Hive

26

After he got out of the infirmary, it began to occur to Hayes just how apt his rats in a maze analogy was. It was so apt that he wanted to run screaming out of the compound… except, of course, there was nowhere really to run to. He kept imagining the lot of them there like microbes on a slide while some huge, horrible eye peered down on them gauging their reactions. It was very unsettling.

So, since he couldn’t run, he did the next best thing: he got rid of some snow.

It was something Biggs and Stotts generally did, but after what happened to St. Ours and what they had seen… or not… they weren’t in much shape to do much but hide in their rooms. Rutkowski was doing the same. None of them were as bad off as Lind, but they’d been broken on some essential level.

So Hayes decided he would pick up the slack.

The snow blower they used to keep the walkways clear was basically a big garden tractor with a blower attachment on it and a little cab that kept the wind off you. Hayes was tucked down in his heated ECW’s, so the cold that was hovering around sixty below wasn’t bothering him. The night was black and blowing, broken only by the security lights of the buildings themselves. Hayes moved the tractor along at a slow clip, clearing the walkways that led from Targa House to the drill tower and power station. The secondary paths that connected them with the numerous garages and outbuildings and huts, some of which held equipment and some of which had become makeshift labs. He banked the snow up against the walls of the buildings to help keep them insulated and most, by that point in the long winter, no longer had walls as such, just drifts of snow that sloped from the roofs to the hardpack on the ground. Doorways were cut and windows kept clear, beyond that everything looked like igloos.

He cleared a path to the meteorology dome — Cutchen would appreciate that — and tried to sort out what was in his head. The things Gates had said were exactly the sorts of things Hayes did not want to hear. Just affirmations that all the crazy shit he’d been thinking and feeling were not out and out bullshit, but fact. That was hard to take.

But, then again, everything down here this year was hard to take.

There was so much ugliness, it was hard to take it all in, keep it down. Sharkey said that Lind was getting no better. He no longer was any danger as such and didn’t need to be restrained, but he did need to be watched. She said she considered him to be clinically depressed now. He wouldn’t leave the little sick bay. He sat in there and watched TV, most of which was routed through American Forces Antarctic Network-McMurdo. Sometimes he read magazines. But most of the time he just sat on his cot with his head cocked to the side like a puppy listening for his master’s approach.

And maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing, Hayes thought.

And maybe it was what they were all doing without realizing it. Waiting and waiting. Because, when he thought about it, didn’t that seem almost right? That maybe what he’d been feeling since he stepped onto the frozen crust of Kharkhov Station was a sense of expectancy? Sure, underlying dread and fear and rampant nerves, but mostly expectancy. Like maybe somehow, some way, he’d known what was coming, that they were going to make contact with something.

Sounded like some pretty ripe bullshit when you actually thought about it, framed it into words, but it almost seemed to fit. And maybe, when you got down to it, there was no true way of knowing what was going on in that great soundless vacuum of the human psyche and its subcellar, the subconscious mind. There were things there, imperatives and memories and scenarios, you just didn’t want to know about. In fact, you -

Jesus, what in the hell was that?

Hayes stopped the tractor dead.

Terror punched into him like a poison dart. He was breathing hard, thinking things and not wanting to think them at all. He swallowed. Swallowed again. He thought… Christ, he was almost sure he had seen something over near Hut #6, something the tractor lights splashed over for just an instant. Looked like some shape, some figure pulling away, moving off into the darkness. And it wasn’t a human shape. He peered through the clear plastic shield of the cab. Didn’t see anything now and maybe he hadn’t in the first place.

Fuck that horse, there was something there. I know something was there.

But whatever it had been, it was gone now.

Hayes sat there for a few more minutes and then started throwing snow again. A storm was on them and the snow was flying thick as goose down, filling the shaking security lights of the compound with white clots that seemed busy as static on a TV screen. Snow was drifting and whipping, powdering the cab of the tractor like sand. The wind and blackness were sculpting it into huge, flying shapes that danced through the night.

Hayes stopped the tractor again.

That wind was funny, the way it howled and screamed and then dropped off to a steady buzzing whisper. You listened long enough, you started not only seeing things, but hearing voices… sweet, seductive voices that were pulled out long and hollow by the wind. The voices of women and lovers lost to time. Voices that wanted you to run off out into those bleak, frozen plains where you could lose yourself forever and maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t mind being lost, those blizzard winds wrapping you up tight and cooing in your ear until it was just too late. And by then, you would recognize the voice of the wind for what it was: death. Lonely, hungry death and maybe something else, maybe something diabolic and secret that was older than death.

Stop it for the life of Pete, Hayes warned himself.

But it could get to you, the wind and the snow and perpetual night. So many men had gone glaring mad with it that the medicos had coined a term to explain something that was perhaps not explainable at all: Dementia Antarctica. They saw it as a disease born of loneliness and isolation and maybe they were half right, but the ugly and bitter truth was that it was also a condition of the soul and its dark, destructive poetry that seemed to cry in your head: I am your soul and I am beautiful, I am a lover’s sonnet and silver rain, now destroy me… if you love me, destroy me and yourself, too.

Hayes figured if he kept up like this, he would run off into the silent devastation of the polar night. So he put his mind on other things, things he could get his hands on and wrap his brain around, make work for him. And what he started to think about was not something you could really touch or ever know: the city. That great sunken, cyclopean city which lay dreaming on the bottom of Lake Vordog. Sheathed in weeds and morbid aquatic growths, time and madness, it was like some grotesque and moss-covered alien skeleton down there.

Remembering it now, it seemed like seeing it had been some nightmare, but Hayes had seen it all right and it had seen him. At the time he had not been able to truly understand the way it made him feel, it was just too shocking and overwhelming, but now he thought he understood: that city was taboo, shunned. He… and all men, he supposed… retained a vestigal memory of the place. It was some awful archetype electroplated onto the human soul from the race’s infancy that would later re-channel itself as haunted houses and cursed castles and the like. Evil places. Places of malignancy and disembodied horror. Maybe something about the angles and the sense of desertion, but it had persisted and it always would, that memory. The first true dream of supernal terror humankind had known.

Here again, Hayes was thinking things he had no right to think. Maybe it was like Cutchen said, maybe part of it was Gates’ disturbing little talk coupled with all the badness those mummies emanated. But he honestly thought it was something more. He truly believed that the Old Ones and their phantasmal, eldritch city were locked down in the minds of all men in the form of primal memory.

We interacted with those things, he found himself thinking, in our distant past. We must have. And probably not out of choice. That’s the only thing that can explain our instinctual terror of them and that nameless city…

Without realizing it, Hayes had stopped the tractor.

Most of the job was done, but with that blizzard pounding down on them, he could pretty much start again for already the walkways were drifting over. But the thing was, he had stopped the tractor on its way to Hut #6 and he did not know why. He just sat there, feeling cold and hot, looking around desperately for the reason and not coming up with a thing. The night was alive with viscid shadows and creeping shapes and the wind was full of voices. He could hear them calling to him through that blowing white death: There’s no hurry, Jimmy. You just sit tight and wait and all will be revealed to you. Because you’re waiting for something as you’ve been waiting from day one and maybe all your life and that something is coming, Jimmy. It’s coming out of the darkness of the polar graveyard and, like a chameleon, it’s about to show itself…

And then it did.

About the time he was ready to call himself a fucking lunatic, it did.

But before he saw it, he heard it.

Heard that weird, high musical piping that he knew was a voice. Heard it in his head and outside the cab, and in the pit of his mind he remembered that voice as one of authority, as the voice of a master and such was its dominance, he did not dare try to get away from it. He could feel the ice of Antarctica breathing in his belly, sending out breaths of frost that shut him down and made him watch.

Then he saw it.

It came drifting out of the shadows, a ghostly alien form with outspread wings and trembling tentacles and leering red eyes that opened up his brain like a tin can and reached in there with cold fingers. He screamed, he supposed he screamed, for something came ripping out of him that slapped him sure and hard across the face.

The thing came closer and Hayes pressed down on the accelerator of the tractor, those chained balloon tires catching and vaulting Hayes forward and right at the thing. And he felt something snap in his brain like a tree branch and the pain was immense. But then the tractor rammed into that thing and it broke apart into a thousand luminous fragments.

Then he was alone.

And the wind was just the wind and the snow was just the snow. But in his mind, there were shadows. Ancient shadows that called him by name.

