Frozen Below

FRozEN BELOW

by

Ian Luke

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

Copyright © 2012 by Ian Luke. All rights reserved.

The story herein is a work of fiction. Any characters or events bearing similarities to actual persons or occurrences is strictly coincidental.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold, and it may be lent only by means set forth at Smashwords.com. If you would like to share this book with another person, please do so as outlined at Smashwords.com. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, it was not properly lent to you or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

To all those who helped along the way,

my kids, my dogs, and my friends,

what can I say but

Thanks!

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

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Chapter 1

Australia. A land of burning plains and flooding rains. And a vital chapter in the history of sled dogs. Few understand the role they’ve played in Australia’s history, or the vital role they played in Douglas Mawson’s exploration of Antarctica more than a century ago. At Mount Kosciusko, teams trained in an effort that would provide Antarctic exploration transport for decades. The dogs that survived were housed at Melbourne Zoo upon their return. From them, a strain of huskies were developed over decades of breeding and sledging in Antarctica— and the dogs were then given away by the Federal government in an act of cultural vandalism.

And for some time now, a small, quiet community of mushers, racers, have been running mostly on dirt, occasionally on snow. It’s a history built over more than a decade of use, and the contributions of those in that community have been ignored, unknown, unrecognized.

As another long, hot, drought-laden summer dragged on, change was in the wind. Change that would bring those sled dogs to the fore, into their element. Many people would not survive this upheaval. Those that did would need every bit of strength they had. And those who did survive cursed the weather forecasters who got it all so horribly wrong.

The drought was now in its fifteenth year. The last five years had seen an increasing number of extreme weather events: howling winds, short bursts of flooding rains, days hitting the midforties Celsius. Raging bush fires had taken a terrible toll, another sign that the environmental meltdown kicking in. The fires, which had started in 2009, had also seen a failed satellite crash into the Antarctic later that year. That, on top of the unprecedented bushfires—and another two more years of drought, searing heat and even more fires—were about to culminate in a storm of the opposite extreme, of unimaginable intensity, and of freezing death. The year 2012, discussed by many and the subject of movies, was indeed going to be the beginning of the end of life as it had been known.

The storm hit New Zealand without warning. Most New Zealanders were still in bed when it hit. Those who were out and about quickly froze. Those still in bed froze. Everyone in New Zealand froze. The cold was brutal, the wind worse. The South Island disappeared under snow and ice. The southern tip of the North Island did the same. And gradually, but quickly, the whole of the North Island was buried.

***

Tim woke with a start. Rhonda’s elbow nudged him once more. Tim, your dogs are howling again, she said. Summer, way too hot for any sledding activity at the best of times. Today would be another oven, with the forecasting experts suggesting mid-forties temperatures again. The dogs wanted to be let out after being kenneled overnight. They were bored after months of inactivity, and getting noisy. Today they seemed to be noisier than ever. They wanted out before things got too hot, or so it seemed.

He walked over dry, parched ground to the kennels. Ongoing drought kept it dry, years now since it had greened. After being released from their nighttime confines, the dogs raced up and down their yards for a few minutes, before settling to the task of peeing, scratching the ground, dumping and searching for shade. The cool weather needed for running, training and racing seemed a lifetime away.

Record high temperatures suggested things weren’t going to get any better soon. Years of dire warnings about greenhouse gases and loss of permanent ice at the poles, having fallen on deaf ears, were now accompanied by warnings of rising temperatures at the bottom of the world, along with manmade and natural disasters. And still the politicians talked of things that must change, never once understanding that what had to change was the ratio between talk and action.

Soon though, much sooner that any had forecast, those record high temperatures would give way to record low temperatures, flooding and icy rains. And later, freezing windblown snow and the beginning of an all-new ice age.

But Tim didn’t suspect any of this as he watched his dogs, proud of the team they made and in awe of what they could do in winter. Right now, he was puzzled by their almost frenetic behavior as the dogs raced the fence lines of their pens for longer periods, faster than usual, and noisier now they were out than they had been before. Tim called for them to be quiet and settle down, and cursed them for ignoring him.

They were good-looking dogs. But despite their looks, they were not easy to live with. They were destructive when bored, affectionate but independent, stubborn but smart, and likely to ignore you unless you had earned their respect. They did not make good pets, and Tim thanked his lucky stars for tolerant neighbors who didn’t complain about the howling.

