Hive

Stotts, tall and angular and lantern-jawed like some stock New Englander, kept licking his lips. “It’s in the back of my head . . . I can feel it back there.”

“Oh, for chrissake.”

Rutkowski shook his head, too. There was something there and it wasn’t to be denied. The more he tried to ignore it, the more it raged, the more pain it brought with it. Maybe this wasn’t a migraine coming on him, but it lived next door.

“Fuck is with you people?” St. Ours wanted to know.

But they couldn’t really say because they were having trouble stringing words together and the pain was uniform and disorienting. Like something had woken up in their heads. Woken and stretched and started clawing up things. Rifles were lowered and then dropped and eyes went from being confused to being dark and shifting like simmering oil. Those eyes stared and rarely blinked and there was something very strange about it all.

St. Ours had been thinking maybe these boys had been affected by a leaky gas furnace or something because headaches were sure as hell not catchy. But what he was seeing in their eyes and beginning to feel along the nape of his neck was not gas, it was . . . it was a sense of visitation. Something was in that room with them, something unseen and nameless and malefic was filling the empty spaces between them, making everything and everyone just go bad to their cores.

Rutkowski kept trying to talk, but his mouth wouldn’t seem to open and his head was filled with a thick, black down and he couldn’t seem to think around it. His belly was filled with spiders and he could feel them in there, crawling up his spine and along his nerve ganglia making him want to fold-up or scream and -

“Fuck’s with you people?” St. Ours was saying, flat-out scared now. What was in their heads wasn’t in his, but he had enough other bad stuff going on to make up for it.

About then, they all became aware of the most peculiar vibration that seemed to be traveling through the floor beneath their feet and up into their bones, making their teeth ache. It was subtle at first, but growing, rising up now like some generator amping into life, that rhythmic thrumming passing through all of them and making them tremble and shake. And, Jesus, it was getting louder all the time like having your ear up against the metal casing of a hydraulic pump.

St. Ours tried to say something, but that thrumming drowned out his voice and the others were completely in thrall to it now, lost in a fog, their bodies moving now in cadence with that awful vibration. Noises began echoing around them . . . pinging sounds, whispering sounds, metallic sounds echoing down long pipes and brief squeals that almost sounded like human screams inverted or played in reverse.

And then there was a crackling like static electricity, a discharge of energy that made the hairs stand up on their arms and St. Ours wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t. He still had the .22 in his hands and he wanted to open up on something, drill something, anything to make it stop before his head flew apart. Maybe the others didn’t see what he saw then . . . and it was hard to say because they looked empty and dumb like window dummies . . . but it made him want to run.

Except, he didn’t think he could.

The far outside wall of the room was getting fuzzy. It was made of bare concrete blocks, except now it looked like it was made of smoke. Something almost diaphanous and insubstantial. It was fluttering and glowing now as if it were backlit by some enormous burst of energy and you could see the mortaring between the blocks standing out lividly.

Yes, St. Ours wanted to run away, but all he did was stumble forward, a weird sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach. But he still had the .22 and he was going to use it . . . use it when whatever was out there melting through the wall made its appearance.

Because it would.

And then it did.

It came through the wall as easily as smoke through a window grating, insubstantial and ghostly, yet gradually gaining solidity. And at that point, a ghost carrying its head tucked under its arm would have been welcome. Because this . . . well, this was something else.

St. Ours knew it was one of those things from Hut #6 and the sight of it filled him with a terror that was dream-like and blank.

It was obscene to see it in motion, to see it gliding forth on those thick and muscular snakelike tentacles at its base. It should have been sluggish, but it moved with a marked fluidity, grace, and ease. Its body was like some oblong barrel, the flesh gray and oily and ribbed, some sort of wriggling parasitic podia hanging from the lower quadrant. When it got within five feet of St. Ours, it opened up its wings, almost seeming to inflate them, fanning them out like the collar of a frilled lizard. It sounded like wet umbrellas being snapped open.