucked in his cheeks. “I’m just trying to confirm who was where when.”

“Where were
you
, Soren?” Amber spat.

“I was out in the lab.”

Amber placed her hands on her hips. “Who hauled Robert out of the sleeping wing? And then what happened to him? He vanished when you attacked us.”

“I was standing at the door to the sleeping wing the whole time,” Sasha interjected. “If Soren had dragged Robert off, I would have felt them pass, and felt him struggling. I did feel something go past me, but whoever, or whatever it was, it was alone.”

“I think we better go check the storage bay,” Soren said quietly.

Sasha sank onto one of the couches. She was definitely not prepared to go into the bay and see the dogs, but she couldn’t let Soren go alone. Maybe being blind had been better. They could fool themselves into thinking there was not a deranged killer on the loose in the station.

“I’m not leaving this room until you radio for help,” Amber declared.

Soren zipped up his parka. “The channels are all written down on the paper stuck to the wall there. I’d try Retort first. If the radio doesn’t work, try the sat phone and the Internet. We’ll be back to help in a few minutes.”

Sasha closed her eyes for a second as they exited the station and heard Soren’s surprised inhalation. When she opened them again, she saw nothing. Not the pile of dead dog bodies in the snow that she had expected. Not Robert, Cal, and Kyle laid out execution style. Just a few streaks of blood and tufts of fur on the snowy floor of the bay.

“Do you think all the dogs survived that conflict?” she breathed.

“I have no idea,” Soren said sharply. He walked away from her and made a beeline for the storage bay hatch, and Sasha immediately saw why. The bottom right corner of the big door had been peeled up and away from the frame, opening up a small hole that led to the outside. Soren leaned over to stare at the hole, just as someone started pounding on the small side door that exited the bay.

Sasha gave a small scream, but the knocking continued. “It’s Vincent Robinson,” a voice bellowed. “Please let me in!”

Soren pulled open the side door to reveal a very old man with a full beard, large red nose, and a broad chest, wearing full winter gear and a large metal-framed backpack.

Vincent stepped over the threshold shaking his head and waving his arms in the air.

“This is a completely untenable situation,” he said. “I must have access to your radio immediately.” He hustled in through the bay and headed up the ramp that led to the station door at an extremely rapid pace for a man clearly in his late seventies.

Soren jogged along behind him. “Vincent, it’s me. It’s Soren Anderson.”

“I know that, Soren. I knew that as soon as I saw the station. You think I don’t recognize the Arctic International Polar Research Station when it’s right in front of me? Aside from the very obvious problem of me being on the wrong side of the earth, we have other very big issues. Very big issues. I need to use the radio at once. My sat phone has been offline since yesterday.”

“Of course, but what big problems are you talking about?”

Vincent paused with his hand on the station door. “Well, the meteors for one.”

“Meteors?” Soren said.

“There are giant round holes out there. I can’t think of what else might have caused them.”

Sasha and Soren looked at each other. Was that what Soren had fallen into?

“You’re welcome to try the radio Vincent, but I’m not sure if you’ll have much luck. We couldn’t find anyone that would talk to us yesterday. Did you happen to see my dogs out there anywhere?”

“No, although I did hear barking.”

“Where did you spend the night?”

Vincent patted his backpack. “Got everything I need in here. And fortunately for me, despite the storm, it was an unusually warm night.”

Vincent turned the doorknob and marched into the station.

Amber stood over by the radio, her mouth wide.

“The time is near. He will come, and he will rule all of us,” the crazy lady said over the radio in her heavily accented voice.

“I can’t find anyone who speaks English,” Amber said in a strangled tone. “Except this woman. And she keeps talking about you, Soren. How does she know you?” Amber’s words were, as always, an accusation.

“We made her acquaintance yesterday,” Soren said grimly.

“Who’s he?” Amber said, looking at Vincent. “Is he part of the rescue crew?”

