The Abdominal Snowman

Sounds came close and snapped Chastity back to the situation at hand. She leaned back into the deep, slanted shadows below the mess hall window as the coordinated clomp clomp of disciplined footfalls moved closer through the hollow spaces between the tents and hastily erected buildings.

Chastity leaned close to the wall and listened. The tense silence that lingered after the earlier exchanges between Pauline, Amanda, and Doug was broken by the strained whine of hinges pushed beyond acceptable angles, and the crack of the mess hall doors swinging inward and clapping the frame. Caleb's voice, loud and harsh, and amplified by the machismo of a raised weapon, screamed: "Down! Down! Down!"

Chastity gripped the machete hilt tight and pushed. The tip slid through the thin layer of fabric that separated her from the growing confusion. The sound of fabric separating was buried under Pauline's piqued exclamations, "Caleb!? What the hell is this?"

Caleb's body stayed taut and he lowered the barrel of his rifle only slightly. "You called—said the yeti were attacking—said to come immediately."

"I didn't call for—" Her words were interrupted by the metal-on-metal clang of canisters hitting the alloy floor near the far wall.

Chastity stood and tapped the window. Pauline's baffled gaze rose from the clouds of gas billowing from the canisters in time to see the grin spreading across Chastity's face. Chastity blew a tiny kiss and mouthed sleep well as the older woman's face went slack and she and her compatriots fell to the floor.

"Subtle but still with the trademark deviousness I expect of you, Alex. I'm proud."

A voice came from the comm-cuff—not Alex's own, but an exact reproduction of Pauline's, "Devious is what I do best."

"We've got to get to the cave and make the yeti understand what Pauline is going to do."

"The motor pool awaits."

*

Allie held her breath and listened for the scrape of claw on stone or the grind of gravel and grit underfoot in the dark. It was easier now that she was deeper, insulated away from the icy winds that were a ceaseless howl at the cave's entrance. There had been no tell-tell sound of movement from any other living thing for a while, not since she had slipped through the main cave and into the uncomfortably narrow crooks of the secondary cave system. Reassured that there were no sounds beyond the thumping echo of her pulse in her ears, she relaxed against the rock wall and flipped on her emergency lamp. The glow of the pale light dimmed each time she lit it. Even on the lowest setting it wouldn't last.

Allie cursed Doug under her breath and pulled the map he had given her from the pocket of her tactical vest. They had moved too fast. We're moving up the timetable, he had said. Eastburn is being overly cautious, he had said. We can increase our profit margin, he had said.

Fuck him and his profit margin, Allie now grumbled silently. The knockout gas Doug was counting on didn't work and she was the one who paid the price. A glove tossed down a side tunnel to throw her hunters off the trail. Her radio down another, because these things had amazing hearing, and there was no way to stop Amanda from overriding the mute function and sending out a constant barrage of staticky cries for Allie to answer. If she had kept it they would have caught her the first day. Her backpack of supplies—her food and water and backup batteries and pistol—they were the real loss, now at the bottom of a crevice that had opened with the melting Antarctic ice. Fuck him and his profit margin hard, she thought again. He was safe at camp and she was drinking her own piss and scratching lichen patches from the cave walls and licking the frilled, flaky specks from beneath her ragged nails to survive.

The lamp gave a warning flicker. Allie didn't have time to waste on Doug; she turned her full attention to the map and traced her finger along the drawn passages and rested her finger on her likely location—likely location, if she managed to stay on track for the past three, or could it be four days. She was close, so close she told herself over and over, and her only option was to go on. Once she got to the deep cavern, she would worry about getting back out.

"One step at a time, you bad bitch," she said to herself. "One step at a time."

She flicked off the light and slipped it into one of her many pockets, then stretched out her hands to the rough cave walls, and felt her way forward. Earlier she had tried counting steps, then seconds, but she had given up on both. Counting made her more miserable and she finally wrote it off as a waste of mental energy.

And she didn't have any extra to spare at this point.

Long minutes—or maybe long hours, because time ticked at an unknowable pace in the unending night of the deep cave system—moved by, and Allie let her mind sink into the internal darkness in her head. It was a place she went often over the past days—to that quiet, safe place where she didn't have to contemplate the likely conclusion to this idiotic errand.

