Cold Hell - 28. Chapter 27

The change in Danni's demeanor was sudden and disturbing; it was like watching the face of a cliff crumble and fall into water had Everest ever witnessed such a thing. His face, the lips pressed thin, the eyes widening in an almost comical expression of shock, plateaued, becoming flat and seemingly expressionless.

Everest had seen it before several times. It happened when someone's mind cracked under the weight of something it couldn't handle. So when Danni reached for his gun, Everest was not surprised. By the time Danni took aim, the movement was quick and fluid and completely natural, Everest stepped in the way, grabbed Danni's arm, and pressed him up against the wall.

“Don’t,” he said.

Danni tried to wrestle his hand free. “Get the fuck off me, Everest!” he growled, breath tense. Every muscle in his body was tense; his body vibrated with rage.

“We need him,” Everest said.

Danni’s other fist flashed towards his face. The movement was quick and precise, hitting Everest beneath the chin. The blow was hard enough to make his head fall back. Danni wriggled like a worm, almost broke himself free. Everest bore down on him. Danni may have been small and quick, but he couldn’t outmatch Everest’s strength. “Quit it!” Everest roared. His hand sliced down through the air, knocking the gun from Danni’s hand. He kicked it towards Dinah. “Damn it, you idiot, quit it!”

A mechanism in Danni seemed to have been triggered for he stopped struggling as suddenly as he’d started. His head fell back against the wall. To Everest’s surprise he realized the younger man was crying. His shoulders shook with unsuppressed emotion. Everest didn’t know what to do or what to make of this side of Danni, which he’d never expected to see. Everest released him.

“Are you done?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” Danni said. His voice was empty, without feeling. His face flattened into a hard slab of ice and the vulnerability he’d shown just seconds ago was gone. Something inside Everest shuddered at this new shift in Danni’s demeanor. Three times Danni had flitted from psychotic rage, to despair, to empty apathy. He stalked out of the room without looking at anyone.

Everest scooped up the gun off the floor.

“You saved my life,” said Brantov. He actually looked shaken. “Thank you.”

Everest gave him an icy look. “I don’t know what would cause Danni to react so violently towards you without being instigated to do so, but whatever the reason I’m sure it’s valid. If it wasn’t for the fact we need answers I’d just shoot you myself.” Whether he meant it or not, Everest didn’t know, but he felt satisfied when he saw a refreshed expression of fear on the man’s face.

Several minutes later Danni came back into the room. He did not so much as spare Brantov or anyone else a second glance; it was as if the man ceased to exist. He leaned against the wall, looking out the window. He crossed his arms over his chest. He looked smaller than ever. Small and dangerous. Everest watched him, confused. He was still trying to process everything Brantov had said. Aamodt? Why does the name sound so familiar? He knew he’d heard the name somewhere before but couldn’t think of where from. More confusing yet was the depths within Danni’s character that had been revealed. He was quite possibly the most dangerous one in the room.

Dinah interrupted the tense silence.

“Are there any more survivors?” Dinah asked.

“No,” Ulana said; her voice shook slightly. “It is just the two of us. A few people tried to make a run for it, to get help, but we don’t know what happened to them.”

“Delivery day was almost a week ago,” Dinah said, clearing her throat. “Adwele didn’t show up...Now I know why. We found his body as well as the bodies of two of your clanman. They were in a truck.”

“You speak of Ben Trask and Boris Vasiliev,” Ulana said. “And you said Adwele too? What happened to them?”

“They’re dead,” Dinah said without hesitation. “We had to kill them. They attacked our colony. They were infected.”

Ulana’s reaction was immediate: Her face melted into a reaction of despair. She sunk onto one of the sofa’s, as if someone had knocked her over. Brantov went to her side, wrapped his arms around her, and said something softly in Russian while Ulana sobbed into his lab coat.

“I’m sorry,” Dinah said. She didn’t sound sorry at all, Everest thought. More and more he was starting to think Danni was right about her.

“He was such a good, good man,” Ulana crooned.

“I know.” Brantov kissed her forehead and rocked her back and forth, as if trying to comfort a frightened child.

“What happened here?” Dinah asked after a minute. “Before he died Adwele told us about how he discovered the city, but not about how the outbreak happened.”

Brantov looked up. “I’m just a doctor here. I’ve only been on the project for a few months and the information I have is scarce. All I know is a week ago, after years of drilling through the ice, we finally reached the caves. Adwele sent a team of men into the caves to explore the city and see what they could find. Only one came back - we think they were killed. We kept him in the lab, which also serves as a medical facility and quarantine zone.”

“Was he the cause for the outbreak?” Dinah asked.

“Yes.”

“What happened to him?”

Brantov’s smile was humorless. “Perhaps it is best I just show you. Come Ulana, it will be alright my love.”