“I am Vincent Robinson, caretaker of the Antarctic Polar Research Station.” Vincent announced. “If you don’t mind, I need to use your radio.”

“What are you doing here?” Amber said.

“I’m quite frankly not sure myself. But I need to use the radio, if you don’t mind young lady.”

“Be my guest,” Amber said. “I doubt you’ll find anything. The whole world has gone nuts.”

“The polar champion must meet their fate at High Desert Town,” the woman on the radio said.

Vincent stopped in his tracks. “I know that voice,” he said. “That’s Helga Murgo. She’s the station dispatcher at Antarctic. Has been for years.”

Soren cocked his head. “I thought she sounded familiar.”

“So the station may still be standing after all,” Vincent said. “But I heard a terrible explosion, and then there was nothing where the station should have been.”

“But maybe if you were already here, Vincent, there would be nothing where the station should be according to your GPS, but the station is in fact fine. It’s just still in the Antarctic,” Soren said.

The whole conversation seemed surreal to Sasha. High Desert Town? Travel from one pole to the other? She really just wanted to go home to Denver and curl up on the couch with her cat, Edward. Actually, that was not true. She wanted to go to Mexico and drink margaritas and do tequila shooters with a hot guy…like Soren. She was pretty sure he would look just fine in a bathing suit. Edward had always preferred her roommate Stephanie anyway. But perhaps the entire world had been obliterated. Or replaced—with this new, entirely topsy turvy, world?

“I need to talk to Helga,” Vincent said, striding across the room.

Amber stepped aside with a faint eye roll, and offered the microphone of the hand-held radio transceiver to Vincent.

“Helga, this is Vincent,” he announced. “What is going on? Is everyone at the station okay?”

“They are helping the dragon,” the woman said.

Vincent’s liver-spotted hands were shaking. “Stop this nonsense about a dragon, Helga. Have you been drinking again? I need to get an immediate message to Lafunda, or Retort. We need a military presence up here right away.”

“Lafunda and Retort no longer exist. Soon we will be part of the new world, where all will know the benevolence of the master.”

“Okay, Helga, seriously, where are Alfred and Sampson? I need to talk to them.”

“The end game is coming,” Helga said, “and all heroes must be ready.”

“I’m not sure if we’re going to get much out of her,” Soren said. “I tried all day yesterday.”

“Well, there must be another channel, someone else then,” Vincent said giving the dial an authoritative turn.

“Not that I could find,” Amber said. “I think we are in the world of crazyville.”

Soren grabbed one of the pre-packed backpacks off a hook by the door. “Vincent, why don’t you spend some time with the radio? There’s another sat phone in the drawer. Sasha and I are going to go out and look for the dogs. We also have a few people missing from the station. If you were able to survive the storm, maybe they did too. We’ll try the sat phone and portable radio out there.”

Sasha flashed a look at him. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go at all.

Vincent barely looked up from the radio. “Good luck. Be careful you don’t fall into one of the meteor holes.”

“Yup,” said Soren. “Just so you know, there’s a dead body in the east wing of the station. We’re going to deal with it. We’ve just been trying to get our bearings.”

“Natural causes?” asked Vincent.

“’Fraid not,” said Soren.

Sasha zipped up her parka, grabbed her mitts, and joined Soren back out in the bay. Vincent had not even blinked when Soren had indicated that Edie had been murdered. But really, things had gotten so strange that Sasha probably would not bat an eyelash if Edie came back to life, turned into a black dragon, and flew out of the storage bay, so she supposed that Vincent’s response was not surprising. Nothing seemed surprising anymore.

“Do you think we should leave them alone?” she murmured darting a look back at the station door. “What if Amber convinces Vincent that you’re the murderer?”

Soren shrugged. “Vincent knows me. He’s completely trustworthy. We need to try to find the dogs, and the others.”

“That was pretty brave, taking the gun from Amber.”

Soren snorted. “She still had the safety on. Amber declined the shooting lessons I offered her last year, which is probably a good thing, or I’d be dead right now.”

