Terminal Freeze

  Ashleigh Davis did not share these sentiments. She sat disconsolately at a table in the officers’ mess, elegantly coiffed head lolling on her hands, staring at the wall clock in its metal grill. This, she decided, was a living hell. Worse than a living hell. The place stank. The food was beyond vile. It was a million miles from the nearest spa. You couldn’t get a decent cup of bergamot-infused espresso to save your life. And worst of all, it was a prison. Until the storm lifted, she was stuck here, twiddling her thumbs, her glorious career on hold. There was no way out except to walk. And if she had to stay here much longer, she thought morosely, she’d probably be driven to do just that: walk out into the snow and the dark, like that guy on Scott’s antarctic expedition…she’d narrated a documentary on the subject but couldn’t summon the energy to remember the poor chump’s name.

  And the time crawled by so slowly! The afternoon had lasted an eternity. She’d bullied the makeup staff into giving her a makeshift facial, doing her fingernails and toenails; she’d had her hair done; she’d run the costume girl half dead, bringing first one, then another, then still another outfit for her to try on while deciding what to wear to dinner. Dinner. That was too kind a word for it. “Slop” was more accurate, or maybe “pig swill.” And the company at dinner, never entertaining to begin with, had tonight been absolutely cadaverous. Just because this idiot Peters was stupid enough to bump into a bear, everybody was acting like it was the end of the world. They’d forgotten they had a star in their midst. It was pathetic, truly pathetic; she was utterly wasted on this bunch.

  She sighed with irritation, pulled a cigarette from her Hermès handbag, lit it with a snap of her platinum lighter.

  “There’s no smoking on the base, Ashleigh,” came Conti’s voice. “Military rules.”

  Davis gave an exasperated snort, plucked the cigarette from her mouth, stared at it, replaced it between her lips, took a deep drag, then stubbed it out in a dish of congealing tapioca. Blowing smoke through her nose, she looked across the table at the producer. She’d spent the better part of the last hour trying to beg, blackmail, or bluster an emergency airlift out of this horrible place and back to New York—all to no avail. It was impossible, he’d said; all flights, public or private, were suspended indefinitely. Nothing she said had budged him. In fact, he’d barely taken notice of her; he seemed to be preoccupied about something. She slumped in her chair, pouting. Even Emilio was taking her for granted. Unbelievable.

  She pushed her chair back, stood up. “I’m headed for my trailer,” she announced. “Thanks for a delightful evening.”

  Conti—who had looked down again at the notes he’d been scribbling—glanced up once more. “If you run into Ken Toussaint,” he said, “please send him to me. I’ll either be here or in my quarters.”

  Davis placed her coat over her shoulders, not deigning to reply. Brianna, her personal assistant, picked up her own coat and rose from the table. She’d been silent throughout dinner, knowing better than to speak when Davis was in a black mood.

  “Are you sure you want to return to your trailer?” Conti asked. “I could get accommodations fixed up for you here.”

  “Accommodations? As in, share a bathroom, bivouac on some army cot? Emilio, darling, I can only hope you’re joking.” And she turned away with a contemptuous sweep of ermine.

  “But—” he began to protest.

  “I’ll see you in the morning. And I expect a helicopter ready and waiting by then.”

  As she walked briskly toward the doorway, she became aware of someone approaching. It was the man who had trucked her trailer to the site. She glanced at him briefly. He wasn’t bad-looking, with the tanned, lean body of a surfer. But his outrageously pastel Hawaiian shirt was in the worst possible taste. He was chewing, cudlike, on an enormous wad of gum.

  “Ma’am.” He smiled at her, nodded at Brianna. “We’ve never been formally introduced.”

  I’ve never been formally introduced to my chauffer, either, she thought with a frown.

  “The name’s Carradine, in case you hadn’t heard. I’m heading back to my cab, too, so I’ll walk with you ladies—if you don’t object.”

  Davis looked toward her assistant, as if to ask: Am I to be spared nothing?

