Supernatural Thriller Romance Set in the Most Amazing Place of All: Antarctica
Icy
Passage
By Ann Gimpel
Dream Shadow Press
110K words
Release Date: 2/29/16
Genre: Supernatural thriller romance
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Book Description:
Fresh out of
residency, Dr. Kayna Quan opts for a tour in Antarctica. Money is short, so she
hires on as medical officer aboard a Russian research vessel headed for McMurdo
Station. Primed for almost anything, she plays her paranormal ability close to
the vest.
Stationed on
remote South Georgia Island for two years, Brynn McMichaels is eager for a
change. When cultures of the single-celled organism, archaea, overgrow their
bins in his lab and begin shifting into another form, he worries he’s losing
his mind and talks with scientists at McMurdo, but they have problems of their
own—bad ones. Brynn agrees to help. The weather’s too uncertain to send a plane,
so he hitches a ride aboard Kayna’s ship and brings his mutant culture colonies
along.
Attraction
sparks, urgent, hot and powerful, between Brynn and Kayna, but her disclosure
about her magic is a tough nut to crack. It doesn’t help that her dead father is
stalking her. Lethal cultures, bizarre illness, and McMurdo’s refusal to let
them land force Brynn and Kayna into an uneasy alliance. Will their fragile
bond be enough to thwart the powers trying to destroy Earth, and them along
with it?
Excerpt from Icy
Passage:
Micah
Greenwich sucked air as he pushed up from his squat, a weight bar balanced
across his shoulders. He did one more squat before a wave of dizziness
threatened to bring him to his knees. Gasping, he shucked the bar onto pins protruding
from the back of the squat rack and grabbed one of the metal stanchions for
support. A headache pounded behind one eye, and he felt nauseous.
“What the fuck
is wrong with me?” he muttered, still clinging to the metal cage shoved in a
back corner of the gym at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. No one was in the gym.
Not at this hour. Granted, the perpetual night for part of the year, followed
by perpetual day, yielded some odd circadian rhythms, but Micah rarely had
competition for any of the gym machines or weight equipment late at night.
He glanced at
the weight plates balanced on the ends of the forty-five pound bar, thinking
perhaps he’d misjudged and put too much weight on it, but that wasn’t the
issue. He shrugged. Maybe he was getting sick. Something was going around. So
far, he’d been lucky during his brief stint at the southern end of the Earth
and had avoided the colds and flus McMurdo residents passed among themselves
like candy.
He wiped sweat
from his face with a ratty towel and decided to call it a night—at least for
working out. He still needed to stop by his lab. Because he was the newest and
greenest microbiologist, he’d been assigned archaea, the most ancient
single-celled life form on the planet. His cultures had taken a decidedly odd turn,
though, a couple of weeks back—growing like mad and not looking like any
prokaryote he’d ever seen. While he might have started with archaea, what was
in his bins didn’t look much like them anymore.
Another wave
of nausea battered him, and he folded his arms around his midsection, wondering
if he was going to vomit. Saliva flooded his mouth, but he choked it back. Even
though he didn’t feel like doing anything beyond finding his bed, he left the
gym and made his way three buildings over to his lab. McMurdo was a series of
prefab buildings with interconnecting doors and insulated tunnel-walkways, so
you didn’t have to go outside into the weather. Antarctica never got
particularly warm, and nights were always bitter.
He glanced out
a window at an inky sky shot with stars, and a reluctant smile split his face.
It might be minus something outside, but it was beautiful too. He’d always
loved wild, remote places, and Antarctica was about as wild and remote as it
got—shy of signing up to be an astronaut, which was a long-standing dream of
his.
Micah frowned,
wondering if the astronaut gig was even possible. The United States had cut
their funding for the space program rather dramatically. Besides, he needed
more in the way of credentials to even be considered for something like that.
With another swipe at his still sweaty face—the more he thought about it, the
surer he was he was coming down with the flu—he pushed open the door to his lab
and froze, not believing his eyes.
“Britta?” he
called. “Marguerite!”
The women
didn’t answer. They sprawled face down on the floor in front of his main
workbench, clearly passed out. Wondering if they’d gotten into the high-grade,
ethyl alcohol he used to preserve things, he called their names again, louder
this time. The longer he looked at them, the weirder he felt. They were too
still. Sudden fear gripped him, making the nausea worse.
“Jesus fucking
Christ. Why me?” he muttered, and raced to the women. He bent, grabbed Britta’s
shoulder, and shook her. When she didn’t respond, he flipped her over and
stared at her cherry red face.
Fighting a
deeply sinking feeling, he turned Marguerite over. She looked just like her
friend and roommate. Micah squatted next to them and laid his fingers across
their necks, searching for a pulse.
Nothing.
He placed his
ear over their hearts, willing there to be something, anything, before he
started CPR. Still nothing. He ground his teeth together, unnerved. How could
there possibly be two dead women in his lab?
Even though he
was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good, he tilted Marguerite’s head back and
breathed into her mouth before doing chest compressions. When he looked over at
Britta, he understood he had to have help and lurched to his feet. Snapping up
the wall phone, he punched in the after hours code for the clinic. As soon as
one of the nurses answered, he screeched, “Send help now. Third micro lab.”
His headache
worsened. So did his twisting, roiling guts, but he went back to the women. He
didn’t need to be a doctor to recognize death. Despite the futility, he
alternated CPR from one to the next. Five long minutes passed—but they felt
like five years—before the door burst open.
