Beneath the Dark Ice

Thirty-two

The most powerful ordnance they had on hand was an army-issue M16 assault rifle. Primitive compared to what the HAWCs used as standard operating equipment, but better than throwing large rocks, which was all Alex had left.

Alex grabbed the weapon and stepped back from the ice hole. The sound of the jackhammer was not loud, just a grinding pump followed by chunks of ice coming through the hole. He ran down the tunnel; he knew their pursuer would not have given up and he could sense its presence all around him. The smell of ammonia was strong but not overpowering, meaning the creature was near, perhaps just behind one of the walls. Alex knelt on the ground and put his hand flat to the cold stone surface; he could feel the vibrations. Below the freezing blocks he could now hear the liquid sliding sound as if a river of flesh was moving quickly along just below them. He could sense a massive gathering of strength.

Alex picked up the rifle and sprinted back to the ice door. They were about to be ambushed.

The creature could sense them just ahead and above. It compressed its boneless body into a long elongated pipe and moved along the large drainage tunnels, gently widening the old stone walls as it went. It was being driven mad by hunger as the pumping of the jackhammer gave off vibrations similar to a creature in distress, and that meant easy prey. It would get below them and launch its final attack.

“We’ve got company.” Alex ran back to Matt and Aimee just as the jackhammer stopped and a rope dropped through the hole. The water had stopped flowing and was now solidifying into an icy sludge. The new hole itself was large enough for a body to be pulled through. Alex grabbed Aimee and lifted her towards the opening.

“Aimee, go.”

Aimee turned around and quickly kissed Alex on the side of his mouth and then said, “Don’t you dare be long.” With that she grabbed the rope and disappeared up through the hole as if by a conjuror’s rope trick. In a few seconds the rope came back down and Matt wasted no time in grabbing hold; he turned briefly and gave Alex the thumbs-up and he too disappeared up through the hole. Matt looked older. Alex remembered when he first saw Matt and how young he seemed. Now he looked hollow, weary with loss. Alex turned back into the darkness. Monica, Tank, Johnson; all of them gone. He felt little sorrow. As a HAWC he was trained to ignore physical and emotional trauma. But he was still human; there should have been more. What else was changing inside him?

Alex shook his head to clear his mind and opened his senses to the underground. He could feel the enormous malicious presence lurking nearby. He could sense hunger, strength, anger and an eons-old intelligence. This was not a creature that deserved to roam the earth today; it was a thing of myths and nightmares — a creature of darkness and brutality.

The rope dropped back down. Alex seized it as the ground shook beneath his feet.

It was a tight squeeze and Alex was thankful the water had smoothed the edges and made them slippery — though his tolerance of pain was much greater than an ordinary person’s, he didn’t relish the idea of being dragged over iron-hard jagged ice with a naked upper body. It took four men to haul Alex out of the ice hole. The glare from the light on the ice and snow brought tears of irritation to his eyes but the air was cool and clear even with the faint odour of thermite. As well as Lieutenant O’Riordan and the other soldiers who pulled him out, there were six other military men on the ice loosely cradling either ice axes or M16s. Aimee and Matt stood off to the side, covered in army-issue blankets. They had refused to be winched back to the surface until Alex was out and safe.

The ice was thickening up again now, and was already another few feet higher than when the rescue team had started to widen Alex’s hole. The mist of humidity had dropped to the ice; the refreeze had begun.

O’Riordan walked quickly up to Alex and shook his hand. “Good to see you, sir. Incoming transmission for you.” O’Riordan handed Alex his radio.

“Arcadian, I knew you’d make it.”

At the edge of the melted pit a mound broke open and the muzzle of the M98 lifted out of the snow.

Borshov blinked his remaining eye and focused on the large man that had just been pulled from the ice hole. There was a lot of distance between them and he had no sniper scope — it would be a long shot, but he had the high ground and there was nowhere for Alex Hunter to hide. If he missed on the first round, he would get another, and another.

He had plenty of time before Volkov’s men picked him up. He steadied his breathing and lined up on the HAWC leader’s head.

