15

Even though Fear Base turned relatively quiet-everyone abed in expectation of a busy tomorrow- Marshall as usual spent a restless night, tossing in his spartan bunk. Try as he might, he could not get comfortable. Pulling up the sheets made him too warm; throwing them aside chilled him. Now and then, the muscles of his arms and legs tensed spasmodically, as if unable to relax, and he could not escape the feeling that-despite all evidence to the contrary-something was quite wrong.

Finally, he sank into a half doze in which a succession of disturbing images moved slowly across the field of his inner vision. He was out walking the permafrost, alone, beneath the strange and angry northern lights. In his mind, they were lower than ever in the sky, so low they seemed to press down upon his shoulders. He stared at them in mingled awe and unease as he walked. And then he stopped, frowning in surprise. Ahead of him, on the torn and frozen ground, the lights actually met the land, viscous driblets flowing like wax from a tilted candle. As he stared, the forms grew larger, took shape, solidified. Legs and arms appeared. There was a moment of dreadful stasis. Then they began approaching him-slowly at first, then more quickly. There was something horrible about the way they came, their bodies alternately bulging and ebbing; something horrible about the evident hunger with which they stretched out their splayed hands toward him. He turned to run but found, with that horrible creeping paralysis of a nightmare, that his leaden feet were so terribly slow to move…

Marshall sat up with a start. He was sweating and the covers were twisted around him like the winding-sheet of a corpse. He stared left and right, wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting for his breathing to slow, for the vestiges of the dream to fade.

After a minute, he glanced at his watch: quarter to five. “Shit,” he murmured, sinking back onto the damp pillow.

There would be no more sleep-not tonight. He sat up again, then stood, quickly dressed in the gloom of his bunk, and slipped out into the corridor.

The base was so quiet it reminded him of the first nights he’d spent here, when the labyrinthine corridors and the long-abandoned spaces seemed to overwhelm the tiny band of scientists. His footsteps rang on the steel floor and he felt the ridiculous urge to tiptoe. Leaving the dormitory section, he walked past the labs, the mess, the kitchen, then turned down a corridor into an area of the base they’d never used: a warren of equipment rooms and monitoring posts. He paused. In the distance, he could just make out the faintest strains of music: someone’s CD player, he assumed; there were very few radio stations within five hundred miles, and even those tended to concern themselves with the price of diesel oil and the state of the annual moose rut.

Hands in pockets, he wandered deeper into the maze of listening posts. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to shake an oppressive sense of foreboding. If anything, it seemed to increase: a perverse conviction-given the excitement of the coming day-that something terrible was going to happen.

He paused again. The claustrophobic base, shrouded in watchful silence, just exacerbated his gloom. On impulse, he turned, threaded his way back, climbed a stairway to the topmost level. He walked to the entrance plaza, walked by the sentry post, then passed through the staging area, donning his parka as he did so. It was only eight hours since he’d last been out, but in his current frame of mind nothing was going to keep him inside this shadow-haunted base another minute. Grabbing a flashlight and zipping the parka, he opened the outer doors and stepped outside.

He noticed with surprise that the display of northern lights had grown even more intense: a deep, unguent red, throbbing and pulsating. It transformed the entire apron-with its temporary shacks and Quonset huts, tents and supply caches-into a monochromatic, otherworldly landscape. He put the flashlight in a pocket. The wind had picked up sharply, worrying at loose tarps and indifferently tied ropes, but even it could not explain the eerie cracklings and moanings he could have sworn came from the lights themselves.

There was something else that seemed odd, but it took him a moment to realize what it was. The wind was almost warm on his cheek. It felt as if a false spring had abruptly come to the Zone. He unzipped his parka slowly; he should have checked the thermometer on the way out.

He moved through the low structures, half of them backlit blood red, the other half sunken into shadow. As he did so, a low creak sounded from the small forest of outbuildings ahead.

He paused in the crimson half-light. Was somebody out here with him?

Everybody-scientists, documentary crew, and the mysterious new arrival, Logan -were bunking inside the base. The only exceptions were Davis, in her mega-trailer, and Carradine, the trucker. He glanced in the direction of Davis ’s trailer: it was dark, all lights out.

“Carradine?” he called softly.

The creaking noise came again.

Marshall took a step forward, emerging from between two supply tents. Now the bulk of Carradine’s semi came into view. He glanced toward the rear of the cab, where the “sleeper” was. Its windows were dark, as well.

He remained still, listening intently. He heard the mournful howl of the wind, the low rumble of the diesels in the powerhouse, the purr of the backup generator affixed to Davis’s trailer, and-now and then-the eerie murmurings and moanings that appeared to come from the northern lights themselves. But that was all.

He shook his head, smiling despite himself. Here he was, on the eve of what promised to be one of the most memorable days of his life…and he was working himself into a lather over a bad dream. He’d walk to the perimeter fence, take a turn along its length, then head back to his lab. Even if he couldn’t put in useful work, at least he’d try. He squared his shoulders, took another step forward.

The creak came again. And from where he now stood, Marshall got a bearing. It was coming from the direction of the vault.

He moved toward it slowly. The vault stood alone, one wall haloed in the unnatural light, the rest in darkness. Even without his flashlight, Marshall could make out the sheen of water beneath it: clearly, the automated thawing process was well under way. Tomorrow this steel container-and its contents-would be the star of the show. Tugging the flashlight from his pocket, Marshall aimed it at the silver structure.

Then he heard the creak yet again, louder. Armed with the flashlight, Marshall identified its source: a piece of lumber, hanging down loosely into the three-foot crawl space beneath the vault.

Marshall frowned. Shoddy workmanship, he thought. That’ll have to be taken care of before Conti and his variety show go live. Or perhaps something had simply broken loose from the structure. It was swaying in the wind, just above the dirty puddle of meltwater…

But there was something else wrong here. It wasn’t so much a puddle he was looking at but a lake. A lake full of chunks of dirty ice.

He moved closer, crouched, shone his light at the pool of meltwater. Frowning, he raised the beam to the loose piece of lumber. It creaked again as the wind played with it, the lower end badly splintered. Slowly, he let the flashlight beam travel up the lumber to the vault’s underside.

A hole-large, circular, and rough-had been cut into the wooden floor. And even in the shifting beam of his flashlight, Marshall could clearly see that the vault was empty.