Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) by Jennifer Ellis Page A

was creeping her out. The noise had seemed more like voices , but she didn’t want to say that. Whose voices would they be? Edie was dead. Cal was dead—and she was strangely obsessed with the fact that he had been smoking. He had never smoked before. Robert was back at that pyre. She shouldn’t call it a pyre. Pyres were for burning dead bodies. Vincent and Amber were back at the station. Kyle was who knows where—and he wouldn’t be talking to himself, and there shouldn’t be anyone else here in the Arctic.
    Unless someone else had come on the military planes yesterday. She still assumed that was how Vincent had gotten here, even if he didn’t think so. How else could he have gotten here?
    She heard the voices again. Snippets of conversation. Soren must have heard them too as he steered the snowmobile in the direction of the sound. They emerged from the mist in front of the station. Sasha snapped her head back in surprise. She had not thought they had driven that far away from the bear, and Cal, but her eyes had been closed, and with all the craters she had gotten a little disoriented.
    She started to get off the snowmobile, but Soren reached back and clasped her thigh so hard that it hurt, and his body went rigid. She raked her eyes over the station.
    It was the same single-story blue metal building on cement pilings they had departed a few hours ago, with the central common area, storage bay, and long sleeping wing jutting out to the east. The west sleeping wing that she and Soren occupied was not visible from this angle. She glanced around furiously for bodies in the snow, polar bears, dogs, and demons, for anything in the windows of the station, but she saw nothing.
    “What? What is it?” she hissed at Soren.
    Soren extended a shaking finger to the sign that hung by the side door to the storage bay.
    Instead of “International Polar Science Station—Arctic” which she was fairly sure it had read before, it said, “International Polar Science Station—Shackleton.”
    “Did it say that before?” she said.
    “No,” Soren said.
    “Did Shackleton even come to the Arctic?”
    Soren shook his head.
    “Do you think we’re still in the Arctic?”
    “I sure as hell hope so,” Soren said, dismounting and heading toward the station door. He climbed the short flight of stairs and punched in the code on the keypad to open the storage bay door. There was no comforting response from the door. Soren punched in the numbers again. Sasha got off the snowmobile and came to join him, while the dogs scattered and started to sniff around the edges of the station pilings where yellow marked the white snow. Still, the door did not open.
    Soren had his fists clenched. “The code doesn’t work,” he said.
    “Could Amber have changed it?”
    “That and the sign? I can see why she would change the code, but why the sign? Anyway, she would need my passcode in order to change the keypad entry code.”
    Inside the station, a lone dog started to bark.
    Sasha and Soren looked at each other. Had one of the dogs come back? But instead of howling the greeting that Sasha thought they would, Tundra, Timber, and Cedar started to growl and bark in response.
    Soren pressed the buzzer that would ring in the common room, and yelled into the old comm system that would broadcast his voice in the station. “Amber! Vincent! It’s Soren and Sasha. Let us in!”
    The door remained closed, but the barking of the dog intensified. Soren tried two more times with no response. Then he started to pound on the door with his fist. His intensity scared Sasha a little.
    “Maybe we should go look in one of the common room windows,” Sasha ventured. Because of the pilings, the windows were high in the air and relatively small to conserve heat in the icy Arctic winter. Soren would have to boost Sasha in order for her to see in.
    Soren backed away from the door and started examining the storage bay walls with intense focus, running his hands down the