Below Zero

2 APPROACHING OUTPOST ZERO, ANTARCTICA ^NOW

The DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft lurched and rattled with a violent sensation of falling that startled Zak from his book. He had been trying to lose himself in the adventure story in front of him, but it was becoming harder and harder as they flew further into the storm.

Everything about the plane was ‘no-frills’ and rickety. Half the interior was lined with fold-down seats – six on either side, facing each other – and the rest was filled with steel cargo containers secured with nylon webbing straps. The exposed metal walls and floor were freezing to the touch.

The plane shook again, dropping in the thin air, and Zak’s heart dropped with it. Cold and fear were all he could feel now. His hands were shaking so much there was no point trying to read. Even the latest Jackson Jones adventure couldn’t take his mind off it, so he closed his book and stared at the cover.

Jackson Jones and the Ghosts of the Antarctic.

In the picture, two brave adventurers were standing in front of a jagged cave cut into a wall of ice. One of the adventurers was Jackson Jones himself; wearing a heavy orange parka similar to the one Zak was wearing right now. Jackson was also dressed in black windproof trousers, and had a black hood over his head. He was stepping back in surprise, with one arm raised, brandishing a vicious ice axe. Following close behind was a boy dressed the same. The cave was dark, with a clawed hand gripping one side of it, as if something was about to leap out. From the black shadows inside, a pair of glowing red eyes glared at the approaching adventurers. But Jackson Jones and his companion weren’t afraid. Jackson Jones was never afraid – something Zak Reeves wished he could say about himself.

Zak held the book flat and jammed both hands between his knees.

The ancient aircraft carried just five of them, including the pilot – the only five people crazy enough to be flying out to Antarctica in the middle of the worst storm in years.

Sitting opposite, Zak’s sister May was also holding a book – one of those relationship books she always read – but Zak could tell she wasn’t concentrating on it. She looked ill at the best of times, with all the pale make-up and black eyeliner she liked to wear, but she looked even worse right now. The colour had drained from her face and her brow was scrunched into a deep scowl. Resting on her thigh, the index and middle fingers of her right hand were crossed.

May was fifteen – three years older than Zak – and she was one of those kids at school who was proud to be different. ‘Why fit in when you can stand out?’ she always said. May liked to wear black. In fact, she loved to wear black. Black jeans (ripped, of course), black T-shirt with either a band logo or a picture from a horror film on it, and a black leather jacket. She had three piercings in each ear – Mum wouldn’t let her have her nose or lip pierced – and she darkened her eyes with thick eyeliner. Her black hair usually hung down and hid most of her face, and she could scowl like a champion. May called herself an ‘emo-punk-half-Chinese-horror-fan’, and she was unlike anybody else at West Allen School; she ‘customized’ her uniform with badges, covered her books in pictures cut from horror film magazines, and carried a backpack with The Evil Dead printed on it. She had a handful of friends but most of the other kids thought she was weird, and kept out of her way. One girl in particular was just plain mean because May wasn’t like her and her friends. Vanessa Morton-Chandler said nasty things to May and spread rumours behind her back. May usually just made some kind of sarcastic remark, gave Vanessa a withering look and did a good job of pretending it didn’t bother her, but Zak knew it hurt her when they were unkind. That’s why the black clothes and the leather were important to May; they were her armour.

Zak would never admit it to her, but he thought his sister was cool.

When she caught sight of him watching her, May brushed away the wisps of straight black hair falling over her dark eyes. She tightened her bow-shaped mouth and nodded once.

Beside her, Dad took off his glasses and winked at Zak. ‘You OK, my young Padawan?’ The words came out as a wispy cloud of warm breath in the cold air. ‘Quite an adventure we’re having, eh?’ He pinched the bridge of his nose, then put his glasses back on. ‘And we haven’t even got there yet. You’ll have a good story to tell your friends when you get back.’

‘I’d rather tell them about the sun in St Lucia,’ May said. ‘Can’t we just turn around and—’

‘We come up on it now.’ The pilot’s thick Russian accent crackled over the intercom system. ‘You will be seeing Outpost Zero at any moment.’

The plane shook again and Zak gritted his teeth, trying not to think about dying. He’d had enough of thinking about that, and he was sick of it. It would be kind of funny, though, if after everything the doctors had said, he ended up dying in a plane crash. Funny strange, that is, not funny ha ha. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that; all of them dying together in some kind of horrible accident. It was supposed to be just him, slowly fading away in a hospital bed, the disease eating away at his brain. Zak was supposed to leave them behind, so he was sure that today they were all going to be fine. It was just turbulence. In a storm. Over Antarctica. No problem. Nothing to worry about.

