'Jeez, Cueball,' Geller said. 'Enough drill instructor dramatics, okay?'
'You people are almost asleep on your feet. You need some dramatics.'
'I just don't know that we're up to stabbing people,' Dana said tiredly.
'Well, someone might be up to stabbing you. That make a difference?'
The New Zealander looked at him gloomily.
'Come here, Dana,' Pulaski suddenly said.
'What bloody for?'
'Come here.' It was an order and she complied against her own wishes, walking over to the cook. He turned her around to face the others. 'You're my Raggedy Ann for a little knife lesson.'
'Oh please,' she groaned. 'I just want to go to my bloody bed.'
'Now, listen,' he said to the others in the galley. 'The whole point of this is that you don't get attacked. That any killer knows that open season is over. But if you are attacked, you don't want to pussy around, right? You want to stop an assailant so they can't stop you, cut them so they can't cut you, make them go down and stay down so you can run for help. Right? Otherwise all you do is piss them off.'
They looked at him with exhaustion.
'Stay here a moment,' he told Dana. He went to the kitchen and came back with a jar of spaghetti sauce and a basting brush.
'Wade, Jesus Christ, come on- '
'Stand still. This might save your life. Our lives.' He dipped in the brush.
'Please…'
He dabbed a splotch of red under her nose and she started. 'Hit them here, under the nose. Try to break it. Try to push it upward. It will hurt like hell. If you're lucky, the cartilage will be shoved into the brain and the frontal lobes will bleed and they'll go down permanently.' He dipped again and painted her throat. 'Hit here. Under the Adam's apple for men is a good pain point. It can chop off air for either sex. With a weapon you can cut an artery, with a blow you can collapse the windpipe. Don't screw around! Don't give your opponent time to do it to you! Not unless you want to get laid out in the snow with Gabriella Reid.'
Dana looked at him with distaste.
He dipped again and aimed toward the hollow behind her clavicle. 'Next pain point- '
'No.' She stepped away, raising her own knife. 'Enough. Stay away from me, Cueball. I'm not some damned American killer mercenary.'
'Excellent reaction, Dana. Get that knife up. This is exactly my point. I want to make you a damned killer mercenary.'
'So I declare my graduation. Enough with the sauce.' She walked away and slumped in a chair, throwing her knife with a clatter on the table.
He turned to the others, pointing with the brush. 'The solar plexus, right under the rib cage. The abdomen. Breasts if it's a woman, balls if it's a man. The eyes. The ears. Anywhere you can inflict pain. Any way you can get the other guy to hesitate, back off, go down. Listen, I know it's grim, but I'm tired of people dying like rabbits. You gotta look after yourself. I've climbed, I've rafted, I've jumped, I've shot. Look for yourself. Check your own chute. Sharpen your own bayonet. Lock and load, people.'
'You're scaring me with all this army stuff,' Gina said. 'You're going to make us fear every man and woman on this base.'
'That's right, Gina. Fear is the one thing that might just keep you alive.' He looked at the others. 'At the end of the winter, that's all that counts.'
'Is that all?' Geller asked wearily.
'No. When we finish boarding things up, I think it would be smart to search each other again as well.'
Lewis was dreaming of Arabia. He was on a flat plain, stony and hot, looking for oil. The sky was white, the horizon watery, and he was uneasy because if he didn't find his prize soon he'd lose his job. The oil was under one of the rocks, he knew, but every stone looked alike. Each was the shape of a potato, burnt and glassy, and he was having to turn them over one by one to find what he was looking for. Finally he turned one over and was startled to see a face looking up at him. It was a woman, buried in the sand, her long hair made of strands of quartz and mica. He stepped back in surprise and she rose up out of the desert, robed, her gown made of silicon. It was a gray, shimmering, translucent thing, her body perfect beneath it. The woman was looking at him boldly and he heard himself think, I don't know you, and then the gown turned to sand and slid away, leaving the woman naked except for specks of quartz on her shoulders and thighs and breasts like a scattering of glitter. The merciless glare from the sun turned a cool blue directly above her, a small dark circle giving her a column of shade. Except the woman was now Abby, her hair shorter and her expression shy, and the glitter wasn't sand, it was specks of ice.
Lewis awoke groggily, his dream penetrated by a tapping. The sauna was pitch-black and stuffy, the bench where he lay hard and uncomfortable. He sat up. Someone was knocking at his door. It was the latest in a series of noises that had bewildered him- an explosion, alarms, hammerings, drills, saws. Despite his shouts, no one ever came to explain what was going on. It was like he'd been locked in the sauna and abandoned. It was like being buried in the old base. It was like freezing to death in the pit where they'd found Mickey Moss. His claustrophobia had come back to him.
'Who's there?' His voice was thick, doped from sleep.
'It's Abby. Can I talk to you?'
He was frustrated and embarrassed at his plight. In the end she'd stopped trying to defend him. In the end she hadn't known who to believe. 'Go away.'
'Jed, please, we're in danger. You've got to let me in.'
He didn't answer.
'I'm sorry that I didn't say more in the galley. I was quiet because I had to think things through. I had to trust, first.'
'Trust what?'
'Trust who to believe.'
He sat there brooding tiredly, feeling angry and frustrated. There was no chance to prove anything to anyone now, locked up in here.
'I decided to believe you,' she said.
'Well, hell.' He flicked on the sauna light. Pulaski had barred the door from the outside as he'd promised, preventing Lewis from escaping his makeshift prison. But he'd also left the latch working on the inside, preventing anyone from getting in that Lewis didn't want to see.
'We can't afford a guard to protect us from you, and we can't afford a guard to protect you from us,' the cook had growled. 'I don't want some vigilante coming in here and beating the crap out of you until we know what's going on. So lock the damn door from the inside and don't open it up for anyone but me. Okay?'
Lewis had nodded. He wasn't even going to open it to Pulaski until he was so damn hungry and thirsty that he had to face the cook. Until then he wanted to be alone in his depression, willing himself mentally ten thousand miles from the Pole.
Yet did he? He felt so isolated. And Abby…
He cautiously opened the door, fearing a mob behind her, but it was only the woman. She quickly slipped inside, latching it behind her.
'Jed, I need help,' she whispered.
'You need help? What the hell is going on out there, anyway?'
'We're completely cut off from the outside world and we're making prisoners of ourselves. Comms blew up and- '
'What?'
'The batteries exploded. They think it was sabotage. It knocked out the power grid to the outside buildings and everyone's gone nuts. They've barricaded all the entrances with beams and bolts and they're building walls to block off the fuel arch and the generators because that's where we're most vulnerable. We can't get to the fuel and we can't get to the gym and garage anymore. Only Pika knows how to get around them; he's the only one mild enough that everyone trusts him. And he's become some kind of hypochondriac, running off to BioMed all the time like he has a case of the runs. The rest of us are in prison, just like you. They're walling us in against a boogeyman
