Killer

Six hours. Robbed by the snow of anything to relate their progress to, they soon slipped deep inside themselves, and the boredom of simply walking, seeing nothing, saying nothing, began to eat at their sense of time. But their bodies were not so easily tricked. After three hours, at lunchtime, their bellies began to demand food. Ross let it last for as long as he dared, until he genuinely thought he was becoming faint with hunger; after six hours they stopped to eat.

They crouched shoulder to shoulder at a slight angle which protected the food from the wind. They opened the Thermos flask with the soup. This was not an easy task. They had to open one of the knapsacks, select the flask, remove it, close the knapsack, buckle it shut, take the flask, unscrew the cup-top, unscrew the stopper, pour out the soup, drink it, turn-about from the cup, re-seal the stopper, replace the cup, and put it all away. All this they had to do with a wind whose temperature was well below freezing, gusting to seventy miles an hour, without being able to remove their mittens for fear of frostbite, having to ease their balaclavas down from their noses and over their mouths to sip at the soup held uneasily with both hands, being careful, in spite of their shivering, to spill none of it in case it froze on their face-masks and gave the terrible cold access to their mouths, cheeks and chins.

After they had eaten half the soup, they began to move on again. The wind began to slacken now, and the walking became easier. Inch by inch, the whirling white curtain of the snow fell back. They began to make better time. They could make more of a guess as to how they were doing now, and the walking became relatively pleasant. Time slipped by almost unnoticed as they plodded on. The wind died completely within the next three hours, and suddenly the cloud vanished also, revealing an ice-blue sky and the afterglow of sunset.

They decided to eat the meat now. They had stopped anyway to go through the complex procedures of relieving themselves. The meat was slimy and cold, but they ate it with relish. They were tired; they had walked all day, for nearly ten hours.

“Better keep moving,” said Ross, his voice gravelly with fatigue. Jeremiah nodded, pulling his face-mask back up over his nose. His breath rose white on the still air, and hovered in a cloud about his head.

The clear weather was a mixed blessing, for the clear sky sent the temperature a further twenty degrees below zero. The ice on their clothes grated and flaked as they rose and began to move. The sky began to darken slowly, and the two of them followed their hunched shadows into the gathering dusk.

During the next hours, the quiet became almost as great a strain as the wind had been. In the strange twilight which never seemed to fade they shuffled on. Ahead of them, the stars began to twinkle. Ross kept consulting his compass, checking its unreliable readings against the constellations of the southern sky.

Time passed out of time. Each man had withdrawn into himself again; tapping deep sources of will and energy; a primeval urge to survive in spite of all. Ross’s lips moved as he walked, singing old marching songs with a steady relentless rhythm to which he moved his tired legs over and over again. A strange euphoria began to take hold of his mind. Pain receded by degrees until it became a distant thing. He became exultant, high, confident.

He cried out, “Do your worst, you Queen of Bitches. I’m ready for you.” And the Queen of Bitches took him at his word.

Jeremiah, at Ross’s side, saw it clearly coming, now out of the east, luminous, dead grey, reaching its unimaginable head to where the stars had been, tearing the horizons with its claws, galloping over the ice with terrible sinuous ease. He saw its ears flatten back amongst the clouds, he saw the wells of its eyes which were as black as the skies before stars, he saw the great hammock of its belly sweeping aside the snow, he saw the black of its lips writhe back to reveal its lightning teeth, and he heard its thunder-roar in the moment before it gulped them into the chaos of itself. Jeremiah saw all this, and screamed. His fists beat upon Ross’s invisible shoulders.

“It is the Bear,” he cried, again and again. But Ross did not hear. He stood, horrified, dumbfounded by the power of the thing he had summoned out of the icy night.