Antarktos Rising, Page 3

  She reached the front door, unlocked the deadbolt, and flung it open. Vaulting down the five front stairs in one leap, Whitney hit the driveway at a sprint. She heard roaring water, breaking glass, and the horrid wrench of metal as the unseen torrent pounded relentlessly forward.

  Not waiting for the gate to be opened, the fleeing group began climbing over it. To the left, a little girl struggled with the smooth metal bars. The others were leaving her behind. Whitney leapt at the gate and clung to it like a monkey. She yanked herself to the top, feeling the muscles in her arms tear. At the top, she reached over and thrust her hand out to the girl. “Take my hand!”

  The little girl’s fingers intertwined with Whitney’s, and the girl was pulled steadily up. A bearded man next to the girl saw that she’d clear the gate first and took hold of Whitney’s arm to hoist himself.

  “Let go!” Whitney shouted as the gate dug into her arm.

  “Amber!” another man shouted with shock in his eyes. He lunged at the bearded man pushing the girl back down, and Whitney knew the girl’s rescuer was her father. Amber’s father wrapped one arm around the aggressor’s neck and pushed off the gate with his feet. The action added an unbearable amount of weight to Whitney’s arm, but both men fell to the ground. The father seemed willing to die for his child, and as the two men rolled away from the gate pummeling each other, she realized he would.

  The water was upon them.

  Whitney pulled with all her might, but her muscles had little strength left. The water hit her like an explosion. Whitney was flung back ten feet, her grip on Amber’s arm lost. She sat up quickly and looked to the gate. The people were gone, replaced by a churning wall of water that roared like a wounded Kodiak bear.

  Whitney shouted as she pushed herself up and ran back to the house. Ten feet from the front stairs, her feet began splashing through ocean water. A surge of water hit her knees and threatened to knock her down, but she lunged up the stairs, freeing herself from the water’s grasp.

  She entered the house, closed the door, slammed the deadbolt home, and careened for the stairs, hoping another ten feet would be enough to save her life. She reached the top stair in four leaps. As she stepped into the hallway, a force struck the house so hard that she was shaken from her feet. She fell forward and heard a loud crack, but it wasn’t the house; it was her head. A stab of pain shot through her skull. As she fell, she saw the wooden chest she’d struck as she’d fallen.

  It was the last thing she saw. Her vision blurred and turned black.

  As her consciousness faded, the sound of rushing water and groaning wood surrounded the house.

  Whitney awoke with a start and clasped a hand to her throbbing head. She struggled past the pain, attempting to gather her thoughts. As the pulsing headache in her left temple eased in intensity, she remembered: the wave. The people. The death. Despair, rage, and confusion attacked her all at once, an emotional lion pride, circling with hackles raised and talons extended. They wanted to devour her alive. But they were old enemies she’d faced before. Using willpower built over the past year’s suffering, she pushed the emotions away and faced her grim new reality.

  She forced herself to calm and became more aware of her surroundings. She was still on the hallway floor of her house, but she was freezing. Wondering if she was wet, she checked herself and found her clothing to be dry. She looked down the stairs. Even the downstairs floor was dry.

  From her position on the floor, she could see her alarm clock, but the power was out. She had no way of knowing how long she’d been unconscious, but it couldn’t have been long. It was still daylight, though the previously blue sky was now thick with ashen clouds . . . and something else.

  Standing came only after a concerted effort. Her head pounded with every step, and she found herself walking through the bedroom and toward the deck door with her eyes closed. Hands outstretched, she stopped when she reached the wall. She slid her fingers from the wall to the glass of the sliding door.

  When the flesh of her finger made contact with the glass, Whitney yelped and pulled her hand away. The pain was like searing heat, but she knew from experience that it was cold. Freezing cold. Whitney’s eyes flew open and blinked at the brightness. Despite the overcast sky, something outside was abnormally bright.

  Through squinted eyes, Whitney took in her new view.

