Hive

They heard someone come hurrying up the corridor and Cutchen appeared, looking somewhat tense, maybe a little out of breath. “You two seen Meiner?” he asked.

They both shook their heads.

“Why? What’s up?” Sharkey said.

“He’s missing.”

“Missing?”

Cutchen nodded. “Last anyone saw him was early this morning, maybe around seven. He had breakfast with Rutkowski and the boys and nobody’s seen him since. He never showed for lunch and he isn’t the sort to miss a meal.”

Hayes felt a little tenseness himself now. “You tell LaHune?”

“I sent St. Ours over there with a couple others,” Cutchen said. “We’ve been looking all over the compound for him.”

About that time, LaHune came over the PA that was linked to every building and hut at the station, calling for Meiner to report in immediately. There was silence after that, maybe for two or three minutes while they looked helplessly at one another, then LaHune came back on again. Same message.

“He’s gotta be somewhere,” Sharkey said.

But Cutchen didn’t comment on that. They followed him back down the corridor to the community room where maybe a dozen others were gathered in small groups, speculating on Meiner’s fate.

“Anyone look down in the shafts?” Hayes said, referring to the maintenance shafts that ran beneath the station where all the lines and pipes were run from the power station and pumping shacks.

“Rutkowski and some of the contractors are down there now.”

Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she was spearing him with those blue eyes of hers and they seemed to be saying to him, this is probably unrelated. But already Hayes was thinking otherwise.

He walked over to one of the east windows, peering out into the claustrophobic darkness of an Antarctica winter’s day. Sheets of snow lifted, blowing through the compound in whirlwinds and torrents, engulfing the buildings and then retreating, backlit by pole lights and security lights whose illumination trembled and shook, casting wild shadows over the white. As the latest deluge played out, Hayes could see Hut #6 out there all by its lonesome, a tomb shrouded in ice.

“Anybody check the hut?” he said to Cutchen. “Gates’ hut?” Cutchen shook his head. “Why the hell would he be out there?” But Hayes didn’t say.

All he knew for sure was that he had left the door wide open when he left last night and now it looked to be closed.

16

Anybody could have closed it, Hayes was telling himself as they followed the guylines and drifted walkway out to Hut #6. Somebody could have passed, maybe one of the maintenance guys or somebody doing a little plowing early this morning.

Could have happened.

Yet, he didn’t believe it for a minute. The weather was bad . . . it hadn’t stopped snowing and gusting for three days now and the temperature was hanging low at a near-constant seventy below with wind chills pushing it down near a 100 below. In that kind of weather, you didn’t go out of your way looking for extra outside work. And just about everyone was steering clear of Hut #6 and what it contained now. Maybe if it was summer and there was light, but in this perpetual screaming blackness . . . no way. Even if someone saw the door swinging wide they would not have gone over there anymore than you would go into a graveyard at midnight because a vault door was left open and creaking.

Superstitious or not, there were limits to what you’d do.

Hayes was leading the charge, battened down in ECW’s, eyes wide behind his plastic goggles. Cutchen and Sharkey were behind him. All of them were gripping the guylines, feeling that wind trying to knock them down and sometimes lift them up, up, and away into the frozen night.

Hayes paused outside the door to the hut.

Yes, it was closed, all right. And he had a pretty good idea that the wind had had nothing to do with it. There was no point in looking in the snow for tracks because the wind erased them every ten minutes. Right now, there was a three-foot drift pushed up against the door and Hayes had to kick it away with his boots so they could get it open.

Then he undid the latch, grinned secretly at the length of chain and Masterlock dangling from it, and pulled it open, feeling that warmth coming out at them.

You step in there and they’ll eat your mind down to the bone.

But Hayes stepped in and clicked on the lights and the others came in with him, Cutchen shutting the door behind them. They pulled off their mittens and goggles, smelling that room right away. After the ultra-fresh air on the walk over, the stench in the hut was offensive and roiling. It was a thick and vaporous green odor of rotting marshes and sun-bloated fish.

“God . . . what a smell,” Cutchen said. “Why in the hell would Gates let these things decay like this? They’re priceless.”

“Look,” Sharkey said.

Neither Hayes nor Cutchen had seen it, the angle of the wall blocking most of the lab except for that decaying, meaty mass on the table. But now they got a look.

“Meiner,” Cutchen said.