The Day After Tomorrow

153

VON HOLDEN emerged first, thrown free onto a nearly flat plate of rock and loose stone. Staggering up, he looked around. Above was the avalanche trail and the narrow chute down which he’d fallen. Rivulets of ice and snow still rolled down it in the aftermath. Turning, he saw the glacier, where it should have been. But nothing else looked familiar. Where he was, in relation to the trail he had been on, he had no idea. Looking up, he hoped to see the moon reemerge from behind the clouds but instead he saw the sky. No longer gray and overcast, it was crystal clear. But there was no moon or stars. In its place, reaching far into the heavens, were the red and green of the Aurora. The massive, overpowering ribbon-candy curtains of his nightmare.

Crying out, he turned and ran. Desperately looking for the trail that would lead to the entrance to the shaft. But nothing was as it should have been. He had never been in this place before. Terrified, he ran on, only to be confronted by a wall of stone, and he realized he had entered a cul-de-sac, with rock cliffs reaching hundreds of feet straight up into the red-green sky.

Breathless, heart pounding, he turned back. The red and green grew brighter and the towering curtains began to descend toward him. At the same time beginning to slowly undulate up and down, like the huge monolithic pistons of his dreams.

The curtains came closer, undulating obscenely, bathing him in the colors of their glow. Threatening to settle like a shroud around him.

“No!” he shouted, as if to break the spell and make them go away. His voice echoing off the rock masses and out across the glacier. But the spell did not break and instead they came closer, pulsating steadily, as if they were some living organism that owned the heavens. Abruptly they became translucent, like the hideous tentacles of jellyfish, and suddenly descended further as if to smother him. In silent terror, he turned and ran back the way he had come.

Once again he was in the cul-de-sac and face-to-face with headwalls of stone. Turning back, he watched in dread as the tentacles came toward him. Translucent, glowing, undulating. Lowering. Were they here to warn of his imminent death? Or this time, was it death itself? He shrunk back. What did they want? He merely was a soldier following orders. A soldier doing his duty.

Then that same sense rose in him and the fear left. He was a Spetsnaz soldier! He was Letter der Sicherheit! He would not allow death to take him with his purpose hot yet done! “Neinr he shouted out loud.

“Ich bin der Leiter der Sicherheit!” I am chief of security! Tearing the pack from his shoulders, he undid the straps and took the box from inside. Cradling it in his arms, he took a step forward.

“Das ist meine Pflicht!” This is my duty! he said, offering the box up in both hands.

“Das ist meine Seele!’ This is my soul!

Abruptly the Aurora vanished and Von Holden stood trembling in the moonlight, the box still in his arms. A moment passed before he could hear his own breathing. A moment more, and he felt his pulse return to normal. Finally, he started forward out of the cul-de-sac. Then he was out and on the edge of the mountain overlooking the glacier. Below him he saw the clear trail to the air shaft. Immediately he started down it, the box still clutched in his arms.

By now the storm had passed and the moon and stars were stark in the sky. The clarity of the moonlight and the angle from which it came gave the snowy landscape a raw. timelessness that made it at once past and future, and Von Holden had the sense that he had demanded and been given passage through a world that existed only on some Jar-removed plane.

“Das ist meine Pflicht!” he said again, looking up at the stars. Duty above all! Above Earth. Above God. Beyond time.

Within minutes he’d reached the split of rock that concealed the opening to the air shaft. The rock itself jutted put over the edge of the cliff and he had to step out and around it to enter. As he did, he saw Osborn sprawled on a snow covered shelf thirty yards downhill from where he stood, his left leg turned under him at an odd angle. Von Holden knew it was broken. But he wasn’t dead. His eyes were open and he was watching him.

“Don’t take another chance with him,” he thought. “Shoot him now.”

There was a puff of snow from Von Holden’s boot as he stepped closer to the edge and looked down. His movement had put him in deep shadow, with the full light of the moon on the Jungfrau above him. But even in the darkness Osborn could see him shift the weight of the box and cradle it in his left arm. Then he saw a secondary movement and the pistol come up in his right hand. Osborn no longer had McVey’s gun—it had been lost in the rush of the avalanche that had saved his life. He’d been given one chance, he wouldn’t get another unless he did something himself.

Grimacing in agony as his fractured leg twisted beneath him, Osborn dug in with his elbows and kicked out with his other leg. Unbearable pain shot the length of his body as he inched backward, squirming like a broken animal over the ice and rock, trying wildly to drag himself across the shelf and out of the line of fire. Suddenly he felt his head dip backward and he realized he had come to the edge. Cold air rushed up from below and he looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but a vast dark hole in the glacier beneath him. Slowly he looked back. He could feel Von Holden smile as his finger closed around the pistol’s trigger.

Then Von Holden’s eyes flashed in the moonlight. His gun bucked in his hand and he jerked sideways, his shots spraying off into space. Von Holden kept shooting and his entire body jumped with the rattle of the gun until it was empty. Then his hand went limp and dropped to his side and the gun fell away. For a moment he just stood there, his eyes wide, the box still cradled in his left arm. Then, ever so slowly, he lost his balance and pitched forward, his body plunging downward, sailing over Osborn, free-falling in the clear night air toward the gaping darkness below.