Something, a tickle at the edge of her emotional autopilot, pulled Allie back to herself. The air was different—a sweet and subtle shift away from the stale rock-and-earth smell she had filled every breath for days.

And heat. A soft ripple of warmth carried on a barely noticed current brushed the exposed skin of her cheeks.

Her heart raced as the new sensations strengthened to the point she knew they weren't hallucinations. The soft brush of warmth and humidity against her scuffed fingers and face. A smell, a mix of almonds and cinnamon and something she could only describe as otherworldly. She inhaled deep to take it in. Light? Light! Ahead, Allie was sure she saw the faint glisten of reflected light on damp stone—not the unreal sparkles and shimmers that her mind had generated in complete darkness to fill the void. This light was steady on stone. Pale. Blue. Real.

Allie coughed out a dry laugh and wiped at the rock dust on her cheek where a tear might have slid down if her body hadn't been holding onto every drop of fluid for more vital functions. She stepped faster down the last of the tunnel's convolutions and smiled as the last turn revealed source of the luminescent glow.

A grotto stretched out before her like a great, surreal cathedral, but instead of piers and carved limestone arches, the deep space was filled with grand stalactites descending at a tectonically slow pace toward the lake that filled the broad basin of the cavern floor. Allie took a wary step forward, remembering the second-hand briefing that Doug had given her. She hadn't been included in the hours of briefings that Pauline had with Doug about the geography of the mountain and the cave system detailed on an antique map that he had slipped her a copy of. Only, on the supplementary geological documents that Doug showed her, some caves were labeled as lava tubes. What Allie had made her precarious way to was, in truth, the empty magma chamber of a dead volcano. Or, she thought, a mostly dead volcano if the warmth in the chamber was any indication. Somewhere beneath her, something was heating the rock to something above freezing.

Allie considered the unknown thickness of the cave floor beneath her and the possibility of it collapsing and dropping her into a pool of molten rock. "It couldn't be any worse than the past week," she said to herself. She tapped the rock floor with the toe of her boot and walked carefully around the edge of the underwater lake.

Hazy light rose through the still surface of the water. While it was predominantly blue, there were other hues that seemed to stretch beyond the normal spectrum of her vision. She blinked away the ache building in her eyes and focused on the shallows, where the color was less intense. In those shallows she saw smaller sources of light, chips of a glowing, crystalline mineral. Doug had been less than specific about the goal, other than saying, "You'll know it when you see it." Allie expected that even Doug didn't know for sure. She had caught him trying to hack the retrieval robot's AI system, and saw through his faked confidence when he talked around the description.

The item Doug sent her in blind to collect so they could gather enough to sell to black market buyers. She knelt and slid her fingers through the water's surface, then hesitated before touching a thumbnail-sized chunk. It glowed. Was it radioactive? Her mind raced around the little she knew about radioactive materials. Allie expected some past teacher had discussed mutagenic and morphogenic fields, Allie had spent those classes dreaming of head-busting in the military Special Forces.

She clicked her teeth, resigned, and picked it up. Either she was going to make it out of this and get medical attention, or she would die alone in a glowing puddle a mile beneath the Antarctic ice. The crystal was cool to the touch. She had expected whatever process created the light to generate some warmth. Was cool a good sign? She decided not to worry and rolled it between her fingers. Its drowsy glow crawled like a heavy vapor beneath the facets. What was special about it? A lot, she presumed, considering the price Eastburn and McMurtey were paying. And if the Think Tank is willing to pay, the black market will too, Allie told herself as she waded into the water to collect as many crystals as she could. The water lapped at her knees as she rummaged and picked through the submerged pockets of igneous pebbles for her treasures, and after pocketing the last crystal that she could fit in her pocket she lifted a hand from the water and studied the drops that gathered on her fingertips. She brought them to her mouth and touched a drop to her tongue. It had a mineral tang to it, but didn't taste polluted or stagnant. Allie cupped more in her hands and brought it to her mouth. She looked at the water for long moments, unsure. Any sense of caution evaporated as her hindbrain took control and forced her to drink to replenish her depleted stores. Her muscles trembled as she dug her hands, again and again, into the water and gulped until her stomach hurt. She ignored the splashes and ripples moved across the water's surface and reflected back, somehow stronger, from the lake's unseen edges.

