Adam Baker - Outpost

Nail looked around. He had to create a fire or they were both dead.

Shelves against the tunnel wall loaded with Skidoo components. A few empty crates and fuel cans stacked by the wall. The snowmobiles themselves were under tarpaulin.

Nail swept the shelves clear and tipped them over. He stamped and smashed. He slopped a capful of petrol from a jerry can and set the shelves alight. He sat cross-legged in front of the fire and hugged Gus. He rubbed and slapped his companion until circulation returned.

‘Christ,’ murmured Gus. He struggled to sit up. He spat in the fire and watched spit fizzle.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Nail.

‘The pain comes and goes.’

Half Gus’s face was scorched black. Cooked skin. Cracked and flaked. His hair was gone. His right shoulder was burned bare, scraps of polyester fleece fused to charred skin.

‘Did you see Yakov?’ asked Gus. ‘Did you see him die?’

‘Fucking horrible. Worst thing I ever saw in my life.’

‘I didn’t know a person could make that kind of noise. That’s going to stay with me.’

The infected passengers had broken through the barricades at midnight. Somehow they circumvented locked doors, blocked corridors, and men on patrol. Hordes of them choking the passageways, some in fancy dress. Nail had been standing on the upper deck sharing a joint with Gus. They watched fog eclipse the moon and discussed girlfriends and heartbreak. If they’d been asleep in their cabins they would have been cornered, overwhelmed and ripped apart.

‘We should go back,’ Gus had said, as Nail pushed him across the Hyperion deck. The Rampart crew had prepared knotted ropes in case they needed to make a quick exit from the vessel. ‘We should go back for the others.’

A burning passenger stumbled from a cabin doorway and gripped Gus in a bear hug. Gus screamed as his clothes caught alight. Nail kicked the passenger over a railing, then slapped Gus’s fleece until the flames died out.

They glimpsed Yakov at the end of a companionway. He shouted and waved for help as he ran from monsters in party costume. He squealed like an abattoir pig as a Pierrot clown dragged him to the ground.

‘Forget it,’ said Nail. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him. We need to get the fuck out of here.’

They fled the ship. Grenades began to detonate with a concussive roar and set the ship ablaze. They were running across the ice when the fuel tanks blew. Heat washed over them. Smoking shrapnel peppered the snow.

‘Do you think we are the only survivors?’ asked Gus. ‘Do you think anyone else made it off the ship? I didn’t see any of the others. Jane and Ghost were in their room. Punch and Sian, too. We might be the only ones left. You and me.’

‘I honestly have no idea.’

‘But what if we are? What if it’s just us?’

‘Then we’ll deal.’

‘And even if they made it to the rig? No one knows we are here. How do we summon help?’

‘You should rest. Seriously.’

‘How long do you think that lantern will lust?’

‘Standard batteries. Four or five hours at the most. I’m going to leave you here for a little while, all right? I’m going to take a look around. Check out the tunnels. I need to find more wood.’

Nail walked into the tunnel holding a piece of blazing plank before him.

Echoing footfalls. Burning wood crackled and fizzed. The torch flame flickered. The tunnels whispered and sighed. There must be ventilation chimneys deep within the complex. How extensive was the tunnel network? Did it undermine the entire island?

He walked deeper down the sloping shaft. Black archways, sinister shapes. He wanted to explore but worried, if he strayed from the central passageway, he would quickly become lost. If his torch burned out, if a gust of wind extinguished the flame, he might have to make his way back to the surface by touch.

Vast cyclopean chambers. Ceilings so high weak torchlight couldn’t penetrate shadow. The tunnel complex seemed built for some purpose other than nuclear storage. Too big, too elaborate to store fuel rods.

He stopped to catch his breath. Sudden, palpitating claustrophobia. Gut conviction that this ferro-concrete catacomb would be his grave. He was looking at the glistening, mildewed walls of his own coffin.

He wandered through caverns and halls. Incomplete galleries. Raw, unfinished bedrock. He was travelling downward through the strata, down through fossil layers. A coal-stripe of rainforest. Distant millennia compressed to a sliver of carbon crystal. The walls glittered with crushed shell and silica.

He once heard that a group of Soviet dissidents, exiled to work in a Siberian mine, discovered a mammoth preserved in ice. They cut strips and chewed it like jerky. It kept them alive.

Long corridors. Dormitories and offices. Desks and typewriters matted with stone dust. A military situation room frozen in time. Cold war Soviet maps. Portraits of Lenin. Rusted telex machines. Heavy dial phones.

Metal-frame furniture. Nothing to burn.

How much further should he explore? The plank was half burned down. He should head back.

He crouched and examined the tunnel floor. Fresh footprints in the dust. The grip-tread of his own heavy snowboots. And a second set of prints heading deeper into the tunnels.

He measured his foot against the print. Whoever had recently walked down this passageway wore small boots with chevron tread.

A white tiled chamber, dazzling after miles of drab concrete.

Nail knew he should turn back and head for the surface, but he was overcome by curiosity. This vast subterranean necropolis held secrets. He and Gus were in a hopeless situation, injured and marooned. Maybe if Nail pushed further, travelled deeper into the tunnel complex, he might unearth some kind of salvation.

Lockers, shower heads, a hatch in the floor.

Chemical warfare suits in the lockers. Rubber hoods with glass eye-holes.

The room was a decontamination suite. Soldiers could wash away radioactive fallout, unzip their suits, climb down the shaft and seal themselves inside the hermetic environment of Level Zero.

Nail approached the floor hatch. A hinged lid like the turret hatch of a tank. He heaved the door open. A gust of foetid air from far below ground. His torch fluttered and died.

Absolute dark. Nail fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. Three strikes. Sparks, then a steady flame. He re-lit the plank of wood.

He looked down the shaft beside him. Walls lit by flickering flame-light. For a moment, deep at the bottom of the shaft, he thought he glimpsed a figure looking up at him.

Nail returned to the bunker entrance an hour later. He carried a wooden chair over his shoulder. He smashed the chair and put the pieces on the fire.

Gus sat by the fire and rocked back and forth. The man was clearly in agony, sweating the pain minute by minute.

Nail chiselled ice from the wall with a spanner.

‘Rub it on your burns. It’ll help.’

‘You found some wood.’

‘There are some bunks down there. And some tables and chairs. Dormitories for the team that built the place. Enough wood to buy us some thinking time.’

‘Nothing to eat, I bet.’

‘I’ll check the Skidoo panniers in a minute. I need to sit down a while. I’m exhausted.’

They dried their boots over the fire.

They heard a thud against the bunker door. Then another. Fists pounded. Fingers scratched.

‘I truly don’t get it,’ said Gus. ‘Can they smell us? Is that it? How do they know we are in here? Some kind of super-sense?’

‘They can smell you all right. You stink like cooked bacon.’

They sat by the fire for an hour. A gentle draught drew wood-smoke down the tunnel like cigarette fumes sucked into a smoker’s lungs. They listened to fists thump against the doors.