Cass stumbled away, gulping down the bile in her throat, her head screaming at what she’d seen. Leave it, get it out of your head, start over . Her mind clawed at something it could hold on to, found purchase on a goal that would keep her stable and safe. The Lifeboat . The Lifeboat is ahead of you . Five doors separated her and it on the right, three lockers on the left. She’d idly counted them months before when she was bored, in the same way that, as a bored child on long family trips, she’d tapped forefinger to thumb for each passing truck and car. Now the habit was a tenuous strand that barely kept her mind in one piece.
As she approached the emergency shelter, she slowed, puzzled at the strange look of the entrance. Initially, she thought it was because the fire door was shut, which of course it would be if the Lifeboat were actually being used. It simply looked odd now because the massive emergency door had commonly been kept propped open , a safety rule that had never been violated since the first day she’d arrived at Shackleton.
But then she realized it wasn’t just that. Two strange pieces of metal as long as her arm, struts or braces lifted from some other part of the base, were jammed at an angle against the door, planted into the ridge in the hall floor that was normally used to lock the door open. Hesitating, she grabbed one piece and tried to move it without success; pressure, bulging outward, was holding the metal as though it had been welded in place. Running her eyes along the jamb, she could see where the door had warped outward as though by some great force from within.
Determined to get inside, Cass kicked the strut, aiming out and away from the door. The first try was ineffective, but on the third, she flinched as the metal strut sprang away and shot down the hall. The second did the same. She closed her eyes for a brief second, then turned the Lifeboat’s latch.
The door was even colder than the air around her. She jumped at a faint scratching sound that started as soon as she began pulling it open—something was leaning against the other side, sliding down its face. She swallowed and opened the door the rest of the way.
A blast of frigid air hit her full force. She jumped as an object flopped through the open doorway. It was the frozen hand of Ron Ayres. His body, no longer propped up by the door, rocked in place, preserved by the cold in a stiff, bowed curve. His arm and hand were a claw that had been draped over the inside latch and now hung in the air above his head in a grotesque croisé devant . Beyond him, softly lit by the emergency lights, were the stiff, crystalline bodies of twenty or thirty people, huddled together to conserve a warmth that had been leached out of them by degrees and dissipated into the Antarctic night, slowed only marginally by the insulated walls. If the Lifeboat had been heated, there was no evidence of it now.
Cass backed away from the door, her mind simultaneously screaming and numb. Her eyes tried to unsee the twinkling crystal forms arrayed in a row, unsee Ayres’s frozen face, unsee the struts that had transformed the Lifeboat into a tomb instead of a sanctuary. She turned her head away, only to face the bodies sprawled across the hall near the galley.
Thoughts of rescue or hunkering down to wait out the crisis were gone. The idea that the atrocities that had occurred were either accidents or arranged by Hanratty evaporated. Someone was responsible, someone had made this happen. There might not be a reason, but there was an answer. She just had to live long enough to find it.
Cass turned and ran down the hall, chased by the cold and the frozen gazes of the dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
As Shackleton’s security chief, Taylor had spent little time looking out over the ice fields that made up the world around the base. If he’d noticed the outside at all, it was in the early days of last summer, when the sunlight bouncing off the bright snow irritated him enough to snap closed the blinds or pull a blackout curtain across the window.
On the rare occasion when he gave himself the time to wrap his head around the immensity of the ice, the intimidating expanse of white, his thoughts ran toward the impossibility of traversing it. The fact that men had attempted to travel over it with dogsleds, ponies, and even on foot was stunning. Sometimes, when he saw the cliffs and crevasses, felt the screaming wind, comprehended the absolute nothingness that lay in every direction, he had to sit down on the floor to get back in touch with something solid, man-made, and real.