Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Chapter 12

When Millie woke him, Gabriel felt disoriented and dehydrated, a feeling not unlike a bad hangover. He dragged himself upright and slipped his altitude-swollen feet back into his too-tight boots, grunting wordlessly as Millie slid into the sleeping bag in his place. Staggering down the tunnel to empty his aching bladder, Gabriel still felt foggy and half asleep. He kept going till he was a good, respectful distance away from the others and leaned against the wall with one hand while he struggled with the other through far too many layers of snaps, buttons and zippers. By the time he was able to begin relieving himself against the wall, Gabriel found that he was flushed and damp with sweat from the effort. He realized that while it was certainly still cold here, it was substantially warmer than it had been back by the tunnel’s mouth. The wall against which he was leaning felt like rough stone beneath a thin crust of ice, not the solid ice of the section in which they’d slept.

Curious, he headed farther along the tunnel, head cocked and listening. He could have sworn he’d heard—yes, there it was, at the edges of his hearing, a delicate trickling sound.

Running water.

He came around a bend and discovered a tiny, winding stream flowing along a deep groove in the ice.

Gabriel rushed back to the mouth of the tunnel, where he found Nils awake and melting chips of ice over a camp stove.

“Nils,” Gabriel said. “There’s a stream up ahead. About fifty yards down the tunnel.”

“What?” Nils stood, frowning. “That’s not possible. It’s far too cold for liquid water here.”

“Well, it’s warmer there,” Gabriel said. “Much warmer than it is here.”

At the word “warmer” Velda was wide-awake and on her feet.

“It’s just like my father said. We must be getting closer to the place he found. The place he vanished.” She jammed her feet into her boots and hastily began rolling her sleeping bag.

“Hold on a minute,” Gabriel said, keeping his voice low. He motioned to Millie and Rue, both of whom were still sleeping. “We need to let them rest for a while first.”

“No time to rest,” Velda said. “Not when we’re this close. Not when my father’s been on his own here for weeks—maybe sick or hurt, starving. No. We’re going.”

Gabriel watched Velda shoulder her pack and head down the passage. Nils bent to turn off and pack up the stove. He offered Gabriel a drink of meltwater from the small tin pot and Gabriel accepted gratefully.

“Better wake the others,” Nils said.

Millie and Rue were not happy to be dragged from their sleeping bags.

“Who the hell put her in charge?” Rue grumbled, when Gabriel had explained.

“She’s right about her father,” Gabriel said. “If he’s still alive, he needs help. And we can’t let her go on alone.”

“You can’t let her go on alone,” Rue said. “She’s not smoking my joint.”

“We must all stay together,” Nils said. “Going alone down here is suicide. That’s how Lawrence vanished.”

“So this way we can all vanish together,” Rue said. “Much better.” But she tugged on her boots.

Millie came up behind her. “Man, Rue, you’re getting grouchy in your old age. What’d you think you were getting into when Gabriel called and said, ‘Wanna go to the South Pole?’ A five-star hotel with a feather bed and a down comforter—”

“Ah, fuck you, Millie,” Rue snarled, “and your down comforter. I’m a driver. You see anything down here for me to drive? No. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.” She gave Gabriel a big false smile. “So, we going, or what?”

Gabriel led the way down the passage after Velda. They followed the stream a hundred yards and found her crouching beside it.

“It’s water all right,” she said, pulling off her glove and scooping up a handful to drink. “It’s cold as hell, but it’s water. It’s real.”

Gabriel bent down and took a drink from the stream. It was deeper here than the little trickle he’d first spotted, and the water was cold, fresh and delicious. He could feel his dehydrated body soak up every drop and beg for more. But it was still too cold to expose his bare skin to it for long—his hand felt almost as if it were burning where it had touched the water, and he had no choice but to dry it off as quickly as possible and tuck it up under his parka.

Nils brought out the tin cup and they took turns filling and emptying it. When the team had all had enough, they set out to follow the stream. It bubbled along the left side of the narrow tunnel, sometimes shallow enough that you could see the stone bed beneath the water, sometimes deep and wide enough to cover almost the entire floor of the tunnel, forcing the team to walk single-file along a skinny strip of higher ground against the right-hand wall.

Gabriel was beginning to lose track of time in the dim unchanging sameness of the tunnel. Even though he had slept, he still felt tired. It was far too easy to lose focus, and at one point he nearly lost his footing as well, his boot coming within inches of plunging into the icy stream.

“Careful,” Nils said, gripping Gabriel’s upper arm and steadying him. “It may be warmer down here than on the surface, but it’s still cold enough that you do not want to have a wet boot. I can tell you from personal experience that frostbite is nothing you want to become familiar with.”

Gabriel was suddenly keenly aware of the missing fingers on the hand that gripped his arm. He nodded, and continued carefully along the edge of the stream.

About thirty minutes later, the tunnel opened into a wide, high-ceilinged ice cave. There, the little stream ended, depositing its flow of water into a rushing underground river, more than twenty feet wide and disturbingly deep. Peering down into the water, Gabriel could see, beneath the spume and froth on the surface, several sharply crenellated columns of ice plunging vertiginously downward into what seemed no less than a water-filled canyon. The river traveled sinuously around several small humped islands of ice—some of them large and bulky, some as small as manhole covers back in New York—before disappearing into a crevice on the far side of the cave. To the left of the crevice was the entrance to another small tunnel. On the right side of the river—the side they were on—was a dead end, the path they’d been following coming to an abrupt halt against a wall of ice.

“That tunnel looks like the only way forward,” Gabriel said.“And I think it’s fair to say that swimming across is right out.”

“Without dry suits and specialized diving gear?” Nils said. “Hypothermia would set in almost immediately. Even if you made it across, without a change of warm, dry clothing on the other side, death would not be long in coming.”

“What about those?” Velda asked, pointing at the islands in the middle of the river. “Couldn’t we work our way across using them as stepping stones?”

“Maybe you could,” Rue said. “I’ve got shorter legs.”

“I’ll go,” Gabriel said. “I’ll carry one of the ropes across. You anchor one end here, I’ll anchor the other in the wall over there, and that’ll give the rest of you a guide line to hold onto. Rue, you can even go hand over hand if there are gaps that are too wide for you to step across.”

“Do we both remember the condition my hand’s in?” Rue said. “I know I do.”

“Seeing as how I bandaged it for you, I think I do, too,” Gabriel said. “But unless you’ve got a better plan to suggest…”

“All right,” Rue said after a moment, kicking a fragment of ice into the water. “I’ll do it. But you anchor that rope tight, you understand?”