He mouthed, This ain't good.
Linda moved up to his side and looked for herself. The room was in shambles. Clothing was strewn across the floor. Lockers had been emptied and overturned. A bench where workers once donned their boots had been flipped onto an object that truly held her attention. It was the body of a woman, turned blue from the cold. She was wearing a hoarfrost death mask, tiny icicles that clung to her skin and made her eyes opaque. What was worse was the blood, a pool of it frozen solid on the floor under her. Her chest was covered in it, and streaks and splashes decorated the walls.
Gunshot? Linda whispered after taking off her face shield.
Knife, Linc grunted.
Who?
Dunno. He swept his weapon's light around the space, checking each square foot, before stepping into the room. Linda and Mark entered at his side.
It took ten tension-fraught minutes to confirm that everyone at the station was dead. There were thirteen bodies in total. All of them showed similar signs of a gruesome death. Most had been stabbed and lay in hardened lakes of blood. A couple showed blunt force trauma, as if someone had taken a baseball bat to them. One of them showed defensive breaks to the arms he had clearly put up a fight. The bones were splintered. Another looked like he'd been shot with a large-bore gun, though Linda had been assured that there were no firearms at the base. In fact there were none on the entire continent.
Someone's missing, Linda told them. Wilson/George had a winter staff of fourteen.
It's gotta be our killer, Mark said.
I'll go check the vehicle shed, Linc said. How many snowcats should there be?
Two, and two snowmobiles.
A few minutes later, Linda was searching through a desk drawer when Mark called out to her from another module. His voice made her jump. To say the research station and its grisly inhabitants gave her the creeps was putting it mildly. The hair on her arms had yet to stand down. She found him in one of the small crew's rooms, his light trained on more bloody smears on the wall. It took her a second to realize the lines weren't random. It was writing.
What does that mean?
Mark read it aloud, 'yMime Goering for crow Nicole.'
Was someone saying they were killed by Hermann G+|ring?
I don't think so, Mark said absently.
It doesn't make any sense. No one stationed here was named Nicole. I checked their roster.
Murph didn't reply. His lips moved silently as he read the bizarre sentence again and again.
What are you thinking? Linda asked, as the seconds dragged out to a minute.
Whose room was this?
I'm not sure. They looked around and found a book with Property of Andrew Gangle written on the flyleaf.
Who was he?
I think a tech. A grad student, if I recall.
He's also our killer, and confessed before he carried out the murders. He was also very sick.
No kidding. Hello? Thirteen slashed-up bodies. He was sick, all right.
I mean ill. He had aphasia.
What's that?
It's a speech disorder where the victim can't process language properly. It's usually caused by a stroke or brain injury, or it can progress as a result of a tumor, Parkinson's, or Alzheimer's.
And you're able to figure this out how?
There was a game I used to play with some neuroscience grad students back at MIT. We'd make up sentences as if we had aphasia and challenge the others to decipher them.
You didn't go on many dates, did you?
Mark ignored her jab. We usually had to give a clue, like a theme to the sentence, otherwise it would be impossible to work it out. The clue here was the killings, the murder, okay.
Sure, but what does 'yMime Goering for crow Nicole' have to do with murder?
What do you call a group of crows?
I don't know, a flock?
A murder, Mark said with a triumphant gleam. For someone who was always the smartest person in the room, he still enjoyed showing off his intellect. A group of crows is called a murder. In Gangle's brain, the two words 'ymurder' and 'ycrow' were synonymous.
So then we're looking for some Nazi other than G+|ring?
No. Aphasia doesn't work like that. The connections in the brain are messed up. It could be words that sound alike or words that describe objects that go together or words that reminded Gangle of something out of his past.
Oh, so Mime Goering sort of sounds like 'yI'm going.'
Exactly. 'yI'm going to murder.' Gangle wrote the word 'yI'm going for murder' instead of 'yto.' I'm thinking in his brain, two is half of four. Switch numbers with prepositions and you get 'yI'm going to murder' instead of 'yI'm going for murder'.
Okay, smart guy, what's up with Nicole?
Mark threw her a cocky grin. That was the easiest part of all. Nicole Kidman stared in a horror movie called The Others.
'yI'm going to kill the others,' Linda said, stringing together the complete translation. Wait, does aphasia make you go nuts?
Not usually. I think the underlying illness that caused his aphasia also caused him to turn against his crewmates.
Like what?
You'd have to ask Doc Huxley. I only know about the condition because of the word game I used to play.
There was a sudden sharp bang that made both of them jump.
Linda, Murph, we got company, Linc's baritone echoed throughout the entire base.
Both grabbed up their assault rifles from where they'd laid them on the bed and rushed out of Andy Gangle's disturbing bedroom. They met Linc in the rec hall.
What did you find?
Some weird stuff, but not now. There's a snowcat heading our way from the south. That's where the Argentines have their closest research base, right?
Yeah, Linda replied. Maybe thirty miles down the coast.
I saw it when I was on my way back. We've got less than a minute.
Everyone, outside.
No, Linda. There isn't enough cover. Concern etched Linc's face. They'd see us, no problem.
Okay, find a place to hide, and be quiet. Let's just hope they're doing a little recce and not planning on setting up housekeeping. If you're discovered, come out with guns blazing.
What if these are just scientists checking on the station? Mark asked. It was a reasonable question.
Then they would have shown up here a week ago like our government had asked. Now, go!
The trio split up. Linda returned to Andy Gangle's room. The ceiling was acoustical tile made of a cardboardlike material hanging from metal support tracks. As limber as a monkey, she hoisted herself onto a dresser and lifted one of the tiles with the barrel of her gun. There was a three-foot crawl space between the ceiling and the dome's insulated roof. She set her gun onto the ceiling and boosted herself up. Her heavy clothing made it an almost impossible job, but by twisting her hips and kicking her legs she managed to lever her upper body through the opening.
She heard the front door crash open and someone calling out in Spanish. To her ears, it sounded like shouted commands rather than inquiring hails.
She slithered her legs up into the crawl space and carefully set the thin tile back to its original position. There
