Bones of Ice Page 5

  ~~*~~

  Day Seventy-Four

  It took two days for Jade to figure out how to make a long-burning torch and assemble an even dozen of them to bring with her into the cave. On the third day, she approached the edge of the northern rockfield with one torch already burning, having paused to light it when the barren landscape first came into view between the trees.

  Holding the torch low and swinging it side to side, she advanced into the stony terrain. Movement through the rockfield was more like climbing than walking, and it was full of shadowy cracks and crevices that could hold anything, as well as sparse bushes and patches of long grass. Clear stone wasn’t safe either - Tad had walked right into his Ice badger while it was sunning on a rock, perfectly camouflaged by its mottled tan and gray fur.

  Jade couldn’t afford that sort of injury. Hopefully, keeping the torch ahead of her would discourage any of the animals she encountered from attacking, or at least disturb them enough to warn her before she was in easy range.

  A growl made her jump, and a small Ice badger leapt away from her torch. She hadn’t even seen it before it moved, but now it perched on a rock a couple of meters away, snarling at her.

  Jade shuffled closer, jabbing the torch at it. It was small, but nowhere near as small as she remembered the kittens being. Was it an older juvenile, or did this species just mature quickly?

  If the latter, the Ice badger she faced could be one of the kittens she had faced, maybe even the one that had bitten her. Would it stalk her when she went into the cave? Did it recognize her as the meal that got away?

  “You’re being ridiculous, Jade. Stop it!”

  The juvenile flinched at her words, then redoubled its snarling.

  “Don’t like the sound of my voice?” she asked, her perspective suddenly changing. Maybe it was afraid of her.

  “How about this?”

  She jabbed at it with the torch again, adding a breathless “Hah!” that came out higher-pitched than she intended. She swallowed and tried again, rewarded by an improvement in both volume and tone.

  The Ice badger turned tail and ran.

  Holding her breath, Jade resumed her steady advance. She hoped that she remembered the cave location as well as she thought she did. Survey work required a good sense of direction and personal geography, but she had not been in the best of shape on her way out. Nor had she explored this region during either of the surveys - after Tad’s accident, No Hazard had barred all of them from known Ice badger territory.

  Two more juveniles fled from her voice and torch before she spotted it - a wide cave mouth with the skeletal remains of a grazer lying scattered and cracked outside. The skull remained clearly recognizable, its horns nearly untouched by the creatures who had stripped flesh from bone.

  This was the place.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, crouching down to touch the skull with one finger. The grazer had saved her life, at the cost of its own. Of course, if she hadn’t spooked it into the full-grown Ice badger standing guard over the cave it would have died inside anyway, but she still felt guilty.

  At the mouth of the cave, she paused. It didn’t look like much, but she still hesitated to take that first step down into darkness. What if there was something in there, waiting to attack?

  More Ice badgers… Donly’s ghost… She stood at the edge and wavered, reason pushing her forward while fear held her back. Finally, she pulled one of the spare torches loose and lit it. She waited until she was sure the fire had caught, then threw the first torch into the darkness with as much force as she could muster.

  It bounced, spun, and fell to the ground just out of sight. The cave still seemed impossibly dark, though she could see the light of the torch flickering off stone. Nothing burst out through the opening, either to flee or to attack, and eventually she sighed and took the first cautious step.

  The floor of the cave rose in a slight ridge before sloping down, the stone smoothed by centuries of exposure to the elements - or perhaps by generations of Ice badger use. Jade was surprised to find that she had to duck to walk along. She didn’t remember the roof being so low when she escaped, but it was possible that she had crouched out of instinct then, or simply been too drained by her involuntary hibernation to stand tall enough for it to be a problem.

  Now, she walked in an awkward crouch, one hand held above her head to warn of sudden height changes while she swung the torch left and right with the other.

  The area closest to the world outside was clear of bones, or any other debris. Thinking back, she did remember the footing suddenly clearing enough for her to run, though she hadn’t made note of it at the time.

  Further down, the cave floor dipped, and the walls curved out into a large chamber. It was there that the first torch had fallen and now lay flickering in the midst of a grazer’s ribcage.

  The chamber was massive.

