The Last Vikings

#LoveLife

Now, I don't think I'm in any position to start doling out life advice, especially considering the horrors that were so shortly to follow, but I do feel qualified to tell you this:

Don't ever drink and sauna.

That's definitely a mistake.

The next morning, curled up in the foetal position on my skinned reindeer, I felt like death itself would be a mercy to me.

I was wrong, of course, but that's definitely how it felt at the time.

My hangover hit me hard.

My head was mouldy, over-ripe fruit, squeezed into a rusting bucket then run over by a car.

My mind was the sad funeral of my drunken invincibility, my anxiety tuned up to the max.

I'd found a dead body. A man I'd just spoken to. Then I'd cavorted in the possible place of his death.

I was in a freezing wasteland of terror, not meant for human life; miles from civilisation, miles from safety.

There was nothing on this icy desert to support human life. No sunlight, no animals, no plants. Not even insects.

Without those ottercopters, the shipped-in food and generators, we'd all die within minutes.

There was so much that could go wrong, and the consequences, if it did, were massive.

My instincts screamed at me that I was going to die out here, and I realised they were probably right. Playing at inspectors with Ruben—what was I thinking? This wasn't a game. People had died.

And what if I died?

No one would care.

I doubted they'd even come for my body. I'd just lie, frozen in my death pose in my Perry Sport, forever, like those grim neon corpsicles up Everest.

I whimpered, sweated and shivered in my sleeping bag on my freezing, uncomfortable bed, floundering in a whirlpool of rabid self-pity.

I was painfully thirsty, but couldn't bear to move. The hostile H2O walls, ceiling and floor mocked me like the ocean mocked the Ancient Mariner.

Unpleasant hallucinations kept flashing into my mind like lucid dreams, each one accompanied by a wave of cramping nausea.

Sam's bent blue fingers in the snow. His pale, hard thighs. The dusting of snow glittering on his skin, as if he was salt encrusted.

Flashes of Ruben too, in the sauna, mixed up with my images of Sam. The hair on his chest. His sweating arms and long thin fingers. The uncomfortable scratch of his beard on my chin.

It was a freakish cocktail of hot and frozen flesh, all jumbling up together.

I tried to push both out of my mind.

When Suzie came in and started shouting at me, it only added another layer to my nightmarish imaginings.

"I can't believe you're still in bed, Jennie!"