They were a good group, she thought. None questioned or blamed her for the unexplained event.
They immediately began comforting each other, the younger ones helping the more elderly to restful positions. They watched as she swung open the massive door and walked through the portal until the beam of her flashlight vanished around a curve in the tunnel.
As soon as Maeve reached daylight again, she couldn't help wondering if it had all been a hallucination.
The sea was still calm and blue. The sun had risen a little higher in a cloudless sky. And the two ladies who had preferred to remain in the open air were lying sprawled on their stomachs, each clutching at nearby rocks as if trying to keep from being torn away by some unseen force.
She bent down and tried to shake them awake but stiffened in horror when she saw the sightless eyes and the gaping mouths. Each had lost the contents of her stomach. They were dead, their skin already turning a dark purplish-blue.
Maeve ran down to the Zodiac, which was still sitting with its bow pulled onto the shoreline. The crewman who had brought them ashore was also lifeless, the same appalling expression on his face, with the same skin color. In numbed shock, Maeve lifted her portable communicator and began transmitting.
"Polar Queen, this is land expedition one. We have an emergency. Please answer immediately. Over."
There was no reply.
She tried again and again to raise the ship. Her only response was silence. It was as if Polar Queen and her crew, and passengers had never existed.
January is midsummer in Antarctica, and days are long with only an hour or two of twilight.
Temperatures on the peninsula can reach as high as fifteen degrees Celsius (fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit), but since the tour group had come ashore it had dropped to freezing. At the scheduled time for the Polar Queen to return there was neither word nor sign of her.
Maeve continued her futile attempts to make contact every half hour until eleven o'clock in the evening.
As the polar sun dipped toward the horizon, she stopped hailing on the ship's channel to conserve the transmitter's batteries. The portable radio's range was limited to ten kilometers, and no other ship or passing aircraft was within five hundred kilometers of picking up her calls for help. The nearest source of relief was the Argentinean research station on the other end of the island, but unless freak atmospheric conditions stretched her signals, they would not have received them either. In frustration, she gave up and planned to try again later.
Where was the ship and crew? she wondered constantly. Was it possible they had encountered the same murderous phenomenon and suffered harm? She did not wish to dwell on pessimistic thoughts. For the time being she and her party were secure. But without food or bedding for warmth, she did not see how they could hold out very long. A few days at most. The ages of her excursion group were on the high side. The youngest couple were in their late sixties, while the rest ranged through the seventies to the oldest, a woman of eighty-three who wanted a taste of adventure before she went into a nursing home. A sense of hopelessness welled inside Maeve.
She noted with no small apprehension that dark clouds were beginning to drift in across the sea from the west, the vanguard of the storm that First Officer Trevor Haynes had warned Maeve to expect. She had enough experience with south polar weather conditions to know that coastal storms would be accompanied by fierce winds and blinding sleet. Little or no snow would fall. Debilitating windchill would be the primary danger, Maeve finally gave up hope of seeing the ship anytime soon and began to plan for the worst by making preparations for the excursion members to bed down for the next ten hours.
The still-standing huts and rendering shed were pretty well open to the elements. The roofs had caved in long ago, and high winds had broken the few windows as well as carrying off the doors. She decided her group would stand a better chance of surviving the bitter cold and life threatening wind by remaining in the cavern. A fire using a stack of weathered lumber at the whaling station was a possibility, but it would have to be placed near the entrance. Farther back in the cave, and the smoke could cause asphyxiation.
Four of the younger men helped her place the bodies of the two women and crewman in the rendering shed. They also pulled the Zodiac farther ashore and tied it down to prevent it from being blown inland by the increasing winds. Next they sealed all but a small opening of the tunnel entrance with rocks to minimize any frigid gusts that might sweep through into the cavern. She did not want to seal them off completely from the outside by closing the rock door. Then she gathered everyone around and ordered them to huddle together for mutual warmth.
There was nothing left to do, and the hours of waiting for rescue seemed like an eternity. They tried to sleep but found it all but impossible. The numbing cold slowly began to penetrate their clothing, and the wind outside turned into a gale that shrieked like a banshee through the air hole in the stone barrier they'd erected at the tunnel entrance.