Check back every week for a new instalment of the online exclusive by Richard Cozicar The Ice Racer. Chapter 4
I fall briefly, my arms flailing in the dark. I land hard and I am left gasping for breath. My body is stopped by a solid surface deeper inside the ice hill. I lay still calming my heart, trying to regain my breath. Lying on my back I carefully feel around with my hands, checking the area around me before moving. My instincts tell me that the cave I’ve fallen into is large; I try not to move around too much incase I’m on a cliff or shelf of some sort I don’t want to fall again. Noticing a glow above me, I watch as the blade of my shovel tumbles through the space above me. The red blade of the shovel is growing larger as it nears me. Pushing with my arm I shove and roll out of the way as the blade clatters down inches from were I had landed. I sit up and dig in my suit for a light. Turning it on I move it this way and that, the beam cutting through the darkness searching the cavern around me. I seem to have fallen into an expansive ice cave, it was probably caused by trapped air as the ice hill originally formed. The floor is slick, my hand and my feet slip out from under me as I try to stand causing me to land face first onto the floor. My visor smacks on the ice again and the shovel flies from my hand. Lying facedown, my eyes lock straight ahead of me through a clear ice floor at a faint red glow far below me. For a moment I remain motionless, my mind trying to comprehend what I’m seeing. A loud snap brings me back to reality. The ice I’ve come to rest on is cracking. The floor shifts downward then holds. My breath catches in my throat, my heart quickens. Very gently I start to rise to my feet. A loud groan fills the space as the ice floor gives way. Once again I find myself tumbling through the blackness. The faint red glow that was far below me is rising fast as my descent continues. At this point I’m not even sure if I am awake or still dreaming. The all-encompassing darkness blots out everything but the glow below me. A scream is frozen in my throat and I’m aware of an up draft tugging at my suit as I fall. The whole scene is surreal. I know I’m falling but with nothing except blackness around me I feel as if I’m floating. The only perception I have is the growing glow rising up to meet me. Seconds, minutes, I’m not certain how long I spiral downward. I struggle to inflate my suit to capacity hoping that it will help cushion my fall if and when I make contact. I think I’m screaming. The fear and adrenaline overwhelm my brain. Then complete blackness takes over as I pass out. I open my eyes briefly when my fall is abruptly halted with a bone jarring impact, the air build up in my suit takes a portion of the crash and I am aware as my body bounces and then finally settles. How long I was unconscious I have no idea but when I awake I find myself sweating. That is something I have never felt before in my life. My home and my whole planet is a block of solid ice, so perspiring is very uncommon. The closest anyone gets to this is in the warming rooms and even there a person is more cool than hot. The only time a person would experience any type of sensation close to this is as a newborn when we are raised in the incubation rooms for the first few months of our lives, but my memory isn’t that good. My eyes blink bringing me back to consciousness. My eyesight is blurry. I lay totally still, dazed as my mind races to catch up with what I have been through. A searing pain works its way to my brain. I am lying on my side, my arm twisted beneath me. I move my fingers and have to stop as I pinpoint exactly where the pain is coming from. Gingerly I sit up. The ground beneath me is soft and mucky. I raise my good hand up to my visor but my vision is still blurred. I shake gently to try and clear my head when I realize that my sight is fine but something is clinging to the outside of my visor. Wiping at my visor I realize my hand is covered as well so I use the sleeve of my suit to clear the outside of my visor than stare at my hand. Mud. My glove is covered in mud. But how is that possible? Sitting up straighter I slowly turn my head. Behind me I discover the source of the red glow I’d seen from above. A river of lava is flowing across the landscape a couple of hundred yards from where I sit. Slipping in the soft muck I try to stand. I slip and instinctively move my injured arm out to steady myself. A cry of agony leaves my mouth as I land on it once again. I hesitate, waiting for the pain to pass then I try a second time to get to my feet, being a lot more cautious this time. Using my good hand, I half walk and half crawl farther away from the stream of