Hive

Hive is published by Elder Signs Press, Inc.

This book is © 2009 Elder Signs Press, Inc.

All material © 2009 by Elder Signs Press and the author.

Cover art © 2009 by Dave Carson.

Design by Deborah Jones.

All characters within this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written persmission of the publisher.

FIRST EDITION

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published in June 2009

ISBN: 0-9759229-4-7

Printed in the U.S.A.

Published by Elder Signs Press, Inc.

P.O. Box 389

Lake Orion, MI 48361-0389

www.eldersignspress.com

This is for Elaine Lamkin

PART ONE

OUT OF THE ICE

“... there was one part of the ancient land... which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

1

Antarctica was a graveyard, of course.

A subzero cemetery of high frozen monoliths and leaning tombstones of exposed, ancient rock. A burial ground of sunless wastes and biting cold, snow plains and ragged mountains. Gale-force blizzards sucked the warmth from a man and tucked him down deep in frozen tombs and covered his tracks with shrieking windstorms of ice crystals that blew just as fine and white as crematory ash. Like the snow and the cold and the enveloping darkness of winter, the winds were a constant. Night after night, they screamed and wailed with the voices of lost souls. A communal death-rattle of all those interred in mass graves of coveting blue ice and sculpted into leering, frosted death angels.

Antarctica was dead and had been for millions of years.

A wasteland, some said, where God had buried those things he no longer wished to look upon. Nightmares and abominations of flesh and spirit. And if that were true, then whatever was entombed beneath the permafrost, locked-down cold and sightless in that eternal deep-freeze, was never meant to be exhumed.

2

Nothing stays buried forever at the Pole.

It was one of those sayings they tossed around down there. Sometimes you weren’t sure what it meant and other times you weren’t sure you wanted to. But it was true, nonetheless: nothing stays buried forever at the South Pole. The glaciers are in constant motion, grinding and tearing at the primordial bedrock far below, and what they don’t dig up, sooner or later the blizzard winds will blow clean like bones in the desert. So if Antarctica was a graveyard then, it was one in a process of perpetual resurrection, vomiting out those awful bits of its past it could no longer hold down in its belly.

This is how Hayes saw it on his darker days at Kharkhov Station when his poetic turn of mind began devouring itself one bite at a time. But he knew it to be true. He just tried not to think about it, was all.

“I can see ‘em now,” Lind said, his face pressed up to the frosted glass of Targa House, the place where all the personnel of the station ate, slept, and lived. “It’s Gates, all right, coming in with the SnoCat. Must be bringing those mummies in from the high ridges.”

Hayes set down his cup of coffee, scratched his beard, and went up to the window. What he saw out there was winter at the South Geomagnetic Pole . . . sheets of snow whipping and swirling and engulfing. The steeple of the drilling tower, the dome of the meteorology station, the power Quonset, half dozen other structures limned by electric lights and shrouded beneath blankets of white.

Kharkhov Station sat near-center of East Antarctica on the Polar Plateau, some 3500 meters above sea level in what had once been the Soviet sector of the continent. A desolate, godless place that was completely cut off from the world from March until October when spring finally returned. During the long, dark winter, only a small crew of contractors and technicians remained, the others got out before the planes stopped coming and winter set its teeth into that ancient continent.

A burial ground.

That’s what it was.

The wind howled and the huts shook and day by day that immense bleak nothingness chewed a hole through your soul and blew through your numbed mind like an October gust through a deserted house. It was the third week of winter and you knew the sun would not rise and break that womb of blackness for another three months. Three long, bitter months that would eat at your belly and your brain, freezing something up inside you that wouldn’t thaw until you saw civilization again in the spring. And until then, you waited and you listened and you were never really sure what for.

A graveyard indeed, Hayes thought.