“Where do you think she got the gun?”

“I don’t know for sure, but we do know that when I made her go look for the flashlight and she knocked over the bedside table, that she was in Kyle’s room.”

“You think Kyle…” Sasha trailed off.

“I have no idea. It could have been Robert’s gun. I just said I knew where she got it to see if I got a reaction out of Kyle, which I didn’t. Either way, someone didn’t listen to the ‘we’re in Canada now, so no guns in the station unless they’re locked up’ rule.”

Sasha decided not to point out that both she and he were clearly flouting that rule now. She wanted to ask about Marina, about what Amber, and clearly Vincent, knew about Soren’s past, but it didn’t seem appropriate somehow. Not now anyway.

Tundra, Timber, and Cedar bounded around at the bay door, anxious to get outside. Soren went over to investigate the hole in the corner and started cursing about goddamn polar bears. Sasha looked all around the storage bay for potential threats, but it was empty and theoretically whatever might be after them could just as easily be inside the station as outside. She still had the gun Soren gave to her stuffed in the pocket of her parka, and she was quite certain Soren was armed.

They went out the small side door to investigate the bay door from outside. Sasha had heard of polar bears peeling open car and garage doors like the tops of aluminum cans to get at the people and garbage inside. While Soren stared at the ruined door with a furrowed brow, Sasha glanced out at the snow-covered plain. Were the bears watching them now?

A smear of red in the snow caught her eye. She approached it cautiously, praying that she would not find the body of one of the dogs.

It was not a dog. Written in the snowbank in shaky crimson script was a URL.
http://theblindness.com/darkness
. A URL written in blood.

“Soren, I need you to come here, right now,” she said.

She felt movement behind her and heard Soren’s intake of breath. Then Soren was in the snow, kicking away the blood and marring the address.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m getting rid of someone’s stupid joke,” he said, his voice terse.

Soren spent the next fifteen minutes cutting away the bent part of the door with tin cutters and a miter saw and then covering the hole with plywood. She handed him tools while he worked, and listened to his colorful epithets regarding bears and polar wildlife in general. They did not talk about the writing in the snow, or whose joke it might have been.

The sky was clear, and the temperature moderate by the time they stepped out onto the frozen plain. The dogs ran in gleeful circles, barking and howling. If the events of the past twenty-four hours had not occurred, it would be a glorious day to be out in the Arctic.

After running the dogs for a bit, they loaded the huskies into a small trailer behind the snowmobile and headed northwest, or what had once been the northwest—the GPS now told them it was west, which caused Soren to swear even more and shove it in a hatch on the back of the machine, because the damn thing couldn’t even be consistently incorrect. The compass corroborated the GPS reading, and Soren swore at it too. At least with the clear sky they could navigate by landmarks, and they headed for the warming hut, the last known spot Edie and Cal had possibly been.

Although the sky was a cloudless, deep, and surreal blue, curious patches of fog billowed over the snow. It did not collect in depressions or valleys or near the ocean as it usually did, but rather simply lingered about in random spots on the plain.

“We should go check out the spot where those two jets might have crashed as well,” Sasha said into Soren’s ear.

He nodded, the back of his fleece toque brushing against her cheek. He had indicated that they could each take their own machine, but she did not want to risk getting separated, and realistically, they should preserve fuel as much as possible.

It did not take them long to encounter their first giant crater. It was about half a mile from the station, a yawning maw of a hole nearly a hundred feet in diameter. It was like the ground had just exploded, with piles of dirt and dirty snow lining the edges of the crater that appeared to extend hundreds of feet into the ground.

They stopped the snowmobile and approached it, the dogs skirting the edges barking hysterically. About fifteen feet from the crater, in the piles of mud and snow that had been thrown up into the air, the ground became sinky and unstable.

Soren halted. “I don’t think we should go any closer.”

“What would have caused this?” Sasha said. She almost expected to see a large round alien ship in the bottom of the crater, but there was only darkness and the sound of dripping water.