“Christ!” One
of the docs—Stewart maybe, Micah was too rattled to take a good look—pulled him
off Marguerite. A tall, broad-shouldered woman Micah didn’t recognize examined
Britta.
“Looks like
carbon monoxide poisoning to me,” the female medic said flatly. “This one’s
well past CPR.”
Dr. Stewart
rocked back on his heels. “Yeah, her too.” He trained his blue eyes on Micah.
“What happened?”
Micah shook
his head. “Damned if I know. I just got here. I had dinner in the mess hall,
worked out in the gym, and then I swung by here to check on my cultures.”
The woman
narrowed her eyes and half-crawled to where Micah sat on the floor. She folded
her fingers over his wrist and took him in with practiced hazel eyes. Her
reddish hair was short, almost in a butch cut. She pressed her lips into a
harsh line, frowning.
“I’m Ariana,”
she said, letting go of his wrist. “One of the nurse practitioners. How have
you been feeling?”
“Bad,” he
admitted. “Think I finally succumbed to the community disease everyone else
has.”
Dr. Stewart
joined them and squatted next to Micah. He ran a hand down the side of Micah’s
neck and listened to his chest with a stethoscope before exchanging a pointed
glance with Ariana. “Where’s the CO meter in here?” he asked.
Micah gestured
behind him. “On that wall.” He twisted to look at it, but the indicator light
was green—safe. Maybe it was defective. His scientifically trained mind
arranged informational bits into an unpleasant pattern. “The women,” he said.
“If I’d been firing on all cylinders, I’d have figured it out as soon as I
looked at the color of their faces. They died from carbon monoxide poisoning,
didn’t they?”
“Probably.”
Dr. Stewart said cautiously. “But it’s conjecture at this point.”
“That cherry
red color is a dead giveaway,” Ariana said with conviction. “Nothing else will
do that.”
“We’ll wait
for an autopsy before we make statements like that.” The doctor eyed his
colleague coolly.
“Yes, Doctor.
Sir. King of all things medical.” She set her lips in a thin line, clearly
biting back further sarcasm. “Meantime,” she ground out, “I’m pretty sure he—”
she jabbed a finger at Micah “—has whatever killed these two.” She stood and
punched numbers into the wall phone. “I’m calling security.”
Dr. Stewart
sifted his hands through his untidy, blond hair. “Tell them to alert
maintenance. Until we figure out what killed these two, we’ve got to get out of
here. Now.”
Micah
straightened. “Wait a minute,” he sputtered. “The meter says it’s safe. For all
we know, Britta and Marguerite got poisoned elsewhere and just happened to be
in here cleaning when they collapsed.”
Dr. Stewart
got to his feet and hauled Micah upright. “For tonight, we’ll put you in the
infirmary and run tests to check if your hemoglobin’s been compromised. I’ve
got to alert the boss and talk with base security. We’ll to get to the bottom
of this.”
“But my lab—”
Dr. Stewart
made a chopping motion with one hand, and the rest of Micah’s protest died
unspoken.
Ariana hung up
the phone and nodded at Dr. Stewart. “You take care of the boss. I’ll deal with
security and maintenance. Need to get the gas sniffer in here to make sure
there’s not a leak.”
Micah tried to
focus, but the room spun crazily. He really was wiped out. Much more tired than
a thirty-year-old man had a right to feel.
“Can you
walk?” Dr. Stewart nudged him.
Micah focused
bleary eyes on the physician. “Yeah. I think so.”
“How are you
feeling?” Ariana asked the doctor.
He shrugged.
“Normal. But it takes time for exposure to take a toll. Micah probably lives in
this lab, except when he’s asleep.”
“Yeah, but,”
Micah pointed out, “those women didn’t. They clean all the science labs. Maybe
one of the other ones is the problem.”
The doctor
folded an arm around Micah’s waist supporting him, and led him out of the lab.
“I’m on it. By the time you wake up, we’ll know more.”
Micah
staggered through the door, flanked by Dr. Stewart and Ariana. “What are you
going to do about the women?” he asked.
“You were
there when I alerted base security. They’ll take care of them,” Ariana assured
him. “For tonight, focus on getting well.”
*
* * *
It hadn’t been
just that night, though. Micah spent the next three days in the infirmary
sucking bottled oxygen. When that didn’t clear his red blood cells fast enough,
the doctors ordered chelation treatments. In the meantime, he had a chance to
think, and he didn’t care for what he came up with. Besides, it was so fantastic,
no one would believe him.
Maintenance
had given his lab, and the other three microbiology studios, a clean bill of
health, which meant he could go back to work tomorrow. Even more disturbing,
the entirety of the science wing where the dead women cleaned showed zip in the
way of evidence of a gas leak. In the interest of thoroughness, maintenance had
checked the female dorms too, and found exactly nothing. Autopsy was conclusive
regarding cause of death, but no one could figure out how the women had been exposed
to a big enough dose of carbon monoxide to kill them.
The same was
true for him—major exposure to something pigging up his hemoglobin, but without
an identifiable source. Another few hours without medical intervention and he’d
have been just as dead as Britta and Marguerite.
Armed with
that knowledge—and a phalanx of unanswered questions—Micah spent his downtime
in the infirmary mapping out a series of tests to run on his strange archaea
colonies. He had suspicions, but needed facts before he presented them to Jack
DeVoe, the man in charge of McMurdo operations. If he went to him now, Jack,
who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, would laugh him right out of his office. And
there would go Micah’s hopes of earning his chops, so he could go on to
something more prestigious than working at McMurdo Station.
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