Crawford Kilian - Icequake - A Prophetic Survival Thriller

The first two kilometres were fairly easy, a steady march over long, shallow gradients. Then they came into a relatively high area where the wind had carved the surface into sastrugi, and footing was treacherous. Now they had to scramble and slide, and in places they could get through only by chopping steps into the hard, slick sides of the sastrugi. After an hour Penny’s feet and hands were numb. She realised she had fallen behind the others and hurried up the slope of the next rise. At the top she coughed until she couldn’t stand upright. There was a salty taste in her mouth, and red spots in the snow by her feet.

“Steve — Steve! I’m in trouble!”

He turned and came back to her while the others waited.

“I’m coughing blood.”

Steve put his arm around her shoulders and guided her down the slope. “It’ll be okay. You’re moving too fast, breathing too deeply. The air’s starting to freeze your lungs. Don’t walk so fast that you start panting. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m scared.”

“It’s all right. I’ll stay with you.”

They walked and climbed slowly, trailing after the others. The sastrugi field seemed to go on forever. The crests were blindingly bright; some of the troughs between them were deep in shadow. It was hard to see where to put her feet and she fell several times, but Steve always caught her.

“Your face looks pink,” she said to him.

“So does yours.” He looked closely at her. “It’s sunburn. We’ll all be pretty badly burned by the time we get home.”

“At least I can’t feel it.”

Around 1000 Al called a halt. They ate some biscuits and sweet chocolate, and Will melted snow for tea. He poured it into their mugs at a rolling boil, but it cooled rapidly — to Penny, the first sip was scalding and the last only tepid. At least it warmed her enough to make her feet hurt.

“Can I have some more?” she asked.

“No, but you can have some hot water. Too much tea and you’ll dehydrate yourself,” Will said. “Not to mention freezing your bottom.”

They moved on. The surface was softer here; snow was deep and powdery in the lee of each sastrugus, and in places they waded knee-deep. Penny felt less dependent on Steve, but didn’t let herself get too far away from him. She noticed Jeanne keeping close to Will. Tough kid. She looks like hell, but she’s not complaining. Jeanne seemed to have got over whatever had made her sick yesterday morning.

Her throat and chest hurt like hell. Even though she kept to a slow pace, she was sweating; the sweat kept freezing, breaking off her skin and gathering at her waist and boot-tops. It was worst inside her padded bra, which trapped the ice on her breasts. When she rubbed a forearm across her chest, she could hear the ice crackle but couldn’t feel anything except a steady ache. At least they’d warned her to expect this, back in Manitoba at the training camp, or she’d have started screaming — frozen lungs or not.

One foot after another. The sastrugi were replaced with a stretch of hard, flat wind-crust, but after only a couple of hundred metres they found a belt of deep crevasses cutting across their path. The first few were narrow cracks, easily crossed in a stride, but after that the gaps were four and five metres wide.

“I don’t remember crevasses like these anywhere close to Shacktown,” Al said.

“They’re old,” Will answered. “Must’ve had thick, hard snow over them till the quake.”

“Everybody stay well away from the edges,” Al ordered. “We’ll just have to detour.”

It was like traversing a maze without walls: a hundred metres’ progress cost three hundred in cautious zigzags. As the sun climbed to its zenith, the depths of the crevasses turned from black to a deep glowing blue. They moved slowly. Al, Tim and Will, roped together, tested the surface with telescoping aluminium rods. If the snow resisted a hard push, they advanced; if it yielded, they stopped to find another path.

Penny was beginning to feel drowsily detached from herself, and to daydream about the dry warmth of her bunk. A tremor ran through the Shelf, no different from a dozen others they had felt since the crash. This time, however, the snow under Will collapsed into a crevasse five metres wide. As he fell, Al and Tim were yanked off their feet and dragged downslope, head first, towards the edge.

Steve lunged forward and caught Tim’s ankle with one mittened hand; with the other he drove his ice axe deep into the snow. Penny and Jeanne stumbled up to him and gripped his shoulders.

“Thanks,” Steve panted. “Will! You all right?”

“As long as I don’t look down.”

“Does the edge of the crevasse look solid?”

“No — it’s crumbling—” An instant later a metre-wide belt of snow vanished and there was a hard jerk on the rope that nearly pulled them all in. Al and Tim were right at the edge now, their hands and knees digging in for purchase.

“I’m right against the wall of the crevasse,” Will called. “Can you climb back out?” Al asked.

“Lost my bloody axe. Al, can you lower another rope?”

“Can’t move or I’ll go in on top of you.”

Penny let go of Steve and crawled the two metres to the edge of the crevasse. Lying beside Al, she tried to untie the rope looped around his shoulder. Her bear-paws were too clumsy so she pulled them off, and then the leather gloves underneath. The wool shells still on her hands were little protection, but at least she could use her fingers. Untying the coil of rope, she carefully unwound it from Al’s shoulder. He grinned and winked at her.

“Good going. Now lower it to him.”

Will caught the end of the rope. After a few endless minutes, he knotted it to the first one and rigged a sliding loop.

“Right. Ready or not, here I come.”

If he climbed too fast or too abruptly, he might yank the others in or further collapse the edge of the crevasse. Penny lay across Al’s back to hold him securely. She saw Jeanne doing the same thing with Steve. Tim was carefully working his elbows and knees deeper into the snow, his face set.

It took Will almost ten minutes to pull himself to the surface. As he reached the top, Al gripped his wrists and helped him over the edge.

“You’ve got some frostbite,” Al said conversationally.

“More than that — I could hear my ears freeze. They snapped like potato crisps.” Will managed a smile as he crawled past them on to safe ground. Al and Tim, relieved of Will’s weight, inched backward on their bellies. Penny knelt by the edge, pulling on her gloves and bear-paws. Her hands hurt so much she wanted to scream. Instead, she looked down into the blue-black depths of the crevasse, and whispered: “Fuck you. You’ll never kill us.”

Long before they got out of the crevasse field, they saw the Sno-Cat prowling along its edges, looking for a safe path. When they reached it, Howie and Simon welcomed them with handshakes and embraces. It was long past noon.

“How far are we from Shacktown?” Al asked.

“Only about three kilometres,” Simon answered. “Just over that rise.”

“Why can’t we see the masts and the drilling rig? I was starting to think we were lost.”

“Masts are down. So’s the rig,” Howie grunted.

“Christ,” said Will.

“Wait’ll you see the place. We’ve moved all the furniture” Simon smiled. “C’mon, let’s go.”

The cab of the Sno-Cat was unheated, but still warmer than the outside by four or five degrees. Penny squatted against the rear wall of the cramped cab, wedged between Tim and Steve. The roar of the engine made talking difficult, but she was too tired to talk anyway. Steve caught her eye.

“You were damn brave.”

“Didn’t feel brave.” She leaned against him and abruptly fell asleep.