27

There were things in life that could destroy you an inch at a time.

Booze, drugs, depression, tobacco. Hayes knew all about the tobacco-thing, because he’d been smoking for nearly thirty years now. So he knew that one and understood it and realized like anyone else that you lost a minute or five or whatever it was every time you lit up.

But he never saw it that way.

He looked on it by the months and years. That he was buying himself a plot of cemetery earth, shovelful by shovelful. But it didn’t stop him and it didn’t slow him down. The nicotine had him and it was a pure and senseless thing that was more than just a simple physical addiction, but something destructive in the soul that saw its own end and welcomed it.

So, he understood there were things that took your life slowly. But there were also things that ate away your life in big chunks, in heaping spoonfuls. And what was laying on the cot in the sick bay the next morning was definitely one of them.

Lind.

Or maybe not Lind at all.

Sharkey had him strapped down and he was sweating and feverish and his skin was bubbling like hot fat. Actually bubbling. You could say in your mind that they were blood blisters or water blisters, but that didn’t cut it and you knew it. Just as Hayes knew it. What he was looking at, what Lind had become, was something akin to the little girl in that old scary movie. The one who puked up green slime and had the Devil in her.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Hayes asked.

“You tell me,” Sharkey said. “I can’t explain the lesions any more than I can really explain his state of mind. I would guess this is something psychosomatic, but—”

“Yes?”

“But to this degree? This is out of my league, Jimmy.”

She had wisely shut the door now to the sick bay and the outer door to the infirmary itself. Lind was just laying there, staring up at the ceiling, his mouth opening and closing. He was making a gulping sound in his throat like a beached fish.

Hayes swallowed down whatever was in him that made him want to turn and run. He swallowed it down and went over to Lind. He looked terrible. His flesh was white as a toad’s belly and the oddest smell was coming off him… a sharp chemical odor like turpentine.

“Lind? Can you hear me? It’s Hayes.”

The eyes blinked, the pupils hugely dilated, but nothing else. There was no sense of recognition. Anything. Lind’s mouth snapped close and then his lips parted slowly. The voice that came out was windy and echoing, unearthly… almost like Lind was speaking from the bottom of a very deep well. “Hayes… Jimmy… oh, Christ, help me Jimmy, don’t let them… .”

He stopped, making that gulping noise again. Although he was restrained, his hands were flopping madly about, looking for something to grasp. Horrified as he was by all of it, Hayes was seeing another human being in a terrible plight and he put his hand in Lind’s own. He almost immediately pulled away… touching Lind was like laying your hands on an electric cow fence. Hayes could feel the energy, the electricity thrumming through the man. It seemed to be moving in waves and he could feel it crawling over the back of his hand.

Lind took a deep breath and that energy died away. Thankfully.

Now all Hayes was aware of was the actual feel of Lind’s flesh against his own. It was hot and moist and repulsive. Like handling some reptilian fetus that had been expelled from its mother’s womb in a breath of fevers. Lind’s hand was like that… smooth, warm, sweating toxins and bile. It took everything Hayes had in him not to pull away.

“Lind… c’mon, old buddy, you can’t go on like this, you—”

“I can hear you, Jimmy, but I can’t see you, I can’t see anything but this place, this awful place… oh, where am I, where am I?”

That voice was making a rushing, hollow sound that human lungs were simply incapable of. Hayes couldn’t get past the notion that it was coming from very far away. It sounded like it was being accelerated across great distances.

Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she chewed her lip.

“You’re in the infirmary, Lind.”

Lind’s hand played in his own, felt pliant like warm clay, something that might melt away from body heat. “I can’t see you, Jimmy… Jesus Christ, but I can’t fucking see you,” he whimpered. “I… I can’t see the infirmary either… I see… oh I see…”

“What do you see?” Hayes asked him, thinking it might be important. “Tell me.”

Lind just lay there, staring holes through the ceiling. “I see, I see…” He began to thrash, a wet and tortured scream coming from his mouth. And it almost seemed more like a shout of surprise or terror. “The sea… there’s only the sea… that big, big sea… the steaming, boiling sea… and the sky above… misty, misty. It’s… it’s not blue anymore… it’s green, Jimmy, shimmering and glowing and full of sparkling mist. Do you smell it? That bad air… like bleach, like ammonia.” He started to gag and cough, moving in boneless gyrations like a snake, sweat rolling down his blistered face. He was madly gulping air. “Can’t… breathe… I can’t fucking breathe, Jimmy, I can’t fucking breathe!”

Hayes held onto him, trying to talk him down. “Yes, you can, Lind! You’re not really there, only your eyes are there! Only your eyes!”

Lind calmed a bit, but kept gulping air. His eyes were huge and filled with tears and madness. His breath smelled unnatural, like creosote.

“Take it easy now,” Hayes told him. “Now just relax and tell me what you see. I’ll help you find your way out.”

And Hayes figured maybe he could, if he could find out just where the hell this place was. Sharkey was watching him, neither approving nor disapproving of what he was doing. Just standing by with a hypo if it came to that.

“It’s hot, Jimmy, it’s hot here… everything is smoking and misting and those, those great jagged sheets of glass… sheets of broken glass rising up from the sea and shattering into light… that green, green, green sky… purple clouds and pink clouds and shadows… those shadows coil like snakes, look how they do that… do you see? Do you see? Shadows with… veins, veins… living shadows in the green misting sky…”

“Yes,” Hayes said. “I see them. They can’t hurt us, though.”

“I’m sinking, Jimmy, don’t let me go, don’t let me go down there! I’m sinking down into the sea and the water is warm, so very warm and thick… like jelly… how can it feel like that? The depths, oh those glittering emerald depths. The sea lights itself up and it shows you things… and… and I’m not alone, Jimmy. There are others here, many others. Do you see them? They swim with me… swimming and gliding and rising and falling. Yes, yes! Them things, them things like in the hut… but alive, all of them alive, gathering at the city!”

It could have been the city beneath Lake Vordog, but Hayes seriously doubted it by that point. Wherever this was, it was no place man had ever trod. Some awful, alien world with a poison atmosphere. And the crazy thing was, although Hayes could not see it and was glad of the fact, he could feel it. He could feel the heat of the place, that thick and turgid heat. Sweat was running down his face and the air was suddenly close and gagging, like trying to suck air through a hot oven mitt.

Jesus.

Hayes was nearly swooning now.

He could see the heat and it was coming from Lind, rolling off him like shimmering heat waves from August pavement. Hayes looked over at Sharkey and, yes, her face was beaded with sweat. It was incredible, but it was happening.

Lind was like some weird portal, some doorway to those seething alien wastes. He was there, his mind was there, and he was bringing some of it back with him. Because now it was more than just the heat, it was the smell, too. Hayes was gagging, coughing, his head reeling, the room saturated with an unbearable stench of ammoniated ice. Steam was rising from Lind now and bringing the smell of that toxic atmosphere with him. It reminded Hayes of wash day back home when he was a kid. That eye-watering, nose-burning stink of Hilex bleach.

Sharkey wisely opened the door to the infirmary and started a fan going. It cleared the air a bit, at least enough where Hayes wasn’t ready to pass out.

Lind was talking on through it all: “…seeing it, Jimmy? You seeing it? Oh, that’s a city, a gigantic city… a floating city… look how it bobs and sways? How can it do that? All them high towers and deep holes, honeycombs… like bee honeycombs, all them cells and chambers…”

“Are you still with them, Lind? Those others?”

Lind chattered his teeth, shook his head. “No, no, no… I’m not me anymore, Jimmy, I’m one of them! One of them spreading my wings and swimming and diving through those pink honeycombs and knowing what they think like they know what I think… we… we’re going to… yes! That’s the plan, isn’t it? That’s always, always, always been the plan…”

“What’s the plan?” Hayes asked. “Tell me the plan, Lind.”

But Lind was just shaking his head, a funny light in his eyes now like a reflection from a mirror. “We’re rising now… the hive is rising now… through the water and ice into the green glowing sky… thousands of us into the sky on buzzing wings, thousands and thousands of wings. We are the hive and the hive is us. We are the swarm, the ancient swarm that fills the skies…”

“Where are you going?”

“Above, up and up and up into them clouds and thickness, sure, that’s where we go… up beyond into the cold and blackness and empty spaces. The long, hollow spaces, long, long…”

“Where are you going? Can you see where you are going?”

