The Ice Garden
Ice-cold horror, in time for spring.
Colonel Masterson thought to himself, one day this will all be so funny.
He had served nine seasons on the US Air Force base in Antarctica. If there was one thing he knew by now, it was that stories of people going woo-woo on The Ice were always a hit back home. He pictured his wife, her silver blonde hair done up in a twist, doing that big laugh with her mouth wide open, prodding him to share the latest antics from the bottom of the world.
This one would have her in stitches.
It would be so funny when he explained that it was only spilled paint that created so much fuss.
It was paint in a shade of red that made his heart beat faster than he liked.
Paint that outlined ghostly hand prints with blackening edges.
Paint with a strange, undeniably meaty tang.
The Colonel steadied himself in the door frame while a tingling nausea passed through his body, like bubbles rising in a bottle of pop. It was paint, it had to be.
His men, young and brave and armed, moved confidently around him and into the building, content to ignore an old man’s sudden weakness.
Still, his mind could not catch up to what his body knew. The next feeling he had was gratitude. A warm, overwhelming love for the tight team of the 13th Air Expeditionary Group and how well they worked together. It could almost bring a tear to his eye.
They were so kind to not make him go inside and face that awful red paint.
“I’m telling you! He stabbed his roommate for spoiling the end of a book.”
Alfredo overheard two men making their way down the buffet line, their plastic plates piled high with carbs.
“People go nuts down here. Every year there’s at least one.”
He wrapped his apron around his hand and pulled a hot pizza out of the oven. The apron was thin— useless against the searing heat—but ever since he came to Antarctica, he found he didn’t mind a little burn.
“That guy was Russian. The stabber,” Alfredo said, sliding the pie under a heat lamp. The men startled; no one ever expected the cook to speak. “The roommate too.”
He had heard the story of the scientist who stabbed his roommate on The Ice dozens of times. Entertainment was limited in Antarctica and legends lived forever. Especially the bloody ones.
“Only a Rusky could lose their shit like that over a book,” one of the men said, shaking his head.
“You’d be surprised,” Alfredo said back, a tiny, crooked grin on his face. “Lotta stories of crackups down here.”
He leaned on his right leg and winced.
“You guys ever hear the one about the pizza chef from Newark? He spent eighteen months in this hellhole, then he turned himself into a compost heap.”
But the men were done listening to the Help. They descended on the pizza without a moment’s consideration for its maker. He fantasized about slicing them with his pizza cutter— how satisfying that would be— but it was a pedestrian dream, so common it bored him. Angry kitchen grunt kills scientists— everyone’s heard that one.
Instead, he turned back to his pizza oven, where a blast of hot air put him at ease.
He brushed fingertips across the tops of his thighs, feeling the ridges and grooves, the dampness soaking through his pants, and swallowed a groan. Pain brought him clarity. It was exquisite–-a sweet, living reminder of good things to come.
The Colonel’s men moved through the building with guns drawn, following the stripe of red blood smeared on the floor. The Colonel himself, looking a little woozy, had stumbled back to his truck.
“Sergeant Martinez, this is Base. Come in.” The sound of the radio jolted the soldiers, who were already on edge. One dropped into a crouch, swinging his gun wildly.
“Anders, chill! It’s just the radio,” said the Sergeant. “This is Martinez, come in, Base.”
“The two missing scientists have been located. Everyone is safe. Over.”
“What?” Martinez blurted without thinking. His men turned their heads to him in shock. The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees.
He cleared his throat. “Try again, Base. I do not copy.”
“Missing scientists located. Everyone safe. Over.”
Martinez was at a loss for words.
“What does that mean, Sarge? Whose blood is this?” Anders whined. He put his back against the wall, his eyes wide.
“Anders, man, you have got to chill,” Martinez barked, but he felt his own terror mounting. The men shifted and Martinez saw their eyes dart around the bloody mess.
He lifted the radio to his lips. His mouth was dry.
“Base, reconfirm objective.”
“Objective has not changed. Locate missing individual.”
“Copy that, Base.”
The men were quiet for a few seconds, then Martinez spoke into the radio again.
“That you, Quinn?”
“Yeah Sarge, it’s me.”
“Are you seriously telling me we’re looking for one guy?”
“Copy. One individual: Alfredo Aiello. Pizza chef. Last seen in the galley after dinner.”
“There’s a lot of blood down here, Quinn. Is Aiello a suspect or a victim?”
