Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Chapter 27

“Step away from that machine, Gabriel,” Velda said, coming toward him. Her gown was in shreds, leaving her naked to the waist and barely covered below.

He didn’t move. “What did you do to Millie?”

“Made him put me down,” she replied flatly as she crossed the room, raising the spears to point at Gabriel’s chest. “Remarkable what a kick to a broken ankle will do.”

“You shouldn’t have done it, Velda,” Gabriel said. “He was taking you to safety. This place is going to be destroyed in minutes.”

“This place? What are you talking about?” Her voice suddenly wasn’t affectless anymore.

“I reset the device,” Gabriel said. “To target itself.”

“You did what?” Velda came to a stop.

“I can’t let you kill millions of innocent people. No matter what the women here did to your father. Or what the Germans did to him sixty years ago.”

“You had no right,” she snarled. She jabbed one of the spears at him. He knocked its point aside with his forearm.

Velda lunged for him with the other spear, its sharpened stone blade whistling through the air directly toward his face. He ducked at the last second and it clanged against the metal sphere behind him. She pulled it back while stabbing out with the first spear again. It caught him high on one thigh, drawing blood.

He reached out, seized the shaft right behind the blade, and yanked it out of her grip. Spinning it in a circle like a staff, Gabriel brought the point around toward Velda. They faced off, weapons aimed at one another.

“Vierzehn minuten zur aktivierung…”

“If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die,” Gabriel said. “This thing’s going off in fourteen minutes.”

“So let me change the goddamn settings back, Hunt!” She swung her spear at his head. He tried to duck it, but the rapid motion of his head brought on a powerful wave of dizziness. He tried to stay upright, but couldn’t. He put out one hand and caught himself as he tumbled to the floor. The spear fell from his grasp.

Velda was still standing. She was wincing, but she hadn’t been in the room with the machine as long as he had, so she hadn’t been affected as strongly yet. She strode forward, raising her spear high above her head with both hands, preparing to plunge it down into his neck.

“Don’t, Velda,” he said. He could barely hear his own voice over the thrumming of the machine and the rush of blood in his ears. “Please. Your father wouldn’t want this sort of vengeance. His own daughter killing millions in his name? How could anyone who survived what he did want that?”

“Don’t you dare presume to tell me what my father would have wanted,” Velda shouted, her eyes blazing with fury. “Don’t you dare!” The silver pocket watch hung by its chain between her sweat-streaked breasts, its cover having snapped open as she ran. Inside, he saw the tiny photo, the older man and the loving daughter. She still saw herself as a loving daughter, he knew—but the savage hatred on her face now had nothing in common with the girl in the photo. Nothing in common with a sane human being.

If there had been more time, maybe he could have helped her, or someone could have; she could have recovered; this madness could have passed.

But there was no more time.

“Okay,” Gabriel said, his voice soft. “Change it back. Do what you have to.”

She lowered her spear and stepped forward. She was just a foot shy of the machine, and he was in the way. “Move,” she said.

He tried to look her in the eye, but from where he lay she seemed miles away. “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “I really am.” And he rolled backward, hard, ramming with all his strength into the narrow metal legs of the frame that held the Untergang machine in place.

For an instant, the machine stayed where it was, just rotating as the structure beneath it tipped; the body of the sphere turned, the side with the heavy lens attached sliding down toward Gabriel and Velda, the side with the red-hot nozzle swinging up and out of reach. Then Gabriel rammed the frame again and the metal ball toppled from its perch.

Velda had time enough to raise one arm, as though to ward off a blow. The device plunged toward her. The thick, riveted metal skin narrowly missed her—and so did the heavy glass surface of the lens. They passed just inches away, the metal in front of her and the glass behind her. But any feeling of relief or triumph on her part must have been infinitely brief. Gabriel ducked his head and rolled out of the path of the sphere, so he didn’t see what happened—but he heard the gruesome sizzle, saw the blinding flash of magnesium-white light, and smelled the strong, nauseating scent of ozone. When he looked back, she was gone.