  “You know,” the trucker said as they made their way toward the main stairwell, “I’ve been hoping to talk with you, Ms. Davis. When I heard it was your trailer I’d be ferrying up here, when I realized I might just get the opportunity to speak to someone in your position…well, it was like the kind of a happy accident you read about sometimes. Like Orson Welles meeting William Randolph Hearst.”

  Davis looked at him. “William Randolph Hearst?”

  “Didn’t I get that right? Anyway, I hope you don’t mind if I take just a minute of your time.”

  You already have, Davis thought.

  “See, I’m not just a trucker. The season’s pretty short, you know—four months, I’m not usually up here this early, the lake ice isn’t thick enough yet—so I have plenty of time to do other things. Oh, not like I’m busy all the time—life moves kind of slowly down in Cape Coral. But I’ve certainly kept busy with something.”

  He seemed to want her to ask what it was. Davis climbed the stairwell in resolute silence.

  “I’m a screenwriter,” he said.

  Davis glanced back at him, unable to conceal her surprise.

  “That is to say, I’ve written a screenplay. See, I listen to books on tape while I’m driving—helps keep your mind off the ice—and I sort of got into the plays of William Shakespeare. The tragedies, anyway, with all that blood and fighting. My favorite’s Macbeth. And that’s the screenplay: my version of Macbeth. Only it’s not the story of a king, it’s the story of an ice-road trucker.”

  Davis walked quickly across the entrance plaza, trying to distance herself from Carradine. The man hurried to keep up. “The king of ice-road truckers, see. Except there’s this other trucker that’s jealous of him and his fame among the rest. Wants his girl, too. So he sabotages the king’s route, fractures it, fractures the ice, know what I mean?”

  They passed through the staging area and out the main entrance. Instantly, the wind and ice slapped them back with a giant, invisible hand. The exterior lights barely penetrated the swirls of snow, and it was hard to see beyond a few feet. Davis hesitated, remembering it was a polar bear that had killed Peters just outside the perimeter fence.

  Seeing her hesitate, Carradine smiled. “Don’t you worry,” he said, lifting his shirt and displaying a huge revolver tucked into his waistband. “I never go out on a run without it.”

  Davis winced, wrapped her coat more closely around her shoulders, and allowed Brianna to go first and act as a windbreak.

  They moved slowly across the apron, the sheds and Quonset huts around them mere specters in the roiling snow. Davis kept her head down, picking her way unhappily over the rivers of electrical and data cables that lay treacherously beneath the coating of white. Carradine walked alongside, oblivious to the cold. He hadn’t even bothered to grab a parka from one of the lockers in the weather chamber. “As I was saying, the king’s rig falls through the ice. And the other trucker, he becomes the new king.”

  “Right, right,” Davis muttered. God, only a dozen more steps to the trailer.

  “Anyway, it’s a great story, real violent. The ice-road trucker angle is killer. I’ve got a copy of the screenplay in the cab. And I was wondering, with your connections and all, if you’d be willing to have a look and maybe recommend—”

  He stopped speaking so abruptly that Davis glanced toward him. Then she heard it, too: a muffled thump, like a heavy, deliberate knock, coming out of the darkness ahead of them.

  “What’s that?” Davis breathed. She looked at Brianna, who returned the look nervously.

  “Don’t know,” said Carradine. “Some loose piece of equipment, maybe.”

  Knock.

  “It’s just like the porter scene in Macbeth!” Carradine exclaimed. “The
knocking at the gate, after they’ve wasted Duncan! I have that in my screenplay, too, when the new king of truckers is back down in Yellowknife, and he hears the son of the old trucker king at his door—”

  Knock.

  Carradine laughed. “Wake Duncan with thy knocking!” he quoted. “I would thou couldst.”

  Knock.

  Davis took another step forward, then hesitated. “I don’t like this.”

  “It’s nothing. Let’s take a look.”

  They moved forward, more slowly now, through the thick pall of snow. The wind whistled mournfully between the outbuildings, biting Davis’s bare legs and plucking at the hem of her coat. She tripped over a cable, staggered, righted herself again.

  Knock.

  “It’s coming from the back of your trailer,” said Carradine.

