THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go Read Online Free Page B

I am living are just like the one that I started out with in one particular. I never get to keep Davey for long.
                 
 
                  THE END
                 
 

 
    MCMURDO SOUND
     
     
     
    by
     
     
     
    Billie Sue Mosiman
     
     
     
                 
 
     
                 
 
     
                 
 
     
                  First published in URBAN NIGHTMARES as "The Hook of Death," Baen Books, edited by Josepha Sherman & Keith DeCandido, 1997
     
                 
 
     
                  McMurdo Sound has been slightly changed, revised, and lengthened from "The Hook of Death."
     
                  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012, All Rights Reserved
     
                 
 
                  I DON'T KNOW WHAT SINS I've committed that sent me to the cold wasteland of Antarctica. Brian, the radar tech, and I have often sat mulling over steaming cups of the blackest coffee we could make to figure out how we came to be stationed at McMurdo Sound. Being a government employee means taking a risk on where in the world you might wind up, but two years duty at McMurdo seems the cruelest punishment. And for my friend, Brian, the deadliest.
                  He has done something unforgivable, and they have sent a team from the FBI to check us out. Tomorrow the plane should land and they will take Brian away. If I had the strength to argue, I'd beg them to take me too.
                  It's the isolation that either makes you mad or kills you. They tell me a few years ago another recruit went insane and had to be locked up in a supply room for months before they could ship him out. If he'd been allowed to run amok, they feared he would have murdered everyone at the base. Another time at a Russian base in this region, two men argued over a sandwich and one buried an ax in the other man's head.
                  If only we had locked Brian away...
                  It began with stories. The days and nights are interminable here. Once our stations are secure and all the work complete, the hours stretch out before us like years until the next day can begin. Brian came from Alabama. He had a soft drawl and a sunny smile. At least he did back in the beginning. We had struck up a friendship early on. He had been at McMurdo for two years already when I shipped in. Since I was a replacement in Brian's sector and new and raw, he took me under his wing. The first year of my exile we played games to pass the time. Cards, dominoes, chess, darts. Brian nearly always won. He was quick-witted and able to recognize patterns inside of patterns, giving him the edge in most competitions. After a while, when it appeared I'd never improve and he would always be the victor, be suggested that I might like to hear some of the old tales he had heard or experienced as a boy in the rural south.
                  "Sure," I said, happy to be freed of the role of loser. "I'd love to hear some stories."
                  During those first few months of storytelling after work we'd take our mugs over to the heating vent in the corner of the radar room where it was quiet and warm. Brian told me about watching his grandfather pick cotton on the farm, the ice cream socials on warm summer evenings, many hunting and fishing stories involving detailed descriptions of rifles, shotguns, frog gigs, 'coons run up trees, the proper way to tan hides, and the best bait for catching bass and catfish in country fishing holes. Being from Chicago, a city boy all my life, these stories were of great interest. Picking cotton? The boles with their spiny covers that made the fingers bleed? Gigging frogs with a trident, taking them home to fry the legs for dinner? It was like an entirely new and strange world and Brian made it vivid and real for me so that I could hear the