“Unknown. Proceed with caution.”
Chef Shelley emerged from the galley, a greasy apron wadded in her hand. Her blonde hair had sprung loose and her face flushed pinker than Easter grass.
“You going out for the sunset party?” She asked Alfredo.
“Sunset party?” He tried to sound normal, but he was in so much pain, his voice strained. He knew his shirt was spotted with blood, so he quickly turned his back to his boss, and busied himself wiping down the oven. He thanked God the uniform was black.
“Is that tonight?” He peeked over his shoulder at her, but she seemed relaxed.
“Yeah, doofus.” Shelley said, and tossed her apron into the laundry bin. “Our one sunset of the year— don’t you think that’s reason enough to party?”
“Of course, the great Antarctic equinox,” Alfredo said, through clenched teeth.
“Yep. Coupla hours then it’s back to the dark for us grunts.”
Alfredo’s stomach twisted. His memory of last year’s six-month night haunted him. Wind so loud it felt like it would break his skull, ice sheets screaming like banshees in the bay. Not a leaf, not a flower. Not even a housefly in this godforsaken place.
“You ok, Fredo? You look pale.”
“Yep. Fine.”
“Sun sets at eight eleven,” Shelley said to his back. Her tone was placating, like she was talking to a rampaging toddler. “Get out there at eight twelve and you don’t see daylight again until September, got it?”
Alfredo grunted uh-huh, and waved a dismissive hand. He shuddered, his shirt clinging and catching on his many wounds.
Martinez found his voice.
“Base, we need backup. We don’t know what we’re getting into. Over.”
The radio was silent.
“Quinn, do you read me? We’re alone in here. The Colonel isn’t with us and my gut is telling me something’s off. We need backup.”
“Copy, Martinez. There’s no one to send right now. We got a lot of upset people in the barracks and a transport plane that has to take off before the weather goes to shit. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Martinez holstered the radio and looked at his men. He straightened his back, set his jaw, and tried to set aside the fears that crept around the recesses of his brain.
“Alright, men. We’re gonna check the galley for this guy and then we’re done. Judging by the scene, we’re looking for a body, not a bogey man. And if he’s not here, we get the fuck out and make it someone else’s problem. We do our jobs, ok?”
The men looked at each other, and in their fear he could see the little boys they used to be.
At eight eleven Alfredo was in his bunk, blackout curtains drawn.
Between his fingers, he rolled a blade of dried grass. He had found it on his rug shortly after arriving to Antarctica and something possessed him to save it.
Twenty minutes at the bottom of Creation, white sky above meeting white earth below in a cottony, monotonous wash, and he already craved green. The grass had blazed in his eyes like a lit match.
Eighteen months later, it was dead, nothing but a crisp brown strand. But when he held it to his nose, Alfredo could somehow smell lawn mower trimmings, muddy puddles, and his Nona’s daffodils—even the stink of sulfur at his sister’s house when she inevitably overcooked the Easter eggs.
He missed spring with a fervor he had not anticipated. His heart broke for the pastel-plastic optimism of real spring— for soft things and little plants, for the feeling of a body waking up after winter.
A cheer came from outside his window, a bunch of drunk jerks actually celebrating when the sun fell below the horizon. There it would hover out of sight, drenching them in soupy twilight for a few months, before disappearing until next Fall.
Spring.
Whatever.
Antarctica was upside down and backwards. Fall, spring, day, night, none of it made a lick of sense.
Alfredo would not watch the sun set. He would not grieve as the frozen land turned silver, hard as steel and untouchable as mercury. He would stay inside with his grass.
The galley was silent and the grayish fluorescent lights flickered on and off. Martinez felt like he was in a morgue, not a kitchen. They stood in the room’s big double doors, squinting at a shape in the distance.
A mound of dark, wet mud was heaped in front of the pizza oven.
As they got closer they saw it was a garden. A weird looking garden, somehow transported in one piece to an industrial kitchen in Antarctica. Martinez squinted, unsure how to make sense of it.
Thin red vines that looked chillingly like arteries snaked across the floor. A bed of short grass in a bizarre pink color seemed to sway in invisible air currents. And, reaching for the lights, eerie, bone white stalks raised beige flower heads.
A red liquid, viscous and awful, pooled around the wretched garden. The trail of blood ended here.