  The air held a damp chill, and there were bones everywhere. Jade let her breath out slowly between her teeth, realizing only then that she had been holding it. There was a faint smell that might have been rot, but it didn’t look like the Ice badger kittens had left much for microbes and insects to work on. That and the intervening weeks had transformed the abattoir of her imagining into something closer to the famous catacombs of Earth’s older cities. This cave was less ordered than those meticulously arranged assemblies of bones and skulls, but it gave her the same sensation of being watched.

  “I’m here to look for my friend,” she said out loud. “Not to disturb your rest.”

  Her voice echoed back, making her wince. With no one else to talk to, it had been easy to slip into the habit of talking to the world around her as she worked. When setting her deadfall traps, she admonished them to “stay there, and don’t fall until something takes the bait,” mainly because they so often fell as soon as she let go. She talked to her bait, and her meals, and her fire. Now, though, she wished she hadn’t said anything to the bones.

  It felt too much like they might be listening.

  And the sheer number of them was daunting. Last time she was here, she had no light to see by, nothing but touch and the distant glow of the sun shining outside the cave mouth to give her any sense of the shape of her surroundings.

  It had felt like it took forever to crawl her way over the bodies of grazers and who knew what else, seeking that distant light and the way out, but even then she didn’t think it had been more than five or six meters before she hit clear ground. She had assumed that the darkness and fear had made her overestimate the distance, but the chamber before her stretched out far enough that the back wall was lost in shadows.

  The size of the cave, and the number of animals that must have died here, took her breath away. She had been lucky, she realized now, that she had so many fellow victims. Their bodies had given her a relatively level surface to scramble across, compared to the tangled mess of bones that stretched before her now.

  “I would have broken an ankle for sure,” she said, looking around and wondering where to start. There was no human skull conveniently placed to catch her eye, and she was a little appalled to realize that a part of her had hoped for it. The sooner she found him, after all, the sooner she could leave.

  “Maybe he isn’t here,” she said uncertainly. His death seemed like the simplest explanation of the colonists’ continued absence, but she wouldn’t be here if she could be sure of it any other way. She couldn’t let herself get her hopes up, though.

  There was no sign to tell her where she had lain, which would have been her first choice for a starting place. Shifting the bones one by one would be thorough, but might take her months depending on how deep the cave went, and she needed to solidify her long-term plans soon.

  “Stupid,” she said after a minute, smacking her forehead. “It’s not just human bones you’re looking for - they couldn’t have eaten all of his gear. And this looks like several years of accumulation. If Donley is here, his clothes and belt pack should be in the top layer, as w
ell as his bones.”

  If they were, she could salvage the fabric and equipment to augment her own. If they weren’t, then she still had some hope of going home.

  Home… she would kill for a shawarma right now, or a noodle bowl from Jimmy’s, or even just a piece of cheese.

  Mouth watering, she took an image of the cave with her com, and then moved one careful step forward, easing her foot down to what she hoped was solid ground.

  “Remember the tacos at Albanada?” The remembered scents and flavors from her favorite taco place filled her senses, and the fear she had been struggling with faded a little.

  “Oh, and those little pastries Kitra had at her birthday party. I never did get around to asking where those came from.” She spent a moment remembering how perfectly they combined light, fluffy dough with a delicately flavored cream that she just couldn’t get enough of. She didn’t know what they were called, but they were the best dessert she had ever tasted. “Oh, yes. I’m definitely getting some of those to celebrate when I get back.”

  Jade opened her eyes and picked her way a few steps further in, setting her feet with a confidence she hadn’t felt a moment ago. “Never underestimate the power of food,” she said softly, looking around for the best path to take.

  The bones were piled deeper against the cave walls than in the middle, probably pushed there by the Ice badgers when they dragged in new prey. The rest of the cave floor was still strewn with remains, but she could see spots where the coverage seemed shallower, and tried to stick to those as she made her way further in.

  Every few steps, she took another image of her changing view of the cave and its bones, sticking to still images instead of video to save her com’s charge. A part of her wondered why she bothered at all, but she was still a surveyor and this was data. Whether it would be useful was something that could be worked out later, but as long as she was here, she might as well record it.

  She moved forward slowly, holding her breath every time she spotted an especially dark shadow or a suspiciously rounded skull. After a while, she grew dizzy - there were a lot of shadows, and a lot of animal skulls. In addition to the grazers that made up the bulk of the skeletons, she found lapins, forest pigs, and even the remains of a wolverine. It appeared that the Ice badgers weren’t picky about what they stored for the winter.

