And it was white. It was water. It was steam.
“Impossible,” Gerhny said through stiff jaws.
The tremor died and the smaller steam vents began to droop, losing strength, and Yurman hopelessly helped the others to their feet. He didn’t know what to make of all this and he didn’t really care anymore.
“We’re gonna freeze,” Leek moaned. “I don’t wanna freeze!”
“Let’s keep moving!” Yurman ordered. “That’s the only way to stay warm.”
“Why are you so special?” Leek cried. “Why ain’t you all wet?”
“Come on, Leek, let’s march,” Yurman commanded.
“Don’t give me that. I’m dying. We’re all freezing to death except for you. It ain’t fair!”
“You can make it for another hour,” Yurman said. “Just keep going for one hour and the rescue will be here.”
“One hour! I’m freezing to death, Yur. I ain’t gonna live twenty more minutes! And you know what—I’m taking you with me!”
Leek charged. His feet were already lifeless and his entire body was becoming stiff, but he managed to lumber through the splashing slush and raise his arms to tackle Karl Yurman.
Let him, Yurman thought. Leek was right. He didn’t deserve to escape this any more than the others did, and he sure didn’t want to have to live with the guilt of being the only survivor. So let Leek push him into the water, so that he could freeze to death alongside his comrades.
Something else was coming toward Yurman. It was Polo, the little Argentine doctor, who tackled Leek hard. Polo and Leek sprawled in the slush.
“It’s not fair,” Leek whined. “It’s not fair that he gets to live and we don’t.” He picked himself up, soaking wet and dripping. Polo struggled to his feet.
Gerhny and Linfrey moved alongside Polo to keep him from doing anything else stupid. They all knew they had just minutes of life left in them, and yet they had silently allied to save Yurman. They prodded Leek to walk ahead of them, with Yurman following.
None of this made sense. The numbing cold made the suffering all the more genuine and yet it was surreal. Even Yurman’s thoughts were sluggish, as if the blood in his brain were slushy. One voice in his head kept insisting that he must do something to help the others. He couldn’t just stand there and watch them freeze. Another part of his brain reminded him that there was nothing he could possibly do.
Another part of his brain kept insisting that none of this could really be happening. It just couldn’t.
When he looked behind him, he could still see the gigantic steam column. It must be fifty miles away, and unthinkably huge. Something new was there, too—a white sandstorm.
“What’s that?” he asked aloud.
Polo stooped and squinted. “Steam. Superheated from below ground.”
It was a tornado on its side, rolling across the vast valley at a tremendous speed. It was hundreds of feet tall but shrinking visibly with every passing moment.
“It cools fast on the outside and hot steam churns out from the middle and it goes faster and faster,” Polo said. “It will burn itself out quickly.”
“How quickly?” Yurman asked.
Polo shrugged slowly. “Maybe before it comes to us. Maybe not. How could I know?”
“Run, Yur,” Gerhny said. His feet folded up beneath him, and he sat with a splash in the slush. “Get over the ridge.”
Yurman looked at him.
“Yeah. Run. Beat it. Beat it.” Linfrey sat down beside Gerhny, then laid himself down. The ice water and slush covered his face. Bubbles trickled from his nose. Gerhny watched him.
Polo raised an arm and pointed. “Run.”
Karl Yurman ran—or did his best imitation of a run. He left the others without speaking. He plodded around Leek, who was kneeling in the slush and no longer blinking. He left his companions behind.
He ran for the ridge. It was just a ripple in the landscape, but they knew it was caused by a series of stony spikes in the ice-covered rock, and there was rock beyond it. The ice melt would be slowed by the ridge, they had hoped. That’s where they had been headed. Now maybe, beyond the ridge, Yurman would be protected from the steam storm.
What a joke. He was a mile from the ridge. The steam storm was coming too fast.
He felt his body growing weak but becoming warm. That gave him hope. He heard the scream of the wind behind him. His hopes were dashed.
He glanced over his shoulder as the maelstrom bore down on him and engulfed him in bitter cold that instantly transformed into searing heat His body was tossed by the blow. His goggles and hood and cap were torn off, and he was thrust under the water, which boiled through his layers and cooked his skin.
He fought to the surface, only to feel a sudden gust tear away the water and Yurman was on his stomach on a rock-hard layer of ice. The flesh-cooking heat from the steam cloud was gone.
He experienced fire like he couldn’t imagine. Every inch of his skin surface was burned, and continued to burn when the boiling water soaking his clothing refused to cool.
Then came the thunder. The air convulsed in the wake of the violent steam storm, rushing to fill the displacement. It was good, clean Antarctic air, minus 28.3°C and moving along at more than one hundred miles per hour.
The wind chill was unimaginable. In a heartbeat, Yurman’s clothes went from scalding to bone-chilling and seconds later they were frozen on the surface.
His drenched face was locked in ice. The shallow water in which he knelt crusted over instantly.
Rain. Hot rain. It ate into the flesh of his exposed face, then froze a moment later. The wind went on and on and Yurman was a statue, locked up solid.
He couldn’t move.
The physical suffering would go away soon. He would grow numb or he would die in the next few minutes. Right?
Right?
Chapter 28
Had a day passed? Had two? Okyek Meh Thih’s limbs were stiff as death and his throat was parched. The water gourd was empty—he must have sipped it away as he sat chanting his endless plea.
Then he felt again the shaking that had awakened him, and he scrambled to his feet. He lumbered to the mouth of the cave. The mountain was shaking under him.
The Caretaker’s feet had been folded together for more than twenty-four hours and he stumbled, almost pitching out of the cave mouth to his death, but he managed to grab the wall of the cave and hold on.
Then he saw the fountain of Chuh Mboi Aku erupt from the jungle. It was miles away, just a hiss of steam that darted out of the earth and reached into the sky like a finger pointing out of the treetops. Okyek Meh Thih, the Caretaker of the People, was fascinated, and relieved, too. The plume was small and harmless looking.
But it grew in fits. Part of the earth that it was forcing up through had been blocked, but the blockage broke and the hot column of water roared into the sky. Twice as tall as the tops of the rain forest canopy. Heavy billows of steam poured off of it. The Caretaker could see the shadow of the scalding rainfall and he witnessed the jungle wilt under the boiling water.
It became bigger again.
The People! At this rate, the column would soon grow huge enough to drench his precious People with its killing rain. He had to get to them! He staggered along the trail on wobbling legs.
Before he’d traveled ten paces, the earth exploded at the base of the column of water, which doubled in size and height, then doubled again, until the top of it was higher than the mountain of the cave.