Martinez crept closer, sure this was a science experiment gone wrong, and soon he saw there was no mud, but a grotesquely swollen human body. Behind him, he heard Anders gag.
There was a face, or the suggestion of one, carpeted in tiny leaves. From the open mouth spilled a thick vine, bright green and splattered in gore. On the floor nearby, a name badge read Aiello. Cook.
Martinez reached for his radio.
“Base, come in. We found…something…we found…the pizza guy…”
“Copy. Is he alive?”
Martinez looked at the mound in front of him, a mass of vibrant, alien plant life like he had never seen.
He opened his mouth then closed it again.
“Find whatever scientists are still on the continent and get them in here. It’s definitely alive.”
Alfredo carefully stripped off his uniform, which stuck to his skin, pulling at scabs and suppurating spots. He unwrapped sticky gauze from his arms, his torso and thighs, becoming as giddy as a kid with an Easter basket.
Underneath, his skin was shiny and hot, and blood dripped and oozed out of him.
The smell was not good, not fresh or green, but it was undoubtedly alive.
Shoots sprouted from his body, each one reaching for the light. Some were getting quite large. His fingers drifted over the leaves. He wiggled a thick, fibrous stalk that curved out of his inner arm, and he felt its roots holding deep inside, a sensation that made him a little lightheaded. Fresh blood spurted from the spot, spraying the wall with a fine mist.
He looked around his bunk and noticed there was blood everywhere— it had really started to accumulate after his weeks of planting.
He wondered if he should prune himself or just let the growths stick out of his uniform, come what may. There were rules about piercings in the kitchen, but there was no rule about plants.
He found his pizza cutter, round and sharp and true. Locating an unmarked place on his forehead– rare real estate– he made a cut, simple, straight, and shallow. For a second, nothing happened, but then the blood came, a tiny stripe that emerged from his skin like new growth. From his apron he pulled today’s treasure– a wilted tuft of green fringe pinched from a carrot, the last fresh produce of the season.
He pressed the leaves into his wound, then held the cut closed and sealed it with super glue, as he had been taught by the cooks in his uncle’s pizza shop back home.
He checked the other slits. Here, the leaf from an apple lost in cold storage had begun to sprout new buds; there, the seeds from a discarded tangerine bumped under his skin. The eyes of an old sweet potato had begun at last to vine, their ghostly white heads peeking out from his arms. On his face, he found one tiny, spade-shaped leaf growing near his hairline. It had been neatly covered by his bandana and emerged a happy surprise.
Blades of grass, plucked from carpets around base where they fell off the boots of new arrivals, had been carefully planted in a thick bed across his chest and belly. Of this he was intensely proud. His little lawn wasn’t green, but a sort of beige-pink color, and he understood that he and the plants were becoming one.
Symbiotic.
The super glue held in some places, but in others yawning wounds had opened up. Some he tried to seal again, others leaked so much blood the glue couldn’t hold. He hoped his body would make enough to feed his garden.
He laid back on the blood-soaked mattress, feeling pleasantly full. His skin ached and wept, but he was so pleased with his work that the pain felt like confirmation of something magic.
He wondered if he should find some soil— maybe a discarded experiment left in the science lab?— and pack it into the wounds.
Maybe he could get down to the galley and sleep by the oven…the plants would surely appreciate the heat.
Cynthia Masterson perched on the arm of a big, white sectional, sloshing her martini back and forth. Her platinum hair gleamed in their home’s tastefully low light.
“There was red paint spilled everywhere and someone called in an emergency! Can you believe it? They actually called soldiers from the base thinking it was blood! Tell them, hon,” she elbowed her husband.
The Colonel smiled at his wife and their gathered friends, his square veneers holding back his bile at the memory of that terrible day.
Outside, the sun was just setting, the Virginia dusk as sweet as a chocolate bunny. A little pruning here and there made the story so much better. More palatable.
And boy did they love a good Antarctica story back home.
“Well,” he began, “what you have to understand about Antarctica is someone always goes woo-woo. Happens every year.”
This story is part of Spring Fever, a Spring Equinox horror event hosted by the talented Garen Marie and TiF Team. Click the image below for all the spring horror you could ever want.
loved this! loved it!
great scene switching.
like a vegan version of THE THING.
Thanks EJ 🥰
I am so glad someone did a story inspired by the Antartica stabbing over spoiling the end of a book. This story definitely made me thing of "All Summer in a Day" and "The Thing". Really enjoyed it!