  Instead of Donley’s matte-black all weather coat, though, every shadow she investigated more closely revealed only animal bones and more shadows, and every skull she picked up was easily identifiable as something not human. The torch she had left lying on the ground burned out, and she lit another one, wedging the older torch upright between two sets of shoulder blades to give more light as she moved on.

  It took a long time to reach the back.

  She could see that the cave itself continued on, but the way was thoroughly blocked with old bones. It looked to her like these bones had been pushed into place with intent, rather than just swept up like the piles lining the walls. And up at the top of the wall of bones, built into it, was a nest. The construction didn’t look like anything a human would have made, so she could only assume that the Ice badgers had done it.

  “Like birds, only more gruesome,” she said to a nearby skull.

  The nest was lined with matted plant matter and fur, and Jade took several close-up images, hoping she’d be able to identify the sources later. She thought the fur had to have been pulled from the hides of the grazers, since there was enough of it lining the nest to bare an entire Ice badger down to its skin. The size of the nest also surprised her, and she wondered if it might be intended for multiple adults and their young.

  The remote footage from the summer survey hadn’t shown the Ice badgers to be social animals, but their hunting activities changed with the onset of winter. Perhaps other behaviors did too.

  Again, she wondered about the Ice badgers’ strange adaptations. “One adult outside, and kittens inside, eating. Or were there adults inside too, and I was just lucky enough to miss them? And do they hibernate along with their prey, or eat a little bit at a time all through the winter?”

  It wasn't just idle speculation. If they truly hibernated, then they wouldn't be out hunting her while she was trying to survive the winter.

  She took more pictures, and then turned back, taking a different path on her way out so that she could be sure she had checked everywhere. Now that she was looking for it, she noticed the uniformity of the teeth marks on the bones. Not all the same, exactly, but certainly all small. Kitten-sized.

  “Why wouldn’t the adults just nurse them like normal mammals?” It had to have something to do with Ice’s harsh winters, but finding out what would take someone with more time, training, and access to the Ice badgers themselves than she wanted to have.

  The chamber was littered with dead torches by the time she reached clear stone again. She had been careful to investigate every questionable shadow, and take a comprehensive set of images, and she was sure now that Donley had never been there.

  “So, certainty. That’s what I wanted, wasn’t it?” It was, but… Now there was no running away. She had to stay, and hope she was clever enough and lucky enough to survive another winter. Unfortunately, right now she wasn’t feeling either clever or lucky.

  “Shouldn’t I be happier? Donly’s alive, and I still have a chance to go home. Just a little later than I was thinking.” The depression didn’t lift, and if anything, felt heavier. She sighed, and started walking again. “Maybe it’s just that I’m tired.”

  It had certainly been a long day. Jade climbed out of the cave into twilight and the unpleasant realization that it was even later than she thought. The sun was going down, and she was a good hour’s hike away from her shelter in daylight, across rocks and through trees.

  She shivered, though the breeze blowing across the rockfield was still warm with the heat of the day. How many Ice badgers were lying in wait out there, waiting for her to stumble across them? Or moving through the growing darkness, hunting for a human-sized meal?

  “Nonsense,” she said, and the word felt too loud.

  “All right… cotton candy. Mom’s chili. Apple-bacon fudge.” Maybe because the potential danger was more real, or because she was more tired, her food strategy didn’t help at all this time.

  Jade took a deep breath and plotted out her course towards the trees. She lit her last unburned torch from the previous one, and stepped out briskly, one torch in each hand.

  A snarl made her jump and turn to face the source of the threat. Well out of range of her torches, a mature Ice badger snarled at her again, baring intimidatingly large teeth.

  While she still stood frozen, it overturned a stone, licking something away from the underside. Jade edged away, relieved to see it move in the other direction and turn over another stone, although it kept a wary eye on her.

  She moved faster now, trusting to her torches and the Ice badgers’ own activity to keep her safe in the dying light.

  Once she reached the forest, she breathed a sigh of relief. Coyfoxes and wolverines weren’t big enough to be a real threat, and until the grazers came through in the fall, there were no large herbivores to steer clear of either.