He picked the pooper-scooper and bagged the fence, the clattering sound finally having an effect.

What was going on? As he returned to the house, Tim pondered their unusual behavior. With a cloudless sky and stifling heat already, usually the dogs sought shade early.

Later, Tim would remember their strange behavior and wonder whether he should have listened closer to their carryings on. Later, he would come to appreciate just how important it was to listen to them.

And later still, he would come to appreciate their weather sense. And he would rejoice in the strange, almost bizarre hobby he had enjoyed over years, which equipped him to survive and travel in an icy hell.

But now, blissfully unaware of anything other than the oppressive heat, Tim went in for breakfast and to plan his day. Putting the kettle on to boil, he watched the dogs out of the window as they settled into the shady bits of their yards.

As he watched, thoughts of the sledding season to come, months away, came into focus. He found himself musing over team configurations and equipment. Rising temperatures would mean they would be running at night again, which meant that he had to do something about getting better lights for the wheeled rig he used to race on dirt. Maybe car lights, with a car battery. The way it was going, they’d be racing at midnight or later.

The whistling kettle drove these thoughts from his mind and he turned to the plan for the day, weeding the vegetable garden, watering the patch before it got too hot, adding more mulch.

Whistling, he carried Rhonda’s coffee into the bedroom, where she had gone back to sleep. Come on, he said, shaking her awake, let’s get moving before the day gets too hot. Plenty of time for sleep later.

* * *

Chapter 2

Near the Australian Base at Mawson, Antarctica, a loud crack echoed. A piece of permanent sea ice broke from the ice shelf. It wasn’t the first. It wasn’t the largest. It was simply the latest. It moved, following the others into the Southern Antarctic Ocean. But what followed was unusual—slabs of ice from the rocky shores, pushed in front of howling winds, slid in to the waters. The windiest place on earth just got windier. Douglas Mawson had described it as an accursed land. The number of bergs entering the southern waters and currents increased in numbers that had never seen before. And the wind drove them further than even before, out of Antarctic waters. The accursed land was about to grow. A massive amount.

As the icebergs moved into warmer waters, they melted. Ice water dripping into the ocean normally had no effect. But this massive and unprecedented accumulation started to affect the ocean’s temperature, with the number and size of bergs causing an overall drop in water temperatures. And still the winds howled and roared.

Worse yet, a slab of continental ice, massive in its size but tiny in comparison to what remained, slid into the sea. This triggered an avalanche of smaller slabs. Tiny it might be in terms of the sheer volume of ice on the bottom of the world, but massive in effect, the consequences of this fall would reverberate for decades, as it too began to melt as it drifted.

The sea level rose with the addition of the continental ice. As the ocean’s temperature dropped, the effects snowballed. Katabatic winds, already roaring, picked up speed and moved out across the ocean. Air temperatures plummeted and gale force winds blew over New Zealand, turning the beautiful islands into frozen wastelands, and onto Australia. Snow, ice and sleet carried by the wind, hit the Australian coast, scouring the land. Steadily, it moved inland, at first landing as ice-cold torrential rain. As the rain fell, so did the temperatures. And as the temperatures fell further, rain became snow, sending temperatures falling lower than ever before.

Snow was falling on the beaches.

The seas were starting to freeze.

Over a drought-stricken land, rain fell. It fell in torrents, causing flash flooding, creating pools that would later freeze and cover roads. Later, temperatures plummeted, sealing off highways and setting off panic.

Life as it had been known was gone.

Life, if indeed there were to be life, would be forever different. Few would survive. Those who did might not survive for long.

In southern towns and cities, people tried to flee. Only partly aware of the horror that the unusual freezing temperatures might bring, they took to the roads with terrifying results. Single-car accidents became multi-car pile ups as first one car slid off the road, then another followed, plowing into the first. Then another. And another. And another. Head-on collisions closed roads and caused gridlock. Four-wheel-drives attempted to go around the pileups only to lose control as well and slide into whatever large objects were in the vicinity.