He led them out of the rec room, down the hallway, towards another hatch. An animalistic screeching sound stopped Danni in his tracks. He peered around, speaking for the first time since his murderous episode. “What was that sound?”

“That would be the monkey, Okja,” said Brantov. For the moment he seemed to have decided to leave the incident in which Danni had tried to kill him, in the past.

“Adwele’s enigmatic pet monkey?” Dinah smiled.

Danni peered into the room from which he had heard the sound. The monkey stood on a perch inside of a large cage; the cage was placed on top of a wooden table. The monkey turned and looked at Danni curiously with dark brown eyes, as if silently begging to be let out. Tufts of white fur stuck out from the side of her face; a similar white stripe streaked down her back.

Beside him, Everest could only stare in surprise. While he had heard stories of the mythic monkey seeing it for himself was equally a shock. Its hands and face were so...human.

“We are very closely related to them,” said Danni. He smiled, looking amused. “Even more so than cows. Scientists even believe we come from them.”

“And they have these all over Earth?”

“Not all over,” Danni said sadly. “Except for the few kept in zoos they are extinct.” He approached the cage.

Everest hovered behind him, uncertain. “Do they bite?”

Danni smiled at him again from over his shoulder. “Maybe if you stick your finger through the cage. But their omnivores which means they don’t eat meat - luckily for us.” He cocked his head to the side slightly, as if listening to someone speak; someone Everest could not see. Danni’s face saddened.

“What is it?” Everest asked. He felt himself tense automatically.

“She knows,” Danni said, “something is wrong. That Adwele has been gone for a long time. She’s worried about him.”

“You can sense this?” Everest asked. He still found himself marvelling at Danni’s psychic abilities.

“Yes. Okja is a very emotional creature. She’s also very hungry.”

"There's a baggie beside the cage," said Ulana. Her cheeks were still ruddy from crying but she seemed to have pulled herself together. "It has pieces of dried banana in them. Okja loves them."

Danni found the plastic bag and opened it. He pulled out two thinly sliced pieces of banana and poked them through the bars of the cage. Making a small chittering sound unlike anything Everest had ever heard before, he watched the monkey take the dried fruit from Danni's hand and nibbled at it.

;"The poor thing is probably starving," said Ulana. She brushed past Danni. "I'm going to let her out. Don't worry, she won't hurt anyone."

She unlatched the door. Okja ventured cautiously outside of her cage, a chunk of dried banana puffing her tiny cheek out. The expression of weariness and wonder was so human, Everest thought - and adorable. She looked at Danni, then hopped gracefully through the air, climbing up the side of Danni’s coat and perched on top of his shoulder. She chittered at him once more.

Ulana laughed, her almond shaped eyes narrowing down to crescents. “It seems she likes you - really likes you.”

“Can we go to the lab now?” Dinah snapped impatiently. “I get the monkey is cute and fascinating and all, but time is of the essence.”

Danni gave her a perturbed look. “Okja and I were having a moment.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” Dinah snapped. “I don’t want to be here any longer than we have to!”

“Fine.” Danni sighed, looked sideways at the monkey, and smiled. “But the monkey is coming with me.”

…

Brantov led the group into the medical part of the facility, a large white room that made Danni think of the clinic back in Colony Wuxia. Brantov stopped in front of a wall of square metal freezers. “Be prepared...what you see might shock you.”

Dinah scoffed, seeming to share Danni and Everest’s thoughts: After everything they had seen how could anything else shock them?

They were wrong.

The thing lying on the tray was no longer human: the thumb and index finger on both hands had fused together as well as the ring and pinky finger. Eel-like limbs hung over the side of the tray, protruding out from holes that had been punched through the flesh of the ribs. There were more limbs coming from its back. The body itself was emaciated, as if its victim had starved before death; the arms and legs were longer than humanly possible. The face was still human for the most part but the head had elongated.

Danni was so stunned he’d forgotten about Okja; the monkey clung to his jacket, resting comfortably in the crook of his arm. She was amazingly light. The silence stretched on. No one else seemed capable of speaking. The sight frightened Danni to his core. He was truly looking at something extraterrestrial.

“This...thing...was a man?” he managed to croak at last.

Brantov nodded gravely but said nothing.

Danni wanted to deny this, to tell the man he was crazy. But how could he after everything they’d witnessed?

“How long did it take for him to change?” Dinah asked. Her voice was soft, not the authoritative bark Danni associated with her.

“Five days - a week at most.” Brantov scratched at his beard, the scratch of nails on bristles audible. “It seems to take longer for the change to occur when they’re alive. When they are dead it’s much more rapid.”

It made sense. The two men from the crashsite had already changed while Adwele had still been undergoing his mutation. What the hell had the men who’d gone down into the excavation site found?

“Do you know what caused all of this?” Dinah asked. Her eyes were wide with hope for answers. Everyone was watching the doctor.