  Jade started through the trees, wondering idly about the grazers. Where did they come from, and go to? Did they pass through the area again in the early spring, going the other way?

  “More importantly, can I use them to build up my food stores, the way the Ice badgers do? I don’t think any of my snares would work on something that big, but maybe a pit trap. Or I could try making a weapon of some sort to hunt with, as long as I can keep my distance from those antlers.”

  How much food would she need to make it through the winter? And even if she did catch some grazers, how could she preserve the meat with no freezer or salt? Would her com have any more information on primitive food preservation than it did on building torches? What about directions for building a permanent shelter by hand?

  She doubted it, and he
r steps slowed as despair welled up in her mind.

  “Come on, Jade, you’re just tired. If I make it home, I swear I’ll treat myself to a whole kilo of apple-bacon fudge, all right?”

  She tried to imagine it, and was rewarded with a faint sensory memory of biting into the Savory Sweets specialty, one that grew more intense as she focused. “Better.”

  Walking through the forest, she tried to keep her spirits up, but fatigue and depression made it difficult. There was so much to do, and she didn’t even know what she didn’t know yet. There were sure to be challenges she couldn’t even imagine, standing between her and home, but that didn’t stop her imagination from going wild.

  Night closed in around her, and the dancing light of her torches created more confusion than clarity. She kept freezing and spinning in place, driven by a visceral dread that whispered to her hindbrain that she was being stalked by something just out of sight.

  Movement caught the corners of her eyes, and branches cracked in the darkness beyond her small circle of light. Bright flashes in the dark might have been her firelight reflecting off of wild eyes, or just figments of her imagination.

  She couldn’t tell and increasingly didn’t care. All she wanted was to get back to the safety of her shelter. It might not be enough to get her through the winter, but it would be better than blundering through the woods in the dark.

  Her torches felt like more of a hindrance than a blessing. The shifting shadows played tricks on her eyes, making her trip on hidden roots and branches, and jump over obstacles that weren’t really there. But if she put them out she would have to wait, sightless and vulnerable, until her eyes adjusted to the dark. If she lived that long.

  Who knows, the fearful part of her mind whispered, what we might have missed before. You hear about it all the time, the things that colonists run into that Survey never warned them of. With only two weeks in the summer, and five days in the fall, who knows what predators might have been hiding, watching. Watching me right now!

  Jade spun again, tripping over a branch and nearly falling.

  There was nothing there but shadows.

  She pushed on, using the foods she longed for as a crumbling shield against fatigue and fear, and the light of her torches to keep the lurking darkness at bay.

  The older torch sputtered and died, and she left it behind, pushing herself to go faster. She had to reach her shelter before the final torch went out!

  With one hand free, the going was a little easier, although the underbrush still caught at her legs, and her ankle turned painfully when a rotten branch disintegrated underfoot. Her breath came quicker, reflecting the panic that she was just barely managing to suppress. “Keep going,” she chanted to herself. “Just keep going.” She kept going, and picked up the pace.

  Her half-walk, half-jog through the forest made the light and shadows jerk and flash more than ever. For a time, she thought dropping down to one torch had made it easier to see, the light and shadows less confusing, but the faster she went the more disconnected the motion around her seemed.

  The torch grew louder too, the crackling of the burning pitch echoing oddly off the trees as she passed. Not only that, but she kept hearing rustlings and snaps from just out of sight, of animals moving through the forest.

  She tried to ignore it and just keep moving, but then an especially loud rush of pops and cracks made her whirl around again, to face whatever was chasing her.

  Nothing.

  Light played through the trees back the way she had come, but there was no Ice badger, no saber tooth tiger, nor any of the other predators her fears had populated the night with. Peering intently into the shadowed forest, she jumped away from a shape barreling towards her, but it kept going, disappearing into the trees beyond. It had been moving too fast for her to identify it, but by the size it was probably a small forest pig. Nothing for her to fear.

  Then she realized what was wrong - there was firelight flickering through the trees. “Idiot!” she spat, remembering her own carelessly discarded torch.

  Get to the river!

  She ran flat-out, twisted ankles be damned. Her mind was a blank, every neuron dedicated to running without falling, without colliding into any trees, without stumbling over any of the animals that now surged past her, all fleeing the wildfire. Trees flashed by, and somehow she kept hold of her live torch. The last thing she needed was to throw it away and start another fire even closer behind her.