Lind’s breathing had slowed now to barely a rustle. His eyes were glazed and sleepy and lost. The air in the room no longer stank like bleach. It was cold, very cold suddenly. The temperature plummeting until a bone-deep chill settled into Hayes. Sharkey killed the fan and cranked the heat up, but it was barely keeping an edge on that glacial cold. Hayes could see his breath coming out in frosty plumes.

“There are winds,” Lind said in a squeaky whisper. “We drift on the winds that carry the hive and we dream together… we all dream together through the long, black night that goes on and on and on… nothingness… emptiness… only the long, empty blackness…”

Lind stopped talking. In fact, his eyes drifted shut and it seemed he had gone out cold. He was sleeping very peacefully. He stayed that way for ten or fifteen minutes while Hayes and Sharkey could do nothing but wait. About the time Hayes decided to pull his hand free, Lind gripped it and his eyes came open.

“The world… the blue world… the empty blue world… this is where we come, this is where the hive goes now. Oceans, great oceans… black, blasted lands… mountains and valleys and yellow mist.”

Hayes knew where they were now. They could be nowhere else. “Is there anything alive there, Lind? Is there any life?”

But Lind was shaking his head back and forth. “Dead… dead… nothing. But the hive, the hive can seed it… create organic molecules and proteins and the helix, we are the makers of the helix… we are the farmers, we seed and then we harvest. The primal white jelly… the architect of life… we are and have always been the farmers of the helix, the hive mind, the great white space, the thought and the being and the structure and… the helix… the perpetuation of the helix, the surety and plan and the conquest and the harvest… the makers and unmakers… the cosmic lord of the helix… the continuation of the code the helix the code vessels of flesh exist to perpetuate the helix only exist to perpetuate and renew the helix the spiral of being… the primal white jelly… the color out of space…”

Hayes tried to pull away now, because something was happening.

Lind’s eyes were now black and soulless and malevolent, filled with a dire alien malignancy. They were black and oily, yet shining brightly like tensor lamps. They found Hayes and held him. And those eyes, those bleeding alien cancers, they did not just look through him, they looked straight into the center of his being, his soul, coldly appraising what they found there and contemplating how it could be crushed and contained and converted into something else. Something not human, something barren and blank, something that was part of the hive.

Hayes screamed… feeling them, those ancient minds coming at him like a million yellowjacket wasps in a wind tunnel, punching through him and melting away his soul and individuality, making him part of the greater hole, the swarm, the swarm-mind. He tried vainly to pull his hand out of Lind’s grasp, but his muscles had gone to rubber and his bones were elastic. And Lind was like some incredible generator, arcing and crackling, electric flows of energy dancing over his skin in pale blue eddies and whirlpools.

And that energy was kinetic. It had motion and direction.

The glass face of a clock on the wall shattered like a hammer had struck it. Papers and pencils and folders were scattered from Sharkey’s desk and blown through the air in a wild, ripping cyclone. Shelves were emptied of bottles and instruments and the floor was vibrating, the walls pounding like the beat of some incredible heart. The infirmary and sickbay were a tempest of anti-gravity, things spinning and jumping and whirling in mid-air, but never falling. Sharkey was thrown against the wall and then to the floor where she was pushed by a wave of invisible force right against the door leading out into the corridor. That awful vibration was thrumming and thrumming, the air filled with weird squeals and echoes and pinging sounds. Hayes lost gravity… he was lifted up into the air, Lind still clutching his hand, tethering him to the world. Cracks fanned out in the wall, ceiling tiles broke loose and went madly spinning through the vortex and then –

And then Lind sat up.

The straps holding him down sheared open, wavering and snapping about like confetti in a tornado. His face was contorted and bulging, tears of blood running from his eyes and nose. He seized up, went rigid, and then collapsed back on the bed.

Everything stopped.

All those papers and pens and vials of pills and drugs and books and charts and paperclips… all of it suddenly crashed to the floor and Hayes with it. He sat there on his ass, stunned and shocked and not sure where he was for a moment or what he was doing. Sharkey was pulling herself up the wall, trying to speak and only making weird grunting sounds. The force of that wind, or whatever in the Christ it had been, had actually blown the tight pony tail ring from her hair and her locks hung over her face in wild plaits. She brushed them away.

Then she was helping Hayes up. “Are you okay, Jimmy?”

He nodded dumbly. “Yeah… I don’t even know what happened.”

Sharkey went to Lind. She pulled open one of his eyelids, checked his pulse. She picked her stethoscope up from where it was dangling from the top of the door. She listened for Lind’s heart, shook her head. “Dead,” she said. “He’s dead.”

Hayes was not surprised.

He looked down at Lind and knew that if the man’s heart had not given out or his brain exploded in his head, if whatever had not killed him, then both Sharkey and himself would probably be dead now. That energy had been lethal and wild and destructive.

“Elaine,” he said. “Should we…”

“Let’s just clean this mess up.”

So they did.

They had barely begun when people were coming down the corridor, demanding to know what all the racket had been and why the goddamn infirmary smelled like bleach or chemicals. But then they saw Lind and they didn’t ask any more questions. They politely tucked their tails between their legs and got out while the getting was good.

After they had put things back in order and swept up the rest, Hayes and Sharkey sat down and she got out a bottle of wine she’d been saving. It was expensive stuff and they drank it from plastic Dixie cups.

“How am I going to log this one?” Sharkey said. “That Lind was possessed? That he exhibited telepathy and telekinesis? That something had taken over his mind and it was something extraterrestrial? Or should I just say that he died from some unexplainable dementia?”

Hayes sighed. “He wasn’t possessed or insane. At least, not at first. He was in contact with them somehow, with those dreaming minds out in the hut or maybe the living ones down in the lake. Probably the former, I’m guessing.” Hayes lit a cigarette and his hand shook. “What he was telling us, Doc, was a memory. A memory of an alien world where those Old Ones had come from… it was a memory of colonization. Of them leaving that planet and drifting here through space, I think.”

“Drifting through space?” she said. “It must have taken ages, eons.”

“Time means nothing to them.”

Sharkey just shook her head. “Jimmy… that’s pretty wild.”

He knew it was, but he believed it. Completely. “You have a better explanation? I didn’t think so. You felt the heat, smelled that ammonia… it was probably one of the outer planets they came from. Maybe not originally, but that was their starting point when they came here. Jesus, they must have drifted for thousands of years, dormant and dreaming, waiting to come here, to this blue world.”

“But the outer planets… Uranus, Neptune… they’re cold, aren’t they?” she said. “Even a billion years ago, they would have been ice cold…”

Hayes pulled off his cigarette. “No, not at all. I’m no scientist, Doc, but I’ve been hanging around with them for years… I knew this one astronomer at McMurdo. We used to hang out at the observatory and he’d tell me things about the planets, the stars. Neptune and Uranus, for example, because of their size have immense atmospheric pressures, so the liquid on them can’t freeze or turn to vapor, it’s held in liquid form in massive seas of water, methane, and ammonia.”

“All right,” Sharkey said. “But for them to drift here… you have any idea how long that would take?”

“Again, time only means something to creatures like you and me with finite life spans and I think the Old Ones are nearly immortal. They’d have to be. Sure, they may die by accident or design, but not from old age. No, Doc, they drifted here like pollen on the wind.”

Hayes said he figured it was how they worked. Maybe drifting from one star system to the next, something that probably took millions of years. Then establishing themselves on worlds, hopping from planet to planet, seeding them with life.

Sharkey didn’t want to believe any of it, but slowly the logic of it took hold of her despite herself. “Yes… I suppose that’s how it must’ve been. It’s just incredible, is all.”

“Of course it is.”

“You heard what Lind said? That business about the helix and organic molecules, proteins… the conquest and the harvest… the perpetuation of the helix?”

“I heard.”

“And…”

“They created life here, they are the engineers of our DNA,” Hayes said. “They created it. Maybe out of themselves or from scratch, who knows? Jesus, this is outrageous. This is really going to throw the creationists firmly on their ass. So much for religion.”

“So much for everything.”

“I guess we’ve seen the face of God down here,” Hayes said. “And it’s an ugly one.”

