Hive

Panting and half-out of his mind, he stumbled through Gates’ makeshift laboratory, past the two thawing horrors and amongst tables of instruments and chemicals. He wanted fire. His simplified brain told him the thing had to be burned, so he sought fire, but there was nothing. Acid, maybe. But he was no chemist, he wouldn’t know acid if he saw it.

And in those precious seconds that he stumbled drunkenly through the hut, he could feel that buzzing in his head rising up again and he looked over his shoulder at the Old One, certain now it would be rising up, those bulging red eyes seeking him out with a flat hatred and those branching tentacles reaching out for him -

But no.

It lay there, dreaming meat.

But its mind was alive and he knew that now, could feel it worrying at his will, and that was insane because there was an incision just beneath that starfish-shaped head and he knew without a doubt that Gates had removed its brain. That even now it was sunk in one of those jars around him, a fleshy and alien thing like a pickled monstrosity in a sideshow.

Yet, its mind was alive and vibrant. The idea of that made hysterical laughter bubble up the back of Hayes’ throat and then he saw the axe hanging by the fire extinguisher and then his hands were on it, gripping it with a primitive glee. He raced back at the thing, knocking a table of fossils over in his flight. He was going to chop that motherfucker up, hack it to bits.

And he meant to.

He stood over the thing, axe raised and then the buzzing rose up, felt like a fist taking hold of his brain and squeezing until the agony was white-hot and he cried out.

The axe fell from his fingers and he went down to his knees.

Fight or flight.

He crab-crawled to the door, fumbling it open and falling out into the screaming polar night. He got the door shut, those frozen winds slapping him none too gently back into reality. He found his mittens, put them on and pulled himself along the guylines back to Targa House, the door of Hut #6 wide open, hammering back and forth in the wind.

He looked over his shoulder only once, thinking he saw some lurid alien shape moving through the blowing snow at him . . .

12

The next morning, before they started their day, the boys were hanging out in the community room, chewing scrambled eggs and bacon, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes, doing a lot of talking.

“I’ll tell you guys something,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is some kind of fucking nut about all this. No communication, no email . . . I mean, what the hell? What’s all this James Bond shit about? Because of those dead things that might be aliens? Jesus H. Christ, so what? What if they are? He can’t lock us down here like prisoners. It ain’t right and somebody’s gotta do something about it.”

St. Ours lit another cigarette from the butt of his first, flagrantly ignoring the NO SMOKING sign on the wall and getting hard looks from some of the scientists who were trying to eat. “Yeah, something’s gotta be done. And it’s up to us to do it. You know those fucking eggheads won’t lift a finger. You lock them in a closet with a microscope and they’d be just fine and dandy with it. Now, way I’m seeing this, LaHune has slipped a cog and he’s about six inches from being as crazy as Lind. He’s supposed to be in charge? Well, if we were at sea and the captain was crazy . . . “

“Mutiny?” Rutkowski said. “Get the hell out of here.”

“You got a better idea?”

If Rutkowski did, he wasn’t admitting it.

Meiner sat there watching them, thinking things. He knew these two. He’d wintered over with them half a dozen times. Rutkowski was full of hot air, liked to talk, but was essentially harmless. St. Ours, however, was a hardcase. He liked to talk, too, but he was a big boy and he wasn’t above using his hands on someone that pissed him off or got in his way. When he drank, he liked to fight and right now there was whiskey on his breath.

“We can’t just go doing shit like that,” Meiner said, though part of him liked the idea. “Come spring they’ll throw us in the clink.”

“Hell we can’t,” St. Ours said. “Let me do it. I’d like to take that little cockmite LaHune outside and pound the snot out of him.”

Meiner didn’t even bother commenting on that. The visual of a couple guys out in that sub-zero blackness in their ECW’s swinging was hilarious.

“Just simmer down now,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is a pushbutton boy, all company. Push button A, he shits. Push button B, he locks us down. He’s just doing what hard-ons like him always do. The mummies is why. He’s towing the NSF line and it’s because of those fucking mummies.”

“That’s Gates’ fault,” St. Ours said.