Hive

With the grotto lit . . . or their part of it . . . it was easy enough to make a run back to the archway. They did so, vaulting debris and slipping around stalagmites and climbing over rocks. When they got inside the archway, Hayes tripped and went flat on his face. And if he hadn’t, they would not have seen. His light went spinning, revealing the dark corners of the arch they had not originally noticed.

“What is that stuff?” Sharkey asked.

Hayes didn’t answer, not right away. What he was seeing were a series of thin plastic tubes wrapped around rocks and the frame of the arch itself. It was detcord hooked to electric blasting caps and their had to be seventy or eighty feet of it. Enough to cause a massive explosion.

That’s why the remote control detonator was up in the SnoCat. Somebody was planning on sealing this place off for an eternity. Gates. Must have been Gates.

“Don’t touch it,” Hayes warned Sharkey. “That’s detcord . . . C-8 plastic explosive shaped into a cord.”

“The detonator . . . “

“You got it.”

The lights were holding the swarm at bay, but they wouldn’t for long. Already Hayes could feel those minds out there collecting themselves, gathering their energies, charging their batteries as it were. And when they turned that force at the generator . . .

Hayes and Sharkey started up the steps.

They moved as fast as they could, running and climbing, falling down and getting back up again until they found the original passage. Behind them, echoing and reverberating, came that piping. It was building now. Angry and resolute and directed.

Hayes and Sharkey found the rope ladder, climbed up out of the chasm into the subzero polar night. The storm had passed and there were stars out above. Auroras were flickering and expanding in swaths of cold white light over the mountain peaks.

“Get that ‘Cat warmed up!” Hayes called to Sharkey as he ran through Gates’ deserted encampment.

He ran one way and she ran the other.

He palmed the detonator from Gates’ SnoCat and climbed the slope to his own. Sharkey had it running. He climbed into the warming cab and brought the ‘Cat around so its nose was pointing back down the drifted ice road. Then he hit the firing button on the detonator.

At first there was nothing and he thought it hadn’t worked or they were out of range, but then it came: a great rumbling from below that set-up a chain reaction of destruction down there. The ground shook and the hills trembled and Gates’ camp suddenly disappeared into a smoking crevice.

That’s all there was to it.

“Drive,” Sharkey said.

Hayes did.

43

On the way back, Sharkey read Gates’ field journal, breezing through things she knew. She said nothing for a long time and Hayes just drove. He couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say after what they’d been through. Nothing. He couldn’t even work up the strength to mourn Cutchen. Poor, goddamn Cutchen.

Finally, thirty minutes later, Sharkey said, “Gates had some interesting theories here concerning what this is all about. You up to hearing them?”

He reached over and held her hand. “I’m up to it.”

“According to Gates, there’s a method to the madness of the Old Ones. They’re harvesting minds in a very selective pattern. Some will be harvested to be used, but most . . . most of us will be culled, drained dry, and purged.” She clicked off her flashlight and closed Gates’ notebook. “They’ve waited a long time, Jimmy, for their seeds to bear fruit. Again, according to Gates, they’ll seek minds much like their own —cold, militaristic intellects that they can easily take hold of, brains that are ready to be awakened and, in some ways, are already awake, receptive. These will be the cells by which they’ll contaminate and conquer the entire race . . . reaching out and infecting us mind by mind by mind, spreading out like a plague and waking up those buried imperatives they planted in us so very long ago until we’re essentially a hive of bees or wasps, a colony with a single relentless inhuman intelligence, one that can be bent to their will, harvested, and used for their grand plan.”

Hayes lit a cigarette. “Which is?”

“Gates is a little vague on that.”

“So they don’t really want all our minds, just certain ones?”

“Yes. They will infect us all, then purge off those that are what they might consider mutants . . . defiant wills, individualistic minds. They cannot allow such disease germs in the greater whole. But even those that are purged, killed off . . . their psychic energies will be reaped.”

“Jesus,” Hayes said. “They develop us only to harvest. Like farmers. We’re nothing but a crop for them.”