There . Tossed casually on a stool was a set of Carhartt overalls covered in grease. He hurried over and started tugging them on, cursing at the tight fit. He was hopping around on one leg, trying to shove his body into the overalls, when he shouted in victory. Hanging from a hook in the corner: Jennings’s spare ECW gear.
He abandoned the overalls and snatched the parka. A light sheen of sweat that had formed on his brow and back had already frozen, and he ran a hand along his face to break up the ice. He began throwing on the gear as fast as he could, fumbling with the zips and buckles. His hands had lost feeling, the fingers thick as sausages and just as clumsy. In thirty seconds, however, he had the entire set on and the tremor in his limbs slowed to an occasional twitch. The gun he stashed in an inside pocket, which was a shame, but he no longer felt quite as exposed as he had back in the halls of Shackleton.
Now he needed wheels. He jogged over to the station’s fleet of Skandics, parked neatly in a row. Moving as quickly as the bulky gear would allow, he checked their gauges and general state of wear. He needed something tanked up and in good working order; his life depended on which machine he chose.
He finally settled on one of the older but more reliable-looking sleds, started it to get it warmed up, then ran to a supply shelf, where he rummaged through pre-stocked saddlebags meant for outside workers who needed to grab-and-go. Cannibalizing several, he managed to put together a bug-out bag of two first-aid kits, a GPS system, flares, a radio, and a basic survival kit. He tossed this onto the back of the Skandic, strapped down an extra can of gas, then trotted over to the large garage door to open it. The great bay door whined and ground its gears, unused to fighting the massive snowdrifts that had piled against it since summer. It rose slowly, inevitably, and the warmth of the VMF disappeared as the black cold of the South Pole night flooded in like water bursting over a dam.
Staggering against the push of the wind, he returned to the snowmobile, threw his leg over the saddle, and headed out of Shackleton for the last time. As he crossed the threshold, however, a thought occurred to him. He slowed the Skandic, then stopped. The idea was vicious, and possibly self-destructive if anyone with any authority ever caught up to him, but it suited his sense of completeness and right. TransAnt wanted to see if the crew of the Shackleton base could handle adversity and stress? Well, he’d give it to them.
Jogging back into the main floor of the garage, he pulled a fuel hose twenty feet out of its reel, then nicked the hose with a pair of shears. Back at the fuel dashboard, he punched on the flow button and kicked the lever. Gas pulsed out of the hose and pooled on the floor, filling the garage with evil-smelling fumes. He ran back to the Skandic, kicked it in gear, and tore away from the garage as fast as he could.
A hundred feet away, he parked and looked back. The bright lights of the VMF formed a perfect square in an otherwise velvet black world. He couldn’t have asked for a better target—it was literally the size of a barn door. Reaching into the saddlebag, he pulled out the flare gun and aimed directly for the center of the square, like he was shooting the heart of Shackleton itself.
The flare, blown slightly off course by a savage wind, barely sizzled and tumbled its way into the garage. But, as he’d hoped, an errant spark met the spreading gas fumes. The square blossomed into a flower of fire.
The shockwave hit Taylor hard, nearly knocking him off the snowmobile. But he kept his balance, then turned and sped off, the weak beam of his headlight showing the way into the night.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Leroy woke crying. He’d been dreaming of the ocean and pale sand the color of a peach, the warm breezes he’d felt once on a trip to the Gulf, and the feeling of the sun hot on his back. The dream dimmed, and out of the darkness, he saw his sister, her face first scared, then smug and cruel, slipping and molting into another woman’s face, someone dark-haired and screaming.
He lay under the mounds of carpeting and nesting material he’d scavenged, trying to calm the tumult in his head. Guilt, anger, pain, hunger, fear. And cold. So incredibly cold. He couldn’t seem to stay still and he was always cold, so he’d taken to stalking up and down the ice tunnels, hitting himself and slapping the walls like they were sides of beef to reassure himself he could still feel. But now the cold seemed to be inside of him, freezing him from the inside out, and there seemed to be no answer to it.