  Extending out from ten feet below her home’s foundation all the way to the horizon was a sheet of ice. Thick flakes of snow fell from the sky. She seemed to have been transported to the North Pole. She didn’t dare go outside dressed for summer as she was, but from her view behind the glass she could see that everything, from Maine to Massachusetts, was buried under hundreds of feet of snow and ice.

  And now she was alone, completely, and she feared that the most. More than the wave. More than the cold. Being alone with her thoughts, with her demons, was just about the worst way she could imagine to die.

  Chapter 7

  Kneeling in prayer had become a nightly ritual for Dr. Merrill Clark. The topics of his prayers typically centered on what little family remained to him, his safety, his work, and his sanity. He knew prayer was supposed to be equal parts praise to God, personal requests, and asking for forgiveness, but by the time he finished his list of personal requests, he was usually sound asleep. He’d thought about rearranging the order of his prayers but found his sins painful to express, and praise for God, after what had happened to Aimee, was in short supply.

  He was a believer still, to be sure, and knew that upon his death he would see Aimee again, but he was certainly not pleased with his creator’s timing or methods. The day she disappeared in a sudden snowstorm had been the worst of his life. The wash of white, the bite of frigid air, and the sounds, the howling, had haunted his nightmares for ten years.

  The storm had almost claimed his life as well. After reaching base camp, his body had thawed out, but his heart remained cold. He abandoned his Antarctic research and fled home to the States, returning only once to have pictures taken for his book. The bones, after all, had been there for millions of years. And any remnants of human civilization—what he was really after—the existence of which was hinted at on ancient maps dating back to Alexander the Great, would remain buried and untouched.

  Aimee was right.

  He should have listened.

  His stubbornness had cost him his wife’s life. It was his greatest sin, one for which he could never forgive himself. And he could not confess it.

  Five years after losing Aimee, Merrill was living a lonely life in a tiny, unkempt apartment in Cambridge, teaching paleontology and anthropology at Harvard. He was qualified to teach archeology as well but lacked the energy. He found the Harvard campus and surrounding sprawl of Boston to be overwhelming, and if he wasn’t in the classroom he was studying in his home office.

  Except for the presence of his noble, black-coated Newfoundland named Vesuvius, Merrill sat alone at home, every day. He had even stopped going to church. Vesuvius was his single comfort in life. The big dog would sprawl out on his bed at night, providing primal companionship for Merrill. Each morning consisted of a ten-minute celebration and face-licking session, as though Merrill and Vesuvius had been reunited after years of separation. But even with Vesuvius, Merrill still longed for human contact.

  He did not want to marry again but had moved in with Mirabelle, who had accepted him for who he was and adored the dog. They had lived in the Portsmouth home for three years, and he’d taken up teaching at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The pace was slower, the air less toxic. And Mirabelle . . . spending his days with her helped dull the pain of Aimee’s loss. She was a godsend. An angel. He smiled as he pictured her thick-lipped, squinty-eyed grin and remembered the warmth of her embrace. He missed her now.

  She had been a source of strength during his worst days, and leaving her was his second greatest sin. After so many years of neglecting his true calling, the bug had returned: he traveled to Antarctica a second ti
me, this time for good, bringing only fresh gear and Vesuvius. Upon returning, he found everything at the base camp just as he left it. The digs, tents, and gear all appeared untouched.

  Base camp consisted of five red tents which had been bolted into the stone floor of one of Antarctica’s driest valleys. The crevasse was carved into the Transantarctic Mountains four hundred miles north of the pole, where snow rarely fell; if it did, it was swept away by the fierce katabolic winds. The tents were bordered by crates of supplies placed on the southern side to buffer the freezing wind which rolled down from the center of the domed continent. The valley floor looked like the surface of some alien planet; smooth brown stone slabs were layered in sheets that eventually rose up into steep cliffs. At the top of the cliffs juts of stone separated the valley from the glacier above and kept the slowly flowing ice from entering the valley. The three-mile-long, half-mile-wide valley and everything in it had been freeze-dried for the last twelve thousand years.