Sharkey started laughing. Was having trouble stopping. “Gates… that’s what Gates was saying. That they might have seeded hundreds of worlds, directed evolution, that their ultimate agenda was harvesting those minds they had created…”

And this was the very thing Hayes was having trouble with. “But why? What do they want with them? What could it be?”

“To bring them into the hive, subjugate them… who knows?” Sharkey swallowed. “Down in the lake… those things down there… they’ve been waiting for us all this time. Waiting to harvest what we are. Fucking Christ, Jimmy… the patience of those monsters.”

What Hayes was trying to figure out is why they took total possession of Lind like they had. He’d been in the hut that day with Lind and those mummies had freaked him out, made him feel bad inside, but they hadn’t taken over his mind. Was it that Lind was just a sensitive of some sort? A natural receiver, a medium for lack of a better word?

And what about Meiner and St. Ours?

Those things had leeched their minds dry and destroyed their brains. And Hayes himself had been psychically attacked twice by the Old Ones… once in the hut alone and last night out on the tractor… why hadn’t they killed him, too? Why did he have the strength to fight? And Sharkey? She had had the dreams, too, as they all had. What in the hell were those things saving them for? What was the ultimate plan here?

“You feel up to that drive I was talking about?” he asked her.

“Vradaz?”

He nodded. “I don’t think we have much time left, Elaine. If we can learn something up there, maybe we might make it out of this yet.”

“Okay,” she said, but didn’t sound too hopeful. “Jimmy? Lind said ‘The Color Out of Space’. I’ve heard him say it before while he was heavily sedated. I thought it meant nothing… but I’m not so sure now. What is this Color Out of Space?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Old Ones themselves,” he speculated. “And maybe it’s something a lot worse.”

28

“Tell me again why I’m doing this,” Cutchen said.

“For the good of humanity,” Hayes told him. “What more reason do you need?”

Maybe Cutchen needed some reassurance here, some encouragement, but Hayes didn’t really have a lot to offer up in that department. Why were they going up to Vradaz Outpost, the abandoned Russian camp? Even he wasn’t sure, not really. But something bad, something truly terrible had happened there and he felt it was important that they find out what. Maybe they’d find nothing but a snowed-in empty camp, but Hayes was thinking there had to be evidence of what came down. If even some of what Nikolai Kolich said was true, then the outpost had undergone pretty much the same sort of shit that Kharkhov Station was currently undergoing.

Hayes could remember very well what Kolich had said.

Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then… I remember things got funny after that.

And didn’t that just sound familiar?

“Storm’s picking up pretty good out there,” Sharkey said.

Hayes worked the stick of the SnoCat, pressing in the clutch, and bringing it up to high gear as they came over a rise and moved across a barren ice plain. He figured they’d make Vradaz in thirty or forty minutes if the storm didn’t swallow them alive. They were plunging through Condition Two weather, sheets of wind-driven snow blasting the SnoCat and making it tremble. It was dark out, of course, and the only lights came from the ’Cat itself. All you could see in the high beams was the white, uneven tundra broken occasionally by knobs of black rock and the swirling, blowing snow.

“You’re not going to get us lost are you?” Cutchen said.

“No, I don’t think so. I have a roll of kite twine on the back of the ’Cat and I tied the other end to Targa House.” He glanced out his window at the huge rectangular mirror out there. “Shit… must have run out of string.”

“Ha, ha, you so funny,” Cutchen said.

“Relax. GPS knows the way and I took a bearing on Vradaz before we left. If we get lost, the beacon from Kharkhov will bring us back home.”

“If worse comes to worse,” Sharkey said, “we can gather up some wood and start a signal fire.”

“Boy, you guys are good. I’ll book you in Vegas when we get back… unless we don’t get back.” Cutchen thought about that a moment. “You think these Old Ones have much of a sense of humor, Hayes?”

“Yeah, I think they do. Look-it all the gags they’ve pulled on us. They’re some really silly bastards, you get to know ’em.”

The SnoCat began to jump and lurch as it passed over a field of sastrugi, frozen ridges of snow and ice that looked like waves heading ashore at a beach. Except these never moved and they were tough as granite. But the SnoCat handled them just fine, jarring and bouncing, but handling it better on its twin sets of caterpillar tracks than an ordinary wheeled vehicle would have.

Hayes swung the ’Cat around a glacial valley, the storm getting worse, beginning to howl and screech, filling its lungs full of frost and white death and letting it back out in a wild, whipping tempest. The cab of the ’Cat was warm even without their ECW’s on, but outside? They wouldn’t have lasted long. Hayes had followed the ice road that Gates and his people had flagged for some thirty miles before the GPS told him it was time to trail blaze. It was dangerous work on an Antarctic night, but he had plotted a course on the contour map so he didn’t drive them into a fissure or crevice. It was lumpy and bumpy rolling over serrated ice ridges and steering around weathered black outcroppings of stone, but they were going to make it.

Hayes had already decided that.

He just wasn’t giving much thought to whether or not they’d make it back again.

One heartbreak at a time.

The wastelands to either side were dead white with canopies of ice that jutted like mountain peaks. You caught them out of the glare of the lights and out of the corner of your eye, they looked like monuments and gravestones sometimes. The landscape became very hilly as they approached the Dominion Range, full of sudden gullies and ice-pilings, horns of wind-blasted rock rising up like church spires. Rough, dangerous country. The Dominion Range was located along the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the massive Beardmore and Mill Glaciers came together. Had it been daylight, Hayes knew, they would have been able to see the rugged cones of the Transantarctic Mountains rising before them.

The SnoCat plodded along, plowing through waist-high drift and over ridges of ice. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept pushing from the high elevations, threatening to bury them at times.

“Hey! You see that!” Cutchen said, almost choking on his words.

Sharkey tensed next to him and Hayes tried to swallow. “What? What did you see?”

“I… well, I saw a shape… I thought I saw a shape,” Cutchen said. “Off to the right. It passed right by us… then I lost it in the snow.”

“Probably some rocks,” Sharkey pointed out.

“No, it was moving… I think it was moving away from us.” Cutchen let that hang a moment, then added, “I thought I saw eyes reflected.”

“Eyes?” Hayes said. “How many?”

Sharkey crossed her arms almost defiantly. “Stop it. Both of you.”

“Just a shape,” Cutchen said. “That’s all.”

Hayes was going to tell him he was crazy, that there was nothing moving out there but them, but the spit had dried up in his mouth. It felt like something was spinning a web at the base of his spine, a chill stealthily creeping up his back.

“It was probably nothing,” Cutchen said like he was trying to convince himself of the fact.

Ten minutes passed while Hayes hoped they’d see nothing else. He checked the GPS. “Okay, we should be right on top of Vradaz… gotta be right in this area somewhere.”

But it was dead winter in Antarctica, the perpetual night billowing and consuming like black satin. Hayes downshifted the ’Cat and cranked up the headlights, put the spots on. Shafts of light cut across the glacial plane, making it no more than twenty or thirty feet before they reflected back the blizzard. It looked and sounded like a sandstorm out there.

They kept going, Hayes bringing the ’Cat around in a loose circle, staying within the perimeters of the GPS field. Cutchen splayed the spots around. The snowfall died down a bit and they could see a huge ice barrier just beyond them that must have been seventy or eighty feet high.

“There,” Cutchen said. “There’s something over there.”

He was right.

A cluster of irregular shapes thrust from the snow, right at the foot of the barrier. Hayes could see what might have been roofs, an aerial, the rusted sheet metal of a wall blown clean of drift. Much of it was lost beneath an ice fall. The glaciers were pushing that barrier down from the mountains, a few feet a year. Sooner or later, Vradaz Outpost would be crushed beneath it.

Hayes pulled the SnoCat in closer, pushing through the night. Waves of snow like breakers at sea were spread across what must have been the compound at one time, gathering here at the foot of the ice barrier.

“A few more weeks and the camp would have been buried,” Cutchen said. “I think we should have waited.”

Hayes pulled the ’Cat to a stop and killed the engine. Suddenly then, there was only that immense and eerie stillness, that ominous sense of desertion and lifelessness all abandoned camps seemed to have. The wind was blowing and that great ice barrier was cracking and popping.

They sat there in the cab, waiting, thinking.

Hayes didn’t know about the others, but the sight of Vradaz entombed in snow and ice made something in his belly stir like gravy. There was a tenseness to his limbs, a tightening of his ligaments and a quickness to his pulse. He found himself involuntarily reaching out for Sharkey’s hand just as she reached for his and for Cutchen’s. And there they sat, in that windy darkness, listening to the snow glance off the windshield and pepper the sides of the SnoCat. Nobody was moving. They were barely breathing.

