The light coming from the sun barely visible through the heavy clouding was a jaundiced yellow. Ryan didn’t think anyone around this place had ever seen a blue sky, which was still some days rare even in Deathlands.
And he knew they weren’t in Deathlands anymore. No place he had been to looked anything like what he saw before him.
Sixty feet and maybe more below him, an emerald green ocean lapped at the bottom of the shelf they found themselves on. There was no indication of land mixed in with the accumulated snow and fresh layers of ice. Out before him, scattered across the wide expanse of the sea, were hundreds of ice floes. Nearly all of them were smaller than the one they were encased in.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Mildred said, stepping up beside Ryan to look out over the ocean. “We’re in a damn ice cube floating in the middle of the goddamn ocean!”
And that, Ryan figured, summed it up about the best.
Chapter Twenty-Three
For as long as he could, Ryan stood out on the lip of the access tunnel where the door had been sheared away trying to see a way clear of the situation. The companions had been in a lot of hard places, but nothing like the present predicament.
“How do you think it happened, Dad?” Dean asked. His teeth chattered from the cold.
“You should go on back inside,” Ryan said. “You’re going to catch your death if you keep standing out here.”
“I’ll go back in when you go back in,” Dean said stubbornly.
For a moment the boy’s refusal to do what he asked touched a raw nerve in Ryan. He felt his jaw twitch and turn hard. Then he made himself remember it was the situation he was mad at, not Dean.
The wind was worse in the open, whipping around the huge glacier with the intensity of a possessed thing. Mildred and Krysty had taken shelter inside the tunnel again.
Ryan let out a tense breath, watching the long streamer of his gray breath spin away from him. His face felt numb all over, not just the nerve-deadened spots. “I guess we’re somewhere up near the Arctic Circle,” he told Dean. “Only two places that I read about have glaciers as part of their natural environment.”
“The Arctic and the Antarctic,” Dean said.
Ryan nodded at his son. “Guess you learned a lot at Brody’s school.”
“I tried. Lot of learning to do, Dad.”
“I know. It’s something a real man doesn’t ever give up on.”
“Trader teach you that?”
“Yeah. Him, and a few other real men I’ve had the chance to meet over the years.” Ryan shifted the conversation back to the glacier. Below the dropoff, three white birds with wingspreads that must have been near ten feet across circled and heeled, riding out the rough winds. Their thin cries echoed back up to Ryan. Now and again one of them would dive below the water and come back up with a fish jumping in its beak.
“Back before skydark, when the Americans were up against the Russians, they had a lot of their armament invested in submarines. Russians ran the most and the biggest, according to the books I read, and the Americans kept track of them through satellites up in space and sensors along the ocean floor.”
“Like some of the comps we saw back in the redoubt?” Dean asked.
“Mebbe.” Ryan shrugged. “At this point I can only guess. The thing is, one of the most watched areas where the Americans searched for the Russian subs was the Lantic Ocean.”
“Near here?”
“Yeah.”
“So they put a redoubt here, watching over things. Then what?”
“Then skydark,” Ryan said. “Earthquakes, tidal waves and lots of cold. The Arctic Circle was mostly ice anyway. When the nuke dust shut out the sun for all those years, mebbe nobody knows how much of the world turned to ice up here. Know for a fact that a lot of England is under water now.” He glanced down at the iceberg. “Figures that the redoubt mebbe goes through all of this iceberg, helps hold it together.”
“Like a skeleton,” Dean said.