Adam Baker - Outpost

They walked across the frozen ocean.

‘Ghost says avoid blue ice,’ advised Jane. ‘It’s fresh. Looks pretty, but you could drop through it like a trapdoor. You won’t get any warning.’

The sky was pale pink. They had a clear view of Hyperion. It was a scorched shell. The cabins were burned out. The decks were buckled and black. The funnels had collapsed.

She could smell it. Burned plastic. Cooked meat.

They could see a handful of infected passengers out on the ice. Black dots on the slopes of the island like sheep on a distant hillside.

‘Let’s make this a quick trip,’ said Jane. ‘Smash and grab. Hopefully, this will be the last time any of us leave the rig. The last time before home, anyway.’

A woman in a gold ball gown stood alone on the ice, slump-shouldered and forlorn. She saw Punch and Jane. She staggered forward, arms stretched towards them.

Jane checked the little blue igniter flame at the mouth of the flamethrower barrel.

‘Let’s see what this thing can do.’

Punch stood clear.

Jane braced her legs, took aim and pulled the trigger. She fired. An arc of burning fuel spat twenty metres. The woman was engulfed in fire. She stumbled. She fell to her knees. A second burst. Clothes and hair seared away by a typhoon of flame. She crawled on her hands. She fell forward and slowly melted into the ice.

They hurried across the frozen sea to the shore. They climbed on to the jetty and up concrete steps to the bunker entrance. Two infected crewmen were slumped in front of the bunker doors. Officers in brass-button dress uniform. Ice crackled as they struggled to their feet.

Punch kicked their legs from under them, and pulped their heads with the butt of his shotgun.

‘The chain is gone,’ said Jane. She tugged at the doors. ‘They seem to be tied shut from the inside. Do you have a knife?’

Jane took off her glove, squirmed her fingers through the gap and sawed through the rope.

‘Do you think someone made it off Hyperion ?’ asked Punch. ‘Well, I can’t picture any of those zombie fucks tying a reef knot.’

They entered the bunker. They swung the heavy doors shut and propped them closed with a snowmobile.

Punch examined the campfire. He kicked the burning planks. Burst of sparks.

‘Fresh wood. Someone was here a moment ago.’ ‘There’s a bone. A rib.’

Jane stood at the tunnel mouth and shouted into the darkness.

‘Nail? Gus? Hello?’

‘Must be Nail,’ said Punch. ‘Anyone else would come running.’ ‘Hello? Anyone?’

Jane released a puff of fire down the dark passageway, a rolling burst of flame. Brief glimpse of cracked concrete. Tunnel walls receded to vanishing point.

‘Let’s get what we came for,’ she said.

Punch checked the map.

‘Five levels down, then keep heading straight. Be all right as long as we don’t deviate.’

‘Don’t creep,’ said Jane. ‘Let him hear us coming.’

They trudged down a passageway wide as a subway tunnel. Their flashlights lit damp concrete archways Bedrock ribbed with reinforced pillars.

‘How much further?’ asked Punch.

‘Quite a way. Ghost hid the explosives in one of the deeper galleries. Can’t find it by accident. You have to know where to look.’

They approached something blue on the tunnel floor. A snow-boot. Jane crouched and examined the shoe.

‘Size ten. There’s blood in it. Blood on the floor.’

Her flashlight lit a trail of drips.

They kept walking.

The tunnel terminated in a massive lead door. A skull etched above a cloverleaf radiation emblem.

Jane wiped away stone dust.

Beneath it, written in blood:

Jagged letters. Splatters and drips.

‘This place stinks of madness,’ said Punch.

Jane examined the blood. It was black. It crumbled and flaked to the touch. The letters had been daubed by a gloved hand.

‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Whatever happened down here simply isn’t our problem. I’m just not interested. We get what we want then leave.’

The vault was big as a church nave. The walls and ceiling were lagged with lead plate. The chamber was built, Jane supposed, to house the decommissioned reactor core of a Soviet submarine or a nuclear ice-breaker. Relics of the Northern Fleet. The sleek hunter-killers that operated out of Archangel, prowling beneath the polar ice cap, waiting for their comms to flash red and chatter launch codes and target coordinates. The crusted, corroded reactor would be towed down the tunnel on a freight wagon and parked at the centre of the vault. The vault would be filled with salt and the doors sealed for a quarter of a million years.

The vault had been used as a temporary store for excavation equipment. There were picks and shovels, a jumble of hard-hats, and a couple of pneumatic drills propped against a wall. Hard to know why construction suddenly ceased. But the mining teams downed tools one day and didn’t resume.

Tin mugs and plates. A broken welder’s mask used as an ashtray. A bottle of Stolichnaya long since evaporated dry.

Punch pulled off his gauntlets and began to load his backpack. He pulled ammo boxes from the shelves. He flipped the latches and removed patties of explosive wrapped in brown paper.

Jane explored corner shadows. A scoop-digger with a broken track.

Something smelled bad. She lifted the edge of a tarpaulin. An emaciated hand. She pulled the tarpaulin aside.

‘My God,’ said Jane.

‘What have you found?’ Punch kept packing.

‘A body.’

Jane crouched over the body. The corpse was jammed in the digger scoop. Thighs, calves and buttocks were gone. The upper arms, belly and chest had been flayed. Slow decay, despite the cold.

‘Who is it?’ asked Punch. ‘Can you tell?’

Jane trained her flashlight on the bearded face. Sunken cheeks.

A rictus grin. Scraps of neck flesh. Fragments of a barbed tattoo.

‘Gus. I think it’s Gus. It looks like someone ate him.’

Punch stuffed a tin of detonators into the side pocket of his backpack.

‘Ate him?’

‘He’s been butchered. Someone used a knife. Did a thorough job.’

‘Let’s get off this fucking island.’

‘Punch,’ shouted Jane. She trained her flashlight on the vault door. A figure in a red hooded parka was struggling to heave the door shut. ‘Don’t let him lock us in.’

Punch hurriedly shouldered his shotgun. He shot wide, and blew a crater in the lead wall. He fired again. The impact scoured a deep trench in the closing door. He threw the gun. It skittered across the concrete floor and jammed the vault door just as it closed.

He dived for the gun and grabbed the butt. He wrestled for the weapon with an unseen adversary. He pulled the trigger. Muzzle-flash. Blast like a thunderclap. A scream of rage.

‘Punch, get out of the way,’ shouted Jane.

Punch rolled clear. Jane fired the flamethrower. Screams. She ran across the room. Second burst. The walls and door dripped flame. Lead rivulets like lava. The chamber filled with smoke.

Jane kicked the door wide with her boot. A puff of fire from the flamethrower lit an empty tunnel. Scraps of smouldering fabric on the floor.

‘Run, you fuck,’ she shouted, her voice turned metallic by the tunnel walls. ‘Keep running.’

Punch picked up his smouldering shotgun.

‘Think it was Nail?’ he asked.

‘Who else would it be? Fetch the backpack. Let’s go.’

They trudged upward, counting the levels. Jane turned round every few paces to check they weren’t followed. Brief burst of flame at each junction. She inspected every crevice in case Nail was crouched waiting to launch a second ambush. He was injured but desperate enough to attack.