Like standing outside a haunted house on a chill October night, Hayes found himself thinking. Listening to the leaves blow and the shutters creak and wondering if we have the balls to see this through.

“Okay, I’ve had enough,” Cutchen said. “Either we do this or turn around. I say we turn around. The brochure clearly said this place had a pool. I don’t see any pool.”

Hayes broke his grip with Sharkey’s gloved hands. “I suppose we can’t sit here like this being all girly.”

He opened his door and the cold blasted in.

And outside, the snow piled up and the wind screeched their names.

29

Well, it was no easy bit getting into the Vradaz Outpost.

It was a small camp, but the buildings — those that weren’t crushed beneath the ice barrier—were pretty much drifted from roof to ground. Hayes and his compatriots had to fight through snow that came up above their hips at times and then was blown clean five feet away. Hayes had brought lanterns, ice-axes, and shovels and they put them to good use. They chose a squat, central structure that appeared to be connected to the others and got to work. The sight of the place had filled them all with an unknown terror, but after thirty minutes spent shoveling and cutting their way through the heaped snow, that passed.

It was just a dead camp.

That was all it was and the exertion helped them see it. Their nerves were still sharpened, but Hayes figured that was only natural. Jesus, this was the South Pole at the dead of winter. Wind screaming and snow flying and the temperature hanging in at a steady fifty below. If their imaginations got a little worked up, it was to be expected.

When they found the door, it was sheathed in blue ice, buckled in its frame and Hayes had a mad desire to plow right through it with the SnoCat, but he didn’t want to take the chance of destroying anything in there. Anything that might remain. So they took their turns chopping through the ice by lantern-light, the snow whipping and creating jumping, distorted shadows around them.

And then the door was free. One good kick and it fell in.

“You first,” Cutchen said. “I’m the intellectual type… you’re the brave, stupid type.”

“Shit,” Hayes said, ducking in through the doorway and turning on his flashlight, something pulling up inside of him as he entered the abandoned structure. There was a smell of age and dust and wreckage.

The place was made of wood and prefab metal like most of the buildings at the South Pole. Concrete didn’t hold up too well with the abrasive wind and extreme temperature changes, it tended to flake away and crack wide open.

Looking around in there with his flashlight, Hayes was seeing debris everywhere like a cyclone went ripping through. The floor planking was ruptured, the roof sagging, great holes punched into the walls. Snow had drifted into the corners. He supposed the place was held mainly together by frost and ice. Seams of it necklaced the walls.

“Look,” Sharkey said. “Even the back of the door.”

“Jesus,” Cutchen said.

There were crude crosses etched into just about any available surface. Hex signs, really, to ward off evil. You could almost breathe in the madness that must have overtaken the place. Those scientists losing their minds when their science could not explain what appeared to be some sort of malefic haunting… in their desperation they had turned to the oldest of apotropaics: the cross.

But it had failed them.

Hayes, Sharkey, and Cutchen stood there maybe five minutes, sucking in the memory of evil and insanity that seemed to ooze from those bowed, ice-slicked walls.

“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” Cutchen finally said.

“Maybe one did.”

They were in some sort of entry, what Hayes’ mom had called a Mud Room back in Kansas. The sort of place you stowed your boots and coats and work clothes when you came in out of the fields. They passed through another doorway into a larger room. There were some old fuel oil barrels in there and a stove over in the corner. Everything else was in shambles… camp chairs overturned, video equipment shattered, papers spread in the dusting of snow. What looked like a desk had been reduced to kindling. A light fixture overhead was dangling by wires. The rungs of a red fireman’s ladder against the wall were hung with icicles.

Sharkey was examining some of the papers with her lantern.

“Make anything of it?” Hayes asked her.

She dropped them. “My Cyrillic is a little rusty.”

They passed into another room in which the ceiling was caved in, stalactites of ice hung down and pooled on the floor. The walls were charred and bowed. There was a lot of electronic equipment in there, most of it destroyed and locked in flows of ice.

“Looks like they had a fire,” Cutchen said. “I wonder if it was an accident.”

They kept going, moving down a short corridor past some cramped sleeping quarters and then into another room which had been a laboratory once. There was still equipment in there… microscopes and racks of test tubes, antique computers and file cabinets whose drawers had been yanked open and left that way. The floor was a down of broken glass and instruments and papers. Hayes found a couple drills and an electric saw they must have used to slice up their ice core samples. There was a small ell off the room with a handle like a freezer on it. Inside were the core samples themselves, dated and tagged.

Sharkey almost went on her ass on a flow of ice on the floor. “Look at this,” she said, indicating a room just off the lab. The walls in there had great, blackened holes ripped into them through which you could see a maze of snow, ice, and lumber… the portion of the outpost crushed beneath the ice fall. There were a series of smaller holes drilled into the walls, too.

“Bullet holes,” Hayes said. “And those bigger ones…”

“Grenades?” Cutchen said, panning his light over them.

Sharkey was on her hands and knees studying some ancient stains on the walls, others spread over some folders caught in the ice flow. “This… well, this could be blood. It sure looks like it. I guess it could be ink or tomato sauce or something.”

Hayes felt something sink in him. Yeah, and maybe the center of the universe has creamy white filling, but I don’t think so. You were right the first time, Doc. That ain’t the blood of tomatoes, it’s the blood of people.

“Must’ve had themselves a showdown here,” Cutchen said. “Or a slaughter.”

Hayes was wondering how much truth there was in what Kolich had told them. There was more to this mess than just men going mad and seeing ghosts and what not. You could almost feel the agony and suffering in the air. Those holes… there was no doubt about them. Somebody had opened up with an automatic weapon in here.

What had Kolich said?

A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead.

Or been killed.

Hayes was picturing some security force, maybe something more along the lines of a hit squad coming in here and killing everyone. Saving those three others for interrogation or study. Whatever had happened it had been violent and harsh and ugly. The outpost had been under Soviet jurisdiction at the time. The Soviets knew how to handle little problems like hauntings and alien minds trying to take over their men.

“So what does it tell us?” Sharkey said.

Cutchen shook his head. “Nothing we want to know about.”

There was a set of double doors against the far wall. They were encased in twining, thick roots of ice. Summer melt-water from the barrier that had frozen up come winter. Desks and furniture and battered file cabinets had been piled up against it. They had to use the ice-axes to free the wreckage.

“What do you suppose the point of this was?” Cutchen said.

Sharkey started hammering ice away from the doors. “Only two possibilities, isn’t there? They were either trying to keep something in or something out.”

Cutchen paused, resting his axe on the shoulder of his red parka. “I was thinking that and, you know, I wonder if certain doors shouldn’t be opened.”

“You scared?” Hayes asked him, because he knew he was.

Cutchen tittered. “I don’t know the meaning of the word. Still… I think I might have left my electric blanket on. Maybe I should pop back to camp, come back for you two wide-eyed intrepids later on.”

“Chop,” Sharkey told him.

But it was really getting them nowhere, for the ice had puddled beneath the door and locked it tight as a bank vault. Hayes dashed out to the ’Cat and came back with a propane torch. He ran the flame along the bottom of the door until it loosened. Then he hit the hinges and the seam where the two doors came together.

“Okay,” he said.

Cutchen looked from one to the other, then pushed his way through, stepping out into a larger room that held a variety of equipment, mostly portable ice drills, corers, and air tools. The far wall was collapsed and a foot of snow had blown over the floor.

“Looks harmless enough,” Cutchen said. “You two coming in or—”

There was an instantaneous cracking and ripping sound and Cutchen let out a cry and disappeared from view. They heard him land below, swearing and calling the Russians everything but white Christians.

Hayes and Sharkey crept forward. They put their lights down there and saw Cutchen sitting in a drift of snow, a gleaming wall of blue ice behind him.

“Are you all right?” Sharkey asked him.

“Peachy. Why do you ask?”

Hayes went for the ladder they’d seen when they first came in. Sharkey stayed there, hanging her lantern over the edge of the hole. “Looks pretty big down there. Must have been their cold storage,” she said. “I bet you stepped on the trap door.”

“Do you really think so?”