  Returning had been a painful jolt to Merrill’s memories. Photos of him and Aimee rested on trunks. Her clothes were still neatly folded on her cot. Even her scent seemed to linger. It was only after a week of sifting through the past that Merrill was able to stop crying and start working.

  He threw himself into his work, uncovering three new species of dinosaur: two small predators, and one herbivore. His most exciting discovery came in the form of a four-foot man-made wall that he dated at ten- to twelve-thousand years old. He knew his finds would be ridiculed on the mainland, so he kept them to himself. The dinosaurs weren’t the issue. Since 1994, when the first dinosaur remains—a predator named Crylophosaurus—were found on the seventh continent amid fragments of several prey animals, the idea of life flourishing on Antarctica in millennia past was no longer debated. But the subject that had captured Merrill’s attention so closely since switching the focus of his profession from paleontology to anthropology was debated with fervor: Antarctic civilization. Some believed that a civilization had once thrived on the mainland of the southernmost continent before it froze over. Most evidence supporting the theory was circumstantial, and promoters of the theory were often Atlantis fanatics who did more harm to the science than good. But to Merrill the smooth stone wall, with its almost seamless joints, proved that someone had lived there.

  Yet he wanted more. A wall was not definitive. Hell, it could be argued that he had made it. His evidence had to be irrefutable. He worked in the cold without pause. He was obsessed and kept little track of the days or his health. Supplies were brought via a Dash-7 Turboprop from Punta Arenas on the southernmost tip of Chile and flown over the continent where it stopped at McMurdo Station. The cargo was then flown by helicopter to Merrill’s valley where it was unceremoniously kicked out the door. Everything survived the fall, most of the time. Supplies arrived once a month, but he let them sit unopened for weeks at a time, until the first pangs of starvation and the whines of Vesuvius told him sustenance was necessary to continue.

  He would have continued in this pattern of work, starvation, and prayer until his dying day, but again God disturbed his plans. When he knelt to pray on the night of July 21, just over a year since his return, the ground began to shake. His red pyramidal tent vibrated and equipment rattled violently. His first thought was that the ancient wall might crumble but as the shaking grew worse, and louder, he feared the valley walls would come down.

  The shaking grew so fierce that Merrill found it impossible to stand, let alone kneel. And the sound, like an angry grumble pumped through loudspeakers, was enough to cause his ears incredible pain. He bundled his head inside earmuffs and his hooded down jacket, then wrapped a pillow around his head in an effort to dull the noise. Lying on the floor of his tent, he curled up with Vesuvius. He kept his hands clamped over Vesuvius’s ears, knowing that the 120-pound dog’s hearing was even more sensitive than his own.

  The two remained on the floor all night. Hours into the ordeal, the pair grew accustomed to the shaking and noise. Exhaustion eventually claimed them, plunging them into a deep sleep where Merrill faced his worst fears—his unconfessed sins—the past.

  Aftershock

  Chapter 8

  Though still numb from the shock of seeing the seacoast of New Hampshire deluged and frozen over, Whitney had recovered sufficiently to check the phones. Nothing. The electricity was out, too. She was cut off from the world. If she’d been anyone else in Portsmouth, she’d already be dead.

  The arctic chill had invaded the old Victorian, causing Whitney to retreat into the basement. It was only the generous supply of arctic gear and a diesel-powered generator, which she rigged to run off of the full tank of home heating oil in the basement that kept her alive. It took several hours to work a hose from the fuel tank to the generator so that it didn’t leak. Thankfully, the generator was inside and already set to vent directly outside, or the fumes would have done her in as quickly as the cold. She only used the generator to operate the single electric heater, which she set on low, just enough to keep the temperature above freezing. She had no idea how long she’d be trapped in her basement and wanted to stretch the fuel. There was food for a month; three, if rationed. By day the room was lit only by a single half-window that allowed the gleaming brightness of sun on snow to shine through. At night she lit a single candle. The flickering flame was her only company.

