Hive

The glass face of a clock on the wall shattered like a hammer had struck it. Papers and pencils and folders were scattered from Sharkey’s desk and blown through the air in a wild, ripping cyclone. Shelves were emptied of bottles and instruments and the floor was vibrating, the walls pounding like the beat of some incredible heart. The infirmary and sickbay were a tempest of anti-gravity, things spinning and jumping and whirling in mid-air, but never falling. Sharkey was thrown against the wall and then to the floor where she was pushed by a wave of invisible force right against the door leading out into the corridor. That awful vibration was thrumming and thrumming, the air filled with weird squeals and echoes and pinging sounds. Hayes lost gravity . . . he was lifted up into the air, Lind still clutching his hand, tethering him to the world. Cracks fanned out in the wall, ceiling tiles broke loose and went madly spinning through the vortex and then –

And then Lind sat up.

The straps holding him down sheared open, wavering and snapping about like confetti in a tornado. His face was contorted and bulging, tears of blood running from his eyes and nose. He seized up, went rigid, and then collapsed back on the bed.

Everything stopped.

All those papers and pens and vials of pills and drugs and books and charts and paperclips . . . all of it suddenly crashed to the floor and Hayes with it. He sat there on his ass, stunned and shocked and not sure where he was for a moment or what he was doing. Sharkey was pulling herself up the wall, trying to speak and only making weird grunting sounds. The force of that wind, or whatever in the Christ it had been, had actually blown the tight pony tail ring from her hair and her locks hung over her face in wild plaits. She brushed them away.

Then she was helping Hayes up. “Are you okay, Jimmy?”

He nodded dumbly. “Yeah . . . I don’t even know what happened.”

Sharkey went to Lind. She pulled open one of his eyelids, checked his pulse. She picked her stethoscope up from where it was dangling from the top of the door. She listened for Lind’s heart, shook her head. “Dead,” she said. “He’s dead.”

Hayes was not surprised.

He looked down at Lind and knew that if the man’s heart had not given out or his brain exploded in his head, if whatever had not killed him, then both Sharkey and himself would probably be dead now. That energy had been lethal and wild and destructive.

“Elaine,” he said. “Should we . . . “

“Let’s just clean this mess up.”

So they did.

They had barely begun when people were coming down the corridor, demanding to know what all the racket had been and why the goddamn infirmary smelled like bleach or chemicals. But then they saw Lind and they didn’t ask any more questions. They politely tucked their tails between their legs and got out while the getting was good.

After they had put things back in order and swept up the rest, Hayes and Sharkey sat down and she got out a bottle of wine she’d been saving. It was expensive stuff and they drank it from plastic Dixie cups.

“How am I going to log this one?” Sharkey said. “That Lind was possessed? That he exhibited telepathy and telekinesis? That something had taken over his mind and it was something extraterrestrial? Or should I just say that he died from some unexplainable dementia?”

Hayes sighed. “He wasn’t possessed or insane. At least, not at first. He was in contact with them somehow, with those dreaming minds out in the hut or maybe the living ones down in the lake. Probably the former, I’m guessing.” Hayes lit a cigarette and his hand shook. “What he was telling us, Doc, was a memory. A memory of an alien world where those Old Ones had come from . . . it was a memory of colonization. Of them leaving that planet and drifting here through space, I think.”

“Drifting through space?” she said. “It must have taken ages, eons.”

“Time means nothing to them.”

Sharkey just shook her head. “Jimmy . . . that’s pretty wild.”

He knew it was, but he believed it. Completely. “You have a better explanation? I didn’t think so. You felt the heat, smelled that ammonia . . . it was probably one of the outer planets they came from. Maybe not originally, but that was their starting point when they came here. Jesus, they must have drifted for thousands of years, dormant and dreaming, waiting to come here, to this blue world.”

“But the outer planets . . . Uranus, Neptune . . . they’re cold, aren’t they?” she said. “Even a billion years ago, they would have been ice cold . . . “

Hayes pulled off his cigarette. “No, not at all. I’m no scientist, Doc, but I’ve been hanging around with them for years . . . I knew this one astronomer at McMurdo. We used to hang out at the observatory and he’d tell me things about the planets, the stars. Neptune and Uranus, for example, because of their size have immense atmospheric pressures, so the liquid on them can’t freeze or turn to vapor, it’s held in liquid form in massive seas of water, methane, and ammonia.”