lava. The heat is more intense than anything I’ve ever felt. My feet finally find a solid footing as I move further up the embankment to a spot where the heat is not nearly as bad. With the help of the faint light from the lava I search for a place to sit and evaluate my condition. I know that my arm is in bad shape and the pain from it must be blocking out other receptors in my body from reporting injuries. Injuries, which I know will reveal themselves when the pain from my arm subsides. On a positive note, hopefully that means none of my other injuries are as sever. I dig around in my suit for a strap and fasten my injured arm to the front of my suit. Then it dawns on me. With my good arm I reach behind my back and feel for my emergency kit. I let a sigh out. The shovel and flashlight I am certain are lost but from what I can tell my pack is still intact. Unstrapping my bad arm I grit my teeth and work the pack off my shoulders. When I have the pack in front of me I fight against the pain and recompose myself. Using my feet to hold the pack still I undo the flap and search around for my medical kit. In the dim light I find a pack of pain reliever and try to attach it to my feeding tube only to discover that it was damaged in the fall. Obviously the heating modules and the breathing filter in my helmet weren’t damaged which I never thought of until now, but the tube that I eat and drink through didn’t fair as well. If I was going to take the pain reliever I will have to remove my visor. On the surface this would mean instant death from the subzero air, but in this cavern I know that I won’t instantly freeze but that doesn’t mean the air isn’t poisonous. Methodically I undo my visor. I am going to try to quickly consume the pain medicine and then refasten my visor. Holding my breath I flip up the visor and then grab the top of the foil envelope containing the medicine in my teeth and fight to rip it open. It takes longer than I want. My body is bucking, fighting for air. I finally tear the package open and pour the powder into my mouth. Dropping the foil I hurry to reseal my visor. It’s awkward to do with only one hand. I can’t hold my breath any longer. As is human nature, I gasp and then take a big gulp of air to fill my lungs breathing in the cavern air before my visor can be sealed. With trembling fingers I manage to finish the task and then wait expecting the air to poison me. Nothing. I slowly relax my tense body still expecting to become violently ill and fall to the ground dying. I am not sure if something like that would be instant or if it would take a while. I don’t have anyway to test the air and I have never breathed air without the safety of my helmet before. I forget about the pain while the reality of this new experience intrigues me. Mind you I’ve never breathed poison air before so I really have no idea how long it will take to effect me. In the New Capital, we are told that the air in our ice settlement was toxic so at no time did we ever remove our helmets to breathe it. Our ice dome is a couple of miles from the base of Mount St. Helens, close enough so that the elders are able to pipe heat to our small community but far enough away to protect us from the numerous eruptions that take place within the volcano. Close to the base of that volcano the same rivers of red run like the river that I am now sitting and looking at. I close my eyes and take several deep breaths still expecting to fall sick and die. Leaning back I close my eyes. The effects of my ordeal begin to takes its toll and I fall into a restless sleep. I wake up several hours later from the pain in my arm and now my growling stomach. The breath of air didn’t kill me after all. Do I risk removing my visor so I can eat or am I pushing my luck? I am too tired to move around yet. I contemplate my decision and give in to my stomach. Grabbing a food pouch I prepare myself to once again open my helmet. The movements have to be thought through carefully. I set the pouch within easy grasp, flip my visor up quickly and then grab the pouch and tear it open with my teeth. I hesitate. I stop. I put off eating for now and instead turn the filter in my helmet way down letting the air in the cavern mix with the filtered air. I will try this for a while and if I don’t have any bad side effects than I will remove my visor for a short time. I take a taste of my food pouch, and while I wait breathing in the mixture of air I pull the reading paper out and turn the power on. The page lights up. At least it didn’t get damaged when I fell. I will read a few pages to take my mind off my experimenting with the mixture of air from the cavern. I swipe my glove across the page stopping at a random entry.
