They passed through the staging area and out the main entrance. Instantly, the wind and ice slapped them back with a giant, invisible hand. The exterior lights barely penetrated the swirls of snow, and it was hard to see beyond a few feet. Davis hesitated, remembering it was a polar bear that had killed Peters just outside the perimeter fence.
Seeing her hesitate, Carradine smiled. “Don’t you worry,” he said, lifting his shirt and displaying a huge revolver tucked into his waistband. “I never go out on a run without it.”
Davis winced, wrapped her coat more closely around her shoulders, and allowed Brianna to go first and act as a windbreak.
They moved slowly across the apron, the sheds and Quonset huts around them mere specters in the roiling snow. Davis kept her head down, picking her way unhappily over the rivers of electrical and data cables that lay treacherously beneath the coating of white. Carradine walked alongside, oblivious to the cold. He hadn’t even bothered to grab a parka from one of the lockers in the weather chamber. “As I was saying, the king’s rig falls through the ice. And the other trucker, he becomes the new king.”
“Right, right,” Davis muttered. God, only a dozen more steps to the trailer.
“Anyway, it’s a great story, real violent. The ice-road trucker angle is killer. I’ve got a copy of the screenplay in the cab. And I was wondering, with your connections and all, if you’d be willing to have a look and maybe recommend-”
He stopped speaking so abruptly that Davis glanced toward him. Then she heard it, too: a muffled thump, like a heavy, deliberate knock, coming out of the darkness ahead of them.
“What’s that?” Davis breathed. She looked at Brianna, who returned the look nervously.
“Don’t know,” said Carradine. “Some loose piece of equipment, maybe.”
Knock.
“It’s just like the porter scene in Macbeth!” Carradine exclaimed. “The knocking at the gate, after they’ve wasted Duncan! I have that in my screenplay, too, when the new king of truckers is back down in Yellowknife, and he hears the son of the old trucker king at his door-”
Knock.
Carradine laughed. “Wake Duncan with thy knocking!” he quoted. “I would thou couldst.”
Knock.
Davis took another step forward, then hesitated. “I don’t like this.”
“It’s nothing. Let’s take a look.”
They moved forward, more slowly now, through the thick pall of snow. The wind whistled mournfully between the outbuildings, biting Davis ’s bare legs and plucking at the hem of her coat. She tripped over a cable, staggered, righted herself again.
Knock.
“It’s coming from the back of your trailer,” said Carradine.
“Well, tie it down, whatever it is. I’ll never sleep through that racket.”
Now the bulk of the trailer loomed ahead of them, a gray monolith in the snowy murk, its generator purring. Carradine led the way around the back end, shirt flapping and fluttering behind him. It was darker back here, in the shadows between the trailer and the perimeter fence. Davis shivered, licked her lips.
Knock.
And then there it was, directly before them: a body, hanging upside down from a support for one of the window awnings. It was coatless, its clothes torn in several places. The arms stretched limply toward the ground. The head, which was level with their own-too snow-covered to be recognizable-bumped slowly against the metal wall of the trailer at the caprice of the wind.
Knock.
Brianna screamed, took a step back.
“It’s dead!” Davis shrieked.
The trucker stepped forward quickly, brushed the snow from the face that hung before them.
“Oh, God!” cried Davis. “Toussaint!”
Carradine reached up to unhook the body from the support arm. As he did so, Toussaint’s eyes abruptly popped open. He looked at each of them, uncomprehending. Then, quite suddenly, he opened his mouth and screamed.
Brianna crumpled to the ground in a dead faint, her head hitting the trailer with an ugly thump.
As he hung there, Toussaint screamed again-a ragged, ululating scream. “It plays with you!” he shouted. “It plays with you! And when it’s finished playing-it kills. It’s going to kill us all.”
30
The crowd in the Operations Center had grown even larger. The last time it had been this crowded, Marshall thought grimly, was when Wolff ordered the emergency meeting after the vault was found empty. At that meeting, there had been shock, dismay, disbelief. This time, the prevailing mood was fear. It was so strong that Marshall could almost taste its metallic bite in the air.
He stepped into the room and was at once approached by both Wolff and Kari Ekberg.
“How’s Toussaint?” Wolff asked.
“He’s half frozen, he’s suffered a broken ankle, and he’s sustained numerous nasty lacerations to the legs and arms. But he’ll survive. He’s raving-we had to sedate him heavily with some meds from the military’s stockpile. Gonzalez has rigged up temporary restraints-even with the tranquilizers, he’s been quite a handful.”
“Raving?” Wolff echoed. “What about?”
“It’s pretty incoherent. He said he was attacked in the infirmary, knocked about a lot, then dragged outside.”
“Who would have done such a thing?” breathed Ekberg.
“According to Toussaint, it’s not a who,” replied Marshall. “It’s a what.”
Wolff frowned. “That’s crazy.”
“Something hung him up like a side of beef. That hook was a good ten feet off the ground.”
“A polar bear wouldn’t do something like that,” said Wolff. “And it couldn’t move in and out of the base with impunity. The man is clearly delusional. What was he doing in the infirmary, anyway?”
“It seems he was trying to sneak a shot of Peters’s corpse.”
Wolff started. Then his face darkened. “Did he get it?”
“Hard to say. There was a camera in the infirmary-Gonzalez had his men check just now. But it was badly damaged, the video feed was blank. All you could hear was the audio, Toussaint murmuring ‘no, no, no’ over and over again.”
“Did he describe what attacked him?” Ekberg asked.
“Not in any detail.” Marshall paused, trying to recollect the frantic torrent of babbling he’d heard while stabilizing Toussaint. “Said it was huge-big as a station wagon.”
Wolff looked skeptical.
“He said it had more teeth than you could count. Not big, but sharp as razors. He said they wriggled.”
Wolff’s look of skepticism increased. “Not likely, is it?”
“I don’t know. Razors would account for all those marks on Peters’s body.” Marshall paused again. “And the eyes. He kept talking about the eyes.”
Ekberg shuddered.
“He said it sang to him,” Marshall added.
“I think I’ve heard enough.” And Wolff turned away.
“There’s something else,” Marshall called after him.
The network rep stopped without glancing back.
“Peters’s body is missing.”
Marshall and Ekberg watched Wolff exit the room. They stood for a moment in silence. People were huddled in small knots, heads together. Their tones were muted, barely whispers. In marked contrast to the rest was Davis, whose shrill complaints and expostulations had been instrumental in spreading the news in the first place. She was standing in a far corner, loudly demanding personal military protection.
Ekberg nodded toward Carradine, who was sitting in a corner by himself drinking cocoa from a Styrofoam cup. “He’s offered to take everybody back,” she said.
“You mean, back down to Yellowknife?”
“Wherever. Away from the base. He said he’d be able to fit almost everyone in Ashleigh’s trailer.”
“Might not be a bad idea-if he sticks to a safe route and doesn’t do any hotdogging.”
“Wolff overruled him. Said it was too dangerous.”
“Well, being around here is getting more dangerous by the minute.” Marshall glanced at her. “Would you leave? If Carradine got the green light, I mean.”