Brantov shook his head. “I know you came here in search of answers. Unfortunately we do not have many. Adwele was hoping to get answers when he sent the team down in the lift. All I can tell you is something attacked them - all of them. Look at this.” Making sure not to touch the skin of the body, he pointed at the dead thing’s throat. There, discoloring its blue-grey flesh, was a bruise that seemed to wrap all the way around its necks as if something had tried to strangle it.

Danni shuddered. I’ve seen enough for today, he thought. All at once he felt exhausted to the point he didn’t care about it any more. They’d been going since the beginning of the day. The only thing that had kept him going was the need to survive - and the will of survival could only take one so far. The body had very real, very solid, very human limitations. But the exhaustion he felt wasn’t just from today nor was it just in Danni’s body. This nightmare had been going on since he’d woken up on the frozen ice planet.

“Do you have any way I can take a shower?” he asked, threading his fingers through Okja’s fur.

“How can you be thinking about taking a shower at a moment like this?” Dinah snapped at him.

“I haven’t showered in three days,” he said. “I’m sweaty, I stink, and I’m tired. I’ll be more equipped to deal with things once I’ve had some sleep.”

“We have a way you can take a shower,” said Ulana. “We have wash rags, towels, and plenty of soap.” Her hostility seemed to have disappeared for the moment in wake of the current situation. “I can show you where the showers are.”

The showers were in one big room, half a dozen showerheads to one side. Each head was separated by a concrete partition. In exchange for a wash rag, a towel, a small bar of soap and shampoo, Danni handed Okja to Ulana. He was reluctant to part with the monkey; her small, furry presence had been a comfort. He felt a strange, inexplicable connection with the monkey.

Once alone it took Danni a minute to figure out the water temperature. He had to turn the nob several times before the water was warm enough to his likings. He let out a silent groan when the hot water touched his skin. I could stand under the water for hours, he thought. He had just begun to scrub his body when Everest stepped in, naked.

“Hope you don’t mind if I join you,” Everest said.

Danni looked him up and down unabashedly. “Not at all.” He continued to watch as Everest turned the spray on.

For a long time they were silent, simply enjoying the silence and the relief of becoming cleansed. Then Everest asked, “Do you think we’ll get out of here alive, Danni?”

“Do you want me to tell you what you want to hear or do you want me to tell you the truth?”

Everest chuckled. “I don’t imagine you’ve ever been the person who tells people what they want to hear.”

“Maybe we will,” said Danni. “Those two people have survived here for several days. I’ll try and think of something to get us out of this but I’m not going to be able to do so until I get some sleep. I will tell you this, I’m not leaving until this place is up in flames.”

Everest studied him intently from across the room as he lathered soap across his chest. “Why do you care so much about what happens to the people of this planet?”

“It’s not just the people of this planet I care about,” Danni said. “What if this infection gets to earth somehow? Slim chance, but it could happen. What could happen if the transport comes back with prisoners and they realize there’s no one to meet them?” Images of disaster passed through Danni’s mind. He wanted to say more but was too tired to be able to form the words. The inside of his head buzzed with exhaustion.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said instead.

Everest grinned. “Remind me not to get in your way again.” His face turned serious. “Is it true what Brantov said? About who your father is?”

“It is. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought it would only make things more dangerous for me. There are a lot of people on Earth who don’t agree with sending people to a penal planet - you could imagine what they’d do to me if they knew. My family was the one who surveyed the planet and made it possible.”

“It doesn’t matter to me.” Everest slowly crossed the room. Steam wafted around them, beginning to fill the bathroom. “And I don’t care about the things you did on Earth. I know you’re trying to make up for them now...that’s why you care.”

“Yes,” Danni said, glad someone else had said the words so he didn’t have to.

Now standing directly under the spray, Everest pulled Danni into his arms; they embraced, water sliding down their mingled bodies. After a moment Danni lifted his head, smiled, kissed Everest once and said, “If we are going to die I want us to make this moment count. Are you up for it?”

Everest turned him around and pressed him up against the tiled wall. “I’m always up for it.”

…

Everest was still asleep when Danni woke up. They’d shared a pallet on the floor made of blankets and towels. Danni’s back was stiff from sleeping on the hard surface of the floor but he felt better after having slept for a few hours. Now it’s time to stop asking questions and start coming up with a plan.

He found Dinah sleeping on a couch in the rec room. Good. The less she heard of his plans the better. He still didn’t trust her. Even now, after everything she’d seen and everything her decisions had cost her, Dinah was still only thinking about herself. He kept hoping the recents events would change her but also knew deep down inside, like most humans, she was incapable of changing. Her stubbornness and narcissism made her every bit as dangerous as the creatures they were fighting against.

