whalers’ fears and discover the cause of the eerie pyrotechnics, Karl led a group of sailors away from the harbor’s ramshackle wooden buildings and onto the glacial ice that covered the fifty-square-mile island.
On a vast frozen plain, they recovered a large, metallic object shaped like a coffin built for a giant. The object was embedded in the ice in the middle of a huge crater. Its silvery surface was smooth and bullet-shaped, with no visible joints or openings. There were markings etched into the metal—a strange, alien scrimshaw no whaler in the party could read or even recognize. Though the metal coffin appeared to be hollow, no one could figure out how to open it, or what was inside.
Karl Johanssen thought it best to leave the thing where it lay, but in this one instance the skipper overruled him. Captain Nyberg was eager to find another way to make the voyage profitable, so he ordered the sailors to load the object onto a sledge and use a dog team to drag it back to camp. It took five men and fifteen dogs a full day to fulfill the captain’s wishes, but when they were finished, the shining metal coffin was stored in the warehouse, among the barrels of whale oil waiting to be loaded into the ship’s hold. In just a few weeks, moderate temperatures would slowly free the
But hours after the object was brought into their camp, Karl was jolted out of his narrow sleeping bunk by the sound of screams. Yanking on boots but leaving his coat, Karl dashed across the icy street to the warehouse. The doors were ajar, and one of them had been torn off its hinges. In the center of the room Karl found four dead men —more than dead, they were ripped apart, and their heads and spinal columns had been severed and removed. More ominous, the strange coffinlike object was now wide open and empty, and inside the drafty warehouse, mingled with the smell of freshly spilled blood, was a dank, reptilian stench.
Back outside, and shivering on the street, Karl discovered mammoth, bloody footprints leading out of the warehouse and across the street. The crimson spoor formed a path right up to the rough wooden building where the sailors bunked. There, at the door, he saw a ghostly shape shimmering in the frigid air. Before he could shout a warning, Karl watched some invisible force smash down the door and surge into the sailors’ quarters. He heard cries of surprise and panic—then fear and agony—from inside the building. There was a single shot, then a severed human hand flew through the door, still clutching a small pistol.
Finally, Karl watched as a sailor flew toward the window, his nightshirt bloody, his face a mask of terror. The man’s eyes met Karl’s for a split second before a silver blur slashed across his naked throat. Then bright red arterial blood coated the glass, and Karl could see no more.
Choking down his panic, Karl ran back to the warehouse and searched for a weapon—anything to defend himself. Finding none, he sought escape instead. Karl knew it was certain death to go outside without protection from the elements, but when he tried to remove the coats from the dead men, he found them torn and soaked with blood—blood that would freeze in an instant. Finally, Karl wrapped himself in a dirty canvas tarpaulin and stumbled out the back door, slipping down an icy slope that led to the whalebone-littered beach. There, among the skeletons of sperm, minke and blues, he hoped to find shelter enough to protect him until whatever it was that had emerged from that silver coffin returned to the hell from which it had come.
A tremor under the ice woke Karl Johanssen from a dreamless sleep. With the perpetual twilight sky above, he could not know how long he’d been unconscious. But the canvas that covered him glistened with ice, and his limbs refused to respond to his brain’s commands. More ominous, Karl could not even feel the cold that had seeped into him while he’d been unconscious. Instead, it almost seemed as if a languorous cocoon of warmth enveloped him—a sure sign that he was freezing to death.
It took all of his willpower, but Karl forced himself to stand. Without a proper coat, even the heavy canvas was not enough covering to retain his body heat. A fire might save him, but he dared not risk attracting the invisible demon that had slaughtered the camp. And anyway, he had nothing to burn. Karl knew from experience that if he did not find warmth in less than an hour, he would be dead. He could never cross the frozen bay and make it to the ship in that time. Which meant he had to return to the camp and hope that the thing that had murdered his crew was gone.
With leaden footsteps Karl crossed the field of bones. Shards of shattered whale ivory clattered under his feet with each step. Finally, he reached the icy slope that led to the camp. With raw, blue-veined arms and black fingers swollen to the size of sausages, Karl hauled himself out of the boneyard. He crawled across the snow, rising only when he reached the cover of the buildings.
Cautiously approaching the greenhouse, where he hoped to find food and warmth, Karl discovered a scene of carnage. First he noticed that most of the windows were broken, the paltry array of herbs and vegetables frozen solid. Then he spied a bloody handprint frozen on a pane of glass. Finally he saw the near-frozen body of a whaler. The man lay in the middle of the greenhouse floor, among shards of shattered glass. Like the corpses Karl had found in the warehouse, this man’s head and spine were missing.
Turning, Karl moved down a narrow alley between two structures. At the end of the corridor, he tripped over a sledge and tumbled into a pile of dog harnesses.
Snarling jaws snapped at his face, and Karl jumped backwards. The mad dog’s tether went taut just before the creature’s fangs closed on his throat. Eyes black and terrified, the dog howled and pulled at its leash.
Karl got to his feet and staggered to the mess hall. His shoulder hit the door, and it flew open with a slam. Inside a fire still burned in the hearth, oil lamps glowed, and simmering pots steamed and boiled over on the cast- iron stove. The long tables were set for a meal, but the mess was empty—hastily abandoned, by the look of things. Turning, Karl slammed the door and lurched into a table.
He was ready to slump into a rough wooden chair when he heard movement behind him. Whirling, Karl thought he saw a black shape moving across the mess hall. Cautiously, he squinted into the shadows.
With a snarling hiss, something emerged. Karl saw the slavering jaws and the eyeless head and reeled backwards, tripping over a bench. Whimpering, he watched the black nightmare stalk him, long tail swishing back and forth like that of an angry cat.
Karl crawled backwards, his eyes locked on the evil thing. Finally, his back struck a seemingly immovable object. Turning slowly, Karl looked up to find another demon towering over him. Humanlike but not human, the creature was clad in armor from head to toe, its face covered by a metal mask. With a quick backhand, the humanoid monster threw the human aside.
Crashing into the tables, Karl felt his rib cage and the bones in his frostbitten arm shatter. Moaning with agony and the certainty of death, he crawled into a corner, where he lay forgotten as the twin horrors began to tear one another apart, piece by bloody piece.
CHAPTER 2
Whistling tunelessly, Francis “Fin” Ullbeck tipped his Boston Red Sox cap to the bored guard, then whisked his access card through the magstripe reader, punched in his code, and waited for clearance. When the security doors hissed, then yawned, Fin squeezed his considerable bulk through the opening and sauntered along the climate-controlled tunnel.
On the other side of the wide, tinted windows that lined this concrete tube, the high desert of New Mexico shimmered under the ruthless assault of the afternoon sun. A forest of radar dishes stretched for miles across the sandy plains and red-brown hills, their faces tilted toward the heavens. Out there on the desert floor, temperatures topped out at 106 degrees with near zero-percent humidity. But on this side of the glass and concrete, the temperature was a cool and constant 72 degrees.
Fin grinned when he spied a gangly, long-limbed man approaching from the opposite direction.
“Headley, my man. Leaving so soon? Do that and you’ll miss the maestro in action.”
“Shift’s over,” Ronald Headley replied dully.
Unlike Fin, whose skull appeared rather small on his short, rotund body, Headley’s defining feature on his flagpole form was his oversized cranium—an ironic trait, considering his name. Consequently, Headley was the only technician working in the Telemetry and Data Monitoring Center who didn’t have a nickname. In everyone’s opinion,