0 Comments
Check back every week for a new instalment of the online exclusive by Richard Cozicar The Ice Racer. July 3, 2044
We continued training with some European Union troops. Our allies flew in two days ago and we are all anticipating rigorous drills for the next three weeks in preparation for a possible war against the forces of the climate prophets. At first the world’s governments had not taken the prophets threats seriously, writing them off as annoying fanatics. The climate armies now have numbers in the millions and are proving to be a dangerous adversary with their coordinated attacks. The prophets have been recruiting large numbers of volunteers with their continued posting of anti-fossil fuel campaigns that highlight the bombings of strategic world fuel reserves. The terrorist actions by these organized groups are now having a huge affect on the continued harvesting and transportation of necessary supplies. At the rate that the attacks are happening most countries around the world are now struggling to maintain day-to-day operations. I was told yesterday I had been promoted. I am now the youngest captain in the Canadian Army at twenty-three years of age. Captain Jeff Ryan. Cool. Has a nice ring to it, but my celebration comes at a bad time as world forces are striving to fight off the determination of the climate prophets and their growing fuel resistance army. I was notified this morning that my training here in Wainwright will be cut short as I am to report as a Canadian liaison to the American Army at Yakima Training Center in Washington state. Officers from around the world are meeting there to be briefed on plans for the retaking of the fuel reserves that we’ve lost to the enemy. I hate to leave at this time. Since the rains of June have stopped we’ve experienced nothing but blue skies and sunshine with the temperatures hovering in the high twenties. The rain has turned everything green and the air has a clean, fresh smell to it. I close my eyes briefly trying to imagine a world where a person walks on grass and can be outside with out a thermal suit and helmet. What would fresh air smell like I wonder or grass under my feet and sunshine on my face. I am snapped out of my daydream by the chilling bite of the cold. I turned the batteries down in my suit while I was tunneling to save battery power. I forgot to turn it back up. I stand up and move as much as I can in my small ice cave to warm myself. I’m restless. I came to terms with my situation while I was plowing through the snow earlier but the desolation is hard to deal with. I’ve never been alone before and definitely not outside our compound above ground. I don’t know how to deal with it. I can feel the heat of the suit starting to ward off the chill. I sit back down, my back against the wall of my ice cave, fighting to keep thoughts of doubt and despair from flooding my mind paralyzing me. Picking up the reading paper I swipe my gloved hand across it and stop at a page deeper in the diary. Anything to take my mind off the situation I’m facing. June 10, 2045 The climate prophet’s armies are growing exponentially. The governments around the world are losing the battle. The climate armies are burning and destroying all our sources of fuels at an alarming rate forcing us to retreat on many fronts. The lack of fuel is slowing and in some cases stopping our progress at several strategic locations across the world. Today the European president recalled a large number of troops back to defend the few large fuel reserves they still had now that the climate armies have invaded the Saudi Conglomerate States decimating their armies and destroying the Middle Eastern oil reserves. The other side’s strategy appears to be to starve their enemies of all fossil fuels. Not only is this slowing down the armies united against them, but also a worldwide ration has been adopted. Basically the only manufacturing left untouched by the ration is the arms factories. People by the thousands and soon millions will be without work and shortly without fuel to heat their homes and run their cars. If the attacks keep up everyone but the people contracted or enlisted in the military will be left to their own means of survival. The army can’t fight off the climate armies and keep peace among all the people being affected by the energy shortage. October 5, 2045 Everywhere we travel now people are milling around. Jobs are very scarce and the military has stopped hiring, they can no longer accommodate the millions of despondent civilians who are signing up so they can have a way to support their families. Traveling through the major cities is the worst part. There is no more room for the hordes of people who keep arriving daily. The factories and high-rises are being deserted ever since the power grids were shut down a month ago and the weather is turning cold. Winter is arriving and very few people have a means to heat their homes. Smoke is seen everywhere now as people scrounge around for materials to burn for heat. Wooden buildings are being stripped of any and all flammable materials and the very citizens who we are sent to protect are turning against us in their desperate search for supplies. The army has been tasked with protecting the reading material in the major libraries and they are being sent extra men, but with the need for heating materials increasing as the weather cools, the defense of these bastions of written wisdom will surely