Read an extract of The Chilling by Riley James.
PROLOGUE
It was a bird that lived on carrion—a bird that ate the dead.
Arindam heard the skua gull before he’d fully regained consciousness. He was still strapped into his plane seat and had no idea how long he’d been there. The impact of the landing must have knocked him out. As he came to, the bird’s repetitive burr echoed over the empty white valley.
There was usually no life in this godforsaken place, nothing that could eat or breathe or even make a background noise—no trees, no dogs, no trilling insects. But now there was this one bird somewhere outside his window. It had to be a skua, didn’t it? The predatory creature was known for scavenging the carcasses of seals and penguins. It also chased, robbed and pirated the food of other birds, and it gorged on their fledgling young. But mostly, it ate the dead.
Oh great, thought Arindam in despair.
He knew his injuries were not catastrophic: there was only a cruel throbbing in his head and a stiffness in his neck—he’d been in worse pain with a dislocated shoulder last summer. But he couldn’t ignore the sickening dizziness and the furious pounding of his heart. He was suffering from severe shock and he wasn’t dressed for minus eight degrees Celsius. A search-and-rescue team wouldn’t make it in time. As an ice driller, he’d done too many field-training exercises to fool himself otherwise: he would soon be carrion.
Prior to the crash, their twin-engine aircraft had been lost, technically speaking. On any other day, the captain would have handled the weather with ease. An experienced pilot and a fellow Brit, Noah was used to flying in snow-covered terrain. He’d flown the same interior route to East Antarctica dozens of times—he’d already transported Arindam’s field research group twice that season—and he knew what to do in a whiteout. But today, when the aircraft had reverted to flying by instruments, something hadn’t been right. Noah suspected the altimeter was broken.
‘We’re not where we’re supposed to be,’ he said, an edge of concern to his voice. ‘I don’t think we’re in position. I’m just going to duck under this cloud bank.’
He was speaking to his co-pilot Roger, but Arindam heard everything from the first row. He’d learnt they’d been in the air too long and should’ve been approaching the runway by now.
‘If I could find the horizon,’ muttered Noah, ‘I’d have a visual reference.’
In an Antarctic whiteout there was no way of telling the difference between the sky and the ground. There was no contrast between the clouds, the great sheet of ice on the water and the snow coating the surface—everything was a uniform shade of white. Usually, the pilot could catch a glimpse of shadow or a jagged peak. But in the current conditions, he was having trouble finding even the landing aids.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Noah, glancing back at his three passengers. ‘This just doesn’t look right.’
His voice had been calm, but when Arindam saw the captain’s face, his stomach plunged. There’d been a flicker in Noah’s eyes, a flash of panic.
Arindam couldn’t remember much after that. There was the deafening roar of the engines as Noah tried to turn the plane, and there was Roger’s frantic mayday call to base. Arindam clung to his seat, the aircraft rocking, his muscles aching with the strain. When he glanced at the window, a blur of white sped past before a grey ridge loomed into view.
Now the plane was still and quiet. There was a pile of snow where the cockpit had been. On top, a pale arm stuck out at an odd angle, stiff and frozen. Arindam registered that it was wearing Noah’s watch before a wave of nausea pulled him under.
When he woke again, a cold wind was blowing through the fuselage. His head felt worse than before. He slowly turned and saw that the tail section was gone. A gaping hole exposed the wreckage to the drift outside. It was still daylight, but the sky had turned a dishwater grey.
‘Hello?’ he croaked into the void. His throat felt dry, like he’d been shouting.
No one replied. No one else was on board. It occurred to him he was going to die alone. Unless there was someone in the tail section? Someone still strapped to their seat? Outside?
As he went to unbuckle himself, pain shot through his hand, a burning pins-and-needles sensation. He groaned and looked down to see a fine crystalline layer of ice had formed on the exposed flesh of his forearm. It extended from his elbow to his wrist, covering the friendship band his daughter Aisha had made for him. With a shock, he realised his skin looked like frozen meat. His body was being devoured by the cold. Soon the blood in his veins would be frozen too. He imagined tendrils of ice stretching up his neck and into his scalp.