Yeah, right.

He glanced at Mum, sitting beside him with her lips clamped so tight it made the tiny zigzag scar just below her nose go white. The scar had come from the time she fell off her bike when she was growing up in Hong Kong – Zak had heard the story a million times – and when it went white, it was always a dead giveaway that she was either worried or annoyed. The usual twinkle in her brown eyes was dull too, and when she smoothed her dark hair back from her narrow face, she forced a smile at him. ‘Be there soon.’

Zak turned to watch through the window behind him. On the other side of the small circle of glass, the propeller was a blur. Beyond that, there was nothing. Just black. No light at all. Zak knew that when the sun had dipped below the horizon at Outpost Zero three weeks ago, the people who lived there were prepared for a long night. It would be months before the sun would rise again. If the sky was clear, Zak guessed there would have been stars, but for now the storm smothered everything.

Dad had told Zak that Outpost Zero was in a natural dent in the landscape – like the top of a long-dead volcano. It was a kind of a shallow bowl, with low mountains to the west and a wall of ice to the east, before the world dropped away into The Chasm. But from what Zak could see, they might as well have been over London – or Mars, for that matter – because there was nothing to see but black. Or, as May would say, there was literally nothing to see but black.

‘We are heading down,’ the pilot said. ‘Into the storm. It will be bumpy. Ve-ry bumpy.’ As soon as the words left his mouth, the aircraft lurched to one side and dropped.

Zak’s insides squashed up into his chest, and his bum lifted away from the torn padding of the seat. The safety belt dug into his waist, keeping him from tumbling into the cabin, then he thumped back down as the whole plane shook like a washing machine on full spin.

‘You see.’ Dima laughed. ‘What I tell you? Bumpy!’

Yeah, hilarious, Zak thought as the plane dropped once more, juddering in the storm.

We’re not going to crash, he told himself. We’re NOT going to crash. This isn’t how it happens. I don’t die like this. Please don’t crash.

A picture flashed in his mind, of him in a hospital bed, eyes closed and at peace. Mum and Dad and May were standing around him. Grandma and Grandad in the background. That was how he was supposed to die.

Dima’s accented words came over the intercom once more. ‘Don’t worry.’ He shifted in his seat to see back through the open cockpit door. ‘The Reeves family will be safe tonight. I get the Reeves family to Outpost Zero in one piece, OK?’ He was slightly overweight, with a mop of dark hair, greying at the temples. His face was weather-beaten, and his nose was crooked from the many times he had broken it. ‘You not worry. I have landed in much worse than this. Much worse. One time, total white-out on the ground. I see nothing at all. Da, it was a bad landing, plane could not be used again, but everything was horror show.’

Horror show? And the plane couldn’t be used again? How bad is this going to be? Zak stared at the pilot. The guy is completely nuts.

‘I pulling your leg.’ Dima’s face broke into a huge tobacco-stained smile with a tooth missing at the top. ‘It’s a joke. No one can land in total white-out, not even me. Impossible to see.’

Oh. Great. Zak turned back to the window as lightning crackled in the sky. He caught a glimpse of brooding clouds hanging heavy, but it was what lay below that scared him the most. A swirling mass of ice and snow that hammered against the plane as it descended.

If that wasn’t a total white-out, Zak didn’t know what was.

‘Don’t listen to him, Zak.’ Mum put a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘We’re going to be fine.’ And she did that thing where her expression was so full of concern her face crumpled up like a piece of paper. ‘You feeling OK?’

‘Yeah, fine.’ He moved his arm, pretending to rearrange the collar of his thick coat, but really it was just to get Mum’s hand off him. Sometimes, sympathy is the worst thing in the world.

‘You see the base now?’ Dima’s voice carried into the cabin once more. ‘The lights. Look.’ He pointed out the front of the cockpit but all Zak could see was Dima’s wonky reflection in the glass, so he shifted his focus to see beyond it, and there it was. An orangey glow filtering through the storm.

‘Outpost Zero,’ Dima said. ‘The base. At last we are arriving.’

The glow became more concentrated as they approached, and before long, Zak could make out individual lights, and he began to think this wasn’t a total white-out after all. One thing was for sure, though – the base was smaller than he had expected.

In the cockpit, Dima was speaking into his communication system as he took the plane down. ‘Outpost Zero, Twin Otter seven-one-five request advisory.’