Seeing Alex now free, Aimee and Matt consented to be winched towards the rim of the large pit. Looking down, the surface of the ice was still remarkably clear and as Aimee rose she could make out the beautiful Aztlan court in all its fantastic detail. However, while Aimee watched, she could see something that refused to make sense to her already tired mind. The structures below the ice seemed to be falling away. The open courtyard that had been just outside the doorway looked to drop into a black pit and something mottled and sickly greenish seemed to now boil below its surface — a giant stain was spreading to cover the city once again, but this time not of ice, but of muscle and flesh. The roiling motion slowed and Aimee could make out what it was she was looking at.

A huge eye was rolling under the ice and Aimee felt it stop to fix first her, then Alex and the other marines with its cold stare. She screamed a warning as all hell broke loose down in the pit.

Alex was the first to sense the movement — a deep shuddering beneath their feet. Something grazed his temple and he ignored it to yell to the men in the ice pit.

“Everyone clear the area, out of the hole. Now!”

Alex’s warning got most of the marines moving to the ropes, however, some who were unfamiliar with the danger or Alex’s rank looked instead to O’Riordan — it was their fatal mistake.

The first two marines had buckled themselves onto the guidelines and depressed the lift studs when the ice in the centre of the pit exploded upwards.

A fury of mottled, grey-green giant tentacles burst out of the ice. Now in the raw daylight, the true colour and size of the creature could be appreciated. It was a monstrosity. Something that had been hidden away from natural selection for millions of years and grown to be the ruler of its domain once again entered the world of man. In a sweep of one of the tentacles it latched onto two of the marines who had failed to move quickly enough. They were held fast by the suckers and the deadly talons embedded themselves into their flesh with ease. The struggling men were pulled into the pit below the ice and Alex could see that the creature wasted no time in stuffing the tiny morsels directly into its cruel, jagged mouth.

The other marines were hooked onto their lines and slowly ascending. Alex and O’Riordan shared a rope and this made their ascent slower than the rest. One of the hovering helicopters banked and positioned itself above the pit so it could provide cover for the retreating soldiers now that they were out of the line of fire. It poured hundreds of deadly rounds from its big M60 machine cannon into the hellish leviathan, bringing forth waves of a greenish ichor from the punctured tentacles before one of the long clubs shot upwards like a rocket and stuck to the bottom of the helicopter. The 1,662-horsepower engines were no match for the strength and weight of the creature, and it easily drew the helicopter down almost gently onto the ice so it could tear open its canopy and pluck out the still belted-in solders as if they were sardines from a newly opened tin.

The giant cephalopod gave a heave and pulled more of its bulk up from under the ice. It fully filled the pit now and from above it looked like some horrid hell-borne blooming flower. Alex and O’Riordan made it over the lip of the ice pit and sprinted to the last helicopter. Matt and Aimee waving them on, they launched themselves into the remaining seats and the pilot lifted off immediately.

“Got any thermite left?” Alex looked at O’Riordan who was ashen-faced.

“My thoughts exactly. Prepare an immediate drop canister with detonation on impact.”

“Hold that order; something’s happening.”

The helicopters hovered hundreds of feet overhead, well out of range of the orthocone’s deadly tentacles, but Alex noticed that the creature was starting to thrash uncontrollably. Blood began to spread out below and now above the ice line.

Borshov had fired several shots and only grazed his target. What kind of chush’ sobách’ya gun was this? He had only been stopped by the rock and ice beneath him pulsing like an earthquake, cracking the continent from below. Then before his ruined eye, a great creature was growing up out of the pit. Dragan Zmey Gorynych! To Borshov, it was an ancient dragon from Russian mythology, the Gorynych, the devourer of men.

Borshov feared no man, but this monstrosity liquefied his bowels and broke his nerve. He burst from his snow cover and sprinted away to his rendezvous; his white suit and the chaos behind him masking his escape.

The jackhammer and its vibrations had excited more than just the orthocone; the inexorable climb of the giant blood worms had at last brought them to the base of the ice roof. They could sense and taste the blood in the air and it was filled with the scent of the orthocone. The blood that splashed down to the ice from the helicopter attack spurred them on.