The device itself rolled till it fetched up against the wall. The nozzle, miraculously, was still attached, still protruding from the sphere like a stem from an orange. The lens had snapped off and lay in pieces on the floor. Painted in soot across the surface of the largest piece he saw the silhouette of a woman, head thrown back, one arm raised above her head.

“Good-bye, Velda,” he whispered as he staggered to his feet.

Was there any chance the thing was irreparably damaged, that it wouldn’t go off…? Any hope he might have harbored was dashed when he heard the crackly recorded voice, still counting down.

“Zwölf minuten zur aktivierung…”

Twelve minutes. He grabbed the spear he’d dropped and raced out of the room.

His head began clearing as soon as he got out into the open air. It was sticky, it was hot, it was humid—but it wasn’t filled with deadly radiation or that intense, unnatural, unbearable pressure the machine had somehow created. He oriented himself quickly and headed off in the direction of the plane. He couldn’t hear the voice any longer, but he knew what it would be saying: zehn minuten…neun minuten…acht minuten…

“Millie!” he called as he ran, pushing branches and enormous fronds out of the way. “Millie!”

“I’m here,” came a pained reply a hundred yards later, and as Gabriel rounded a bend he saw the big man crawling toward him on his hands and knees, his face a mask of pure agony. The splint was still on his ankle, but the foot was bent crookedly inside it. Gabriel threw the spear to him and Millie reached up to snatch it out of the air. Gabriel rushed over to his side and helped him up. Millie leaned heavily on the spear and slung his other arm around Gabriel’s shoulders. He stood on one leg, kept the other bent at the knee. He couldn’t put any weight at all on it.

“Where’s Velda?” Millie whispered through his grimace.

“She’s dead,” Gabriel said.

“Feel better already,” Millie muttered.

“Bad news is, we’ll be joining her if we don’t get to that plane in ten minutes or less.” He thought for a second. “Less.”

“Seriously?” Millie said.

“Seriously,” Gabriel said.

“Fuck.” Millie took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s do it.”

They ran—or anyway Gabriel ran, as best he could with Millie’s weight bearing down on his shoulders. The big man hopped along on one leg, planting the foot of the spear in the dirt each time and using it to pull himself forward with enormous heaves. The foliage grew thicker around them, slapping them in the face and chest as they lunged through it. But they kept pushing forward. Gabriel’s heart was hammering and his breath was painful and ragged when they finally glimpsed the H-shaped tail fin between two trees up ahead.

“That’s it,” Gabriel said, “we’re almost there—”

He heard a rustling in the undergrowth beside them. With a falling heart, he turned halfway around to face it. If it was another Tasmanian tiger, or god forbid one of those birds…

But when Millie, balancing on one leg, used the butt end of the spear to push aside a screen of leaves, Gabriel saw it hadn’t been an animal making the noise. Crouched low to the ground, her half-strung beads clutched tightly between her hands, was the young girl from the village.

“Oh, god,” Gabriel said. He looked back toward the village. The top of the tall central building was still in view, and as he watched, it crumpled inward.

He thought of the two unconscious guards he’d left behind on the floor. He thought of the old women by the well, who’d disappeared to who knew where. He thought of the pitiful sufferers in the men’s tent. Even if Gabriel and Millie made it to the plane, even if Rue managed to get them off the ground, there’d be no shortage of death in this valley.

Not this one, too.

“Come on,” he said to the girl, knowing she couldn’t understand a word. She shrank away from him.

“Millie, you do it. Talk to her.”

“I don’t speak their—”

“Just talk, you goddamn horse whisperer,” Gabriel said, and Millie steeled himself, forced the pain off his face and out of his voice, and began talking to the girl, low and soft, his words a trickle of sweet, slow molasses. “Come here, beautiful, it’s okay, we’re not gonna hurt you, you’ll be okay—but you’ve got to come with us, that’s it, come here…”

Gabriel looked back at the village again. The central building was completely gone, and a hot wind had started to blow in their direction, rattling the branches of the trees.