He found Brantov and Ulana in the medical lab. They immediately became silent when he entered the room. Ulana’s face was red with distress, evidence they’d been having a strenuous conversation when he’d entered. Whatever they were talking about, it wasn’t his business. I have enough on my plate as it is without adding eavesdropping to it.

Ulana got up from the chair she’d been sitting in. She smiled cautiously at Danni as if he were a dog ready to attack. “We have food if you are hungry. Cereal with powdered milk.”

“Cereal would be nice.” He waited until her back was turned before adding, “You don’t have to be afraid of me Ulana. I’m not here to cause trouble.”

Her back stiffened at this. She turned slowly. Her voice was low when she spoke. “You understand nothing, do you? Our peace treaty has existed for almost two hundred years - and it has been there for a reason. So there is no raping and pillaging until there’s nothing left. By being here, you and your people have broken the treaty. It has never been broken before.”

Danni clenched his jaw. “Your clan leader broke the treaty when he dug an alien fucking city out of the ice.” He stood before a computer and wiggled the mouse to wake it up. The computer was password protected of course. He looked at Brantov. “What is the password?”

“Why should I give it to you?” Brantov asked suspiciously. “What do you intend to do?”

Danni sighed, annoyed. “I intend to come up with a plan that will get us out of here alive.”

…

Calvin glanced at Natalia. She sat in the seat next to him, head leaning against the seatback, dozing silently. He didn’t blame her. Last night had been rough trying to sleep in the truck: uncomfortable and cold. Still it would have been nice to have someone to talk to. Not only was he tired of staring at the same boring landscape but his nerves were stretched tight to the point of snapping.

They’d spoken little on the journey. Calvin sensed Natalia was every bit as scared as he was, probably thinking about what they would find at the research station...this was assuming they made it to the other side without getting caught by Clan Mureen first. If they did make it would they find their friends alive, or would they only find a massacre? It was only now Calvin realized he didn’t have a plan; once again he’d let his emotions get the best of him and it was going to get them both killed.

Too late to turn back now. We’re almost there.

He was in the middle of passing through a procession of seracs and pressure ridges. He drove slowly, cautiously, at twenty miles per an hour. A caterpillar’s crawl. A constant voice screamed in the back of his mind to go faster - time was of the essence. But he forced himself to stay calm. The last thing he needed was to get themselves stranded miles away from civilization. He’d brought heat lamps but those would only keep the cold at bay. Their chances of making it back to Camp Wuxia would be very slim.

And we won’t be good to Danni or the others if we’re dead.

There it was! The marker splitting Clan Wuxia’s territory from Clan Mureen. He looked over at Natalia. He didn’t want to wake her up but now was a time when he needed her. Slowly easing down on the brake, he brought the truck to a stop and shook her gently. She lifted her head, blinking at him through darkened eyes.

“We’re here.”

Her eyes fell on the marker, a small beacon half submerged in snow. White light flashed from a lense.

“If you don’t want to go any further now is the time to tell me. We can turn around and go back.” He watched her face intently.

“What’s the point in turning around? We came this far didn’t we?”

He gave a final sigh. I gave you one last chance. Once we’re over the border there’s no going back. He hit the gas pedal and they passed the border.

No sooner were they a mile into Mureen territory when Natalia sat up straight awake, eyes wide with fear. “Fuck me. Oh God we are so fucked…”

Under more typical circumstances Calvin might have been shocked at Natalia’s sudden use of profanity, but there was a platoon of trucks, about six or seven of them, headed straight towards Calvin’s truck, leaving a trail of exhaust fumes in their wake. Calvin contemplated turning the truck around. In the back of his panicking mind he knew there was no chance he could get them back over the border in time. He slammed on the brakes. Their only hope was that these people would ask questions first before shooting.

He slammed on the brakes.

“What are you doing?” Natalia squeaked.

“I’m going to try and see if they’re willing to have a civil conversation. Stay in the truck.” Calvin climbed out of the truck on legs that felt made of air. He walked several paces away from the truck and stopped.

The platoon of vehicles came to a stop. Several men marched towards him with rifles upraised, their shouts muffled by their breathing masks. Calvin kept his hands held up, doing his best to look as non threatening as possible.

“Who are you?” asked the man in the middle. He was clearly the leader for the other men and women in the group looked to him for instruction. He spoke with a clipped accent Calvin was unfamiliar with. “You are Clan Wuxia! You have violated our treaty by coming over our border!” Black eyes bore into his with hostility.

“Please,” Calvin pleaded. “I know about the city Adwele found beneath the ice - the alien city - ”

Before he could finish, the man slammed the handle of his rifle into Calvin’s face. The force of the blow knocked him onto his ass. He could feel blood running from his nose. Was it broken? Disoriented, he looked up just in time to see the man standing over him.

“Please,” he managed to say one more time before the handle of the rifle crashed against his head once more.