Hive

EPILOGUE

The coming days were busy ones as were the coming weeks.

There were things that had to be done and there was no one but them to do it, so they screwed up their courage and clenched their teeth and got their peckers out of their pants, and did what had to be done.

Hayes bulldozed down the drill tower and reduced all that multi-million dollar equipment to twisted metal and shattered plastic and wiring that the wind and ice claimed immediately. He took down Hut #6 completely and then pushed the frozen mummies into an ice trench. Then he dumped about two-hundred gallons of diesel fuel in there and had a little wienie roast. The Old Ones were reduced to burned out husks. To finish the job, Hayes pushed a two ton slab of concrete in after them which crushed their remains to cinders. Then he pushed snow over the hole and within a day or two, the winter had done its job and you could not see where the grave was.

Sharkey was no less busy.

She wrote out a detailed report of all they had seen and all they had witnessed. Hayes and she spent long nights debating about what they should tell the NSF and what they shouldn’t tell them. They decided on a severely truncated version of events. In the report, they would say that LaHune had sent them up to Gates’ encampment after he had not been heard from for days. That was essentially true. They would leave out their journey below, saying that the camp was already destroyed when they got there. And that when they returned from the camp, everyone in the station was dead. Again, essentially true. This was the sort of story that would cause the NSF some sleepless nights, but in the long run, they could live with it.

Then came the dirty work.

They photographed the bodies in the community room for evidence and then carried them out into the snow, dragging them off one by one with a snowmobile to one of the storage sheds.

After that, they sent their report and the NSF began besieging them with emails and radio calls. They got more of the same from bigwigs at McMurdo and the Amundsen-Scott Station. But there was nothing to be done. An investigation would begin in the spring.

A month after the death of the LaHune-thing, Hayes and Sharkey were actually beginning to relax. They sat in her bed, drinking cognac and still trying to sort it all out. Whatever came out of all this, they knew, they would always have each other.

“After this is wound-up,” Sharkey said, a tangle of red hair falling over one pale shoulder, “they’ll start again, you know. Even if they can’t dig down to Gates’ ruins, they’ll be hot to get down to that lake again.”

Hayes knew it. He sipped his cognac, listening to the lonesome voice of the wind that no longer sounded haunted. “I know. Those things are still down there and as long as they are, they won’t stop until they bring their scheme to an end. Not after all this time. They might be as patient as bricks in a wall, but they’re going to want payback.”

Sharkey looked over at him. “If it comes down to it, if they push us into a corner, we better tell the truth. I have Gates’ notes, his laptop. Gundry’s notes. A lot of evidence… whether they want to believe it or not is another thing.”

They set their glasses aside and hunkered down into the warmth of the bed. “We’ll do what we have to do,” Hayes said. “I keep thinking about that global warming business. If these caps ever melt all the way, the world is going to have much bigger problems than flooded cities.”

“One day at a time,” Sharkey said.

And in each other’s arms, they did not feel the loneliness and solitude. They only felt each other and in the endless polar winter of the South Pole, that was enough.