fall. Everyday now there are numerous reports of people burning to death by fires that were started to heat homes but got out of control. If there are fire departments that have not been attacked and had their reserves of fuel stolen, they won’t even attempt to venture out to most house fires, the fuel they are allotted needs to lay in wait for more serious responses. What that is… I’m not sure what would qualify. October 30, 2045 Europe has fallen to the climate armies. The defeat came only weeks after the destruction of the Middle Eastern oil reserves. The massive climate army marched north picking up millions of recruits with promises of heat and food for the upcoming winter. Energy is power these days. If you have it you make the rules for society. We are told that the siege of the United Kingdom is only days away and the majority of service men in the North American continent are being deployed to the eastern seaboard to build up our defenses against the impending surge from across the ocean. We have not received any oil shipments from abroad for months now and our fuel supplies have dwindled. My unit has been tasked with protecting the last of our oil fields in Alberta and the Dakotas. So far we have been able to limit the amount of damage. The climate forces are building around here now though and it is a monumental struggle to keep our small reserves from being destroyed or falling into the hands of the enemy. We can’t expect any help from the South Americans either. They are currently fighting a loosing battle of their own. The last report from the southern hemisphere is that the war has pushed far inland and any fuel reserves are now burning or under the control of the climate prophet’s armies and will soon be destroyed. I turn the papers power off as my head starts to droop. The long walk today is taking its toll on me as I fight to keep my eyes open. I lean my head back thinking. Why would a world that from my point of view must have been paradise want to destroy everything they had built? This thought is even more depressing than the position I now find my self in. I drift off into a cold restless sleep. My dreams are torn between a green warm earth and the white freezing world I was born in. Dreams or more like nightmares. At one point I dream that the floor I’m sitting on is cracking and I’m falling. I wake up, my eyes opening. It’s dark. I can’t see anything. As I turn my head my eyes focus on the glow of my thermal shovel. I must have forgot to turn it off. The floor shifts again. It wasn’t a dream. Suddenly I’m falling. I have been trudging through this waist deep snow now for the past couple of hours. In spots the snow is so deep that I almost sink to my chest. Every step is arduous and my steps are more like shuffling then walking as I push one leg in front of the other moving the snow ahead of me. The one saving grace is that the atmosphere is so dry that the snow is loose and doesn’t pack that easily.
My legs are burning, my breathing laboured as I push forward. My breathing continuously fogs up my visor. When I left the ice hill I chose a direction that I hoped would lead me closer to the New Capital. In all honesty I have no idea if I really am heading on the right path. All around me I see nothing but endless miles of snow broken only by the rise of the odd ice hill but nothing to indicate a specific direction. The sky is permanently blurred by volcanic ash so there is no way to know what direction I am going in, no landmarks to guide me. For all I know I could be walking in a large circle. I am pretty sure that I am not going in circles. Being the pilot of a snow sled a person develops a sixth sense in regards to directions, I’m certain that I am heading the right way. Reality set in the moment I was blown off the deck of my ice sled. I was lost and will more than likely perish in this desolate endless white landscape only to be buried in the never ending blowing and shifting snow. If I were smart I would sit down and save my energy as I wait for my last breath to leave me. I guess I’m not that smart. To become the pilot of an ice sled a person had to have a very strong sense of survival and an undaunted willingness to persevere. I was at the top of the class when those attributes were needed. Again, maybe I am not all that smart. Very few of the people at the New Capital are suited or volunteer for being a crewmember on an ice sled. It is the one job that is a near perfect guarantee to get you killed. Very few members of our society have ever ventured up and walked or even seen the earth’s surface. People never leave the confines of our ice domed city for one reason, the environment on the surface is a harsh bitter place to venture. As a teenager I volunteered to work on the sleds. I figured it couldn’t be any worst than staying below the surface. I felt trapped, I needed to escape. Life in our community was hard. Every day was a struggle. A struggle to keep from freezing, a struggle for food and a struggle to just make it another day. We do the best we can but we are a civilization trying to rebuild after the great climate wars almost decimated all life on earth. Now we are fighting against a world that was turned hostile as we arduously work to prolong life. The main reason we even have sled teams risking their necks every time they go out onto the frozen plains is for energy. We have precious little and what we do have has to be guarded and rationed