He’d just completed the H, 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.
He revved off across the hard-packed ice, directly into a headwind, as usual. Some days were like that: headwind coming out, headwind going back in, as if they followed him purposely. The winds here defied common sense.
He frowned, thinking of a conversation he’d overheard at base between Angel Smith and Pam, the station’s doc. They’d been discussing love languages or some crap. Apparently, there were people who needed gifts in order to feel wanted, while others sought quality time with their loved one or acts of service. Whatever those were.
Coop craved headwinds and bracing chills the way others did human contact. His love song was the crackling of ice underfoot, staccato and sharp as a snare drum, his language the low, melodious roar of a Condition 1 storm blasting over endless white expanses. He’d take the translucence of blue glacial ice over diamonds any day.
Angel Smith, of course, wanted touch.
Which he wouldn’t think about. Instead, he focused on the landscape spread before him. He’d heard it described as lunar, empty, or flat, but it was none of those things. This place was as vital and complex as the ocean, its depths as fascinating as the Mariana Trench. He’d never tire of this view.
Thirty minutes into his ride, something flashed to his right.
Blinking through his dark goggles, Coop eased to a stop and stared across the wind-scoured stretch to the east, where Cortez had set up his research site.
Hadn’t Cortez moved his equipment yesterday? With the coming winter, he’d planned to settle a new site closer to the station.
Coop waited for another movement, his sun- and snow-blinded eyes working hard to focus this late in the day. And then, because Cortez was one of the only people whose company Coop actually enjoyed, he veered off in that direction with an internal Why not? Maybe he had last-minute cleanup to do on the site. In which case, Coop could lend a hand.
Ha! a tiny voice whispered as he cut due east. Anything to avoid her.
He shoved that as far down as it would go. No point in dwelling on the person who turned him—an awkward man at the best of times—into a monosyllabic robot. Angel Smith would be gone by this time tomorrow. Thank God.
Cortez’s site had been right around here. He slowed and swiveled his head a hundred and eighty degrees—noting nothing out of the ordinary.
Wait. There. What was that?
A pennant flag, used by researchers to mark a specific spot or, in some cases, a camp itself, lest a snowstorm cover it up entirely. This one, a reflective silver, was what he’d no doubt spotted. No Cortez, no more research site. Nothing but a lone flag in the middle of the colorless landscape. A glance at the sky confirmed that it was a rare flat white evening—the kind that pilots preferred not to fly in, since there was no way to tell the difference between the ground and the clouds above it. Earth and sky mingled until there was nothing but pale, milky white everywhere.
For one strange, discomposed moment, Coop saw himself, in his red NSF-issued coat, as a solitary drop of blood in the middle of all this vastness. If he wasn’t careful, he’d get soaked up by the ice, by the ground itself. Not eaten so much as absorbed, covered, layered over, forgotten until some enterprising researcher with a drill chose this particular spot to study.
Jesus. Better nip this kind of thinking in the bud. Coop swallowed and shook his head, tried to blink dark spots from his vision. He considered pulling the flag up, and then went very still.
Rather than disappear, one of the dark spots coalesced into a stain on the ice. It didn’t belong there.
Some old instinct kicked in, making him check his surroundings with jittery eyes before getting off the snowmobile and crunching over to look.
About six feet away from the bright red mark, he stopped and stared, unblinking.
It was blood. Had to be, or maybe Cortez’s team had used a dye to test something out here and left some of it behind. But that was unlikely, given how obsessive most scientists were about keeping this continent clean. Coop knew for a fact that Cortez wouldn’t contaminate future research by leaving something, even a thimbleful of blood, behind.
Funny how half his mind flew immediately to the new slew of crew members, while the other half fixated on that stain with absolute certainty as to what it was.
Yeah, it was blood all right. And since no flora or fauna lived this far inland, it had to be human.