Cutchen dug his flashlight out of the snow, stood up, slipped and dropped it farther away. He cursed under his breath and dug it out from a drift. “Hey, what the hell?” he said, down on his knees, digging through the snow. He was uncovering something with mittened hands, brushing a dusting of white away from it.

“What is it?” Sharkey said from above.

“I’m not sure,” Cutchen said, his voice echoing out in the cavernous hollows below. “Looks like a… oh Jesus, yuck.” He stumbled away from whatever it was, breathing hard. “Where’s that goddamn ladder? Tell your boyfriend to hurry.”

“What?” Sharkey said.

Cutchen put his light on it.

Even from where she was, Sharkey could see it just fine. It was sculpted in ice, but there was no doubt what it was: a human death mask. A face peeled down nearly to the skull beneath and frosted white.

Cutchen wasn’t liking it much. “I’m hoping this is just evidence of a Halloween party that got out of hand.”

He stepped away from that leering, hollow-eyed face and made it maybe two or three steps and cried out. His leg had sank nearly up to the knee. His flashlight took another ride, this time landing about ten feet away, just under the trapdoor. It spun in circles, casting a magic lantern show of vast and twisted shadows over the ice walls. Cutchen went down on his hands and knees, struggling away from whatever he’d gotten himself stuck in. His knee sank once and his hand dropped down a foot another time. But he got out of there.

Whatever it was he’d been on… it was not made for walking.

Hayes came back with the ladder, banging it into walls and getting it hung up on the door. He saw the look on Sharkey’s face, said, “What? What now?”

“Never mind, Rapunzel,” Cutchen said, an odd edge to his voice. “Let down you fucking hair already.”

Hayes fed it down into the hole and he’d barely gotten it balanced before Cutchen came scrambling up it like a monkey up grapevine. His foot slipped once and he banged his chin, but he never slowed down. He lay in the snow on his back, breathing hard, looking like he’d been inflated in his bulky ECW’s.

“I found out where they keep the Halloween decorations,” he said to Hayes.

Sharkey started down the ladder and Hayes went after her, taking the flashlights and leaving Cutchen the lantern.

The room they found themselves in was about twenty feet in width, maybe thirty in length. The floor was hard-packed snow and the walls were ice and you could clearly see the chopping and hacking marks in it. The Russians had cut it right down into the ice.

Hayes played his light around.

There were crates of food and barrels of gasoline along the walls. One barrel was tipped over and ruptured as if somebody had opened it with an axe. A small room off to the left held a small Honda gasoline-powered generator that was now hopelessly ruined, covered in frozen melt-water. Huge stalactites hung from the ceiling and Hayes had to duck under them. Some reached right to the floor.

Sharkey was on her hands and knees, brushing snow away from what Cutchen had found.

Hayes helped her.

It took some time, but before they were done they had uncovered a roughly circular pit filled with frozen cadavers. It looked like a winter scene from Treblinka: skulls with yawning jaws and hollowed orbits, jutting femurs and ulnas, the barrel staves of ribcages. He figured there were probably twenty bodies in there, all tangled in a central heap of limbs and skull-faces and spirals of vertebrae that were fused together in a pool of ice. Some had the rags of clothes wrapped around them and others went to their maker naked. They weren’t exactly skeletons, but damn close. They all looked blackened and melted, knitted with sinew and wasted quilts of muscle.

And they’d all been shot.

Skulls had bullet holes in them. As did iliums and sternums and clavicles. Arm and leg bones were snapped. Jaws blasted away and pelvic wings shattered. No, this hadn’t been a careful cleansing here, this had been a wild murder spree carried out with submachine guns and automatic rifles. These bodies had taken an incredible volume of fire and at close range.

Hayes just stood there, breathlessly, staring down into that bone pit and almost sensing the terror and madness that had brought an atrocity like this into being. He stepped back and away, having trouble being clinical about it all like Sharkey. To him, it looked like those cadavers were trying to crawl out of the ice. All those staring faces and reaching, cremated hands. Like something from a waxworks or a spookshow, but certainly nothing real.

He ducked away beneath the ceiling of icicles and saw another irregular shape in the snow. For some reason, it caught his eye. Motes of dust and crystals of ice hung in the air. His breath frosted from his lips in great clouds. Using his boot, he scattered the snow away from that shape beneath. He was looking down at a shriveled, conical form maybe six or seven feet long that had been incinerated right down to a husk. Looking now like something that had been pulled from an alien crematory.

Hayes knew what it was, of course.

He recognized that shape and it filled his belly with fluttering wings. Another one of those things. Probably chopped from the ice and then burned when they realized what it was doing to them. Or maybe the security force had burned it. Not that it mattered.

“You better come over here,” he said to Sharkey, using a hush and quiet voice. The kind you used when you didn’t want to wake an infant… or something sleeping in a coffin.

“What now?” Cutchen said from above. “Can you guys hurry this up? I’m… I’m starting to lose it up here.”

Sharkey came over, saying, “Some of those bodies are wearing fatigues, Jimmy. Some of Kolich’s security people must have went in there, too.”

And Hayes didn’t doubt it.

… a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide… weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men… ghosts, bogies, I think… they spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls…

Yes, he could hear Nikolai Kolich saying it.

Except Kolich had left out the meat of the matter. These men at the outpost had drilled into a chasm, yes, but it hadn’t been just any chasm, but maybe a burial chamber of the Old Ones. And opening it had been like cutting the scab off some primordial, invidious wound. And the pus that leaked out was infectious and evil, a wasting pestilence in the form of alien memories and undead essences, a decayed intelligence that was still virulent after all those uncounted eons, a spiritual contamination that took their minds one by one by one. Making them something less than human, something ageless and undying, a cosmic horror.

“Another one,” Sharkey said. “Their tombs must be all over these mountains and rifts.”

Hayes kicked it with his boot to prove to himself that it was dead. A piece of its leathery, burnt hide fell off like tree bark. It was hollow inside, that alien machinery boiled to ash. Even its ghost was dead now. Or what Hayes would have called a ghost, because nothing else seemed to fit. That diabolic power, the vestiges of those remorseless minds that seemed to cling on after death like a negative charge in a dry cell battery… just waiting to come into contact with living mental energies they could twist and subvert.

“You wanna guess what happened here?” Sharkey said.

“Oh, you know as well as I do. They dug up some of these ugly pricks and those minds woke up, became active. The Russians started having bad dreams and seeing ghosts and hearing things… and by the time they realized what was happening, they weren’t even men anymore. Just… vessels for dead, alien minds that maybe wanted to fulfill some perverse plan set into motion millions of years ago.” He put a cigarette in his lips and lit. “Then the people at Vostok got worried, so they sent in soldiers. Some of the soldiers got contaminated by those minds… but not enough. Those that weren’t, killed everyone except those three Kolich mentioned, those drooling and insane things that had once been men. The soldiers burned the rest and the Old Ones, too.”

“That’s why they abandoned this camp, Jimmy. To stop the spread of the infection.”

Cutchen said, “C’mon already, I…” He paused like his throat had seized up. “I’m hearing things up here, people. Sounds. I don’t know… like things moving, sliding…”

Hayes walked over to the ladder.

He heard a thump up there, followed by another. Then a scraping sound like nails dragged over ice. Then there was silence. Cutchen came barreling down the ladder, missing the last three rungs and landing on his ass.

He looked up at Hayes with wild, unblinking eyes. His face was white as kidskin. “There’s… there’s something up there, something moving in the other room.”

They were all tensed and waiting, just as still as the ice around them.

A floorboard overhead creaked. There was a weird and low vibration followed by a crackling sound. A pounding like a fist at the door above. A sliding, whispering noise. They were all crouched down low with Cutchen now, holding onto one another. A shrill, echoing peal sounded out above.

“What the hell is it?” Cutchen said.

“Shut up,” Hayes whispered. “For the love of God, be quiet…”

They waited there, hearing sounds… thumpings and knockings, scratching noises and that unearthly crackling. Hayes held onto them, never having felt this absolutely vulnerable in his life. His thoughts had gone liquid in his head. His soul felt like some whirlpool sucking down into fathomless blackness. He felt something catch in his throat, a cry or a scream, and Sharkey made a muted whimpering sound.

No, they hadn’t seen anything, but they had heard things.

The things that probably drove the Russians insane. And they were feeling something, too… something electric and rising and palpable.

