Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Gabriel smiled and slapped Millie’s big meaty shoulder. “You ready?”

“You know,” Millie said, his steaming breath labored as he grabbed hold of the rope, “the town I grew up in is only seven feet above sea level. Seven feet, Gabriel. I can’t help but ask myself what the hell a decent God-fearing Chalmetian like me is doing freezing his ass off and making like a yoyo at twenty-eight-hundred feet. It ain’t natural, I tell you.”

“Go on, you big baby,” Gabriel said.

“How do I keep letting you talk me into this kind of thing?” Millie asked, lowering himself hand over big hand down the rope, which swayed despite Gabriel’s best efforts to hold it steady. “I oughta have my head examined.”

The Spryte groaned and shifted under Millie’s considerable weight on one end and the even greater weight of the piled-up ice on the other. A sudden lurch shook the vehicle. Gabriel tasted an icy metallic fear in the back of his throat. The rope bearing Millie’s weight swung to one side and a barrage of colorful swearing echoed up the chasm.

“Don’t want to rush you,” Gabriel called down, “but…shake a leg, okay?”

“What’s happening up there, boss?”

The groaning and creaking was getting louder, and though the darkness was now almost complete, by peering closely Gabriel could see the metal frame of the Spryte bulging inward. “Not your problem. Just get down.”

Suddenly, Gabriel felt the rope jerk in his hands. There was no weight on it anymore. A moment later, he heard a heavy impact. “What happened?” he shouted.

“I got down,” Millie called. “Figured I could stand to drop the last dozen feet or so. Wasn’t the slickest landing ever, but I’m in one piece. Now you, boss. Get your ass down here.”

Gabriel didn’t need to be told twice. He took hold of the rope and pushed off, sliding down as quickly as he could into the blackness. His head was aching from the altitude and his breath was leaden in his constricted chest but he pushed all that aside and concentrated only on lowering himself into the chasm.

Above him, he heard the sound of metal twisting, and he felt the motion transmitted through the rope. The Spryte couldn’t fall any farther—could it?

It was a chance he couldn’t afford to take. He slackened his grip on the rope and slid, as quickly as he was able. He could feel the walls of ice narrowing around him until he had to twist his body sideways in order to slip down between them. Another noise came from above, the sound of metal snapping this time—and a moment later, there was no tension in the rope at all. It had been severed, and Gabriel was falling.

Chapter 11

There was a moment of blind plummeting, the useless rope still gripped between his hands. Then he hit—but where’d he’d expected to strike solid ice, he felt something soft under him instead. Millie’s arms wrapped around him from behind and set him down gently on the ground.

Velda swung the light around.

They were in a long narrow corridor of ancient ice that glowed blue in the flashlight’s glare. Above their heads, the crack leading up to the crushed Spryte was the only opening. Everything else was sealed solid, the ice bulging around them in an oval pocket that was disturbingly reminiscent of the spine and ribs of some enormous animal, viewed from the inside. Only in one direction was there any way they could go—and who knew how far?

“What do you think, Nils?” Gabriel asked. “Think there may be another way up? Nils?”

The big Swede was bent over, sorting through a pile of smashed equipment scattered across the ground. It was the contents of the first pack, Gabriel realized, the one that had fallen out of the Spryte when they were still aboveground, the one that had plummeted past Nils while he’d been clinging to the ice ledge. Nils was gathering up what he could, sorting the hopelessly broken from the salvageable.

“Velda,” Nils said, excitedly. “Look at this. These are not mine.” He held up a pair of broken goggles.

Velda took the goggles from him and examined them up close in the flashlight’s beam.

“They’re his!” she said, her voice shaking. “They are, aren’t they?”

“I think you might be right,” Nils replied. “They certainly look like your father’s. I don’t think any of the rescue team lost their goggles while searching, and no one else has been anywhere near this area recently that we know of.”

“So he must have been down here,” Velda said, almost to herself. She swung the flashlight around. “His last transmission, it must have been from here…”

“Then where’s his radio?” Gabriel said. He didn’t add, And where’s his body?

Velda aimed the light toward the passageway at the far end. “Nowhere else he could’ve gone.”

“By an amazing coincidence, there’s also nowhere else we can,” Rue said. “Who’s up for a walk? It’s too damn cold just standing around.”

Millie used the severed rope to rig a strap for his bundle and slung it over his shoulder. Hunched over to pass under the low roof of ice, he made his way to Rue’s side. Velda stood silent for a moment, holding the goggles and looking away down the dark tunnel. She put the goggles into her pack, then shouldered it.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

Gabriel nodded and took his place by her side. Nils brought up the rear, not too badly slowed by his limp or his need to walk bent over almost double due to his height.

The natural corridor narrowed and widened as they went, twisting first to the left and then back to the right. They came to a section where the ceiling got so low that even Rue had to bend over to keep walking, and then it became lower still. They were forced to creep forward first on their hands and knees and then on their bellies, pushing the packs ahead of them. As they inched forward, Gabriel noticed that the ice beneath them was becoming a downward slope, gradual at first, then increasingly steep. Gabriel could feel himself starting to slide. He had to arch his back and wedge himself against the ceiling as he went, to prevent himself from slipping.

“Can you see anything?” Gabriel asked Velda, who was in the lead with the flashlight.

Before she could answer there was a grunt and a cry and both Millie and Rue came sliding down behind them, slamming into Gabriel and sending him headfirst into Velda’s boots. The four of them slipped and slid and bounced off one another until they hit the bottom of the slope, wind knocked soundly from their aching lungs.

Standing unsteadily, Gabriel picked up the flashlight from where it lay. The light was flickering, and he had to slap it twice before it returned to a full, steady beam.

He shone the light around the room. It was an enormous cavern, the walls composed entirely of the curious red ice they’d seen on the surface. The roof was perhaps seventy-five feet overhead and angled sharply. Thousands of glittering crimson stalactites hung from it, some finger-sized, some well over forty feet long. They were not smooth and rounded like traditional stalactites, but sharp-edged and faceted, like giant crystals. Equally varied and equally sharp stalagmites reached upward from the floor of the cavern. The resulting impression was that of standing inside a cathedral-sized geode.

“It’s…amazing,” Velda said. The surfaces of the strange, mineral-laden red ice seemed to pick up the tone of her voice and resonate until the resulting cacophony was almost unbearable. As the sound swelled and echoed, a few smaller stalactites came loose from the ceiling and rained down around them like crystal daggers. One caught Millie on the arm, slicing easily through his parka sleeve. He pulled his arm back with a sudden intake of breath. He bit down on a hiss of pain but the short, truncated sound was picked up and relayed all across the cavern and back again, as if whispered by gossiping old ladies.