Iceling Read online

  Finally, we’re past it; it’s nothing but a sinister dot behind my shoulder. We’re in the trees now, those tall, tropical-looking trees with the low-hanging branches forming canopies weighed down with ice and snow. Up close, they’re not exactly like palm trees, but I’ve also never seen real palm trees in person before, so the truth is I don’t know. They’ve got these long, broad, flat leaves, and they bend so low with the weight of the snow. I’m looking up at those leaves and the patterns they make in the sky, and my steps slow down, and all of a sudden I’m no longer moving. I can’t stop staring at the leaves, because whereas at first glance it seemed that the snow was weighing them down, I see that it’s not that at all. They’re sloping and drooping at this willful kind of angle, like if you brushed the snow off, they wouldn’t spring up. In other words, it looks like these trees are bending their branches and leaves low on purpose, for the purpose of holding the snow. It looks like they’re built for this strange job, all the way out here. Stan turns around for me and follows my gaze upward. I know he sees what I see, but he doesn’t say a word, just nudges my shoulder and guides me back on the path.

  We keep walking under this weird canopy for at least half an hour, just following the trampled-down snow to see where our Icelings are going.

  “Look!” someone shouts, the need to believe choking his voice. “A squirrel!”

  We look, see nothing.

  “Oh,” says the same voice, this time tinged with sadness. “It was just a gust of wind.”

  My heart sinks, and I realize how desperate I am—how desperate we all are—to see something familiar. Because not only are there no squirrels around here, there isn’t anything. No birds, no animals, no lizards, no frigid-water fish. We can hear the water and the wind and the trees as they sigh and bend low under the weight of the snow, but no living things with eyes or minds or hearts. No life, aside from ours, have we yet seen here.

  We follow the trampled path until we’re finally out from under the trees, and it turns out we were just tracing the coastline, but vaguely inland, and we’re approaching another dock. Two docks, actually, both of them newer-looking than the one we used to get on the island—either that or nobody bothered to make them look as weathered as the first one.

  STRUCTURES THAT LOOK like storage sheds sit on top of each of these twin docks, and there are these tires that hang off their sides like bumpers. Affixed to one of the docks is an old-fashioned gas pump, painted a bright cherry red, with like what look like functional gauges.

  “Huh,” says Stan. “This one looks like it might be a refueling dock. And look at all these slips on the other one. For smaller boats to, uh, park.”

  “How do you know all that?” I ask.

  “According to my dad, fishing and camping trips are great ways to bond with your sons,” he says, and in what is no longer anywhere close to the darkest part of my mind, I feel relieved at least one of us might know some survival skills. “And these,” he says, gesturing at the docks, “are way better maintained than the one we anchored by.”

  “So the only things missing from this equation are the people maintaining them,” says Emily, and we look at her but don’t respond, because we don’t want to think about what that means.

  The docks are in this little rocky cove, hidden and jutting inward in such a way that it was impossible for us to have seen them when we were first circling the island to pull up to the other dock. Hiding them even more is another dense copse of those heavy, weird trees, their stubbornly drooping leaves making a canopy over part of them. The wind blows the snow around, like a smoke screen protecting a fort.

  Stan taps me on the shoulder and points to a spot in the distance.

  “See that spot of color?” he says. Emily and I shake our heads no, so we get out our phones and try the zoom function, but all I can see is a blur.

  “You mean that red thing?” Emily says.

  “No,” Stan says. “It’s yellow. Are you sure you don’t see it?”

  “All I see are blurs. What do you think it is?” I say.

  “I thought it might be a boat,” Stan says. “Forget it, though. It’s probably nothing. We need to keep going, or we’ll lose our way.”

  “If it’s a boat, we need to find it! Otherwise . . .” And I just let the thought drift, because it’s terrifying.

  “If it’s a boat, we will find it,” Stan says. “Right now we need to keep going. They’re somewhere up ahead, and we need to find them.”

