Kyle West - Darkness

Michael shouted at me from the ground, but his voice was lost to the wind. I needed to get moving.

“Listen,” Makara said. “It might be too late to say this, but…be careful, Alex. I can’t lose any of you.”

I sensed concern in her voice — a promise of protection that could do no good, hundreds of miles away. I thought of all the times she’d saved my hide — running from Raiders, giving me food — and how she was powerless to do that right now.

“We’ll see you soon, Makara.”

Ashton worked his way down the ship’s side and entered the waiting arms of Julian and Michael. Anna hopped cleanly down from the ship into snow that came up to her knees. This was going to be a hard slog. I worked my way down the side of the ship. The dragon roared once more from above. It was not visible beyond the thick gray dust.

“The Bunker will probably be somewhere in this valley,” Ashton shouted.

Ahead, I could see nothing but a wall of gray air. Somewhere beyond that was the mountainside and the frozen lake we had spied from above. The wind had kicked up so much snow and dust that we could only see about fifteen feet ahead. Ashton was right; we had to find the Bunker entrance or we might not even survive long enough to be rescued. Makara could follow the coordinates to find our position, but we couldn’t stay in the ship. The dragon was sure to come back. We had to get underground and wait it out.

We forged ahead, Michael and me plowing a trail through the thick snow. I ignored the cold, ignored the pain, and pressed on. After a few minutes of empty space and snow, we stopped before the edge of the frozen lake. The snow was not as thick here — I could see the ice through a thin film of grayish white.

And also bright, fresh red spots.

“Blood,” Anna said.

I knelt down, picking up a small red crystal. Yes: it was blood. But whose? Someone had been here before us — or something.

“Look,” Julian said, his teeth chattering. He pointed toward the right. “There’s more going that way.”

I soon saw that Julian was right. More speckles of red led to the right, across the lake itself.

“Maybe it leads somewhere,” Anna said.

“We have nothing else to go on,” I said. “Might as well follow it.”

We followed the trail of blood. The wind blustered, the snow stung, and the trail led in more or less a straight line. Eventually, we would find where it ended, and whom the blood belonged to.

Soon, the ice petered out, to be replaced by thick snow once more. Several boulders rose from the ground; we trudged between them. We were nearing the mountainside and the trail now skirted the edge of the frozen lake. Maybe it was because of the mountainside, but the wind abated a bit and the snow settled.

As everything stilled into silence, that was when we saw him.

Grudge, lying in the snow, with blood pouring out of his right leg.

“Grudge!”

Anna ran through the snow and I chased after her. Michael, Julian, and Ashton trudged after me. Grudge wasn’t moving. He couldn’t have been out here long — obviously, he had hitched a ride on Odin, had even been the one to open that portal in the cargo bay. Already, a small embankment of gray, ashy snow had gathered on his side. If we had come up on him ten minutes later, that snow might have become his icy coffin. For all we knew, he actually was dead. His eyes were closed.

Anna knelt beside Grudge and looked up at me with wide eyes, as if I could do something about it.

I ran forward, and knelt in the snow, placing two fingers at the base of his neck.

Thump. A long pause. Thump.

“He’s alive,” I said.

Michael ventured ahead, snow swirling around his form, his breath forming clouds. In the distance behind came another cry from the dragon. I spun to see nothing but falling snow. Odin was lost to sight and the dragon would be even farther away.

“I’ll take care of Grudge,” Ashton said. “The rest of you find the Bunker entrance. We need to get inside and out of this cold before it kills us all. Makara will never get here in time.”

“I’ll stay with Ashton,” Anna said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Michael and Julian fell into step beside me. We forged ahead through the snow, leaving Ashton and Anna to tend the fallen Grudge. Why had he come? For some reason, I imagined him sneaking aboard the Odin and finding a warm place in the cargo bay to take a nap, having no idea where the ship was heading. The gang lords, as a rule, were not allowed aboard either Gilgamesh or Odin except under the watchful eye of Makara, Ashton, Char, or Marcus.

Now, though, the wreck was likely going to cost Grudge his life. He lay bleeding in the snow after somehow escaping the wreckage of Odin. Was his being here an accident, or had it been on purpose? We would never know unless he lived to tell us. Maybe it was some conspiracy on the part of the gang lords. If so, it had horribly backfired.

But for now, I had to concentrate on other things. Finding the entrance to Bunker 84 was the number one priority. The shifting snow gave away to a wall of solid gray rock. We had run right into a cliff face. I saw nothing on the cliff face that indicated an entrance of any sort. I glanced back at our disappearing footsteps being filled with falling snow. Getting lost was a very real possibility.

“Let’s follow this cliff back toward the lake,” Michael said.

Julian and I followed Michael. For a couple of minutes we walked on until the icy blue of the lake surface came into view. It was perhaps twenty feet across here. I realized that it was not actually a lake at this point — it was a wide stream. And the stream angled upward, until it was going straight up.

A frozen waterfall.

I looked back, and forward, realizing we had entered a canyon. We would have to turn back, as this was a dead end.

Instead, Julian walked forward, placing a hand on the thick, frozen waves that composed the icefall. The ice stretched up the mountain, far out of view. It was wide at the bottom — perhaps forty or so feet across, and was frozen completely against the mountain.

“Julian, we have to go,” I said.

Julian, however, did not respond. I began to wonder if he had even heard me.

“Julian!”

He turned, a smile on his face. His brown eyes glinted, and he pointed, right at the waterfall.

“I’ll be damned,” Michael said from beside me.

I had no idea what either of them was talking about. I squinted, and through the spiraling snowflakes and sleet falling from the sky, through that thick, clear icefall, I saw it.

84.

“It’s behind the waterfall,” I said.

Julian turned around, rubbing his hands together. “There’s always something behind the waterfall.”

If the Bunker creators were going for hidden, well, they did a pretty good job. This mountain valley could only be accessed by air, and on top of that, they had built the Bunker behind a giant sheet of falling water. Had it been warmer, we might have never found it.

How we were going to get through the icefall was another proposition entirely. But for now, Ashton and Anna had to know.

“Julian, Michael… stay here and get to work on breaking that ice. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Alex…” Michael said.

“There’s no time for all of us to go back,” I said. “It’s too cold, and getting inside twenty minutes earlier could mean the difference between life and death. Start on the ice.”

Michael nodded, finally agreeing. “Fine. Go back the exact way we came in.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

As Michael and Julian grabbed some nearby rocks and began hammering away at the ice, I turned and ran. The cold air stung my lungs. The shock of the cold still hadn’t gone away. All I had to do now was not get lost.