The storm blustered, scooping the plane from side to side as Dima dipped the nose, angling to the left of the main Outpost Zero lights. He lowered his voice so it was impossible to hear what he was saying over the comms, but he was frantically flipping switches, checking read-outs, and tapping dials like something was bothering him.

Like something was wrong.

Zak’s stomach cramped when he realized what it was. There weren’t any runway lights. Nothing. No sign of a landing strip at all. Maybe this was how he was going to die. Forget about doctors and drips and treatments. Forget about hospital beds with clean white sheets, fading away, and everyone being sad he was gone. They were all going to die together. They were going to hit the base and die in a blazing fireball, or—

Lightning flashed outside, bright and white, filling the cabin. There was the sound of shearing metal and the engines screamed.

‘It’s OK.’ Dima glanced back. ‘Don’t worry. We be OK. Everything will be horror show.’

That expression again. Horror show.

‘Shouldn’t the landing strip be lit up?’ Dad shouted.

‘They… there is no answer from the base.’ Dima flicked more switches. ‘Perhaps it is the weather.’

‘And the lights?’ Dad asked.

‘I have done this many times. I know this runway like I know the back parts of my own hands; we will be A-OK. With Outpost Zero lights on, I know where the landing strip is, so—’

The base lights went out.

One moment Outpost Zero was there, glowing like a beacon, and the next it was gone. All the buildings went dark. There was nothing to see through the cockpit window but the swirling whiteness of an Antarctic blizzard.

‘Damn it!’ Dima abandoned the switches and concentrated on lifting the nose of the plane. He needed to take them back up again. Fast.

The twin engines whined in protest and Zak slipped sideways in his seat as the aircraft made a steep and terrifying climb. It rose high through the storm, rattling and shaking like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel. Zak locked eyes with his sister and gripped his book so hard his fingertips throbbed and his knuckles popped.

I’m not going to die. Not here. Not like this.

His mum put an arm around his shoulder, and although his instinct was to shrug it away, like always, he accepted it, let her leave it there.

‘We’ll be fine,’ she said, but she was trembling and Zak knew she was as scared as he was. Even more scared, probably. Death was coming for Zak anyway. Every day, every hour, every minute brought it a step closer. Sometimes he thought about nothing else. It was difficult not to when everyone kept reminding him of it. Everyone trying to be so nice all the time.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Dad said. ‘Why did they turn the lights out?’

Dima didn’t reply; he was too focused on controlling the plane, fighting the sudden climb and the angry weather. And as soon as the aircraft began to level out, and the engines stopped protesting, he was on his comms again, trying to contact the base. ‘Outpost Zero, Twin Otter seven-one-five request advisory. Please respond.’ He tapped the right ear cup of his headset and tried again. ‘Outpost Zero, Twin Otter seven-one-five request advisory. Please respond. Respond.’

‘Anything?’ Dad asked. ‘Are you getting anything?’

Dima swore in Russian and tore off the headset, throwing it down beside him. He cursed again and glanced back with an expression Zak didn’t like. Not one bit.

‘Well?’ Dad asked.

‘I… please. Everything is A-OK. I guess they have some kind of power problem.’

‘You guess?’

‘I mean, that must be what it is. A power problem.’ He took a deep breath and retrieved his headset.

‘So what now?’ Mum asked as Dima took the plane into a wide circle. ‘Does this mean we have to go back?’

‘Not possible. I have to land here. For fuel.’

‘What?’ May’s eyes widened and she leant forward, still crossing her fingers. ‘Are you saying there’s only enough fuel to go one way? We don’t have enough to get back? What kind of stupid plane is this?’

‘We refuel at Outpost Zero.’

‘Yeah, if you can land. Except you can’t, can you? You can’t see anything. How can you land in this?’ She turned to Mum and Dad. ‘I mean, literally, how can he land in this?’

Dad shared a look with Mum.

‘No, seriously.’ May was becoming more agitated. ‘How can he land when he can’t even see the runway? What are our chances of making it? We’re going to be—’

‘May,’ Mum cut her short.

‘We can land anywhere,’ Dima said. ‘Here the ground is mostly flat and we have polar camping gear and survival supplies if we need them. I have landed here many times. It is fine. I promise. Whatever happens, we be A-OK.’

Zak could tell he was trying to sound confident, but he heard the doubt in Dima’s voice and saw the worry in his eyes. The pilot was just as afraid as the rest of them.