Outpost

Samurai soldiers called themselves dead men. They tied their hair in a ponytail before each battle to make it easy for their enemies to lift their severed heads as a trophy. A warrior with no regard for his own life, who flew into battle powered by careless, suicidal rage, was unbeatable. Negative courage. Give up on yourself, and you have nothing left to fear. You become invincible.

The shaft took her further below ground. She felt wind on her face. Maybe there were other routes to the surface. Air shafts and ancillary exits. Ghost said there was an old airstrip nearby with an Antonov cargo plane turning to rust. Maybe there was a connecting passageway.

A figure stood in the dark up ahead. A man standing sentinel in the middle of the tunnel. Jane wondered how long he had been alone in the dark.

She waited for him to make a move. He remained still.

She crept closer. She shone a flashlight in his face. Officer uniform. Brass buttons, epaulettes, anchor insignia.

Jet-black eyes.

The figure slowly inclined his head to look directly at Jane. He screamed. A long, unearthly howl. Mouthful of metal spines.

The scream seemed to last minutes, seemed like it would never end. Jane sparked the flamethrower and blew the man off his feet and down the tunnel.

She stepped over the burning figure.

A shriek from deep within the tunnels. Something, down in the depths of the bunker, was answering the sailor’s call.

The tunnels played strange music. Gentle, fluted breaths that rose and fell as she passed through passageways and galleries.

A vertical shaft to the surface. Ventilation. A massive air-con turbine in the tunnel roof. Rusted blades.

Snow had tumbled down the shaft. A high mound of ice blocked Jane’s path.

Sustained blast from the flamethrower. Ice shrivelled, liquefied, steamed.

She found a sailor sitting against the tunnel wall. Jane trained her flashlight on his face. Beard. Striped naval tunic. He was weak and emaciated. Metal leaked from his ears. His eyes glowed red like a cat lit by headlights. He hissed.

Jane pushed him over and stamped on his head.

She headed downward, deeper into the fossil layers. Her flashlight lit glittering mineral veins. Cambrian, pre-Cambrian. That dark and distant epoch when Arctica was raging volcanism.

She checked her watch. How far had Rampart drifted from the island? It might already be four or five kilometres offshore. Might be fifteen or twenty kilometres distant by the time she reached the surface. She could make it, though. She could sprint across the ice. She had stamina.

Sudden flashback. A cross-country run. Bleak fields. Lumbering along an endless, rural lane. Sweating, sobbing with exhaustion. Long since left behind.

Miss Gibson, the PE teacher, leaning on a farm gate.

‘Come on, stinky. Make an effort.’

Storage vaults. Lead doors high as an aircraft hangar.

One of the doors was ajar. No time to explore. But if the vaults hid infected passengers from Hyperion she might find her route back to the surface cut off.

She stood in the giant doorway and shone her flashlight into the darkness.

A wall of black. A massive propeller. The tail section of an Akula Class nuclear sub. Black, anechoic hull plates. Rudders. Stern planes. Jagged metal where the tail had been plasma-cut from the main hull.

The reactor had evidently been dredged from the ocean bed. Barnacled and streaked with sediment.

Hard to comprehend the vast scale of the wreckage.

What was the radiation count in the vault? Rust pools on the chamber floor. The interment was incomplete. The wreckage should be buried in salt and sealed in lead. Instead, the reactor chamber was exposed to open air.

She hurried onward.

School days.

The chapel. Jane walking up the aisle, trying not to waddle, trying not to shake. She stood at the lectern. She looked at the blazered congregation. Rose, the gum-smacking class bitch, sitting in the back pew with her smirking, sneering gang.

Jane took paper from her pocket and unfolded the poem. She cleared her throat, blushed as the cough was amplified throughout the chapel.

She adjusted the mike position.

She stared, mesmerised, into the foam bulb of the microphone.

She froze. She couldn’t speak. And she knew, in a giddy rush of heightened awareness, that she would relive this memory her entire life. The sounds, the textures. The shame would be seared into her like the pavement burn-shadow of a Hiroshima pedestrian.

She stared at the mike. She could see, in the periphery of her vision, ranks of schoolgirls staring at her. They started to fidget. They started to giggle.

Wherever she went, whatever she did, part of her would be trapped in this moment. A fat girl, clutching the lectern, paralysed with fear.

Jane’s flashlight started to fail.

She hurried down tunnels shored with steel props. She passed evidence of interrupted excavation. Uncleared rubble. Discarded tools. Dormant diggers.

She saw something move in the darkness up ahead. A white figure stepped away from the tunnel wall.