A young man looked out his lounge room window in Melbourne’s outer suburb of Broadmeadows, and stared in disbelief at snow. Switching on the TV, he heard the panicked broadcasters and panicked himself. Racing to get in his worked-up car, he slid on iced steps and fell, landing head first and knocking himself unconscious. A neighbor, seeing what happened, slowly and carefully moved to check on him. Taking the keys from the young man’s hand, the neighbor helped himself to the car. Having moved carefully on foot, he now forgot everything but leaving. Backing out the driveway at speed and without looking, he got t-boned by a truck racing up the street, by a driver desperate to get home and check on his family. Shunting the car out of the way, the truck kept going.

On the footpath, the young man froze to death. In the car, the neighbor was killed instantly on impact. The truck driver drove on, oblivious to everything but the need to get home. But at the speeds he was driving, he had no chance, steering around a corner and sliding straight forwards, crashing into the service station on the corner, plowing over petrol bowsers and spewing petrol across the freezing ground.

The accident rate soared. The State’s death toll on the roads for the year prior had been four hundred and thirty-six. Half of that number died in one day. Twice that number, having survived initial collisions with minor injuries, died from shock and exposure.

The Hume Highway, the main road north out of old Melbourne town, became an impassible combination of pileups and iced roads. At the Tullamarine Airport, runways were closed after a landing plane slid off the runway and into a building, killing the plane’s crew and twenty of the building’s occupants. The Central Business District of Melbourne closed down, with hundreds of office workers trapped with no way to get home.

High-rise office blocks turned into ice towers, and quickly, icebound tombs for many.

The suburbs slowly closed down. Panic buying at shopping centers had turned to car-park madness, with cars attempting to leave sliding into parked cars, pedestrians and shopping trolleys. Shoppers, already nervous and panicking, lost frayed tempers, with brawls breaking out in shops and in the car parks. Fatalities rose as security guards at first tried to restore calm, then struggled to leave, then struggled to survive.

TV reporters filed stories about the weather, the traffic, the chaos, the panic buying and the car park chaos, before becoming part of the stories themselves. They were caught in the weather and traffic, involved in accidents, and in one case, beaten to death for obstructing a car park while the camera rolled, broadcasting live. Horrified station staffers were too shocked to cut the broadcast when it descended into madness.

As the Melbourne and Tasmanian stations broadcast the chaos and storm disaster, those watching in their lounge rooms panicked. The telephone lines soon overloaded and communication became impossible. The elderly died of fear. The Victorian and Tasmanian State governments, acting after the fact as usual, called on the Federal government to declare a State of Emergency. The Federal government, too slow to act, delayed until after most of the damage had been done and most of the people died. By that time, there seemed to be little that could be done, little chance of any survivors, and little point in trying. In fact, by the time the Federal government acted, Tasmania was beyond all help. No one was left alive down there.

The Prime Minister called in his Defence Force Minister and demanded to know the Defence Force’s equipment levels and capacity to deal with Antarctic-type conditions. The Defence Force Minister, having no idea, hurried to his office yelling for his secretaries, assistant secretaries, someone, anyone, to get commanding officers on the line.

An hour later, the Minister had determined the bases in Victoria had suffered the same level of casualties the civilian population had, and worse, a number of the Defence Force’s ranking officers had been in the storms path. The equipment levels were low. Actually, low was a generous description. And past experience with such conditions was almost nonexistent.

The Prime Minister consulted with the Weather Bureau and issued the order to evacuate Canberra. The planes reserved for the Prime Minister was loaded with as many people as possible and took off for Darwin, with other aircraft being pressed into service to move as many as possible. And many had no chance. The storm, moving onwards, reached Canberra and air travel became impossible. The roads had already succumbed to the same madness as Melbourne. Canberra was lost.

The Southern hemisphere changed forever.

Southern Australasia was frozen.

* * *

Chapter 3

In a small central Victorian village called Pyalong, Tim’s family went about their normal daily life, even as that life started to veer crazily from the norm.

Rhonda listened to the news, disbelieving. Tim, come and listen to this! she called.

The urgent news update, across every TV station, and all radio stations, proclaimed the end of the drought with no insight into what was truly happening. Reports of the storm that swept New Zealand into a frozen oblivion were being broadcast without the broadcasters fully understanding the savagery of what Australia faced.

In the middle of summer, in the worst drought on Australian record, gale-force winds were bringing thumping rains. What was initially missed by the forecasters were the freezing temperatures and snow blizzards that would follow, moving across the Australian States of Tasmania, Victoria, NSW, the ACT and South