Hive

“Sure, it is. But you can’t blame him, finding something like that. Like a kid first discovering his pecker, he can’t help but take it out and pull on it. Besides, Gates is not a bad sort. You can talk to the guy. Shit, you can even talk pussy with him. He’s all right. Not like some of these other monkeyfucks — “ Rutkowski shot a glance over at a few scientists at a nearby table, some of the wonder boys who were drilling down to Lake Vordog “ — he’s okay. See, boys, the problem here is those mummies. If they were gone, LaHune might be willing to pull an inch or two of that steel rod out of his ass and let us join the freaking world again.”

“You plan on stealing ‘em?” St. Ours said.

“Well, maybe losing them might be a better word for it. Regardless, it’s something for us to think about.”

“It couldn’t happen soon enough for me,” Meiner said, his hand shaking as he brought his coffee cup to his lips.

“You . . . you still having those nightmares?”

Meiner nodded weakly. “Every night . . . crazy shit. Even when I do manage to fall asleep, I wake up with the cold sweats.”

“Those things out there,” St. Ours said, looking a little green around the gills, maybe even blue. “I’m not too big of a man to admit that they’re getting to me, too. No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, Rutkowski. You’re having the dreams, too. We’re all having the dreams. Even those eggheads are.”

“What . . . what are your dreams about?” Meiner wanted to know.

Rutkowski shifted in his seat, licked his lips. “I can’t remember, but their good ones . . . something about colors or shapes, things moving that shouldn’t move.”

“I remember some of mine,” St. Ours said. He pulled off his cigarette, let the smoke drift out through his nostrils and past those wide, blank eyes. “A city . . . I dream of a city . . . except it ain’t like no city you’ve ever seen before. Towers and pyramids and shafts, honeycombs that lead through stone, don’t come out anywhere but into themselves. I dream I’m flying above the city, moving fast, and there are others flying with me and they all look like those ugly pricks out in the hut. We . . . we fly and then we dip down, down into those holes and hollow places, then . . . then I wake up. I don’t want to remember what happens down in those holes.”

“I dream about holes sometimes, too,” Meiner admitted. “Like tunnels going up and down and left and right . . . lost in those tunnels and hearing a buzzing like wasps, only that buzzing is like words I understand. I’m scared shitless, in the dream. I know those voices want something from me.”

He stopped there. By God, it was enough. He wasn’t going any farther with it, he wasn’t going to pick at the scabs of his nightmares until all that black blood started flowing again. He wasn’t going to tell them about the rest of it. The tunnels and high stone rooms, all those things standing around while Meiner and dozens of others laid on tables. The things . . . oh Jesus . . . those things would be inside their heads and touching them, sticking things into them and cutting into them with blades of light, making things happen to them . . . and the pain, all the pain . . . needles going into him and knives cutting and tubes stuck in his head and oh dear sweet Jesus the agony, the agony while those trilling voices kept talking and talking, hands that were not hands but things like tree branches or twigs taking him apart and putting him back together again . . .

Rutkowski looked gray and old suddenly. “I don’t like it, I just don’t like it. Those dreams . . . they’re so familiar, you know? Like I’ve seen it all before, lived through all that shit years ago. Don’t make no sense.”

And it didn’t. Not on the surface. But they’d all felt it, that sense of familiarity, that déjà vu they couldn’t get out from under. It haunted them. Just like the first time they’d seen the mummies — they had all known implicitly that they had seen them before, very long ago, and the fear those things inspired was inbred and ancient, a wisp of memory from a misty, forgotten past.

“Yeah, I remember those things. Somehow, I do,” St. Ours said. “Fuck me, but Gates sure opened up a Pandora’s box here.”

And, God, how true was that.

Meiner knew it was true, just like he knew he was afraid to close his eyes even for an instant. Because when he did the dreams came and the things swam up out of the darkness, those buzzing voices in his head, filling him, breaking him down. And sometimes, yes, sometimes even when he was awake, when he’d come out of the nightmares at three a.m. sweating and shaking, feeling the pain of what they had done to him or someone like him, he would still be hearing those voices. High and trilling and insectile, outside, carried by the winds, calling him out into the storm and sometimes out to the hut where they were waiting for him.

But he wasn’t about to admit any of that.

13

Of course, Hayes didn’t sleep.