The orthocone had traded its armour-plated shell for speed and manoeuvrability, but in doing so had left itself vulnerable to the worms. The first worm reached the body of the massive cephalopod as it was occupied with trying to launch itself at the buzzing helicopters above it. At first the leviathan felt nothing as the worm burrowed its head deep into the unprotected flesh. Then as more and more of the worms attached themselves to the cephalopod’s hide so they could saw into the skin and suck the flesh from the body, the giant nightmare beast finally realised the danger it was in.

It turned over and tried to drag its body against the stones and edges of the ice, hoping to dislodge the giant parasites. But by now, the bodies of the worms were burrowing into the flesh, their tough bristled shapes impossible to dislodge.

“What the hell are those things?”

O’Riordan and all the crew could see the orthocone as it turned over to fight the parasites, exposing the thistly red bodies of the worms. The squid managed to pull some free with its powerful tentacles and crush them, however, more simply inched their way on towards it with a blind hunger.

“Hell is the right word.” Matt was shivering in the back of the helicopter as they watched the battle. By now some of the worms had actually disappeared into the body of the orthocone — the giant beast now carried its own death within it.

The eldritch screams and thrashing of the gargantuan creature with its tentacles waving madly about and its mottled body now covered in either manhole-sized wounds or the disappearing bodies of the blood worms created an unreal vision for the men in their helicopters. For Major Hammerson and his men back in the command centre watching over the live video feed, it was an image straight from the mind of Lovecraft. With the tail ends of the giant bristling worms still protruding from the cephalopod’s body, it started to withdraw back into the pit where it either thought it had a better chance of fighting the parasites or could die in the darkness of its netherworld.

“My holy Christ.” Alfred Beadman collapsed back into his chair and looked to have passed out.

Major Jack Hammerson, who had seen things throughout his long brutal career that would freeze a normal man’s blood, was stunned to silence. The images that had been streamed to the command centre were of a battle that had no place in this modern, sane world. At last Hammerson spoke. “Tell me you’re recording this, Private.”

Private Everson who had been in a trance leapt for the console.

“We need to seal that hole over, Lieutenant.” Alex was damn sure that not a single one of these creatures should ever be allowed to escape from their deep world, as much for the creatures in the world below the ice as for the world above.

“Roger that, sir.” O’Riordan spoke some clinical orders into his microphone and the remaining helicopters took strategic positions around the rim of the ice pit. On command, each fired multiple AGM-114 Hellfire missiles into the ice and snow about twenty feet back from the rim. At first all that was thrown up were large sprays of snow and some large ice boulders. But by the third explosion large sections of the walls started to collapse inwards, pouring thousands of tons of snow and hardened ice down over the bloody, hellish scene below. In just three minutes all that was left was a slight, smoking depression in the ice. The leviathan’s doorway had been closed, hopefully forever.

Alex sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. Aimee leaned over and pulled the rough green blanket tighter around his shoulders. He opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Afraid I’ll catch a cold?”

She laughed and shook her head. “You? Impossible.” She looked down at the ice and said, “Think that’ll hold them, Arcadian?”

Alex raised an eyebrow at her and smiled; he knew she had a lot of questions. He turned to look down at the endless sea of ice and spoke without emotion. “The Antarctic ice is melting faster now than at any time in recorded history. Those things are chained by geology and ice, not by us. No, Aimee, I don’t think that will hold them — if it ever did.”

Aimee reached across and placed her fingers flat on the back of his hand, a small sigh-like yawn escaping her lips. Alex looked down at her and turned his hand over to grasp her tiny one in his, his thumb stroking her skin.

Aimee rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, her lips turning up contentedly at the corners. Even with the noise of the helicopter, Alex knew in a moment she had fallen asleep. He lifted his arm and carefully folded Aimee into the blanket, kissing the top of her head as she relaxed in closer.

Alex let a long breath escape his lips, leaned back against the cabin wall and after a few more seconds he too closed his eyes; already the dark and the ice seemed a long way away.