No, focus.Walking out of here wasn’t an option, but he could leave a message, in the vague hope that someone would open the tunnel door and discover him in the morning, before it was too late.
Slowly, as if wading through thick, near-frozen water, he patted his pockets in search of something, anything… It was all gone. No pens—not that a ballpoint would work in this cold. No phone. Nothing to communicate with at all.
A hard, razor-sharp cough wracked his body, scraping the bottom of his lungs, sending a rush of warm, thick fluid spewing from his mouth.
Blood.
That was it. If he’d been in better shape, he might have laughed at the old sense-memory urge to turn to one of his students and offer up his palm for a high five. Oh, he’d seen the way they looked at him when he did that, knew they thought he was an absolutewanker. A “science geek,” as the Americans called them. But he’d never been one to waste time caring about what people thought.
Look how little it mattered, after all.
Slowly, his limbs robot stiff, he removed one of the gloves he’d just struggled to put on, reached for his wound, dipped an unwieldy finger into his own oozing blood, and felt for a surface. When he tried to slide his finger, it wouldn’t budge. Stuck to the ice.Shit.
He pulled it away, the digit too numb to register the pain of tearing skin.
There had to be something else he could use. He pictured the tunnel, cold and blue-white, its walls shimmering like glittering diamonds.
Slowly, hoping that he’d got his directions right, he worked his way toward the left, the movement scraping, insect-like. A thrill ran through him when his palmthunkedlightly against a slab of wood. A storage crate of some sort. Perfect.
Another touch of finger to blood before he pressed it awkwardly to the surface, just stopping himself from wasting time on explanations or articles. He’d add them at the end. Wouldn’t want to leave them with improper punctuation. Perhaps, while he was being fanciful, he’d add a footnote. A bibliography.
The blood kept solidifying on his fingertip, so he wasn’t sure if theCworked or not. And then, because he needed his final thoughts to be good ones, he decided that yes, it had most certainly worked, and so would the next.
He’d just completed theH, with a bit of a flourish, when he heard footsteps. It was them, coming back to kill him after all.
Frantic, he hurried to finish, fingers clumsy with death and that endless frozen dark.
* * *
Field Drilling Site—22 miles from the South Pole
Ford Cooper couldn’t wait for the summer crew to leave.
Given Coop’s general disposition, that would surprise exactly no one at the Burke-Ruhe Research Station. But still, this particular year seemed worse than most.
It might be the recent influx of newbies, sent by the National Science Foundation to replace crew members who’d been struck down by a particularly virulent flu. The new operations manager, in particular, rubbed him the wrong way.
A second—very distinct—possibility was that he was getting grumpier with age.
Or it could be the station’s cook, Angel Smith, whose presence put him on edge like nothing had in years.
Just thinking of her—too loud, too enthusiastic, too fluid with regulations—annoyed him.
Instead of sitting through another meal surrounded by all of that bright, colorful messiness, Coop took his usual approach to anything involving humanity and gave the entire research station a wide berth.
Which meant spending even more time alone on the ice, away from the oppressive heat and noise and constant, unpredictable movements of so-called “civilization.”
Though it felt like just moments, he’d been out here for hours, working at one of his field sites. A storm had come through this week and done some damage to his drill, giving him the perfect excuse to stay out all day. He huffed out a laugh. As if he needed an excuse.
Not that anyone was checking up on him. He worked solo because he liked it.
And possibly because no one wanted to work with him.
He squinted out at the wide, welcoming landscape, trying—and failing—to estimate the time based on the sun’s position. After all these years, the eternal daylight of austral summer still confused his internal clock. He checked the time—after eight.
Though he ached to take advantage of the continued light and stay out here, working, safety dictated that he pack it in for the night.
As he climbed onto the snowmobile, the stiffness of his limbs confirmed that this was the correct choice. On cue, his stomach gurgled. He hadn’t eaten since this morning’s breakfast, which wasn’t all that smart in the land of vanishing calories.
