Frozen Solid A Novel

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IT TOOK THREE TRIES, BUT HALLIE FINALLY HAULED HERSELF OUT of the shaft. She lay on her belly for half a minute, unable to do anything more than pull off her mask and gasp. If somebody wanted to bash her head in, they could just have at it. As soon as she was able, she sat up, removed her fins, and looked around. The valves had broken off three single tanks, which escaping, high-pressure air had transformed into giant, caroming bludgeons. The interior of the dive shed looked like a tornado had blown through it. One tank had smashed halfway through the Quonset’s wall and stuck, a giant silver sausage hanging from a ragged mouth.

Guillotte was not there. Merritt was, lying on her back, right where she had been standing when one of the tanks killed her. She looked like someone had hit her in the face with sledgehammers.

Hallie searched for a weapon and grabbed a big ball-peen hammer. Her clothes were gone—Guillotte must have taken them. So he was still healthy enough to do that. Calling the station was not an option. This was the Dark Sector. No telephones or radios here.

She had to get back to the station. Thought about what she was wearing: long underwear, two Viking insulated dive suits, the thick neoprene dry suit, hood, wool gloves, and dive mitts. Not your regulation ECW, but it would have to do. She jumped up and down and windmilled her arms to build body heat and push warm blood out to her extremities.

Outside the shed, the snowmo she had driven down remained. But even before she went to look for the key, she knew Guillotte would have taken it, and in fact he had. She would walk the half mile to the station.

Hallie used neither headlamp nor flashlights, for fear of alerting Guillotte, who had to be moving around somewhere. The cold began to nibble here and there after just a few minutes. She knew it would penetrate a dry suit and diving underwear much more quickly than it would work through all those ECW layers. No time for sauntering. She started trotting. And almost immediately, she stopped. She had gone anaerobic that quickly. She would have to walk, like it or not.

But there was another cause for concern: she could feel the thick neoprene suit stiffening in cold it was never designed to encounter. The dry suit was designed to function in water down to twenty degrees. It was not designed to function at seventy-two degrees below zero—probably closer to one hundred below, with the wind. Trotting in the suit was impossible, and just walking was becoming hard work. So much resistance was generating body heat, a good thing, but she kept tiring and going anaerobic, which forced to her keep stopping. Each time she started off again, the suit was stiffer, less yielding. She was still a quarter mile from the station when it became completely rigid. It was like being encased in a suit of armor with no joints.

Seconds passed. Standing still, she felt her body heat dissipate quickly. She knew that the White Death was coming for her. It did not touch her whole body at the same time. Working its way through weaknesses in her thermal layers, it felt like a succession of icy hands being laid on her flesh, one after another, gradually spreading. It would not be long before her whole body was in that grip.

She looked at the glowing station. People were in there eating, working, walking the corridors, perhaps making love, those few who still had the energy. Light leaking from those windows stopped far short of where she stood in the blackness. Inside the lit rooms, no one could see anything outside. Including her.