  “Well, tie it down, whatever it is. I’ll never sleep through that racket.”

  Now the bulk of the trailer loomed ahead of them, a gray monolith in the snowy murk, its generator purring. Carradine led the way around the back end, shirt flapping and fluttering behind him. It was darker back here, in the shadows between the trailer and the perimeter fence. Davis shivered, licked her lips.

  Knock.

  And then there it was, directly before them: a body, hanging upside down from a support for one of the window awnings. It was coatless, its clothes torn in several places. The arms stretched limply toward the ground. The head, which was level with their own—too snow-covered to be recognizable—bumped slowly against the metal wall of the trailer at the caprice of the wind.

  Knock.

  Brianna screamed, took a step back.

  “It’s dead!” Davis shrieked.

  The trucker stepped forward quickly, brushed the snow from the face that hung before them.

  “Oh, God!” cried Davis. “Toussaint!”

  Carradine reached up to unhook the body from the support arm. As he did so, Toussaint’s eyes abruptly popped open. He looked at each of them, uncomprehending. Then, quite suddenly, he opened his mouth and screamed.

  Brianna crumpled to the ground in a dead faint, her head hitting the trailer with an ugly thump.

  As he hung there, Toussaint screamed again—a ragged, ululating scream. “It plays with you!” he shouted. “It plays with you! And when it’s finished playing—it kills. It’s going to kill us all.”

  30

  The crowd in the Operations Center had grown even larger. The last time it had been this crowded, Marshall thought grimly, was when Wolff ordered the emergency meeting after the vault was found empty. At that meeting, there had been shock, dismay, disbelief. This time, the prevailing mood was fear. It was so strong that Marshall could almost taste its metallic bite in the air.

  He stepped into the room and was at once approached by both Wolff and Kari Ekberg.

  “How’s Toussaint?” Wolff asked.

  “He’s half frozen, he’s suffered a broken ankle, and he’s sustained numerous nasty lacerations to the legs and arms. But he’ll survive. He’s raving—we had to sedate him heavily with some meds from the military’s stockpile. Gonzalez has rigged up temporary restraints—even with the tranquilizers, he’s been quite a handful.”

  “Raving?” Wolff echoed. “What about?”

  “It’s pretty incoherent. He said he was attacked in the infirmary, knocked about a lot, then dragged outside.”

  “Who would have done such a thing?” breathed Ekberg.

  “According to Toussaint, it’s not a who,” replied Marshall. “It’s a what.”

  Wolff frowned. “That’s crazy.”

  “Something hung him up like a side of beef. That hook was a good ten feet off the ground.”

  “A polar bear wouldn’t do something like that,” said Wolff. “And it couldn’t move in and out of the base with impunity. The man is clearly delusional. What was he doing in the infirmary, anyway?”

  “It seems he was trying to sneak a shot of Peters’s corpse.”

  Wolff started. Then his face darkened. “Did he get it?”

  “Hard to say. There was a camera in the infirmary—Gonzalez had his men check just now. But it was badly damaged, the video feed was blank. All you could hear was the audio, Toussaint murmuring ‘no, no, no’ over and over again.”

  “Did he describe what attacked him?” Ekberg asked.

  “Not in any detail.” Marshall paused, trying to recollect the frantic torrent of babbling he’d heard while stabilizing Toussaint. “Said it was huge—big as a station wagon.”

  Wolff looked skeptical.

  “He said it had more teeth than you could count. Not big, but sharp as razors. He said they wriggled.”

  Wolff’s look of skepticism increased. “Not likely, is it?”

  “I don’t know. Razors would account for all those marks on Peters’s body.” Marshall paused again. “And the eyes. He kept talking about the eyes.”

  Ekberg shuddered.

  “He said it sang to him,” Marshall added.

  “I think I’ve heard enough.” And Wolff turned away.

  “There’s something else,” Marshall called after him.

  The network rep stopped without glancing back.

  “Peters’s body is missing.”