  She dressed in her arctic gear, wearing her cherry-red down jacket twenty-four hours a day. Feeling foolish, at times she removed the jacket. But the cold always won out and she’d retreat to the warmth of her fleece-lined coat. Nights were spent bundled in her -40°C-rated sleeping bag. Food was eaten cold, from the can. And worst of all, a bucket, which she kept covered in the corner, had become her bathroom. The single bright side was that the hum of the generator helped her sleep, which she did often.

  Days passed as she organized and reorganized her equipment several times, attempting to occupy her mind. She knew that if she weren’t busy she’d turn introspective, and that would be the beginning of the end. But as she organized the five pairs of moisture-wicking socks for the tenth time, her thoughts slipped past her carefully erected mental barriers. Memories that came first were pleasant enough: childhood memories of herself and her parents visiting the Museum of Science in Boston, attending Red Sox games at Fenway, and exploring America’s Stonehenge in Salem, New Hampshire. Childhood held the only untainted memories, and they were enough to keep her mind occupied for a time.

  Then they ran out.

  She was left with her recent past. And it stabbed at her. He stabbed at her.

  Struggling with the painful memories became overbearing. When thoughts of suicide snuck into her mind, she attempted to distract herself. She sang “Amazing Grace” over and over. It had been her father’s favorite song.

  “Where are you, Dad?” Whitney said aloud.

  With each consecutive day, her situation grew worse. Food was low. The smell from the bucket was rancid. Several times she considered venturing outside to empty the bucket, but the thought of losing what precious little heat she had to soothe her nose kept her firmly rooted in the basement. She knew the generator would run out of fuel soon enough, and then smell would be the least of her problems. Had she thought to bring down a calendar and mark off the days with the rising and setting of the sun, Whitney would have known that an entire month had passed thus.

  It was on her thirty-second day in solitary confinement that her emotions broke down. She wept like a child, face buried into the folds of her sleeping bag. She cried about nothing in particular, but the tears flowed for hours. Then she slept.

  Whitney woke slowly.

  Then her eyes snapped open. Something was wrong. Something had changed.

  Whitney searched the basement without moving as the bright moonlight glowed through the window. The dark shapes of her supplies looked the same as they had every night. Nothing had moved.

  She listened. Wind swept across the home, which cracked and groaned. She could hear every
pop and creak of the old house like never before. In fact, she hadn’t even noticed them before.

  What changed?

  Whitney hugged the sleeping bag to her body. She was cold.

  Stretching to the side, Whitney looked at the electric heater. The power light was off. She reached out and touched it. Cold.

  Whitney gasped as she realized the source of the quietude. The hum of the generator had stopped. She had no power. No heat.

  Hopelessness crept into her sleeping bag like an unwanted lover, smothering her body. She slid deeper inside the bag, hiding from the decreasing temperature, and sealed it over her head. She knew that remaining in the house with no heat was not an option. She’d have to brave the elements. She figured that either path led to death, but she preferred to die trying. Sleep came quickly. She dreamt of snow.

  Chapter 9

  Scrambling to the entrance of the ruby-colored tent took a concerted effort as the vibrations that had been shaking the valley continued. Merrill leaned out of the tent and dry-heaved above a puddle of old vomit. He’d had trouble keeping food down, and now there wasn’t anything left in his stomach to expel. The shaking had continued now for what he believed had been at least a month. Some days the trembling, which fluctuated in intensity, was tolerable, but days like today made him ill. He leaned back into the tent, scurried across the floor on all fours, and lay down next to Vesuvius.

  They had both attempted venturing outside in the past few days, but the geological undulations made walking impossible. Merrill had fallen more than once. His fresh-scabbed knees were a constant reminder to only attempt walking when the shaking was less violent. The few times Merrill had hazarded going outside were to procure food and water. They had both grown accustomed to the sound by now, and whenever Merrill spoke to the dog, which was often, he had to shout. He knew Vesuvius couldn’t understand him, but it felt rude not to speak up.