"Yeah!" He grew more excited. "That's it! To protect the treasure, they conducted human experiments here and used these monsters as guards!"
Marcus's eyes were shining. "Makes sense, right?"
I said earnestly, "Brother, you're wasting your talent not writing novels. The Forbes bestseller list deserves your name."
Marcus pouted. "I'll write one as soon as we get out!"
Still, I was curious about the cabinet too. We crouched in front of it, studying it.
The cabinet was a perfect cube, cold silver metal with seamless edges, almost like a solid block of iron.
"How do we open it?" Marcus nudged it. "No keyhole. Combination lock?"
I picked it up and examined it. "Where would you enter a combination?"
Surprisingly, it wasn't heavy. It felt nearly empty inside.
I shook it vigorously, and to my astonishment, there was a faint sloshing sound.
...Was I hearing things? How could there be water inside this?
Even magma would freeze solid in here!
Marcus lifted the cabinet and stood up. "Let's just smash it open!"
I scoffed. "You think it's made of Styrofoam? This clearly holds something important. How could you—"
My words died in my throat.
Marcus slammed the cabinet onto the ground. White chips sprayed from the ice.
With a sharp crack, it popped open.
I silently touched my face. It stung a little.
Marcus crouched down, pulling the door open, his eyes aglow. "What is it? What is it?"
On a black metal rack, three transparent vials of green liquid sat quietly in their slots.
"What's this?"
Marcus lifted a vial and held it up to the flashlight.
The deep green liquid flowed like liquid jade, emitting an otherworldly glow.
"Liquid? How is that possible?" He frowned at the vial. "Poison?"
"Glowing green. Creepy."
Marcus sighed with disappointment. "All that security, and it's not even gold."
"Oh well, no jackpot for us."
Men must be born with an aversion to the color green. Marcus tossed the vial to me. "What's it for? Drink it and become Superman?"
"No idea." I thought for a moment, then slipped the vials into the side pocket of my pack. "Maybe we'll turn into Ninja Turtles."
This was obviously important experimental material.
In every movie, the green stuff either destroys humanity or saves it.
Either way, we needed to keep it.
Just in case.
---
We couldn't stay here forever. The prolonged cold would slowly kill us.
Marcus and I discussed it and decided our priority was finding a way out.
Going back was out of the question — that creature was probably waiting above for us to climb right into its clutches.
We had to find another way.
But this chamber was sealed tight. No visible exits. No other doors.
I went around tapping the ice walls. Most produced solid, muffled thuds.
"Maybe there's a passage somewhere in this cave. Let's knock and listen."
We went around the ice room tapping everywhere, until I reached one section where the sound changed from a thud to a hollow boom.
My heart leaped. A way out!
"Here. Hit this spot. Our lives depend on you." I tapped up and down, estimating the opening was wide enough for a person.
Marcus crouched slightly, aiming his ice axe at the wall with a calculating squint.
Then he swung with all his might, shouting:
"One swing, eighty!"
"One swing, eighty!"
Crack!
The thin ice shattered. A few more strikes and a large hole gaped open — dark and deep, leading to who-knew-where.
We exchanged a look. Marcus swallowed hard and peered inside.
His flashlight beam reflected off the ice surfaces, illuminating everything in stark white. Beyond, nothing but darkness.
He took a deep breath and stepped in first.
"Stay behind me. If anything goes wrong, I go first — you cover the rear."
I punched his shoulder. "Some brotherhood!"
The tunnel was cone-shaped — narrow at the entrance, widening as we went deeper.
It opened up so gradually that it was no longer a tunnel but a vast underground chamber!
The space was the size of a plaza, tremendously expansive. Above us, a vaulted ice ceiling stretched the height of dozens of stories.
Marcus and I walked through it like two insignificant ants.
The ice walls around us held Shadows — black shapes of varying sizes, sealed within.
Small as basketballs, large as trucks.
I was too scared to look closely, quickening my pace to catch up with Marcus while furtively sweeping my flashlight across the ice.
A gaping, ferocious mouth lunged toward me. I stumbled backward, nearly tripping over my own feet.
"Holy—! What is that?!"
Marcus jumped, spinning around and throwing an arm out to shield me. "What happened?"
I clutched my pounding chest and forced myself to look at the ice.
A massive white skeleton was frozen whole inside, roughly the size of a small car.
It looked like a dinosaur.
"A dinosaur?" Marcus swept his flashlight over it. "Since when are there dinosaurs in Antarctica?"
I was still shaky. "I've heard they found dinosaur fossils in Antarctica. They even found tropical plant fossils here. Who knows. That scared the crap out of me."
Besides the dinosaur, the ice held smaller skeletons — some complete, some just scattered fragments of bones from unidentifiable creatures.
This place was like a giant charnel ground. Chills racked my body, and I urged Marcus to keep moving.
"Are we going deeper?" I worried. "We're down to the dinosaur layer already."
Marcus patted my head and forced a grin, flashing his signature big teeth.
"It's fine. I'm here. Maybe in another half hour we'll be out."
"Besides, the deeper we go, the closer to the earth's core, so it should be warmer."
I rolled my eyes, but I had to admit — in this desperate situation where heaven wouldn't answer our calls, Marcus's relentless optimism was a small comfort.
The ice plaza held too many bones and frozen corpses. We were both uneasy and quickened our pace.
"Hmm?" My flashlight swept over a patch of ice ahead, and something seemed different.
All the other ice surfaces reflected light. This one was especially... dark.
Light seemed to be absorbed by it — just an expanse of blackness.
I nudged Marcus and whispered, pointing. "Look at that."
Marcus directed his flashlight at it and frowned. "What is it?"
---
We aimed our flashlights directly at the dark ice. After a few dozen seconds, the black patch began to rustle and shift. I rubbed my eyes.
"Am I seeing things? Is that ice moving?"
Under the bright beam, the dark surface quickly began writhing. Tiny, scratching sounds filled the air.
Then we realized: the blackness wasn't ice. It was something covering the ice — and now that black mass was flowing toward us like water.
Marcus's face contorted with revulsion. He stepped back and gripped my hand.
"...What the fuck is this?"
Goosebumps erupted across my skin.
The black flood wasn't liquid at all. It was comprised of thumb-sized, wingless mosquitoes!
Black insects layered on top of one another, squeezing together in a seething mass.
My sanity plummeted.
The friction of their bodies produced a fine, scratching sound that grew louder, surging toward us!
"Run!" Marcus shouted.
We snapped out of our daze and fled back the way we'd come. At this point, we didn't care about the corpses anymore.
Live bugs were infinitely worse than dead skeletons!
Marcus ran fast, positioning himself behind me as we sprinted. "What the hell! Mosquitoes in Antarctica? Is there nowhere on earth without mosquitoes?"
I gasped between breaths, "I don't know! There's supposedly a tiny mosquito called the Antarctic midge, but they're only a couple millimeters and eat algae. What the hell is this?!"
The scratching grew louder behind us. I glanced back and nearly died of fright.
These things had long, spindly legs. They ran like spiders — incredibly fast!
Marcus was dangerously close to the swarm!
I gritted my teeth and pushed harder.
After all this running, I'd probably qualify for the track team when we got back!
After about ten minutes, I heard a girl's scream.
"Ahhh—"