Those vibrations started again, making the entire building tremble. The walls above sounded like hammers were beating into them. There were other sounds above… like whispering, distorted voices and hollow pipings, a buzzing noise. And then -

Then Sharkey gasped and a huge, amorphous shadow passed over the trap door as if some grotesque figure had passed before the lantern, making a sound like forks scraped over blackboards and then fading away.

They stayed together like that maybe five or ten minutes, then Hayes went up the ladder, expecting to see something that would leech his mind dry. But there was nothing, nothing at all. The others came up and not a one of them remarked on those weird spade-like prints in the snow.

The wind was whipping and the snow coming at them in sheets as they found the SnoCat and Hayes started it up. He brought it around and bulldozed through a few drifts. Cutchen was staring into his rearview mirror, seeing things darting in and out of the blizzard that he would not comment on.

“Just drive,” he said when Hayes asked him. “For the love of Christ, get us out of here…”

30

So in the days following the successful probe of Lake Vordog, Professor Gundry found himself wishing that he had stayed at CalTech working on his glaciological models. Wishing he had never come down to Antarctica and opened Pandora’s Box, got a good look at what was inside. For though it made absolutely no scientific sense, he now knew there were things a man was better off not seeing, not knowing. Things that could get down inside a man, unlocking old doors and rattling primal skeletons from moldering closets, making him feel things and remember things that could poison him to his marrow.

Gundry was no longer the man Hayes had gotten to know, however briefly.

He was not a bundle of nervous energy and inexhaustible drive and ambition. He was no longer a perpetual motion machine that seemed to move in all directions simultaneously, constantly thinking and emoting and reacting. No, now he was a worn, weathered man in his mid-sixties whose blood ran cold and who felt the weight and pull of each of those years dragging him down, compressing him, squashing him flat. His mind was like some incredibly rare and tragic orchid whose petals no longer sought tropical mists and the heat of the sun, but had folded up and withered, pulled into itself and sought the dark, dank depths of cellars and crawlspaces. Cobwebbed, moist, rotting places where the soul could go to mulch and fungus in secret. There were such places in Gundry, crevices and mildewed corners where he could lose himself.

Away from prying eyes and questioning tongues, a man could face the truth of who and what he was, the ultimate destiny of his race. For these were weighty, soul-scarring issues that would crush any man just as they were crushing Gundry.

Gundry was a Southerner.

He was from the Bible Belt and his old man had been something of a lay-preacher. When he wasn’t raising sugar beets, melons, and sweet corn, the elder Gundry did his share of preaching at county fairs and carnival booths. He had no earthly patience with such higher realms of thought as organic evolution and cosmic generation. He believed what the Bible taught and was happy within those narrow confines.

Gundry had always thought his father ignorant and parochial, a fly trapped in amber, a man in a constant state of denial as science and technology slowly ate away the foundations of conservative belief and tradition. The way Gundry saw it, science and enlightenment were the only true cure for dim centuries of religious bigotry and hypocrisy.

But now, all these many years later, Gundry finally understood his father.

Though he could not honestly believe in some invisible, mythical god, he could understand religion now. He could understand that it was a security blanket men wrapped around themselves. Maybe it was dark and close under that blanket and you couldn’t see more than a few inches in any direction, but it was safe. God created Heaven and Earth and there was a serenity to that, now wasn’t there? It was simple and reassuring. And if religion was indeed a sheltering blanket, then science was the cold hand which yanked it away, showing man his ultimate insignificance in the greater scheme of things, the truth about his origins and destiny. The very things man had tried for so many millennia to walk away from, to forget. A cage he had liberated himself from slowly and, even if a candle of truth still burned in the depths of his being, if he did not look at it, then it did not exist. But now man had been thrown back into that cage, had the door slammed shut in his face. And the truth, the real truth of who and what man was and where he’d come from, was staring him dead in the eye.

And, with that in mind, Gundry knew now that enlightenment was the lamp that would burn mens’ souls to cinders and the truth was the beast that would devour him and swallow him alive.

For if those things down in the lake had their way, men would never be men again, but just appendages of a cold and cosmic hive-intelligence as it had been intended from the very beginning.

The idea of that terrified Gundry.

It shook him to his roots and filled his soul with venom. All these years, all these thousands upon thousands of years, man had been running from his origins. And now the world was poised on an event that would throw him right back into those very arms. Culture, society, philosophy, religion, poetry, art, music… it would all be rendered meaningless beneath the burning, dominating eye of that dire alien intellect.

There was something very offensive and even obscene about that.

So very late in life, Gundry finally, ultimately embraced the insular teachings of organized religion and came to accept that, yes, there indeed was a serpent in Eden… and it had come from another star.

Gundry was sitting in the old core sampling room, his head in his hands, whimpering, mourning at the grave of humanity.

Jesus, oh Lord, if you exist, stop this, stop Them before it’s too late. Before everything we are is lost to Their memory, swallowed by it.

Nobody had been to the drilling tower in several days now.

Oh, they knew what had been found in the lake and mainly because Hayes had been blabbing about it, but they preferred to leave it alone. Even the scientists themselves had not asked to see the video feed. And wasn’t that interesting? Yes, but not surprising with what was going on. Mankind was going full circle and they all felt it and it scared the shit out of them.

Scared? Gundry thought. They think its bad over at the compound, they should try it over here for a few days.

Gundry refused to go into the control booth anymore.

Campbell and Parks had pretty much been in there since the day they launched the cryobot. Though the hydrobot was dead, the primary and secondary cryobots were still operating. Still operating and passing reams of information to the surface.

But that wasn’t all they were passing.

They were picking up a series of vibrations down there that were steady and organized, a constant stream of pulses that repeated every five minutes to the second. Gundy knew it was not due to some natural phenomena. This was purposeful and directed and he knew it was coming from the archaic city down below. These vibrations were very much like Morse code. The computers could crunch those pulses into mathematical symbols, attach to them a numerical value… but it would take months if not years to accurately decipher what the Old Ones were sending.

Or maybe not.

Because maybe on the surface those pulses sounded like noise, but inside, deep inside your mind, you recognized them and understood them. Something long dormant in the human brain was receiving them and waking up. That’s why Parks and Campbell would not leave the booth — they were in tune with it. Gaunt, haggard zombies with eyes like staring glass was all they were now, listening and listening as the Old Ones imposed their will upon them and stripped away their humanity inch by inch.

Gundry could not go in there now.

Those pulses made something in his head ache and something in his belly recoil. The three techs who had operated the drill were gone now. Gundry didn’t know what had happened to them exactly. Just that one afternoon they stood over the drill hole, staring down into it with blank looks on their faces. And by evening, they were gone. Gundry figured they had wandered off into the Antarctic night just as they were told to.

There was a sudden vibration in the drill tower that Gundry could feel coming up through his feet. It was a constant, electronic humming that rose and fell. Made him want to chatter his teeth and scream his mind away. But it was more than that, for it got inside his head and made something hurt in there. And he knew if he would only stop fighting against it, the pain would recede and a black wave of acceptance would carry him off to eon-dead worlds.

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

The pain was so intense in his head now, thrumming in cutting, tearing waves, that Gundry’s vision blurred and tears were squeezed from his eyes. His molars ached and drool fell from his lips. But he was still a man and he would remain one. Digging frantically into his desk drawer, he pulled out his little .38 and put the barrel in his mouth. There was an explosion and an impact, a shattering and a sense of falling.

Gundry’s corpse slid from the chair to the floor.

Denying the intellect of the hive, he died as a man with freedom on his tongue and defiance in his soul.

31

“I’m all out of answers. I’m empty and finished and just going through the motions now,” Hayes said the morning after they returned from the Vradaz Outpost. “I don’t know what to think and what to feel. Like a rat in a fucking maze. Once again.”

“Least you’re not alone in the maze,” Sharkey told him.

Why did that seem precious little consolation?

No, he would not have been able to handle any of this alone. It would have stripped his gears. But at least alone he could have sought the oblivion of suicide, but now that was out of the question. For he felt a sense of responsibility here. Maybe to his race and the world, but certainly to those that were still alive at Kharkhov Station.

Maybe he was inflating his own importance, but he didn’t think so. For he had an odd and unwavering sense of necessity.

