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NOT YOUR GRANDPA'S SCIENCE FICTION
&
NOT YOUR GRANDMA'S VAMPIRE!

A terrifying blend of vampire horror, weird science fiction, and lust!

WEIRD SCIENCE FICTION & VAMPIRES!

BLOOD AND ICE at Amazon.com and fine bookstores everywhere!

"Vampire fans are in for a treat with BLOOD AND ICE! If you're hoping for surprisingly quirky takes on reality combined with cleverly worded fiction, you're in the right place. Lois Gresh always surprises me. She's one of the cleverest writers out there."
---Nancy Kilpatrick, editor of Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead

"Lois Gresh is one of the most talented writers working these days in the realms of imagination - unique ideas, bizarre plot twists, and fascinating characters! Supremely creative!"
---Robert Weinberg, Winner of Lifetime Achievement Award, HWA

"It's a cliche to call horror stories chilling, but BLOOD AND ICE had me frozen to my seat. A spoonful of Lovecraft, a jigger of Dracula, and a pinch of John Carpenter, all stirred up with sex and neutrinos and served on ice."
---James Alan Gardner, Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial award

Available now at Amazon.com and fine bookstores everywhere

January 2011

BLOOD AND ICE: PROLOGUE

Dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft and The Mountains of Madness

Antarctica: October 2015

PROLOGUE

The computer screen crackled once. And then it went black.

And then: Boom.

The plastic lab walls rattled. Notebooks and screwdrivers rolled off the tables.

Sasha Karonski's chair wobbled. She grabbed the edge of her desk so she wouldn't topple over. Nothing ever boomed in Antarctica, not in the middle of millions of square miles of ice and snow.

BOOM.

It was louder this time. From outside, a harsh scream rushed through the air and then abruptly fell silent. A cacophony of shrieks rang out.

Had something exploded on the runway?

Was it even remotely possible that the Amundsen-Scott Station was being attacked?

The South Pole wasn't the sort of place terrorists targeted. This was a scientific outpost, where nothing was top secret and nothing was related to military operations.

They couldn't be under attack. It made no sense.

But those screams --

Sasha shivered. The temperature outside was negative 45, but that wasn't why she was shivering. Her mind flew to the gold cross dangling between her breasts. Dear God, Oh Holy One, Thou Art in Heaven, please forgive my sins...

She couldn’t remember the words!

Then came another explosion. This one was so massive the file cabinets and tables jumped up and down. Again, Sasha lurched, catching herself a second time. She gripped her desk and stared at the door, which was vibrating on its hinges. Outside, the screams escalated, and then suddenly, the computer monitor crashed to the floor and shattered. Damn skinny flat screen monitor; it didn't take much to damage hardware these days, everything was flimsy and put together so it would fall apart if you so much as blew on it. Still, the station was sitting on a block of ice two miles thick: it was solid and earthquakes here were unknown, so what had caused the explosions and what had caused the monitor to crash to the floor?

Sasha's skin prickled with fear, that tingle that sweeps over you when you know something is terribly wrong and you have the feeling things are only going to get worse.

And then the lights flickered and died. The room was as black as the Ross Sea in winter. Sasha knew if the power didn't return, she and the rest of the crew were in a lot of trouble.

The station was still operating with a skeletal winter staff, a few dozen researchers and technicians, and their only source of power was from the three generators running on JP-8 jet fuel. If all three failed, anyone injured would probably die before help could reach them from McMurdo or from the outside world.

Feeling her way along the desk to the lab bench and from there to the wall, Sasha stumbled toward the door that led outside. It was hard to move quickly in her South Pole gear: hat, goggles, face scarf, ten-pound parka, snow pants, insulated gloves, and boots. In the cramped lab, she tripped over cables and bumped into chairs.

She pushed open the door and peeked across the expanse of Antarctic ice. The glare of summer had hit the glacial plateau. After coping with the endless night of winter, February through October, Sasha was blinded every time she went outside now. Even her goggles didn't deflect the sun as it shimmered off the snow, the ice, and the clouds of crystals: diamond dust sparkling under the frozen lid of the sky. Sasha squinted at the snow whipping across the glacier, at the weird ice sculptures molded by the katabatic winds, at the black folds of the crevasses.

As her eyes adjusted to the glare, her first impulse was to run back into the lab and hide in a storage closet and weep. She was surrounded by the sort of nightmare she never thought she'd see; she was an MIT-trained physicist, not the sort of girl who might stumble across the massacre of all her friends.

