Hive

It came at you out of the whipping, black polar night like some football stadium in the dead center of that glacial white nothingness . . . a sudden oasis of lights and machinery and civilization. Targa House and the meteorology dome. The power station and the drilling tower. Observatories and storage garages. Most of it connected by a webbing of conduits and flagged pathways and security lights. All of it capped by antennas and wind turbines and radar dishes. Outbuildings and huts scattered in all directions. And, off to the far left, the drifted-over runway that would bring the planes come spring. A self-contained community locked down in this eternal deep freeze. And as far as outside help went, it might as well have been sitting dead center of the Martian desert. Because if you were thinking evacuation or rescue, you’d get it about as fast as you would have on the red planet.

He brought the SnoCat in slow, happy to have made it back and, yet, haunted by what he was seeing before him as if it wasn’t an Antarctic research station, but some forbidden burial ground, a glacial cemetery that had risen from the ancient ice field, gates swung wide open. Just the sight of it made dread rise in him like flood waters, drowning him in his own sweet-hot fear. By that point in the game he wasn’t bothering to talk himself out of such feelings. His guts were telling him that he was going into something bad here and he did not doubt, he accepted that prophecy.

Hayes brought the ‘Cat to a stop before Targa House and did not move, feeling the station and letting it tell him things. He couldn’t get past the idea that Kharkhov Station had the same atmosphere shrouded over it as the ruined city of the Old Ones now . . . toxic and spiritually rancid.

Sharkey and Hayes stepped from the ‘Cat and, although they did not admit it to one another, they could sense the fear and agony and paranoia of the place gathering up into a single venting primal scream that they could hear only in their minds.

But it was real. It was raw. It was palpable.

They could hear it on the wind and feel it in their souls. So they were prepared for the worst when they entered Targa House. What came first was the stink . . . of blood and meat and voided bowels. Death. A stench of death so thick and so complete it nearly emptied their minds just smelling it.

“No,” Sharkey said. “Oh, dear God no . . . “

But there was no god at the South Pole. Only the cold and the wind and the whiteness, a ravening ancient intelligence that was always hungry, whose belly was never full.

And here, in the community room, it had feasted.

Everyone was sitting at tables like they’d been called in for a group meeting. And maybe they had been. All of them had their eyes blown from their sockets, their brains boiled to stew. Their white faces were spattered with blood and fluid, carved into shrieking masks of pain and terror. All of them. Like a single diabolic mind had seized them at once and drained their minds in one communal swoop. They were all there in that morgue lit by electric lights: Rutkowski and Koricki, Sodermark and Stotts, even Parks and Campbell from the drilling tower, a dozen others, scientists and contractors alike.

Yes, everyone was there but LaHune.

“We . . . we have to find him,” Sharkey said, swallowing, then swallowing again. “We have to get him before he gets out of here. He’ll make for another station . . . maybe Vostok or Amundsen. He won’t stop until he does and they won’t let him.”

She came into Hayes’ arms and he came into hers and they joined together there in that stinking, ghastly mortuary. Needing to touch and be held, needing to remind one another that they were still alive and still human. There was strength in that. Strength in who and what they were, not in what those fucking Old Ones wanted them to be. They had each other and they had feelings and those feelings were real and strong, had greased their skids and fed their engines and got them through all this badness up until now. They figured they could squeeze a few more hours out of them.

“LaHune sent us away on purpose, Elaine,” Hayes said. “He wanted us out of the way when he did this, when he made his run. He may have been contaminated for days or a week or who in the hell knows?”

“He didn’t think we’d come out of the city alive.” She looked around, studying the night pressing up against the windows and frosting the panes with its subzero breath. “They haven’t been dead long . . . he might still be here.”

Hayes was counting on it.