Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [129]
“Film me too, as I run after him,” Carlton Damon Carter whispered. And then, chasing after his husband, he was gone.
Arthur Gordon Pym lay in our sailboat, a bottle of bourbon in one hand and my bag of bones in the other. Whatever exploration he’d been making of the facility had been halted by his blood alcohol level. Fetal and clinging to the bag of the late Dirk Peters as if the remains were his to control, the man was completely oblivious to the coming storm. I didn’t bother waking him to get my treasure back, just grabbed it and swung it over my own shoulder for good measure. The sailboat was already too heavy to lift off the ground without Pym in it, so Garth and I dragged the boat along with us on the way to the exit. With the screams of the beasts echoing behind us, we could see their long and violent shadows along the corridor walls, and we pulled faster. As we passed the piles of bulk snack treats and liquid refreshments, Garth and I simply knocked the boxes into the sailboat on and around Pym, who offered not a peep of complaint, not even opening his eyes.
At the garage, the Karvels’ snowmobiles sat pristine and factory clean, looking as if they were virgins to the continent of powder that lay just outside the hatch door. As we tied the boat to the vehicles, a rope to each tow, we listened for sounds of an outside presence waiting for us when we opened the doors but heard none. No, all the sounds of intrusion were coming from inside the terrarium. The wailing, the aggravated howls, the metal clanging and glass breaking.
“We got to get the hell out of here, dog. We can leave the doors open, see if Jeffree and C-note make it out from a distance, but this sitting and shitting thing ain’t going to work,” Garth said, his eyes stuck on the door to the hallway behind us. And Garth was right. His face was covered in toothpaste, but he was right. Our gas tanks were full, the engines started. I was sitting on a bright pink bike with floral decals, but I didn’t even care at this point. We hit the door opener and were out onto the snow at full speed the moment the gate had risen high enough for us to duck through.
Garth and I were about five hundred yards away, steering a path clear of the enemy camp, when the first explosion went off behind us. Such was the power of the blast and the sound it produced that I lost control of my speeding snowmobile from the vibrations. Still, it was nothing compared to the second explosion, which left my ears ringing to the point of deafness and knocked me completely over, my snowmobile skidding off beyond me.
I righted myself on the snow as soon I had gathered my senses. Behind me, a quarter of Karvel’s amazing dome was now nothing more than fire and ruin, the section where the boiler was situated consumed by a fire that spread across the surface of the roof.
“Jeffree,” I said aloud.
“It’s not their fault,” Garth said back at me, but my mind had not even gotten that far. The destruction of a quarter of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome, and the impending destruction of the rest of the building, paled in its catastrophic weight in comparison to the long line of ice caves that I could see were now imploding.
The ground turned from resolute to uncertain. It shook violently beneath us, until both of us were floored once more by the power and length of the quake. And even when our immediate ground grew less spastic, the roar of the landscape around us told of a destruction just beginning. Coffins of ice collapsing upon themselves where,