With her thirst satiated, Allie leaned back and lowered herself below the surface of the lake, stretching out and letting the refreshing warmth of the subterranean water flow over her. Rock dust washed off of her and floated out into the water like a gritty halo as she combed her fingers through her short-cut hair. She felt weightless as the water supported her. Overworked muscles unknotted and relaxed.

It had been too long since Allie had enjoyed a bath, and she desperately needed to feel clean. The last three days were days of dirt, dust, and rock, and before that the base camp only had a shower that sputtered out marginally warm water. She ran a fingertip along the curve of her neck to the soft hollow nestled between the collarbones where she fumbled with, and finally undid her collar's button. She moved to undo the next when a swell of water lifted and dipped her briefly. Allie took in and held a deep, nervous breath. Had the floor given way? What else could cause that level of disturbance in such a large body of water? She rolled over and fought to make her way back to the safety of the lake's edge before the lake could spin into a whirlpool that would drag her into some deeper, hellishly hot subterranean death trap. She dug the toes of her shoes into the lakebed and kicked off toward dry land. The water was too shallow to swim in, so Allie kicked and clawed at the lakebed to move forward. Wisps of red went ignored as they bloomed in the water, rising from slashes that the sharp edged stones opened in Allie's palms.

Another surge rushed around Allie and she became aware of a presence in the water. It wasn't the cavern floor that gave way—something large—something hidden—moved under the water's surface. She felt the horror of it as her hand sank into something viscous and pliable instead of hard-edged stone.

Allie pulled but the thing pulled back. The force of the opposing tension cost her her footing and she plunged into the water. Muscles tightened as she struggled to free herself from the unexpected encounter, but the thing resisted and reshaped itself, twisting into tentacles that whipped around her fingers and wrist. Under the water she could see her coming death clearly. A gelatinous globule oozed in languid eddies from a fissure in the basin's floor and extruded more tentacles that clambered higher on her wrist and forearm. It was unlike any life form she had ever seen. It was translucent and a sickly grey, and her skin felt hyper-sensual where it touched. She trembled from the sensation overload from the brush of each alien coil over the individual ridges on her fingers and palm—felt the bend of each of the fine hairs on her forearm and the pressure from smaller tendrils exploring the cuts in her hands. It filled her like the waves of a coming orgasm.

Allie's fear faded away and a tranquil warmth spread deep within her. Her eyes flickered and closed and her muscles went slack again. She found herself wanting to give in and let the thing continue its climb, where tentacles, like tongues, could sweep across the contours of her body—to cup her breasts and stroke each in turn, then plunge lower to the darker, deeper spaces between her thighs.

Her lips parted in a gasp and the sudden, wet choke of water stole what was left of her breath. The shock of it returned her to the reality of the situation. What the fuck was she doing? Was this thing filling her with some toxin or venom as it crawled on her skin, flooding her with some hormone that would lull her into submission while it ate her little by little?

Allie groped with her free hand and seized a sharp-edged chunk of granite. She felt no pain as the jagged edges shredded her fingertips as she squeezed, and slammed it into the alien form that had ensnared her. It gripped tighter after the first strike of the rock, threatening to crush her wrist bones, but Allie had hit her mark; a mix of protoplasm and her blood gushed. Allie raised the stone and smashed at it again, then sawed at the thing with the rough edges. The tentacles didn't go entirely lax, but they loosened just enough. Allie heaved forward with the all the strength she had left and ripped free. She hauled herself up and away, kicking water high as she navigated the shallows and made her way onto the dry ledge of rock around the lake. She glanced at her left hand as she ran. The skin was raw and gouged. It looked as if rows of barbed, chitinous teeth had sliced away the epidermis. It would scar badly; she didn't care.

Covering it all was the smoky grey gloss of the thing's spilled sludge.

The surface of the lake erupted and water spattered all around. An angry, whistling drowned out the sound of Allie's shocked scream.

Allie didn't turn. She didn't pause. She didn't look to see what rose from the depths.

