“Didn’t realize leaving would be so hard,” Angel told her friend during a lull.
“Could just stay.” Pam grinned, knowing full well that wasn’t an option. She could return next summer, but cooks didn’t over-winter. From here on out, the crew fended for themselves.
I wish.The thought surprised her.
Behind Pam, some of the recent summer arrivals crowded in and Angel rushed to make more coffee.
Someone shifted and sidled up close to the food. Bradley Sampson, the new operations manager. Okay, so maybe she didn’t likeeverybodyshe’d met here.
“You gonna miss me, Angel?” His jaw tightened as he crunched down on one of the Life Savers he always seemed to be sucking on. The sound was like bones breaking.
“Sure.” She gritted her own teeth and moved back, wondering how he’d managed to enter her personal space with the food still between them.
“You really mean that?” She was always unsure how to respond to the guy. He shifted close enough to press his hips to the counter and leaned all the way over the glass divider, his voice friendly, expression innocent. “Sure wish we could take you with us.”
Angel went very still. Her skin prickled from the top of her head to her toes.
“What?”
“You know. ’Cause you’re leaving today?” He gave her a quizzical, innocent smile, but somehow even that got her heart racing.
“But you’re not.”
“Hm.” He winked.
“Okay,” she muttered weakly before heading back in search of something to do with her hands. What the hell? Had she misheard him? Because if she hadn’t, that was the weirdest—
The door opened and someone stuck their head in to yell, “Sky’s clear! Plane’s taking off from McMurdo!”
A cheer went up and everybody ran to get ready. No time to worry about what she had or hadn’t heard now.
With the help of a couple crew members, she quickly cleaned the kitchen and then stepped back to give her domain one last look. The shelves were a little sparse. And though she hated the supply arch with a passion, she wouldn’t leave the winter crew without supplies. One last task before she said goodbye to this place forever.
Heaving a sigh, she left her warm kitchen, suited up, and descended the long, dizzying spiral staircase that led from the central building to the supply arch, which housed dry storage, mechanical equipment, items needed for the field sites, and everything else that could be kept at a constant deep freeze. Sewage was packaged in one of the arches and prepared for removal. Jameson’s shop, where he and the other mechanics worked on equipment, was in yet another, while many of the researchers counted on the arches’ deep freeze to keep their field samples from melting.
Every clanging step took Angel farther underground, the air around her growing noticeably cooler. By the time she reached the bottom and pushed through the door into the yawning space, her eyelashes had frozen stiff.
It always took a few moments to psych herself into leaving the relative safety of the tin-can-like stairwell for the enormous supply arch.
She was going to call out to see if anyone was there, but that was totally the kind of thing the first victim did in horror movies. Besides, it wasn’t really a creepy, dark snow tomb about to crumble under the weight of a bazillion tons of ice. That was just her imagination. She peered up at the corrugated warehouse ceiling. Well, the dark part was true. Only a few of the lights seemed to be working. Were the others out? She felt along the wall and flipped the switch. Nothing. Okay, great. Fine. A quick check confirmed her Maglite was still in her coat pocket.
From the outside, the arches were snow-covered, nothing visible but brightly shining metal doors, but inside, the place was more shadows than light. In the next arch over, the power plant’s bright-yellow machinery busily chugged out electricity and heat for the entire station. And in the farthest one, Jameson coddled hardworking vehicles into lasting another season, another year. But this arch was silent, dark, lifeless, the type of place where you’d expect to see bats hanging from the ceiling. Except, of course, nothing could survive down here.
Swallowing hard, she avoided the tall rolling ladders lined up on the concrete floor like stairs to nowhere and peered into the shadows behind the massive metal storage shelves lining the long building. The coast was clear. Nothing but a bright red POSITIVELY NO SMOKING sign.
Oh for Pete’s sake. Relax.
She walked farther inside and grabbed a sled, onto which she’d pile supplies before dragging the whole thing out through the big arch entrance, up the ice ramp, across the snow, and to her kitchen. It was a long haul, but she couldn’t carry the stuff back up the steps.
As fast as she could, she yanked big bags of pasta from wooden pallets, a few canned items, then on to paraffin-coated eggs and frozen veggies and fruit. Those were a necessity here, since aside from the freshies coming in on today’s flight, there’d be limited produce. And her people needed their vitamins.
It was at moments like this that she hated being short. The darned canned tomatoes were at the back of the second shelf, which meant the ladder wouldn’t help. And though she stretched as high as she could, she couldn’t quite get her hands on them.
Grumbling under her breath, she pulled the sled into the shadows between two big units and the wall, then slid behind one of the metal structures. Her boobs made it a tight squeeze, but she managed to shuffle down, strained up, and slid a can off. She just caught it before it brained her, and—
What was that?
Every nerve ending in her body vibrated as she went still and listened hard for that strange scuffling sound.