  The smooth stone of the portal site flew beneath her feet and she dashed through her campsite, pausing only long enough to grab the sack of survey tools before dashing on to the river.

  She didn’t bother running downstream to her usual fishing and bathing spot, instead slithering down the steep rocks to drop neck-deep into cold, fast-flowing water. Shivers racked her body, and the current pulled her downstream, but she kicked off the bottom and did her best to swim for the other side.

  Wildlife bumped up against her and swam on, unconcerned with the human in their midst when there was a forest fire behind them. She went under, then surfaced again, struggling to keep her head above water while keeping her grip on the bag of irreplaceable survey instruments.

  A handheld chemical analyzer was the first to slip through the loose weave of the bag, and she submerged again while trying to catch it. Maybe because of her thrashing, or maybe just because the bag was too crudely made, all the rest followed in quick succession. The EMS sensor, remote link, and half a dozen different sampling devices, including the one she had used to bend her precious fishhook into shape. All gone.

  Duty sent her diving after the lost tools - once, twice. She found nothing but rocks and mud. She surfaced for breath, but something large, furry, and wet clawed its way over her shoulders and head, forcing her under again as it pushed off for the far shore.

  Gasping and choking, she gave up on the lost instruments, and made her way after it, dragging herself up onto the rocky shore and ignoring the animals passing by on either side while she coughed. As her breathing cleared, she started to smile, and then to laugh.

  “Winter?” She laughed, coughed, laughed again. “I just outran a forest fire. I think I can figure out how to deal with the winter.”

  Once her breathing eased, and her giggles subsided, she sat up and turned to watch the fire.

  “My fire…”

  She felt guilty, but in her time on Ice, it hadn’t once crossed her’s mind to worry about the danger fire could pose. When she found the sparker in her pack’s embedded survival kit, she had recognized fire as a source of warmth, cooked food, safely boiled water. Protection from wild animals. She had never bothered to think through why wild animals shied away from fire.

  Now, Jade watched the flames raging through the trees lining the other side of the river, and was reassured to see nothing but smoke and shadows at crown level. The fire would clear out the underbrush, destroy her shelter, and all her snares and traps, but the forest would recover, probably within a season.

  Enumerating the things she was losing to the fire also forced her to realize how much she had achieved in just two months - building a shelter, learning to trap and fish, teaching herself to spin and weave, and creating long-burning torches with no guidance but her own need. Surely, given a few more months, she could research, or discover through experimentation, everything she needed to prepare for the winter.

  She hugged her knees, already planning, and settled in to watch the fire burn itself out.

  ~~*~~

  More by this Author

  Science Fiction by A. L. Strezze

  On Ice

  An interplanetary surveyor wakes up in a cave, on an uninhabited planet, to the sound of purring... and screams of agony.

  Can Jade survive long enough to find out what went wrong?

  Bones of Ice

  Stranded on an uninhabited planet, Jade's only hope is to survive long enough for colonists to arrive and send her home. But what if they're not coming?

  Sh
ort Story Collections by Anthea Strezze

  The Trouble With Wishes

  Everyone wishes sometimes - for things to be different, or easier, or better. But when a wish is granted, can you ever get what you really want?

  Five short stories about wishes granted - or not - to amuse a being of power rather than to fulfill the wisher's desire.

  Refuge: Tales From a Zombie Apocalypse

  If the dead started to rise and attack the living, would you go running around with a shotgun, blowing off undead heads? Or would you just try to get on with life, as best you can?

  Seven short stories about normal people living in extraordinary times - without the action-movie clichés.

  Zombie Variations

  Zombies - ravening, mindless monsters? Or just misunderstood?

  Three short stories from the zombie's point of view, and three very different types of zombies.

  Transformations

  If it meant destroying who you are now, could you take the leap of faith, to find out who you might become?

  Includes "Changing Course" and "Final Words."

  ~~*~~

  About the Author

  A. L. Strezze loves the sense of discovery and wonder that science fiction provides, and strives to bring that sense to life in her stories. She lives in New England with her husband and cat, and maintains a blog at https://AntheaStrezze.com/blog.