Hive

Lind was trying to catch his breath. “They been frozen in the ice, Jimmy, but their minds never died. They just waited . . . waited for us to come. Those minds . . . oh, Jimmy, those awful fucking minds are so cold and evil and patient . . . they’ve been dreaming about us, waiting until we came for them. And when we did . . . when that limpdick Gates went down in that cave . . . those minds started waking up, reaching out to our own . . . that’s why everyone’s having nightmares . . . the Old Ones . . . those minds of theirs are invading ours, getting into our heads one inch at a time and by spring, by spring there won’t be any men left down here, but things that look like men with poisoned alien minds . . . “

Lind started laughing then, but it was not good laughter. This was stark and black and cutting, a screech of despair and madness echoing from his skull.

“Have . . . have they come in your dreams, too, Lind?” Hayes asked him, feeling Sharkey’s eyes burning into him, knowing she did not like him encouraging this delusion. But, fuck it, that’s how it had to be handled and he knew it.

“Dreams,” Lind sobbed, “oh, all the dreams. Out in the hut, you remember out in the hut, Jimmy? It touched my mind then and it hasn’t let go since. Tonight . . . “

“Yes?”

There were tears rolling down Lind’s face now. “Tonight I woke up . . . I woke up, Jimmy, and I could feel the cold, oh, the terrible blowing cold . . . and it was there, one of them things . . . it was standing there at the end of my cot, thinking about me... all those terrible red eyes looking at me and ice dropping off it in clots . . . “

Hayes felt gooseflesh run down his arms and up his spine, thinking that he would have went for the knife, too. But it was just a dream, had to be just a dream.

Lind looked like he wanted to say something else, but his eyes slid shut and he slumped over. Hayes moved quick and pulled the scalpel from his fingers, all that blood, but there was no fight left in Lind. With Sharkey’s help they got him on the table and she started swabbing out his slit wrist.

“It’s deep, but he pretty much missed the artery,” she said, cleaning the blood from his wrist and injecting some antibiotics right into it.

Hayes watched as she stitched him close, saying she was going to have to get an IV going, get some whole blood and plasma into him.

“Then you better dope him up, Doc,” Hayes said, “and strap his ass down. Because he might have failed this time, but he’s going to try again and we both know it.”

Then Hayes went out into the corridor, out to the wolves skulking around there, waiting for him to toss them scraps of bloody meat.

“He dead?” St. Ours said.

“No, he’ll be all right.”

“He say . . . he say why he did it? Why he slit his wrists?” Meiner wanted, had to know.

They were all looking at Hayes now. Even Cutchen was. They were all thinking things, maybe things they’d imagined and maybe things they’d dreamed. You could see it on their faces . . . unspoken fears, stuff they didn’t even dare admit to themselves.

“Tell us,” Rutkowski said. “Tell us what made him do it.”

Hayes grinned like a skull. He was sick of this place, sick of these people and their ghoulish curiosity. “Oh, come on, boys, you know damn well what made him do it . . . the nightmares. The things in his head . . . same things that are going to make you all do it, sooner or later.”

11

Hayes could remember having to do things that scared him.

Could remember how he felt before and how he felt afterwards. He remembered having to call his mother up when he was sixteen from the police station, tell her he’d been busted for selling pot, she had to come and get him. He remembered getting in a car accident when he was nineteen, walking away without a scratch while his best friend, Toby Young, who’d been driving, died in the emergency room. When Toby’s parents got there, asking how Toby was, he’d had to tell them, see that look in their eyes — disbelief, shock, then something like anger because he was alive and their son was dead. And, yes, he remembered when his old man was laying in that hospital bed eaten up with the cancer and his sister was out of her head with religious hysteria. He remembered having to tell the doctor to shut the old man off.

All these things had scared him, had stripped away his innocence and made something rot inside him. These were things you had to do, things which you could not walk away from unchanged, but you did them because it was expected of you. It was the right thing and it had to be done.