“Come on, Millie,” Gabriel whispered. “Now or never.”

The girl had crept forward. She was within reach. “I can’t carry her and walk,” Millie said.

“Put her on your back,” Gabriel said.

“Honey, don’t run, I’m gonna pick you up, you understand me?” He made a lifting gesture with his arm. “Up, okay? It’ll be fine, just trust me.” Gabriel looked in the girl’s eyes. She seemed a bit less frightened, or at least he told himself she did.

“Now, Millie. Now.”

With one sweep of his arm, Millie lifted the girl off her feet and tossed her onto his back. She squealed with momentary terror, but he kept talking to her, and when he let go of her skinny waist she didn’t jump off. Instead, she wrapped her legs around his thick neck and took fistfuls of his hair in both little hands.

“That’s great, honey,” Millie said, “now we’re going for a ride.”And sweeping the spear out in front of him, he resumed his lurching forward march, Gabriel running alongside him, keeping him up.

The hot wind pursued them, gaining strength. It felt like it had reached gale force by the time they finally broke out into the clearing where the plane stood. A loud buzz of exclamations arose from the crowd of women when they saw Millie and Gabriel stagger into view with the wind at their back. Rue looked up. She was crouched on the plane’s wing, twisting a wrench in the innards of the fuselage, but she leapt down and ran to them, pushing taller bodies out of the way till she was at Millie’s other side and could grab him around the waist.

Looking down, Gabriel saw that one of Rue’s small bare feet was wrapped with bloody barkcloth.

“Jesus,” Gabriel said.

“Don’t worry,” Rue said. “It’s not my clutch foot.”

She steered them toward the open ramp at the rear of the plane.

“Have you got it working?” Gabriel asked.

“Like a charm,” Rue said. “A cranky, leaky, rusty, sixty-five-year-old charm.”

“Well, you’ve got five minutes to get us in the air,” Gabriel said.

Rue’s face couldn’t properly be said ever to go pale, but she blanched all the same. “Five minutes…?”

“Fünf minuten,” Gabriel said. “Not a minuten more.”

The women crowded all around them fell silent then, and stepped to either side. In the gap that opened up, Anika came forward. She had a vintage Luger in her hand, the German pistol aimed directly at Millie’s gut. Apparently Groener’s notebook hadn’t been the only artifact of the Third Reich left around here.

“Lady, move,” Millie said. To which Gabriel added, “If you don’t let us up that ramp, Anika, we’ll all die.”

Her grip on the gun didn’t waver.

“The Untergang machine,” Gabriel said, then started over. “Unterg. Unterg has been activated. Turned on. Made angry. Look.” He pointed back toward the trees, which were waving wildly in the wind. “Your main building—it’s gone. Gone. Everything will be gone a few minutes from now. Everything—you, me, everything, if you don’t let us get on this plane. If you don’t let us take you away on the Father Bird.”

“We cannot…ride the Father Bird,”Anika said. “It is forbidden.” But Gabriel saw her looking past him, over his shoulder, toward the village, and thought maybe he heard a bit of uncertainty in her voice.

“We have to go,” he said. “Now, or everyone you care about will die. You and all your people. We can save you, but only if we go right now.”

The girl, who was still sitting on Millie’s shoulders, picked this moment to speak up.

Gabriel couldn’t understand what she said in her piping little soprano voice; perhaps something about how they’d picked her up and brought her safely out of the forest. Perhaps something else entirely. But at the end of it, Anika’s hand slowly descended.

“It is forbidden,” she said, unhappily.

“First time for everything,” Rue said and steered Millie up the ramp with her.