  I take some pictures and a few videos before we go, hoping that I captured enough of the peculiarities of this place so we can find our way back here later. “Hey, Bobby?” I call, wanting to ask him if I’ve captured enough angles for us to be able to use my footage as a map, but he doesn’t answer, and when I look for him, he’s not around.

  “Hey, Stan,” I say. “Have you seen Bobby?”

  “Nope,” says Stan. “Probably he’s up ahead? If anyone knows where they’re going, it’s Bobby.”

  Someone calls out, “Yo! Is anyone maybe Hansel-and-Gretel-ing this place?”

  Stan gives the guy a thumbs-up, and I hold out my phone and shout, “I’ve got your bread crumbs right here, champ.”

  We keep walking the path until it opens up and the trees disappear, and all around us are these low hills. The tracks start to peter out here, though there’s still something of a path headed onward. An argument breaks out—some of the kids have had enough and don’t want to continue.

  Some guy sits down and says, so loud and pouty it makes my frozen skin crawl, “It’s goddamn cold! I don’t even like my sister! I wanna go home.” A few other guys and girls who share this sentiment join the chorus and plant their asses down on the hostile ground, the definitive sign that this is indeed a collective temper tantrum.

  But if it were that easy to just dismiss these kids as selfish whiners, then this would be a different story. People are tired. They’re cold. They’re hungry. Someone here has driven from Los Angeles, which seems insane to me. To imagine what I went through—what we went through—in a single day and just a bit of change, and stretch that out over days or maybe even a week or however long it takes to drive from L.A. . . . I don’t know.

  “What if they are weapons?” someone—whether in the sitting group or the standing group, I don’t know—asks.

  “They just ran. They left us. Alone. I never left Jennie alone. Not once in her life,” someone else sobs.

  “So what?” asks someone, and when I see that it’s Jayson, a little happy chime rings in my head. Jayson’s here! “What, are you gonna swim home? Do you even know which way’s land? We’re stuck here,” he says.

  “Just because those . . . things got me stuck here against my will,” says the boy who started all this, “doesn’t mean I have to participate in whatever’s going to happen. Because something’s going to happen, and you’re an idiot if you don’t know that too. It’s not like nobody knows we’re coming. It’s not like they would understand the idea of someone setting a trap for them to run into. It’s not like they’re gonna realize it and then stop themselves from doing whatever it is that’s so important they do. It’s not like they’d even understand what a trap is if we explained it.”

  “We have to keep going,” says Stan. “We have to leave them and keep going.” He’s looking out at the Iceling tracks.

  “What?” says Emily.

  “He’s right,” I say. “We don’t know what’s out there or what’s waiting for them. And maybe we can’t do anything about it, but . . .”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Right. Okay.” It’s not the resounding yes I was hoping for, but I know she understands that this is the only option. She puts one foot in front of the other, same as me, and I guide her onward as Stan turns to the seated shepherds.

  “We’re going,” he says. “We’ve got to. I get why you maybe think you can’t, but you can. We can all do this.
You’re welcome to come with us. Just follow our tracks and you’ll find us.”

  He turns and catches up with us. We trudge on after the speck in the distance we know, in our hearts, to be our siblings. We trudge on and on and on.

  I KNOW THAT I shouldn’t be running like this, toward whatever’s to come, happy or horrible. But I can’t help it. And it looks like neither can anyone else. At least, anyone else who’s with us. Stan, Emily, Jayson, me, and about thirty others are running along this path up one of the low-slung hills, and when we get to the top, we stop and stare.

  Because below us is the trembling field of ice. A field about the size of a middle school auditorium, sheeted completely in ice, and it’s trembling. There’s snow all around the ridge of hills bordering the whole island, not so much piled up as somehow shaken off. The ice is starting to look weird. The snow is scattered and heaped in such a way that it’s as if the ground is shaking itself loose of things before something shakes itself loose from the ground. I mean that it looks like something’s under the surface, and it wants to come out. After several seconds of silent staring, we trudge on again, and as we get down to the bottom of the hill, we see them.

  Our Icelings.

  And I see her.

  Callie.

