Wintership by M. King (anthology contribution – Weirdly, Volume III)
Cover art: P. Ellis
Length: anthology contribution / 6,000 words
Published by: Wild Child Publishing (2010)
Wild Child Publishing’s Weirdly anthology series features the best in strange tales to unsettle, spook, and downright terrify. This third volume in the series includes a spooky M. King story, ‘Wintership’, in which a rookie driver on the Canadian Ice Road encounters a legend of the frozen north.
Excerpt:
© M. King 2010
Nothing like the Winter Road existed anywhere else in the world.
Up here, where the weather became an enemy and everything sensible turned inside out, there were reserves of natural gas, diamonds, and other junk worth millions. Worth enough to endanger the lives of men who spent months isolated from the rest of civilization, chipping treasure out of the frigid earth. Communities grew up around those desperate places, industrial shantytowns of steel and grease, and they needed supplies to keep going. Those supplies could only be delivered during a few frozen months when the ice that crusted the whole region grew thick enough to support carefully scheduled vehicle runs.
It wasn’t risk-free, obviously, but money makes men do crazy things and, Jack reflected, driving a big rig across a frozen river was probably going to be one of the dumbest things he’d ever do with his life. It might also wind up being the last, but…he didn’t want to think that way. Not now. He waved at Lenny again one last time and knew he meant every word he’d said.
Since Jack’s real dad never bothered to be around much, Lenny had been the closest thing to a father in his life, but that wouldn’t count for anything if Jack made a mess of things today. If anything, it’d just add to how mad Lenny would be, after he’d gone through so much to fix up this chance. Jack steeled his nerves and ran back over all the things he’d learned on his evaluations and written tests. So much to remember, all choking up behind his eyes as the ice-rimed gray shapes of the yard receded into the distance and his truck headed on towards the road.
There were rules about speed; you had to take the whole deal slow and steady because the pressure of the truck’s weight on the ice caused the water beneath—the actual salty, honest-to-God Arctic Ocean, in some parts—to ripple in waves beneath the surface of the road. Fluctuations like that spelled disaster. If they got too big or happened too suddenly, cracks could appear right under your wheels, sending both truck and driver to an immediate, icy grave.
Of course, the road shifted all the time. Jack had found that the hardest thing to get used to, on his evaluation run. Every minute left unfilled with talking, or radio chatter, there was the sound of the Ice Road cracking under his truck’s tires, little shards of noise sliding in to fill the silence. Every few seconds, the landscape readjusted itself once more around his presence, and it seemed an uneasy truce. It had scared the crap out of him at first, and he’d kept on jawing to cover it up, cranked the radio, and tried to ignore it. Lenny had put a stop to that pretty damn quick.
Can’t ignore Nature, Lenny’d said, because that’s when she gets to be a really mean mother. Gotta learn how to listen to her, how to judge how safe you are, and stay alert the whole damn time. So, now, he had his first solo run. His first paid load, and Jack found himself alone with nothing but the world inside his truck to protect him from the world outside it. Behind his cab, the empty barrel of the truck’s massive vacuum tank echoed gloomily, ready to be filled when he reached the Nordschatz barge. A huge vessel, the barge spent seven months of the year as a floating research lab and, for the other five months, she became an oasis in the ice. Trapped in the big freeze, she couldn’t move or fend for herself, and, dependent on supplies, just waited, dormant until the thaw.
The crew stayed on board—where else could they go?—and so Jack’s job would be to take care of what, as he understood, bilge pumps usually did. He’d have to get the vac truck up there—effectively out into the middle of the goddamned ocean—pump out who knew how many hundreds of gallons of shit, and cart it back to the treatment plant another hundred and fifty miles away. If something went wrong, he would most likely die sitting on top of several tons of crap.
Keywords: horror, short story, ice road, truck, trucker, canada, canadian, mad trapper, speculative fiction
Available formats: pdf available from publisher. Additional formats may be supported at other retailers.
