Frozen Solid A Novel

52




WHEN SHE HEARD THE CRACKING SOUND, HALLIE DOVE UNDER THE desk and crouched in the kneehole, an instinct-driven reaction, too fast for conscious thought. She huddled and prayed that the massive desk was as strong as it looked.

This collapse took much less time than the avalanche—not more than three seconds, ending with a huge whoomp. She didn’t move, wanting to make sure the cave-in had stabilized. She was unhurt and breathing but would exhaust the air in her little cave quickly. When the carbon dioxide load became too great, she would fall unconscious and then suffocate.

She had the headlamp and two handheld lights. Her cellphone, which would be useless. An energy bar. Matches. The Leatherman multitool. Light would not be the problem. Nor food and water. She would live or die by air.

She guessed her hole to be about two feet high, three feet wide and deep. She had waited out mountain storms in snow caves not a whole lot bigger, and worked through cave passages a good deal smaller. Here, she was crouched on her knees, bent over sideways in the hole, perpendicular to the way she wanted to go.

She pulled off her mittens, found her Leatherman tool, and formed it into a pair of pliers with tapered jaws.

You have to breathe easy, she told herself. Don’t overexert. This will take time.

With her mittens back on, she jabbed the pliers’ point into the wall of frozen material blocking the front of the kneehole. It was not as compacted as concrete-hard avalanche debris. The snow above Old Pole had never slid and melted. It had compressed, yes, but that was different. When she jabbed the pliers in and pulled, fist-sized chunks popped out.

Trying to tunnel up was out of the question. Her only hope was to work her way horizontally toward the room’s doorway. The room’s ceiling beams were long and could support less weight than those in the narrow hall. Maybe the collapse had been limited to this one office.

She kept her breathing as shallow as possible, but soon she started to feel oxygen hunger, a constant, low burning in her chest coupled with an urge in her brain to suck in a huge, deep breath. Bothersome, but something she could control. She did know that at some point the rising carbon dioxide level in her blood would trip an autonomic response. Then she would gasp involuntarily. For a few seconds she would feel relief, but then the urge to breathe would again become irresistible. The cycle would repeat itself over and over until, by exhausting the oxygen in her space, it would kill her.

She kept digging, lying on her belly, shoving icy debris back behind her as it accumulated in front of her face. Halfway out of the kneehole, she stopped and hollowed out a space in front of the desk’s lower drawer. She was gambling, and it was taking extra time and air, but it might be worth it. When she had a space big enough to open the drawer halfway, she pulled it out. Inside were four sturdy metal dividers, more common back in the days when files still meant only paper. They were rigid steel the size and shape of a file drawer’s interior. Little arms on their sides ran along horizontal tracks in the drawers. There was some proper way to get them out, which Hallie didn’t recall or maybe never knew. She grabbed one with both hands, wrenched it around, and it popped free. It would become her shovel. She could move ten times as much ice and snow with each stroke as she had been chipping out with the pliers.

She didn’t need a large tunnel, just the size of a manhole cover, big enough to wriggle through and to push debris back behind her. There was always the possibility that the tunnel might collapse, but she could do nothing about that. After a minute, digging with her “shovel,” she had advanced another foot. The distance from the desk to the room’s doorway was about eight feet, if she remembered correctly. So, roughly eight more minutes of digging. Call it ten. She was unhurt, had the tool and the energy and the will. Whether she had the air remained to be seen.

After five minutes, she was panting and her head hurt, signs that the oxygen level in her tunnel was dangerously low. When her vision started to gray, she would be close to passing out. Her arms and back and neck muscles were burning, but she had to keep chopping and clearing, extending the tunnel, inching forward, doing it over again and again.

She had to work hard enough to progress, but not so fast that she burned through all the oxygen too soon. From rock climbing she had developed the ability to shut out fear and distraction by focusing on the tiniest grains and flakes and color variations right in front of her eyes. She did that here, concentrating on the ice in her headlamp’s white circle.

Finally she chopped what looked and at first felt like solid snow, felt something change, chopped harder, broke through. Created an opening, made it larger, breathed fresh air. It had been close. Her blood carbon dioxide level was dangerously high. For a while she lay there panting. Then she pulled herself out of the tunnel, into the hallway. The force of the cave-in had splintered the office’s plywood walls on either side of the door frame. Snow and ice had flowed out and now formed a sloping pile that blocked half of the passage.

Something groaned overhead. A cracking noise. The floor twitched. She looked up, heard another crack, turned and started running. Old Pole was less complex than the Underground, and here there were more landmarks that she’d committed to memory on the way in. Several minutes later, she was standing at the foot of the access shaft. Her light shone all the way to its top.

There was no ladder.

Someone had pulled it up. Why would anyone do that? Only two possible reasons: They didn’t want anybody going down into Old Pole. Or they didn’t want her to leave it. Right now it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding a way out. Maybe there were other access shafts. She would have to search the whole complex, corridor by corridor, room by room. There was no telling where else Polies might have gained entrance or where original shafts might exist. At any moment, the whole thing could come down on her. While that was always true in caves, as well, she knew that snow and ice would be less stable than solid rock. Even if she located another shaft, the chances of finding a ladder dangling handily for her convenience were slim. But there was nothing else to do.

She retraced her earlier route, moving through the galley, stopping at the T intersection. She stepped out into the intersecting passage, searching for some rationale about which way to go. There really wasn’t one. So she would be like a rat in maze, blundering around blind, relying on the most inefficient search method of all: trial and error.

She had turned right before—a trial in that direction. Not very far, true, but a trial. She turned left, followed that corridor until it dead-ended at a cave-in. She turned around and retraced her steps though that corridor, exploring four other side passages. Two ended in cave-ins, two others with plywood walls. She went back to the point where she had started. Having explored everything the left corridor offered, she would do a more complete search of the right.

Half an hour later, she was back where she had started. Her primary light was dimming. She was thirsty and shivering and feeling weak. When had she last eaten? Couldn’t remember. Felt dizzy, took two steps, faltered. Stood carefully, one hand on the ice wall to steady herself while her head cleared. Started to move again, stopped. She stood perfectly still, then stepped out into the center of the corridor. Turned a full circle.

She yanked off her clumsy overmitts and removed the thick wool Dachstein mitts underneath, leaving only a pair of pile gloves. They would keep her hands from going numb for maybe sixty seconds. That should be enough for her to unzip one of the Big Red’s pockets and find what she wanted. It took ten seconds to get the stiff zipper working, another five to pull it open. Ten more to search around in the cavernous pocket, feeling and discarding the energy bar, the multitool, cellphone, spare headlamp batteries. Finally feeling the unmistakable shape of the thing she sought, she removed a small metal cylinder. Unscrewing its top, she withdrew a wooden match, struck it against the cylinder’s abrasive bottom, and waited for the flame to stabilize. Then she very carefully raised it high over her head, as if offering the tiny fire to some ancient deity.