Hive

Hayes would never have said any of this to anyone else, but it was true. What you generally had at a station like Kharkhov during the winter was a lot of boredom. There was work to be done, sure, but the pace was nowhere near as frenetic as you saw during the summer. This year the boredom had been replaced by something else . . . a nervous tension, a sense of expectancy, the knowledge that the ball was going to drop. Hayes could feel it. Although the crew wandered around with stupid smiles on their faces and went through the motions, it was all an act. You peeled those smiles off and underneath you were going to see people on the edge, people cringing, people confused and worried and, yes, scared.

The atmosphere at a winter station locked down by the cold and snow and perpetual darkness was never exactly yippy-skippy, let’s-have-ourselves-a-parade, but even on bad years when you threw together a group that simply did not get along, it was not like this. There was not this sense of brooding apprehension, that almost spiritual sort of taint hanging in the air.

“What’re you thinking, Doc?” Hayes asked, seeing Sharkey’s blue eyes focused off into space.

She shrugged. “I’m just wondering if I’m going to have enough happy pills to get these people to spring.”

“Pills won’t cut it,” Hayes told her.

Sharkey smiled, looked into his eyes. “I was just thinking, Jimmy, how easy it would be for the NSF to dump a group of us down here and then throw something odd at us like this, see how we handled it. A sort of feasibility study. A group of people fairly diverse in that they come from the working class right up to the scientific elite. See how we react to certain things.”

“You saying they invented those mummies? Those ruins?”

“No, of course not. But it would be an interesting opportunity for the powers that be to take advantage of. Us stranded down here, facing philosophical and psychological challenges brought about by our isolation and the discovery of Gates’ mummies.”

“Doc, really, don’t be feeding my paranoia.”

She laughed. “Oh, I’m just speculating here.”

“Sure, but it sounds right to me. The bunch of us riding out this fucking winter, our lines of communication severed. Those goddamn mummies out there that are scaring the shit out of everyone . . . whether they’re willing to admit it or not.”

“Yes, exactly. And with our good Mr. LaHune as the control. Because, you know, if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be surprised if a mob decided to gather up Gates’ mummies and burn them like alien witches.”

Sharkey laughed nervously as if to dismiss it all, but Hayes wasn’t ready to dismiss it. He wasn’t much on conspiracies and the like, but those mummies were having a very negative effect on the crew. They were getting under peoples’ skins, making them imagine the worst possible things and runaway imaginations were a bad thing when you were trapped down at the bottom of the world. A mass-paranoia becoming a mass-insanity could become savage and devastating at the drop of a hat.

“If LaHune has any brains,” Hayes said, “then he’ll open this place back up, let these people chat with the outside world. It can’t be good for them to be internalizing this shit, chewing on it and swallowing it whole, letting it boil in their bellies.”

“It’s not,” Sharkey said. “Ever since those mummies came I’ve had people coming to see me wanting sedatives. They can’t sleep, Jimmy, and when they do they have nightmares.”

Oh, I’ll just bet they do. Some real doozies no doubt.

LaHune knew what all this was doing, but he was a company man and he’d toe the line regardless of what it did to these people. Even if the crew started cracking up and going at each other — and themselves — with razors, it wouldn’t move him. He’d sit there like some shit-eating weasel atop a heap of turds, simply enjoying the stink, the rot, and the flies.

Because that’s the kind of guy he was.

“I tell you what, Doc, LaHune better get his hands out of his fucking shorts already and derail this train because I got me a nasty feeling the track ahead is real dark and real bumpy.”

PART TWO

THE MIND-LEECHES

“A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

10

But the train wasn’t derailed.

And that night, about two in the morning, there was a fierce pounding at Hayes’ door and from the intensity of it, you could be sure it wasn’t a social call. Hayes came awake, shaking off some dream about mountains of black ice, and took a pull from his water bottle.

“Hayes!” a voice called. “Hayes! Would you fucking wake up already!”

It was Cutchen.

Hayes climbed out of bed, hearing the wind moaning through the darkness of the camp, cold and eternal. It sounded like something hungry that wanted in, something looking for warmth to steal.

“Coming,” Hayes said.