And yet, there it was, and there was no denying what she was seeing. As her eyes swept over the scene, her limbs went numb, and for a few moments, she froze in place, unable to will her legs to move forward. It was hard not to cry. Everywhere she looked, Sasha saw hell. Blood was etched across the ice like spider webs. Blood was soaked into the snow. Legs, arms, hair, heads: bodies, and pieces of bodies were scattered in shreds by the runway, the equipment buildings, the recreation center, the food depository.

What had happened? How could this be real? What if the killer came after her?

Her mind raced. There was no place to hide in a small Antarctic station. The lunatics who had killed her friends would find her no matter what she did. Then a thought flashed through her mind: someone else might still be alive. She couldn’t just hide and let another die out here. She’d never forgive herself.

There had to be survivors.

She scanned the vast plateau beyond the carnage, beyond the station. Nothing out there had changed: ice sculptures twisted toward the sky like broken fingers; the surface was a blinding sheet of ice, like a gigantic mirror reflecting the sun back upon itself. The scene was one of frigid beauty marred by death and loss.

She stepped from the station onto the ice. As the lab door closed behind her, she smelled the bodies -- full blast, like burned meat on a grill, and she doubled over from nausea and gripped her stomach. She was going to throw up, she just knew it. She swallowed and swallowed, hoping the nausea would pass, and she clutched the railing by the door and blinked, trying to clear what must be an hallucination.

But the hallucination didn’t clear, and the burned meat and nausea didn't go away.

The blood, the bodies, the arms, the gore was splattered everywhere over the ice. It was a massacre, but there were no gun men, no terrorists, no weapons. Just all of her friends, dead.

No, she saw, not everyone was dead. There were some survivors. A few guys limped over the carnage, and she thought she saw movement near one of the IceCube modules.

Halos shimmered around the sun as if angels were up there, watching over Antarctica. Apparently, the angels had been distracted and not watching very carefully today. Everywhere was beauty and death, blood and ice.

The green house was intact, thank god, so they still had food. But the supplies and recreation building was burning, or rather, what was left of the building was burning.

They weren’t particularly equipped for putting out fires here, but someone -- she couldn't see who it was at this distance -- was dousing the flames. He was using a hose that normally supplied hot water for drilling the IceCube neutrino observatory holes into the ice. The whole IceCube experiment, Sasha’s life’s work, now seemed trivial. In the face of death, who cared if neutrinos passed through the Earth from unknown sources in the universe? Sure, lately, the data was showing odd neutrino events that had intrigued her, but it would be a long time, probably years, before scientists analyzed the data sufficiently to know if they were seeing anything truly unusual.

"Over here!" someone called. She recognized the voice. It was Antoine Damar, one of the key lab technicians. He was waving his arms and trying to get her attention. She crunched over the ice, carefully avoiding frozen streaks of blood and body parts. She couldn't make out who had been killed and who survived; god it was awful, the faces blasted off or shredded on skulls, entire heads blown off necks and wedged in pockets of ice. Fighting down the bile, she made her way over to Antoine, who stood by one of the dozens of bore holes. On top of the hole was a digital optical module that was frozen into an IceTop tank. The entire IceCube experiment was basically an upside down telescope that peered through ice thousands of meters beneath the surface to gather information about outer space. As if it mattered now...

She forced her lips to move, forced herself to talk. "What happened? Are there any clues?" She swallowed, unable to say more.

Antoine motioned for her to crouch down next to him by the equipment. She lowered herself to the ice. "All of the equipment is dead. It all crashed," he said. She stared, numb, at the optical module, which looked like a transparent globe filled with electronics, cables coiled beneath it like octopus tentacles. When she said nothing, he added as if to further explain the inexplicable, "The circuits are fried, Sasha."

Sasha shook her head, tried to focus on technology, tried to care about it. Finally, her mind cleared sufficiently to think. "How could all the circuits short out, Antoine? How? These things are tested to--" She paused. "They’re tested to death."

"Yeah," he paused, too, "I’ve never seen anything like it before. But I’m not actually saying the circuits shorted. I’m saying they literally fried. Melted. Whatever hit--" he pointed to a half dozen bodies freezing in the snow-- "whatever hit them...well, it hit the IceTop modules, too."

His voice grew soft, and he choked on his words. She could tell he was trying not to think about his dead friends, that he was using a technique that she often used. Talk about science to avoid thinking about emotions. "I don’t know what happened, Sasha. I don’t have a clue. I was on my computer when the blast hit. I ran outside and saw all this--" And then he stopped. His shoulders slumped, and he bowed his head; and she heard the muffled sobs. "Oh, Sasha, what happened?"

She placed a hand on his shoulder. Even if she had a clue, she couldn’t answer because her own words were strangled in her throat. Ten yards behind Antoine, she saw Zhen Qing, or what was left of him. Poor guy, he was only twenty-two, even younger than Sasha. Zhen, an ace engineer fresh out of school. His legs and arms were shattered and laying in pools of blood far from his body.