She just ran. Back into the dark—back into the labyrinth, towards any tunnel that would get her away from this horror.

*

Chastity coasted the snowmobile to a stop and killed the engine, but left the wide beam of the headlight shining through the darkness. She didn't want to sneak in—she wanted the yeti to know she was here. She rose from the seat and stepped off to consider what was before her. The mountain rose from the ice and snow, a basalt colossus, up through the layer of hazy clouds that concealed the night sky. It was a beautifully silent moment, except for Alex.

"Fuck, that's big."

"It's a mountain. It's supposed to be big," Chastity said. "You need to get out of the city and see more of the world now that you're mobile."

"Maybe, but you're wrong. It's not a mountain. It's a volcano."

"Seriously?"

"To your left, two-hundred feet up: a parasitic cone—likely the alternate entrance Allie Murdock entered. Another larger one is on the northern face if you'd like to hike to it. And there, at the cave entrance columnar basalt formations—formed from cooling lava.

"How do you know all of this?"

"You didn't expect me to come into this blind, did you? Jumping into a situation without a clue, then asking questions later is your thing. My clone program is feeding me data from the camp's computer system, and we've co-opted the surveillance drones that Pauline has monitoring the cave entrance."

Chastity raised the military goggles she appropriated from the armory to her eyes and tapped a button on the side. The world brightened and the hard edges of the mountain and cave were outlined. Alex was right. She had seen similar columns in Ireland when Brinkley took her on a vacation to the Giant's Causeway. It was their last trip before she was infected and he died.

"The thermal view shows an increased in temperature in the cave, Alex. Is this thing active?"

"Possibly. The expedition records are vague on that, but there's evidence that suggests the presence of magma pockets. There hasn't been a recorded eruption in over two thousand years and the area seems tectonically stable, so I'm going to assume you won't die a horrible, blood-boiling death while we're here."

"Reassuring," Chastity said. "We need to get back on track and warn the yeti. Can you see any of them with your drones? We need to make contact ASAP."

"Of course I can see them. They're all around us. And I wouldn't worry, the one charging from the rear is about to make contact."

In the second it took Chastity to spin around, it was on her. She saw a blurred snarl and teeth. A wooly, muscled arm rose against the night sky. Fingers tightened into a fist. Pain shot through her head. The world turned bright red then gratefully faded to black.

*

Allie chewed at her lower lip until it was raw, unable to describe the intensity of the hunger that had overtaken her. The sharpness of it cut like glass shards in the gut. She had never felt so profoundly empty—not even when she had been separated from her squad without food or fresh water for a week in the Canadian Dead Zone.

Her left hand didn't itch, but she scratched at it anyway and pried her nails as far into the raw flesh as she could. She wanted to feel anything other than this gnawing inside, and hurt would be better than hunger.

She clawed deep and twisted her nails, but the crimson flare of agony she desperately needed no longer came. All she felt was the collapse of gluey flesh as her fingers sank through the slime that her skin and muscles had liquefied to. She was an idiot to have believed that she had freed herself from the monster in the lake. The goo that was left on her skin continued its work, dissolving her flesh. All she did was delay the inevitable.

Allie wanted to delude herself into believing that was all it was—leftover digestive juices dissolving her like the foodstuff the monster meant her to be—but that didn't explain the hunger... or the change happening in her senses. Her peripheral vision had expanded and while the cave was still dim, it was no longer blindingly dark. Her sense of smell had transformed. She could smell the distant smoke from a fire and the wood and oil fueling it, and something else, something that she desperately needed. She knew that if she followed that smell down the current passageway she would find something better at it's end—something that might satisfy the hunger, if only for a while.

Allie moved forward, faster.

*

Smells came first—wisps of smoke and the stink of burning oil carried on the smolder of a nearby fire, then wet leather and damp fur. The stink of sweat and too many bodies in a confined space. Sounds came next. Deep murmurs that rolled into higher, guttural tones. Voices? Not human, but the cadence and phonology seemed structured—more complex than the monosyllabic grunts of mindless animals. It was similar, in a way, to the songs she heard while tracking and studying Sasquatch in the shrinking pine timberlands of Pacific Northwest. How the hell would she ever make them understand?