Guns of Mars 7
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 2.4
And here another challenge presented itself: how to make a fire in this damned wind when only two sticks of houdon remained!
As darkness swiftly fell, he checked the position of the sunset once more. According to his rough calculations the sun should have been off to his left shoulder. Instead, it sank down directly behind him. That meant he had not been riding directly east but deeper into the ice field.
As this grim realization dawned on him, he heard a deep grunt. The pack thoat sank to the ice on ten legs and collapsed onto its side lifeless. He dropped from the saddle to poke at it with the barrel of his rifle. It was no use. The animal was dead. He whirled at a bleating sound to find his mount falling to the fetlocks of its four front feet. It took one last gasp before dropping to its belly where it moved no more.
Kal squatted on his haunches in the shelter of the dead pack beast, his rifle across his knees. The wind roared over him in an increasing fury. Bits of ice slashed at him like blades. His mount was but another white mound within minutes as the chaff drifted over it.
He would die here. In time he and the thoats would be a pile of ice-covered bones. He managed a shrug, the fatalism of the Warhoon. He was destined to die on some dry waste, he only did not expect it to be one so cold as this.
He crouched there, watching the mist of crystals blowing across peaks of ice as though a storm on a frozen sea. He thought back across his life to the men and tharks he’d killed, the females he rutted, the loot he’d amassed and frittered away. It was a good life as he recalled it. Though others would remember him, if they did at all, as the outlaw Kal Kettaq who betrayed a trust and slipped away to never be seen again.
These thoughts and more swirled and eddied in his mind in an increasingly confused mélange of memories and thoughts as the cold stole into his bones. A desire to sleep came upon him, a slumber from which he knew he would never awaken. And yet, he no longer cared as the soporific effects of the cold eroded his will as well as his wits.
He surrendered to the numbing embrace, ice forming on the lids of his discus eyes even as they closed.