Looking back, he was the only who had felt the badness coming and seen it for what it was. More or less. Maybe the others had, too, in some sense, but just refused to admit it. He felt somehow that he was the guiding hand in this shitfuck and if there was going to be any closure to it, he would be the one to shut the door.

Maybe because those things had tried to infect his mind several times now and had failed. Maybe it was this that gave him such a feeling of self-importance. Sharkey was on the same page with him and so was Cutchen… most of the time… but the others?

No, from LaHune on down they were mice.

Just going about their mindless business and nibbling their cheese, pretending they were not in incredible danger. St. Ours had been an asshole. Hayes would be the first to admit to that. But good or bad, St. Ours had had enough gumption to sense danger and fight against it.

But what now? What came next?

Hayes just wasn’t sure.

Sharkey had just finished telling him two disturbing pearls of knowledge. First that Gates and his people had not been heard from in nearly thirty-six hours now. And secondly, that she’d been on the radio with Nikolai Kolich at the Vostok Station and he had pulled a complete 360 on them, acting like he had never said a word about anything odd happening at Vradaz. Completely denying it all like somebody had a gun to his head. If they’d had an ally there, they’d lost him now.

“We have to decide what we’re going to do, Jimmy. Do we try and sit this out? I don’t think so. Something has to be done and it’s up to us to do it. We can’t expect LaHune to help us and probably nobody else either.” She appraised Hayes with those crystal blue eyes of hers that always made something seize up inside him. “What I’m thinking is we first… neuter those mummies out in the hut. A little exposure to our lovely air down here ought to put them back to sleep. Also, how do you feel about me sending a message to the NSF that we’re in serious trouble here?”

Hayes didn’t know if that was such a good idea. “I’m willing to bet the NSF will ignore it. Because, chances are, LaHune is sending in his glowing daily reports, fiddling while Rome burns to fucking toast.”

“You’re probably right.”

He figured he was. “We’ll look like a couple crackpots. Besides, Cutchy says we’re heading into a full-blown Polar cyclonic storm within twelve hours. We’re going to be looking at white-out conditions when those winds start sweeping down from the mountains, picking up everything in their path. No way in hell a rescue team can get in here… even if they wanted to.”

Sharkey didn’t dispute any of that.

Winter on the Antarctica continent was savage and relentless, marked by screaming subzero winds, perpetual darkness, and wild blizzards that buried camps almost overnight. Planes did not fly to the South Pole even on good days, let alone what they were facing a Condition 3 blizzard with zero visibility and 80 mile-an-hour winds that would lock Kharkhov down for days if not weeks. So whatever was going to happen here, they were going to face it alone.

“There’s more here at work than the weather, Elaine, and I think we both know it.” Hayes lit a cigarette, seemed to find revelation in the glowing tip. “We’ve all been sensing a lot of things, some of it coming in dreams and some of it coming just as feelings we can’t honestly explain. I’m probably the worst of the lot, spouting out reams of bullshit that I have no way of explaining or proving. Most of what I’ve been… what word should I use here?… intuiting has been about those dead ones out in the hut, the others down in the lake. But not all of it’s been about that. I told you I had a bad feeling about LaHune and I still do. And now, with our good buddy Nikolai Kolich turning his pink tail on us… I’m getting an even worse feeling.”

Sharkey just watched him, far beyond the stage where she would even consider trying to talk him out of his conspiracy theories… because piece by awful piece, the puzzle he’d been prophesizing was slowly coming together. “You think…” She swallowed, paused. “You still think that LaHune is sitting atop a conspiracy, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Yes, even more than I did before. I’m seeing him as the big old mother hen sitting on a brood of eggs that are going rotten and wormy, but he’s so fucking brainwashed that he don’t have the sense to climb off… until he’s told to. You like that, darling? Well, I got more. You wanna hear more?”

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

Hayes grinned. “Well, sweetheart, it’s your quarter so you might as well get your money’s worth.” He pulled off his cigarette. “LaHune. I told you once he doesn’t belong here and that’s the truth. But I think he was selected for this post by certain high-ranking assholes. Maybe he’s NASA or JPL, shit maybe he’s NSA or Cee-Eye-Aye, baby, I don’t know. But I think Uncle Sugar sent him down here. I think LaHune is some kind of spook. There, I said it. I felt it pretty much all along and now I’m admitting it. You’ve pulled a few tours down here, Elaine, and I’m willing to bet you’ve heard the same tired old stories I have. Crazy, fringe-shit about the government sending certain security types down here on occasion, undercover, just to keep an eye on things.”

Sharkey couldn’t lie. “Yeah, I’ve heard it. And it was probably true during the Cold War… but now?”

“Yes, particularly now. I’m not even saying for one mad moment that the NSF is even aware that these types are crawling through their organization like worms in shit, but I’ll bet they are. My guess is that some people on the highest rung of the dirtiest ladder we got… or sitting on the biggest turd, take your pick… arranged to have LaHune come down here. Why? Because I think they had an inkling of what we were going to find. Maybe that nonsense you hear about Area 57 and Roswell isn’t as crazy as you think. Maybe there are things like that and maybe our government knows about ’em. Maybe. And just maybe they knew about what was down here. Maybe they took the Pabodie Expedition a lot more seriously than people imagined… and, hell, maybe the same sort of people who quashed that back in the thirties are active now, sterilizing things for public consumption. Yeah, I know. That’s a whole big peck of pickled peppers I’m balancing on the top of my pointy head, but it all makes sense to me.”

Sharkey smiled. “I like the peppers analogy, because all of this is giving me an upset stomach.”

“Don’t blame you. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I have cabin fever and maybe my dick is made of yellow sponge cake, but I don’t think so. LaHune is dirty and he has an agenda. I think the people who yank his strings knew about that ruined city and had suspicions about what was down in the lake… and that magnetic anomaly? Well, that was the icing on the cake, so to speak.”

Sharkey leaned back in her chair, locking her fingers together behind her head. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said, looking like a bad headache was coming over her. “I’m not saying you’re wrong… but it’s pretty spooky thinking, you know? If it is true, then why did LaHune lift the ban on communications, email?”

“I think he had to… or he was told to so things didn’t get too randy down here.” Hayes finished his cigarette. “Listen to me, Elaine. I’m not saying I’m completely right here, but I think I’m on the right path. And I think you know I am. I don’t know what LaHune’s people might want… maybe they want the technology, maybe they want to seize it before anyone else does. I don’t know. I don’t believe they realized the level of power that was still active down here, but maybe they did. Again, maybe they had some kind of half-ass inkling of it. But I don’t really think they meant to put us in any sort of real danger. I’m not that much of a conspiracist. No, whoever these people are, they only wanted us to do our jobs and gather intelligence for them… I don’t think they meant to hurt us.”

Sharkey just sat there for a time, not looking at Hayes, but the papers on her desk, a few framed snapshots of friends from other Antarctic camps. “You know what pisses me off, Jimmy?”

“No, but I have a feeling you’ll tell me.”

“You do.”

“Me?”

“Yes. And you piss me off because I think you’re right. Maybe not completely, but I think you’re pretty close. What I saw at Vradaz pretty much confirms that. But where does any of it get us? Nowhere. Even if it’s true, so what? It’s out of our hands. LaHune will do what he’s told to do and maybe some of us will walk out of this come spring. And I’m willing to bet if we do, we’re never invited back.”

“I agree,” he said. “But I think it’s beyond just that now. Regardless of what LaHune’s puppet masters decide or don’t decide, these things, these Old Ones, are the immediate threat. They’re the ones in power now. If we want to get out of here alive, we better start thinking of how we’re going to cut their balls off… if they have any.”

Sharkey got out of her chair and walked around behind Hayes. She stroked his hair and then kissed him on the cheek. “Why don’t you go accidentally knock Hut Six down… that’s a start. That might shut them down or at least set them back.”

Hayes stood up and took her into his arms. And maybe he didn’t really take her, because she seemed to fall right in place like a cog. He kissed her and she kissed him back and that kiss was in no hurry, it held on, pressed them together and only ended when it was on the verge of bigger things.

“I think I’ll go do just that. Have a little accident with the ’dozer. A big fucking oops,” he said, his insides filled with a warmth that quickly sought lower regions. “And then we’ll see. We’ll just see. You know, lady, I got me this crazy idea of us walking out of here together.”

“Me, too,” she said.

Hayes turned away and started down the corridor.

“Be careful, Jimmy,” she said, not sure if he heard her or not.