among the several thousand occupants that call the New Capital home. This is where I come in. Several generations ago explorers from the Capital stumbled across a cache of oil and gas reserves and since then the main job of the ice racers was to travel between the fuel stash and the New Capital transporting the valuable cargo. We only have a few ice sleds and the sleds can only carry a small amount at a time. The trips average almost two months, so by the time we return with our cargo we have to head back again. We would build bigger sleds but materials of any sort are very hard to come by. If we are lucky we’ll find some of the monstrous metal giants that our ancestors erected hundreds of years ago to take advantage of the winds but even these huge metal windmills are hidden by the snow. Sometimes when we are on our supply runs we may accidently discover some of these metal towers because the constant, shifting wind blows the snow away. When one is discovered we try to mark it so a crew of inventors have a chance to cannibalize it for its metals and wires. Most times though by the time anyone has a chance to return, the drifting snow has once again reclaimed it. Such is life. But it is our life and we keep going. Speaking of keeping going, my legs are burning from forcing my way through the snow although the exertion has meant that I don’t need to drain the batteries in my thermal suit as quickly to run the heater. Dark is turning to darker and I would prefer not to have to sit down and wait out the night as the snow envelops me. In the growing blackness I see a slight rise in the snow a head of me. With luck it’ll be an ice hill and I can burrow into it to escape the winds and spend the night. Forcing my legs to move one shuffling step at a time I head for the rise, hoping it is not my eyes playing tricks on me. I never take my eyes off of it so I don’t loose sight of it. My legs are burning and quivering from the walk, my breathing coming in gasping breaths. My body is protesting so much that I briefly forget how cold I am. One step followed by another. My next step is into a deeper bowl of fresh snow. I sink. Swimming back to the surface I rise in with a slight panic turning my head frantically for the sight of the ice hill. The dark is even darker now. With blind determination I forge forward. Finally I step forward and my foot slips. I slide briefly on the ice on the side of the hill. Too tired to even think I sit to catch my break and give my burning muscles a reprieve. Very shortly the numbing cold cuts through my thermal suit reminding me to move and seek shelter from the winds and cold. Grasping my thermal shovel I start tunnelling up into the solid ice hill. I tunnel up for several feet and then start digging downward. The purpose of the change in direction is to keep the wind from entering. I pause to rest. The strain on my body helps ward off the bone chilling cold then resume. I want to dig in deep enough that the wind and cold are left behind. I stop tunnelling. I must be at least twenty feet down. The wind no longer pulls at my suit. I use the shovel to melt and move the ice as I make my hole big enough to comfortably turn around but not to big so that the heat pod can’t warm the space. Setting my shovel down and activating a heat pod I sit down with my back against the wall, all my muscles are screaming from over exertion. It a good thing that I talk to myself otherwise I would go crazy from being deserted. Letting my mind dwell on the situation I’m in is too dangerous so I hook a food ration capsule to my helmet, the capsules consist of a synthetic food that comes as a powder and is drawn in through a tube in my helmet. When the powder comes in contact with liquid it expands to a solid substance that you chew. I don’t know if it is good or bad because it’s the only thing I’ve ever eaten, I have nothing to compare it to but I do remember my grandfather complaining about the bland nature of it. I then dig into a pocket in my suit and pull out a reading page. The power for the reading page is low. I’m not sure if I should hook the page to my suit to recharge it and drain my battery supply further or face a night alone with the thoughts of my deadly predicament wearing on my mind. After a brief tussle between the two I decide to charge the reading page. It’s funny because reading pages are very scarce and if anyone back at our colony knew I had one it would have be taken away and yet, stranded as I am, at least I have something to do besides fret over my bad luck. This reading page has been passed down in my family from my great grandfather to his son, my grandfather and then to my father and now it’s in my possession. I keep the page on me at all times and have never told or shown anyone about it for fear of loosing it. My great grand father started dictating to it back in the middle of the twenty first century. He was a general in the people’s army against the armies of the climate prophets. I turn the page on and go to the first entry. Check back every week for a new instalment of the online exclusive by Richard Cozicar The Ice Racer. Global warming never happened. Not the way my great grand father had explained it to my father. They were warned that the world was supposed to heat up, the oceans would rise and lay claim to millions of hectares of inhabitable coastline, the drier areas of the world they were told would become barren desert unable to sustain humans.
