The Glaciermen #44: Jailbreak (Part One)
Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"
Merry Christmas Eve!
I’ve got a wonderful gift for your cold-weather enjoyment: the next segment of The Glaciermen!
Also, I want to express how grateful I am to all of you who faithfully read, like, or share whenever a new segment comes out. A special shout-out to those quiet enjoyers out there who leave no trace. I know you’re there and I appreciate it.
- Xavier
Without further ado…
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P.S. If you haven’t already checked out the free books available through BookFunnel (no account required) you can find them here or at the bottom of this post.
(Here’s the previous segment if you missed it, and the first chapter and index, if you’re new).
Recap (spoilers!): Back in the present, the Amanda, Lee, and the station crew come up with a daring plan to save their people captured in the glacier.
Jailbreak (Part One)
The tunnel echoed with footsteps as the station crew trundled along. Everyone was loaded up with headlamps, flashlights, and makeshift weapons. Rolf wore the flamethrower pack, fuel canisters slung over his back, dual nozzles flickering with their pilot lights. David carried a flare gun, Lee wielded a pair of icepicks, and Amanda had a jerry-rigged bandolier of flares and molotov cocktails around her waist. Mikkel had stayed above, keeping the helicopter running in case they needed a quick takeoff.
“Here we go,” Amanda said to Lee as they came to a junction, “Guide the way.”
He shined a light above the two forking passages, illuminating symbols that held no meaning for Amanda, then led them down the passage to the right. They followed him into the black-mouthed tunnel, their flashlights tracing across the rippling blue surface of the ice. Amanda’s breath came in white clouds in front of her face. The air was cold and stale. The walls of the passage seemed to swallow them as they descended deeper into the belly of the glacier.
When they had entered the tunnels, she was wound tight, ready to react to the slightest sound or movement, but as the minutes of walking stretched to over an hour, it was impossible to keep herself so alert. The passages all looked the same. The scrape of footfalls and the echoed breaths of their exertion began to lull her in an almost hypnotic fashion. Step, step, breath. Step, step, breath. Another junction. Another choice. Step, step, breath. She barely registered that this latest passage had various small offshoots every so often. Step, step, breath. Step, step, breath.
A twanging snap broke the pattern.
Amanda’s eyes shot to the source of the sound. Lee was looking down at his feet, where a broken length of twine lay across the floor of the tunnel. A moment later, a dump of falling ice came down on top of him. He dove forward, but it caught his legs, burying him up to his waste.
A bellowing cry came from the darkness of one of the small passages to the side, then out of the gloom lept a wild shape, covered in dark swirling pattern and an effervescent layer of the blue gelatinous stimulant. The shape slammed into David, sending him flying into the side of the tunnel. Rolf aimed with the flamethrower, but did not unleash the flames because David would have been within blast. The shape was a man-creature, weapon raised, a great blade of shiny metal affixed to a pole, ready to drop the killing blow. But it hung in the air, never falling.
This was no monster, not another tunlaq, Amanda realized. This creature was a regular man, a bald man with a long beard, and lots of tattoos. He looked around, spotted Lee struggling to free himself, then a big smile formed on his lips.
He said, “You guys have anything to eat?”
• • •
Amanda watched in awe as the massive man tore through every protein bar they had to give him. She had never seen someone eat so fast.
“How did you manage to survive?” Lee asked.
The viking swallowed, then smiled again.
He spoke in a flat, powerful baritone, “While I waited in that pit of death, most of those things chased after you and Tyra without a second look. Two of them noticed that I didn’t look dead enough. Like you said, I waited for them to get close, then—”
He made a forceful stabbing motion with his hand.
“After that, I stuck to the shadows, watching. I learned their tunnels, learned their patterns. It started stealing to survive, limiting myself to small things that might not be noticed, but when I spied on their prison, and Tyra wasn’t there—”
He paused, face straining to hide emotion.
“I couldn’t let those bastards suck another breath. I began striking back, hitting their supply of this blue berserker substance, using it against them and killing as many as I can in the process.”
“The demon in the tunnels…” Lee muttered to himself, then blurted out, “Tyra is alive.”
The viking immediately stood up, “Then what are we doing here talking? We need to go after her.”
“We will,” Amanda said, holding up a hand, “They have our people too. But we’re outnumbered, and it’s unlikely we can break anyone out without raising the alarm. We need to have the best shot, which means we need to know everything you know.”
David piped in, “Why did you call it ‘berserker’ gel?”
“Did you not recognize it immediately? My ancestors, the true Víkingr raiders of old, used something similar before going into battle—henbane. You would know it as hyoscyamus niger, science man. Many cultures use such things. This blue stuff is obviously something similar. It does leave one feeling quite tingly, though,” the viking said, wrinkling an eyebrow and holding his hand in front of his face.
“That’s great,” Amanda said, “But I meant what do you know about our people? Did you see anyone else when you found their prison?”