  Callie and Tara and Ted and Greta and all the rest, holding hands. They stand in a circle along the perimeter of the trembling field of ice, and all I can say about it is that they look like they belong there. I zero in on Callie. She knows exactly where she is, exactly whom she’s with, exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. In other words, she looks a way I’ve never seen her look before. Like she belongs. Like what I feel like when I walk through Mom and Dad’s front door and think—not actively, not even with my brain, because when you belong, you don’t really need to think—This is home. And I feel safe. They all look like that, like they just got back from a long, long trip, which was exhilarating and rewarding but ultimately really difficult, but they’re home now, and they remembered to clean up before they left so that their homecoming could be that much warmer.

  Their eyes are closed, and they’re holding hands, and they’re smiling.

  And we stand above them, shivering and numb with awe and terror, and we look at them like we have no idea who they are, and we realize we are strangers here. To each other, to our brothers, to our sisters, to this frigid mystery of a place.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SAVE FOR THE trembling, all is still. Until it isn’t.

  Suddenly, the whole island bellows with a chorus of terrible, unfamiliar sounds. We cover our ears and cower, but they just grow louder and closer and louder and closer until they’re right on top of us. And it’s not the sound of thunder, and it’s not the sound of the lightning that we smelled earlier.

  Stan grabs my wrist, then Emily’s.

  “Holy shit,” he says, and points skyward. Three winged, needle-nosed aircrafts soaring over the island. On each of the wings is a missile. Which means, I think, that these are drones.

  And then we hear what sounds like a fleet of jeeps churning slowly toward us. And then after we hear them we see them, pulling up over the ridge, and from these jeeps pour soldiers, and the soldiers have guns. “Hut,” they say. “Hut.” They de-jeep, rifles slung low with their elbows straight out, wrists limp, like at any minute they could flick their wrists and spit a hundred bullets at your skull and heart. If they weren’t on the other side of the ridge, I might honestly just hand myself over.

  But they are. They’re over there, and we’re over here, and the Icelings are between us. It’s a pretty clear Us vs. Them situation here. People gasp. Someone faints. A girl next to me pees herself, and for a second I envy the fleeting moment of warmth she must be getting from it, and then I remember where I am.

  I feel like I’ve floated up and out of my own body, and I’m watching myself from up above, and I watch myself look down to the trembling field below. And then I see something that makes me forget all about the drones and weapons and army that has descended upon us.

  Because below this ridge of snowy hills, the trembling field is shivering and shaking. The ice is cracking apart. At first it’s just the very outer surface, but then dozens of little holes start to crack open, like they’re being punctured from below, and then the cracks grow longer and deeper, and it’s all happening so fast, like when a nature doc shows the process of a plant blooming from a seed in superfast motion.

  The drones move. I can hear this roaring of engines and see snow moving around in their wake. I can hear the soldiers’ rifles, and they sound like they’re aching.

  I feel a little tug and look down to see I’m squeezing Stan’s hand way too hard. Just as I’m letting go, I feel and then see a flash of color and movement on the field below. We all look down. Remember how I said it looked like the ground was shaking itself loose of things before something shakes itself loose from the ground? This, I guess, is what was trying to shake itself loose. The ground shudders and shakes like someone’s just grabbed it, and there’s this sound I can’t place as this . . . hole opens up. And there’s something like smoke, but I know it’s not smoke, it’s more like a mist, like what might happen when warm air meets Arctic air. And then what shakes itself loose from the ground is this . . . body.

  I don’t know what else to call it. There are two arms, and they’re shivering, and they’re attached to a torso that just shoots up, as if the shaking gives it energy. As it keeps rising up it keeps looking like a human figure, and it looks like a him, and then he looks like an Iceling. He’s got that flaxy dirty blond hair, and when he walks, he walks like a part of him always needs to feel the ground. I think he’s headed toward this big mound of snow. He doesn’t once look at the soldiers. None of the Icelings do. But you can tell that they all see them. It’s in their bodies. It’s the first time Callie’s looked like she perfectly understands the world around her.