Boy, were they wrong. The great climate prophets of the early twenty first century railed against the continued use of carbon based fuels forcing governments to discontinue their uses. Only green power was promoted, massive turbines driven by the wind, solar panels to catch the suns rays and geothermal heat from deep with in the earth would be permitted. I remember something my grandfather told me years ago. His stories were always told with a smile as he fondly remembered the days of his youth. “Mike,” he would say. “When I was a kid, my brothers and I would run out the front door to meet our friends with just our clothes on. We didn’t need thermal suits back then. In fact, if I recall correctly, sometimes we even wore short pants, pants that came above the knee and no socks or shoes on our feet.” And every time he told this story he would stop and I could see in his eyes the longing for the times he once knew. He was old and I never questioned him because I enjoyed spending time with him and listening to his stories. I often wonder if he made them up himself or if his grandfather had told him similar tales. Sometimes I would lie by his side and close my eyes dreaming along with him of the wonderful world that existed only in his mind. I knew he was old and his thoughts weren’t clear anymore, but still, the way he describes it, these places would be heaven. When I asked my dad about grandpa’s stories dad would laugh and remind me to not to take him too seriously because as long as he or anyone else knew the world has been a frozen tundra. In the summer, the hottest time of the year, the temperature climbed to a balmy minus fifty, too cold to even consider walking around our dome without even a thinner heat suit on. These were the things I thought about as I sat on the only obstacle to break up the horizon. A large hill of solid freezing snow packed and formed by the non-stop artic winds. Peering through the tinted visor on my helmet at the never-ending plains of white that stretched out in front of me I planned my next move. The batteries in my thermal suit still have some of power remaining and if I alternate turning then on and off I may be able to find my way out of this vast white frozen collection of shifting snow dunes soon enough to have a small chance of survival. I say a small chance because I’m in hostile territory. Funny. Anywhere outside the massive walls of the New Capital was hostile territory. Hostile in the fact that anyone alone and separated would perish, if not from our enemies than from the wrath of the surface of this icy globe we call earth. My crew and I were on the return trip to the New Capital with a cargo of much-needed fuel and food that we had collected from a site several hundreds of miles from home. The ice sled I was on got caught in a blizzard. A blizzard we were trying to out run even though we knew the odds of success were miniscule. Just as we figured it would, the storm caught up with us and as the pilot I tried to force our way through. Being stopped by these storms meant undue hardships for both the crew and ship and with limited power supplies any length of storm could possibly leave the whole lot of us stranded. Besides, the Capital was in desperate need of the cargo, desperate enough that I had to risk running the storm. I left my co-pilot manning the rudder while I ventured outside to fix one of the sails that had been damaged by the storms hurricane force winds. Stepping out of the shelter of the cabin I was ravaged by the wind and ice pellets. I was fully aware of the risks but it was my ship and my crew and the people at our settlement that depended on me. I had not been outside for more than a minute when the sled careened off the edge of an ice hill that was camouflaged by the storm, tossing me overboard. With the ferocity of the storm I knew that by the time my crew realized I was gone the time for rescue would be gone. For my crew to turn around and search for me would put the ship and their own lives in jeopardy. The loss of one person was better than having the whole ship and crew disappear on this run. I realized and accepted that fact; it had been burned into all our minds when we trained for these missions. I was not the first person to be lost to these storms and I certainly would not be the last. How long I had been stranded I wasn’t sure but it must have been hours before the storm abated and by that I mean the winds died from hurricane force to a more normal savage howl. Every man and woman that ventured out to the surface from our city had an emergency kit permanently attached to the back of our suits. The kit contained packs of food rations, a thermal shovel and a few small heating pods. The thermal suit had its own emergency air supply but like the thermal heat in the suit I had to use it sparingly so I didn’t drain the batteries. The air supply was turned on once I had made contact with the surface. The only option open to me when I was tossed from the sled was for me to sit down and wait out the storm. That part was fine but the winds from the storms bring large amounts of blowing snow with them so even a short time of being stationary resulted in being buried in several feet of snow. At least the snow helped insulate me against the frigid temperatures. I switched on and off the air supply along with the heat in intervals in an effort to maintain the batteries. I waited under the snow and ice patiently and when I detected the winds decreasing I dug my way out to the top and searched around for shelter of some kind; but, I have to admit that in all my years of captaining a sled I have never been aware of seeing anything that resembled what I would consider shelter, just show and ice hills anywhere you turn. Fortunately it was still daylight when I emerged from my temporary snow cocoon and made my way to this ice hill. In my time daylight only means that the dark isn’t as dark. All my life this is the only ‘daylight’ I have known. They said volcanic ash clouded the sky barely allowing light to filter through to the surface. That was how it was explained by elder knowledgeables when I was in school and it has been this way for the past century and a half. Enough thinking. Time to either find some sort of shelter or dig deep into one of these ice hills and pray that I have enough heat to keep me alive for the next couple of days while I try to figure how I am going to survive and return to the New Capital. The odds of me surviving are stacked against me but as long as I can still function I won’t give up hope. I don’t believe in miracles but now would be a good time for one. |
Richard CozicarA new Canadian Author with too many ideas in his head. Surprising even himself with where his stories go. Archives
January 2018
Categories
All
|