“Yes,” he replied, “There were two women. One looked like she was hurt badly, but alive.”
Erika’s alive! Amanda thought, letting out a sigh of relief. She had assumed Erika had been killed when she had been taken.
“There were only a handful of the blue men guarding them,” he continued, “Together we could free them easily.”
“What about the villagers Lee talked about?” David asked.
“We can’t do anything for them if we’re dead,” Amanda said. “And those villagers are not in immediate danger as far as we know—plus we can’t be sure whether they’d help us or try to turn us in. We can come back for them with the military or something once we get out of here alive. Now c’mon. This guy’s right. We don’t have time to keep standing around talking.”
• • •
A stream of burning kerosene spewed from Rolf’s flamethrower, engulfing a tunlaq guard in a blanket of searing flame. His shrieks echoed around the small cavern that housed the prison cells as the four other guards jumped in surprise at the monstrous power of the unknown weapon. Amanda lit a flare, put it to the alcohol soaked cloth tucked into one of whiskey bottles from her bandolier, then threw the makeship firebomb toward one of the guards, where it shattered around his legs in a splash of fire. Crying out in pain and fear, he ran off as the splattered alcohol flames burned into his legs.
David shot a flare into the chest of another, where it sizzled and popped, spewing three-thousand-degree magnesium sparks and bits of burning flesh. The guard fell to the ground, thrashing at his sternum before going still.
Lee and the viking charged forward at the two remaining guards. Lee sidestepped a lunge from a spear, then buried an ice-pick spear into the guard’s temple. The viking batted away the weapon of his opponent, then in one sweeping motion of his axe, sent the poor bastard’s head tumbling across the ice.
It all happened in just nine seconds.
Amanda put her hands on her knees, breathing heavy as the adrenaline slowly began to die down. The ambush had actually worked! But the intensity of the carnage was more than she could have ever anticipated. In addition to the sizzling of the flare and the crackling flames of the burned guard, she could hear her father vomiting somewhere behind her.
And the stench! It was almost unbearable.
“Help! He’s still in here with us—help!”
The woman’s voice was thick with a Scandinavian accent. Rolf rushed over to the side of the prison cavern from where the voice came. A blonde woman with recognizably similar facial features was pressed up against the interlocking wooden bars of a cage door set into the ice. She began weeping as she recognized Rolf.
Runa! Amanda realized, having never met the woman up to this point.
Rolf jerked against the bars, then said something in Danish. Runa looked back skittishly, then stepped out of view. Rolf blasted the cage door with a gulch of fire, then stood back as the flame disintegrated the bindings holding the wooden bars together. Ignoring the heat, he grabbed the weakened cage door and ripped it away.
A scream came from the icy prison cell, then a hideously disfigured man emerged holding Runa from behind with a knife to her throat. His body shone with a meager coating of the glowing stimulant gel, like the guards, but the skin underneath was scarred and deformed. Blackened splotches interspersed the deep pink of flesh where patches of skin were completely gone. Mud and herbs packed a gory wound in his shoulder.
Rolf was stock still, finger ready on the trigger, but unwilling to risk Runa.
With a grotesque grin, the man let out a laugh that was equal parts joy and malice, making the hair on Amanda’s neck prick up. He scanned the room. When his gaze landed on Lee, he spat onto the ground, then began speaking in an indigenous language. Lee seemed to understand, then spoke back to him.
The hideous man laughed again, uproariously this time, throwing his head back and letting his howls echo around the chamber.
Then Runa stomped on his toes, digging her heel down hard. As his laughter turned to a cry of pain, she slammed her head back into the wound on his shoulder, and the cry became a shriek. She twisted around under his arm, using the motion to move her neck away from his blade while also squirming out of his grip.
Moving so quickly that Amanda could barely register what was happening, Runa seized his wrist, controlling his knife hand, then clamped her other hand behind his neck for added leverage, then directed the full strength of her body into her knee for a brutal blow to his crotch. As he staggered, she spun again, maintaining her grip on his wrist and neck. Dropping to her knees, she pulled him off balance and flipped him over her back, slamming him against the ice.
She pressed her knee to his neck, then twisted his arm sharply. There was a sickening pop, and the arm went limp. She smacked the knife from his grip, then let the arm fall to the ground like a wet noodle. After kicking the knife away, she drove her boot into his ribs with a force that left him gasping. She spat on him, then turned to the rest of the group, flicking the slime from her hands.
Everyone except Rolf just stared at her for a moment, mouths agape, astounded by the sudden deliverance of precise violence. Rolf snorted. Runa simply shrugged.
Then, out of the opening of the cage, another figure shuffled into the view. It was Erika, her arm was in a sling and her face was badly bruised.
“What happened to you two?” David asked, finally breaking the silence.
Until Next Week (ideally)
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– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen
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