Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

“Put her on your back,” Gabriel said.

“Honey, don’t run, I’m gonna pick you up, you understand me?” He made a lifting gesture with his arm. “Up, okay? It’ll be fine, just trust me.” Gabriel looked in the girl’s eyes. She seemed a bit less frightened, or at least he told himself she did.

“Now, Millie. Now.”

With one sweep of his arm, Millie lifted the girl off her feet and tossed her onto his back. She squealed with momentary terror, but he kept talking to her, and when he let go of her skinny waist she didn’t jump off. Instead, she wrapped her legs around his thick neck and took fistfuls of his hair in both little hands.

“That’s great, honey,” Millie said, “now we’re going for a ride.”And sweeping the spear out in front of him, he resumed his lurching forward march, Gabriel running alongside him, keeping him up.

The hot wind pursued them, gaining strength. It felt like it had reached gale force by the time they finally broke out into the clearing where the plane stood. A loud buzz of exclamations arose from the crowd of women when they saw Millie and Gabriel stagger into view with the wind at their back. Rue looked up. She was crouched on the plane’s wing, twisting a wrench in the innards of the fuselage, but she leapt down and ran to them, pushing taller bodies out of the way till she was at Millie’s other side and could grab him around the waist.

Looking down, Gabriel saw that one of Rue’s small bare feet was wrapped with bloody barkcloth.

“Jesus,” Gabriel said.

“Don’t worry,” Rue said. “It’s not my clutch foot.”

She steered them toward the open ramp at the rear of the plane.

“Have you got it working?” Gabriel asked.

“Like a charm,” Rue said. “A cranky, leaky, rusty, sixty-five-year-old charm.”

“Well, you’ve got five minutes to get us in the air,” Gabriel said.

Rue’s face couldn’t properly be said ever to go pale, but she blanched all the same. “Five minutes…?”

“ Fünf minuten ,” Gabriel said. “Not a minuten more.”

The women crowded all around them fell silent then, and stepped to either side. In the gap that opened up, Anika came forward. She had a vintage Luger in her hand, the German pistol aimed directly at Millie’s gut. Apparently Groener’s notebook hadn’t been the only artifact of the Third Reich left around here.

“Lady, move,” Millie said. To which Gabriel added, “If you don’t let us up that ramp, Anika, we’ll all die.”

Her grip on the gun didn’t waver.

“The Untergang machine,” Gabriel said, then started over. “Unterg. Unterg has been activated. Turned on. Made angry. Look.” He pointed back toward the trees, which were waving wildly in the wind. “Your main building—it’s gone. Gone. Everything will be gone a few minutes from now. Everything—you, me, everything, if you don’t let us get on this plane. If you don’t let us take you away on the Father Bird.”

“We cannot…ride the Father Bird,”Anika said. “It is forbidden.” But Gabriel saw her looking past him, over his shoulder, toward the village, and thought maybe he heard a bit of uncertainty in her voice.

“We have to go,” he said. “Now, or everyone you care about will die. You and all your people. We can save you, but only if we go right now .”

The girl, who was still sitting on Millie’s shoulders, picked this moment to speak up.

Gabriel couldn’t understand what she said in her piping little soprano voice; perhaps something about how they’d picked her up and brought her safely out of the forest. Perhaps something else entirely. But at the end of it, Anika’s hand slowly descended.

“It is forbidden,” she said, unhappily.

“First time for everything,” Rue said and steered Millie up the ramp with her.

Gabriel stayed at its foot a moment longer. “Tell them to get on board as quickly as they can. Up there.” He pointed at the plane’s interior. “We’re leaving in four minutes, with them or without them.” Anika repeated the instructions to the throng of women and they began rushing up the ramp. Gabriel went ahead of them and pointed them to seats on padded benches against each wall. He opened a set of ancient supply lockers along the walls, one by one, disgorging parkas, blankets, and assorted other cold weather gear.

“Do we have enough fuel to make it to the nearest station?” Gabriel asked.

“Barely,” Rue replied from the cockpit. “We’ll be flying on fumes and Hail Marys.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s an I’ll do my best.”

It would have to do.

Gabriel returned to his search of the cavernous hollow interior of the plane. He found stacks of tanned furs, skins of water, and baskets of desiccated fruit and dried meat—decades of offerings to the Father Bird, no doubt. He also found a complement of flight suits that had lain untouched for over sixty years.

“Anika, is everyone on board?” Gabriel said.

The older woman looked from face to face, tallying the confused and anxious women sitting half naked on the benches, and nodded. “All in.”

“Tell them to bundle up in those furs,” Gabriel told her, as he began pulling on one of the flight suits. “You too. You have no idea how cold it is where we’re going.”

Anika looked at Gabriel as if he’d lost his mind but did as he requested.

“Millie,” Gabriel said, tossing him the largest of the suits. The big man was seated sprawled across the floor beside the cockpit. “Put some clothes on.” Gabriel threw the smallest of the flight suits through the open door of the cockpit. “Rue, when are you going to start those engines?”

There was a growling sputter and cough before he finished getting the words out, and looking through the cockpit windows he saw the antique propellers struggling into motion like old men getting out of bed. The stench of thick smoky exhaust was overwhelming.

He returned to the center of the cabin, took one last look around the clearing through the still-open ramp at the back of the plane.

What he saw terrified him. The wind was strong enough now that the trees in its path were bent almost horizontal, the ones that hadn’t already snapped off and been blown away. As he watched, the ground itself began to tremble, then to twist and hump like a living thing. This was minimum intensity? Good lord—what would have happened to D.C. at the maximum level?

He felt the plane grind into motion along the runway and saw the ramp slowly rise, laboriously drawing shut.

Then, suddenly there was an awful, unnatural sound, like a thick piece of metal being shredded. The surface of the runway seemed to shimmer with the same sort of distortion he’d seen beneath the giant lens of the Untergang machine. Gabriel felt the terrible pressure return, squeezing his skull painfully, and he saw the women around the cabin holding their heads in torment. As the plane’s nose tipped up and its belly left the ground, a hot wave of fire struck them from behind, shoving them violently into the air. Gabriel was thrown against the side of one of the lockers and held on tight to prevent himself from being flung all the way into the cockpit.

“Rue, you okay?” he shouted.

“Don’t talk to me,” she shouted back.

The metal of the plane’s body was screaming from the pressure, the velocity, the heat. Above them, the red dome of ice seemed to glow, the frozen fire coming to life as the furious heat from below began to melt the dome away, layer by layer. In the middle distance, he could see the narrow rift in the ice toward which they flew, and through it the slash of clean, white daylight beyond.

They were rushing toward it at ferocious speed—but they weren’t there yet.