  Marshall and Ekberg watched Wolff exit the room. They stood for a moment in silence. People were huddled in small knots, heads together. Their tones were muted, barely whispers. In marked contrast to the rest was Davis, whose shrill complaints and expostulations had been instrumental in spreading the news in the first place. She was standing in a far corner, loudly demanding personal military protection.

  Ekberg nodded toward Carradine, who was sitting in a corner by himself drinking cocoa from a Styrofoam cup. “He’s offered to take everybody back,” she said.

  “You mean, back down to Yellowknife?”

  “Wherever. Away from the base. He said he’d be able to fit almost everyone in Ashleigh’s trailer.”

  “Might not be a bad idea—if he sticks to a safe route and doesn’t do any hotdogging.”

  “Wolff overruled him. Said it was too dangerous.”

  “Well, being around here is getting more dangerous by the minute.” Marshall glanced at her. “Would you leave? If Carradine got the green light, I mean.”

  “Depends on what Emilio does.”

  “You don’t owe him anything. Besides, now I know what you really think of him.”

  “What I really think of him?”

  “You didn’t exactly make a secret of it this morning.”

  Ekberg smiled ruefully. “I can’t deny he’s something of an ass. But most directors I’ve worked with are. You need an inflated ego if you’re going to put your personal stamp on something as big and complex as a prime-time documentary. Besides, I didn’t just sign on with Conti—I signed on with the show. That’s how it works in this business. I’m the field producer. I stay through the final cut.”

  Marshall smiled back. “You’re a brave woman.”

  “Not really. Just a very ambitious one.”

  Marshall became aware that somebody was standing at his elbow. Looking over, he saw Jeremy Logan watching them. He may be an academic, Marshall reflected as he nodded at him, but he’s like no professor I’ve ever known.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Logan said. “I was hoping to have a few words with Dr. Marshall.”

  “Of course. I’ve got to do what I can to reassure the troops anyway. I’ll speak with you later, Evan.” And Ekberg moved away.

  Marshall turned to Logan. “What’s up?”

  “A great deal, it would seem. Let’s find some place a little more private. We can talk there.” And Logan motioned toward the exit.

  31

  Marshall’s lab was just half a dozen doors from the Operations Center, but nevertheless the walk seemed to last an eternity. Marshall kept thinking about the torn, sprawled figure of Peters, the wild-eyed rantings of Toussaint. It was all he could do to resist glancing over his shoulder.

  Rea
ching the lab, Marshall removed his MIDI keyboard from the spare chair, waved Logan to sit down, closed the door carefully behind them. Then he took a seat on the lab table.

  “Private enough for you?” he asked.

  Logan glanced around. “It’ll do.” He paused. “I heard what happened. How are people taking it?”

  “Hit-and-miss. There’s an awful lot of fear. I’ve seen several who are pretty close to the breaking point. One of the makeup crew got hysterical and had to be sedated. If this storm doesn’t pass soon…” He shook his head. “People don’t know what to believe, don’t know what’s going on—and that’s probably the hardest thing of all.”

  “I want to know what you believe. You scientists, I mean. I have a hunch you’re on to something—and I need to know what it is.”

  Marshall glanced at him thoughtfully a moment. “I’ll tell you what I don’t believe. I don’t believe a human could have torn Peters apart like that. And I don’t believe a polar bear could have hung Toussaint up by his ankles.”

  Logan crossed one leg over the other. “That doesn’t leave very much, does it?”

  Marshall hesitated. Logan, he recalled, had already taken him into his confidence, told him why he was here, explained about the ill-fated scientific team. “Faraday has a theory,” he began after a moment.

  Briefly, he sketched out what Faraday had explained to him: about the unique low-temperature melting qualities of ice-fifteen; about the possibility the creature had been flash-frozen in the ice; how there was a chance—a remote chance, but a chance nevertheless—that it had not been killed but instead placed in a form of cryogenic sleep.

  Logan listened intently, and Marshall noted the historian didn’t once look skeptical. When it was over, he nodded slowly. “That’s very interesting,” he said. “But it still doesn’t answer the biggest question of all.”

  “Which one is that?”