  “Who the hell is that?” asks Stan, but I don’t answer him. I don’t want to move a muscle, that’s how scared I am to lose sight of what’s unfolding below.

  The Iceling person reaches the mound and steps on top of it. He turns around and stretches out his arms, and all of our brothers’ and sisters’ body language changes, like they’re all deferring to him.

  Their eyes snap over and their arms fall to their sides, like an army at attention. The new Iceling drops his arms, fingers tight and hands curved like scoops, palms up. Everyone grabs hands, and the effect is somewhere between the beauty of a choreographed dance and the weird terror of a cult ritual. I don’t know how to feel. Mostly what I feel is awe, and terror, and fear for Callie—and for me. So I just keep feeling that.

  “Lorna, what the hell is going on?” Stan asks, but again I don’t answer him, and I’m not going to, because my legs are moving and I’m heading down the hill.

  It’s a short descent, maybe twenty feet, to Callie, whose back is to me. I can hear Stan coming down after me, and I can see the soldiers. They started to move down, maybe in response to me, but then someone yells—maybe not a soldier but a commander of some kind—and I hear them stop all at once. “Hut!” they say again.

  I reach the edge of the field, where I get the strong sense that I’m to go no further. That I don’t belong here, and that that’s okay. That what’s happening here has nothing to do with me and that to cross this boundary made of Icelings would be a trespass of the most awful kind. I move around so I can see Callie. Her eyes are closed, and then they open, her stare fixed on this new guy, who is, I guess, their leader. She looks like she belongs here. She looks like she’s noticing and accounting for everything around her in a way that I’ve never seen her do before.

  And it hits me that maybe every time I was tired, or kind of mean to her, and despite that she would just smile at me, like It’s okay, Lorna, I love you anyway, that maybe that . . . that maybe that smile. Maybe that smile was just something her face did. That nothing I ev
er did, good or bad or mean or kind, made any sense to her at all. And even if any of it—any of the hours I spent sitting up with her or any of the times I stayed at home instead of going out with my friends because I thought she seemed sad and needed comfort and companionship—did get through to her in some small, simplistic way, it would be nothing like the way this moment right here is affecting her. Is making the purest sense possible to her. And that kind of wrecks me a little.

  And as it wrecks me, the soldiers adjust their grips on their rifles, and everyone takes one step forward.

  I’m panicking, but I know that if I move I’ll only make things worse, so I watch from the outside, keeping an eye on Callie the whole time, making sure I can see her, grab her and run away with her if anything goes wrong. Soon a light—dim yet brilliant, if you can imagine such a thing—starts pulsing beneath the ice. The trembling expanse of ice, around which our Icelings huddle and within which this new Iceling stands, continues to crack open, over and over and over and over, until the field looks like the shell of an egg that’s been rolled and smashed but not quite split. The Icelings’ faces come alive with what I read as a sort of nervous excitement. Some of them break rank and look around at each other. They grin, like Can you believe it? But it could be something else entirely, something as un-intuitive to me as singing karaoke is to Callie.

  And then—oh my God—these little . . . things, all of them lichen green, start shooting up from the ice. One by one, row after row of them sprouting up with an energy I’ve never seen in nature before. They’ve fully breached the surface of the ice, and now they’re growing up like stalks, like hundreds of large flowers poking out, and they shiver and shake their way up there, up here, to the surface. Only the more they grow, the more I see that they’re not flowers. Not flowers but . . . pods. Jesus. Pods. And the Icelings all look on with awe, their eyes wide, their jaws slack, straining against each other to run out to the pods. I look at Callie, and then at the pods, and at Callie, and at the pods, and I smell the air. I can’t explain what the smell is other than to say that it’s different from the green one and that I’ve never smelled it before. It’s sort of burnt, and like rain, and electric. There’s something else in there that I’m not quite getting, but I’m almost getting it, and before I can wonder about it, I see Callie’s face, and it’s falling. It’s like her heart is breaking behind her face, and I look around, and so is Tara’s and Greta’s and everyone else’s. I look from them to the pods, and that’s all it takes to see why.