Gabriel stayed at its foot a moment longer. “Tell them to get on board as quickly as they can. Up there.” He pointed at the plane’s interior. “We’re leaving in four minutes, with them or without them.” Anika repeated the instructions to the throng of women and they began rushing up the ramp. Gabriel went ahead of them and pointed them to seats on padded benches against each wall. He opened a set of ancient supply lockers along the walls, one by one, disgorging parkas, blankets, and assorted other cold weather gear.

“Do we have enough fuel to make it to the nearest station?” Gabriel asked.

“Barely,” Rue replied from the cockpit. “We’ll be flying on fumes and Hail Marys.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s an I’ll do my best.”

It would have to do.

Gabriel returned to his search of the cavernous hollow interior of the plane. He found stacks of tanned furs, skins of water, and baskets of desiccated fruit and dried meat—decades of offerings to the Father Bird, no doubt. He also found a complement of flight suits that had lain untouched for over sixty years.

“Anika, is everyone on board?” Gabriel said.

The older woman looked from face to face, tallying the confused and anxious women sitting half naked on the benches, and nodded. “All in.”

“Tell them to bundle up in those furs,” Gabriel told her, as he began pulling on one of the flight suits. “You too. You have no idea how cold it is where we’re going.”

Anika looked at Gabriel as if he’d lost his mind but did as he requested.

“Millie,” Gabriel said, tossing him the largest of the suits. The big man was seated sprawled across the floor beside the cockpit. “Put some clothes on.” Gabriel threw the smallest of the flight suits through the open door of the cockpit. “Rue, when are you going to start those engines?”

There was a growling sputter and cough before he finished getting the words out, and looking through the cockpit windows he saw the antique propellers struggling into motion like old men getting out of bed. The stench of thick smoky exhaust was overwhelming.

He returned to the center of the cabin, took one last look around the clearing through the still-open ramp at the back of the plane.

What he saw terrified him. The wind was strong enough now that the trees in its path were bent almost horizontal, the ones that hadn’t already snapped off and been blown away. As he watched, the ground itself began to tremble, then to twist and hump like a living thing. This was minimum intensity? Good lord—what would have happened to D.C. at the maximum level?

He felt the plane grind into motion along the runway and saw the ramp slowly rise, laboriously drawing shut.

Then, suddenly there was an awful, unnatural sound, like a thick piece of metal being shredded. The surface of the runway seemed to shimmer with the same sort of distortion he’d seen beneath the giant lens of the Untergang machine. Gabriel felt the terrible pressure return, squeezing his skull painfully, and he saw the women around the cabin holding their heads in torment. As the plane’s nose tipped up and its belly left the ground, a hot wave of fire struck them from behind, shoving them violently into the air. Gabriel was thrown against the side of one of the lockers and held on tight to prevent himself from being flung all the way into the cockpit.

“Rue, you okay?” he shouted.

“Don’t talk to me,” she shouted back.

The metal of the plane’s body was screaming from the pressure, the velocity, the heat. Above them, the red dome of ice seemed to glow, the frozen fire coming to life as the furious heat from below began to melt the dome away, layer by layer. In the middle distance, he could see the narrow rift in the ice toward which they flew, and through it the slash of clean, white daylight beyond.

They were rushing toward it at ferocious speed—but they weren’t there yet.

Gabriel pressed his face against the glass of a window and looked down. The ground continued to rapidly drop away beneath them, but that was the least of what he saw.

It was as if the entire valley below was being crumpled like a used paper napkin in a giant’s hand. The ground seemed to double up and fold in on itself, twisting and crushing everything in a rough spiral pattern radiating outward from the clearing where the machine had been. As Gabriel watched, appalled, the mesmerizing spiral suddenly collapsed inward, and a spout of churning, steaming lava gushed like blood from the torn earth.

“Lava at three o’clock,” he shouted.

“I told you,” Rue shouted back, “don’t talk to me!” The plane suddenly lurched, as she turned the heavy-bodied craft nearly on end and steered it in a sharp turn away from the deadly flow.