The skua sounded its alarm again outside the window. Arindam hunched forward to get a better look. The powerful brown-grey bird was perched on a plane seat a few feet away from the fuselage. It kept bobbing up and down, its pointed wings drawn back like a Viking helmet. It was yanking at something with its frightful beak. The bird filled Arindam with fear. He moaned into the silence, his heart still pounding. This is no way to die, he thought, with that creature out there waiting for him. He recalled eight-year-old Aisha presenting her gift bracelet, begging him to remember her. For his daughter’s sake, he could get up and stomp his feet; he could get his blood pumping and generate some warmth. Perhaps the feeling would come back to his fingers and he could write a note. Then he could find one of his colleagues—Pete or Barry—and they could shelter together and make a plan.
With fumbling hands, he unclicked the seatbelt. He slid out of the chair onto his knees. His seat was broken and bent, almost ripped from the flooring. His yellow coat rustled as he inched into the aisle and crawled towards the back of the aircraft, panting and moaning. Unable to feel his hands and feet, his limbs got caught in the scattered bags and equipment on the way. When he got to the opening, he tumbled towards the ground below. With a soft crunch and a puff of snow like smoke, he landed on his back. Somewhere in his sluggish brain, he could feel his Polartec trousers grow cold and wet.
Breathing heavily, he struggled to his knees, and looked over the crash site. There was a dirty streak like a driveway scorched into the ground, and several patches of debris across a field of crevasses. Most of the wreckage was submerged in snow. He could make out the shape of a wing to his left and something that might have been the tail section further off. His heart sank when he realised there was no sign of other people, dead or alive. The lonely part of him would have preferred carnage to this desolate wasteland.
Then he spotted the skua, still on the back of the seat.
He lurched towards the bird, ploughing through the snow on his knees. ‘Shoo!’ he called out hoarsely, as he stumbled forward. ‘Shoo!’
His voice sounded weak to his own ears, but it startled the bird, which hopped to the ground, beating its wings impatiently.
As Arindam rose behind the seat, he spotted an arm thrown over the side. ‘Hello?’ he called, peering around the front.
His heart stalled in his chest.
The broken, twisted corpse was slumped into the cushions. Its head was bent at a sickening angle, with its neck elongated and one cheek resting on its shoulder. The face was livid white, and instead of eyeballs there were only two bloodied holes.
Before he could look away, he noticed that the sockets were framed by torn pieces of flesh and bare patches of skull where the skua had been feasting. On one side of the corpse’s mouth, a row of stained teeth was exposed; on the other, a piece of frozen drool trailed down a white beard.
He had found Pete.
On the flight, the lead scientist had been sitting behind Arindam. A long-limbed man, he kept pushing the back of the chair, until Arindam turned around and glared at him.
‘Sorry, buddy,’ said Pete, who was simply uncrossing his legs. He sounded sincere and Arindam felt bad for being so prickly. It had been a long day: they’d been cutting trenches in the ice since early morning. As a courtesy, Pete moved to one of the empty rows in the tail.
Arindam collapsed against the side of Pete’s chair, his breath coming in great heaving sobs. When the bird returned to its feast, Arindam jerked his head away and staggered backwards. He’d taken only a few steps when his boot plunged through the dusty surface of a snow bridge. He dropped into the crevasse as if through a trap door.
With a hard jolt, he landed upright on a platform hardly wider than a window ledge. The crevasse walls glowed pale blue, and the caverns below appeared eerily lit from within. The sudden fall in temperature was shocking. His lungs gasped for air, and he could no longer feel any part of his body. He was beyond cold, beyond breath and beyond pain.
Barely conscious, he heard a low rumbling in the distance. To his surprise, he realised it was a motor engine: a Hägglunds.
The vehicle stopped, and a door creaked open. There was a flurry of human movement and the crunch of feet on snow. It seemed to go on for some time.
Then a man began talking only a few yards away, his soft Australian twang rising and falling in the wind. ‘There’s no survivors,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead.’
Extracted from The Chilling by Riley James.
The Chilling
by Riley James
An unputdownable thriller set in the pressure-cooker environment of an Antarctic winter.
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