Randy snatched up Cruparkins garments, then grabbed for the carrying handle of the tape player atop the locker. Swinging it with all her strength she smashed out the heavy thermaplane of the bunkhouse window. Mess table chairs crashed to the floor. Randy threw the shirts over the bottom edge of the window frame as protection from the glass shards and rolled through to the outside. Behind her, the door to the women’s quarters tore open. She felt the blowing ice spicules stab at her face, and the explosion of outside cold. It all depended on that cold now. If the snow crust had frozen solidly enough in the night to support her weight, she’d live. If she broke through and bogged down in a drift, she’d die.
Scrambling to her feet and clutching the shirts to her, she ran for the safety of the darkness. She heard enraged shouting and started to weave and sidestep as she ran. Her flashlight beam stabbed after her, and someone emptied a handgun out of the window. Bullet strikes sprayed snow around her feet. Pray that no one in there had grabbed a submachine gun. The toe of her boot broke through the snow crust and for a hideous moment, she stumbled. Then she caught herself, and ran on.
Out of the light’s reach, she veered sharply to her left. An Agram SMG started its angry typewriter chatter, but the gunner was firing blind, wildly spraying the night. Randy diverted laterally again, heading away from the camp. The cabin lights fading rapidly to indistinction in the swirl of the snow. She was clear. She paused panting, and struggled with the stolen shirts, untangling them, shaking out the glass shards, and trying them on, augmenting her ski outfit. Already, she was feeling the bite of the cold. They weren’t going to be enough protection out here tonight. Not nearly enough. She ripped the tail off the flannel shirt and bound it over her face as an ad hoc snow mask and drew her already aching hands up into the overlong sleeves of the shirts.
She looked around in the bleak near pitch-blackness. The wind would be her compass. She would move north and try to join up with John and Valentina. Randy’s one course of action, her one chance, was to keep moving and somehow find the others. She would work on the premise that they had come down from the crash site to find Wednesday island station occupied. Given that, she would further presume that divert and go to cover on the island’s central ridge where they could both find shelter and keep the camp under observation.
Knowing John, he’d try to work in close during the night, to try to establish the identity of the landing force and learn what had happened to her and Traubridge. The odds were not good. If her teammates hadn’t come down from the crash site, or if she couldn’t find them, then she’d die before morning. But the death out here looked cleaner and more defiant than the death back there. Hugging herself to conserve body warmth, Randy began her stumbling trudge through the growing blizzard.
The Arctic Event by James Cobb
