Hive

But none of them, none of those things, as terrible and necessary as they’d been, had gotten inside him like when he’d gone to Hut #6 to look at those mummies, to prove to himself that they were dead and nothing but dead. The temperature had dipped to a bitter seventy below and the wind was shrieking at sixty miles an hour, flinging snow and pulverized ice crystals across the compound. Antarctica at dead-winter: black and unforgiving, that wind wailing around you like wraiths. Hayes went alone.

He did not ask for the key from LaHune. He took a set of boltcutters, bundled into his ECW — Extreme Cold Weather — gear and started off across the compound, following the guylines through that blasting, sub-zero tempest, knowing that if he let go of the guiding rope and got off the walkway, he’d probably never find his way back. That they’d find him curled up out there come spring, a white and stiffened thing frozen up like meat in a deepfreeze.

The snow was piling up into drifts and he pounded through it with his white bunny boots, gripping the guyline with a wool-mittened hand that was already going numb.

You’re crazy to be doing this, he told himself and, hallelujah, wasn’t that the goddamned truth? For, Christ, it wasn’t as if he really believed what Lind had said. But there was something there . . . a grain of sanity, an underlying nugget of truth . . . in what the man had been raving about. Something behind his eyes that was incapable of lying. And Hayes was going to see what that was.

The snow crunched beneath his boots and the wind tried to strip him right out of his Gore-Tex parka. His goggles kept fogging over, but he kept going until he made Hut #6. Outside the door, he just stood there, swaying in the wind like some heavily-swaddled child just learning the fine art of balance.

Just fucking do it.

And he knew he had to, for something both ancient and inexplicable had woken deep in the very pit of his being and it was screaming danger! in his head. There was danger here and that half-forgotten sixth sense in him was painfully aware of the fact. And if Hayes didn’t get on with it already, that voice was going to make him turn and run.

LaHune or Gates or both had locked the hut with a chain and a Masterlock and the bolt cutter took care of that pretty damn quick. And, holy oh God, it was time for the show.

The wind almost pulled the door out of his hand and his arm out of socket to boot. After a time, he got it closed and went inside, feeling the heat of the hut melting the ice out of his beard. It was only about fifty degrees in there, but that was positively tropical for East Antarctica in the cruel depths of winter.

In that stark and haunted moment before he turned on the lights, he could’ve almost sworn there was movement in the hut . . . stealthy, secretive.

Then the light was on and he was alone with the dead.

He saw the mummies right away, trying to shake the feeling that they were seeing him, too.

Crazy thinking.

They were stretched out on the tables like shanks of thawing beef.

The shack shook in the wind and Hayes shook with it.

Two of the specimens were gradually defrosting, water dripping from them into collection buckets. For the most part, they were still ice-sheathed and obscured, unless you wanted to get in real close and peer through that clear blue, acrylic-looking ice and see them up close and personal. But that wasn’t necessary anyway, for the other mummy was completely unthawed.

Unthawed to the point where it was really starting to smell. Gates had thrown a canvas tarp over it and Hayes knew he had to pull that tarp back, had to pull it back and look at the thing in all its hideous splendor. And the very act took all the guts he had or would ever have. For this was one of those godawful defining moments in life that scared the shit right out of you and made you want to fold-up and hide your head.

And that’s exactly how Hayes was feeling . . . terrified, alone, completely vulnerable, his internals filled with a spreading helix of white ice.

He took off his mittens, let his fingers warm, but they refused. He took hold of the tarp, something clenching inside him, and yanked it free . . . and it slid off almost of its own volition. He backed up, uttering a slight gasp.

The mummy was unthawed.

It was still ugly as ugly got and maybe even a little bit worse, because now it had a hacked and slit appearance from Gates and his boys taking their samples and cutting into it with knives and saws.

And the smell . . . terrible, not just rotting fish now, but low tides and decaying seaweed, black mud and something like rotten cabbage. A weird, gassy odor.

Fucking thing is going bad, Hayes was thinking, like spoiled pork... why would Gates want that? Why would he let the find of the ages just rot?