ICEBOUND By Dean Koontz

Standing to the left of the transmitter, George Lin was as unlike Breskin as a hummingbird is unlike an eagle. He was shorter and slimmer than Roger, but the differences were not merely physical. While Roger stood as silent and still as a pinnacle of ice, Lin swayed from side to side as if he might explode with nervous energy. He had none of the patience tht was reputed to be a trait of the Asian mind. Unlike Breskin, he didn’t belong in these frozen wastes, and he knew it.

George Lin had been born Lin Shen-yang, in Canton, mainland China, in 1946, shortly before Mao Tse-tung’s revolution had ousted the Kuomintang government and established a totalitarian state. His family had not managed to flee to Taiwan until George was seven. In those early years, something monstrous had happened to him in Canton that had forever traumatized and shaped him. Occasionally he alluded to it, but he refused ever to speak of it directly, either because he was not capable of dealing with the horror of those memories–or because Brian’s skills as a journalist were insufficient to extract the story.

“Just hurry,” Lin urged. His breath billowed in skeins of crystalline yarn that unraveled in the wind.

Brian focused and pressed the shutter release.

The electronic flash was reflected by the snowscape, and figures of light leaped and danced with figures of shadow. Then the deep darkness swarmed back to crouch at the edges of the headlamps.

Brian said, “One more for–“

The icecap rose abruptly, precipitously, like the motorized floor in a carnival fun house. It tilted left, right, then dropped out from under him.

He fell, slammed so hard into the ice that even the heavy padding of his insulated clothing did not adequately cushion him, and the painful impact knocked his bones against one another as if they were I Ching sticks clattering in a metal cup. The ice heaved up again, shuddered and bucked, as though striving mightily to fling him off the top of the earth and out into space.

One of the idling snowmobiles crashed into its side, inches from his head, and sharp shards of ice exploded in his face, glittery needles, stinging his skin, barely sparing his eyes. The skis on the machine rattled softly and quivered as if they were insectile appendages and the engine choked off.

Dizzy, shocked, heart stuttering, Brian cautiously raised his head and saw that the transmitter was still firmly anchored. Breskin and Lin were sprawled in the snow, having been pitched about as if they were dolls, as he himself had been. Brian started to get up–but he fell again as the wasteland leaped more violently than it had the first time.

Gunvald’s suboceanic earthquake had come at last.

Brian tried to brace himself within a shallow depression in the ice, wedging between the natural contours to avoid being thrown into the snowmobiles or the transmitter. Evidently a massive tsunami was passing directly under them, hundreds of millions of cubic yards of water rising with all the vengeful fury and force of an angry god awakening.

Inevitably, additional waves of still great but diminishing power would follow before the icecap stabilized.

The overturned snowmobile revolved on its side. The headlights swept across Brian twice, harrying shadows like wind-whipped leaves that had blown in from warmer latitudes, and then stopped as they illuminated the other men.

Behind Roger Breskin and George Lin, the ice suddenly cracked open with a deafening boom! And gaped like a ragged, demonic mouth. Their world was coming apart.

Brian shouted a warning.

Roger grasped one of the large steel anchor pins that fixed the transmitter in place, and he held on with both hands.

The ice heaved a third time. The white field tilted toward the new, yawning crevasse.

Although he tried desperately to brace himself, Brian slid out of the depression in which he had sought shelter, as though there were no inhibiting friction whatsoever between him and the ice. He shot toward the chasm, grabbed the transmitter as he sailed past it, crashed hard against Roger Breskin, and held on with fierce determination.

Roger shouted something about George Lin, but the wailing of the wind and the rumble of fracturing ice masked the meaning of his words.

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