Gabriel found himself flung from one side of the plane to the other, his fall softened only from landing on the bodies of half a dozen young women all wrapped up in furs and blankets. He made apologies uselessly—incomprehensibly, to them. At least there didn’t seem to be any new broken bones, though he hated to think what Rue’s maneuver might have done to Millie’s ankle.

Out the nearest window, Gabriel saw the cliffs at the valley’s edges begin to shudder and collapse. Cracks appeared and widened in the ice ceiling above. The ancient plane was vibrating all over as if about to shake itself to pieces.

“Hang on to something,” Rue shouted from the cockpit. “It’s gonna be a tight squeeze.”

There was a deafening crunch as one of the wing tips smashed against the edge of the crack in the ice dome. For a terrible moment, Gabriel was afraid they were going down, but Rue fought with the controls and somehow held the plane steady.

The temperature inside the main cabin suddenly plummeted, dropping a hundred degrees in forty seconds. It left Gabriel gasping and shivering. The flight suit helped, but only so much; for one thing, his feet were still bare. And Rue couldn’t be doing any better, especially with the wounds she’d endured. He grabbed an armful of skins and raced into the cockpit with them, dumping them on Rue’s shoulders and lap. Freeing one hand at a time from the controls, she pulled them tightly around her.

“Thanks,” she said, her teeth chattering.

“Can I talk to you now?” Gabriel said.

“No,” Rue said. “But you can huddle with me for warmth.”

Gabriel climbed into the seat beneath her and pulled the furs back over them both. She was freezing, but then so was he; together at least they stood a chance.

Glancing back, he saw that the faces of the women in the cabin were pale with shock, their eyes huge and unable to process what was happening, their bodies shivering pitifully with the brutal cold. The little girl was clinging tightly to Millie, her arms too short to protrude from the sleeves of the parka in which he’d zipped her up.

“Anika,” Gabriel said, shouting to be heard over the roar of the engines. “Tell them to huddle together, to hold tight to each other. It’s the only way they’ll survive this flight.” He heard Anika saying something and saw Millie gesturing.

They’d figure it out. They’d have to.

“How much longer till we land?” Gabriel asked Rue. “How far to Pole Station?”

“Which do you want to know?” she said, concentrating on correcting for chop. The turbulence was exceptional.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

“Pole Station is quite a ways off,” she said. “But with that engine gone, we won’t be in the air for long enough to reach it.” She nodded toward the right side of the cockpit, where Gabriel saw that one of the giant propellers was not turning. As he stared, the second one on that side sputtered to a stop.

Rue flipped an old toggle switch on the control panel. Her voice boomed out of a loudspeaker behind them. “Attention passengers, this is your captain speaking. We are beginning our descent into beautiful downtown nowhere.”

She flipped the switch again, tried to look through the iced-over cockpit windows, then gave up and peered at the instruments. “This isn’t the way I wanted to go,” she said. “Frozen solid at the South Pole.”

“Oh?” Gabriel said, forcing a grin onto his trembling lips. “How did you want to go?”

“Heart attack,” she said, “brought on by the biggest orgasm of my life.”

“Well, don’t give up on your dream just yet,” Gabriel said. “If you put this bird down safely, we might still make it.”

“That’s what I love about you, Gabriel,” Rue said. “You’re such a goddamn optimist.”

The plane was wracked with a huge blow, as if they’d been swatted by a tremendous club.

“Hang on, optimist,” Rue muttered, “we’re going down.”

Gabriel had been through some hairy landings in the past, but none of them could compare to the vicious turbulence of this one or the blast of freezing wind that enveloped them as the plane began to come apart at the seams. They plowed into the snow, wings snapping and propellers flying off in every direction. The passengers in the cabin were thrown and scattered. And Gabriel himself was flung through the air. He saw a heavy metal panel loom before him, jutting from the snow. Then he hit it face-first, and blackness swallowed everything.