Dan Simmons - The Terror

Des Voeux supervised the preparation of dinner, removing the patented cook kit from its series of cleverly nested wicker baskets. But three of the four cans they had chosen for their first evening’s meal on land were spoiled. That left only their Wednesday half-ration portion of salt pork – always the men’s favorite since it was so rich with fat, but not nearly enough to assuage their hunger after such a day of heavy work – and the last good can, which was labeled “Superior Clear Turtle Soup,” which the men hated, knowing from experience that it was neither superior nor clear and most likely not turtle at all.

Dr. McDonald on Terror had been obsessed for the last year and a half, ever since Torrington ’s death at Beechey Island, with the quality of their preserved foodstuffs and was constantly busy experimenting, with the other surgeons’ help, to find the best diet by which to avoid scurvy. Goodsir had learned from the older doctor that a certain Stephan Goldner, the expedition’s provisioner from Houndsditch who had won the contract through extraordinarily low bids, had almost certainly cheated Her Majesty’s government and Her Majesty’s Royal Navy Discovery Service by providing inadequate – and possibly frequently poisonous – victuals.

The men filled the freezing air with obscenities upon learning that the cans were filled with rotten stuff.

“Calm down, lads,” said Lieutenant Gore after allowing the barrage of best sailor obscenity for a minute or two. “What say you that we open tomorrow’s rations of cans until we find enough for a good meal and simply plan to get back to our ice cache by supper time tomorrow, even if that means midnight?”

There was a chorus of assent.

Two of the next four cans they opened were not spoiled – that included a strangely meatless “Irish Stew” that was only barely edible at the best of times and the deliciously advertised “Ox Cheeks and Vegetables.” The men had decided that the oxen parts had come from a tannery and the vegetables from an abandoned root cellar, but it was better than nothing.

No sooner was the tent up with the sleeping bags unrolled for a floor inside and the food heated on their spirit stove and the hot metal bowls and dishes distributed than the lightning began to strike.

The first blast of electricity struck less than fifty feet from them and led to every man spilling his ox cheeks and vegetables and stew. The second crash was closer.

They ran for the tent. Lightning crashed and struck around them like an artillery barrage. It wasn’t until they were quite literally piled inside the brown canvas tent – eight men in a shelter designed for four men and light gear – that Seaman Bobby Ferrier looked at the wood-and-metal poles holding the tent upright and said, “Well, fuck this,” and scrambled for the opening.

Outside, cricket-ball-sized hail was crashing down, sending splinters of ice chips thirty feet into the air. The midnight arctic twilight was being shattered by explosions of lightning so contiguous that they overlapped, setting the sky ablaze in flashes that left blinding retinal echoes.

“No, no!” cried Gore, shouting over the thunder and grabbing Ferrier back from the entrance and throwing him down into the crowded tent. “Anywhere we go on this island, we’re the tallest things around. Throw those metal-cored tent poles as far away as you can but stay under the canvas. Get in your bags and lie flat.”

The men scrambled to do so, their long hair writhing like snakes under the edges of their Welsh wigs or caps and above their many-wrapped comforters. The storm increased in ferocity and the noise was deafening. The hail pounding them in the backs through canvas and blankets felt like huge fists battering them black and blue. Goodsir actually moaned aloud during the pummeling, more from fear than from pain, although the constant blows constituted the most painful beating he had suffered since his public school days.

“Holy fucking Christ!” cried Thomas Hartnell as both hail and lightning grew worse. The men with any brains were under their Hudson ’s Bay Company blankets now rather than in them, trying to use them as a buffer against the hail. The tent canvas threatened to suffocate all of them, and the thin canvas beneath them did nothing to keep the cold from flowing up and into them, taking their collective breath away.

“How can there be a lightning storm when it is so cold ?” shouted Goodsir to Gore, who was lying next to him in the huddle of terrified men.

“It happens,” the lieutenant shouted back. “If we decide to move from the ships to land camp, we’ll have to bring one God-awful heap of lightning rods with us.”

This was the first time that Goodsir had heard any hint of abandoning the ships.

Lightning struck the boulder they’d been huddled near during their abbreviated supper not ten feet from the tent, ricocheted over their canvas-covered heads to a second boulder no more than three feet from them, and every man huddled lower, trying to claw through the canvas beneath himself in an attempt to burrow into the rock.

“Good God, Lieutenant Gore,” cried John Morfin, whose head was closest to the collapsed opening of the tent, “there’s something moving around out there in the middle of all this.”

All the men were accounted for. Gore shouted, “A bear? Walking around in this?”

“Too large to be a bear, Lieutenant,” shouted Morfin. “It’s…” Then the lightning struck the boulder again, another blast struck close enough to cause the tent fabric to leap in the air from the static discharge, and everyone cowered flatter, pressed their faces to cold canvas, and abandoned speech in favor of prayer.

The attack – Goodsir could only think of it as an attack, as if from Greek gods furious at their hubris for wintering in Boreas’s realm – went on for almost an hour, until the last of the thunder moved past and the flashes became intermittent and then moved on to the southeast.

Gore was the first to emerge, but even the lieutenant whom Goodsir knew to be almost without fear did not rise to his feet for a full minute or more after the barrage ceased. Others crawled out on their knees and stayed there, staring around as if in stupefaction or supplication. The sky to the east was a latticework of air-to-air and air-to-ground discharges, the thunder still rolled across the flat island with enough violence to exert a physical pressure on their skins and to make them cover their ears, but the hail had ceased. The smashed white spheres were piled two feet high all around them as far as they could see. After a minute Gore got to his feet and began looking around. The others then also rose, stiffly, moving slowly, testing their limbs, heavily bruised, Goodsir judged, if his own pain was any measure of their common abuse by the heavens. The midnight twilight was dimmed enough by the thick clouds to the south that it almost seemed as if real darkness was falling.

“Look at this,” called Charles Best.

Goodsir and the others gathered near the sledge. The tins of food and other matériel had been unpacked and stacked near the cooking area before their aborted supper, and somehow the lightning had contrived to strike the low pyramid of stacked cans while missing the sledge itself. All of Goldner’s canned food had been blasted apart as surely as if a cannonball had struck the stack – a perfect roll in a game of cosmic ninepins. Charred metal and still-steaming inedible vegetables and rotten meat were scattered in a twenty-yard radius. Near the surgeon’s left foot was a charred, twisted, and blackened receptacle with the legend COOKING APPARATUS (I) visible on its side. It was part of their travel mess kit and had been sitting on one of their spirit stoves when they had run for shelter. The metal bottle holding a pint of pyroligneous ether fuel next to it had exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions but evidently just barely passing over their heads as they huddled in the tent. If the lightning had ignited the stack of fuel bottles sitting in their wooden box next to the two shotguns and shells a few feet away on the sledge, the explosion and flames would have consumed them all.