Antoine turned slightly and saw Zhen, too, and then Antoine gripped Sasha’s shoulders, and she fell back on the ice, and he fell on top of her; and then they were both laughing hysterically, and she knew it wasn’t because anything was funny, but rather, because they had stepped inside a nightmare and laughter was the only release.

Holding onto each other, Sasha and Antoine stood and awkwardly pulled themselves together, and then she said through chattering teeth, "We have to find out how many are dead."

"We won't make it through the night without heat. I'd like to know what's left of the station."

Sasha nodded. It was only October, with Antarctica inching into summer: were enough guys left from the skeletal winter crew to fix the generators and get the communications up? Did they even have any generators or communications equipment left? The guy with the hose had to be using some sort of power.

Ash filtered down to the snow and ice, coating the blood with black flakes. The fire was out, and the supplies and recreation building was damaged but intact. Across the expanse of snow, the two-story drill building was okay, as were the red equipment trailers. The yellow cable repair tent had collapsed into the snow, and giant brown cables coiled around the tent like snakes.

Surreal. Sasha bit her lip, tasted the blood before it froze.

They were just emerging from the dark hood of the six-to-eight-month winter. It had been night twenty-four hours a day with temperatures down to negative 85 degrees, and with the wind chill to negative 120. The blizzards had been absolute hell: winds roaring at 100 miles per hour, ice raging across the bleak landscape and killing everything in their paths. Antoine and Sasha, and the rest of the winter crew, were more than ready to leave the South Pole and return to civilization. Now most of them wouldn’t go home. The dead would spend eternity mummified in coffins beneath the ice.

"What are we going to do, Sasha?" Antoine’s voice was calm again. The scientist was in control; the emotional human had been stifled. "The summer crew won’t be here for a couple of weeks. We probably don’t have any communications left. I think it’s all been blown out."

"We don’t know that for sure," she said. "Look, there’s Rayna. Maybe she knows something."

Rayna Chubkoff was lifting small objects -- fingers -- from the ice and putting them on a stretcher. She was the only medical pro at the Amundsen-Scott IceCube Lab. Russian by birth, brilliant mind, a good doctor, Rayna also had the personality of, well, an ice cube. Sasha didn’t like her much.

Sasha asked Antoine to check the generators and determine if any modules were still online and functioning, then made her way through the snow, ice, and dead bodies over to Rayna.

The young doctor turned from the stretcher, paused to acknowledge Sasha. Her face hidden by goggles and scarf, Rayna might have been scowling, angry, worried, or any mixture in between. There was no way to know, but her voice was cold, to the point, and sharp. "Before you ask, there are twelve dead. Nobody injured. Just dead."

With twelve dead, that meant only six people had survived. Sasha, Antoine, Rayna, the techs putting out the fires.

She asked Rayna to clue her in about the deaths, but the doctor wasn’t much help. "I don’t know what killed them,” she said. “I was asleep when the blast hit, whatever it was."

"I thought maybe--" Sasha groped for the words, "maybe you could tell what hit us from the condition of the bodies...the people."

Rayna lowered her head. She was clearly rattled. She was in her twenties and had no experience with this sort of thing. She handled frostbites and minor cuts, headaches and mild illnesses. "Maybe I’ll know more after the autopsies but I don't think so. It’s clear that some people died from the blast and the fire. But as for the others, I don’t know. It’s like they were burned in place, not close to the explosion at all, but nearby. I’m afraid that I just don’t know what happened."

"Have you contacted the Air Force?" Sasha asked.

"All my equipment is dead. All I can tell you is, in my quarters, everything short circuited and switched off. A lot of equipment went up in flames. Maybe you should see if you can fix the equipment, Sasha, and maybe you can get us some help."

Yeah, fix the equipment, that’s what Sasha would do. Fix the equipment. Get her mind off the bodies, the blood. That was Rayna’s domain.

"I’ll do what I can," she said.

Rayna nodded and returned her attention to the head, torso, leg, and fingers on the stretcher. All in pieces: the hair singed off, the face half melted from fire, the blood-splattered skull glittering in the sun. It was Sarah Hermann, pretty, petite, engaged to be married next month in Maine. Sarah wasn’t going to make it to her wedding. Sarah wasn’t even going to make it home.

NOT YOUR GRANDPA'S SCIENCE FICTION & NOT YOUR GRANDMA'S VAMPIRE!

BLOOD AND ICE: PROLOGUE

NOT YOUR GRANDPA'S SCIENCE FICTION
&
NOT YOUR GRANDMA'S VAMPIRE!